On the outer perimeter, he counted eight gray Navy destroyers. There were more than a dozen vessels of various kinds, formed roughly into concentric circles. "How much longer until we get there?"Īfter two hours of monotony, the cluster of ships appeared unusually interesting. I'm from Florida and I saw some hurricanes when I was a kid, but you've never seen anything like a Pacific cyclone, sir." Weather can be tough in this part of the world, sir. There's a cyclone forming up in the Admiralties, should swing down this way in a few days." "I'm real happy to see it flat like this. "To tell you the truth, no, sir," the pilot said. Norman stared at the flat horizon, still blue and featureless. Right now you're two hundred miles from anywhere, sir." "Between Samoa and Fiji in the South Pacific," the pilot said. Ellen, and Tim and Amy and his mother's birthday, now seemed very far away. He had been on this helicopter for two hours, sleeping part of the time. Norman was hurried onto the big Sea Knight helicopter, which immediately lifted off the cold tarmac and headed west, over palm trees and rusty corrugated rooftops, into the Pacific. He arrived at Pago Pago just as dawn was breaking. First at Hickam Field in Honolulu, then at the Naval Air Station in Guam, where he had arrived at two in the morning, and had spent half an hour in a room that smelled of aviation gasoline, staring dumbly at an issue of the American Journal of Psychology which he had brought with him, before flying on.
Everyone had been polite and pleasant, but they had kept him away from telephones. "They never sent a Navy car the other times," Ellen said, following him down the stairs to the front door. When the car pulled up in front of his house, Norman had been surprised to see it was a Navy pool sedan, with a uniformed Navy driver. There was no news on the radio of an airline crash. "I haven't heard about any crash." She turned on the radio while he packed. And it was possible Norman might miss his mother's birthday the following week. And Amy, now sixteen, was just back from Andover, and Amy and Ellen didn't get along very well if Norman wasn't there to mediate. Then, too, Tim was coming back from his sophomore year at Chicago, on his way to a summer job in the Cascades. This time his wife, Ellen, had been annoyed because he was called away on July 1, which meant he would miss their July 4 beach barbecue. Each time the pattern was the same - the hurried telephone call, frantic packing, the absence for a week or more.
The first time had been at the United Airlines crash in San Diego in 1976 then he had been called to Chicago in '78, and Dallas in '82. "You get called on crashes?"įor a decade, Norman Johnson had been on the list of FAA crash-site teams, experts called on short notice to investigate civilian air disasters. "They told me," Norman said, "that there was an airplane crash." The pilot glanced at him, eyes unreadable behind dark aviator sunglasses. Everybody being flown to the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Ocean." Physicists, biologists, mathematicians, you name it. "We've been ferrying people out of Guam for the last two days. "Why not? They've called in just about everything else." "Where'd they bring you in from?" the pilot asked. "Not bad." Norman looked at the islands as they flashed by: a curve of white sand, a few palm trees, then gone. "Technically part of Tonga, but they're uninhabited. "Islands of Ninihina and Tafahi," the pilot said. He said over the intercom, "What's this?" When he awoke, he saw that the horizon was still flat there were white semicircles of coral atolls ahead. It was not the kind of thing a fifty-three-year-old professor of psychology was used to. He was tired he had been traveling on various military aircraft for more than fourteen hours. Despite the noise and the thumping vibration of the blades, Norman Johnson fell asleep. The Navy helicopter raced forward, flying low, near the waves. For a long time the horizon had been a monotonous flat blue line separating the Pacific Ocean from the sky.
0 kommentar(er)
