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The Depths
“All passengers prepare for emergency landing!” Every nerve in Mason’s body was a livewire. There wasn’t a damned thing left to try, but he couldn’t let go. Even though he knew the jetliner was out of control, even though the ground was rushing at him with all the visual impact of atsunami, even though he knew he was about to die a death beyond imagination. “Everybody out of the aisles! Seatbelts fastened! Heads down between your knees!” He switched off the cabin speakers.“God in Heaven!” the copilot screamed. “Oh God! Oh God! Oh Jesus Oh God! Oh Jesus ohGod oh God oh God oh—”“Ground, this is AAL-7. We are going down. We are going down. Beth I love you, I love you.Kids, I love you I love you I lo—” His throat seized. Blood filled his eyes, his arms locked, his entire body went into shock. To port and starboard, black smoke billowed and wheeled, racing its orphanwisps in dark tendrils that swept the glass like loose wipers. Now the smoke passed as though cleared by a gigantic lung, and the visual window blew out to a rocketing, reeling panorama of fuzzylandscape and crystal clear details—ancient cacti, gutted cars, weeds and rocks so sharply definedthey might have been etched into canvas—as his head jerked back, as his mouth shot open, as hisairways broke wide for one riveting, endless, mindblowing scream.
 
 The smoke and dust were terrific, all but obscuring the crash site. Flames shot through the plane’s corpse, danced and raged overhead, lit the windows and passed. The smell of jet fuel waseverywhere. A trough the length of three football fields had been ripped out of the land, ninety feetwide at its broadest. Nose, cabin, and tail were in three distinct sections, buried, rather than scattered,due to the dramatic incline of descent. The right wing had detached completely, the left was a black crumpled ruin. And the real-time concussions, the aftershock of impact, still sang in the earth, stillsent small stones tumbling.And the rifts in the desert appeared as tiny sand pools. And the dirt spilled round as the hotdusty creatures burst aboveground at full tilt and maniacally charged the wreckage. Their peckingorder was evident; the fastest and toughest were the first inside—the first-pickers of cufflinks andfountain pens, of ribbons and bows. Seat belts and oxygen masks were savaged in the rush, thecarnage completely ignored. One squealed, and there was a sudden frantic pile-on of hairy bodies. Ina minute the victor came up grasping a cheap patent leather billfold. After a short, brutal flurry, thislittle monster used his teeth to tear out a photograph of a sweetly smiling family. He snatched it withhis paw, pressed the treasure to his chest, and threw the billfold, with its cash and traveler’s checksand credit cards, to the losers.Crash investigators have one of the toughest jobs on the planet. You never really adjust to it— ever—though it’s imperative to develop a steely exterior, and to always treat it as just a job.Crash investigators for major airlines have upped that career ante considerably. Analytical andtechnical aspects aside, it’s not just a matter of noting and recording the dead—angles, impetus,collateral consequences—it’s a matter of cataloguing torsos, mutilated faces, miscellaneous body parts, many burned beyond recognition. A museum display in Hell: the plane’s great black ruptured body, split open like a ripe pomegranate, the horror of charred corpses duly strapped in for theunbelievable, some cut right in half by those very seat belts . . . the nauseating stench of a charnelhouse, the hundreds of wild fixed expressions that not even death, not even flames, not evenformaldehyde can repair.
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