Page 7 of Holmes, Margaret and Poe

Shortly after midnight, dozens of officers and emergency workers from four different states donned full hazmat gear and began removing the remains that an army of crime scene techs had photographed, bagged, and coded based on their GPS locations. The gruesome job of recovery was so complicated that the last bodies would not leave the airport grounds for another thirty-two hours.

Around three a.m., NTSB supervising investigator Bob Holland showed us bullet holes in the forward foil of the right wing and in the housing of the right engine.

“Fifty-caliber,” Holland said. “Looks like he chewed up the left side, nose, and the forward landing gear, which is over there on the other side of the runway.”

“How many rounds?” I asked.

“I’m thinking a full belt. Two hundred at close range.”

“Lot of destruction fast,” Sampson said.

“Enough to say this is now officially a mass murder,” Mahoney said grimly.

“You going to announce that?” Holland asked, looking pale.

“In the morning. I want to see what ATF finds in Gravelly Point Park first.”

But before we could go there, Ned came under more pressure. A media horde and scores of relatives and friends of passengers on American Airlines Flight 839 had gathered during the night in front of the closed airport and were demanding answers.

Worse, airport managers were demanding to know when flights could resume. Reagan’s closure was causing a travel nightmare up and down the East Coast.

After identifying himself, Mahoney had the brutal job of publicly announcing that there were no survivors of the crash, the cause of which was still under investigation. People began to wail and sob. A pregnant woman collapsed into another woman’s arms.

“People are saying there was machine-gun fire!” one cable news reporter yelled.

“We’re still working to confirm that,” Mahoney said. “We’ll have more for you later.”

“Did the jet crash on its own or was it shot down?”

“We’ll know more in the morning,” he said, and we left.

CHAPTER 9

IT WAS NEARLY FOUR A.M.when we finally got to the crime scene perimeter around Gravelly Point Park, which had its own bank of lights shining on it; at least fifteen agents in hazmat suits were there, all wearing big headlamps that they trained on a twisted skeleton of charred steel in the parking lot.

“Hard to say what kind of vehicle it was. Probably a van,” said ATF supervising special agent Alice Kershaw, who was also clad in hazmat gear. “Looks like he was doing his best to disintegrate whatever was inside.”

“Did he succeed?” Mahoney said.

“He blew a lot of it to smithereens, but we’re good at putting puzzle pieces together.”

“What do you know so far?”

“I don’t know how it was detonated yet, but it was a fertilizer bomb. A big one.”

I said, “What about a machine gun?”

“There was one here,” Kershaw said. “Still is, in parts. My guys found pieces of the receiver and barrel. And fifty-caliber casings, a lot of them in a spray north from the van. They think it’s an old Browning M two. Vietnam era.”

Sampson said, “Let me get this straight. You think this guy was in the back of the van with his fifty-cal waiting specifically for this flight?”

The ATF agent shook her head. “I can’t tell you if he was waiting for that particular plane or not, but I know for certain he was not in the van with the machine gun.”

“How?” I asked.

“We’ve found no body parts here, for one thing. That bomb was huge and threw a lot of metal, but no flesh so far. And we have witnesses who said the bomb went off within seconds of the plane going down, so he had to have been far away when he triggered it. We also found other pieces of the gun that were attached to brackets and fittings that suggest it might have been remotely controlled, probably hydraulically by a computer program of some kind.”

She showed us a piece of tripod with melted plastic hydraulic lines fused to it and to part of the barrel, a section of a scorched track that she thought was used to position the rear of the gun, and pieces of the housing of a Dell laptop.

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