Read The Death Trust for Free Online Page B

structure. This is what seven-oh-seven-five should look like.” He passed me another black-and-white print. “Compare them.”
    I put the two prints side by side. On one, the crystals were big; on the other, they were small. Easy to see the difference, sure, but I still didn’t know squat.
    “Basic metallurgy lesson number one: When the crystals are small, the metal is good and strong,” Roach said. “The bigger those crystals get, the weaker the metal becomes. Milled nonferrous metals like aluminum don’t take kindly to stress. They have almost zero elasticity. Put too much stress on them and they don’t bend or deform, they just crack. Pah-ting,” he said, musically.
    “Do you mind putting it together for me like I was a five-year-old, Squadron Leader?”
    Roach swapped the photos for a couple of bits of aluminum he’d recovered from his bench. “We’ve duplicated what we believe happened to the failed clamp that held on the general’s wings. We heated and cooled it rapidly a couple of dozen times. Doing that to a metal—just about any metal—changes its crystal structure, making it weaker. The seven-oh-seven-five in your left hand failed at one-tenth the load of the seven-oh-seven-five in your right. Take a closer look.”
    I did as I was asked and examined the metals. On the outside, they appeared identical. In cross-section where they’d cracked, though, one piece had broken clean while the other had a porous honeycomb appearance.
    “Nothing like this could happen by accident?” I asked. I knew the answer to that before I asked the question, but I’ve found it sometimes pays to ask the obvious.
    “No bloody way,” the squadron leader said, shaking his head. “Someone got to the general’s plane, removed the clamp, and then went to work on it, or exchanged it for this one, knowing full well what the consequences of that would be.”
    “Don’t stop now, Squadron Leader. You’ve got a captive audience here. What happened when that clamp failed?”
    “You read about it in the report,” he said.
    “I’ve read an eyewitness account. Tell me in your own words what you think happened.”
    He shrugged. “On the morning of the crash, the general and another pilot were chasing thermals, maybe ten miles from the base. The weather was good and the conditions were ideal for soaring. The general, like the pilot in the other plane, was climbing to around twelve thousand feet and then doing aerobatics—loops, rolls, and spins—down to around five thousand feet. They’d apparently done that twice—gone up and then come down—before the general’s day flew into the crapper. When he reached altitude for the third time, he put the glider into a flat spin. I reckon the clamp was probably already broken by then, but it’s impossible to say. According to the witness, the right-hand wing on the general’s plane appeared to fold. The airflow ripped it clean away a second or two later as what was left of the aircraft began a spiral dive.
    “It dove like that, spinning, for several thousand feet before the g-forces tore the other wing off. Within moments, gravity accelerated the wreckage to around two hundred and fifty miles per hour. General Scott would’ve had plenty of time to contemplate his end before it came. From the clamp letting go to impact took around thirty seconds. That’s a lot of time for your life to flash before your eyes.” Roach paused. Maybe he was picturing the man trapped inside his fiberglass coffin heading for the ground. I certainly could. Roach snapped out of it and cleared his throat. “The tail broke off at about two thousand feet of altitude. The nose of the aircraft hit a tree, which is why so little of it was left intact. Not much of the tree left, either. The general’s remains—what they could find, at any rate—were scooped into buckets with a ladle. Shooting the bugger with a twelve-gauge at close range wouldn’t have been nearly as effective, or messy. Not a great