Page 83 of Into the Fire

Hollis found me at the racks the second morning. “You should hear it from me instead of around a corner,” he said. “When the examiner gets here, packing error stays on the table until the evidence takes it off. That’s not me saying it happened. That’s me saying that if we start with sabotage and work backward, whatever we find is worthless to anybody official. Packing error has to be ruled out, or ruled in, by somebody who isn’t us.”

He was right. That was Hollis. He was honest, but the words still cut.

Boone came down hard on speculation when he heard it. Outside the ready room somebody’s sentence ended in his own rig and I heard Boone’s flat voice. “The examination will show what happened. Until then, that sentence doesn’t get finished on my base.”

The county deputy arrived the next morning, a heavyset man named Hanson who took photographs of everything. Boone walked him through the base, and I tagged along.

The morning was cold enough that the gravel had a ring to it under our boots, and Hanson’s camera clicked at every door. Every time he asked who could get through the door, and the answer was some version of anyone with a reason.

Once I understood what it meant, I couldn’t stop seeing it. The base ran on trust. Nobody had ever needed to break into anything at Silvertip, because Silvertip’s whole design assumed that anybody inside the fence belonged inside the fence.

It wasn’t a flaw in the system. It was the system.

Hanson flipped his notebook to a clean page. “Anybody else with regular access that I haven’t got?”

Boone thought for a moment. “Fellhauer,” he said. “He’s spotting while Coyle’s down. He’s been in and out of the loft all week for streamers and the spotting gear.”

Fellhauer. He’d driven posts for the same Wyoming outfit I had, ten years apart. He quit drinking after his truck landed in a creek, and now he nursed root beer at the Sawtooth and wanted me on his stick because I could land where the spotter put me.

I liked Fellhauer. There wasn’t anyone I disliked. That was the problem with the entire list.

An examiner came up from Missoula two days later. It was Niebur, a master rigger out of the parachute program there. A malfunction in a federal jump program gets reported to Missoula immediately. A malfunction with an injury and a sabotage question dispatches someone in person.

Niebur spent four hours alone in the loft with the main, the deployment bag, Hanson’s photographs, and my packing sequence as Boone had written it down. Then she asked for the base manager and anyone he wanted present.

Boone went in. Anyone he wanted present turned out to be a group: me, Hollis with his clipboard, Shep because he’d handled the streamers and gear that morning, Marty with the logs. Nash came over from the bunkhouse in the walking boot.

Niebur didn’t give a speech. She stood at the end of the packing table where Boone had stood the night I packed my chute and kept it brief.

“The line didn’t migrate,” she said. “If a line-over is packed into the rig, it loads up when the canopy inflates. It drags across the top and marks the fabric, and the path it takes has to agree with how the rig was folded. This one doesn’t agree. There’s no fold sequence in your packing record that puts this line where it is. The only way it gets there is if the bag was opened after it was packed.” She turned back one corner of the tarp with a gloved hand. “The stows around it were redone, two of them reversed against the sequence in the record. And this band isn’t from your loft stock. It’s the wrong size. You don’t carry it.”

She delivered her conclusion. “Somebody opened this bag, moved the line, and closed it again. That’s not wear, and it’s not packing error.”

The room was silent.

Five minutes ago there had been a version of what happened where I was wrong. Now there wasn’t.

Shep looked sick. He was near the racks with a strap still in one hand, and the color had faded from under his tan.

Nash kept his weight off the boot and stared at the tarp.

Marty pushed his glasses up onto his forehead. “What do you need copied before it travels?” he asked Niebur. “If that rig’s leaving, I want the file complete on our end. Photographs, the packing record, and your notes if you’ll sign them.”

“Everything,” Boone said before Niebur could answer. “What can we establish from this, and what has to be preserved? I want that list today. Nothing leaves here without a receipt.”

“It travels federal,” Niebur said. “The county took the report, but this is a federal facility and Vega’s a federal employee. There’s a Forest Service special agent coming out of Missoula. The rig goes with him, and so does everything you copy.”

I watched all of them. Shep looked sick—too sick? Hollis was calm—too calm? Marty had questions—why so ready with questions? Nash had none—why none? I watched everyone, and there was no way for an innocent person to react that I would trust.

That scared me.

I’d sat in the infirmary after Carson Ridge, needing one official piece of paper to say I hadn’t imagined it. The paper never came, and it broke something inside me. Now a licensed examiner had come to the Silvertip loft and reached a plain conclusion. I wasn’t wrong. Somebody else had done it, and the official record would say I was right.

I felt worse. Being right meant somebody on the base had opened my bag and closed it again, knowing I’d be under it at three thousand feet.

Niebur started dictating her preservation list to Marty. Boone had stopped listening. He was deciding something.

Niebur was still talking when Boone left the loft. He didn’t excuse himself. He crossed the yard, and I followed him seconds later because I knew where he was going.