The sea speaks in many voices. On that first morning after the explosion of TWA Flight 800, amid the overwhelming stench of burning jet fuel and the plane's charred remains, hundreds of letters floated on the surface of the Atlantic, unanchored memories of diplomats, designers, doctors and teenagers. A postcard of the Statue of Liberty had become an interrupted souvenir, an image of the monument born in France that never made its way home. Out of a camera bag fished from the waste came a list in pencil, in what seemed to be a young girl's handwriting. Amy: light pink, size 8. Corry: dress. Steph: orange or hunter green--the plan for a spree in Paris, transformed into a haiku of loss. And somewhere lost in the waters too is an unuttered promise, a diamond ring to accompany a proposal to a lover who must now long for the rest of her life. The miasma off the beaches of New York was the cruelest of elements, mixing the memory and desires of the dead with the terror and fears of the living.
"My mother, I came to see if my mother was on the plane," said a stunned young man, clutching a companion's hand at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. Police whisked him across the street, where he was shown a piece of paper held by an official. The official nodded yes, creating yet another mourner for the 230 people who died off Long Island last week. What killed them? A mechanical malfunction? A technical failure had once sent another hardy Boeing 747 crashing into a Japanese mountain, killing more than 500 people. But this 747 had burst into flames 13,700 ft. in the air. What accident could have caused such a swift and merciless catastrophe?
In the 24 hours after the disaster, experts were already speculating about a powerful bomb that may have found its way onto the plane or of people yet unknown who may have launched a small missile against the airliner from a vantage point as yet undetected. The stories were cautious, with the ifs loudly iterated and "theory" worn like a reluctant fig leaf. Yet by Friday, there were indications that the Federal Government was weighing a decision to order stringent security directives not before seen in peacetime to all U.S. airlines, which would leave little doubt that the fall of TWA Flight 800 was deliberate terror. If the plane was sabotaged, the disaster becomes America's third milestone on a forced march into a demonic dimension, even as the country had been preparing to soar to Olympic heights. If the 230 who died last week were murdered, then the toll of terror is escalating precipitously: six people died in the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993; 168 in the Oklahoma City attack in 1995. And as it waits for the sea to give up its mysteries, America sifts the wreckage for clues to the crime, reassembling the plane and its people, and in doing so, hoping to disperse its grief.
STRANGERS ON A PLANE