The authorities arrived before sunset: mountain rescue, aviation investigators, police, and a recovery team. Everyone was sombre and yet excited to be climbing toward a missing aircraft from the nineties. Nora remained nearby because she had found it, and because the lead investigator, Erik Voss, kept asking her practical questions about the slope, the thaw, and how stable the ice would remain overnight.
When they reached the cargo door, everyone went quiet. The plane had not exploded. It had not shattered. It looked as though it had made a brutal but controlled landing on the glacier and then slid into the bowl, where the ice later sealed it in. The landing gear was torn off, one engine was crushed, and the belly was badly scraped, but the fuselage had mostly held. Erik shone a light into the cockpit first. “No bodies,” he said after a surprised moment.
That changed the mood at once. The cargo hold suggested the same thing. Most of the crates were still strapped in place, but the path to the rear hatch was open. A survival pack was missing. A folded thermal blanket lay near the galley wall. In the cockpit, one route map had been marked in pencil, and the emergency beacon cable had been unplugged by hand. None of it looked random. It looked as though the crew had survived the landing, moved through the plane carefully, and left it with a plan. The real mystery was no longer where the plane had gone. It was what had happened after it came down.