Playing Solitaire
Copyright© 2026 by Jody Daniel
Chapter 3
Dragon Peaks Hotel.
As André and I wandered into the restaurant, I noticed the rest of the team filtering in behind us. They drifted naturally into little groups, claiming tables here and there as though everyone instinctively knew where they belonged. Some gravitated towards familiar faces from the previous day’s recovery operation, while others found a quiet corner to compare notes over steaming mugs of coffee.
I smiled to myself. That, at least, was encouraging.
A team that talks to one another is a team that works together. The formal meetings are important, but it’s often over coffee and casual conversation where the best ideas surface.
Then my eyes found Megan.
Just as she had the previous day, she’d chosen a table of her own, tucked away from everyone else. It wasn’t hidden exactly, but it was far enough removed from the rest of us to create its own little island of solitude.
A couple of the guys wandered over to greet her. They exchanged a few words, smiled politely, and within a minute or two they drifted away again, returning to their own conversations.
Megan simply opened her notebook.
Again.
At first I’d dismissed it as someone needing a bit of personal space after a long morning in the mountains. We all process things differently.
But now I found myself wondering.
She wasn’t rude. Far from it. She answered when spoken to, listened attentively and was always courteous. Yet there was an invisible wall around her that nobody seemed able — or invited — to cross.
Was it simply her personality? Or had life taught her that keeping people at arm’s length was safer than letting them get close? I honestly didn’t know.
What I did know was that investigations like this depended on everyone pulling in the same direction. Helicopter crews, accident investigators, engineers, pathologists, police, aviation specialists — every input mattered. If one person worked entirely in isolation, there was always the risk that an important piece of the puzzle never found its way onto the table.
It wasn’t something I intended forcing. But it was something I quietly filed away for later.
Our coffee arrived, interrupting my thoughts, and André wasted no time reaching for his mug.
“That smells better than aviation fuel,” he said.
“That depends,” I laughed. “I’ve smelt coffee that could probably run a Boeing.”
He chuckled as I reached for my coffee.
After a few minutes of comfortable silence he looked up.
“Are we gathering after lunch to compare notes?”
“Yeah,” I replied, taking a sip of the hot coffee. “I want to give everyone enough time to sort through what they’ve collected this morning. Let them organise their notes, compare photographs and put together a working document before we all sit down.”
“That makes sense.”
“What good is a meeting if everyone arrives with half-formed ideas?”
André nodded.
“I’ve got my own mountain of paperwork waiting for me. I need to visit the local morgue, collect the death certificates and start compiling the inquest docket.”
“You’re also going to need photographs.”
“Yeah ... I was going to ask if I could get copies.”
“No problem.”
I took another sip of coffee.
“Help yourself to whatever you need. There are photographs of the wreckage, the impact site and where every victim was recovered.”
André’s expression changed.
“That last sentence is a bit optimistic.”
I frowned.
“What do you mean?”
He sighed quietly.
“Some of the remains weren’t ... complete.”
I stared into my coffee for a moment.
“No,” I said softly. “They weren’t.”
The image of the crash site came flooding back with uncomfortable clarity.
“There’ll be very little visual identification,” I continued. “DNA is going to be the only reliable way of putting some of those poor souls back together again.”
“The pathologist is going to earn every cent of his pay.”
“Poor bugger.”
“Or buggeress,” I corrected. “The pathologist could be a female...”
He laughed.
“That too.”
For the next twenty minutes the dining room became an unofficial operations centre.
One by one the team members wandered over to our table. The engineer had structural photographs. The avionics specialist had downloaded equipment serial numbers. The police photographers promised copies of every image they’d taken. The mapping team had GPS coordinates ready on memory sticks.
Everyone seemed to have another piece of the puzzle.
By the time the last person wandered off we’d agreed to reconvene at three o’clock that afternoon. Fifteen hundred.
That would give everyone enough time to digest the mountain of information we’d gathered before trying to fit it together.
André stood up and collected his notebook.
“I’d better disappear before my commander starts wondering whether I’ve gone missing as well and sends out a search party.”
“Tell him you’re hiding under a mountain of paperwork.”
“He’d never believe that.”
“True.”
He grinned. “See you at three.”
I watched him disappear through the foyer before turning back towards the dining room. Most of the tables had emptied while we’d been talking.
A few tourists lingered over second cups of coffee, reluctant to swap the warmth of the restaurant for the cold waiting outside.
Megan hadn’t moved. She was exactly where she’d been when we’d arrived.
The laptop screen glowed in front of her. Every now and then she’d stop typing long enough to jot something into the little notebook that never seemed to leave her side, pause for a few seconds as though assembling the next thought, then continue typing again.
Type. Pause. Scribble. Think. Type again. It was almost rhythmic.
What struck me wasn’t how hard she was working. It was everything she wasn’t doing. There wasn’t an empty coffee mug on the table. No empty food plate. No sandwich.
Nothing except the laptop, the notebook and a bottle of water that looked as though it hadn’t been opened.
Forty minutes had slipped by without her noticing.
I caught the waiter’s eye.
“One coffee,” I said quietly. “For the lady over there.”
He smiled knowingly. “Right away, sir.”
I picked up my own mug and wandered across just as the waiter placed Megan’s coffee on the table next to her.
“I didn’t order coffee,” Megan said to the waiter.
“No,” I replied. “I did.”
She looked up at me.
“I’ve been watching you.”
One eyebrow lifted.
“Watching me?”
“Observing,” I corrected. “Watching would imply I had nothing better to do.”
She folded her arms. “There’s a difference?”
“A considerable one.” I pointed towards the dining room. “You came in about forty minutes ago. Everyone else ordered coffee, something to eat, compared notes and left. You’re still sitting here with the same notebook and laptop.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly.
“You’re watching me.”
I smiled. “No.” I gestured towards the empty table. “You don’t have an empty mug.”
“No.”
“You don’t have an empty plate.”
“No.”
“You’ve been working flat out for forty minutes without taking a break.”
She looked down at the coffee.
“That’s not watching,” I said. “That’s simply noticing.”
For a few moments she said nothing. Then she pushed the laptop back, reached for the mug, added sugar and milk and stirred it thoughtfully.
“No human being can concentrate properly for more than forty minutes without taking a ten-minute break.”
“Thank you for that, Professor.”
“I’m not a professor.”
“No,” she replied quietly. “But one of mine used to lecture me exactly like that.”
“Wise old fellow.”
She looked up.
“She was a woman.”
I blinked. “Right.”
“People always assume otherwise.”
“My apologies.”
She gave the coffee another stir. “Don’t apologise.” She shrugged. “It happens all the time.”
“Well,” I said, “your professor was right.”
She took her first sip of coffee.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
I studied her for a moment.
“You should order something to eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Your stomach disagrees.”
She frowned.
“What?”
“It just rolled like distant thunder.”
Her stirring stopped.
“You heard that?”
“I think half the restaurant heard that.”
For the first time I thought I saw genuine embarrassment cross her face.
Before she could object, I reached for the menu.
“Toasted chicken mayo or toasted ham, cheese and tomato?”
She looked at me as though I’d changed the subject too quickly.
“What?”
“The sandwich.”
“Oh...” She hesitated. “Chicken mayo.”
“Good choice.”
I waved the waiter over.
“Two toasted chicken mayo sandwiches on brown bread.”
She looked up.
“You’re having one too?”
“I was planning to. I don’t like eating alone.”
That seemed to catch her completely off guard.
While we waited for the sandwiches she reopened her laptop.
“I managed to get the radar track for the King Air.”
“You did?”
She turned the screen towards me.
“Yes. And I also managed to get some ADS-B data picked up by a local lodge owner that has an ADS-B antenna on the lodge roof and recorded the data on his computer.”
“Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast from the aircraft’s own transponder!”
Her voice became noticeably more animated. “They maintained twelve thousand feet for most of the flight.”
She zoomed in.
“Then, approximately nine kilometres from the mountain, they descended to eleven thousand.”
Another click.
“They covered that 9 kilometres in one minute and thirteen seconds. And about three kilometres before impact they descended again to ten thousand eight hundred feet.”
I studied the figures.
“That is odd.”
“Exactly.”
“So in the last minute and thirty-seven seconds before impact, they descended from twelve thousand to ten thousand eight hundred?” It was more statement than question. “They dropped twelve hundred feet in just over a minute and a half.”
“Yes.”
I tapped the screen of her laptop. “And the pilots did not see it?
“Instrument rated pilots ignore the inner ear data inputs, or the human body’s ‘feeling’, and trust their instruments,” she replied.
“And how do you know that piece of pilot training? Through investigative instinct?”
“I am also an IFR certified pilot with a fifty-fifty share in a little Beech Bonanza single engine...” She looked down at her notes and a slight shy blush spread on her cheeks.
“Go girl!” I replied, taking a sip of my coffee. “And flying Instrument Flight Rules in Instrument Meteorological conditions the altimeter kept telling the King Air pilots they were clear at 12000 feet MSL.”
“Yes. Therefore I need the flight computer data. I want to compare it against the radar returns, and the ADS-B data.”
“Ruan’s busy removing the cabin section first.”
She looked surprised. “I thought he’d leave that until last.”
“I changed the plan.”
“Why?”
“I want the instrument panel and flight data equipment down here before sunset.”
She nodded slowly. “You think there may still be recoverable information?”
“I think it’s worth finding out.”
For a moment she simply looked at me. Then, without another word, she closed the laptop. Both the laptop and note notebook disappeared into her backpack.
It struck me that this was probably the first time since we’d met that she’d voluntarily stopped working before she’d finished.
“Then,” she said, wrapping both hands around the warm mug, “I suppose I should enjoy the coffee while it’s still hot.”
A tiny smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. It wasn’t much. Most people in the restaurant would probably never have noticed it.
But after two days behind a wall of professionalism and quiet reserve, it completely changed her face.
I couldn’t help smiling back.
The afternoon meeting.
By quarter to three the hotel had taken on a different atmosphere.
The relaxed chatter over lunch had given way to quiet purpose. Coffee mugs had been replaced by laptops, notebooks and memory sticks. People who had spent the morning scattered across the mountainside, the wreckage and various government offices were now converging on one place with one common goal—to make sense of what we’d found.
The conference room the hotel had allocated to us wasn’t particularly large, but it served the purpose well enough. One entire wall had already disappeared behind aerial photographs of Champagne Castle, enlarged topographical maps and satellite imagery of the valley. Red and blue marker pens lay scattered across the tables alongside rulers, protractors and rolls of transparent drafting film.
Someone had thoughtfully wheeled in another urn of coffee.
Judging by the number of empty cups already standing around, it wasn’t going to survive the afternoon.
I arrived with André and Cecil a few minutes early. Ruan was already there, talking quietly with two of the structural engineers. The police photographers were connecting a laptop to the projector while one of the surveyors carefully laid out a series of GPS plots across the main table.
Megan sat by herself near the far end of the room. Some things, it seemed, never changed.
Her laptop was already open, the familiar notebook beside it. She wasn’t typing this time. Instead, she was reading through several pages she’d filled during the morning, occasionally making another neat notation in the margin.
As always, she appeared completely oblivious to everything happening around her.
Or perhaps not oblivious.
Simply ... comfortable.
I’d started to realise there was a difference.
One by one the remainder of the team filtered in until every chair was occupied. Conversations gradually faded as people settled into their places.
I looked around the room.
This was probably the most diverse investigation team I’d ever assembled.
Military pilots. Civil aviation investigators. Aircraft engineers. Forensic specialists. Police detectives. Surveyors. Pathologists.
Each one had spent the day looking at exactly the same accident from a completely different perspective. Now came the difficult part. Putting all those perspectives together.
I stood up.
“Right, ladies and gentlemen.” The last few conversations stopped. “First of all, thank you.”
I looked around the room.
“I know today wasn’t exactly easy. Some of you spent the entire morning hanging off a cliff. Others were crawling through wreckage or standing in a morgue.”
Nobody smiled. There wasn’t much humour to be found in that.
“But you’ve all gathered information that somebody else couldn’t have.”
I walked over to the map pinned against the wall.
“The objective this afternoon isn’t to reach conclusions.” I tapped the map with the end of my pen.
“It’s to build a picture.” I looked around the room again. “Facts first.”
I held up one finger. “Opinions later.”
There were several nods around the table.
“If anyone has a theory, keep it in your notebook until we’ve got enough evidence to support—or destroy—it.” That produced a few quiet chuckles.
“Trust me,” I continued. “Aeroplanes have an irritating habit of making fools of investigators who jump to conclusions too early.”
Even André grinned.
“Let’s begin with the site survey.”
The projector hummed to life.
For the next hour the room settled into the steady rhythm of an investigation.
The mapping team projected a detailed aerial mosaic assembled from more than four hundred drone photographs and video that was taken throughout the morning.
Watching the software stitch individual images together was like seeing a giant jigsaw puzzle assemble itself.
Every boulder. Every snowbank. Every fragment of aluminium. Every scar gouged into the cliff face. Nothing escaped the camera.
The surveyors overlaid GPS coordinates onto the imagery while the plan-drawing team quietly marked reference points onto transparent film.
Within minutes the chaotic crash site began transforming into something measurable. Understandable.
The police photographers followed. One image after another appeared on the screen. Close-ups. Wide angles. Impact marks. Scrape patterns. Broken control surfaces. Sections of fuselage. The cabin roof. The tail assembly.
Nothing was discussed. Nothing interpreted. Each photograph simply became another piece of evidence. Another sentence in a story the mountain was slowly telling us.
Ruan stood next.
“The cockpit section has now been recovered from the cliff.”
He changed slides.
The photograph drew everyone’s attention.
The remains of the nose section sat strapped inside a heavy steel transport cradle, looking more like crushed foil than an aeroplane.
“It was impossible to recover as one piece,” he explained. “The structure had to be stabilised before it could be lowered.”
The next image showed the twisted mass disappearing beneath the cliff on a long line suspended beneath the SAAF Oryx.
“The entire cockpit section is now secured inside a sealed shipping container. It’ll remain under police guard until we’re ready for the detailed strip examination.”
He paused before changing slides again.
“The right engine came down with it.” That image was somehow even worse. Or perhaps fascinating was the better word. There was almost nothing recognisable left.
The PT6A engine I’d expected to see had become hundreds of individual pieces spread across several evidence trays. Gearbox fragments. Sections of compressor casing. Shattered turbine discs. Twisted pipework. Bearings. Mounts. Things I couldn’t even identify.
It looked less like an engine and more like someone had detonated a hand grenade inside a precision Swiss watch.
I glanced towards Megan. She hadn’t looked up once. Her eyes remained fixed on the photographs with an intensity I’d not seen before.
Every now and then she’d make another note. No wasted movement. No unnecessary expression. Just observation.
The sort of observation that comes from years of knowing exactly what you’re looking at.
I’d watched her over coffee earlier that day.
Quiet. Reserved. Almost invisible. The woman sitting across the room now looked different.
She hadn’t spoken a word. She hadn’t needed to. There was a quiet confidence about her that hadn’t been there before.
Or perhaps it had. Perhaps I’d simply failed to notice it.
Ruan sat down.
“Colonel?”
I nodded.
“Thank you.”
I picked up the small anti-static evidence bag lying beside my notes.
“One item before we move on.”
Every eye turned towards me.
“We’ve managed to recover several of the primary flight instruments from the cockpit.” I held up the bag. “They’re beyond repair.”
A few people nodded.
“I expected that.” I turned the bag over in my hands.
“The casings are shattered. The displays are gone. The altimeters are destroyed.” I paused.
“But...”
That single word immediately drew everyone’s attention.
“The internal circuit boards survived far better than I expected.”
I laid the evidence bag back on the table.
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