He was still trying to reckon this terrible fact when he began to encounter debris. A cluster of water bottles went by. A white garbage bag. A snapped piece of varnished wood paneling with drink holders in it. A man’s black Nike sneaker.
On the other side of a swell to starboard appeared a huge white drumlike object. It was bouncing up and down in the water like a giant fishing bob. He couldn’t think what the hell it was. Then he came close enough to smell the jet fuel and see the glistening steel turbofan blades still rotating inside of it.
A football field beyond the ripped-free jet engine lay the plane’s dissected rear fuselage. Gannon eased the throttle back. He looked up at its aerodynamic rear stabilizers as he came alongside it. G550 was written in high-sheen blue paint upon its pale side.
He slipped the boat into full idle as he came around to the front, where the cross-sectioned fuselage had breached asunder. From its top hung a spaghetti of aluminum framing and electrical wiring and tattered fiberglass. Yet through these ragged streamers, the rear interior of the aircraft was almost perfectly intact. There was cream-colored carpet on the floor, a window seat covered in bungee-corded luggage, a highly varnished wood sideboard.
Behind the sideboard was the open doorway of a restroom. Gannon stared into it, mesmerized. The white marble sink basin within it looked like something from a five-star hotel.
“Hello!” Gannon called into the fantastic floating ruin. “Hello! Is anyone in there?”
Gannon closed his eyes, listening intently. Thirty seconds passed. A minute. There was nothing. The only sound was the low chugging of his diesels.
He retrieved his binoculars and pointed them to the south. Far off beyond the wreck at ten miles or more, he could just make out the dark coast of one of Little Abaco’s tiny uninhabited outer islands.
“What in the hell?” he said angrily as he scanned a three-sixty.
Why were there no boats in the water? he thought. Or choppers in the sky? Hadn’t the pilot called in a mayday? Hadn’t the airport in Little Abaco seen it disappear off the radar?
He went back up into the flying bridge and did another slower, tighter sweep with the binoculars. About another football field north of the tail section, he spotted a thick clump of objects floating in the water. It was quickly getting darker now, so it was hard to know what they were. Just five or ten black lumps bunched together, rising and falling in the calm swells.
“Please don’t be what I think you are,” he said to himself as he levered at the throttle and turned the wheel.
He’d chugged the Rambler in close enough to see that the items were only a cluster of floating pillows and seat cushions when he spotted something below in the clear water beneath them.
It was something large and pale.
4
Gannon came down the ladder and threw off his shirt and grabbed a diving mask from his equipment locker. The diving door was port side rear, and he swung it open and extended down the telescoping diving ladder with a loud clack and plunged feetfirst into the warm water.
In the darkening water below the hull of his boat there were some undersea limestone ridges at a depth of about fifty feet. In the murk, about fifty feet farther down their crusted slope, was the entire front of the jet with its huge wings and most of its forward cabin resting on a coral plateau.
He searched the plane and the coral all around it through the mask until he couldn’t hold his breath anymore. Then he scrambled back up and stripped off the mask and kicked off his wet sneakers as he raced across the deck for his tanks.
It was three minutes later when Gannon plunged backward into the water. He clicked on all his lights and thumbed at the buoyancy compensator as he spun himself around and down into the dim water.
He was geared up with everything he could think of. His double 120 tanks, his flippers and wrist dive computer, his brand-new BCD vest. The light was almost gone now, so he’d also grabbed his powerful hand-strap Sola flashlight along with his GoPro camera diving mask because the camera had another light.
Descending along the crusted ridgeline toward the plane, he swung the powerful flashlight back and forth at the wreck, hoping to see air bubbles. But all he saw were bits of fiberglass and a couple of gray angelfish that came out of the coral, attracted to the light.
He finally came flat and level with the plane two long minutes later. The first object he made out inside the torn tube of its opening was the back of a large beige luxury leather seat. To the right of it across the narrow aisle was an empty leather couch of the same creamy beige color. A few feet in front of the couch beneath a porthole window was a low wood desk with a large black TV monitor on it that blocked his view farther in.
There was a brief moan in the plane’s metal as Gannon floated there, considering his options. He checked his depth gauge with his flashlight. It said he and the plane were at one hundred fifteen feet.
He looked back at the plane through his mask. The ripped opening of the front half of the plane was strung with even more tatters of wire and shredded metal than the floating half above. But there was ample room for him to swim in as long as he stayed low.
He trimmed some more air out of his buoyancy compensator to get his horizontal balance even better, then went in slowly, careful of his hoses. He arrived at the beige chair and grabbed on to its armrest to pull himself forward.
He immediately face-planted down into the carpet as the chair unexpectedly swiveled on him. He lost his balance, and his light and his mask went askew. He had just cleared the mask and was turning, pushing up off his knees, when he bumped into something with his chest, and he swung the light around.
And came nose to nose with the revolting open-eyed corpse sitting in the chair’s seat.
Bubbles spewed, and he almost lost a flipper as he reared back in full-blown blind panic and terror. His mask went askew again and completely fogged into a gray mess as he clonked his head off the plane’s low ceiling.
He turned and twisted and lunged away out of the plane as fast as his kicking flippers and fear-crazed windmilling arms could take him. He didn’t stop swimming until his hand finally found his neon dive rope he’d dropped twenty feet to the wreck’s south.
He cleared his mask again and floated there beside the faintly glowing rope. The hiss and gurgle of the regulator loud in his ears, his heart hammering.
Of course the people are dead, you idiot, Gannon thought angrily as he glanced back at the wrecked plane. What the hell else would they be?
He needed to stop this silliness, he thought as he looked past the plane into the immensity of the rapidly darkening ocean in front of him.
Diving alone in the open Atlantic was suicidal by itself without going into some coffin-sized wreck filled with who knew what. He was almost certain to get himself killed in another minute if he kept this nonsense up.
The rasp of his breath calmed a little as he fussed with his mask strap. He looked at the time on his dive computer. Then he glanced back at the wrecked plane again.
Oh, whatever. One more try, he thought, already swimming back toward it.
5
The dead man belted into the swivel chair back in the plane was a tall and lean distinguished-looking white-haired Caucasian male somewhere in his midsixties.
He looked polished, Gannon thought. Expensively groomed. With his white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his gray suit slacks, he could have been a doctor from a daytime TV commercial.
When Gannon looked more closely in the flashlight beam, he could see there was actually something wrong with the man’s photogenic face. There was a horribly pale bluish cast to his skin especially around his open eyes, and from his nose to his chin, there was a thin stripe of what looked like dried blood.
Behind his diving mask, Gannon squinted, perplexed.
How could his blood already be dry? he thought.
Ga
nnon swam in a little to the right of the corpse. In two more leather swivel chairs on the left-hand side of the aircraft’s tight cabin sat two more dead men.
Like the first man, they were both white, both wearing business clothes. The one closest to him was about thirty-five or so. He had a closely cropped haircut and was stocky and rugged-faced. The other one seated farther toward the front of the plane was younger. He was bony, in his early twenties. He had longish hair and the wisp of a blond beard and was wearing white earmuff-style headphones.
Gannon passed the light from one to the other. Like the first body, they, too, had the same strangely pale bluish tone to their faces.
When Gannon finally turned to the right-hand side of the cabin beside them with the light, it took the entirety of his restraint to not rear back in another panicked bubble-spewing jolt.
In the forward galley before the cockpit was yet another dead man. He was floating upright as if standing. Unlike the others, this dead man was black and was dressed in jeans and a gray hoodie. Gannon watched as the corpse rotated around in a slow, horrid lifelike turn. There was the same blue sickly look to his features as well, and his nosebleed had been so bad, it had stained the top of his sweater black.
When Gannon pointed the light into the cockpit behind the body, he could see that there were two pilots in white-shirted airline-like uniforms still seated at the controls.
He tried to look to see their faces more closely, but the upright floating hoodie-wearing dead man in the galley was blocking the view.
And the chances of him moving the floating dead man out of the way or going any farther into the claustrophobic undersea mausoleum even another inch, Gannon thought, were exactly none at all.
Six dead. No survivors, Gannon thought with a nod. There was nothing to be done.
Time to go, he thought, flippering around in a hectic rush to finally get the hell out of there.
6
After what seemed some very long, slow minutes of following the coral ridge back up through the ten-story depth of the dark water, Gannon finally hauled himself back aboard his boat.
After he pulled himself up through the dive door, instead of sitting on one of the benches, he spit out the regulator and knelt and lay facedown on the deck in the sluice of the water.
He’d shrugged out of his clanging tanks and was still light-headed with the ebullient joy of breathing through his nose and being alive when he finally stood a long minute later.
And still, there is no rescue effort! he thought as he looked over the wreckage to the now-dark horizon.
Nothing. Not a boat. Not an aircraft. Not even a light anywhere in sight.
The boat pitched hard port to starboard in a swell as he peeled off his dripping gloves. As it baby cradled back and forth, he turned to the left and saw that the floating rear tail section of the shattered jet was lower than it had been. It had foundered to one side a tad, its pale cruciform tail fin slightly tilted.
In a moment, it would sink, too, Gannon thought, shaking his head at the absurdity of the whole crazy thing. In an hour, the dark Atlantic would swallow it like it had swallowed the first half of it. And but for Gannon’s memory, it would be as if the plane had never existed at all.
Gannon had just pulled up the dive rope and was clacking up the dive ladder a minute later when the boat pitched again, and he heard the clatter to starboard.
He walked over and looked over the gunwale and saw some luggage there in the water, bumping up against the side of his boat.
The first piece Gannon brought aboard with the help of his gaff was a little dark green hard case that looked like something you’d put a camera in. He laid it on the deck and went and got a penlight. He clicked the light on, put it in his mouth, undid the case’s clasps and flipped up the lid.
Inside of the case, sunk into the hard gray packing foam, was a gun. He could tell by its distinctive shape and black matte texture that it was a polymer Glock pistol. There were some large magazines and a suppressor half-buried in the packing material beside it. He peered at the length of the magazines then tilted the light at the pistol barrel. A thin number 18 was engraved along the side.
A Glock 18? Gannon thought with a whistle.
He’d heard of them. They looked like a regular pistol but they were actually small yet extremely powerful handheld machine guns with a rate of fire twice that of an Uzi.
A fully automatic machine gun pistol, he thought, looking at it curiously. But weren’t only people in law enforcement or the military allowed to legally possess those?
He was still staring down at it with a hand to the back of his wet mind-boggled head a full minute later when he heard some more knocking and clacking against the boat.
The second hard case he pulled aboard was silver and far heavier than the first. He actually had to gaff it around to the diving door and almost threw out his back as he lugged it up over the lip. It had to be about seventy pounds or more, he thought as he brought it over and thumped it onto the deck next to the gun case.
He stood, chewing at his lower lip as he stared at it. Then he finally knelt down and opened it up.
And felt his breath exit his lungs in a mad-dash rush.
Gannon tracked the columns and rows. Right to left and up and down. And then he did it again.
The case was jammed tight with money. They were all hundreds. Packets and packets and packets of United States of America Benjamin Franklin one-hundred-dollar bills.
They were wrapped tight in red rubber bands. He edged one out. He thumbed at the cloth-like paper. He held it up to his face and smelled it and riffled its soft edge against his wrist.
“Seventy pounds,” Gannon whispered as he stared.
But that’s not all, came a TV game show host voice from somewhere in Gannon’s mind as he noticed a huge lump in the cloth webbing on the underside of the case’s lid.
Inside the flap, there was a big butter-soft black leather bag about the size of a laptop case. The word Cross was embossed along its bottom. He lifted it out and unzipped it and unfolded it on top of the pallet of money.
He was no jeweler, but inside of the leather bag was what appeared to be rough uncut diamonds. Some were grayish and some had a yellow tinge, but most of them were as colorless and clear as broken car glass.
They had been separated into clear plastic sleeves by size. A grouping of about ten of them in one sleeve section along the left side of the sheet particularly captured his attention.
He’d seen diamonds before. Just never ones the size of Jolly Rancher hard candies.
There were about enough diamonds to fill a cereal bowl, Gannon thought, shaking the bag. Hell, more. Several bowls. He bit at his lower lip some more as he began nodding idiotically. He was staring down at the damn entire box of cornflakes, wasn’t he?
Seventy pounds of worn US hundred-dollar bills plus a fat satchel of uncut diamonds, he thought as he stood. Plus a fully automatic law enforcement–only machine gun pistol.
He glanced back at the sinking tail section.
Plus six dead men in a multimillion-dollar crashed luxury Gulfstream jet.
He knew what it was now. He had thought it already, but now he knew.
It was a drug deal. Some kind of crazy high-level drug deal. Down in South America. In Colombia or Bolivia or somewhere with the cartels. But it had gone super loco apparently.
Gannon blinked at the piled treasure.
He looked up at the dark vault of the sky, the first faint silver sprinkling of stars that could be seen there.
The opportunity he had here. All that money. Like a Powerball hit.
Only the kind you could never tell anyone about.
He slowly passed a hand over his scruffy jaw. He looked at the water, turned in every direction. All still dark. Still nobody coming. He looked at the cross of the listing tail section about to sink.
What would the Bahamian government do with it? Gannon thought. Lower the tax rate? Give it to the poor?
Sure they would, he thought as he took a deep breath.
Then he decided.
Was it even a decision at all? he thought as he went and found his gloves again and pulled them on.
Gannon hurried up to the bow and clicked on the electric anchor winch. As the chain began to chatter against the bow roll, he came back and dumped the money out onto the deck and tossed the bag of diamonds on top of it. He wiped down the empty suitcase with a wet towel before he brought it back to the diving platform and filled it with water and made it sink.
He thought about keeping the gun before he closed its lid and wiped its case down and heaved it into the sea from whence it came.
He tossed the diamonds and money into a dirty blanket he used as a pad when doing engine repairs and locked it in the head before he went forward and secured the anchor.
Gannon could feel butterflies in his stomach and his heart pounding crazily in his chest as he came back and climbed the ladder up into the dark flying bridge.
“Caught something after all,” he said to himself with a crazy laugh as he turned off the running lights and slammed the twin diesels to full reverse, keeping his eyes on the dark horizon.
7
Coming on eleven at night, there was an accident on Miami’s Palmetto Expressway that was backing up traffic just west of the I-95 on-ramp.
Pressed up against the left side window of the coast guard C-130 Hercules on approach to Miami Coast Guard Air Station, navy lieutenant Ruby Everett squinted down at the commotion.
In the police blue-and-red bubble light glare, she counted three vehicles involved, a pickup truck and two cars. She craned her neck back as the thunderous aircraft zoomed over the highway. She looked for debris, telltale skid marks. But it was fruitless. They were too far away.
Stop at Nothing Page 2