The Rough English Equivalent (The Jack Mason Saga Book 1)

by Stan Hayes

“Switch on?” I shouted, glad for the chance to shout down my sadness. “Switch on,” Mose echoed. The big Cyclone’s starter ground, turning it over slowly for a couple of turns before it cleared its throat and caught, quickly settling down to its familiar loping, flat bass. After a couple of minutes of earth-shaking idle, Mose gave me the “thumbs-out” signal. I scurried around behind the wing to pull the wheel chocks. Dropping them, I stood there with Mom as Mose, with a wave, taxied out of Bisque forever. In a way, I felt like hell that I couldn’t tell her what was going to happen, but in another way I didn’t. If she wanted him, she’d had plenty of time to do something about it.

  Mose ran the engine up at the end of the strip. The tattered windsock showed a steady 10-knot wind, just south of east, as they taxied onto the runway. The morning shook as he throttled up, bringing the big engine quickly to takeoff power. The tail came up right away, and with a final wave from the open cockpit as the F3F broke ground, Mose was gone. We watched the plane shrink, the landing gear creeping into the fuselage as Mose held his heading. There was something feathery in the wings’ shadow that ran ahead of them. Then I remembered; Flx’s on board.

  Turning to go, we saw GD standing on the porch, watching the takeoff and, no doubt, giving Mose a grade for it. “Hey,” he said, reluctantly shifting his attention from the aircraft’s climbout. “Didn’t expect to see you people out here this af’noon. Want sump’m to drink?”

  We sat on the porch, drinking and feeling the absence of Mose. “Wish that was us takin’ ’at old bird cross-country,” GD said to me. “We oughta run it down to Pensacola next time you’re home.”

  “Suits me,” I said, “I’ll call you when I know.”

  “I’ve been thinkin’ about upgradin’ the engine,” he said. “You know, that 2-stage blower version that they run in the T-28s. One of my old shipmates down there says it’ll bolt right up.”

  “I don’t know; how do you think the airframe would handle it?”

  “Hell! If Al Williams could put Gs on that Gulfhawk the way he did, I don’t think another 25-30 knots of cruise is gonna strain anything.”

  “Jack, we need to get back,” Mom said. It was the first thing she’d said since we sat down.

  “OK.”

  GD picked up the glasses as we stood to leave. “Well, maybe old Cueball’l bring us back some fish. Be careful, Bub. Don’t let that Rocket 88 get out from under ye.”

  Throttling back to twenty-six inches of manifold pressure, Moses eased the F3F’s nose down to level flight attitude, retrimming the controls as the aircraft picked up its normal cruising speed of 180 knots. They were at eight thousand feet, the magnetic compass steadied up on a heading of 112 degrees, making a beeline for the Atlantic, for which his preflight planning provided an estimated en route time of 36 minutes. Keying the microphone on the recently-installed intercom system, he asked Brück, “How’re you doing?”

  “Very well, my friend,” he responded. “How long before we get our feet wet?”

  “Thirty-five, forty minutes,” said Moses. “Got your smoke cartridge ready?”

  “Ready and waiting for your signal, Captain; just give me the word.”

  “Great. We want to pop it before we start our descent. I'll let you know as soon as I have contact with the boat.” He had already tuned the VHF receiver to the specified frequency. Beginning at ten past six, Linda would key her microphone for ten seconds, at sixty-second intervals, to allow Moses to take a bearing on the Striker with the plane’s radio direction finder. Unless something totally unexpected were to occur, he would be able to make visual contact with the boat, whose cabin roof was overlaid by a white canvas cover with a black cross painted on it, and ditch the aircraft beside it with no verbal communication having been necessary. Discreet research in the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics publications had satisfied Moses that he would be able, as a number of Naval Aviators had been, to ditch the F3F into a reasonably calm sea with little or no difficulty.

  As soon as Linda had the aircraft in sight, she would cut the boat’s power to the minimum necessary to keep the boat headed into the ocean swells. Moses would fly the aircraft carrier-type approach that Gene Debs had taught him, turning off the downwind leg of his approach in a constant one-hundred-eighty-degree descending turn instead of flying an orthodox base leg, using the boat to mark the end of an imaginary runway in the ocean. Leaving the landing gear up, he would fly the aircraft onto the water at two or three knots above stall speed, letting the rear third of the fuselage make first contact with the water, slowing the craft further before its bottom wing, and immediately after that a half-ton of engine, dropped onto the surface.

  Moses’ radio fix at six o’clock showed them two minutes ahead of their preflight-planned six o’clock position. He glanced down at the remote radio detonator, wedged between the right side of his seat and the skin of the aircraft. He had wrapped it in a metal box quite a bit larger than the transmitter, the extra airspace in the box producing a package that would float. The box lid’s rubber grommet fit onto the box’s knife edge, and the several layers of two-inch electrical tape that encased it, guaranteed its watertight survival as he swam from the plane to the boat. A wire cable secured with more layers of electrical tape extended from the box to a loop that would be closed around his wrist by a spring latch. The long blade on his pocket knife, honed to razor sharpness, would cut through the layers of tape very quickly as soon as they were on board the boat.

  Moses looked at his watch; when the sweep-second hand hit twelve, it would be six-ten. Glancing at his compass, he confirmed their heading and continued scanning the blue water for sea traffic. He took some comfort in seeing nothing, confirming his expectation of little or no activity in the area that he’d chosen. On the other hand, where the hell was Linda? Three things happened almost simultaneously; he banked gently to the right, beginning a series of easy s-turns that would let him see the areas of water that the fuselage and wing were blanking out. As the nose of the aircraft moved right, he saw a white speck about five miles ahead. The click and sizzle in his earphones sent his gaze immediately inside the cockpit to the radio magnetic indicator; its needle pointed directly at the growing white speck. “Looks like our ride, dead ahead,” he said over the intercom. “We should get another bearing in a few seconds. By the time we have it, we should be close enough to see the black cross. “Roger,” said Brück. “Standing by.”

  He heard the click and sizzle in his earphones again as the needle pointed solidly in the direction of the boat; the black cross on its roof stood out as it neared the edge of his port wing. “That's it,” he said over the intercom. “Open the canopy and stream the smoke.” He throttled back to begin their descent, checking the sea around them once again for other craft. Seeing none, he flew another thirty seconds or so on the same heading before banking left to set up the downwind leg of his approach. He could see wisps of black smoke to his left, and was relieved to see that the first smoke grenade had worked, eliminating the need to fire one of the two backups they’d brought along. As they passed through five thousand feet, he leveled his wings on a heading roughly reciprocal to that of the boat. He pulled back the power a little more to increase their rate of descent, shooting for an altitude of seven to eight hundred feet by the time they were abeam the boat. Checking again for other traffic, he asked Brück, “See any other craft down there?”

  “I'm pretty sure that I saw one due east of us just as I popped the smoke,” he said. “But I lost it over the horizon as soon as you began to let down.”

  “Any idea what it was?”

  “No; looked pretty small, but I couldn't say for sure.”

  “Well, he's at least twenty miles away,” said Moses as he snapped the detonator cable around his right wrist . “We’ll be down and headed out of here way before he can get within binocular range of us, even if he saw the smoke as soon as it started streaming.”

  As his left wingtip passed abeam the boat, Moses opened his canopy and banked left, ad
ding a little power back to slow their rate of descent just a bit. Passing through five hundred feet, he took it off again, confident now of touching down very near the boat. “Check your shoulder harness locked,” he said over the intercom.

  “Roger,” Brück acknowledged.

  The waves were near enough now to estimate their height, which he put at a couple of feet at most. The boat was just off the plane's nose now; he smiled to himself as he shot a quick glance at the stern. Striker. Quickly pulling the throttle back to its stop, he eased a little more back pressure onto the stick, scrubbing off a bit more speed but making sure the aircraft didn't begin to stall. He wanted to ease it into the water as gently as he possibly could. Easy, easy, he said to himself just as he felt the tail kiss the water. The aircraft settled on to the sea with a whoosh and a very sudden stop. Although he couldn't see it, Striker was already under way, picking up speed to cover the scant two hundred feet between them in a hurry.

  “This a WBQE news flash… This morning, Federal District Court Judge Whitlow Richards ruled that former Bisque residents Moses Kubielski and Paul Pulaski were killed when the airplane in which they were flying last August sixth crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. While the Judge was not specific with respect to the process of his decision with regard to the deaths of Messrs. Kubielski and Pulaski, who were bound for Kitty Hawk for a weekend of fishing, expert observers who would not consent to be identified credited the testimony of commercial fisherman Rodney Bledsoe as crucial to the case. Mr. Bledsoe, of Nag’s Head, North Carolina, testified that he had seen the Grumman biplane begin a smoky descent into the sea, exploding on impact. Mr. Bledsoe also testified that his boat reached the impact site within a half hour of sighting the stricken airplane. His crew recovered a few pieces of the wreckage, but saw no sign of either man. ‘The sea just swallowed ’em up,’ Mr. Bledsoe said.”

  Chapter XXX. Case Discount

  The breeze blew briskly, drier than usual for Miami, even in the winter. Jack pressed the button, and again half a minute later when he’d heard no bell or buzzer inside. Seconds later Linda opened the door. “Hi, Jack,” she said, the husky alto bringing everything back to him, smiling as she extended her hand. “How’ve you been? Her dark red hair was cut short now, making the high cheekbones more of her face than ever. A blue scoop-neck top clung tastefully to the well-remembered contours of her body.

  Recovering, Jack managed to say, “Hey, Linda; long time.” She smiled again, glancing back over her shoulder. A tan, slim, long-haired Peter Wessel, in a white guayabera shirt, stood grinning behind her. The man who had once been Moses Kubielski had also acquired a close-clipped moustache and a new nose.

  “Get in here, shitbird,” he said, reaching out to put his arm around him, hauling him into a hug, which Linda augmented with an arm around each of them. “Sorry to spring my new look on you this way.” Keeping an arm around him, he pulled him into the house’s interior, down a shadowy hall toward the daylight at its end. “This place is no Taj Mahal, but it’ll do for awhile. Plenty of room, anyhow. You can stay for awhile, caincha?”

  “As long as it takes, seenyore,” Jack said, “I wanta hear what the hell y’all’ve been up to for the last two-three years, besides plastic surgery, you ol’ muffucker. I can’t believe we’re here.”

  “Unbelievable’s the only word that fits,” Peter/Moses agreed. They went through the door into a large courtyard that hosted three six-foot-plus palmettos. “Sit,” he said, waving a hand at one of two white wicker chaises on either side of a glass-topped table. A large metal pitcher sat on the glass in a pool of condensation, sharing the space with half a dozen stemmed glasses. “Daíquiri OK, or something else?”

  “Daíquiri? Fine,” Jack said. “It’ll be my first.”

  They sat, Jack and Linda on the green-and-white striped chaises and Peter in a matching armchair, letting the first half of their drinks settle things down. Jack spoke first. “When’d y’all get here?”

  “Couple of weeks ago,” said Linda. “We loaded the boat on Christmas eve, and weighed anchor at sunup. The gunfire over in Santa Clara kept the sky lit up all night.”

  “We weren’t that much ahead of Lansky’s bunch- or Batista’s either, for that matter,” said Peter, getting up to top off the Daíquiris. By New Year’s, Castro and company were movin’ into Havana and takin’ over.”

  “It sure happened in a hurry,” said Jack, who had to keep reminding himself who this ersatz Latino was. “Do you think things’ll get better down there, or worse?”

  “Hard to say, if you mean better for the Cubans,” said Peter. “But it sure as hell won’t be better for Gringos any time soon.”

  “Guess not. A revolution’s no place for the ‘haves’. By the way, what’d y’all do with Dieter? He came back with you, didn’t he?”

  “He’s dead, Jack. Almost two years,” Peter said, his head dropping slightly, seeming to rotate on the axis of his eyes as they continued to look at him.

  The blood drained out of Jack’s face. “Dead? What happened?”

  “Got his head blown off in Havana when a bunch of rebels attacked Batista’s palace. Sittin’ in the back of a cab, on Calle Monserrate, mindin’ his own friggin’ business. It was his bad luck to be sittin’ there when they blocked traffic and charged the building. The casino people got us a copy of the police report; fifty-caliber slugs hit Paul and several others when one of the machine guns opened up on the rebels.”

  Jesus. When was that?”

  1957. March 13th. A Wednesday; we hadn’t even been there a year.”

  “God. What a shame.”

  “Yeah. Dieter- his new name was Robert- was really enjoying Havana. We’d gotten a house out in Vedado; we called it ‘Hawkcienda,’ for this hawk whose picture Linda shot. He ran a herd of Cubanitas in and out of there day and night. They loved his pale blondness, even when he’d left the pale part behind. He used to say, ‘Havana makes up for all of the horseshit,’ in that piss-elegant way of swearing that he had, making it seem like he really hadn’t said ‘horseshit’ at all, but something that you’d say at a Ladies’ Aid lunch. Well, at least he had a good time while it lasted.”

  “About that hawk,” said Jack. “You say you shot a picture of it on th’ boat?”

  “Yeah; it came out so well that I had had it blown up so we could hang it in the hall,” Linda said. That damn bird was sump’m else; he flew in and lit right after I picked ’em up. Just perched out there on the bow and watched everything that went on. He’d come and go, but he stayed with us all the way to Havana. Guess that was the only way he’d ever have made it, using the boat has his own personal hangar.”

  “Yeah, that crazy bird was a lot of company to us.” said Peter. “Dieter got in the habit of talking to him, and damned if he didn’t act like the damn bird was talking back to him. He took off as soon as we had Cuba in sight, and we never saw him again. So we hung that picture of him in the house, and it seemed like the right thing to do for Dieter to take him along when he was cremated.”

  “Guess you could say he’s back in the air,” said Jack with a momentary grin. “Just livin’ there must’ve been awful, after losin’ Dieter like that. But y’all really had no alternative to stayin’ there, at least for awhile.”

  “Well, there probably were alternatives, but it just seemed easier to stay. Except for the few weeks when we snuck up here last year to get this nose job.”

  “It looks good; it’d take awhile for anybody who knew you before to recognize you, which I suppose is the idea.”

  “Just a precaution, once I realized that I’d be wantin’ to come back here some day. We had a helluva good time down there for those first few months. After Dieter bought it, of course, things turned pretty flat. And even with the connection to Lansky’s people, a police state’s a police state. The longer you stay, the more you see. We were about ready to get back to the mainland, Castro or not.”

  “I guess so,” Jack said. His assumption was that Mose- he couldn’t call
him Peter yet- and Linda were together, had been together for all this time, and that Moses knew that he and Linda had been lovers- could you call it that? A kid’s passion for an older woman, who, as much as she’d seemed to enjoy it, had probably never been all that excited about it- but he wanted to, had to, hear it from them. He decided to wait them out, at least for a while. “Were you down there th’ whole time too, Linda?”

  “Yes, I was,” she said with a wry smile. “He promised to show me Cuba, and I held him to it.”

  “We’d never’ve pulled it off without Linda,” said Peter. “She’s some navigator; met us out there on the high seas like it was nothin’. Nine days later, we were anchored in Havana harbor.”

  “I know that it had to be done, but I still hate to think about that beautiful bird on the bottom,” said Jack. “Particularly since I never got to solo it.”

  “It’s on the bottom, all right, and in a lot of little pieces; I have a hard time with that myself, from time to time. But I couldn’t think of another way to wipe Dieter and me clean off the face of the earth, with no chance of anyone bein’ able to poke around into what happened. Not in 100 fathoms of ocean.”

  “No, I certainly couldn’t imagine a better way. You guys really evaporated.”

  “Good description,” laughed Peter. That’s what we did, but it never occurred to me to think of it as evaporation.”

  “And it felt just about as slow as evaporation, running down the Intracoastal with them laying low in the cabin,” said Linda.

  “Yeah, it got kinda rancid below decks,” said Peter, “but it was pretty cheap insurance. Even though Linda had to deal with a few people askin’ her how it was to solo sump’m as big as a 46-footer, it was better than somebody rememberin’ later on that they’d seen a coupla guys that looked a lot like the unfortunate crash victims of July 6.” He paused, taking a long pull of his drink. “Well, that’s the short take on where we’ve been, bud,” he said. “How’ve you and Bisque been doin’?”