“Yeah,” repeated Macaulay, looking out at the billowing wind sock on the pole outside the boathouse.
“It’s bad luck about the wheel strut,” said Hurdnut, and Macaulay nodded.
A week earlier, the strut on the Goose’s right wheel well had been compromised after a rough landing. They were still waiting for parts. Otherwise, Macaulay could simply have run the bird up the launching ramp and then taxi over to the dirt landing strip for his takeoff and the landing when he came back. Now they were confined to the sea.
“Where you planning to lift off?” asked Hurdnut with a forced smile.
“The only place is the sheltered side of the inner lagoon.”
“That would be awful tight, Steve. You sure you have enough room?”
“It’s the only choice,” said Macaulay. “There are already six-foot seas in the harbor.”
Ten minutes later, Carlos was rowing him out to the mooring in the big company skiff. Looking up at the darkening sky, Macaulay watched as a swarm of brown pelicans and cormorants headed inland. Smart move, he thought as the wind-whipped rain stung his eyes.
“You be crazy to go, Steef,” said Carlos.
Macaulay held on to the gunwales as the skiff rode crazily down a deep swell.
“I go with you, man,” said Carlos as they reached the Goose’s mooring ball.
“Not this time, compadre,” said Macaulay. “You be too heavy to get us off.”
Carlos stared at him morosely for a few seconds, the rain pouring off the brim of his Yankees hat.
“I be buy you a Goombay Smash at Lana’s when you be get back.”
“A deal.”
The green water was roiling violently under the Goose’s hull as Macaulay stepped across the stern of the skiff to pry open the cabin door. Timing his jump to the wave action, he leaped inside. Seawater surged in behind him and covered the carpeted floor of the compartment. He shut the cabin door and moved forward to the cockpit.
The Grumman Goose was tired. In 1944, it had been shiny and new, and its original motors had carried it across the Pacific in the naval war against Japan. Now the eight-passenger cabin was permeated with decades of cigarette smoke, spill stains, and body odor. The latest coat of white paint was flaking off the frame, and red rust was showing through. The cockpit windshield was cracked in two places.
The plane had absorbed thousands of takeoffs and landings, and the metal itself was nearing the end of its operational life. Macaulay wondered if she had one more important charge in her.
He sat down in the leather pilot’s seat and automatically turned on the switches for the flight instruments and gauges. The fuel gauge showed he had about an hour’s worth of flying time, which was plenty. Once he was airborne, it would take less than fifteen minutes to reach the island.
He fed the GPS coordinates Tom Hurdnut had given him for the offshore island into the navigation system and tuned the VHF radio to its emergency frequency. He heard several distress calls as he started the first of the two Pratt & Whitney 985 radial engines mounted on the leading edges of the wings.
The first engine caught immediately and he revved it a couple of times before starting the second one. It turned over for ten seconds before bursting into life with a loud backfire. When they were both running smoothly, he motioned for Carlos to unhook the plane from its mooring lines.
The Goose had a forgiving design for a seaplane, which was why there were still many of them in service after eighty years. The deep fuselage served as a hull and the plane was seaworthy in even moderately rough ocean conditions. It wasn’t designed for the conditions where Macaulay was heading.
Pushing the throttles forward, he crossed the harbor toward the entrance to the lagoon, the Goose wallowing sluggishly through the water, barely making headway. Each new wave slammed into the windshield and coursed past along the hull. The wipers couldn’t keep up. At times it felt as if he were underwater.
The wave action and swells subsided to eight feet once he was inside the lagoon, four feet up and four feet down. The far end of the lagoon was home to several exclusive resorts and a boat marina. Dotted across the water were sailboats and motor craft, all pitching wildly at their moorings. He spent a few minutes determining the longest clear path for his takeoff.
From end to end, it was less than two hundred yards long fringed at one end by a two-story hotel and at the other by the stone footbridge that connected the lagoon resorts to the harbor. The bridge towered about twenty-five feet above the surface of the water.
For Macaulay, flying a seaplane was the easy part. The biggest challenges were the variables of wind, speed of current, roughness of the sea, obstacles in the water, and other things over which he had no control. Wind was the worst. The Goose was like a weather vane, and its wind gauge was now clocking gusts of thirty miles an hour from the west. At least he wouldn’t be bucking a headwind.
At maximum power the Goose would need about two thousand feet of sheltered water to clear a fifty-foot obstacle. Macaulay estimated he had less than a third of that distance to work with. At least the plane wasn’t carrying a payload.
With the eight-foot swells, he figured he would probably need twenty seconds to become airborne and another five to ten seconds to gain enough height to clear the roof of the hotel or the crown of the stone bridge. Even though the bridge was higher, there were people in the hotel. He would take off from that end. With all the variables, he estimated his chances at around one in five.
Above him, the sky was purplish gray and growing darker as he taxied past a moored catamaran and two channel markers. As he neared the hotel dock, he swung the bird around in the opposite direction and gunned the throttles forward to maximum power.
The Goose staggered forward through the turbid water as it slowly picked up speed. After trimming the plane, Macaulay glanced toward the beach. A dozen tourists had braved the wind to come down from their resort villa to gaze out at the storm. One of them pointed at him.
He set the wing flaps at twenty degrees. Even though it put additional drag on the wings, he needed to gain as much uplift as possible to lift the bird out of the water. As the stone bridge loomed closer at the end of the flight path, he realized it was at least ten feet higher than he first estimated. The Goose began to yaw to the left and he counteracted it with the rudder pedals.
He could feel a small surge of speed as the Goose began to climb out of the swells and fully separate from the sea. The unsettled and turbulent water brought up a rank smell of decay that filled the cockpit.
The bridge quickly began to fill the windshield. There was no turning back now. Macaulay was beyond the point of no return. Either he would clear the bridge or the plane would bury itself in the rock pilings.
They were free of the water now, climbing slowly but steadily toward the crown of the bridge. He pulled back on the wheel as far as he could without stalling her. Then they were there.
“Come on, baby,” he shouted as the roar of the engines filled his ears.
Macaulay felt and heard a shuddering crunch beneath his legs. When he looked down, there was a newly rent section of the cabin floor, and he could see the base of the hull. It had been breached at the wheel wells. The top of the bridge had torn off a six-foot-square section of the air frame.
He knew the plane would still be airworthy. He just wasn’t sure how he was going to land it and walk away.
The sky had turned a menacing purple. Clusters of thunderheads marked the approaching squall line as Macaulay leveled off at two thousand feet. There was no point in trying to get above the storm. By the time he had gained enough altitude, he would be at his destination. He checked the GPS coordinates he had fed into the navigation system. The island was about twenty miles away, due east. Maybe fifteen minutes of flying time.
He thought again of the all-too-brief weeks he had spent with Lexy after getting out of the hospital
in Maine. He had never known what love could be until then, the hope and promise of every new day, the intensity of it all. Then she was gone.
He was into the squall line now, the Goose cruising at one hundred forty miles an hour. A lurid flash of lightning lit up the purple sky. He would have to descend when he approached the island, close enough to the ground to see the Maglite beam. He thought about the possibility of a sudden downdraft and what it would do.
The Goose shuddered in the wind. It was as rugged as they came, a big lumbering workhorse, but even a workhorse came to the end of the line. There was no margin for error. He would need plenty of luck.
Macaulay glanced down at the Norse medallion that he had hung from the altimeter knob. He had never thought of himself as sentimental. Lexy had been wearing it when he hauled her ten miles across the Greenland Ice Cap in the middle of another hellacious storm. She had given it to him in the hospital.
He checked the GPS coordinates again and began a slow descent. Rain was drumming hard against the windshield, and visibility was only a few feet as he took her down through the dense clouds.
He was still flying blind when the plane began to buck and tumble in the violent air. The altimeter read a thousand feet, but when he looked down there was only more ink. He wondered if there would be any break in the cloud cover at all.
He handled the controls with calm disinterest. Over his twenty years as an air force pilot, he had flown just about everything in the arsenal, from Apache helicopters to F-15 Eagles and C-5A transports. He flew on instinct and experience.
The altimeter read four hundred feet when the clouds finally broke apart in the night sky and he could see the whitecaps of mountainous seas raging beneath him. According to the coordinates displayed on the navigation system, he would be over the island in less than a minute.
He fought the controls to stay on the exact course heading as the Goose was buffeted on both sides by vicious gusts. An updraft suddenly took him up a hundred feet before he brought the plane under control and dropped back down toward the deck.
Then the island was there ahead of him. It was no more than a quarter mile wide and maybe a half mile long. Unlike most of the offshore islands it had a belt of Caribbean pines dotting much of its surface. In the heavy downpour of rain and darkness, it looked lifeless and deserted.
He slowed the air speed to seventy-five. Anything less and the Goose could stall. He could see shadowy waves crashing into a sand beach as he came in just above treetop height. He looked for the Maglite beam, but there was nothing to be seen in the dark stillness below him.
He was already past the island when he glanced back and saw it.
It was little more than a flicker, but enough for Macaulay to get a sense of its general location in the trees. He swung the Goose around and headed back. Opening the side window, he grabbed the package from the copilot’s seat and extended it from the cockpit in his left hand.
The Maglite beam was now clearly visible ahead of him and tracking toward the Goose. Macaulay roughly estimated the distance and then dropped the package. A moment later, the light beam went horizontal as the man ran to retrieve it.
Macaulay was headed home. He climbed to two thousand feet, shut the window against the howling wind, and punched the reverse GPS coordinates in the navigation system. Another fifteen minutes or so and he would be arriving back at Dangria. He looked down through the torn cockpit floor at the massive rent in the fuselage and remembered that his landing options were limited.
Actually, the options were practically nonexistent. He couldn’t land the plane on the retractable wheels because they were no longer there. He couldn’t land in the water without the sea engulfing the plane through the hole in the fuselage.
The wheel began vibrating and shaking in his hands. He was again flying blind. The sky around him was an impenetrable black. It didn’t matter. The navigation system would take him exactly where he needed to go.
A minute or so later the electrical system failed and the instrument lights went dead. Macaulay threw the switch to engage the backup power system. The gauges and instruments remained unlit. He remembered that the batteries for the backup system were located in the hull below the cockpit. The wind-driven rain blasting through the open cavity had probably killed them.
His best chance was to fly on a westerly heading toward the coast while descending low enough to find the lights of Dangria. He checked the floating compass on the flight console to get a rough westerly heading and stayed on it while he began to descend through the storm.
The wind was beginning to diminish now, but without a functioning altimeter, he had no idea how close he was to the water. If the ceiling went all the way to the deck, he would crash into the sea.
As in all his air combat missions in the Persian Gulf, Macaulay felt no physical fear. He didn’t believe in a benevolent God. He did believe in fate. If he were to die now, it would be with a profound sense of regret that things with Lexy had not turned out as he had hoped.
The Goose broke through the solid black cloud layer. He was no more than a hundred feet above the sea. In the near distance he could see the lights of Dangria. After turning to head toward them, he saw something even better.
There were two sets of green beacon lights running parallel to each other in the pitch-black sea. He realized that Tom Hurdnut must have set them up to designate a safe landing path for him.
As he drew closer, Macaulay saw that the flight path ran parallel to the beach, about twenty yards out in shallow water. Hurdnut had erected light stanchions along the beach to illuminate the water. It was still very rough with five – or six-foot seas. If the Goose hadn’t lost its belly, he could probably have landed her safely.
There was no point in delaying the inevitable. Dropping down toward the lit flight path, he saw that a crowd had gathered on the nearest section of beach. A few of them began pointing at him as they took in the gaping hole in the hull.
He engaged full wing flaps and pulled the nose higher to try to put it down on the part of the air frame that still had integrity. The engines suddenly lost power and began spluttering as sea spray clogged the intakes.
The nose dropped down and an instant later the damaged forward section of the plane hit the water. There was a shriek of tortured metal and the Goose stopped dead as if hitting a brick wall.
Macaulay was thrust forward in the safety harness, his head hitting the wheel and momentarily stunning him. A cresting wave slammed into the nose of the plane. He watched the already cracked windshield disintegrate in front of him.
Throwing up his arms to protect his eyes, he felt a jolt of sharp pain in his hands and right arm as the glass exploded through the cockpit. Then the cold sea was around him. Macaulay took a deep breath before seawater covered his head and filled the compartment.
Moments later, he felt a jarring bump as the nose of the plane rammed into the sandy bottom of the harbor. He was sure the depth of the water couldn’t be more than eight feet. He simply needed to unbuckle his safety harness and swim through the opening where the windshield had been.
His lungs strained against his locked throat as he reached down to unbuckle the separate harnesses around his chest and midsection. There was no quick-release mechanism in these old belts. Both had buckles that were joined in the right lower corner of the pilot’s seat.
It was when he tried to raise his right arm to release the buckles that he realized it had been broken by the exploding windshield. It hung inert and seemingly paralyzed by his side. He twisted to the right to attempt to reach the buckles with his left hand. He was able to reach the chest buckle and tear it loose. The waist buckle was too far down to reach.
In the still swirling maelstrom of cold water, a section of loose debris slashed his face and dislodged his tightly shut jaw. He swallowed seawater. Planting his feet on the cabin floor, he drove himself upward. The second safety harness rem
ained tight around his waist and he sagged back down in the seat.
As his brain began to shut down, he momentarily considered the absurdity of having survived the flight only to die because of a belt buckle in eight feet of water. If his lungs had not been filling with seawater, he might have laughed. Something large rocked into him from the direction of the empty windshield.
In his last semiconscious moments, he felt he was now somehow free and floating weightlessly in the dark sea toward a brilliant light in the far distance. Maybe there was a heaven after all, he thought as his mind finally shut down.
A voice intruded on his eternal rest. It was an angel’s voice.
“Breathe, baby.”
He slowly came back up out of the darkness to the same voice.
“Breathe, baby.”
He felt someone’s mouth on his own, breathing air into his lungs.
“Breathe, baby,” the voice repeated.
He thought he knew the voice. Macaulay opened his eyes.
The face materialized above him, wet with the rain.
It couldn’t be. But it was.
Lexy.
SIX
14 May
Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital
Belize City, Belize
He came awake to the gaunt, beaming face of Carlos leaning over his hospital bed. Macaulay only wished it had been the face he had seen when he was regaining consciousness on the beach. Had Lexy been there or had it been delirium?
Macaulay’s head was throbbing, but it wasn’t from a hangover. He reached up with his left hand and felt the bandage on his forehead. He remembered slamming into the steering wheel when the Goose hit the water. His right arm was immobile and wrapped in a soft cast. There were bandages on both his hands from the shattered windshield.
“You made it, Steef,” said Carlos. “I no believe it. The lady he dive on the wreck and he bring you back.”
A mammoth figure appeared in the doorway and approached the other side of the bed. Carlos glanced up and took him in. He had never seen the man before and he sure didn’t look like any tourist. He was wearing overalls and was nearly seven feet tall, with a huge chest and a head of white hair that ran halfway down his back. His slanted nose was as red as a kumquat.
The Bone Hunters Page 7