Blackwater Sound. James Hall

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СКАЧАТЬ Fifteen hundred feet, a thousand, seven-fifty, five hundred, enough time left, drawing up the nose, getting it level for a water landing. But no time to make announcements, pull out the manual, go over ditching procedure. She had to keep the landing gear up, flaps down, that much she knew.

      There was nothing on the Florida Bay. Calm seas. A long silvery runway. She had to keep the wings level with the water, not the horizon, she remembered that. Get speed down. She was thinking of the flare and touchdown, rotating ten degrees nose high, she was thinking of the APU and engine fire handles that she would have to override. Or would she? The engines weren’t turning. She stifled the half second of panic, got her focus back.

      Mark said something, but Kathy wasn’t listening, keeping the wings level, bringing it down, feeling the ground effect, that aerodynamic cushion that kept the plane skimming the surface of the sea like a pelican.

      She was ditching the plane on the shallow bay. A strange serenity flushing her, the yoke alive in her hand. A single fishing boat appearing in the distance.

      The nose of the jetliner pitched up, transforming speed into lift, but this couldn’t go on forever. Kathy would have to get the speed as low as she could manage, then do what no other wide-body pilot had ever accomplished, make a successful water landing.

      Thorn watched the jet scream out of the northwest, darken the sky, and pass so close overhead that its brutal tailwind lasted for half a minute, a hundred-mile-an-hour squall buffeting them broadside, nearly capsizing the Heart Pounder. The tidal surge that followed slammed them a second time. Casey was hurled backwards onto the deck and slid on her butt to the transom. Thorn managed to hang onto the wheel, trimming the engine down, and digging through the sudden surf, until he got the vessel back under control.

      ‘You okay, Case?’

      She lifted her head and squinted at him.

      ‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.’

      A half mile to the east, the jet exploded. A greenish-red plume shot ten stories into the air and a few seconds later the blast-furnace whoosh swept over them. Casey ducked below the gunwale and began to weep.

      A flock of egrets that had been hunched in the high branches of the nearby mangroves burst into the air, white and stalky and deathly silent. Thorn swung the wheel and mashed the throttle forward. He made a wide arc to the south, then cut back his speed and headed east toward the crash site. Through the dusk, he saw the flames dotting the water like the campfires of some ghostly, defeated army. Five-foot swells pounded their hull and all around them the twilight was tinted a sickly green.

      ‘What the hell’re you doing, Thorn!’

      ‘Going to help.’

      ‘Are you crazy? All that fire, we’ll blow up.’

      Casey staggered to his side, stood at the windshield looking out. Blurry ripples rose from the surface of the water like heat off a summer highway.

      ‘I’ll get a little closer, then I’ll take the skiff. You can stay here.’

      A caustic breeze flooded the cabin with the fumes of jet fuel and bitter smoke and the sweet, sickly reek of charred flesh.

      ‘I want to go home, Thorn. I want to get the hell out of here.’

      ‘So do I,’ he said. ‘But we can’t. Not yet.’

      He motored forward into the haze. Billows of smoke curled up from the surface of the bay; the water smoldered and fires flared to life as if spurts of volcanic gases were breaking through the earth’s crust. As he worked closer, Thorn saw the outer edge of the debris field scattered several hundred yards from what he took to be the center of the crash site, a single wing that jutted up like some senseless monolith planted in the sandy bottom. Next to it, a twisted section of the aluminum fuselage glowed in the strange green light.

      Mats of insulation floated on the surface, a stack of white Styrofoam cups bobbed past, life jackets and seat cushions, a black baseball hat and several blue passports. As the flotsam thickened, Thorn shut down the engine and while the boat coasted forward, he went to the stern, unknotted the rope from the cleats, and hauled in the skiff. Casey watched him, shivering, holding herself tightly.

      ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Get on the radio, channel sixteen, make a distress call. I’m going to look for survivors.’

      She opened her mouth but found no words and clamped her lips together and looked away.

      Thorn climbed down into the skiff and popped loose the long white fiberglass pole, and he mounted the platform over the outboard. He planted one end of the pole against the soft bottom of the bay and leaned his weight against it and shoved the skiff forward. If there were in fact survivors floating out there, it was no time for a propeller.

      He drew the pole out of the muck and planted it again and heaved the skiff ahead. The water was less than four feet deep. Shallow enough for an average adult to stand flat-footed with his head out of water. But Thorn saw no sign of life, no movement at all as he poled past a floating cockpit door, more seat cushions and drifting clothes and baby bottles and a blond-haired doll.

      He was fifty yards from the jutting wing when he heard the first splashes and made out the whimpers and soft cries, and a low, wet snuffling like penned-up horses. He poled faster, sweating now, as the boat skimmed ahead, the last ticks of daylight dying in the west. Everything was coated with gold. The bay, the shadowy people floundering up ahead, the suitcases and duffels that hung like dark icebergs just an inch or two below the surface.

      The first two he came upon were women. One in a blue business suit, another in a white sweatshirt. They thrashed over to the skiff and clambered aboard before he could get down from the platform to help. One was dark-haired with a bad gash across her forehead. The one in the white sweatshirt was a frail woman with weak blue eyes. A triangular chunk of flesh was missing from her cheek. The business suit thanked him and the other woman peered at him, then her face collapsed and she began to sob. The large woman took the small one in her arms and held her tightly as Thorn pushed on.

      ‘There’s a first-aid kit in the console.’

      The woman looked back at him.

      ‘Who are you?’ she said.

      ‘Nobody.’

      ‘You wait out here for airplanes to crash?’

      ‘You’re my first,’ he said. ‘You should put something on those cuts. You’re losing blood.’

      She tightened her hug on the small woman.

      ‘We’re all right. Believe me, there’s others who need it more.’

      Behind the broken fuselage he heard voices, cries and blubbering, the first moments of numbness and shock wearing off. He shoved the pole into the sucking mud, withdrew it, shoved it in again, and the skiff coasted forward.

      ‘On your right,’ Thorn called to the woman in the business suit. ‘Coming up on your right.’

      The woman looked out and saw the child’s arm and let go of the delicate woman and leaned over to grab the elbow. She swung forward, then drew back with the arm in her hand. A bloody stump severed at the shoulder. She held it up for Thorn to see, then dropped it back in the poisoned water.

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