by C.G. Banks
Chapter 11: The Crash
Huge, spattering raindrops rattled against the windshield as they taxied around toward the shack. The wind ripped around from seemingly all sides, buffeting the plane so that it wavered back and forth as it proceeded down the runway. Frederick checked the gauges and glanced back at Samuel, sitting unconcerned behind and across from him.
"I didn't appreciate you walking out back there," he said.
"Come again?" the man asked. Samuel leaned forward to get in better earshot.
In so doing, Frederick was acutely aware of his presence but raised his voice anyway, so much that Paul did turn around this time. He glared at Samuel while preparing for take-off. "I said, 'I didn't appreciate you walking out back there.'"
Samuel smirked and held his hands up as if to ward off further comment. "Hey Freddy, this is your show. I'm just along for the ride, remember?"
"Yeah, that's right. But what you did could have gotten somebody killed!"
Samuel leaned back comfortably in his seat, pointed at Frederick. "And that's the thing you got wrong, Freddy. I'm not one of your goddamn men." He paused. "I'm financing this whole fucking operation, so don't you forget that." His voice was solid, hard-edged.
Frederick fought to hold back his temper; he could feel it about to boil over. He looked at Paul who remained tight-lipped. Frederick knew the last thing he needed was a fist fight right now, so he counted to 10 and tried to regulate his breathing. "Yeah," he said. "You're half right. You're paying for the trip, but on this fucking plane, I'm the fucking boss. Don't forget it!"
Samuel held out his hands again in mock surrender. He glanced out the window. "The weather's not getting any better, you know," he said, disinterested.
Frederick turned back to what he was doing and left the slow burn to die. He knew he didn't need any of this bullshit, flying in weather like this. Cool it, he told himself. You set yourself up for this, you shouldn't be surprised what you get.
He tried to refocus his attention on the business at hand. "Get ready," he said. “It might get a little rough,” as he gunned the engines to full power.
The take-off went smoother than expected and by the time they were three hundred feet above the tree line, the wind didn't buffet the plane nearly as bad as it had on the ground. Frederick had flown in storms in Vietnam and sometimes such conditions served well as cover.
He pulled back on the controls, climbing hard. He was going to track the weather (ceiling and all) as soon as he had a moment, but currently his hands were full. Out of the corner of his eye he watched Paul sink farther into his seat, although he still continued to peer, nakedly concerned, out his window.
Minutes later, in easier winds at 3000 feet, Frederick noticed Paul flinch. "What the fuck?" he heard the man say. Frederick was turning toward him when a huge thunderclap deafened him. Seconds later an explosion came from behind and almost instantaneously the right engine heaved to a lurching stop. The sound of rending metal racketed the air, and the controls jerked violently down, almost tearing themselves from Frederick's grip. Everything was a sudden, blinding whir through the windshield as the wipers fought weakly against the storm.
An incredible calm centered on Frederick and the noises around him faded to background fuzz. As if from a distance, he watched the dials and meters spin and dim simultaneously. Lightning? he thought.
The altimeter took a deadly plunge. Hurtling images plunged by the windshield, vague shadows at first which took on ominous shades of green as they got closer to the tree line.
The realization was as a shot.
They were going down.
He heard a scream off to his right but did not turn, using all his concentration to focus on the controls. A roar tore through the cabin as they broke into the treetops, and even then Frederick knew it was the sound of the wings shearing off as the plane went into the trees.
There was a peppering of wetness on his face. Frederick attempted a breath, almost choked, his eyes fluttering. He flexed his limbs, trying to figure out what had happened.
After a couple of minutes he came to the realization the windshield had shattered. That’s where the rain was coming from. He raised his hands and began wiping the shards of glass from his face and hair. He found the seat buckle and unlatched it. He felt around to see if anything was missing, found no mortal wound.
It was so still.
He turned his head slowly to get a look around, throwing the belt strap away as he did so. Shit was everywhere, instruments broken and incomprehensible one from the other, glass and twisted metal haphazardly thrown about.
And Paul.
Paul was prone in his chair, looking oddly like some forlorn dentist's patient left too long. But at a peculiar angle and tomb silent. Minutes passed and the young man slowly turned his head in a small arc to lock eyes with Frederick.
"Freddy?" he asked, as if the inhabitant of another world. There was a trickle of blood there, in a line from his mouth, dripping off his chin.
"Yeah?" It was all he could manage.
"Fucking shot us down, man!" he said, the exclamation only in his eyes, his voice now whispered and fleeting.
Frederick couldn't be sure he heard right. "What...?"
"The fucking helicopter, man...goddammit..." and a tear welled free. It was then that Frederick noticed his face. Paul began making strange lost sounds, deep gurgles. He groaned again, this time much louder. A new, huge red bubble grew out of his mouth and burst, spraying his face with blood. Then his body began a bizarre, tremor-fueled dance, and his feet pointed and flexed, the shoes torn free in the crash. "I can't see, Freddy...Jesus Christ, I can’t see! Oh, they're gonna fuckin kill us, man..." and then he was gone without another word.
There was no sound save the creaking of the plane and the steady drip of water. Frederick swung around to a sitting position and closed his eyes until his head stopped spinning. He tasted blood but that was probably just the busted lip. Everything was blurred and numb. He sat up on the chair back and stared down between his feet.
Paul was dead but his eyes were open, fish-like and glazed as they stared silently into the rain. Frederick searched down into the shadows below and found Samuel, also crumpled up in the lower wreckage. "Jesus," he whispered. Supporting himself on the cabin wall, he reached over and touched Paul. His spirit had fled.
Frederick could not even really remember going down. Where the hell were they? He couldn't recall ever being so distanced from reality, but as he played things through his mind, guilt began its slow, unperturbed entry. Paul dead. What would he tell Jelly? The rain continued to drench his back and the wind was picking up again.
Frederick squinted into the wet darkness below, trying to accommodate the crazy angle. He saw that the fuselage had cracked clean through just behind the rear seats.
The shadows down there must be the muddy jungle floor, and there, amid all the strewn equipment and twisted metal: the duffle bag with the cocaine. Samuel was a part of the piled debris, his top half spilled outside the broken plane. He was not moving.
Frederick gingerly tested the footing on the wet, slanted floor, carefully bracing himself on his chair. But he was still too dizzy and lost it and slid down the tilted surface, his head glancing off a row of cabinets as he went face down into the mess that had piled around the gigantic split in the hull.
When he opened his eyes he found himself face to face with Samuel Franklin, coming honestly by his silence now. Frederick had tumbled out through the crack, and the wet face so close to his own seemed oddly relaxed. The rain kept up its incessant, staccato drumming, louder out here, drowning out everything else.
Frederick coughed and pushed himself up to his knees, a thin rivulet of saliva hanging from his mouth as his hair blew about his face. He pushed off the dead man's chest, the pressure causing a thick gout of blood to well out of the corpse’s mouth. He rolled off to the ground gasping and sucking air like a fish slapped down upon a dry dock.
After a while he opened h
is eyes. Fought to relax his frantic breathing so he could get a bearing on the situation.
Paul's words slowly took form in his mind.
Something about shots and a helicopter. But Frederick had thought lightning. He began piecing the puzzle together. Lightning? Probably not; He’d been struck before (again, in ‘Nam) but it had been nothing like what he’d just experienced. Too many different noises, the rending of metal even before they met the tree line. And (thinking back much harder now that the rain had begun to beat some of the fogginess out of him) something had happened right before the flash. He couldn't swear to it, but thinking back... He couldn't remember, couldn't fix it right in his head.
He clenched his teeth and kicked his way out of the hole in the plane. Time was an immediate, pressing concern. He thought back on the fucks who'd sold them the cocaine. Paul had been uneasy the whole time too.
He pushed himself to his feet and leaned on a nearby tree for support. The rain continued to come down in pouring sheets, its intensity cut only by the monstrously thick foliage that hung densely around the crash site. He wondered how the plane had even managed to reach the jungle floor. He stood there like that for several moments with his head bowed and eyes shut, trying to regain his balance. He breathed in deeply and turned so that he could rest his back against the smooth, wet bark of the tree. A few minutes rest couldn’t be that bad…
Get moving.
It was the voice from Vietnam, coming back after its long sojourn in silence. Not his own voice, but even so the one he remembered. Deep, husky. Almost like a woman's though very old. Characteristically urgent.
Just like in the village.
He opened his eyes suddenly, shaking the ghost voice to a safe distance in his head. There was no need to go begging trouble, not now when he was just beginning to feel human again. The ruined plane rested no more than ten feet away, wrapped in vines. Dents and a deep, jungle-green plastered the whole body, the rear end cocked and hanging limply like the broken tail of a mangy dog. Looking back that way Frederick could just make out the path they'd cut through the treetops. As far as he could see trees were sheared off at varying heights. The smell of gasoline and sap hung in the downpour as thick as a coterie of thieves hunched around a sprung safe.
He was lucky to be alive.
The Cherokee's cockpit had come to its lopsided final resting place wedged in between two large trees that Frederick was thankful had not tested the strength of the plane's seams. He beat his way through the foliage toward the front, where the cabin was hoisted above the ground. He wanted to get around to the other side. There were questions that had to be answered.
The angle of the front section of the broken fuselage was such that Frederick had to hunker down to pass underneath. Vines were thick here and pressed up tight against the trees, bound up in many tangles, but he fought through to the other side. It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for. Large bullet holes pock-marked the passenger side of the Cherokee, a tightly-fanned pattern of fifteen to twenty separate holes. There was only a stump of the wing left but it also bore evidence of gunfire.
"Goddammit," he whispered. "A fucking double-cross!" But it didn’t make sense. They could have gotten them earlier, and even though they hadn’t, of course they wouldn't let the cocaine go to ruin out here in the jungle. Not if they could help it. But it still didn’t make sense. Yeah, maybe the weather fucked up their plans, but why pull a stunt like that in a fucking helicopter, in weather like this? It seemed pointless. But who was to know?
Maybe they'd wait until the weather died down, perhaps they'd put down at the airstrip and hike back, or maybe they'd just find another suitable spot to put down close by, but it was a given they'd be back. Whether what had happened was retribution on the Franklins for something or other or not, nobody left this much cocaine lying around. Not if they could help it. Frederick squinted in the gloom and checked his watch. Almost twenty till six.
Had he been out that long?
Suddenly, every sound in the jungle was the warning approach of booted feet, every drumming thud of rain against the cooling side of the Cherokee a short intake of breath from one of the murderous drug dealers. Frederick clinched his fists tight and gave a vigorous shake of his head.
Get the fuck out.
There was nothing left here, nothing he could do for anybody. Dead was dead. He groped his way through the tangled vines to the wide split on the side of the fuselage and crawled into the darkness. He fished his lighter out of his breast pocket and sparked it to life. Waving shadows leapt among the crunched interior. He dug through the pile of junk in front of him, knocking things carelessly out of the way with one hand while he steadied the flame with the other.
Where the fuck was his green bag?
There, right there. Upside down against the crumpled cabinet, not far from Samuel’s booted foot. The lighter burned him just as his hands closed around the strap, and he cursed savagely, giving the duffle bag a tug. Water had pooled like blood around his stomach by the time he found the zipper in the darkness. His hand was wet and there was no way his was getting the lighter to work now. He ripped the zipper back and thrust his hand inside.
He clicked the switch on the side of the flashlight and a white glow lit up the inside of the bag. He breathed a sigh of relief. Pulled the flashlight free from a tangle of clothing and immediately flashed it around the cabin. Paul's head was visible above the seat's crest. "Sorry partner," he said.
It wasn’t long before he found the other duffle with the cocaine. He couldn't take all of it, but since he didn't have much cash and might need bargaining power, the cocaine would have to do. Too bad it was only worth a fraction here what it'd be worth in New Orleans. But it might well be worth the price of his life.
He pulled his knife loose from his belt and cut into the tightly wrapped package. Within minutes he'd cut entirely around the vacuum-seal and the cocaine lay exposed, roughly cut into two equal parts. He took a healthy pinch and held it to his nostrils, breathed in deeply, twice. It wasn't his usual practice, but drastic times called for drastic measures. He needed to get as far away as possible from the wreckage; the drug runners already had a hell of a jump start most probably. And they'd kill him for sure if they caught him.
The only thing he had going in his favor was the fact that the boys who'd downed the plane probably figured he was dead.
He wrapped the half-key tightly inside a poncho and stuffed it into the depths of the green, water-proof bag. Then he squirmed out through the broken fuselage. His mind raced from the coke and he fought to steady himself against the side of the plane.
He rummaged around in his pocket, searching for the compass. Found it and pulled it free. He situated the bag firmly across his shoulders, then stepped away from the plane, making his way around the right side of one of the trees. He shook his head and grimaced.
"Just like fucking 'Nam," he said miserably, checking the compass before trudging in an arduous northwest direction.
