by Barr, Nevada
“I’m not done falling,” she complained.
“Learn to bounce,” he said unsympathetically. He was on to Rick and Dijon as Anna pushed herself warily to her knees, not yet sure everything still worked.
“Up and at ’em,” Marshall said.
Dijon, disgustingly young and resilient, was already on his feet and running back toward the plane. Rick had made it to his knees. Lest she be last, Anna dragged herself up before Al Magnus cleared the ground, and followed Guy and the others back toward the line.
The explosion had extinguished more fire than it set. Within minutes Rick and Dijon had the flames contained. Though it still burned, it was no longer in danger of spreading.
The task of salvaging what they could from the plane’s cabin fell to Anna and Guy. The blast had torn most of the remaining stub off the right wing, leaving a black stain on the side of the aircraft just below, or—as the fuselage was inverted—now above where the passenger sat. Anna crouched down to assess the best way of getting at the cockpit. Behind her she could hear Guy on the radio.
The downed plane was a twin-engine Beechcraft owned and operated by a man named Slattery Hammond. Hammond worked as a freelance drug interdiction and/or resource management plane, hiring his services out to various government agencies. Cumberland Island National Seashore was sharing him with the United States Forest Service in an effort to curb the marijuana-growing industry along the coast.
Hammond had flown off the island that morning to make a low-level sweep of St. Simons, Jekyll Island, and Cumberland, looking for contraband crops. Norman Hull, Cumberland’s chief ranger, was slated to accompany him.
Lynette’s voice, deepened now by professional responsibility, came on to say a medevac helicopter had been requested from Jacksonville, Florida. Lynette was attempting to contact the district ranger, Todd Belfore, to meet the medevac unit and lead them to the burn as soon as she had an estimated time of arrival.
Wheels were turning, the Incident Command System was gearing up. Soon Anna, Guy, Dijon, Al, and Rick would settle back into their relatively insignificant cog roles as the Interagency Incident Command machine took over. There was great comfort in that. Nothing, not even the U.S. military, could mobilize as quickly and efficiently.
After this last transmission Guy replaced his radio on his belt. “The pilot wasn’t alone. Chief Ranger Hull was with him. There’ll be two . . . ah . . . men in there,” he said. The hesitation took place as he stopped himself from saying “bodies.” The explosion of the gas tank destroyed any shred of hope they might have had that anyone in the airplane still lived, but they had to operate as if lives could be salvaged. The concept of giving up too soon was abhorrent.
What was left of the wing and the fuselage formed a smoldering and unstable tent of ruined metal. Leaf litter smoked beneath the wreckage. Using the blunt side of the Pulaski, Anna scraped the smoldering material into a blackened heap behind her, then, on hands and knees, crawled under the amputated stub of wing. Paint had been burned off the door, and the Plexiglas in the side window melted in black sticky tears that crept down the denuded metal. At Anna’s request, Guy turned the paltry stream from his rapidly depleting water pack onto the door handle. When it had cooled enough so that it wouldn’t immediately burn through the leather of her gloves, she gave it a pull. Much to her surprise, it worked. The door opened half an inch, then stuck fast, the top mired in a mess of smoking rubber and crushed metal. “We’re going to have to pry it out,” she said.
“Hang on. I’ll get the guys and we’ll lift this thing so you can get at it.”
The melted window was almost at ground level. Bending down in the attitude of a long-adrift sailor kissing the earth, Anna peered into the cabin. Energies released from the force of the crash, then the onslaught of the fire had wreaked havoc inside. A nauseating odor that Anna knew to be roasting human flesh and hair was overlaid with the pungent sting of gases created when many petroleum products were melted down into their component parts.
Clothing, upholstery, seat belts—all had been reduced to cinders. The people they’d held in place had fallen down, crumpled with the rest of the trash on the ruined instrument panel. Without stronger light and a better angle Anna couldn’t tell where organic matter ended and inorganic began.
Emergency medical training taught her to seek the carotid artery to separate the living from the dead. In this tangled mass she saw a blackened tube shape that was very possibly what was left of the passenger’s neck, but she couldn’t bring herself to remove her glove and press her bare hand in through the melt of flesh.
Straightening up, she sat back on her heels in the relatively fresh air a foot or two from the plane. While Guy organized the crew she stared at the canopy of leaves beyond the burn, her brain in neutral. Inside the Beechcraft there was no life, she was sure of it. Training, courage, adrenaline—all the necessary ingredients for heroics—were of no use. Now she hoped only to disturb as little as possible and keep her breakfast down.
“On three. Ready, Anna? Anna!”
She jerked her chin up at the repetition of her name.
“Sorry to wake you,” Guy said. “You want to pry that door off when we lift?”
“Sure thing.” Anna dropped back to her knees. She squirmed down under the remnant of wing and forced the blade of her Pulaski between the door and the main body of the plane, then braced herself to use the Pulaski handle as a lever. “Ready,” she said.
“On three.”
Guy counted down, and as the bulk of the aircraft was lifted from the scorched earth, Anna dug her heels in and pulled back. Brittle creaks heralded the breakage of fused hinges. The door popped open, swinging out in a crippled arc. The last shred of metal let go and it fell away from the fuselage.
“Okay,” Anna said. “High enough.”
She heard scraping as the men wedged a log or limb under the wing stub and the faintest of groans as they let the weight settle on the prop.
With the door removed she could better see the carnage within. The body farthest from her had burned black but for the right ear, horribly pink and lifelike in a nest of hair singed into a likeness of wire. On the left arm, much of the flesh from elbow to knuckle was charred and falling away in strips, but a single square of red-and-blue-plaid fabric remained over a chunk of tissue that, from the ruin of a watch, Anna guessed was the pilot’s wrist.
Curled around the dead pilot, as if his had been the first to burn loose from the seat belt, was the body of the passenger. It was burned beyond recognition, beyond human. It was crisp and sere and, Anna knew from experience, would crumble if she touched it.
Guy folded down and crawled beneath the plane. Through the smoke and sweat and stench, Anna caught a whiff of cologne and was immeasurably touched by it. Overwrought, she told herself, but the humanity in the gesture struck a chord somewhere in the vicinity of her heart.
“Done deal,” Guy said as he looked inside the cabin. “Get out of here, Anna. We’re finished. Fire’s out.”
Anna crawled backward, rump first into the open air. As soon as she was clear, Guy followed.
“Dead?” Dijon asked.
He was so young Anna guessed he’d not seen much death, and she watched closely to see how he was taking it. Between the black of his skin and the gray of the ash it was hard to tell. His voice sounded matter-of-fact but he’d probably put forth some effort to make sure it would before he’d opened his mouth.
“Crispy Critters?” Rick asked, a little too jovially.
Al worked to get his pipe going and said nothing.
The three radios they carried among the five of them crackled to life. Guy responded and they stood in a half-circle, their backs to the dead men, listening.
A helicopter had been dispatched with two paramedics. They were on final to land at St. Marys to pick up the chief ranger, Norman Hull.
It took a few seconds for the name to register.
“Hull?” Guy echoed stupidly.
“Norman H
ull, Chief Ranger,” Lynette repeated clearly.
“I thought he was our second dead guy,” Anna said.
The radio took stage again, this time a male voice scratching through the ether from air to ground issuing orders.
“Apparently not,” Guy said.
CHAPTER Seven
IN UNSPOKEN ACCORD, the five of them retired to the unburned edge of the clearing, sat down in the dirt, and began uncapping water bottles. Rick was putting on a bit of a show, dredging up black humor to ward off shock. Dijon bought into it, but Anna noticed the only one eating lunch was Al.
Every day he had the same thing, two PB&Js on white bread. “Want half?” he offered when he caught Anna’s eye. She took the proffered sandwich. In her yellow pack was a peanut butter and honey sandwich of her own. Later maybe she’d return the favor. At the moment there was something reassuring in the breaking of bread with another.
“Health food again?” Rick jibed. His hand rested on his belt. Anna suspected he was secretly fondling his “six-pack,” the ridged stomach muscles that adorned the covers of bodybuilding magazines.
“Ambrosia,” Al said, unperturbed.
“I bet your kid loves it when you cook,” Dijon put in.
“As a matter of fact, he’s wild about my cooking.” A dab of strawberry jelly quivered momentarily on Al’s cheek. Before he wiped it away Anna’s ever-active brain had likened it to blood, guts, and half-cooked flesh. The childhood song “great green gobs of greasy, grimy gopher guts floating in the pink lemonade” made its tinny music in the recesses of her memory and she smiled.
Guy shoveled gorp into his mouth and talked expertly around the mash. Paramedics would not be needed. A coroner would. The radio vied with the thump of a helicopter and the growl of an ATV. The cavalry was arriving.
Anna leaned back against a young oak and poured water into her dehydrated body. Al smoked. Guy, Rick, and Dijon wandered back into the fray. By ones and twos it seemed most of the island was trickling in to see the wreck. The green and gray of NPS uniforms predominated and Anna had little doubt she had been introduced to some of them, but she wasn’t good with names and faces. The only person she recognized was Mitch Hanson. His thinning gray hair was slicked over his forehead with sweat and hair spray. Bright blue eyes sparkled under sparse brows and he seemed of good cheer; a sweaty, grubby Saint Nick only sporadically remembering to look somber as befitted the occasion.
Everyone else talked in low voices, looked frequently into the nonexistent distance, and milled around purposefully. The pattern was familiar; nobody wanted to take charge. Anna took another long drink of water and closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, order had been restored. A glance at Al’s watch told her she’d only dozed for a quarter of an hour but the difference was marked. Norman Hull, Cumberland’s chief ranger, had arrived on the scene. Hull was tall, long-legged, and long-necked. A receding hairline provided him with an impressive brow that ended in a frizz of graying brown curls. Pale blue eyes blinked from behind thick lenses, and his rubbery face was in constant motion as he directed the operation.
Yellow police tape had gone up around the aircraft. Photographs were being taken and every third person was talking on a cellular phone or a radio.
An ATV arrived with a plump middle-aged man in madras shorts and a crushed fishing cap. From the unhesitating beeline he made toward the corpses, Anna guessed he was the coroner. He and Hull crouched on the far side of the aircraft, near the broken passenger door.
All Anna could see of them was their feet beneath the remnants of the wing. Death was certain; the coroner needed only to give a look and a signature to make it legal. They were probably looking for identification on the second corpse. She didn’t envy them the task.
Tired of floating around the edges of things, Dijon came back and flopped onto the ground. “They going to leave those guys or what?” he asked.
“I doubt it,” Anna said. “They’ll put them in body bags and take them to the morgue. Since they didn’t die under a doctor’s care they’ve got to be autopsied. Besides, if they left them here it wouldn’t look good. Though the critters would get a good supper out of the deal.”
“Already cooked.” Dijon licked his lips. “If you like your meat well done.”
Anna laughed at the sheer ghoulishness of it and because she could tell that with his macabre joke Dijon had shocked himself. The mental picture arrived half a second behind his words and he looked suddenly nauseated.
Guy separated himself from a knot of men gathered around the nose of the airplane and walked back toward the crew. “Looks like they figured out who the second man was,” he said as he dug through his yellow pack. Sweat glittered in beads on his bald pate. For an instant Anna thought they were blisters from second-degree burns and felt her stomach lurch. Guy pulled a blue handkerchief from the pack and mopped his head and neck. “Face and hands were pretty much gone but the chief ranger found a brass belt buckle and what’s left of a nine-millimeter handgun. And he found the guy’s badge. Looks like he was a ranger. They’ve radioed in the numbers on the back of the badge but nobody’s waiting on pins and needles—they only got one law enforcement ranger on Cumberland.”
“Todd Belfore,” Al said.
Guy nodded.
“That kinda takes the fun out of it,” Rick said.
Guy settled into the dirt and lay back, using his pack as a headrest. Al puffed absently on a dead pipe. Dijon couldn’t take the stillness and leaped up to join Rick gossiping with an extraneous maintenance worker.
Dead strangers evoked a smorgasbord of the lesser emotions and served as marvelous educational tools, warnings, and veiled threats. When an acquaintance was killed, it was closer to home; one knew some of the threads that tied the deceased to a common humanity. Without enough real connection to grieve, one was left in an uncomfortable place between curiosity and embarrassment.
Chief Ranger Hull crossed the clearing, wiping his hands carefully on a clean white pocket hanky. Scenting a shift in the action, Rick and Dijon drifted back to the rest of the crew.
Hull stopped near Guy’s feet and the crew boss sat up as a sign of respect. “Mr. Marshall here has probably already told you the pilot was Slattery Hammond. He was flying drug interdiction for us and the Department of Forestry.” Hull never looked up from his hands while he talked, but continued to rub meticulously between each finger with the square of cotton. His face worked maniacally, the eyebrows rising as if in sudden surprise, then dropping, his mouth stretching as if he were trying to scrape something from his rabbity teeth by moving his lips over them. For the first time Anna saw the facial gestures for what they were; not emotion but uncontrolled tics or nervous spasms, worse now that he was under pressure. “We’re pretty sure the second man was our district ranger, Todd Belfore. Mr. Marshall said he’d spent time with you, so I realize this is bad news for you as well as us.”
Finally Norman Hull pocketed the handkerchief and Anna breathed a sigh of relief. Till it stopped she’d not realized how much his Pontius Pilate routine was getting on her nerves.
“It will be worst for Mrs. Belfore—Tabby. As you are probably aware she is . . . ah . . . with child. Very much so.” Despite the god-awful circumstances, his old-world delicacy elicited a mental smile from the part of Anna’s brain that eschewed modern cynicism. “I would greatly appreciate it, Mr. Marshall—Guy—if you wouldn’t mind lending me this young lady. I feel Mrs. Belfore would be more comfortable if there was another woman present.”
Panic rose in Anna’s chest. “Where’s Lynette?” she demanded cravenly.
“Lynette’s gone over to the mainland,” Hull said. He sounded offended, as if he had offered Anna a great honor. In a way he had.
“Sorry,” Anna said. “Caught me off guard. Sure, I’ll come. Damn.” She levered herself up from the duff but she could tell she’d not been quick enough. Disapproval flickered through the busy machinations of the chief ranger’s face.
Shoulderi
ng her pack, she followed him docilely from the oak woods. A shiny blue Ford pickup truck waited for them in the dust of the lane. That Hull managed to keep it glossy through sand and salt and drought spoke reams about the man.
Anna buckled herself in and the chief ranger drove south. The closer they came to Plum Orchard, the slower the truck moved. Hull was dreading this as much as she was. Anna took comfort in that. Regardless of her gender she didn’t doubt he’d do the actual breaking of the news. He was chief ranger. They were paid for that sort of thing and most took their responsibilities to heart. Stewardship extended to all the animals in the park, even the two-legged variety.
Plum Orchard was a gracious old Georgian Revival-style mansion built in 1898 by Andrew Carnegie for his son. In the grand tradition, it rose three stories with arched floor-to-ceiling windows along the ground floor and four fine strong pillars supporting a gabled porch roof two stories high. A railed veranda ran around three sides. Several additional porches were tucked into odd angles. One, near the back, still boasted a wide swinging bench that Anna liked to catnap on when they were involved in the tedious process of filling rubber stock tanks with well water.
Two of these tanks marred the expanse of front lawn. With the continuing drought the crew kept them full so that should fire break out, helicopters could fill their drop buckets. The island was surrounded by water but so delicate was the chemistry of life that to use salt water to quench inland fires would damage the ecological balance.
Beyond the tanks, ancient oaks, furred in resurrection ferns and dripping veils of Spanish moss, dotted the grounds. Two stately palms, grown taller than the house, stood sentinel at the front entrance. Behind the house was the inland waterway that separated the island from the mainland and the town of St. Marys.
Ranger Hull followed the graveled drive around to the back of the house and switched off the ignition. He and Anna had not exchanged a single word since they’d left the burn site. The bang of a screen door rattled down from the upstairs apartment and they exchanged guilty glances.
