Are you kidding me, Ray?
What the heck could possibly be wrong?
Son of a bitch!
A quick glance at my watch confirmed that I had a minute of bottom time left. Ray was going to have to wait. I peered in the passenger side door and spotted the pouch wedged on the top of the boat’s dash, pressed against the windshield. It appeared green—of course. The sun’s rays lose intensity at this depth, and yellow fades to dark.
Bingo!
Now, how to get it without losing an arm to the moray?
I looked around for an answer, noted the eel’s position, and had an idea. What worked once, just might again. I sucked in a deep breath that lifted me up above the boat, where I exhaled and kicked hard. With my arms locked straight I shoved the end of the kayak hard and fast inside the cabin. I felt it move under my pressure. I backed up and repeated the effort, pushing as hard as I could. The kayak had gone another two feet through the windshield.
I chanced a quick look at the anchor that dangled above me and saw that Ray was now lifting and dropping it up and down to emphasize his distress message.
“I’m working as fast as I can, Goddamnit!” I shouted. All I heard was a groan and more bubbles blasting past my ears.
I peeked through the broken windshield into the cabin and saw the moray pinned under the kayak, still alive and squirming like crazy.
God, he’s pissed.
He’ll rip my head off if he can. I took a deep suck of air, plunged my arm inside and grabbed an edge of the waterproof pouch and tugged … Damn!
It was stuck!
I pulled again, harder this time, and felt the muck, sea anemone, coral roots, and eel crap slowly give way just as the fat moray sensed my presence and whipped around to inhale my arm. I felt his teeth graze my forearm as I withdrew it from the cabin, and a long track of four slices filled with blood on my arm. I kicked hard, sucked air like a sprinter, and scissor-kicked wildly toward the surface.
Was the damn eel coming after me? I didn’t see him but couldn’t be sure.
SCUBA 101 kicked in and I slowed down a little to prevent my lungs from exploding and took quick shallow breaths, now worried about Ray’s alarm.
As the light above grew in brilliance I could hear the distant sound of boat engines. Was that the problem? A boat coming?
I checked my watch and knew I should hang on the anchor line for a few moments to ease the nitrogen from my bloodstream, but considering Ray’s urgency, there wasn’t time. I’d have to count on there being a built-in grace period in the recreational dive tables.
I broke through the surface by the anchor line. Ray shrieked at my sudden appearance and fell backwards inside the cabin.
“Where the hell have you been? Didn’t you see the anchor?”
“I’m here, Ray what’s the emergency?”
“The Cubans are coming, damnit! The fucking Cubans!”
The sound of the boat grew louder as I scrambled up into the fuselage. I got stuck in the small hatch as Ray lunged for the left seat. I dumped the SCUBA gear into the water, then kicked off the fins. There goes the security deposit.
“Cut the anchor line, we’ve got to get airborne, pronto!” he yelled.
Betty’s engines roared to life and I was again grateful I’d had Ray overhaul them. I tossed the waterproof pouch on top of the instrument panel and Ray didn’t give it so much as a glance. We bounced along the water’s surface, which threw me from side to side as I struggled toward the co-pilot’s seat.
“Oh, shit!” Ray said.
He flipped the speaker switch on the dash, and what I heard next surprised me a hell of a lot more then the moray had.
“Stop right there, sea plane! I command you, stop now!” the voice crackled over the radio.
Ray looked at me with wild eyes. “They sound really pissed!”
“You’re violating Cuban waters and breaking international law!”
I felt the thin scar on my forehead from the last time I was on this very spot. When blood dripped into my lap, I looked at my gashes and realized how razor-sharp the moray’s teeth had been.
Just then Betty broke free from the ocean’s grasp and we lurched into the air. Ray banked to port and I spotted a large speedboat slicing through the water toward us.
The voice was Cuban but the English was excellent. Was I imagining it, or was the voice familiar?
Could it really be Manny Gutierrez?
25
Now airborne, Ray breathed a sigh of relief.
“Circle around, I want to see who’s in that boat,” I said.
“Are you crazy? We’re outta here!”
The radio had gone silent, and the speedboat had stopped in the water near the wreck.
“Come on, Ray! It’s not a military boat, it’s just a speedboat. What can they do? We’re in international waters. Circle around.”
“I’m in the pilot’s seat, and—”
“Now, Ray!” He was on my last nerve.
Ray hesitated, then banked hard to starboard.
“Damnit, Buck, I just want to get back to Key West. And we need to get out of here. We—”
“One pass, that’s all, and get lower, I want to see their faces.”
Ray circled and reduced altitude. As we got closer I could see four men standing on the deck looking up at us. The radio again crackled to life, now in the intimacy of my headset.
“You’ve got cojones, coming back to this place, but I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist,” the voice on the radio said.
I saw one of the men holding the boat’s microphone as he looked up at us.
“Resist what?” Ray said.
”Get closer. Is that—?”
“That’s close enough, damnit!” Ray said and banked to the north.
The man lowered the microphone and I caught a clear glimpse of his face. The air caught in my lungs. It was Manny Gutierrez, and I could swear he was smiling.
But why?
That’s when I saw the guy on the bow of their boat lift a long tube and point it at us.
No … No!
“Turn, Ray, turn! Get out of here, now!”
I reached up and shoved the throttle handles down. Betty jumped forward.
“What the hell are you doing?” Ray said.
A flame and trail of smoke launched from the bow of the boat and was headed our way.
“ROCKET!” I screamed.
“What?!”
“Evasive action, quick! Turn!”
I saw the streak of fire headed right for us. Ray swerved hard to port and a fraction of a second later we were rocked by an explosion that sent Betty sideways with yaw into a slide.
“I can’t … control her!”
Ray worked the yoke, pulled it back hard, and the engines screamed in a steady howl with both tachometers red-lined. I pulled back on the throttles, but we continued to veer uncontrollably.
“What’s that smell?” he said.
Uh-oh.
I looked back into the fuselage. Fire was burning a hole through the roof near the tail.
“Fire!”
I jumped from my seat and fumbled with the fire extinguisher strapped behind the pilot’s seat. I nearly fell into the flames before I shot the extinguisher into them. The fire died down but it was burning outside, too.
The hole grew bigger back toward the tail.
“Betty’s on fire!” I yelled. “I can’t get it out!”
“I can barely control her!”
“We’ve got to get her into the water or she’ll burn to a crisp!”
“She’ll sink if we set her down now,” Ray said.
He suddenly banked again and I realized he’d been gaining altitude.
“What the hell are you doing?” I yelled. “We either ditch or we’ll explode!”
Ray fought with the controls as I struggled back into the right seat. Sparks shot out from under the instrument panel.
“Ray, what’re you doing? We have to land!”
�
�I can’t swim, remember!”
He was eerily calm, eyes focused and his teeth pressed together. His resolve helped calm me down. We could only have seconds, minutes at best, before the flames reached the wings and Betty’s fuel tanks ignited.
“What’s the plan?” As I asked the question, I saw the answer out the window.
“Ray? No, Ray, we can’t … Ray?”
He gave me a sidelong glance. “Better get your harness back on.”
I buckled in, then looked back over my shoulder as the fuselage slowly burned forward. The hole in the roof kept getting bigger and the flight deck filled with smoke. Would the fuselage collapse before the tanks ignited? My eyes and throat burned. Ray dropped the nose and pointed us toward land. It was still in the distance, but I could see a beach jutting into the sea. Just then, the yoke fell forward.
The radio crackled again. “I’ll find you, Reilly. If you live!”
Ray groaned. “The ailerons have burned through!”
The altimeter needle dropped like a rock. Our angle of attack was pointed down toward the shore just off the point of land.
Ray pressed his feet up and down on the pedals to no avail.
“The rudder’s gone,” he said.
“We’re going down—brace yourself!”
I hand-cranked the flaps to keep the nose up, but with the tail controls fried it was like trying to sprint with one leg. Ray glanced over, calm as I’d ever seen him, and in the face of death he gave me a crazed smile.
“Always wanted to see Cuba,” he said.
Betty dove toward the water, and through what could only be the grace of God, the nose lifted just before we hit. I tried to hold on, but the force of the impact wrenched us both forward and Ray smashed his head hard on the instrument panel. He slumped over, unconscious.
Betty bounced and skimmed, and with no ability to control our direction I cut the engines and dumped the fuel. The curve of the sixty-plus year old aquatic hull guided the powerless flying boat across the water like a skipping stone until we lurched forward with a loud metallic shriek. We ground to a sudden halt on the shallow bottom, a hundred yards off the western tip of Cuba. Water sloshed around my feet, which meant the hull had been breached.
As I reached up to cut the magnetos, the speaker crackled.
“Welcome back, Reilly.”
I flipped the switches and killed the electrical system—to prevent additional fire and to silence the speaker.
“Fuck you, Gutierrez.”
26
Ray was unconscious and Betty was smoldering. We were beached on a sand flat adjacent to a channel, a hundred yards from land. A quick glance at the shore revealed no buildings, houses, or people. When I shook Ray, his head flopped to the side. He had a gash on his forehead but there wasn’t much blood. His breathing was raspy. I had to get him lying flat to assess his injuries.
The cabin was smoky, the floor covered with water, and spotted embers glowed above my head. The handle wouldn’t work so I kicked open the hatch. I grabbed my bailing bucket and doused the roof with seawater until there was no more smoke. Ray still hadn’t moved. I unclipped his harness, checked his limbs for any obvious breaks, relieved to find none. I grabbed him under the armpits and pulled him back into the fuselage.
He said something unintelligible, windmilled his arms, and tried to free himself from my grasp.
“Ray, it’s me, Buck. You okay?”
He dropped a hand over his eyes and slowly felt upward along the sheen of blood to the gash on his forehead.
“I’m bleeding … What happened? Did we crash?”
He lurched up to a sitting position and looked around.
“Holy crap! We did crash. Somebody shot us down! That boat …” he paused. “You had to circle and see who it was!”
He was right. If I’d have listened to him we’d be halfway to Key West by now.
I pulled my flight bag from under the seat, along with the backpack that had a change of clothes. I grabbed the waterproof pouch from under the pilot’s seat along with the one from the wreck and stuffed them in the flight bag. Ray stared at the hole in the top of the plane. He stood up, weaving a little, put his head through the hole, then made a 360-degree turn.
“The tail’s toast, rudder, ailerons, half the fuselage is charred. Oh, man … we’re so screwed!”
“Based on the sparks that were coming from below the instrument panel the electrical system’s shot to hell too,” I said.
From outside I could see a foot-long tear on the bottom of the fuselage where Betty must have caught on a rock. I pointed it out.
“We’re beyond screwed, we’re … we’re … I don’t even speak Spanish! Do you speak—I don’t speak Spanish!” he said.
“Me neither, Ray. Come on, grab everything you can find that identifies us, or the plane. We need to peel the numbers off the tail—”
“The tail’s fried, Buck! There are no numbers! There’s no freaking tail!”
We dug through the plane and grabbed anything that could be traced back to me.
Was this happening?
Was I scuttling Betty?
Was she beyond repair?
I didn’t doubt Gutierrez’s threat that he’d come looking for me, but hopefully he’d dive the wreck first to see if I found the pouch. Wouldn’t stop him from radioing some of his cronies in the Secret Police to come search for us, though.
I jumped out onto the soft sand flat, where Betty was wedged into marl and turtle grass. The channel we’d bounced over was just behind her. My heart raced, my body was soaked with sweat and salt water, and I more or less collapsed on the sand.
Betty was charred, torn, bent, and broken. She was all I had in this world, aside from two pouches of ancient clues to potential treasures. My business was now gone, Last Resort Charter and Salvage, done, beyond done—crushed, ruined, destroyed along with Betty.
Everything was ruined.
Rage grew within me and without realizing it I was pounding my fist into the surf and sand.
“Aaaaggghhhh!”
I stuck my face into the shallow water. I should just suck in a lungful and—I was being pulled up from the water by my hair.
“What the hell are you doing, man? Pull it together!” Ray said.
When I sat up something caught my eye.
“Oh, shit …”
Ray spun around to see where I was looking. A half-dozen fishing smacks were coming around the point straight toward us. It only took a few minutes until they beached their boats on the flat next to Betty. The first man yelled to us—in Spanish, of course.
“No hablo Espanol,” I said.
“Americano?” one of the men said. He was the youngest of the deeply tanned and weathered bunch. “We saw the smoke streak across the sky when you crashed. What happened?”
“Fucking Gutierrez—”
I grabbed Ray’s arm. “Electrical fire,” I said.
“In the plane’s tail?” The young man looked at Betty again and pressed his lips together.
“Where are we, anyway?” I said.
“Puerto Esperanza. Western Cuba.”
The men were fishermen, amazed at the appearance of the crashed plane and Americans wearing Hawaiian shirts. Or maybe they were just amazed we’d survived the crash.
“Can you men help push the plane into the channel and tow it to shore?” I said.
The young Cuban spoke to the other men, who conferred a few moments in rapid-fire Spanish. I assumed they were questioning the sanity of helping us, but then one jumped out of his boat and felt around Betty’s hull, checking the depth of the sand, eyeing the tear in the hull. He spoke to the others, and two other men jumped out and did the same thing. They then began to dig sand away from the hull with their hands, digging, pushing, pulling, and yelling instructions to each other. We all worked together, and after fifteen minutes Betty was afloat in the channel, tied to two of the boats, and on her way to shore. Ray was in the young man’s skiff, and I was inside Betty bail
ing water as we went.
Even though I was happy to get her off the flat, the more I surveyed her damage, the worse I felt.
Here in the deep water a painful thought stopped me mid-bail. I should just let Betty sink so Gutierrez couldn’t find us. If she were unfixable, it would be the smart thing to do. The thought only rattled in my head for a few seconds, then I started bailing again.
I just couldn’t pull the plug on Betty.
I’d never done the smart thing before, why start now?
27
The trip to shore took forever—as well it should have, since this was a funeral procession not a salvage effort. I could hardly bail fast enough with the water pouring in from the gash in Betty’s hull. When we finally rounded the point, a small fishing village appeared on the shore. Fisherman watching us in the darkness jumped into the water as the boats neared land, they encircled Betty, then guided and pushed until she was ashore, listing heavily to her port side, the green float dug into the brown sand.
I jumped into the shallow water. Betty looked like a beached whale that had been shredded by sharks. What would the Cubans do now? I glanced from face to face and saw the glow of excitement. They talked amongst themselves, gesturing toward the plane and looking back toward their village.
Women emerged from dark dwellings and stood with their hands on their hips. Children came out ran toward their fathers and brothers, chattering like so many birds, all in a rush to see the carcass first hand. The excitement was palpable, their voices vibrated on my skin, oblivious to our loss.
They would assume us to be rich, and once word spread we were Americans, the assumption would solidify. All Americans are rich, even bankrupt Americans, when compared to Cubans. If the village had a telephone or radio, would the word be out on the wire of an American plane shot down by a hero of the revolution? Manny Gutierrez strikes another blow against marauding imperialists? If only I had a picture of him in the Mercedes he abandoned in Key West when he fled all those months ago.
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