by Phil Bowie
The weather was pretty much VFR all the way down the coast but a strong storm front was rolling in from the west. There should be just enough time to get down over Georgia before the winds and rains hit.
The dark blue FBO shuttle van pulled up and stopped fifteen feet from the King Air. The driver got out and slid the big rear door open.
Louis Strake and Montgomery Davis got out. They were followed by another man who looked to be fit and in his mid-thirties, dressed in a black suit with a white shirt and a string tie, and with a long braided blond pony tail.
And then Elaine Strake got out of the van.
Hardin was shaken to the core. Strake was walking toward him, preoccupied and scowling. “I’m Louis Strake,” he said, not offering his hand. “Kelly explained this flight to you? The special requirements?”
Hardin cleared his throat and said in his practiced altered voice, “Yes, sir. No flight plan. Cruise below ten thousand to the coast and then drop it down. Destination is a private strip on Blue Coral Cay.”
“There’s been a change. Two more passengers as you can see. We’ll go to Blue Coral first and spend tonight. Tomorrow morning we’ll fly to Treasure Cay and stay two days at my cottage there. Do you have any problems with that?”
“No, sir.”
Strake looked at his watch. “I want to be airborne within fifteen minutes.” He walked up the air-stair into the cabin. The van driver was piling the luggage to one side of the air-stair so Hardin began loading it into the aft cabin bay, standing aside while the other three boarded.
Davis carried a metal briefcase with him. He hesitated when he first looked at Hardin, then he frowned to himself and went up the air-stair. Elaine did not look at him at all, and the other man just nodded, unsmiling, and climbed up into the cabin last.
The King Air had club seating in the front part of the cabin—a pair of plush leather seats along each side of the aisle behind the pilot’s and copilot’s seats, opposite each other across a small fold-down table. To the rear of the club seats there was another seat on each side of the aisle. Strake was seated directly behind the pilot’s seat, facing aft, with his opened briefcase on the table, reading some papers. The third man sat across the aisle, also facing aft, a paperback book in hand. Davis sat opposite him, facing forward. Elaine was sitting in the right back seat looking out the window, lost in her own thoughts.
Hardin closed the air-stair, moved up the aisle, sat on the Para-Cushion, pulled the headset on over his captain’s hat, and buckled up. He could feel eyes on him and he turned his head to see Davis staring at him intently. Hardin smiled slightly and turned back to begin his checklist.
The plan was out of the question now, of course. There was absolutely nothing he could do but pilot the flight to the Bahamas and back, saying as little as possible, keeping to himself, doing nothing that drew attention.
He fired up the turbines and called Teterboro ground control for taxi clearance. He followed a Comanche single and a Baron along a taxiway and when the tower cleared him for takeoff he swung out onto the runway, lining up. He pushed the power levers to the stops, the big props spinning up to become light gray discs and the plane gathering momentum quickly, the tire-marked pavement rushing by beneath them. As the airspeed needle swung past one hundred miles per hour he gave the yoke some back pressure and the nose wheel lifted off. The mains rumbled along for another two seconds and then the plane was airborne. He held forward on the yoke a bit and trimmed to counter the pitch-up tendency, hit the gear retract and the wheels tucked up in a fast four seconds, and they climbed away with a high deck angle at almost 2,000 feet per minute.
He followed the vectors from Teterboro departure scrupulously, with the green transponder light winking each time they were swept by the ground radar. Released from Teterboro air space and with the transponder switched to the all-purpose VFR code of 1200, he levelled off at 9,500 feet, a mile above a yellowish haze layer, where the air was much clearer. He trimmed for cruise and the airspeed increased to 300 miles per hour. The King Air thrummed along smoothly and some part of his mind marveled once again at the precision, power, and docile handling of the sleek six-ton ship.
He flew offshore and took up a southerly course that would roughly parallel the coast and appear on any inquisitive radar screens as though they were headed for Florida. He knew they were now just one of hundreds of low-level radar blips, some of which were military in and near the Military Operations Areas and the restricted areas, those planes only occasionally in contact with civilian ATC, if at all. There were also many private flights ranging from student practice sessions to business singles and twins, a lot of them not on any filed flight plans and only in contact with local airports.
Unless he did something stupid to draw attention to the King Air it would be no particular problem to drop down at the right time and place, switch off the transponder, which would reduce their radar image to a dim un-coded blip, and slip on over to the islands. They would be arriving over Blue Coral Cay not that long after official dark, so anyone who happened to spot their faint blip on a screen would likely dismiss them as only a late-arriving private inter-island flight of no concern.
The afternoon sky was serenely beautiful in contrast with Hardin’s gut-churning inner turmoil. To the east the sea was already darkening as the sun sank lower into the haze. Off to the west a long sporadic line of angry-looking clouds signaled the approach of the predicted storm front.
He had not programmed Blue Coral Cay into the GPS so he reached back into his flight case for a sectional chart. For no particular reason he decided to bring the gun closer, so he sandwiched it between two partially unfolded sectionals and brought it into his lap. Then with his left hand he slid it down beside his seat, to the floor on the left side, leaving one of the sectionals to cover it. He opened up the other sectional and studied it.
Blue Coral Cay was a kidney-shaped island two miles long at most, one of many islands dotting the sea between Grand Bahama and Andros. Blue Coral was surrounded by several tiny islets, and off to the southeast there was a pair of long slender islands called Big Sandy Cay and Little Sandy Cay. The larger of the pair had a short airstrip at one end and a small group of buildings at the other. He had a handbook on the Bahamas in his flight case so he got it out.
There was only a paragraph about Blue Coral that said the place was private and to be avoided. It had a large residence on a low bluff and a cluster of outbuildings, all close by the 3,100-foot paved strip. Unauthorized landings were strictly prohibited to the extent that an unwary pilot might find the runway obstructed by spaced-out steel barrels.
He fed the coordinates into the GPS, which took a minute to digest the information and then obligingly displayed the range, the desired track over the planet to get there, and the ETA. The suggested course angled away off to the left because it was the direct line there over the ocean, so he inserted a position ten miles offshore of Sapelo Island, midway along Georgia’s mostly desolate coast, as a waypoint. He would fly to the fix abeam Sapelo, drop down to 2,000 feet as though planning to land at Brunswick or somewhere else along the coast, then switch off the transponder and make for Blue Coral Cay. He didn’t want official attention drawn to this flight any more than Strake did.
As they flew farther south the sun became a ruddy striated neon ball in the haze blanket and there were occasional lightning flashes in the bowels of the low black clouds prowling closer here and there along the western horizon, but the air along the coast was still mostly clear and absolutely smooth.
He sensed movement in the cabin behind him and turned his head to look out the windows across the empty copilot’s seat as though scanning for traffic. In his peripheral vision he saw Davis move up to sit across from Strake and beckon him closer to listen. They talked in a huddle over the small fold-down table for several minutes. The pony-tailed man across the aisle paid little attention, absorbed in his paperback book.
He began losing altitude slowly as the marshy river-laced s
horeline of Georgia slid by on the right, the meandering waterways black. The city of Savannah lay off ahead on the right, lights already twinkling here and there in the growing dusk. Beyond it there was not much of civilization until the small city of Brunswick a hundred miles down the coast.
There was a three-quarter moon high up to the east, already growing bright.
A few minutes later Davis moved up the aisle into the cockpit, drawing the heavy curtains closed behind him. He sat in the copilot’s seat and buckled his belt loosely. Half-turned in his seat, he stared at Hardin intently for a minute.
Hardin moved the right earpiece of his headset aside and said, “Yes, what is it?”
Davis reached over and took the sunglasses off of him carefully and held them up to the wan sky light. “Plain glass. So you don’t need these to see.” He was speaking in a low voice. Nobody back in the cabin would be able to hear him over the engine noise. He leaned close. “Contacts. You’re wearing contacts.” He sat back for several seconds and then said, “Tell me something. Was that Indian slut a pretty good fuck?”
Hardin reacted like he had been punched hard in the solar plexus, glaring at Davis, his hands bunching into rock-hard fists on his knees.
“I thought so. How have you been doing, Cowboy? Take it easy. Let’s not make any quick moves. He reached over and patted him down and worked a hand behind his back feeling for a belt weapon. “Wait a minute. What’s this?” He squeezed the edge of the Para-Cushion and felt along it. “This wouldn’t be a parachute would it, Cowboy?”
He felt under the pilot’s seat and down inside the flight case. “Sure it would be. What did you figure to do? Shut down the pressure system and then ease it up high enough to put us asleep while you went on your oxygen? Then aim the plane out to sea and jump, that about right? Well, I have to give you credit. You almost pulled it off. But once I study a man I don’t forget him. Call it a sixth sense. And you couldn’t know Elaine and Buster would be along on this flight, because that was a last-minute thing. So maybe your plan was trashed anyway, wasn’t it?”
Hardin just looked at him. The Sapelo waypoint came up and the plane banked gently under the guidance of the autopilot to take up the heading for Blue Coral Cay. Davis was startled by the turn, but recovered quickly. “So you got out of your plane and made it to shore. I should have figured for that. But sometimes you think things have gone your way just because you wanted them to, you know? They gave you tinted contact lenses. Dyed your hair some. Did some plastic work here and there. Then the beard, and the glasses. But they can’t change the way a man moves or thinks. They say some of the old African hunters could tell a particular lion or an elephant from a mile away, even after years had gone by. Somebody should have studied how they did that.”
He spat out the small cotton wads and said, “Why did you order the bomb put in the Jeep? There wasn’t any need. You could have just yanked out the distributor wires.”
“We all make mistakes. That one was regrettable. But what’s done is done. If it’s any consolation, the man who set the charge is dead. Or do you know he’s dead? Well, I’ll be damned. You did it, didn’t you? Again, I’m impressed. Donny was not an easy man to take. But look, before this gets out of control, I’ve just had a talk with Strake. He would rather his wife didn’t know anything about all of this. I think I can assume you don’t want her hurt, either. So after we land we’ll wait until they’re out of the plane and then you and I will take a walk. It turns out you’re not really much of a threat to us, and your affair with Mrs. Strake, well that was a long time ago now. Strake is willing to chalk that one up.”
“There was no affair.”
“Whatever you say. Anyway, Strake is willing to give you some serious money to just go away. How does fifty thousand sound?”
Hardin said nothing.
“Like I say, when we land, you and I will take a walk. I’ll see that you get your money and a boat ride to Nassau. Be smart. Take the offer and go away.”
Hardin thought, If I take a walk with him on the island, I’ll get a bullet in the back of the head and a boat ride out to feed the reef sharks. He hesitated for thirty seconds, then said, “I guess I don’t have much choice.”
“Good. Good. That’s the way we thought you’d see it. You just fly the plane, then, and think about how you’re going to spend all that money. I’ll sit right here to keep you company the rest of the way. If we get bored we can reminisce about old times.” He snugged up his seat belt.
The darkness was gathering fast now as the vastness of the green-black sea passed by below, the moon growing brighter. He realized he had not switched off the transponder so he did it now.
Neither man said anything for many long minutes. Hardin felt hollow-headed and remote and he couldn’t seem to focus his mind on anything. Blue Coral Cay was drawing closer at nearly 300 miles per hour.
Hardin thought of his days with old Wasituna Light-foot, and a peculiar calm began to seep into him as he pushed aside his blinding anger and fought to quell the fear that was threatening to turn his gut to gruel and steal away his reason.
And he began to think.
“Why are you descending?” Davis said.
“We’re getting close.” The plane was out of autopilot now. “And the lower we are the less likely we are to attract attention on somebody’s radar.”
He leveled out at 1,000 feet and peered intently ahead and as Davis also focused on the sea ahead he reached out and turned the brightness down on the GPS until the numbers faded out. After another minute he pointed ahead and said, “There it is.”
There was a black hump on the sea ahead, with other lumps in the area ranging from dots to larger abstract shapes, the blue moonlight glimmering on the shallow sea among them. The one he was pointing at was still fifteen miles away.
“We’ll go straight in,” he said. He tuned the primary radio to the silent emergency frequency of 121.5 and turned the volume up to maximum. There was a burst of static but he used the squelch to stop it. Then he switched the radio from the headset to the cockpit speaker.
Davis watched his moves but obviously had no idea what was going on. A cockpit is a bewildering array of esoteric gadgetry to anyone not schooled in it, and this cockpit was more complex than many.
He rehearsed it all in his mind as he banked to the right and then back to the left to line up with the long axis of the black mass ahead, the moon swinging around to about eleven o’clock. As it began to look more like an island and less like the humped back of some prehistoric monster he selected approach flaps, turned off the propeller synchrophaser, and pulled the torque back to 1,000 foot-pounds per side, watching the airspeed bleed off to 160 miles per hour.
He let the plane sink smoothly.
Now he could make out trees on the island, silhouetted against the lesser shadows of the sea, and he turned on the powerful wing tip landing lights, startling Davis with the sudden glare.
“We’re fast,” Davis said. “Isn’t this way too fast?”
There was the runway ahead, beginning almost at the shoreline, and he made a slight correction to align with it. There were three light planes parked on scrub grass alongside the strip, one of them an old Cessna Cardinal. He squeezed off another 200 foot-pounds and the airspeed inched down to 130 miles per hour.
The gear warning horn silencing switch was on the left power lever and he had already flicked it off. The gear remained retracted.
Davis had his right arm out straight now, his hand braced on the top of the instrument panel, staring ahead into the brilliance.
In quick succession Hardin switched off the cabin and cockpit lights and the avionics master and shut off the fuel flow to both engines, which kept spinning as though nothing had happened, running on the residual fuel.
As the King Air sped in over a swath of coral that glowed like old bones in the landing light glare and the threshold flashed by fifty feet below, Hardin used his left hand to push the yoke forward and his right hand to snake out an
d uncouple Davis’s seat belt buckle.
Davis said, “Wait. What…”
The plane slammed down onto the pavement on its belly, the big props digging up gouts of pavement and curling back on themselves, the belly grinding, the plane skidding and slewing wildly and the noise deafening, the violent deceleration easily flinging Davis’s big body heavily against the yoke and the instruments and the slanting windshield.
The impact had set off the automatic Emergency Locator Transmitter and the whooping wail issuing loudly over the emergency frequency from the cockpit speaker added to the din.
The plane ground to a stop, rocked up once, then settled back and was still, the ELT signal shrieking out of the speaker at earsplitting volume, one of the landing lights crazily aimed skyward outside, the only glow in the pervasive blackness.
The man with the pony tail ripped aside the cockpit curtain, his face white and shocked, and shouted “What the f—” but Hardin already had the .45 in his right hand and he swung it back with all his strength, catching the man a glancing blow on the side of the head and driving him back to slump in his seat.
Hardin clawed his seat belt buckle loose and pivoted out into the cabin aisle, starting to drop as some part of his brain screamed that he would be outlined against the only light, which was coming in through the shattered windshield, but it was too late and there were two flashes in the darkness that he couldn’t hear and the right earpiece of his headset disintegrated and there was a searing burn across his right collar bone. Then he was down low in a crouch.
Elaine was letting out terrified hoarse screams and whimpering in the darkness off to the left. There was a lightening at the rear of the cabin and a furtive shadow and he knew that Strake had opened the air-stair and fled.
Hardin lurched down the aisle, his leg hurting but not broken, he knew. He paused long enough to see in the dim light that Elaine looked terrified but seemed unhurt. She had been securely belted in. There was little danger of fire now. He half fell down the stairs onto the pavement, going down onto his knees and getting up and moving in a half run.
