The Cannibal Queen

by Stephen Coonts

  On the way back to town we stopped at a beach gear emporium and acquired goggles and a snorkle for David, then drove the twenty miles to the motel and tried out the new equipment in the motel pool. It worked fine.

  At times David looks like a man to me, but sporting around in a pool he is half boy, half fish. “Come on in,” he pleads, then gets upset that his middle-aged father needs only five minutes of water sport to tire of it. Why don’t fathers stay boys for as long as their sons need them that way?

  A thunderstorm drove us back to our room. As we looked out the window at the rain, he asked what we were going to do this evening. “We could get dressed,” I suggested, “and go pick up a couple women. You get the short one.”

  “That’s fine with me,” he shot back, “but I get first choice.”

  We cogitated upon it and decided to go to dinner instead. It was 10 o’clock when we got back to the motel. I went to sleep while he was writing postcards. When I awoke at midnight to answer nature’s call the lights were out and he was sound asleep.

  6

  I WOKE UP MONDAY MORNING AT 5:50. YESTERDAY WE STAYED in Pensacola because thunderstorms rolled in at 9:30 A.M. while David was still asleep. Today we want to fly east to a beach near Jacksonville on Florida’s east coast. The weather will probably be just like yesterday’s, so the sooner we take off and point the Queen east, the better. I roll David out as soon as I’ve had my shower. He wakes easily and jumps out without protest. He wants to go to the beach and he can always sleep in the plane.

  “Where are we going today?” he asks.

  “I dunno. We’ll dodge the storms and find an airport someplace.”

  “Oh, Toto,” he warbles, “this isn’t Kansas.”

  At the airport David installs the wheel hub plates that we removed to get access to the tire inflation valves. We move the plane around to rotate the wheels and allow the screws to be installed easily.

  I keep looking to the south at a huge thunderstorm coming this way. David seems to be going too slow. Better not push him. I break down the tie-downs and preflight the plane between glances at the oncoming storm. The sky to the northwest is relatively clear, just the usual puffy clouds and haze.

  Ready not a minute too soon, we strap ourselves in and I crank the engine. As usual, she starts readily and emits her morning puff of gray, oily smoke. It is 7:02 A.M. The storm has an anvil on it that is blotting out the morning sun. The sky is growing dark. Welcome to Florida!

  We lift off runway 16 heading straight for the approaching solid black wall. Approach gives me a vector of 050 degrees and I turn handily. As we level at 1,500 feet over the bay it is apparent the storm is still several miles away. It wasn’t even a close call.

  We motor up over Whiting Field and once we are north of I-10, turn to parallel it eastbound. The interstate highway is the rough boundary of the Eglin restricted areas, which lie south of the highway and go all the way to the southern coast of the barrier islands. Pensacola Departure switches me to Eglin Approach. A female controller is busy with Air Force traffic shooting practice approaches into Eglin: she acknowledges my existence and forgets about me as Pensacola fades into the haze behind.

  David is doing something in the front cockpit, eating a candy bar I think. That’s his breakfast. His mother would wring my neck if she knew. But she’s in Colorado and that’s a lot of miles behind us.

  No other storms in sight. Ten to twelve miles visibility under a scattered layer of scud, the bottoms of which are several hundred feet above us. At about 10,000 feet is a thin broken layer. We fly in and out of occasional weak patches of sunlight, but mainly we are under clouds. The engine sounds strong, vigorous. I twitch the controls as David rests his head on the right side of the cockpit for a nap.

  We are flying over a vast pine forest, have been flying over one, in fact, since we left Baton Rouge on the Mississippi River eastbound. The farmers of the Deep South have given up. The cotton plantations of the last century that were sharecropper farms in the first half of this one are now just pine tree farms. The forest is broken only by highways knifing through and occasional towns, here and there a pasture, a few meandering streams. The odd grassy area only emphasizes the vastness of this pine wilderness and how iffy it would be to find a safe emergency landing place. I would like to fly higher to increase my chances of finding an acceptable landing place if the engine craps out, but this haze and low scud would obscure the ground, which I must see to navigate.

  Not that there is really anything to worry about. This big round Lycoming has been running strong for longer than I’ve been alive. Today is not its day to die. Nor is it our day.

  Over De Funiak Springs Eglin Approach turns us loose after verifying that we are following the interstate eastward. The controller suggests we switch to Cairns Approach, so I do. Cairns is an Army helicopter base in the Fort Rucker, Alabama, complex somewhere north of us. After a few minutes on that frequency I tire of listening to Air Traffic Control and ask to leave the freq. The male controller readily agrees. I turn the radio off. Blessed silence.

  I flip on the intercom switch and ask David how he’s doing.

  “Fine.”

  “See that little cloud up ahead. Let’s fly through it.”

  He’s agreeable. “All right.”

  I add a couple inches of manifold pressure and climb three hundred feet. I boresight the cloud. It’s dead ahead, growing larger as we thunder toward it at 95 MPH. Seconds from impact David screams over the intercom, “We’re going to die!”

  Then the gray stuff engulfs us, obscuring the ground. I hold the stick motionless, the rudder frozen. And I glance down. A glimpse of the ground—this is a little cloud—just where it should be, then we are out into the clear again.

  “Drat,” I tell David, “I think we’re still alive. I feel alive, how about you?”

  Crossing the Appalachicola River I tune the radio to the Tallahassee ATIS frequency as I inform David that we have entered the Eastern Time Zone. Even at 1,500 feet we pick up the ATIS broadcast clearly: broken layer at 14,000 feet and a solid layer at 25,000, instrument approaches to runway 27 and departures on 36, wind out of the west at ten knots. I can hack that.

  Abeam Quincy I call Tallahassee Approach and tell them I am inbound. They stun me. “Tallahassee Municipal is IFR with two miles visibility in fog.” I look east. It’s gooey all right. The same to the south.

  I consult the chart. “We’ll land at Quincy.” This airport is only two miles north of my position and I know the weather’s good enough.

  Approach suggests either Quincy or Tallahassee Commercial. I consult the chart again. The big airport is Tallahassee Municipal on the south side of the city, about twelve miles south of the VOR, the radio navigation aid. Commercial is a little airport due east of me and six or seven miles north of the city limits. The Tallahassee VOR is at their field. Okay, we’ll go there.

  I see the lake near Commercial’s field at six miles and tell Approach I have the field in sight. I switch to Unicom and give them a call. A woman answers promptly: wind six knots favoring runway 16.

  I pick out the field and descend on a right base, make the 90-degree right turn and drop the Queen in. I flare a foot too high and David comments. He is becoming a connoisseur. Commercial has one asphalt runway 3,000 feet in length. I use about half of it and turn around on the runway and taxi back to the turnoff. On one side of the mat a vigorous elderly man is waiting. He directs me toward a semitrailer painted white and labeled 100LL—fuel.

  I shut down and check my watch. I started the engine in Pensacola an hour and 47 minutes ago. I climb out. “Gonna need gas.”

  David unstraps, takes his helmet off and stands in his seat. I pass the hose up to him. David also likes to add the oil the Queen needs after every flight to replenish the sump tank. Our host hands me the two quarts I ask for while David is still standing on the top of the front cockpit seat, and since I am busy craning my head to the south and wondering what Flight Service will say about the
weather, I forget to wait to let him add it. I do it myself.

  “Nice airplane,” the man tells me.

  “Thanks.”

  “Sure seen a lot of Stearmans in my time,” he says. “Used to buy them surplus for six hundred dollars each.”

  “Six hundred bucks wasn’t easy to come by back then, but that was still awful cheap.”

  “That it was. Them was good ol’ planes.”

  “How long you been here at this airport?”

  “Since ’46. We opened it in “46.”

  “Didn’t know you were here. I was going to stop over at the big airport.”

  “They pump lots of gas. You won’t make any difference to them. You will to us.”

  With the Queen replenished with fuel and oil—Stearman blood—we go into the little one-story building that houses the office. There we meet the lady I heard on the radio.

  On the phone Flight Service tells me the weather is 1,500 to 2,000 scattered, a broken layer at 14,000, all the way east across the peninsula to Jacksonville. No reported thunderstorms, although they will undoubtedly pop before too long. We’ll have a tailwind of ten knots. But no pilot reports along that route. That bothers me. “What about this fog over Tallahassee?” I ask. “How far east does that go?”

  “Pretty localized. A lot of it’s smoke from a forest fire southwest of the field. And it rained an inch down here last night.” Flight Service has their regional office at the municipal airport. “Always gets foggy after that much rain.”

  Reassured, I thank him and go to the little front office with the lady behind the desk. She is nearsighted and bends over the credit card form to fill it out. David is in one of the chairs in front of her desk so I take the other.

  Her name is Emily Hinson. The man who helped us park and fuel is her husband, Jim. They bought the land for the airport right after World War II. “It was grass up until ’67 when we paved it because too many people were just flying over. You’d be amazed—nowadays they won’t even taxi on grass. And we used to have a charter operation off this grass field with twins. After we paved it our tire bill sure went up.”

  I like her. She is feisty and sharp as a tack. In several ways she reminds me of my mother.

  She tells Dave and me how the feds are trying to condemn the 70 acres of land that the VOR sits on. This is land the Hinsons leased to the FAA for 30 years, but now they want to condemn it so the government can take advantage of rising property values in the future. She is indignant. The litigation has been going on for seven years and will finally go to trial next month. “They postponed the trial I don’t know how many times. Seems they just want to wear you down, drag it out so long you’ll just quit and take their money.”

  I agree. That is precisely what the government and big corporations do in litigation with individuals, especially those without deep pockets. I know. 1 used to be a lawyer with a moderately large oil company.

  “I notice you have your fuel in a tank truck. Are you having trouble with the EPA?”

  “Over there,” she points, “we have two eight-thousand-gallon tanks. Been there for years. Going to have to hire one company to dig them up, another company to test the soil, and if it’s bad, a third company to dig it out and treat it or haul it away. The state tells you what you have to do and gives you a deadline, and if you don’t, the EPA comes after you. The fine for not doing it is ten thousand dollars a day.”

  “They’re coming after you like you were Texaco.”

  “Going to put us out of business, that’s what they’re going to do. And they don’t care. They don’t know anything about aviation and they collect their paychecks regardless.”

  Several weeks ago I stopped in Virginia Dale, Colorado, which is merely a wide spot in the road 9,000 feet above sea level, at the only filling station-cafe between Ft. Collins, Colorado, and Laramie, Wyoming. I asked the proprietor why his gasoline pumps were locked up. He told me the same story Mrs. Hinson is telling now—the Environmental Protection Agency made the rules like he was pumping 200,000 gallons a month. They refused to differentiate between huge-volume businesses and tiny operations. “Screw everybody alike; that’s their motto.” Like small independent gas stations all over rural and urban America, he was going out of business. He and his wife would sell hamburgers and candy and try to survive, but there was no way he could get the money required to meet the demands of the EPA GS-2s who were hounding him. And he was bitter. A way of life was being eliminated by unelected bureaucrats because “environmentalists” want the government to get tough with “polluters.” He was being put out of business even though there was not a shred of evidence his tanks ever leaked a drop of gasoline into the groundwater. A lifetime of work blown away by the wind. He was very bitter.

  I refocus on Mrs. Hinson. She is telling me the EPA is putting the aircraft paint shops in southern and central Florida out of business. She asks if they are after the paint shops in Colorado.

  I tell her I don’t know. “Wouldn’t surprise me.” Nothing surprises me anymore.

  As I taxi out Mrs. Hinson thanks me over the radio for stopping and invites me to come back. I tell her I will.

  And I mean it. If Jim and Emily Hinson can find the courage to weather the storms, I will keep coming back. I owe them that.

  A half hour later over Madison, Florida, David and I are craning our necks trying to find a public grass airfield depicted on my chart. The chart says it is 150 feet above sea level and 3,300 feet in length. No Unicom frequency. Right by a north-south road. I decide I have it and point it out to David. There is a strip oriented north and south one pasture west of the road and two empty hangars for airplanes. “That’s it, I think.” I pull the power back to let us descend.

  “No,” David says, and points. “Over there. There’s some parked airplanes.”

  Sure enough. I swing the Queen in the right direction as David chortles, “You were going to land in some farmer’s cow pasture!”

  Such are the trials and tribulations of the world’s finest aviator when he takes his fourteen-year-old son flying.

  We cross above the real field and examine the wind sock. Out of the west. I swing out on a left downwind and pull the power. Down to 80 MPH, trimmed, a gentle left turn to bring us in over the trees for another mediocre landing. Damn!

  We roll out to the western end of the strip and turn around. With the prop ticking over at idle we look at the five little airplanes tied in the sun. There’s no shack, no fuel pumps. Not even a rusty old pump or a newly filled hole in the ground to show that the EPA has been by.

  I gun the engine and we taxi back down the runway for takeoff. Soon we are airborne and climbing steeply. With 300 horsepower in this dense air the Queen climbs like a homesick angel.

  We stop in Lake City for gas and food at another sprawling former military air base. I ask the man who helps us fuel the plane why the tower didn’t answer my calls. “He’s out to lunch,” I am told.

  I eye him. It’s a nonfederal tower, but still … “He always out to lunch?” I ask.

  “No. But it’s ten after twelve.”

  I ask about food. The lunch counter is closed on Mondays. A man standing looking at the plane announces he is on his lunch hour and we can ride into town with him.

  His name is James Rand. He is a mechanic for Emery-Riddle Worldwide, the air freight company, and he is in Lake City tending a sick DC-8 that I saw on the south side of the field as we circled in the pattern overhead.

  He spends our time together talking about airplanes in the manner of a man who doesn’t get to talk to many people in his work. He says he has read all my books. I instantly like him.

  He is just back from a sojourn in Guam, where he wrestled some B-29 pieces from a wreck in the jungle and brought them back. One of the pieces is a top turret complete with two bullet holes. “All the better,” I remark, and Mr. Rand readily agrees.

  “Don’t know what I’m going to do with this stuff, but I’ll do something. It’s amazing, but there’s a
ll kinds of stuff in that jungle over there if a fellow is willing to go into the brush and work like a slave getting it out. I saw a Val dive bomber overturned in a big brush pile with its landing gear sticking out. It’s a warbird restorer’s paradise. Some of the metal is pretty corroded, but some of it is in surprisingly good shape.”

  All of which stirs my acquisitive juices. I begin to think about a trip to Guam to scout around. I could rescue two or three wrecks of the same type and ship them back and hope to get enough critical parts in restorable condition to build one good airplane. It would cost a fortune, of course, but with a couple more novels and maybe a movie, I could swing it. Sure I could.

  What better thing could I do with the money? I have no desire to be the richest man in the graveyard, although there is little chance of that unless some heiress makes a total fool of herself by falling head over heels for me. And where am I ever going to meet a foolish heiress?

  Maybe a Hellcat or gull-wing Corsair. I saw gorgeous examples of those types yesterday in Pensacola. Oh me oh my. I am musing along these lines when we say good-bye to Mr. Rand at the airport and he promises to read the book about my adventures with the Cannibal Queen when it is published.

  Inside the terminal a fellow is leaning on the counter when I pay for my gas. “You going out?” he asks.

  “Yep. East.”

  “Lots of buildups around Jacksonville up to ten thousand feet. That’s why we landed here.”

  I eye him critically. A cloud with tops at ten grand is not anything to write home about. And I have been doing just dandy under this stuff at 1,500 feet above the ground.

  I grunt noncommittally and stick the yellow credit card invoice in my wallet with all the others. When my wallet gets too thick I will throw them all away together. “Come on, David.”

  We pause by the plane and consult the chart. After some head scratching, we decide on Fernandina Beach as our destination. Neither of us has ever heard of the place, but it is on an outer island adjacent to the sea and a town is nearby, so presumably we can get a rental car and motel room.