It’s getting too dark to see anything, he thought. Then he gave himself a few more minutes of careful searching and, satisfied he had seen nothing, pushed in the throttle, retracted the flaps, pulled back on the yoke, and began to climb, turning to the northwest, toward Ocean Reef Club. Hope they won’t give me too much of a hard time for landing at their precious private field, he thought. They’re so touchy about things like that. “Bueno,” he said aloud, “I have no choice now. It’s either Ocean Reef or the water.”
As the airplane gained altitude, Alberto looked at a waxing crescent moon peering between dark clouds. Then he casually glanced down toward the water again.
Yes! There it is! A silhouette, a dark lump on the water. This time he kept his eyes on it as he turned and dove precipitously toward the floating thing. He passed over it at one hundred fifty feet or so, turned steeply, and came back, sideslipping, flaps down, heart in his throat.
The second pass was a little under forty feet. A yellow T-shirt. A man! Floating facedown on something. Too dark to see clearly.
He applied power, pulled back on the yoke, and gained a little altitude, turning steeply round and round, left wing-tip pointing to the man in the yellow T-shirt floating on the water.
Alberto put his hand on the audio control panel to his right, just under the dashboard, and flipped the switch to Comm 2, the second radio, which was already on the universal emergency frequency, 121.5 megahertz. He reached down for the microphone, his hand trembling, and brought it to his lips, quickly glancing at the DME—the distance-measuring equipment in the aircraft—which was fixed on an electronic navigational aid located on the water near Key Biscayne. The device in the airplane had a digital readout giving the precise distance in nautical miles to the navigational aid. A needle on the VOR (Very-high-frequency Omnidirectional Radio) dial next to it showed the direction to the aid.
“Miami Center, Miami Center, Cessna November five-four-seven Romeo, thirty-six miles southeast of Biscayne Bay VOR on radial one-seven-zero. Repeat, thirty-six DME from Biscayne Bay VOR on radial one-seven-zero. Advise coast guard sighted single man in distress floating on the water. Will remain circling until help arrives.”
“Cessna five-four-seven Romeo, Miami, roger. Got your call. Advising coast guard. Thirty-six southeast on radial one-seven-zero from Biscayne Bay. Squawk one-two-two-zero and ident, if transponder equipped. Stay on this frequency.”
Alberto reached over, turned the four knobs of the altitude-encoding transponder to the assigned code, and flipped on the switch. This would identify his aircraft’s location and altitude on the air traffic control radar screens in Miami—as soon as he gained a little more altitude. Right now he was too low to be picked up by their radar.
He also flipped on every available light: rotating beacon, navigational lights, anticollision strobes, even the landing light.
The captain of a Marine Sanctuary Patrol boat returning to his base in Key Largo heard the call as he passed near French Reef. He quickly located the aircraft’s position on his chart, determined it was less than ten miles away, plotted a course, pushed the throttles forward to the limit, and turned to the appropriate heading. His big, powerful twin outboard engines, designed for chasing the fastest boats on the water, threw out a shower of spray as he turned.
At the same time, on a dock at the Coast Guard base in Islamorada, a crewman was casting off the last stern line of a cutter while his companion cranked up the engines. It would be thirty minutes, maybe less if they really pushed it, before they arrived at the coordinates Miami had just called in.
By now Alberto could barely make out the yellow speck floating on the water below him, so he tried something he had not done since his days working as a crop sprayer and general utility pilot on the farm in Cuba. He reached for the big sealed-beam flashlight he carried for emergencies and pointed it down at the water, as he used to do so many years ago when he flew over dark fields searching for valuable lost animals like prized breeder Santa Gertrudis and Brahman bulls that had broken out of their pens during the night.
He fixed the powerful beam of light on the yellow T-shirt and held it there as he circled round and round.
Good training for a student pilot, he thought, as he constantly adjusted his angle of bank to compensate for the wind and the drift of the current. How many times had he taught his students the common ground-reference maneuver known as “Turns About a Point”? At least once a day, five times a week, for thirty years. Okay, say fifty weeks a year times thirty, that’s fifteen hundred times five, which totals seven thousand five hundred.
Seven thousand five hundred times! Seven thousand five hundred sessions of drilling the maneuver into his students’ heads and eyes and hands.
“Turns About a Point,” he said aloud. “Objective: To perform ground track maneuver in which a constant radius of turn is maintained by varying bank to compensate for wind drift, so as to circle and maintain uniform distance from a reference point on the ground such as a tree or a fencepost.”
I should have it down pretty good by now, he thought as he looked down at the yellow speck on the water, and he chuckled. But as soon as he did that, he realized he was getting cocky. And he thought about the ancient Greek legend of Daedalus and Icarus, which he always worked into the final lecture he gave every one of his students—and especially stressed with his more advanced commercial pilots—when they were flushed with excitement after successfully completing their FAA exams.
He would tell them how, in the legend, Daedalus made wings of feathers and wax for himself and for his son, Icarus, to escape from their island prison. Before they took off, Daedalus warned his son: “Icarus, dear son, I charge you to keep at a moderate height, for if you fly too low the damp will clog your wings, and if too high the heat of the sun will melt them. Keep near me and you will be safe.” But as soon as they were aloft, soaring over the brilliant blue waters of the Mediterranean, Icarus became intoxicated with the magic of flight. He felt like a god, thought he actually was a god, and began to climb toward heaven, ignoring his father’s advice. The sun melted the wax and Icarus fell to his death.
“Icarus was the first student pilot,” Alberto would say to his students. “He got cocky, he ignored his father’s NOTAM—Notice to Airmen—warning of dangerous conditions, and he paid for it with his life. If you get careless, if you ignore warnings, if you fly beyond your limitations, the ground will rise up and smite you. And what happened to Icarus will happen to you. You will die, and your passengers will die.”
His students would laugh nervously when he said that, but Alberto, who always had a smile on his face, never cracked even the hint of one when he gave this lecture.
Now he listened to his own advice and he asked God to forgive him for his arrogance and for giving all the credit to himself for finding the balsero.
In the lavender haze of twilight, where the sea and the sky intrude into each other’s domains, the lights on the water mix with the lights above and share a nebulous horizon for a brief time. Looking to the west, Alberto could not tell whether the pinpoint of light under the reddish moon was a star, an airplane, or a distant boat. But each time he looked the light seemed to be a little brighter.
It was clear now that the light to the west belonged to a boat coming toward him. And judging from the distance it had covered in such a brief time, it was a very fast boat. Probably one of those Scarabs or some other similar type of boat, thought Alberto.
Each time, during a turn, that the nose of his airplane pointed in the direction the boat was coming from, Alberto would flick his landing light off and on several times. He thought it was probably an unnecessary thing to do, since the boat was obviously coming in his direction. But it was better to be sure, and if it was the rescue boat, it served to eliminate any lingering doubt that its captain may have had whether the lights he saw, low over the eastern horizon, belonged to the airplane that had made the call.
Looking at the boat, Alberto thought about the rugged camaraderie that bonds
pilots of vessels and aircraft crossing wide-open spaces. He knew that he would probably never see the face of the captain of the boat speeding toward him. But he felt a strong sense of kinship and he knew that it was a kinship of the soul and that it was stronger in many ways than what he felt toward some people whose faces he saw every day.
Long after I have forgotten many of those faces, I will remember the captain of that boat, he thought. And because he was thinking of faces, trying to recall the ones he had seen during the past few days, he thought again about the face and the eyes of the woman he had met in the bar down the road from the Marathon airstrip. What was she doing there? She had never said. And why had he felt such an intimate bond, as if she understood everything about him, everything about his life, the moment he saw her?
He felt sure that she had been one of those resistance fighters holding flashlights down in the valley between the curvaceous peaks of the Escambray Mountains when he made that air drop almost thirty years ago.
Yes, that was the reason he had recognized her and had known her heart so well, and she his. And he thought that in some mysterious way, the way those things happen, their souls must have met and joined in the darkness over Escambray.
Then, because he was imagining and almost believing outrageous things like this matter about their souls joining over the Escambray, he knew now for certain that he was in love, and that he would have to let this pleasant madness run its course and ride it out as best he could, hoping that it would end well and bring them a little happiness.
He looked down at the water and realized, for one frightening moment, that he had lost sight of the yellow T-shirt. And even though he quickly found it again with a sweep of the flashlight beam, he chided himself for allowing this distraction to enter his mind now.
It must have been the light from the boat, he thought, that reminded him of the mission over Escambray so long ago and brought his mind around to the beautiful woman from Sancti Spiritus.
On the next turn he saw, out of the corner of his eye, the powerful beam from the boat’s searchlight scanning the water in a semicircle ahead of it.
Sooner than he had hoped for, the light found the man, illuminating him and the inner tube, which was trailing tattered strips of canvas and other things that showed white against the dark water and looked from the air like the tentacles of some strange mollusk floating on the sea.
I should head back now, he thought. I have pushed my luck too far already. But after all those years of searching, he knew that he would remain circling until he saw the balsero safely aboard the boat.
Without drifting or wavering, the boat kept the searchlight fixed on the raft below him, and even from his vantage point, Alberto could sense that the captain of the boat was no amateur. There was a calm assurance in the manner of his approach.
The boat had throttled back to idle as it came up on the raft, and now began to circle it slowly, turning to port. Alberto saw only one man in the boat, and he seemed to be leaning over the side, trying to grab the man on the inner tube with some sort of hook as the boat drifted by.
He saw the boat make two passes without success, and then the man in the boat threw out a life ring attached to a line. The balsero slipped off the inner tube and began to swim toward the life ring. At first he seemed to be making progress in the direction of the ring, but then he became disoriented, turning round and round on the water—probably blinded by the searchlight, Alberto thought—and he began to flounder.
The man in the boat jumped into the water, holding on to the lifeline, and swam toward the balsero. He reached him with a few strokes, slipped the life ring on to him, dragged him back toward the boat, and pulled himself back up over the gunwale. He then brought the balsero aboard near the stern, lifting him over the gunwale.
Alberto circled one more time and then began to climb as he pulled out of the turn, and picked up a northwesterly heading of three-two-zero degrees toward Ocean Reef Club.
In a few moments a new green point of light appeared on the air traffic control radar screens in Miami with a four-digit code right below it, one-two-two-zero.
As he leveled the airplane at twenty-one hundred feet, the lights of Key Largo stretched across the horizon ahead of him. On his left, the long line of lights arced gently toward the southwest: Tavernier, Plantation, Islamorada, Upper Matecumbe, Lower Matecumbe, Long Key, Marathon, Bahía Honda, Big Pine, Little Torch, Ramrod, Cudjoe, Sugarloaf, Saddlebunch, Boca Chica, Key West. In the distance, the lights turned yellow, then reddish farther out as they mixed with the lower stars near the southwestern horizon. To his right, toward the north, the sky was aglow with the awesome brightness of Miami.
It was a glorious, eternal moment. And in that moment Alberto took in the night, its darkness and all of its lights, above and below, absorbing them, like a subtle fragrance. He thought about Icarus again and wondered if, as he plummeted down to the sea, Icarus felt it had been worth it, after all. The legend is silent on that point.
The rafter was probably not with the group that Vivian called about, he thought. But that did not matter. He had found him and he had stayed. And tomorrow he would go out again, and the day after that.
Silence. Absolute, perfect silence. For a moment it seemed so natural: an extension of the darkness, part and parcel of the night.
Silence.
“Miami Center, Cessna five-four-seven Romeo. Mayday. Mayday. Twenty-four DME on radial one-eight-five from Biscayne Bay. Lost engine. Declaring emergency. Cannot make Ocean Reef. Ditching—repeat, ditching. Will maintain present heading of three-two-zero degrees until splashdown. Estimate splashdown five or six miles southeast of Ocean Reef.”
“Cessna five-four-seven-Romeo, Miami, roger. Radar contact. Alerting Coast Guard. Latest wind at Ocean Reef—stand by—latest wind at Ocean Reef is zero-niner-zero at ten gusting to fifteen. Altimeter, two-niner-niner-eight. No further transmissions required from you. Will confirm current wind and advise. Stay on this frequency.”
Okay now. Flaps, thirty degrees. Airspeed, sixty knots. Rate of descent, three hundred feet per minute. Cabin doors—unlatched. Life vest. Where’s that life vest? Okay. Here. I’ve got it. Wind from the east. Zero-nine-zero at ten. I’ll bring her into the wind before splashdown. Maintain present heading for now. Won’t be able to see the water. Flip on landing light, that should help. It’s already on. Okay. What else? Keep your head. Hope that emergency locator transmitter works. Paid good money for it. Hope it works. Should go on the minute the plane hits the water. Hope it works.
“Cessna five-four-seven Romeo, Miami. Current wind at Ocean Reef is zero-seven-zero at fifteen gusting to twenty. Altimeter, two-niner-niner-eight. Coast guard advises they have a helicopter on the way. Good luck, sir.”
Wind from the northeast now. Zero-seven-zero at fifteen knots. Okay, altimeter. Dammit. Forgot to adjust altimeter to current barometric pressure. Keep your head, Alberto. Keep your head. What did he say?
“Miami, five-four-seven Romeo, I’m sorry, what was that altimeter?”
“Two-niner-niner-eight. Wind is zero-seven-zero at fifteen.”
The lights were much closer now and almost at eye level, filling the windshield. At the air traffic control center in Miami, the green point of light identified as one-two-two-zero on their radar screens flickered for a moment and then disappeared.
Time to turn her into the wind, he thought. Whatever you do, Alberto, don’t stall her. Keep her flying all the way down. Keep her in control all the way to the end. Okay. Heading, zero-seven-zero. Altitude, three hundred feet. So dark down there. Two hundred feet. And he thought he had forgotten his Latin but it came back now, from his days as an altar boy such a long time ago in Santa Clara. It came back clear and mellifluous, smelling of dampness and incense, resounding off dark corners, off hollow round places way up high, so high, so long ago:
“Pater noster, qui est in coelis: sanctificetur nomen tuum: adveniat regnum tuum: fiat voluntas tua, sicut in coelo, et in terra…”
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br /> Dark water rushed over the windshield and he heard popping sounds as the delicate fuselage, designed for more ethereal regions, strained and cracked and ripped in places. Warm water poured into the cockpit, through open doors, through vents, through seams.
He grabbed the life vest and reached down to unfasten his lap belt and shoulder harness. Stuck. Jammed somehow. How can it be stuck? Must be doing it wrong. Must have my hand on something else. Keep your head. Okay. Feel for the buckle. I have it now. Stuck. ¡Dios mio! This is silly. This is not the way it happens.
Why are the instruments still lit? They should have shorted out. Maybe the water has not reached the wiring. Who knows? Why am I thinking such things? Why am I thinking of wiring as if it were the most natural thing to think of now? This is not the way it happens. This is not the way at all, he thought.
But, of course, it was that way—with all the flight instruments shining before him: airspeed dial stuck on zero; the ball on the turn-and-bank indicator wobbling drunkenly back and forth, back and forth; clock still ticking; altimeter at sea level. And, in the center, the artificial horizon: that beguiling instrument pretending to represent the world, with its blue half-circle of sky on top, and its black half-circle of earth below, and its quaint little airplane flying toward a painted horizon, following perfect white lines that converge way off, way off somewhere at the center of things.
They were all there, each in its own place, looking at him like old friends keeping a silent vigil. So that in the end it was more familiar than he had thought it would be. It was not so strange.
Chapter Seventeen
They took Juan to Fisherman’s Hospital in Marathon, and Carmen drove down to be with him, but Vivian stayed behind at the base in Miami, waiting for the helicopter that was bringing the body of Alberto. The first call had come around seven-thirty and the second twenty minutes later.
Now it was nearly ten and the wind had picked up, blowing steadily from the ocean. Vivian was standing by the helipad, looking south across the bay, as she held her cap to keep it from being blown off her head by the rising wind.
The Lonely Crossing of Juan Cabrera Page 12
