Читать книгу Blackwater Sound - James Hall - Страница 9

Minutes after takeoff, Captain Kathy Dubois was still holding at three thousand feet, just passing beyond the southern tip of the state, when she felt the first jolt. No more than a hard buzz in her sinuses, then a quick double blip in her pulse. Miami Departure was keeping them at three thousand because of a jam-up of inbound traffic from the south at five thousand. The Departure controller was sending everyone south over the Everglades to dodge the line of level-five thunderstorms to the north. A dark, roiling mass parked over Fort Lauderdale, extending ten miles out to sea and halfway across the state.

‘You feel that?’

Mark Hensley, the copilot, was staring down at the instrument panel.

‘Just a fritz in the system,’ he said. But he didn’t sound so sure.

She glanced over at him.

‘A fritz?’

‘You know, some little hiccup, dirt in the fuel line. Like that.’

‘Dirt in the fuel line?’

‘It’s from Bonnie and Clyde, the movie. Some auto mechanic is working on their car …’

Out the windscreen of the MD-11, Kathy could see the sun about to melt into the Gulf, splashes of purples and pinks rising up from the horizon. They had one hundred and forty-three aboard, seven crew. American, Flight 570. On their way to Rio.

Mark was still chattering about the movie scene when all the cathode ray screens went blank. Kathy stared down at them. Everything gone except the analog backup instruments.

Mark rapped a knuckle on one of the instrument display screens. All the panels were dead, even the overhead lights were off. They were down to four instruments: airspeed indicator, whiskey compass, altimeter, and the ADI, the artificial horizon. Bare essentials.

‘Shit, we’ve lost the glass. Everything’s dark.’

A second later the engines began to wind down, reverting to a preset power setting.

‘Oh, man, oh, man.’

‘We can still fly,’ she said. ‘We’ve got power. No ailerons, but the rudder’s still there. Thank God for cables.’

‘Jesus, what the hell is this?’

‘Call the tower, tell them we’re coming back.’

He tapped a fingernail against his microphone.

‘Radio’s gone,’ he said. ‘Everything’s fried. Absolutely everything.’

Then she felt another jolt, an electrical stab in her belly, like the first wild kick of her only child.

That’s when the artificial horizon indicator began to spin. At night or in clouds, the instrument showed their upright position, sky above, ground below. It was hooked to a dedicated battery. So whatever they’d just experienced was more than a general electrical failure; their backup systems had been zapped, too. Without the artificial horizon, she’d have to rely on her senses to keep their wings level, stay right side up. Senses that were already more than a little scrambled.

Then the yoke went loose in her hands.

‘Oh, Jesus.’

‘All three engines flamed out.’ Mark tightened his shoulder harness. Took a quick look out the windscreen at the Florida Bay a half mile below.

The big jet slowed like a roller coaster reaching its steepest crest. She heard a single piercing scream from the cabin.

Kathy Dubois drew a long breath, tried the yoke again, but it was still dead. She swallowed hard, realigned her microphone, bent it close to her lips.

She whispered something for the black box. A few words to her daughter. Then as the plane began to drop, she and Mark went to work, cycling the hydraulic systems, the electrical panels, trying to crank the auxiliary power unit.

‘It’s back,’ she said. ‘It’s back.’

She wasn’t sure what they’d done, but the yoke was alive. And Kathy Dubois started to pull them out of the free fall. Fifteen hundred feet, a thousand, seven-fifty, five hundred, enough time left, drawing up the nose, getting it level for a water landing. But no time to make announcements, pull out the manual, go over ditching procedure. She had to keep the landing gear up, flaps down, that much she knew.

There was nothing on the Florida Bay. Calm seas. A long silvery runway. She had to keep the wings level with the water, not the horizon, she remembered that. Get speed down. She was thinking of the flare and touchdown, rotating ten degrees nose high, she was thinking of the APU and engine fire handles that she would have to override. Or would she? The engines weren’t turning. She stifled the half second of panic, got her focus back.

Mark said something, but Kathy wasn’t listening, keeping the wings level, bringing it down, feeling the ground effect, that aerodynamic cushion that kept the plane skimming the surface of the sea like a pelican.

She was ditching the plane on the shallow bay. A strange serenity flushing her, the yoke alive in her hand. A single fishing boat appearing in the distance.

The nose of the jetliner pitched up, transforming speed into lift, but this couldn’t go on forever. Kathy would have to get the speed as low as she could manage, then do what no other wide-body pilot had ever accomplished, make a successful water landing.

Thorn watched the jet scream out of the northwest, darken the sky, and pass so close overhead that its brutal tailwind lasted for half a minute, a hundred-mile-an-hour squall buffeting them broadside, nearly capsizing the Heart Pounder. The tidal surge that followed slammed them a second time. Casey was hurled backwards onto the deck and slid on her butt to the transom. Thorn managed to hang onto the wheel, trimming the engine down, and digging through the sudden surf, until he got the vessel back under control.

‘You okay, Case?’

She lifted her head and squinted at him.

‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.’

A half mile to the east, the jet exploded. A greenish-red plume shot ten stories into the air and a few seconds later the blast-furnace whoosh swept over them. Casey ducked below the gunwale and began to weep.

A flock of egrets that had been hunched in the high branches of the nearby mangroves burst into the air, white and stalky and deathly silent. Thorn swung the wheel and mashed the throttle forward. He made a wide arc to the south, then cut back his speed and headed east toward the crash site. Through the dusk, he saw the flames dotting the water like the campfires of some ghostly, defeated army. Five-foot swells pounded their hull and all around them the twilight was tinted a sickly green.

‘What the hell’re you doing, Thorn!’

‘Going to help.’

‘Are you crazy? All that fire, we’ll blow up.’

Casey staggered to his side, stood at the windshield looking out. Blurry ripples rose from the surface of the water like heat off a summer highway.

‘I’ll get a little closer, then I’ll take the skiff. You can stay here.’

A caustic breeze flooded the cabin with the fumes of jet fuel and bitter smoke and the sweet, sickly reek of charred flesh.

‘I want to go home, Thorn. I want to get the hell out of here.’

‘So do I,’ he said. ‘But we can’t. Not yet.’

He motored forward into the haze. Billows of smoke curled up from the surface of the bay; the water smoldered and fires flared to life as if spurts of volcanic gases were breaking through the earth’s crust. As he worked closer, Thorn saw the outer edge of the debris field scattered several hundred yards from what he took to be the center of the crash site, a single wing that jutted up like some senseless monolith planted in the sandy bottom. Next to it, a twisted section of the aluminum fuselage glowed in the strange green light.

Mats of insulation floated on the surface, a stack of white Styrofoam cups bobbed past, life jackets and seat cushions, a black baseball hat and several blue passports. As the flotsam thickened, Thorn shut down the engine and while the boat coasted forward, he went to the stern, unknotted the rope from the cleats, and hauled in the skiff. Casey watched him, shivering, holding herself tightly.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Get on the radio, channel sixteen, make a distress call. I’m going to look for survivors.’

She opened her mouth but found no words and clamped her lips together and looked away.

Thorn climbed down into the skiff and popped loose the long white fiberglass pole, and he mounted the platform over the outboard. He planted one end of the pole against the soft bottom of the bay and leaned his weight against it and shoved the skiff forward. If there were in fact survivors floating out there, it was no time for a propeller.

He drew the pole out of the muck and planted it again and heaved the skiff ahead. The water was less than four feet deep. Shallow enough for an average adult to stand flat-footed with his head out of water. But Thorn saw no sign of life, no movement at all as he poled past a floating cockpit door, more seat cushions and drifting clothes and baby bottles and a blond-haired doll.

He was fifty yards from the jutting wing when he heard the first splashes and made out the whimpers and soft cries, and a low, wet snuffling like penned-up horses. He poled faster, sweating now, as the boat skimmed ahead, the last ticks of daylight dying in the west. Everything was coated with gold. The bay, the shadowy people floundering up ahead, the suitcases and duffels that hung like dark icebergs just an inch or two below the surface.

The first two he came upon were women. One in a blue business suit, another in a white sweatshirt. They thrashed over to the skiff and clambered aboard before he could get down from the platform to help. One was dark-haired with a bad gash across her forehead. The one in the white sweatshirt was a frail woman with weak blue eyes. A triangular chunk of flesh was missing from her cheek. The business suit thanked him and the other woman peered at him, then her face collapsed and she began to sob. The large woman took the small one in her arms and held her tightly as Thorn pushed on.

‘There’s a first-aid kit in the console.’

The woman looked back at him.

‘Who are you?’ she said.

‘Nobody.’

‘You wait out here for airplanes to crash?’

‘You’re my first,’ he said. ‘You should put something on those cuts. You’re losing blood.’

She tightened her hug on the small woman.

‘We’re all right. Believe me, there’s others who need it more.’

Behind the broken fuselage he heard voices, cries and blubbering, the first moments of numbness and shock wearing off. He shoved the pole into the sucking mud, withdrew it, shoved it in again, and the skiff coasted forward.

‘On your right,’ Thorn called to the woman in the business suit. ‘Coming up on your right.’

The woman looked out and saw the child’s arm and let go of the delicate woman and leaned over to grab the elbow. She swung forward, then drew back with the arm in her hand. A bloody stump severed at the shoulder. She held it up for Thorn to see, then dropped it back in the poisoned water.

On that first pass, he filled the skiff with nine adults and two children and a small white poodle before he swung around and poled the sluggish boat over to the beach of the mangrove island. There was a nurse in that first group, and although her left arm was badly broken, she took the first-aid kit and was already bandaging the most badly hurt as Thorn headed back to the crash site through the last golden moments of twilight.

Thorn was hauling an elderly man aboard when the first Coast Guard helicopter arrived, followed almost immediately by a news chopper. Their searchlights held on him for a moment. Holding the man by his armpits, Thorn stared up into the brightness. The choppers moved on, sending a ghastly halo over the scene and illuminating another boat he hadn’t noticed earlier.

It was only thirty or forty yards away, idling near a half-submerged engine pod. At the helm of the twenty-foot Maverick was a woman with short black hair, and flanking her were two men. One was tall and lanky and wore a cowboy hat. The other man was stocky and short. As Thorn poled through the bloody waters searching for survivors, the Maverick shifted its position, inching along the perimeter of the wreckage. They were making no effort to save the injured, but seemed to be angling for the best view of the proceedings.

Thorn worked for another hour as helicopters filled the sky and the Coast Guard and marine patrol boats finally arrived. He brought four loads of passengers to the beach. Most were badly mangled, gibbering and torn, bones exposed, faces blackened with soot, flesh lacerated and scorched. Some were weeping, moaning, others struck dumb. On his last trip a young man in a blue track suit went into spasms on the foredeck. A middle-aged black woman scooped him into her arms and the young man stiffened, then went slack. The black woman continued to hold him, rocking him gently and crooning what sounded like a lullaby. The deck of his skiff sloshed with blood. Through the darkness, he watched the sharks move in, snatching down the easy meat, and he saw the gleaming snout of an alligator gliding through the wreckage.

Twice more he noticed the Maverick moving in and out of the shadows. And an hour later he saw the boat again, the three passengers at the docks at Flamingo. The men were straining to lift a large cooler from the boat up to the dock. Out in the large parking area dozens of medevac helicopters were landing and taking off, and the television cameras were set up. By then he was woozy with exhaustion, as numb and shaky as if he’d gone without sleep for a month.

He tied up his skiff near the tackle shop and came ashore. A few minutes later as he wandered amid the confusion, he caught sight of Casey staggering across the parking lot, supported by a man in a blue paramedic’s jumpsuit. He jogged over to her and called her name and she swung around and watched him approach. Her mouth was rigid, eyes unlocked from the moment.

‘Your boat’s in the marina,’ she said in a dead voice. ‘Slip eighteen.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘No, I’m not all right. I’m not all right at all.’

Thorn looked at the paramedic. He had his arm around Casey’s waist.

‘This is José,’ she said. ‘He’s looking after me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Thorn said.

She reached out and smoothed a hand across his cheek, then cocked it back and gave him a sharp slap.

‘You’re a goddamn magnet, Thorn. You attract this shit. You’re the baddest luck I’ve ever known.’

He watched her limp away, then he turned and went back to the docks. His daze had hardened into a cold shock that felt like it was rooted so deep in his tissues it might be with him forever. The sky was a black whirling mass overhead, and the earth rocked and wobbled beneath his feet. The roar of the choppers and sirens and the crowd was setting up a deep hum in his skull. Someone handed him a beer and he drained it and dropped the can on the sandy soil. A man in a fishing hat handed him another, and he meandered through the hallucinatory throng of reporters and medics and wild-eyed relatives of the passengers. A woman with a blond helmet of hair and perfect teeth, followed by a cameraman, jabbed a microphone in his face, and he shoved it away and kept on walking.

Gulping the beer, he followed the brightest lights to the pavilion near the boat ramps. Beside the pavilion were four concrete fish-cleaning tables the media were using as the local-color backdrop for their live shots.

He nudged into the crowd and jostled to the front. The woman from the Maverick was being interviewed. Her black hair gleamed in the lights and her blue eyes were achingly pale. She wore a long-sleeved white fishing shirt and khaki shorts. Her legs were sleek and deeply tanned and she stood with the gawky elegance Thorn associated with high-fashion models, back straight, hips and shoulders canted in slightly different directions as if to catch the most flattering light. There was a single spatter of blood on her right sleeve, but otherwise she seemed as cool and unruffled as if she’d just stepped from her dressing room.

‘Bonefishing,’ she was saying. ‘Johnny and I were out on the flats when it came down. Maybe a mile or two away.’

‘And what did you hear, Miss Braswell? Were the engines running? We’ve heard reports that they were shut down.’

Her eyes roamed the crowd, then returned to the reporter.

‘Yes, I believe the engines were silent. It was all very eerie.’

The reporter thanked her and turned back to the camera. He was excited, working a major story, a career boost. He sounded almost elated as he told the TV viewers that so far sixty survivors had been pulled from those remote waters. And that none other than Morgan Braswell, prominent local businesswoman, had been an eyewitness to these tragic events. According to Ms Braswell, the plane’s engines were shut down at the time of the crash.

As the reporter continued to speak, the woman peered beyond the lights. Her eyes catching on Thorn’s and holding. After a moment, she reached out and put a hand on the reporter’s sleeve, silencing him mid-sentence.

‘There’s the man you want to interview.’ She lifted a slender hand and pointed him out. ‘Right there. He saved dozens of lives. Far more than we managed to. He’s the hero of the hour.’

The cameraman swung around and spotlights glared in Thorn’s eyes.

The reporter took a step his way, lifting his mike.

‘Sir?’ he said. ‘Could we have a minute?’

Behind him the dark-haired woman motioned to someone in the crowd. And when she brought her pale blue eyes back to Thorn, a faint smile formed on her lips as if Thorn’s uneasiness amused her.

‘Sir? Sir?’

Thorn turned from the reporter and ducked into the shifting crowd.

As he emerged from the rear of the pack, a chunky man with stringy, shoulder-length blond hair blocked his way and pressed a cold can of Budweiser into his hand. Chubby cheeks, small gray eyes. He was in his mid-twenties and had on a fresh blue workshirt and white baggies and boat sandals. His flesh was stained the deep chestnut of someone who labored in the tropical sun.

‘Beer’s been at the bottom of the cooler all afternoon. Nice and icy.’

Thorn squinted out at the parking lot where the fire rescue vans were screaming away into the night. He fumbled with the tab on the beer can, got it at the wrong angle, and broke it off. He looked at the kid. A toothy grin flickered on the boy’s lips as if he were trying to decide whether to laugh or take a bite from Thorn’s neck.

‘That was you on the Maverick.’

‘Yeah? What if it was?’

The kid’s grin grew blurry. The whole goddamn night had turned blurry. Though not yet blurry enough.

‘And what’s your name?’

The kid thought about it for a moment.

‘“Don’t your nose get sore, sticking it all the time in other people’s business?”’ The young man grinned. ‘That’s George Raft, from Nocturne, 1946. With Virginia Huston and Myrna Dell.’

Thorn peered at the kid for a moment, then shrugged and brought his attention back to the beer can. He tried prying at the broken tab with his thumbnail, but got nowhere.

The kid reached in the pocket of his shorts and came out with a knife and flicked out the blade. He took the can from Thorn’s hand, dug the blade into the tab, and popped it open. The knife had holes in the grip and a blade that looked heavy enough to gut a moose.

‘You admiring my shiv?’

‘Not really.’

On the kid’s thumb was a bandage with blood seeping through the gauze.

Thorn took a slow pull on the beer. The kid held the knife at his side.

‘So how long were you out there?’ the kid said. ‘Before the crash.’

‘Why?’

‘Me and my sister were fishing over behind that island. We didn’t see you. You just kind of popped up out of nowhere.’

‘I didn’t see you either. Not till after the crash.’

The kid smirked as if he’d tricked some vital detail out of Thorn.

‘The three of you didn’t seem to be getting your hands real dirty.’

‘Two of us,’ the kid said. ‘Me and my sister.’

‘I saw three,’ Thorn said. ‘You and her and a guy in a cowboy hat.’

‘Yeah, well, I guess you’re mistaken, crabcake.’ The kid looked back toward the TV lights. ‘And we pulled in a few survivors. Maybe not as many as you, but who’s counting?’

‘That’s not how it looked from my seat.’

‘What’re you, the head Eagle Scout? Handing out the merit badges.’

‘Your cooler looked pretty full. Must’ve caught a ton of fish.’

‘We caught our share.’

‘But you still got the creases in your shirt.’

‘So?’

‘So you weren’t out there fishing. You weren’t out there doing anything. You haven’t broken a sweat.’

The boy’s smile went sour. He peered into Thorn’s eyes and his knife rose in what looked like a reflexive gesture. As if his first instinct was to slash the throat of anyone who called his bluff.

Then he halted and took a quick look around at all the potential witnesses and he lowered the blade. He stepped back and raked Thorn with a look.

‘If you weren’t fishing,’ Thorn said, ‘maybe you were bird-watching.’

A breeze drifted in off the bay, heavy with the sickening fumes. The kid snapped his knife shut and slid it into his pocket. He glanced toward the TV lights, then turned back to Thorn. His fingers toyed with the lump in his pocket.

‘You know what you need, asshole?’

‘A better haircut?’ Thorn said.

‘You need a little negative reinforcement, that’s what. Like maybe somebody should drop a tombstone on your head.’

The kid flashed Thorn an ugly sneer, then swung around and sauntered away into the bedlam.

Thorn drifted back to the docks and watched the Coast Guard and marine patrol bringing in the bodies on stretchers. Most of the living were already on their way to hospitals, and now it was time for the dead. The men worked quietly, with the grim efficiency of those who trained for just such disasters. For the next half hour Thorn nursed his beer and stayed in the shadows, watching the boats unload the charred and mangled remains. Getting glimpses of bodies so twisted and broken they might have been trampled by a stampede of buffalo.

When he could stomach it no more, he located the Heart Pounder, brought the skiff over, and lashed it to the cleats. He started the engine and headed out into the dark, staying away from the searchlights and rescue boats. He headed across the black bay, and when he was a half mile beyond the crash site, he opened up the engine, rising onto the smooth sea. Around him the moonlight coated the bay like a crisp film of ice.

With his running lights shut off, Thorn steered his phantom ship south, plowing across that murky void. A cold shiver whispered beneath his shirt. He took a last look behind him, north across the Everglades where the black sky pulsed with lightning. Then he turned his back on the mainland, gripped the wheel, and put his face in the wind, standing stiff and empty, blinded by starlight.