worry. You’ll find somebody else. That’s how you are. A week, two weeks, you’ll be on to the next thing. Making some other girl all swoony.’
As they motored south the western sky turned pale gold. Along the horizon it was shot full of purple streaks and eddies of red. To the north, out over the Everglades, the sky was bluish-black with thunderstorms – a late cold front stalled just north of Miami. Thorn guided the boat around the shallows and Casey sat in the fighting chair drinking wine and looking back at the froth of their wake.
They were maybe ten miles southwest of Flamingo, the primitive national park that covered the extreme southern tip of the state, about as far from civilization as it was possible to go and still be in Florida waters. Thorn pulled open the tackle box and drew out the .357. He held it in his right hand, steering with his left. Behind him Casey was still facing the wake, sipping her wine. Thorn gripped the pistol by the barrel, and without ceremony, he hurled it over their starboard bow. More heavy metal added to the seabed. An empty gesture. It proved nothing, ended nothing. If the bad shit started again, he could always go buy another gun. He’d tossed the thing away but felt not one bit better about anything. Still stuck in his own tight skin. Cramped by his own mulish ways.
Before him the water lay flat with a spreading scarlet sheen. The twilight air was mellow and seasoned with the tang of barnacles and muck clinging to mangrove roots. The red sun was a smudged thumbprint a few inches above the horizon. Maybe an hour of light left.
Thorn had his face in the wind, steering them around a small mangrove island rimmed with white sand, when he sensed something off to the northwest, and turned to see the silhouette of the jet, a black cutout against the crimson sky.
Casey felt it, too, and swiveled the fighting chair halfway round and stiffened. Thorn pulled back on the throttle. The plane was growing larger by the second.
‘Please tell me that’s a fighter jet going back to Homestead Air Base.’
Thorn shook his head.
‘Wrong color, wrong shape.’
It was skimming very close to the water, headed in their direction, maybe a mile or two away. A 747 or 767, he wasn’t sure. But big, very big, and closing fast. A great blue heron wading on a nearby sandbar squawked once and untangled into flight. To their south a large school of mullet splashed the surface and quickly disappeared.
‘Hear that?’ Thorn said.
‘I don’t hear anything.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Engines are dead.’
‘Shit!’ Casey dropped her wineglass on the deck, stood up.
The Heart Pounder was too old and slow to dodge anything hurtling that fast. Anyway there was nowhere to hide, and no way to be sure he wasn’t putting them even more squarely in the jet’s path.
Thorn shifted the engine into neutral and watched it come.
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
