Scott Williams: The Pulse

Larry stepped up to the cabin roof and leaned against the mast to get a better view through his binoculars. After a few seconds he told Artie to steer for the debris.

“What is it?” Artie asked, “Can you tell?”

“Some kind of wreckage. I can’t be sure, but maybe parts of a boat—or an airplane. We’d better check it out. There could be someone in the water. Head up a bit so I can ease the sheets. I want to slow down and be ready to heave to if we see anyone.”

As they closed the gap, it became obvious what the floating objects were. “Oh my God, it was a plane,” Artie said, astonished, looking at a clearly recognizable wing tip floating, half awash, dead ahead of the schooner. He steered past it as Larry scanned the water for any sign of survivors.

“Looks like it was a small private jet, maybe a corporate aircraft of some type…. Definitely not a commercial airliner,” Larry said as they passed more recognizable pieces of fuselage and a tail section.

“You think it broke up like this when it hit the water, or could it have exploded first in the air?”

“Hard to say, but since there’s more than one piece here in the same place, it probably hit the water first. A lot of the parts may have sunk.”

“Maybe whoever was on it was already rescued,” Artie said hopefully, as they both scanned every wave for any sign of life, half-expecting to see the bobbing heads and waving hands of life-jacket-wearing survivors any minute now. “How long ago do you think this happened?”

“My guess is not all that long, considering that these pieces are still floating together. It wouldn’t take but a few hours with this much wind to scatter them miles apart. I’ll bet it happened when all the electronics shut down this morning.”

“You mean that you think that power surge or pulse or whatever it was that shut down our electronics could have also caused the plane to crash?”

“Absolutely. It might not have affected an older prop plane with manual controls, but this was obviously a late-model, high-tech jet. Aircraft like this have so many computer-operated controls and instruments that a total loss of on-board systems would have doomed it, no matter how good the pilot was.”

Larry grabbed the helm as he was talking and brought the bow of the small schooner through the wind to change tacks. “We had better crisscross through the area a few times and look carefully. If this plane crashed because of the pulse, no one has been here to look for survivors, and no one likely will, at least any time soon. They would not have been able to make a radio call before they went down, and anyway, air traffic control on the islands may be down too.”

Artie was stunned at the implications of what his brother had just said. “What about commercial airliners? Would they crash too if they were close enough to the source of the pulse to be affected?”

“Yes,” Larry said. “Let’s hope this thing was just local, but if not, I’d hate to think of how many jets would have been flying just in and out of the island airports in the area. St. Thomas is especially busy, with all the tourists connecting to the cruise ships there. You know, come to think of it, I haven’t heard any jets overhead at all today, or seen any vapor trails. There are usually so many you don’t give ’em any thought, but I know I haven’t seen any.”

Artie climbed to the cabin top and began desperately scanning the waves for any sign of life among the floating wreckage. “You’d think we would see them if they were still here, even if they were dead. Wouldn’t the bodies float for a while?”

“Maybe, maybe not. The waves could have carried the wreckage at a faster speed than floating bodies. But from the looks of these pieces and parts, I honestly don’t see how anyone could have survived the impact. Then there are plenty of sharks in these waters too. You know that from the ones we’ve already seen.”

Artie shuddered at the thought of being in the water for a long time without a boat. He knew Larry was right. He thought that if he had been in that situation, he would have preferred to have died in the crash rather than be eaten alive later.

“I know in some of the big airliner crashes over water they’ve picked up survivors who had been more than a day in the water,” Larry said, “but this jet might have gone straight down with an impact no one could have survived. That, and the fact that there was probably only a pilot and perhaps a copilot and two or three passengers on board makes it even less likely we would find them even if they were still afloat.”

Larry tacked the schooner twice more and made a couple of passes upwind of the debris, just in case any swimmers or floating bodies were drifting at a slower pace than the remains of the aircraft. They both scanned the rolling seas on both sides of the boat continuously as they sailed, but saw nothing else, and soon the sun was rapidly sinking to the horizon, taking with it the last chance of seeing anything they hadn’t already spotted.

“We may as well get back on course to St. Thomas,” Larry said. “Maybe we can find the answers there.”

“It worries me what we will find out,” Artie said. “This is the most bizarre thing I’ve ever heard of. And I certainly never expected to sail through a plane crash site when I came down here for a tropical vacation. This delivery trip is turning out to be more of an adventure than I had bargained for.”

“You and me both, Doc. All we can do at this point is carry on and get to the anchorage. I don’t think the radio, the GPS, or anything else is going to suddenly start working again, so we won’t get our answers until we get there.” Larry went below and grabbed his logbook and paper charts to work out the approximate position of the crash site, and entered it in the log so they could report it to the authorities when they reached the island. He then hauled in the sheets as Artie steered back on course, and soon the schooner was back up to hull speed, carrying them northeast into the growing darkness as the short tropical twilight faded to night.

Without the formerly familiar glow of the GPS in the cockpit, Artie’s gaze was fixed on the big steering compass. At least its backlight still worked, as it was a simple 12-volt bulb wired through a switch to the vessel’s storage batteries. Larry had said the batteries would continue to provide ample power for a few lights, including the running lights and interior cabin lights, until they reached the anchorage. They couldn’t recharge them because the engineless schooner had no alternator, and the charge controllers and voltage regulators that connected the batteries to the large solar panels mounted on the stern rail had been taken out by the pulse. Larry wished that the owner had allowed the builder to install a small auxiliary diesel engine, but he had stubbornly insisted on keeping Ibis a true sailing ship.

Artie reflected on what his brother had said earlier that day about how men had been crossing oceans in small boats without the benefit of electronics for centuries, and how they were lucky they were on a seaworthy sailing vessel instead of some posh motor-yacht with intricate systems dependent upon technology. The schooner worked now just as her predecessors had, and as long as the trade winds blew, they could depend on her to carry them to their destination. The sight of the plane crash had really unsettled Artie, though, and he longed to be able to contact Casey to make sure she was okay, and to tell her that he was. He knew he had to somehow maintain his patience, but as his four-hour watch dragged by, he had no doubt it was going to be a long night.

When Larry came back on deck at 2200 hours to relieve him, he said that the glow of St. Thomas should be visible by now, but it wasn’t. The skies were clear and stars arced over the masthead in such density they looked like clouds of light, but at the level of the horizon the darkness was the same through a full 360 degrees.