Ted Bell - Spy

They started down the hill toward their cruiser.

Both looked up, startled. The big Peterbilt roared again and then the whole rig lurched forward and just took off down the highway. Franklin figured it was doing about a hundred thirty miles an hour when it disappeared down over the ridge.

The sheriff didn’t see anybody behind the wheel when it went roaring by, upshifting gears, loud and fast. Like Homer had sworn, there was nobody driving the truck.

11

DRY TORTUGAS

T he seaplane flared up and splashed down on the clear blue water, her silvery pontoons throwing out foaming white water on either side. She was an ungainly thing, a Grumman G-21 Goose, painted an unusual shade of light blue, not quite turquoise and not quite any other shade Stoke had ever seen.

Mick Hocking called her the Blue Goose.

On the Goose’s final approach, Stoke had been able to get a closer look at Fort Jefferson. The place hadn’t changed much in forty years. A huge octagonal fortress built out of brick and taking up most of a tiny little island out in the middle of nowhere.

The U.S. Army had built it to guard the southern approach to the Gulf of Mexico. The year it was built, it was declared obsolete. Somebody’d invented an artillery round that could go through six feet of solid brick. The Army had abandoned the place and later turned it into a prison. Dr. Mudd, Stoke knew, the guy who’d fixed John Wilkes Booth’s leg, had done hard time here. Union soldiers had found his house by asking everyone in town the same question.

“Is your name Mudd?”

It took about twenty minutes to moor the seaplane at Fort Jefferson wharf, throw their gear in the old man’s fishing boat, and get underway to the site. Stoke stood up on the flying bridge of the boat with Sharkey and Luis Sr., who was at the helm. It wasn’t one of those modern tuna towers that looked like a jungle gym. This was an oversized solid wood structure, part of the whole wheelhouse it was sitting on top of, reached by a ladder down to the cockpit.

Luis Sr. was planted at the wheel. He stood with his bare feet wide apart. His gnarled feet and thin brown limbs looked like roots growing into the deck. He was an older, skinnier version of his son. He didn’t have a lot to say and what little he had was in Spanish. Old man had a pint of Graves XXX grain alcohol in his sagging back pocket. Took a pull every now and then, a little eye-opener, no harm done, a simple fisherman who liked to tend his own lines. Man had a tan so deep, he looked like he’d been cured in brine. Stoke liked him.

“Doesn’t talk much, does he?” Stoke asked Luis.

“Only if he has something to say.”

Luis Jr. had a map out, talking to his father, and suddenly the boat angled hard to port, and began chugging along on a westerly course at about ten knots.

Stoke understood enough Español to know an airplane had gone down right around here a couple of nights ago. Went right over Luis’s head apparently because when he told Stoke about it, his face screwed up and he made a ducking motion when he got to that part. Had no lights on, Luis had said, none, and it was a dark night.

Sounded pretty druggy to Stoke, but he didn’t say anything to the old man.

Anyway, so it sounded like the old man had seen it go into the water. It had sunk quickly, before he could reach it, and no survivors. Stoke had asked what kind of plane. “DC-3,” Luis Sr. had said, sounding very sure. It was an airplane he seemed to know, but of course he would, living down here. Air Pharmacy, Stoke figured, flying bricks of cocaine and bales of marijuana, but still he kept his mouth shut. Didn’t want to hurt the old guy’s feelings.

Stoke had seen some scuba gear below. Sharkey told him the plane was lying too deep to free dive. This was fine with Stoke. It was a good day for diving, not a cloud in the sky. The highly reflective sandy white bottom helped a lot.

Still, Stoke was getting worried. A lot of these damn flyboy druggies ended up as ocean bottom-nappers out here. More than you’d think. Old airplanes, usually chicken-wired DC-3s, flown by shitty bush pilots smoking dope. Finding a planeload of soggy cocaine and a couple of dead Colombians floating inside was not going to make his day. He motioned to Shark and they went back to the stern.

“What you think about this being a DC-3, Sharkey? Drug mule kind of airplane, right? We ain’t DEA, we’re not in that business, man. You know that. I hope you didn’t bring me down here for some damn drug shit or—”

Sharkey looked hurt. Chin down on his chest.

He said, real low, “I wouldn’t do that.”

“Shark, come on, man, it’s a DC-3! You know what that means. You got to tell me again why I’m down here.”

“My father told me he saw a plane go down right next to a little island. I was down here, man, in the Marquesas. On a visit. I didn’t see it go down, but I dove on this plane myself.”

“Yeah? And?”

“I called you, didn’t I?”

“I’m not interested in drug runners.”

“It’s not drugs. I don’t know what it is, but no drugs.”

“You sure about this.”

“Stokely, you got to trust me, man, I’m on the team. Come on. Let’s get the tanks. I’ll show you.”

“Over there by those mangroves?”

“That’s it.” Sharkey made a slashing motion across his throat. Luis Sr. hauled back on the throttles and the old boat slowed and stopped in about sixty feet of water. There was no wind, and the boat settled into a gentle rocking motion.

“Muchas gracias, señor,” Stoke said, smiling up at the skipper. The old guy looked down from the helm and smiled back. Nice smile. People spend their whole life on the big blue ocean, it gives them something you just can’t find on solid ground. Peace, maybe.

There was a tiny island with nothing on it but thick mangroves and sea grapes. Just a spit sticking up out of the water, maybe a couple of hundred yards long and maybe fifty feet across. Some debris had floated up inside a small cove, a pool of emerald green water washing up on the white sand. Stuff had gotten hung up in the roots inside the cove. It looked recent. Kind of thing you might see after a plane went down. Stoke thought he saw movement over in the mangroves out of the corner of his eye, but when he looked he didn’t see anything.

Probably a big heron or an osprey doing a little fishing. Could even have been a cloud of skeets moving around back in there. He’d go check out the debris after he’d seen the plane. See what had washed up.

“I got to saddle up, amigo,” Stoke said.

Sharkey grabbed one tank and handed it to Stoke, then picked up a second one.

“Where you think you’re going?” Stoke said, looking at the one-armed man.

“Down to the plane,” Sharkey said, “You don’t think I’d let you go down there alone, do you? The plane is sitting in a very precarious position. Edge of a shoal. You get inside and she shifts a foot or two, you kiss your ass good-bye.”

“You want to come, you come on. But don’t worry your ass about me, Luis. I was born alone. I’ll go out the same way.”

STOKE FELT the cold inrush of sea into two layers of wet suit and started down, the twelve pounds of weight on his belt and his tank helping him descend through all the bubbles. The world suddenly turned off-blue and dark. The visibility was okay, though, good enough to see what he saw. Below the thermocline, down around forty feet, it would get a lot colder and a lot darker.

But they’d gotten lucky.

The plane, one wing sheared off, was hung up on a narrow shelf of limestone in about thirty feet of water. The whole shelf was only a few yards wider than the fuselage. One hundred yards farther east and she would have slipped down into a deep trench.