Guns [John Hardin 01] (2 page)

At seven hundred feet he was already in dirty wisps of scud and he leveled off and began a cautious turn across the wind, the left wing lurching up wildly in gusts. He fought around to a heading of one hundred and twenty degrees, the violent bucking easing off somewhat. The turbulence was bad but manageable, not quite exceeding the limits of his flight controls. The island quickly fell out of sight behind and there was only the angry sea below. The dark waves looked monstrous and malevolent, with violently breaking tops and chiseled foam-streaked flanks.

Within ten minutes, off to his right he caught sight of the white Coast Guard motor lifeboat, with its diagonal orange slash on the bow. The boat punched obliquely into a breaking wave and burst in a welter of wind-blown spray out the other side, only to slam down into the trough and bury its nose into the next wave.

Sam thumbed the push-to-talk switch on his yoke and said, “Coast Guard vessel two five two this is Cessna three niner zero Whiskey Sierra more or less airborne on a heading of one two zero. I have you in sight. How do you read?”

“Five by five Cessna Whiskey Sierra. Got you in sight. Jesus, you look like a rodeo bronco. Two five two more or less same heading,” Ruben said.

Sam was crabbing considerably to allow for wind drift and he had to keep fighting the turbulence. He began scanning ahead to the limit of his visibility, back and forth, glancing at the GPS frequently as it counted down to the number two fix. He reduced the power another five percent and leaned it out as much as he dared, conserving fuel.

In another ten minutes he was at the fix but there was no sign of the ketch. He rolled into a thirty-degree banking left turn and tried to gradually increase the radius in order to fly outward in a spiral from the fix, scanning.

Nothing but ranked mountainous black waves. Nothing…

Nothing…

Nothing…

After a frustrating ten minutes he flew back to the fix and took up a heading to the number one fix, the position Adele had radioed. “Okay, Red, where the devil are you, girl?” he said to the wind.

Within minutes the GPS told him he was at the number one fix and he tried the spiraling scan pattern again, making his turns steeper when he flew away from the wind, lessening the bank angle as he flew into it, trying to keep the spirals from elongating despite the gale.

No luck. Nothing.

Turbulence forced him to fight the controls constantly. He wiped his eyes with his fingers and strained to see into the mists. Twice he flew into rain squalls and had to go on instruments until he broke out again. The boat could be under one of these squalls and he’d never see it. He had to believe it was still afloat.

Maybe the ketch hadn’t drifted as far as Ruben had estimated. He assumed they would have taken down or at least reefed any sails on both masts as the storm had intensified. So, without much sail up, such a boat was low to the water, with minimal surface exposed to the wind and a heavy keel to slow its drift. Maybe it was somewhere between the two fixes, then. He tried to fly a loose, wide zigzag course along the line between the fixes. Scanning all around. There was nothing but empty crumpled foam-streaked sea.

He flew back to the first fix and orbited, thinking furiously.
Where. Where.
The wind was warring with the current, but the wind was far stronger. Ruben had to be right. The boat had to be downwind of this point, but farther to sea or closer to shore?
Pick one and try it. Okay, closer to shore, then.
He struck out on a more westerly spoke from the fix and gave himself ten minutes by his watch before he would backtrack and try another spoke.

And he found it.

He was looking at a breaking wave crest that seemed to suddenly solidify and realized there it is.
Yeah, dammit. There it is.
He flew over it, banking, and saw Adele in the cockpit looking small in a yellow slicker and orange life jacket, holding onto the big chromed wheel with one hand and waving at him animatedly with the other, her hair plastered down. The wooden rear mast had snapped and smashed down onto the center cabin, denting and splintering it deeply, and it was now trailing the wallowing boat in a tangle of rigging. He banked into a circle with the boat at the center and thumbed the push-to-talk switch.

“Coast Guard vessel two five two. This is Cessna Whiskey Sierra. I’ve got the
Osprey
and I’m orbiting. Wait one for a fix.”

“Coast Guard two five two. Nice goin’, hot rod.”

Sam flew directly over the boat and punched present position on the GPS, memorizing the numbers. He relayed them, slowly and clearly, to Ruben, who would lay out a line from the number one fix and figure a position to intercept the drifting sailboat.

“What’s
Osprey’s
condition?” Ruben asked.

“Cabin is badly damaged. Trailing the broken mast. No power. Boat looks heavy and very low in the water. Adele looks okay.” She was still waving excitedly at him. “No sign of Ralph. Give me an ETA when you can, Ruben. I’ll try to orbit until you get here. Whiskey Sierra.” He looked at the panel clock and was amazed to see that an hour and twelve minutes had gone by.
Maybe forty-five minutes of fuel left then.
He hoped.

After two more orbits Ruben called. “Cessna Whiskey Sierra. We’re making all the knots we can. ETA’s twenty minutes.”

“Okay two five two. I’ll be parked here.” The ceiling was lowering, and he had to let down to five hundred feet to keep clear of the roiling clouds. He tightened the orbit to make sure he could keep the ketch in sight. Adele had both hands on the big wheel now, hanging on, but was still tracking him. At times she and the boat almost disappeared in the wind-blown spray.

After what seemed an hour but was only seventeen minutes, the motor lifeboat plunged into view a mile off and altered course slightly toward the plane. When the two boats were a quarter-mile apart, Ruben called and said, “Okay, Whiskey Sierra, we got her in sight. We’ll take it from here. Meet us at The Privateer when you can. We’ll buy the beer.”

“I’ll hold you to that, two five two.” Sam rolled out of the bank and struck out for Ocracoke. Before he’d taken off, he’d had some vague idea of landing at Manteo on a wider runway that was more into the wind, but Ocracoke was closest now and both fuel needles were wobbling between the one-quarter marks and zip. He was flying crosswind again, the right wing bucking up in the gusts. Why couldn’t the gods for once have granted him a tailwind when he needed it? He licked his dry lips and crabbed right to stay on course. He pulled off another hundred rpm and leaned it fractionally more.
I’d give about a thousand dollars a gallon for just five more gallons right now,
he thought.

Then the sky began to close in on him. It was no squall, but a wide band of heavy rain that stretched as far as he could see to the left and right and he went on instruments before he flew into it and all visibility vanished in a gray pall, the rain blasting against the windshield. There were no lights at the Ocracoke strip but there were three published instrument approaches, the best of which Sam thought was the GPS, which he had memorized.

Long minutes later, as he drew closer, he set up the GPS to provide the approach numbers while he kept up his instrument scan and fought the turbulence to maintain five hundred feet and stay on course. Both fuel tank needles were bouncing on empty now. He figured he needed only about fifteen more minutes of power to make it. He could catch only an occasional glimpse of the sea below, and did not dare to interrupt his instrument scan for very long to keep checking outside.

If this rain band extended over the strip the visibility might well be next to nothing all the way to the surface, but he had no choice now except to try shooting the approach anyway and hope the wind had shifted enough to the east to be more aligned with the strip. At least there were no buildings with people in them anywhere within a half-mile of the strip so there was little worry about hurting anybody else in a crash.

If he even had enough fuel left to make it that far.

He tried to gain a little altitude. Time seemed to slow down and he was hypersensitive to the regular drumming of the engine, listening for the first cough of a starved cylinder. He could sense those big waves below, reaching up to swat him from the sky like an insect. His first approach would have to be perfect. There would be no fuel left for a second try.

Finally the GPS told him he was close.

Still no letup in the gloom outside. Still the constant lashing of the heavy rain.

He grabbed the yoke with his right hand so he could flex the cramps out of his left. He wiped his left hand dry on his jeans and took a new grip on the yoke. With his right hand he aligned the directional gyro with the wet compass, turned up the lighting on the GPS, and then rehearsed the approach silently, keeping up his instrument scan the whole time and making control corrections automatically, trying not to over-control in the jolting turbulence.

As he began the approach he spoke to the plane again. “Okay, old girl. We’ve done this before, what, twice? So what if we didn’t have anything like this much wind then and so what if we broke out at eight hundred feet or so both times. Hey, it’s still no sweat.”

It was darker than ever outside. He knew the letdown would go slower than it had before, both because he was flying into a savage wind and because he was intently anticipating every foot of the glide path. He kept the power on and noted he wasn’t having to crab too much to hold course, which could only mean the wind must have become more favorably aligned with the strip after all.

Finally a small lucky break.

He was letting down and theoretically aligned with the phantom runway ahead in the murk now. He put down ten degrees of flaps.

Four hundred feet. Three hundred feet…two hundred…one hundred.

Seventy feet.

And then he sensed something outside and glanced aside to see the hump of a dune below. Suddenly it lightened up some ahead and he could make out the approach end of the rain-slicked strip. He was slightly right and he corrected, all his attention focused ahead now, pulling off a little power but just as the engine sputtered anyway, now willing the glide to stretch out just enough to get him there please and the engine died, the prop solidifying in a ten-to-four position. The Cessna was settling and it was going to be too short. His instinct was screaming at him to haul back on the yoke but he eased the nose down slightly to maintain all the airspeed he could.

The mains pounced down softly in the sand, then clipped the end of the strip pavement with a loud bang and the plane bounced and slewed wildly once and then he was down and rolling out, aligned with the centerline dashes, the nose wheel touching down, his feet gentling the brakes. It was a short rollout because of the wind and he sat there for thirty seconds after the plane had come to a stop, the wings rocking madly in the gusts and the rain slashing loudly against the aluminum skin. His left hand felt like a rigid claw and he massaged it with his right fingers.

He would walk to the Jeep and use it to tow the plane to the tiedowns. He set the hand brake, took off the inflatable vest, and climbed out. He knelt down on each side of the fuselage to inspect the gear but could see no damage. He walked along the centerline, watching the angry clouds race by low overhead, the rain drenching him to his skin again but it didn’t bother him at all this time.

He held out a cupped hand and then licked the rain from his palm and smiled.

It tasted sweet.

2

I
RA COHN WAS STRETCHED OUT NAKED ON THE MOTEL BED,
his hands behind his head, his hairy legs crossed, looking at her. Even standing there in profile half wrapped in the badly wrinkled sheet, her glossy blond hair in disarray, no makeup on, glaring out at the storm, Samantha Blackstone was absolutely stunning.

“I guess this means you don’t want to make love this morning,” Ira said.

She didn’t turn away from the window. “I want a cigarette.”

“You quit smoking yesterday, remember? Threw your last pack off the back of the ferry. A seagull grabbed it. Probably dead by now from nicotine poisoning.”

“You drive me halfway across the state in your rattling rust bucket to the end of the world here,” she said with her flawless diction. “The so-called restaurant doesn’t know the meaning of medium rare. The damned cable goes out. And now this.” She flung an elegant hand in the direction of the storm outside, parting the sheet to give him a picture of that perfect body.

“Look, why don’t we go down and have us a good breakfast,” Ira said. He was starving. “Some French toast, maybe. Hot coffee. A little Everest of scrambled eggs. Some really greasy sausages.”

“The damned
power’s
out, Mr. Investigative Reporter? Anyway I don’t
want
breakfast. I’m on a
diet
remember? I want a
cigarette.”

“A tall glass of orange juice, then. And a big bowl of corn flakes Real crispy, with cold milk and about four spoons of sugar. You speak in italics, you know?”

“You go get me a damned pack of Salems now.” And she stamped a foot on the carpet.

“Okay, okay,” he said, swinging his long legs down and using his toes to hook his boxer shorts up from the piles of hastily-shed clothing scattered around the bed.

When he was dressed he said, “How about a fond kiss?”

She aimed her squinted eyes at him and said through clenched teeth, “I’ll be ready to leave by the time you get back.”

So he trudged down the outside wrought-iron stairs, the wind howling and the blown rain spattering him as he jogged to his beat-up Toyota Corolla and got in quickly. He sat there for a minute thinking.

He had not quite believed it when Samantha had accepted his invitation for this getaway weekend, she the gorgeous co-anchor of the Channel Six news, he the slim, casual, bearded, rising-star reporter for the Raleigh
Sentinel.
He thought of himself as slim and casual. His mother called him an anemic hippie and constantly goaded him to eat more—even though he always ate like a horse right after galloping through the Kentucky Derby—and to go visit this certain decent men’s shop in the Crabapple mall, where she worked as a security guard. He could use her mall discount card.

He had run into Samantha a number of times over the past three years while they were both covering some story or other, and she had always treated him as a princess might treat, say, her royal dung-shoveler. They were both of the same kingdom, you might say, but Ira was clearly the tabloidal digger-of-dirt, whereas Samantha performed a type of high docudrama.

So when she had agreed to let him buy her a few drinks one day last week, after they had both covered the release on bail of the deputy state treasurer, and then when she had further agreed to this weekend tryst, he had been more than a little incredulous at his sudden good fortune. And the thirty bucks for flowers, the ninety-eight for the big third-floor room overlooking Silver Lake Harbor, and the seventy for last evening’s dinner and drinks, plus gas and oil and ferry tickets, had seemed as nothing, even though he figured if he were to hold his VISA card up to the light just so he’d probably see little wisps of smoke rising from it.

Then, after they had made love with abandon, at one point him likening a particular pose of hers in the glow from the bedside lamp to the way she smiled at you intimately out of your TV, clutching the microphone close to her lips…

Anyway, after all that, when they were sprawled panting in the shadows, her slender fingers lazily twisting his chest hairs, she had asked, “So, what’s the real story on Senator Farcotton?”

Aha. I should have known
, Ira thought.
It wasn’t that she has a thing for slim and casual, after all.

He offered her a tidbit. “Well, he had a little affair with Wanda Williams, the state attorney general’s daughter, the one who’s married to that big paving contractor Ezra Williams who sort of lucked up and got the Raleigh beltway improvement job last year…”

It was like trying to offer a cheeseburger to a great white shark. Nothing less than clear up to his shoulder was going to even come close to satisfying her.

“Everybody
knows
that,
silly,” she said. “I mean about the excess campaign contributions from the Tobacco Institute.”

It was a story that Ira had been working on for three weeks now and his first installment was due to break on the front page of the
Sentinel
in four days. He’d heard that even the point people from “Sixty Minutes” had been sniffing around and he should have been more on guard against local reporters.

“Campaign contributions?”

“Oh, come on, Ira. You can
trust
me. I won’t breathe a word of it until
after
your piece comes out, next week is it? I
promise,
darling.”

They had sparred verbally for twenty minutes before she had yanked out two of his chest hairs and rolled over to put her back to him.

He started the Toyota and rattled around the harbor toward the Ocracoke General Store to get the Salems for her and two or three of those big Butterfingers for himself. He knew from last night that she wasn’t a real blonde. He would bet one of his inevitable Pulitzers that Samantha Blackstone wasn’t her given name, either.

Inside the dim, dusty, and cluttered general store an attractive young black woman with intricately braided and silver-beaded hair was behind the old-fashioned mechanical cash register, talking to an older couple who looked like island natives.

“The boat sank not long after they got the Stilleys off,” the young woman said.

Ira’s antennae bristled like those of a just-launched satellite.

“Mrs. Stilley is okay,” the young woman said. “Mr. Stilley’s pretty badly hurt but stable, they say. This wind is letting up some so they’re going to send a medical helicopter to fly him over to Pitt Memorial in Greenville. The motor lifeboat is supposed to dock any time now. It’s been pretty rough out there.”

“Good thing they found them fast enough,” the man said.

“Sam Bass really found them,” the young woman said. “He heard about them early this morning and he flew out there in that little Cessna of his and found them almost right away.”

“Excuse me,” Ira said. “I’m Ira Cohn with the Raleigh
Sentinel.
Are you saying somebody flew a light plane offshore in this storm?”

“Hello,” the young woman said pleasantly. “I’m Danielle. Yes. Sam Bass. He’s a friend of the Stilleys’. That’s his flyer right there in the brochure rack, there on the top left. My boyfriend Melvin Stanton is in the Coast Guard. He runs the Ocracoke Station. I just got off the phone with him.”

Ira picked up one of the rack cards. It was cheaply done in dark blue ink on white stock, with a muddy blue aerial photo of Ocracoke Village. It said Sightseeing Flights across the top and below the photo said Reasonably Priced and Safe Air Charters Anywhere, with the pilot’s name, phone, and beeper numbers, and an Ocracoke address. Ira thought the name Sam Bass was somehow familiar.

Ira always carried his very expensive Nikon F4 in its Tamron bag on the floor in the back seat of his Toyota, where it was always close to hand, amid the discarded Coke cans and burger wrappers. He had a white towel over it to keep it cool and hide it from any nocturnal cruising powdery-nosed camera buffs. The bag also contained polished wide-angle and telephoto lenses, a powerful flash, a small Sony tape recorder, and a thick six-by-nine notebook.

“Do you think Melvin would let me interview him if I went over there now?” Ira said.

“Oh, sure,” Danielle said, smiling. “In fact I’ll call and let him know you’re on your way. Mr. Bass is over there, too.”

“Thank you, Danielle.”

He was halfway out the door when she said, “Did you want to buy something, Mr. Cohn?”

“No, thanks. I was after a pack of Salems but the lady who wants them ought to quit anyway.”

As he was rattling back around the harbor at speed he was thinking
find out the exact weather numbers from earlier today, get the model number and specs on the light plane, find out if the Stilleys are anybody and what kind of boat they had, what they were doing out there. If he’s conscious grab a quote from him before they chopper him off to the hospital. Talk to her, talk to the boat crew, maybe get an aw shucks quote from this idiot Bass—hey, why couldn’t the Coast Guard have done the aerial search? Get a few shots of her giving Bass a big hug…

Melvin Stanton met him at the door of the small station quarters carrying a thick coffee mug in one hand. Ira had his camera bag slung from his shoulder. They shook hands and Stanton led him down a hallway. The quarters were immaculate, with vinyl floors waxed to high gloss. The door to a radio room was open, a crisply uniformed young woman wearing a headset seated in front of the lit-up equipment. Somewhere out back a diesel generator hammered noisily at high rpm. Stanton ushered him into a small conference room decorated with a large nautical chart of the mid-Atlantic coast and framed photos of cutters and motor lifeboats and their assembled crews. A fit, lean man wearing a paint-stained denim shirt was slouched at the table. He had a mass of black hair resembling a charcoaled mop. Early forties. He looked damp. His jacket and cap were drying on the back of the chair beside him.

“You must be Sam Bass. I’m Ira Cohn, with the Raleigh
Sentinel
.”

Bass looked immediately defensive, but leaned across the table to take the offered hand and shake it once, unsmiling.

Stanton said, “We’ve got coffee in a thermos and a couple dozen donuts there in the corner. Help yourself.”

“Thanks, I sure will.” Ira turned over a mug bearing the Coast Guard emblem and filled it with steaming coffee. He piled six donuts onto a paper towel and took the feast over to sit at the table with the other two men. He got out the recorder and notebook and began asking questions between large mouthfuls of donut and sips of the aromatic coffee.

Stanton was smilingly cordial and helpful, filling him in on the weather and sea conditions, what facts he knew about the Stilleys and their ketch
Osprey
and the procedures of the rescue, the capabilities of the motor lifeboat and its crew chiefed by an old hand named Ruben Dixon, volunteering information about how many distress calls they got annually and about the Ocracoke Station in general and its long proud history. Bass volunteered nothing, just sitting there quietly with his hands wrapped around his mug, gazing down into his coffee. Ira let the tape run and used the notebook to supplement it, jotting impressions and ideas as they came to him.

“So, Mr. Bass. I understand it was you who found them. In your plane.”

Bass didn’t look up. Just nodded.

Ira flipped back a page to some notes he’d already written on Bass. Not handsome. Somehow striking, though. Might have been a cowboy in an earlier time. What the hell’s bugging him about me?

“How did you learn about the Stilleys being in trouble?”

Bass gestured at the recorder and said, “Maybe we could do without that for a minute.”

“Sure thing,” Ira said, and switched off the recorder and put down his ballpoint. He didn’t need them anyway. He had a memory like a Gateway computer. He used the notebook and recorder mostly to help him think, to make interviews appear semi-formal, and so interviewees would remember they had been recorded when they sometimes later might want to decide they really hadn’t said that.
Bingo,
he thought.
Now we’re getting to what’s bothering him.

Bass leveled penetrating gray eyes at him.
There’s a hell of a lot more to this guy than shows on the surface, Ira thought.

“I hope you’ll understand, Mr. Cohn. I’m not associated with the Coast Guard in any official way. I do have a couple of friends here at the station, though. I was talking with one of them on the phone early this morning and he mentioned the Stilleys.”

So somebody in the Coast Guard had asked him to conduct the search, but they’re not supposed to do that.

“Please. Call me Ira. I understand. Suppose we just say you heard about the Stilleys from a friend. How’s that?”

“Good,” Bass said, but something sizable was still bothering the man. Ira could sense it. He switched the recorder back on. “Flying a light plane out there this morning had to’ve been pretty rough, to put it mildly.”

Bass looked into his coffee again and said, “It was turbulent but not all that bad, really. Visual flight rules conditions, basically.”

Aw shucks time. And bullshit. I’ll have to dig at him, Ira thought.

Then things began happening fast. There was the whapping of an approaching helicopter outside and the young woman called down the hall, “Chief, the motor lifeboat’s coming in the inlet.”

Stanton pulled on a slicker and Bass stood and grabbed his jacket and cap, Ira noting that Bass matched his own height of six two. Ira gathered up his own gear.

Outside, the wind had lost some of its punch, the rain had all but quit, and there were ragged bright holes in the overcast. The helicopter, a Bell JetRanger rigged for EMS, its strobe lights flashing, approached the pad slowly, the pilot obviously cautious in the still-brisk gusty wind. It settled onto its skids and throttled back to cool-down rpm. Two white-clad EMTs climbed out and ducked under the rushing blades to be greeted by Stanton. One of them carried a large metal case and the other a light-weight fold-up stretcher. Stanton walked with them from the pad three hundred feet to the dock and told them the lifeboat was due within just a few minutes. One of the EMTs signaled with a rotating forearm back at the helicopter pilot. Keep them turning.