LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘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

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