LITMIR.BIZ

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what the hell. She could always go out in a so-called blaze of glory.

      Then she spied salvation. On an island that was mostly a volcanic cone, she saw not only signs of civilization, but, also, on a plateau, she made out an unmistakable airport. It was a small airport, and she could only hope she would have enough gas for the reverse thrust, because those landing strips looked awfully short.

      But what choice did she have at this point? She couldn’t even warn them she was coming in. She just had to go. Dipping down low, she circled in and said a quick prayer. This or nothing.

      As she descended to one hundred feet and circled the field in the standard oval approach pattern, she passed over the heads of a gaggle of people who looked at her like she was crazy.

      Well, she was crazy. If she hadn’t been crazy she never would have taken over her dad’s business in the first place. No, she’d have found some sane job in an office somewhere where she didn’t have to put her life on the line on a routine basis. Because she couldn’t escape the fact that flying the Caribbean skies was asking for trouble, what with countries that wouldn’t let you land, smugglers who were trying to fly off the radar, commercial flights that thought they owned the airways and small, private planes piloted by people who shouldn’t be allowed to get both feet off the ground at the same time.

      And of course, always the risk of being mistaken for a drug runner herself. But her luck there had been pretty good, when all was said and done. She’d only been shot at once, and held at gunpoint twice. So far the local police had been fairly decent to her. Once they ran their drug dogs all over her plane, that was.

      And in some airports, she was even left alone.

      This flight to Aruba should have been a piece of cake. She hadn’t even had to fly into the Bermuda Triangle, which always gave her the willies, wondering if this was the time some bubble of methane would decide to thaw and rise from the sea floor, thus depriving her plane of all lift.

      But what should have been, wasn’t, and as soon as her wheels touched the runway, she threw on the reverse thrust for all it was worth. At least that worked. The shields immediately dropped behind her engines, redirecting the push forward.

      But still the end of the runway raced toward her too fast. This was an airport meant mostly for small planes, and older prop jobs, not jets that had to come in faster in order to maintain lift. She had the brakes on for all they were worth, the flaps were at full, and all her hopes hung on the fact that she was light, having lost almost all her fuel.

      She heard her tires screaming, and expected to hear them blow. The runway wasn’t smooth either, forcing her to jolt so hard her teeth banged together.

      Oh, God! The runway disappeared almost right in front of her!

      She wanted to close her eyes against her coming demise, when she realized that her plane was slowing so fast that her safety harness cut into her shoulders and lap like a knife.

      Thank God!

      Moments later, she and her plane came to a shuddering halt with only a few feet to spare.

      For a long moment, she sat perfectly still, trying to catch her breath. Then the adrenaline turned to fury, and she wanted to kill someone. Now.

      And anyone would do.

      ON THE TARMAC below, Buck Shanahan’s adrenaline was also surging. He peeked at his hole cards again, though he didn’t need to. The two black Sevens were right where they’d been last time. Coupled with the Seven of Hearts on the table and the two Jacks on the table, that gave him a full house—three Sevens and two Jacks—and a chance to even things with the man who sat across the table from him.

      Bill Anstin had become Buck’s nemesis. Treasure Island had been so perfect before Anstin moved here with his high-stakes dreams about turning the island into a major casino resort. Buck liked it just the way it was: sleepy, peaceful, an ideal place to hide from the world.

      Each had a constituency. The old islanders, offspring of castoffs from neighboring islands and the earliest white settlers, tended to side with Buck. Anstin’s backers were the new arrivals, most of them Wall Street wizards on the run from the SEC and their investors, looking for a place to hide and launder their ill-gotten gains.

      As with every controversy on Treasure Island, it was litigated at the poker table, the “Court of the Green Felt.” Buck versus Anstin, heads-up, no-limit Hold’Em, best two out of three games. Last week, at his casino, Anstin had hit a lucky flush to win the first match. This week they were playing on Buck’s turf, at the island’s small airport. And Buck was about to take him down and even the match.

      When the jet came screaming in over the airport, Buck and Anstin and their audience instinctively ducked low and covered their ears. It passed right over their heads, the jet wash sending cards flying all over the tarmac, before the pilot circled back around and hit the runway with a screech of rubber and the roar of twin jet engines on full reverse thrust.

      Craig, Buck’s mechanic, stared wide-eyed at the plane as it screeched and roared farther down the runway. “What the hell?”

      Buck stood up and bit on the end of his unlit cigar tight enough to make his jaw hurt. “Idiot. Flying jackass!” He watched, somewhere between fury and fear as the pilot of the jet struggled for control, the tail fishtailing a bit as if the reverse thrust weren’t distributed evenly between the engines. In his heart of hearts he believed his runway wasn’t long enough.

      “Get the fire fighting equipment,” he barked at Craig Thomas, and started trotting down the runway. “This is one pilot I want to save so I can strangle him.”

      The list of offenses was long. Not radioing ahead to request permission, not checking landing conditions, not being sure the runway was long enough…. Not to mention scaring the hell out of him. And—by far the worst of the violations—scattering Buck’s winning cards.

      The jet finally rolled to a stop, within twenty feet of the end of the runway. Behind him, Craig caught up in the golf cart that was their only fire engine. It wasn’t like they were a major airport. Buck caught the rail and bounded up, standing on one foot as they drew close to the plane.

      The engines were winding down. Then, with an awful choke, one of them just stopped. Moments later the other choked, too.

      Buck heard that sound and felt his heart slam. Okay, so maybe he wouldn’t kill the pilot. The guy had come in on fumes. But then his anger surged again. What the hell was he doing flying on fumes anyway?

      What if he hadn’t found Buck’s airfield?

      Worse yet, what if that jet had rolled off the runway and over the lip of the plateau?

      And why couldn’t he have waited until Buck finished the hand?

      HANNAH LAMONT SAT at the controls, her hands still frozen on the yoke. Ahead of her, just a few feet from the end of the runway she had almost run out of, spread a beautiful view. All of it sharply downhill. All of its tropical glory shouting: “Death!”

      She actually wasn’t sure she was alive until she realized her hands hurt from gripping the yoke. Prying her right hand free, she reached for the throttles and pulled them back, shutting down the already silent engines.

      Then she started shaking like a leaf in a hurricane. Adrenaline, which had carried her this far, fled like a rat off a sinking ship, leaving her all too mortal and filled with aftershocks.

      It wasn’t that her life had never been on the line before. When you flew smaller aircraft, you often had a lot of near-misses. But this one was different somehow.

      Different, she realized suddenly, because it never, ever, should have happened.

      Anger sparked in her again, renewing the strength in her limbs. Unclasping her harness, she rose and stomped back behind the pilot’s cabin and hit the button that opened the door and dropped the steps. The hydraulics, working like a charm, hissed as the door opened from the top and descended, turning the steps right-side up.

      She was just about to step on

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