Blackwater Sound Read Online Free PDF Page B

stifled the half second of panic, got her focus back.
    Mark said something, but Kathy wasn’t listening, keeping thewings 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.
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    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.
    â€œYou okay, Case?”
    She lifted her head and squinted at him.
    â€œJesus,” 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.
    â€œWhat the hell’re you doing, Thorn!”
    â€œGoing to help.”
    â€œAre 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.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œI want to go home, Thorn. I want to get the hell out of here.”
    â€œSo 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.
    â€œIt’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