“Broussard!” the old man shouted over the idling engines. “Did you hear an explosion, ol’ hoss?”
“Heard something, McGee,” Caleb allowed. “Back yonder, I think.” He pointed at an angle at least ninety degrees away from where the launch had actually happened.
“Saw something takin’ off like a rocket, too.”
“Probably just some kids. You know how they are.”
[179] “Yeah… in my day it was cherry bombs.”
“These days, it’s likely to be an H-bomb,” Caleb laughed.
McGee leaned over and spit in the water, which didn’t make his female passenger too happy. “Y’all take care, now, y’hear?”
IT WAS FUNNY how, on the way out, I figured we were probably the only human beings for twenty miles in any direction. Coming back, I thought somebody needed to install a traffic light.
I’m exaggerating. But we saw maybe a dozen other airboats. There were pickups and SUVs and ATVs on the dirt roads, and small planes overhead. None of them gave us any reason to believe they were looking for us.
We made it back to the Middle of Nowhere in about an hour, then to Caleb’s trailer-home in fifteen minutes. Travis was in a big hurry. We took hasty showers, said our good-byes, thanked Grace for the food-and accepted a picnic basket crammed with more of it-then piled back into our vehicles and hit the road.
When Kelly saw that Nephew Billy had washed all the road grime and bugs off the Ferrari she kissed him on the cheek. I shook his hand anyway.
IN WHAT I thought was an excess of paranoia, Travis insisted the three vehicles not drive together, but maintain a five-minute separation. We were taking Alligator Alley back to Fort Lauderdale, so it wasn’t hard.
“I’ve been asleep at the wheel as far as security goes,” he told us during a cellular conference call. “From now on, we’re going to be more careful than we’ve been. You gotta remember-”
“Travis,” I interrupted. “If we’re going to be careful… do you think we should be discussing these things on cell phones?”
There was silence for a moment. Kelly looked over and gave me a thumbs-up.
“Manny, you’re a genius and I’m a jerk-off idiot. Everybody hang up and meet me at Bahia Mar in Lauderdale. We’ll have lunch.”
[180] BAHIA MAR IS one of your nicer marinas. About a zillion dollars’ worth of rich folks’ playtoys were tied up at the finger piers, motor and sail, blinding white and those deep blue tarps they wrap sails in. We found each other easily enough, and Travis led the way to a pretty city park and we all unloaded Grace’s lunch onto a picnic table. There was a bucket of fried chicken and a big Tupperware box of potato salad and scratch buttermilk biscuits and a watermelon for dessert. There was also a red-and-white checkered tablecloth to put it all on, heavy plastic plates and spoons, and a big thermos of grape Kool-Aid.
“I have screwed up just about everything I’ve tried so far,” Travis said after the food had been distributed. “You notice my crazy neighbor lately? He’s ready to take off on a flying saucer with Jesus. Which is what he saw the day I landed you all in the pool by fiddling with something I didn’t understand.
“As for today’s fiasco… what was I thinking?”
“I’m sorry, Trav-”
“Not your fault, Jubal.”
“It was a decimal point, jus’ a little-”
“I know, Jube, I know. But I can’t afford to drop any more decimal points. Friends, Jubal did a search while I was driving… show ’em, Jube.”
Jubal went to http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/RealTime/JTrack/3D/ JTrack3D.html on his computer. I knew the site. It kept track of all satellites in orbit. We saw a display of the Earth surrounded by thousands of dots, many of them in a ring at the geosynchronous distance of 22,500 miles. Jubal zoomed in on Florida, then the southern tip of Florida, and entered the time of the launch. We saw a handful of satellites and lines representing their orbits. Jubal moved the cursor over one.
“Dat be Friendship Station. She were ’bout two hunnerd miles away when de rocket go shootin’ by.”
“Jes… You mean we could have hit it?” Alicia asked.
“It would have been a trillion-to-one shot to hit it,” Travis said. “That doesn’t worry me. No, the thing that worries me is that our bird would [181] have showed up on their radar. Also this satellite, and this one. Not to mention ground radars. Now some people in our government know there’s something out there that can outperform any rocket in their arsenal. I mean, our bird was accelerating at twenty gees, and it would have kept it up until it was out of radar range. When they lost it, it was traveling faster than any man-made object has ever traveled. Ever, in the history of the world.”
We all digested that for a while. Suddenly I didn’t feel so hungry.
“Now our government knows there’s somebody out there with a powerful new technology. I’m sure they’re going to want it. And what I worry about is our alphabet soup of intelligence agencies. FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA.”
“What about SMERSH?” I asked, joking. Travis didn’t laugh.
“I’ve often asked myself that question,” he said. “Is there a super, super secret agency in the government, accountable to no one, licensed to kill, like in a James Bond movie? I hope not, but there’s no way for us to know. By its nature nobody would ever have heard of it.”
“ ‘If I told you, I’d have to kill you,’ ” Dak said.
“Exactly. So it’s a waste of time to worry about something like that. I’m worried enough about the ones we do know about.
“By triangulating the radar signatures they know where we did it. I can’t think they would learn much from the launch site. It’s hard digging in the ’Glades. That hole in the ground filled up with muddy water before we even left.
“What worries me most is that I stupidly let us drive into a small, isolated town in three of the most memorable vehicles in Florida.”
I looked at our little automotive fleet. It was so obvious once he’d said it, but it hadn’t occurred to me. Even now, there were half a dozen neighborhood kids standing around the vehicles, gawking.
“They’ve got satellites that can read a license plate from orbit, and it was a clear day, but I strongly doubt they took any pictures. Why would they?”
“But people will talk,” Kelly murmured.
“You said it. Old man McGee saw us, and so did those tourists. As for McGee, he wouldn’t be apt to have much to say to a federal agent, [182] on account of the five years of federal time he did behind a marijuana smuggling conviction back in the ’70s. Not to mention that he’d assume they were revenuers out to find his still.
“We drove straight through town. Those folks aren’t inclined to gab, but it will come out, and it may be linked to Caleb.”
That was the worst news I’d heard so far. How far would those snoops go, if they suspected Caleb and his family had something to do with the launch?
“What’s done is done,” Travis said. “We can’t take it back. But we can lie as low as we are able for a while, and we can be more careful in the future. Deal?”
We all agreed… and pretty soon Dak wished he hadn’t.
“Kelly,” Travis went on, “I guess you’ll be putting that Roman firebomb back in your father’s lot. Not much we can do about it, I guess. I’m hoping that anyone comes snooping around won’t figure a Ferrari demonstrator was likely to be the one showed up in Everglades City today.”
Kelly looked thoughtful for a moment.
“I can probably do better than that. Let me think on it.”
“Good enough. Dak…” I could see Dak hadn’t gotten it yet. “Dak, could you… could you garage that blue beast for a while?”
Dak’s eyes widened with surprise, then he gave a deep sigh.
“Sure, Trav. For a while. You got a bicycle I could borrow?”
“No, but I’ve got another bike somewhere. You could use that.” Dak looked a lot happier. “Manny, you keep the Triumph for a while.”