“Aye, aye, sir.”
“You’ve got it, Murray,” Randazzo said, and released the yoke and pulled a pencil from the long slit pocket on the sleeve of his flight suit. Penner came forward immediately with a sheaf of papers attached to a clipboard. Diel had the controls now, and Randazzo put the clipboard on his lap and wrote:
“Message block, sir,” Penner said.
Randazzo took the six-inch-long, hollow, balsa block and pulled the cork from its end. He folded his message, stuffed it into the block, and then sealed it again. “Better get a red streamer on that,” he said.
“Aye,” Penner answered.
“We’ll come in over the stem again,” Randazzo said, “give you a nice long target. I expect you to drop it right in his lap, Penner.”
“I’ll try, sir,” Penner said, smiling, and started aft with the message block.
“You want to take her down, Murray?”
“Rog, I have it.”
“Standing by the after station, sir,” Penner reported.
“Got your streamer on?”
“Affirmative.”
“Take her down, Murray.”
The plane began its descent again. It came in directly over the stern, some forty feet above the boat.
“Bombs away!” Penner called over the ICS.
“Did you get him?”
Penner, who was looking back at the boat from the open hatch in the side of the plane, did not answer for a moment. The block with its trailing red streamer fell like a bleeding gull. “Right in his lap, sir!” Penner shouted.
“Okay, we’ll give him a few minutes to read our love note, and then we’ll make another pass. Hold it here, Murray. Just circle above her, about three hundred feet or so.”
“Wilco,” Diel said.
“He’s still reading our note, sir,” Knowles said as the plane gained altitude.
“He must be a lip-reader,” Acadia put in.
“Doesn’t want to make any mistakes,” Randazzo said. “Wants to make sure he raises the right number of hands.”
“Lucky thing he’s only got two, sir,” Penner said, and everyone laughed.
“You want me to get this back to base, sir?” Knowles asked. “Well, let’s see what he tells us first, okay?”
“Roger,” Knowles said.
The plane circled over the boat like a giant patient bird.
“One thing I always hated doing,” Randazzo said.
“What’s that?”
“Circling.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. Makes me feel stupid. As if I’m not going anywhere.”
The plane continued its lazy circling.
“Shall we take her down?” Diel asked.
“Guy’s had time to read War and Peace,” Randazzo said. “Let’s go”
The plane began dropping.
“He’s standing in the middle of the cockpit, sir,” Penner said.
“I see him.”
The plane was coming in low now, a hundred feet above the water, seventy-five, fifty, forty. “Pull her up,” Randazzo said.
“He had both hands over his head, sir,” Penner said.
The radioman first class who took the message in room 1021 of the Coast Guard’s Rescue and Coordination Center in downtown Miami immediately went into the room next door and handed it to the chief quartermaster who was on duty. The chief, whose name was Osama and who happened to be a full-blooded Cherokee, read the message slowly and almost tiredly and then waited for his superior officer to get off the phone. His superior officer was Lieutenant Abner Caxton, and he was talking at the moment to an admiral who wanted to know just what the hell that damn hurricane was doing. Caxton was trying to explain that Flora seemed to be sitting still at the moment, but the admiral kept asking Caxton why it was sitting still, and what the Coast Guard was doing about its immobility. Caxton finally succeeded in mollifying the admiral only to hang up and find Big Chief Osama looking at him dourly.
“What now?” Caxton asked.
“Boat adrift, sir, needs medical help,” Osama said.
“Where?”
“Twenty-five miles, zero-nine-zero radial of Key West OMNI.”
“Get me latitude and longitude,” Caxton said. “Do we need a chopper?”
“I don’t know, sir. The message doesn’t say how bad the situation is.”
“Who’d it come from?”
“The seven-two, sir.”
“Who’s flying?”
“Randazzo.”
“He’s a good man,” Caxton said generously. “If his message doesn’t give details, then there aren’t any to give. Where’s the Merc right now?”
“Don’t know, sir. She won’t be reporting until 1500.”
“Tell Di Filippo to raise her. Go ahead, I’ll finish that.”
He went to the charting table. A sign on the door of the message center warned that the area was restricted to authorized personnel only. Caxton watched the chief disappear through the doorway and then leaned over the chart. The chief, he saw, had already positioned the plotting arm on its proper bearing. Caxton counted off the twenty-five miles from Key West and put a dot on the chart. Latitude 24.33.8 north, longitude 81.19.2 west. He looked at the big clock hanging on the wall above the status board. It was 1107. The Merc had left the base in Key West at 0900, and she was probably traveling at eleven knots or so, just outside the reef line, which would put her at about, oh, somewhere south of Summer-land Key. That was, mmm — Caxton consulted the chart again, moving the plotting arm and marking off the area beyond the reef — well, somewhere around latitude 24.30 or .32, and longitude, oh, 81.27, he would guess. He put another small dot on the chart, and then lighted a cigarette and waited for Big Chief Osama to come back with the Merc’s actual position. If the Merc was indeed where Caxton thought she should be, there’d be no need to send out a helicopter. She could be alongside the disabled boat within a half hour, probably sooner if she really poured it on.
Unconcerned, Caxton smoked his cigarette and waited for the chief to return.
The message was received in the radio room of the cutter by Curt Danby, a radioman second. He immediately hit his buzzer, and the quartermaster on the bridge heard the three buzzes, knew there was a radio message, and dispatched the coxswain to pick it up. The coxswain brought the message to Ensign Charles Carpenter, who was O.D. on the forenoon watch. Carpenter walked over closer to the porthole to read it by the light streaming through the glass.
“Very well,” he said, and initialed the original. The coxswain went into the chart room and attached a copy to the clipboard there. He was on his way down to the captain’s cabin when Carpenter picked up the sound-powered telephone.
“Captain here,” Cates said, answering.
“Captain, we’ve got a proceed-and-assist from Miami. Coxswain’s on his way down with it now.”
“I’ll be right up,” Cates said.
“Yes, sir,” Carpenter answered, and the captain hung up. He had been lying on his bunk on the starboard side of the small cabin (he had shared larger quarters as chief quartermaster aboard the Navy AKA) and he sat up now to put on his shoes. The knock sounded on his door just as he was rising. “Come in,” he said, knowing it would be the coxswain. He read the message quickly, and then initialed it and went out of the cabin into the passageway, and then up the ladder to the bridge.
“Where are we now?” he asked Carpenter.
“I’ve plotted the position of the boat, sir, as well as our own. Would you like to see the chart?”
“Yes, I would,” Cates said, pleased by his first lieutenant’s efficiency and foresight, but nonetheless suspecting him of being a first-rate ass-kisser. He studied the chart, and then went back into the wheelhouse.