Bluey grinned at him. “That’s your actual short-field-takeoff-over-an-obstacle,” he said, pleased with himself. “You want to remember how that felt, the angle and all. Might come in handy one of these days.”
“Thanks for the demonstration,” Cat replied, mopping his brow with his sleeve. The real thing had been quite different from practicing on a nice, long runway.
Bluey turned sharply toward Everglades City and kept the airplane flying low. A few minutes later, with the airport in sight, he began an ascent, simultaneously calling Flight Services on the radio. They had just departed Everglades City, he explained, and would like to file for Marathon, in the Florida Keys. The flight plan filed, Bluey relaxed.
“I told you it would lift anything you could put in it,” he grinned at Cat.
“I believe you,” Cat replied. “Why are we landing at Marathon?”
“We’re not,” Bluey said.
Silly question, Cat thought. He should be getting used to this by now. Bluey had pretended to take off from Everglades City, and now he would pretend to land at Marathon. His flight plan was on record. Their next stop would be the Guajira Peninsula of Colombia.
An hour later Bluey set up a landing at Marathon, called Flight Services and canceled his flight plan, then roared down the runway, ten feet above the ground. He switched off the rotating beacon, the navigation lights, the landing light, and the wingtip strobes, climbed to two hundred feet, and turned steeply to the southeast, flashing over the narrow island. Immediately, clear of the land, he pushed the yoke forward and dived at the water, causing Cat to close his eyes and grit his teeth in anticipation of the impact.
When nothing happened, he opened his eyes. “What’s our altitude?” he asked shakily.
“About fifteen feet, I reckon,” Bluey drawled.
Suddenly they blew past a sailing yacht, no more than a hundred feet from the wingtip on Cat’s side.
“Watch out for boats,” Bluey said, tardily.
“Sure thing,” Cat said. “How long are we going to maintain this altitude?”
“All the way past Cuba to Hispaniola,” Bluey said. “Take the airplane.”
Cat lunged for the yoke as Bluey turned his attention to the loran, punching in another set of coordinates.
“Don’t let her climb!” Bluey commanded.
Cat realized he had been unconsciously pulling the yoke back. He tried to settle down.
“Watch the water, not the altimeter,” Bluey said. A moment later he took the controls back from a relieved Cat.
Bluey had told Cat they would be flying around Cuba, down the Windward Passage between that island and Haiti, but he had not told him they would be doing it at fifteen feet. Cat found it impossible to relax.
“There’s a balloon back in the Keys on a fourteen-thousand-foot cable,” Bluey said. “They run it up and use it to look down with radar. It’s not up tonight, but we’ve got to stay under both the American and Cuban radar until we’re in the clear. I don’t want a couple of Fidel’s MIGs using us for target practice.”
For nearly two hours the airplane skimmed the sea, while Cat’s eyes roamed the dim horizon looking for ships and small craft. At one point he saw some lights off to the right. He assumed they were Cuba, but he didn’t want to distract Bluey by asking. Later, lights appeared dead ahead.
“There’s Haiti,” Bluey said. “We’ll be climbing shortly.”
The lights drew closer, and Bluey climbed a couple of hundred feet, Then a beach flashed beneath them, and the airplane began to climb in earnest.
“There’s a nine-thousand-foot mountain out there,” Bluey explained.
“Is nobody going to notice a strange airplane over Haiti?” Cat asked.
“Oh, sure,” Bluey said. “We’re on American defense radar now. They’ll think we’re a Haitian airplane taking off. We’re on Haitian radar, too, if they’re awake, which I doubt, but Haiti doesn’t have an air force, so what the hell?”
Clear of the island, Bluey set the autopilot’s altitude hold at nine thousand feet, leaned out the engine, and tapped in a new longitude and latitude. “That’s Idlewild,” he said. “We’ll be there in about six hours. Our window is between seven-thirty and eight o’clock. I built us an extra half hour into the flight plan for safety.”
“Safety?”
“If you arrive early or late at Idlewild, they shoot you down when you try to land,” Bluey explained cheerfully. “Touchy lot.”
“I see,” Cat said. “Have you flown in there often?”
“I guess I’ve made a couple dozen round trips.”
“How will they know who we are?”
“We’ve got a code. Idlewild is Bravo One, we’re Bravo Two. How’d you meet Carlos, Cat?”
“We had a mutual friend. How’d you meet him, Bluey?”
Bluey laughed. “I was dusting crops in Cuba in ’59. Batista was still in power, but Fidel and his merry band of men were pressing hard. A lot of foreigners — a lot of Cubans too — were leaving the country, but I stuck around. There was money to be made, and I was young and foolish. One day, I was gassing up the airplane, and this Cuban peasant sidles over to me and asks me if I want to make some extra money. Asks me in an American accent. I do a double take, then I say, sure, I’d like to make some extra money. He gives me a camera and says he wants some pictures of a beach near the cane field I was spraying, wants ’em from less than a hundred feet, a couple hundred yards offshore. I made two or three passes, got the pictures, got paid. We had a few beers, got along. The beach was at a place called Bahia de Cochinos. Bay of Pigs.”
Bluey poured himself some soup from a thermos Spike had given them, then continued. “When Castro broke out, I flew the crop duster to Key West — liberated it, you might say — and started a little business in Florida. Couple years later, when I’m pretty sick of crop dusting, I get a call from Carlos. God knows how he found me. Next thing I know, I’m in Guatemala, where they’re training Cubans for the party at the Bay of Pigs. During the invasion I dropped supplies onto the beach from a DC-3, not the most fun I ever had, and I took a little shrapnel in the ass doing it. I ditched in the ocean and got picked up by a landing craft. Carlos was waiting for me when they took me aboard ship. Over the years since, he’s popped up now and then with a job, always for good money.”
“He’s CIA, then?” Cat asked.
“If you say so,” Bluey chortled. “He never once showed me his credentials, just his money. That was always genuine, so I never asked questions. He’s a good bloke, though.”
“I guess he is, at that,” Cat said. “He’s all right with me, anyway.”
“You sleepy?” Bluey asked.
“Are you kidding? My adrenaline is still pumping from your low flying.”
“You take the airplane for a while, then. I’ll grab a nap. Just keep scanning the oil pressure, cylinder-head temperature, and oil temperature.” He pointed out the gauges. “If anything gets out of the green, or if you’re worried about something, wake me up.” He wound his seat back and tipped his hat over his eyes.
Cat glanced around the instrument panel. With the loran navigating and the autopilot flying, there wasn’t much to do. He ate a sandwich and drank some coffee. The engine droned reassuringly on, and the gauges held rock steady. The moon came up and reflected on the sea below, silver on blue. The stars wheeled above in a cloudless sky. Cat felt a kind of contentment from knowing that he was doing all he could do — at least as close to contentment as he had come since the yacht went down, and he savored the moment as best he could with Jinx still in the front of his mind. Once in a while he still got an involuntary flash of the bloody palmprint, even though he now knew that the body had not been Jinx’s. He wondered who the poor girl had been and why she had been murdered with Katie. It made no sense at all, and that bothered him. Had he imagined the voice on the phone was Jinx? Had she really gone down with Katie and Catbird? Was he risking his life and his liquid wealth on a fool’s errand to find a girl who couldn’t be found because she was at the bottom of the sea?