Tourist Season (38 page)

Mack Dane wondered if some letters had fallen off the advertisement.

The helicopter dropped lower and lower, and soon the partiers aboard the Friendship Cruise found themselves drowned to silence by the rotor noise. When the chopper was no more than one hundred feet above the deck, the banner was cut loose. It fluttered into the sea like an enormous confetti. The crowd ooooohhhed, and a few even applauded.

Mack Dane noticed that the top deck—the Royal Sun Deck, according to the ship's guide—was filling with tourists and VIPs and travel writers who had come up from below to investigate the commotion. Before long, people were packed elbow to elbow. In the meantime, the captain of the SS
Nordic Princess
had grown concerned about the reckless helicopter and cut his speed to eight knots.

“Hello, folks!” said a brassy male voice. Somebody on the helicopter had an electric bullhorn.

“Having a good time in Florida?” the voice called.

“Yeaaaah!” shouted the partiers, their faces upturned brightly. Some of the stuffy civic-leader types—the mayor, the Orange Bowl committeemen, the Chamber of Commerce life members—were miffed at the interruption of the cruise but, not wanting to spoil anyone's fun, said nothing.

The loud voice in the helicopter said: “How would all of you like some genuine Florida souvenirs?”

“Yeaaaaah!” shouted the partiers.

“Well, here you go!” the voice said.

A door on the side of the helicopter opened and a white parcel plummeted toward the deck of the
Nordic Princess.
It was followed by another and another. At first Mack Dane thought the objects might be miniature parachutes or beach towels, but when one landed near his feet he saw that it was only a shopping bag from Neiman-Marcus. Soon the deck was being rained with shopping bags from all the finest department stores—Lord and Taylor, Bloomingdale's, Macy's, Burdine's, Jordan Marsh, Saks. Once the travelers realized what was happening, the Friendship Cruise quickly dissolved into a frenzied scrabble for the goodies.

Mack Dane thought: This is some advertising gimmick.

To her credit, Mrs Gilbert held her own against stiff competition. She outmuscled a jewelry dealer from Brooklyn and the vicious wife of a Miami city commissioner to capture three of the prized shopping bags.

“Look, Sam!”

“Really,” Sam Gilbert muttered.

“What did you win?” Mack Dane asked.

“I'm not sure,” Mrs. Gilbert said. The shopping bags were stapled shut. She ripped one open and fished inside.

Her hand came out with a bracelet. The bracelet had a pattern of pale yellow chain, and looked like rubber. The odd thing was, it appeared to be moving.

It was a live snake.

Mrs. Gilbert was speechless. Her eyelids fluttered as the snake coiled around her creamy wrist. Its strawberry tongue flicked in and out, tasting her heat.

“Jesus Christ,” said her husband.

It was not a big snake, maybe three feet long, but it was dark brown and fat as a kitchen pipe. The snake was every bit as bewildered as the Gilberts.

Behind Mack Dane a woman shrieked. And across the deck, another. A man yelled out, “Oh my God!” and fainted with his eyes open. As if jarred from a trance, Mrs. Gilbert dropped the brown snake and back-pedaled; her jaw was going up and down, but nothing was coming out.

By now each of the shopping bags (exactly two hundred in all) had been opened with the same startling results.

The sundeck of the
Nordic Princess
was crawling with snakes. King snakes, black snakes, blue runners, garter snakes, green snakes, banded water snakes, ring-necked snakes, yellow rat snakes, corn snakes, indigo snakes, scarlet king snakes. Most of the snakes were harmless, except for a handful of Eastern diamondback rattlers and cottonmouth water moccasins, like the one in Mrs. Gilbert's prize bag. Skip Wiley had not planned on dropping any poisonous snakes—he didn't think it necessary—but he'd neglected to tell Tommy Tigertail and his crew of Indian snake-catchers. The Seminoles made no distinction, spiritual or taxonomical, between venomous and nonvenomous snakes; all were holy.

As the reptiles squirmed across the teakwood, the crowd panicked. Several men tried to stomp on the snakes; others rushed forward brandishing deck chairs and fire extinguishers. Many of the snakes became agitated and began snapping in all directions.

Mrs. Gilbert, among others, was bitten on the ankle.

Her husband the doctor stood there helplessly.

“I'm just a radiologist,” he said to Mack Dane.

The captain of the
Nordic Princess
looked down from the wheelroom and saw bedlam on his ship. To restore order, he blew the ship's tremendous horn three times.

“What does that mean?” cried Sam Gilbert, who was carrying his wife around on his back.

Mack Dane did not care to admit that although he was a travel writer, he knew nothing about ocean liners. So he said: “I think it means we abandon ship.”

“Abandon ship!” screamed Mrs. Gilbert.

And they did. They formed a flying wedge, hundreds of them, and crashed through the rails and ropes of the upper deck. The Gilberts were among the first to go, plunging seventy feet into the Atlantic Ocean, leaving the ship to the damnable snakes.

As soon as he hit the water, Mack Dane was sorry he'd said anything about jumping overboard. The water was chilly and rough, and he wondered how long he could stay afloat. It also occurred to him, in hindsight, that sharks might be infinitely worse than a bunch of frightened snakes.

The
Nordic Princess
came dead in the water, towering like a gray wall above the frantic swimmers. Fire bells rang at both ends of the ship. Mack Dane could see crew members on every deck throwing life preservers and lowering the dinghies. The ocean seemed full of shrieking people, their heads bobbing like so many coconuts.

Mack Dane noticed that the mystery helicopter was circling again, firing its hot-white spotlight into the water. Occasionally the beam would fix on the befuddled face of a dog-paddling tourist.

From the helicopter drifted a melody, muted by the engines and warped by the wind. It was not a soothing song, either. It was Pat Boone sounding like Brenda Lee. It was the theme from the motion picture
Exodus
.

A good-looking man in a business suit who was treading water near Mack Dane raised up a fist and hollered at the helicopter: “You sick bastards!”

Mack Dane recognized the man as the mayor of Miami.

“Who are those guys up there?” Mack Dane asked. He was thinking about the story he'd have to write, if he survived.

“Fucking Nachos,” the mayor said. He kicked hard and swam off toward the SS
Nordic Princess.

Mack Dane watched the chopper climb sharply and bank east, against the wind. The white spotlight vanished and the cabin door closed. In a few moments all that was visible were three pinpoints of light—red, green, and white—on the fuselage, although the racket of the propellers remained audible, dicing the night air.

An empty lifeboat drifted toward Mack Dane and he pulled himself aboard. He peeled off his blazer and laid it on his lap. As he was helping a young couple from Lansing, Michigan, climb in, Mack Dane saw a diamondback rattle-snake swim by. It looked miserable and helpless.

“What a night,” said the man from Lansing.

Something about the sound of the helicopter changed. Mack Dane looked for the lights and spotted them about a mile east of the ship, and low to the purple horizon. The rotor engines sounded rough, the pitch rising.

“Something's not right,” Mack Dane said.

The next sound was a wet roar, dying among the waves. Then the sky turned quiet and gray. The helicopter was gone. A plume of smoke rose off the water, marking the grave as surely as a cross. A few minutes later, the rain came.

Miraculously, none of the voyagers from the
Nordic Princess
perished in the Atlantic Ocean. Many had snatched life jackets before leaping overboard; others proved competent if not graceful swimmers. Some of the tourists were too drunk to panic and simply lolled in the waves, like polyester manatees, until help arrived. Others, including the Gilberts, were saved by strong tidal currents that dragged them to a shallow sandbar where they waited in waist-deep water, their hair matted to pink skulls, each of them still wearing a plastic nametag that said, “Hi! I'm——” Luckily a Coast Guard cutter had arrived swiftly and deployed inflatable Zodiac speedboats to round up the passengers. By midnight, all 312 missing persons had been retrieved. The rescue had unfolded so quickly that all thirteen victims of poisonous snakebites made it to the hospital with time to spare and only transient hallucinations. A survey of other casualties included one possible heart attack, seven broken bones, four man-of-war stings, and a dozen litigable whiplashes.

Although the thrust of the rescue efforts concentrated around the cruise ship, a small contingent of Coast Guardsmen launched a separate search for the mystery helicopter one mile away. A slashing rain and forty-mile-per-hour gusts made the task dangerous and nearly impossible. As the night wore on, the waves grew to nine feet and the searchers reluctantly gave up.

The next morning, in a misty sprinkle, a sturdy shrimp trawler out of Virginia Key came upon a fresh oil slick a few miles off Miami Beach. Floating in the blue-black ooze was a tangle of debris: two seat cushions and a nest of electronic wiring from the helicopter, an album sleeve from an old Pat Boone record, a bloodied white-and-aqua football jersey, an Australian bush hat with a red emblem on the crown, and two dozen empty plastic shopping bags from Saks Fifth Avenue. Judging by the location of the slick, the helicopter had gone down in 450 feet of water. When the skies cleared, the Coast Guard sent two choppers of its own, but no more wreckage was found. A forensics expert from the Navy later reported to the Fuego One Task Force that no one could have survived the crash, and that there was virtually no chance of recovering any bodies. The water, he said, was full of lemon sharks.

 

Terrorist Believed Dead After Aerial Assault on Cruise Ship
.

Skip Wiley had been right. The wild saga of the Nordic
Princess
appeared in sixty-point type across the front page of the Miami Sun the next morning. Cab Mulcahy had been left with no choice, for Wiley had shrewdly selected the day of the week with the most anemic competition for news space—the President was giving a speech on abortion, a bus filled with pilgrims crashed in India, and a trained chimpanzee named Jake upchucked in the space shuttle. The sensational story of Las
Noches
got big play all over the country, and wound up on the front pages of the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal and
Constitution,
the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Philadelphia
Inquirer.
The version that appeared in the Miami Sun was the most detailed by far, though it made no mention of Wiley's role; Mulcahy was still trying to reach Al García to tell him.

Only one other newspaper devoted as much space to the Nordic Princess story as did the Sun, and that was the Tulsa Express. (Old Mack Dane had outdone himself, dictating thirty-eight breathtaking inches of copy to the national desk over a Coast Guardsman's marine-band radio.) As for the broadcast media, NBC had capitalized on its extra Orange Bowl manpower and diverted camera crews to the Port of Miami, Coast Guard headquarters, and Flagler Memorial Hospital. Heroes, victims, witnesses, and distant relatives flocked to the bright television lights, hoping to be interviewed by Jane Pauley or someone equally glamorous. By Sunday noon, much of the United States had heard or seen the story about killer snakes from the sky and the gang of South Florida crazies known as the Nights of December.

The chairman of the Orange Bowl Committee didn't know whether to laugh or blow his brains out. In the space of forty-eight hours at the apogee of the tourist season, homicidal lunatics had detonated a newspaper reporter and launched an aerial attack against a domestic ocean liner. That was the bad news. The good news was: the bastards were dead. The parade was saved.

At 8:30 A.M. on Sunday, December 30, a press conference was staged at the office of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce, in the hallowed room with the table shaped like a giant navel orange. Sitting around the table's upper hemisphere were the chairman of the Orange Bowl Committee (at the stem), then Sergeant Al García, Sparky Harper's successor at the Chamber of Commerce, the mayors of Miami and Dade County, the police chiefs of Miami and Dade County, and an officer from the Coast Guard, who wished he were someplace else. The lower half of the table was occupied by reporters and cameramen, including a crew from the CBS
Morning News
.

The Orange Bowl chairman stood up and spoke nervously into a microphone at a portable podium. He read from a prepared statement:

“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming on such short notice. At approximately 9:16 last night, the cruise ship SS
Nordic Princess
was accosted by an unmarked, unidentified helicopter off the coast of Miami Beach, Florida. At the time of the attack, the cruise ship was under lease to the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce as part of the Orange Bowl Jamboree festivities. As a result of hostile actions undertaken by occupants of the helicopter, more than three hundred persons were forced to abandon the ocean liner in an emergency Mayday. I am happy to report that all those passengers, including myself and several others in this room, were safely rescued. All of us wish to extend our heartfelt thanks to Commander Bob Smythe and the United States Coast Guard for their quick and decisive action.”

Commander Bob Smythe smiled wanly as a half-dozen motor-drive Nikons went off in his face. He couldn't wait for his transfer to Charleston to come through.