White Death (16 page)

“Welcome to Barranquilla” proclaimed the airport greeting in English and Spanish. My carry-on luggage consisted of water
bottles and peanuts. If the Confederate army survived the 1863 siege at Vicksburg on fresh water and peanuts, I could reach Florida. Oh yeah, and the rinsed-out jars. Soon, I spotted Juan and another man, still carrying the “Sixkiller” sign. We drove west to the private strip where a truck was waiting with two men guarding it. They ambled off to watch from the shade.

“How much is in the truck, Juan?”

“About two-hundred-and-four kilos or four-hundred-and-fifty gringo pounds. I brought the scale because I know you worry about weight.”

I was watching the sky as we loaded the plane. It was clear and unbearably hot and humid – so humid that visibility was down to only five or six miles in the haze. Two of the three ingredients for thunderstorms were present. Hot air over warm water is inherently unstable. Hopefully, no trigger was waiting to cause the air to rise rapidly and form thunderstorms. Orographic lifting is out because the sea is flat, but a frontal boundary could provide the necessary lifting for storms, colder air sliding under hot air. I weighed and loaded the cargo with the able help from Juan and his assistant. Finally, we put the tarp over the load. I asked them to stay with me a few more minutes while I performed the plane preflight, which gave me an idea.

“Juan, I saw a pay phone off the main road here. How much does it cost to phone Barranquilla?”

“About fifteen cents or twelve-hundred pesos.”

“Can you give me twelve-hundred pesos to keep in the plane if I need to call after you leave today or some other day?”

“Sure.”

Handing him a pen and paper, “Write down the office phone in case of an emergency. Thirty kilometers is a long walk.”

I gave him a dollar in exchange for the coins and number. Juan was not trained to be security conscious. He wouldn’t know that my knowledge of Barranquilla operations was limited to him and this truck.

After taking off, I followed the usual route. This time, however, I did not stay low and climbed to ninety-five-hundred feet, an illegal altitude, but so what? The entire trip was illegal. The altitude did three things for me. It guaranteed me five-hundred feet of vertical separation from anyone flying legally out here. It vastly improved my ability to use ground-based navigation equipment. Finally, it gave me a better chance of seeing and avoiding thunderstorms.

I was able to track the twelve degrees radial off the Barranquilla vortac further this time. At ninety-five-hundred feet the wind was pushing me to the east, so I steered due north to maintain my position on the radial, a twelve-degree correction. The high altitude allowed me to monitor center frequencies intended primarily for commercial traffic. They would issue extreme-weather alerts if necessary. Finally, I listened to the Kingston vortac, which had recorded weather. The time passed, and I was content with this new plan, too content.

“Attention all aircraft, Center Weather Advisory three Charlie, level-four and level-five thunderstorms, moving northwest to southeast at thirty-five knots in lines from Kingston, Jamaica to Santiago, Cuba, tops to forty-five-thousand feet, hail to two inches possible, wind gusts to seventy knots.”

Damn! The mountains in Cuba and Jamaica, not some cold front, caused the orographic lifting! To the west, the distant sky appeared black with tinges of green.
Think fast, Jake. Storms like this chew up and spit out small planes. Haiti. I’ll climb to eleven-thousand feet and cut right across western Haiti to outflank the lines
.
Center says the storms are moving at thirty-five knots, and I can coax about a hundred-and-sixty knots out of her at that altitude
.

I shoved the throttle and prop forward and leaned the engine out to twenty-five degrees rich of peak exhaust gas temperature.

Question: What is my relative angle to the storm lines?
I turned right to a heading of fifty degrees, probably too much. Next, I tuned in a low-powered, non-directional beacon in western Haiti.
I was greeted with the sound of lightning instead of Morse code and quickly turned off the receiver. These beacons use the same frequencies as the AM radios found in most cars, rendering them useless in storms. The storms appeared to be growing or moving faster than thirty-five knots. Despite doing everything right, I seemed to be losing. At two miles high, Haiti should have been coming into view, despite the haze. I could see the coast at my 12 o’clock, but there was no time to congratulate myself.

“Unidentified aircraft over Haitian airspace heading fifty degrees; identify yourself or we will intercept you.”

Screwed. Buy time. Lie. Say I’m sorry. I did not want to be intercepted by some World War II fighter with real guns.

“Port-au-Prince Center, this is a Cessna 310, squawking 7700 (emergency), at eleven-thousand feet trying to outflank these storms. We apologize.”

In heavily accented English came the request: “Say tail number and intentions.”

I just invented a tail number with a U.S. country code and a mix of five letters and numbers, adding that our destination is Nassau.

“We don’t have a strip (flight plan) for your aircraft.”

“Manley (Jamaica) gave me vectors east for weather, and they just released me. They’re probably overworked.”

“Cessna 310, proceed as filed.”

“310 roger.”

If they had sent up an interceptor and seen a single-engine Piper instead of a twin-engine Cessna, I would have been forced down or shot down. I’m not sure which was worse. Papa “Doc” Duvalier and his Tontons Macoutes were legendary for their violence and extreme torture methods. No pilot of a plane loaded with drugs would leave Haiti alive.

Watching the north coast of Haiti slide under me, I realized how much I had overcorrected. No wonder the Port-au-Prince voice sounded so clear. The Ile de La Tortue lay directly in front
of me, about thirty-five miles east of Haiti’s western tip. After turning left to a heading of three-hundred-fifteen degrees, I tried the non-directional beacon at Matthew Town. It rewarded me with Morse code and only a few crackles of lightning. Once clear of Haitian airspace, I shut off the transponder and dropped like a stone from eleven-thousand feet to two-hundred, where they could not see me.

Later, I climbed back to the traffic pattern altitude of one-thousand feet for the airport, the storms and Haiti lay behind me. But I had a slight tremble in my hands, probably from too much coffee. I saw one of the boys watching me set up to land. What did he plan for those hundred dollars?

“Glad to see you back so soon,” said the fixed base operator. “Where’s your partner?”

“Oh him. I pushed him out of the plane an hour ago for talking too much.” While not very funny, he enjoyed the only joke he might hear that day.

“I’m Rupert Nevis. What shall I call you?”

“James. Pleased to meet you officially.”

The line boy burst into the office and said, “It took seventy-eight gallons, Mr. Nevis.” He gave me a long stare. I nodded my head.

“Well, at $2.44 per gallon, the total is one-hundred-ninety dollars plus a bottle of soda on the house. I’m sorry about the high price of avgas. The price would be higher if Morton Salt didn’t come in regularly. You know how islands are. If we don’t make it here, somebody has to import it, for a price.”

I thanked Rupert for his hospitality, used the rest room, and grabbed a cola. I also called the pickup team. The line boy got his hundred-dollar fee for outstanding service, but I still visually checked the fuel and made sure the caps were screwed on tight. The air temperature and humidity had dropped a little, so visibility on the final leg would be much better.

After departure, I began ruminating over James who
answered the phone. He was surly about my being late. I explained briefly, with Rupert no doubt listening, it was a weather delay. He ended the call with, “Hurry the fuck up because I don’t like long rides, I don’t like Latinos, and I don’t like standing here holding my dick because you had to run around a few raindrops.”

So, he’s another jerk having a bad day. At least I had some beautiful scenery on the way to Valkaria airport. From the extreme northwestern tip of Great Abaco, Grand Bahama lay off my left wing. The islands looked gorgeous in the setting sun.

At two-hundred feet and a hundred-and-forty knots, the barrier islands off the Florida coast slipped rapidly under me. I slowed up to make right traffic for runway 9. Later, I congratulated myself for a pretty landing after a jarring day. How odd that pilot skill seems measured by the landing. Despite having responsibility for many complicated tasks, the sideways look from another pilot is most likely to come because of a substandard landing. Down to business. I taxied to the truck.

Rodrigo and James waited. I greeted them both and called James
tocayo
, ignoring his bad phone manners.

“I ain’t nobody’s motherfucking
tocayo
. You can take that Spanish shit and shove it up your ass.”

Rodrigo piped up, “It’s not an insult. Relax.”

“I don’t have to like any of you white people or Latinos. I have to work with you because the boss said so.”

“I guess you don’t like Indians either.”

“I don’t like any of you motherfuckers who have never suffered the kind of oppression black people endured.”

Stirring the pot some more, I said, “You blacks don’t know anything about oppression; most of you survived slavery. Until 1890, the white government of this country starved, moved, and exterminated as many Indians as possible. All of the so-called Indian wars and relocations at the end of a bayonet reduced a pre-Columbus population of twenty-two million to one-million
in two hundred years. Genocide was U.S. policy.”

“I wasn’t born then.”

“Well my grandparents were, and they were beaten if caught speaking their own language in school.”

“I work for a black man, an important black man, who wants to make sure these loads go where they’re supposed to, not stolen along the way. A lot of shit can happen between central Florida and D.C.”

“If Marcus Sterling and your boss thought I was a crook, would they let me fly off alone with a fortune in drugs?”

“I don’t get paid to second guess Marcus and Tyrone.”

His name, Tyrone, the D.C. connection. A slip because he’s upset
.

“You know, James. I landed here willing to overlook the rude crap you gave me over the telephone. But you had to start slinging mud again. I don’t take shit from some ignorant truck driver whose only job is to babysit.”

James screamed something and charged directly at me. I stood like I wasn’t going to move; behind me was the truck door. At the last moment, I hopped to my right, dropped down and turned away from him so both hands were on the ground with my right knee in between them against my chest. The left leg shot out and sent him headfirst into the truck door. When he started to get up, I hit him with a roundhouse kick to his neck. He was out. I turned to Rodrigo and said, “Let’s unload the plane.”

Uh oh, I thought. He’s up and still wants to fight
. I stepped over to him and hit him with a left uppercut so hard I could hear the jaw dislocate and teeth shatter from the impact. He never moved, and we loaded the truck. Later, he was semiconscious as I buckled the seatbelt around his waist. Rodrigo regarded me oddly.

“I don’t want him to get hurt in a crash,” I replied to the unasked question.

We swept out the Comanche and secured it. Having found the keys to the same ’67 Chevy, I was preparing to leave when
Rodrigo walked over.

“I will tell my boss James started the fight, and I overheard the phone call. Maybe better if you had killed him. He is a dangerous man, and now he is your enemy. He will try to kill you someday.”

“Rodrigo, I appreciate you’ll tell the truth about this, and I promise to watch my back.”

Developments

At the first 7-Eleven along the road, I stopped for a big cup of ice water for my aching hand. Hatred for racism clouded my judgment, but I learned something useful. Hopefully, except for adding another enemy to a growing list, no damage was done to my relationship with Sterling. He will bring up the incident with me. In addition to the telephone number in Barranquilla, I had the first name on a short list of suspects in D.C.

The ice helped, and the drive to Miami did not seem to take so long, perhaps because it was more familiar now. I needed to talk to Ray or Roy, but it was after 9:00 p.m. when I parked in the driveway. Tomorrow will be soon enough.

Jamie was waiting inside with a big hug and a kiss to the forehead.

“Your hand is swollen,” said the surprised and slightly accusatory voice.

“The black racist who meets me to unload the plane attacked me.” I told her the story, including the two pieces of good news. She seemed a little subdued.

“James, let’s sit and talk.”

I climbed into the Lazy-Boy and she sat on the sofa next to me.

“This sounds important,” I said.

“I suppose it is,” she replied. “You’re more than a friend to me. I am so attracted to you – emotionally and physically. If you
asked me for sex, I would be in the bedroom and naked before you could clear the door jamb.”

I laughed.

Pouting, Jamie said, “Now you’re making fun of me.”

“No,” I lied. “It’s a wonderfully clear summary. What an image!”

“I’m no home wrecker. Giving you a partially naked massage last week was wrong and selfish. It is so hard to accept there is something you want badly, but can never have. I tell you this because I love you. At first, I wanted a casual affair with a pleasant man staying in my house. That changed, however, as we worked together and my respect and admiration for you evolved. I realized that I had something valuable that I have never had before, a real friendship with a wonderful man who also shares my views on law enforcement as a unique brand of public service. Most outsiders don’t understand our world. For me, this is a rare and important relationship, and I do not want a sexual undercurrent to damage the friendship.”

She paused, then continued. “Respect for you will keep my lust in check. Please don’t think any less of me. Also, it’s not fair to Karen. I like the way your voice softens when you talk to her, and you’re not afraid to say ‘I love you’ to her in front of another person. That is precious, and I’ll do my part to support your marriage. Sometimes I think, ‘Why couldn’t he be a jerk like most men I know?’ You know, one-dimensional. I get along fine with them. They put that requirement in my job description. I have never been attracted to an adult, male friend. How about you?”