Pilot Error (6 page)

Hardigan, arriving at the same conclusion, abandoned the laptop and moved to the gray metal filing cabinet instead. Slowly, methodically, he went through the drawers. In the bottom one he found a Pilot's Log Book, the pages of which held his interest for a good two minutes.

Dirk frowned. If Hardigan was smart enough to cross-reference the flight dates with her business ledger...

Despite appearances, when it came to her father's business Micki kept exemplary records. She carefully reported all expenses, no doubt including the Avgas purchased in Miami the times she had unknowingly trafficked inventory to Dirk's 'aunt's junk shop,' and no doubt including Dirk's payments to her for said deliveries. Those records could do a lot of damage to a person's credibility in court.

With the log book in hand, Hardigan moved back to the desk and skillfully slipped Micki's ledger from the bottom of the pile of paper clutter. As he began to match entries, Dirk ducked behind the tail fin and gritted his teeth. In the right hands, that ledger implicated Micki in a Federal crime. If convicted, she could face a two million dollar fine and a minimum sentence of five to ten.

Worse, in Hardigan's hands, it implicated him.

Risking another peek, Dirk watched the man move to the photocopy machine and duplicate several pages from the log book and the ledger. Holding them in his teeth as he returned both books to their places, Hardigan folded the copies and put them in the side pocket of the camera bag he dragged up onto Micki's chair. Then, slipping easily back into the role of sightseeing philanderer, he sat and picked up his discarded coffee cup.

Having seen enough, Dirk turned away. Reynolds needed to be warned that there was company coming, and told to hide the merchandise before it could be seen from the air.

Silently pushing away from the Mooney, Dirk pulled his phone from his pocket and headed back to his truck. It was time to get the hired help off their lazy butts, while he looked into possibly getting those photocopies back. While they may not be admissible in court, they were enough to get the local authorities sniffing about.

'Authorities' and 'sniffing' were two words Dirk did not like in the same sentence. Neither did his boss, Mr. Van Allen.

***

The aerial view of the Keys was one Micki never tired of seeing. The scattered islands were like a necklace of deep green jewels spilled across the clear azure blue ocean. Airborne and leveled off at one thousand feet, they headed out over the Atlantic toward West Turtle Shoal, giving Tim Lewis' charter boat a friendly buzz as it crossed Hawk Channel for open sea, and allowing Luke to photograph the coral flats and shallow aquamarine water closer to the shoreline. In the wide stretches of ocean they caught glimpses of dolphins at play, while just past the scuba area at Coffins Patch they found a cluster of fishing boats anchored in anticipation of the deep sea angling at the edge of the Continental Shelf.

Keeping one eye on her flying and the other on her passenger, Micki watched Luke click off a half dozen digital photos as they banked around and headed for the lower keys. Reaching behind, she spared a pat for Fizz, who relaxed in one of the rear seats of the four-seater Cessna, strapped into a harness made especially for him.

The route was one she knew by heart, having flown it a couple of hundred times. It dictated that they follow the Intercoastal Waterway down as far as Sugarloaf Key before turning for home again, staying well clear of both the Naval Air Station at Boca Chica and Key West International Airport. It was on the return trip to Marathon that she made a slight deviation from normal, flying due north out over the warm Gulf waters and the profuse sprinkling of tiny islands off Big Pine Key that so interested Luke Hardigan.

As they reached the area, his body language changed from casual tourist to intent observer. Curiosity roused, Micki watched him delve into the camera bag at his feet and bring out the heavy artillery; a telephoto zoom lens that was a foot long if it was an inch. That struck her as odd. True, her own photographic expertise was limited to point-n-click vacation snapshots, but surely wide angle panoramas of the ocean and islands were more picturesque—more marketable—than the sort of extreme close-ups of palm trees he was going to get with that monster lens.

As if sensing her attention, he half-turned to her and motioned that he would like to drop closer to the islands below them. Switching to the internal intercom so that she could hear him over the drone of the plane's single engine, she asked for clarification. "What?"

Luke spoke into the small microphone slung on the end of his headset's flexible arm. "Closer. I want to get a closer look. Take us down lower."

"Why?" The question was out of Micki's mouth before she even thought about the consequences.

He gave her that condescending grin she was beginning to hate. "Because I'm the paying customer and I'm telling you to."

Micki's jaw tightened. Paying customer or not, this man was really starting to get to her, and instinct rather than business sense kicked in.

"Whatever you say, Yank." She shoved the control yoke forward to pitch the nose down with a vengeance. The engine revved higher as they lost altitude and gained airspeed very quickly.

Luke swore, dropping everything and hanging on for dear life as their normally split view of ocean and sky became a window filled with nothing but blue-green water coming up to meet them. Fast. Even Fizz raised his head to protest the move.

Completely in control of her aircraft, Micki eased back and, with a wicked grin, set them straight and level again at five hundred feet.

Slowly, Luke pried his fingers out of the dash. "What the hell did you do that for?"

"Do what?" Micki looked suitably innocent of any deliberate wrongdoing. "You said lower, I got us lower." Unable to resist one last shot, her grin matched his earlier one. "I thought a hotshot like you would be used to pulling a few negative g's. Guess I was wrong about that, huh?"

Snorting eloquently, Luke plucked his digital camera out of his lap, but instead of pointing it out the window again, he exchanged it for something else in the camera bag at his feet. No one was more surprised than Micki when the 'something else' turned out to be a high-powered pair of black rubber binoculars—the kind she would have expected to see
Rambo
use.

Luke began to scan the lush greenery beneath them with the air of a man driven by a purpose that wasn't photographic. He had dropped his 'photographer' act when he'd dropped the camera, and was now well into a little spying.

Micki looked out her window to see if she could determine what had claimed Luke's attention. All she saw was a weathered fishing shanty with a red-hulled speedboat moored on the beach before it. What was so interesting about that?

She was considering asking the question aloud, when Luke said curtly, "Circle around that. I want a closer look." With an annoyed glance, he added, "Without any aerobatics, all right?"

Biting down on what she wanted to say, Micki complied with his wishes, taking them about the island again and skimming low past the shanty. It was constructed on poles to protect it from storm surges; a common precaution in the Florida Keys.

"Nice boat," she said across the intercom as Luke raised his camera again and clicked off several shots. It was an observation that quickly drew a frown. Now that she thought about it, the sleek, powerful boat didn't fit the profile of the local fishermen who usually inhabited such places on overnight fishing trips. Neither did the angry man who erupted onto the beach at their low-level pass. His words were lost to distance and the roar of the engine, but the meaning of his gestures were clear; get lost, and fast.

Micki slanted a glance at her passenger, who was still snapping photos with his monster lens. "I don't think he wants his picture taken, Yank." Her lips twitched into a smile. "Maybe he thinks you're trying to horn in on his favorite fishing spot."

"Maybe." Luke's tone was dry and gave nothing away as he exchanged the camera for the binoculars again. He waved toward their previous course. "Let's go on."

Now why didn't that surprise her? The guy antagonizes the locals and then says, 'let's go on,' like it was no skin off his nose. Tourists. Someday, she was going to end up strangling one of them, and Luke Hardigan just may be the one with whom she started.

Clamping down hard on her irritation, she brought them back on course. Luke returned to his snooping, peering down at the islands with meticulous attention. Just what he was snooping for was a mystery Micki puzzled as she flew them toward the outer keys. An old fishing shanty or two didn't seem worth the effort of all that attention, but she decided that she really didn't want to take the time to figure it out. Like he said, he was the paying customer, and as long as he fronted with the money then he could hang by his toes from the undercarriage for all she cared.

Greenery flashed beneath them. These smaller keys were basically sandbars and mangrove swamps, untouched by all but the few adventurous souls who boated in for camping and fishing expeditions. Inaccessibility and the lack of fresh water kept both the land developers and the squatters away, which was exactly the reason why the Coast Guard had started using the area for training purposes. In other words, they were boring.

Seeking distraction, Micki nodded at the window beyond Luke's shoulder and said, "Look down there."

When he did, she rolled them into a tight forty-degree turn, banking on a dime so that they were looking 'down' the window instead of 'out' of it. At an altitude of five hundred feet, it was a good imitation of what it felt like to be water spiraling down a drain.

About half a mile offshore, a submerged orange-brown blob stood out against the shallow sandy bottom. "It's a downed helicopter," she volunteered. "We had a Coast Guard accident here a few days ago."

Micki immediately regretted having drawn this outsider's attention to the place where Razor had died. It was too personal, somehow. Too private.

It had been a routine SAR—Search and Rescue—training exercise, the inclement weather that kept most of Marathon's other vessels in port only adding a sense of realism to the drill. Ensign Ray 'Razor' McNally had drowned when the MH-65D Dolphin helicopter he was flying plunged into the ocean without warning. According to Tex and Padre, the preliminary report read that they were 'in a hover twenty-two feet above the surface and had just deployed the basket, when Ensign McNally jerked the stick forward and to port for no apparent reason.' The result was a descending turn that dumped them into the Gulf of Mexico. Of the crewmen onboard, and the two in the water as part of the simulation, Razor was the only one who hadn't made it.

Gazing down at the helo submerged in the brilliance of sun-sparkled water made it all too real. Micki didn't believe it was 'pilot error,' that Razor had 'screwed the pooch,' but now, looking at the crash site, she was hit again with the gut-wrenching reality that one of her best friends was indeed dead.

Luke gave her an unfriendly look. A quiet, smoldering intensity replaced all trace of the cocky, flirting tourist. This time he looked away first, raising the binoculars to his eyes without uttering a word.

Unsettled, Micki followed his lead and flew in silence for several long moments. Finally, as they rounded the mangrove-treed point of a peninsula shaped like a 'J', she found herself joining him in scanning the vegetation below, looking for... what?

Traversing the short distance over water from one island to the next, she studied her 'paying customer' in a sidelong glance. He now had his Smartphone out, and was pinching the screen to zoom in on the tiny area map it displayed. There was a red digital map pin already marking the location of the submerged helo. Maybe that had something to do with his desire to see this little-traveled portion of the Keys; morbid curiosity.

Annoyed on several levels, Micki was just about to offer a curt reprimand for using his phone in the aircraft and its possible interference with her avionics, when he promptly tapped in another digital pin to mark the GPS coordinates of the fishing shanty as well.

What the hell?

Luke pocketed his phone, completely unaware of her disapproving scowl.

Despite her plan to stay coolly uninterested, Luke 'Mystery Man' Hardigan still managed to get to her. Even when he was ignoring her.

"Just what are we really doing out—?" Before Micki could even get the question out, something off the starboard wingtip seized Luke's attention.

She dipped a wing and, following his line of sight, caught a glimpse of several red-hulled speedboats beached on the sandy shore of the small key they were over. A number of large crates sat on the sand beside the boats, as if someone was moving in. Or out. There was a flash of movement in the dense foliage and Micki caught a glimpse of a blockhouse structure that was significantly more elaborate than the dilapidated shanties found dotted amongst the islands. She watched in amazement as the movement became three men who burst onto the beach, lifted what looked like machine guns, and opened fire.

It took her three stunned seconds before she could accept what her eyes were telling her. They were shooting! They were shooting at her!

A trail of bullets skipped across the nose of her aircraft like pebbles thrown by a mischievous child. But they did far more damage than pebbles, drilling neatly spaced holes through the pristine sheen of her most prized possession. Black 'blood' began streaking from the wounds, flung backward along the side of the polished white fuselage.