Black Sun: A Thriller (30 page)

“And what about you?” she asked, changing the subject. “Is there some gun-toting mercenary girl waiting for you out there?”

“Lots of them,” he said, as if it were an admission. “One in every port.”

She laughed, half hoping it was true. It sounded like a simpler arrangement “Good for you,” she said, as sincerely as he had earlier. “Now, how about telling me where we’re going?”

“Take a look out the window.”

Danielle turned and gazed through the curved glass. Beneath the plane she saw nothing but darkness; endless miles of unlit jungle and impassable terrain.

And then she caught sight of a flash. A fleeting glimpse of silver, as if someone had flipped over a giant mirror and then hidden it away.

She couldn’t say what it was. In fact she’d never seen anything like it before. It seemed to have come up through the trees.

She continued to stare into the darkness as the plane droned on, looking, searching. And finally she saw it again. This time it moved, traveling through the darkness like a snake in the grass. It slithered, disappeared,
and then reappeared, traveling with a calm precision that exactly matched the movements of the plane.

It took another sighting for her to realize what it was. She looked up. The full moon had risen to a spot almost directly above them. Its light was being reflected off a narrow river below.

“You’ve seen this before,” she said.

“Not here,” he said. “But on one of those long, quiet flights we were talking about.”

“You get shot down on that one?”

“No. Not that time.”

“Maybe that’s a good sign.”

Hawker laughed. “Better wake up Sleeping Beauty back there. He wouldn’t want to miss this.”

Danielle woke up McCarter and showed him what Hawker had found. They followed the river, which coincided nicely with the line McCarter had drawn. It snaked across the jungle to a series of small lakes arranged in a kind of offset pattern. One lake was on their left with the next one on the right, and the next one back on the left again.

She saw at least a dozen of them. From the air, with the moonlight reflecting off their surfaces, they really did look like a set of divine footprints.

“Incredible,” McCarter said.

“Not too shabby,” Hawker admitted. “Now, if we can just find one big enough to land on, we won’t have to crash in the jungle.”

H
awker’s statement provoked little alarm from either Danielle or McCarter, but as he stared down at the small lakes passing beneath them, Hawker began to sense a miscalculation on his part.

He’d guessed correctly that a small river winding through the jungle and a series of lakes or ponds would mark the silver path and the footsteps of the gods. He’d seen the same type of thing before in night flights over outlying terrain. If the moon was in the right place, its reflection would travel along the water as the aircraft moved, a silver marker leading the plane as if it were urging him to follow.

A brief look at McCarter’s map and the line he’d drawn showed it heading into the highlands where small streams joined together and meandered along. There were no major lakes depicted on the map, but Hawker knew that the terrain and its climate would mean intermittent lakes that came and went. With the rainy season having passed only a month before, Hawker guessed that some of the lakes would still be present, and when they’d been blocked from acquiring a helicopter, he’d figured that a float plane like the Renegade would do just fine.

This guess had turned out to be correct, but as Hawker studied the lakes in the moonlight he’d begun to worry that they were all too small.

He searched for forty minutes, flying in a zigzag pattern, looking for a larger body of water, but found none. As their fuel began to dwindle he knew they’d have to make do with the lakes they’d already seen.

He dropped the nose and swooped in over the two largest lakes. The first had a roughly circular shape, while the second was elongated and narrower. It offered more room to land but forced a crosswind landing and as Hawker flew its length with the landing lights on, he saw the remnants of drowned trees sticking out in places.

He pulled up and buzzed the first lake once again. They would have about a thousand feet to stop in, which wasn’t really enough, but at least he could make an approach into the wind.

“All right,” he said over the intercom. “Make sure your tray tables and seat backs are in the upright and locked position.”

Beside him Danielle checked her belt and put away the flashlight and the sectional map she’d been holding. McCarter woke Yuri and made sure he was strapped in while Hawker climbed five hundred feet, reduced power, and put the flaps down to full.

The Renegade slowed noticeably and Hawker had to use a lot of pressure to keep the nose up.

“How’s our fuel?” Danielle asked.

“Just about gone,” he said.

“We have enough for a go-around at least, right?”

He looked at the gauges. He didn’t think so, but he didn’t say anything.

“What if get down there and there are more trees?” she asked.

That was a concern, but trying to climb out and do it again would be more dangerous. At this point they were committed to landing, regardless of what they saw at the last second.

“There’s an old pilots’ saying,” he told her. “If you’re making an emergency landing at night, you wait till you’re a hundred feet above the ground and then you turn your landing light on. If you don’t like what you see, you turn it back off again.”

“There better not be trees down there,” she said.

“Don’t worry, there won’t be,” he said, hoping it was true.

Hawker brought the Renegade in slowly, keeping the nose up and using a bit of power in a technique devised for a short-field landing. He could barely see over the nose and was yawing the craft to the right so he could look ahead through the side window.

At a hundred feet he began to see the tops of the trees. They were reaching up toward him and the plane was sinking faster than he’d planned.

He nudged the throttle forward and the engine noise increased but the aircraft was still descending. He was too low now. The treetops were blocking his view. He saw nothing but branches and fronds catching the light.

Where the hell is the lake?

They needed to be a little higher. He bumped the throttle forward and pulled back on the column. The nose came up a bit and then the engine sputtered.

It didn’t die, but it was running rough.

“Hawker,” Danielle said.

He pushed the mixture to full rich and pumped the throttle, hoping to dump a little more gas into the cylinders. The stall horn began to whine, an annoying whistle. The engine sputtered loudly, shaking the plane.

He dipped the nose.

“Hawker!”

They caught the treetops, snapping a branch here and there and then crashing through a thicker strand.

Suddenly they were out over the water, dropping and hitting hard. The deceleration was sudden, whiplashing the passengers forward against their seat belts.

They came up off the water for a second and touched down again. The Renegade settled this time, cutting a white swath across the glassy surface of the lake.

“Hold on,” Hawker said.

“Why? We’re down,” Danielle said.

He looked over at her. How to explain it? “We don’t have any brakes.”

She looked up.

He did the same. The lake’s embankment was coming at them fast, at twenty or maybe thirty miles per hour. They were slowing marginally but they were not going to be able to stop.

Hawker braced himself and the Renegade slammed into the bank and skidded up onto it.

It stopped abruptly.

Leaning forward over her seat belt, Danielle looked over at him. Her thick brown hair had covered her face. With a puff of air she blew some of it back and then used her hands to pull the rest of it behind her ear.

“No brakes,” she said, looking anything but amused. “You got us a plane with no brakes.”

“It’s a float plane,” he said. “None of them have brakes. I guess maybe they have anchors or something. I don’t know. I never flew one before.”

“You took us up in a type of plane you never flew before, to a place you weren’t sure we would be able to land safely in?”

For some reason he found her anger amusing, endearing. “To be fair,” he said, “I actually
was sure
we’d be able to land safely, I just also happened to be wrong.”

She unbuckled her seat belt and popped the latch on her door, pushing it upward.

“Get me out of this contraption.” she said, grabbing the flashlight and climbing out onto the sloping embankment.

The seat popped forward and Yuri climbed through.

McCarter followed behind him. He clapped Hawker on the shoulder. “I hate to tell you, but this hasn’t done anything to assuage my fear of flying. Especially with you. But since I thought we were about to die, and we’re somehow still alive, I say ‘good landing.’”

Hawker stayed in his seat for a few minutes to shut the plane down. They weren’t going to be flying out of there, but the battery still had juice and the plane still had radios. Hawker guessed there was a chance they might need them.

He climbed out and shut the door.

The stars and moon were brilliant. They cast a fair amount of light around the edge of the lake. It was smaller than he thought, maybe seven hundred feet
across, with fifty-foot trees around its edges. It had been like trying to land on a runway with walls at each end.

It was a hell of a landing, all but impossible to pull off safely, yet they’d done it. He didn’t know whether to pat himself on the back or be surprised by their good luck.

Then his eyes turned to the tree line up ahead of them. He saw a flicker of light, white light first, from the beams of flashlights and then several glimpses of orange flames. A group of people were marching through the trees toward them, carrying flashlights and torches and who knew what else. And all Hawker could think of was the angry villagers coming out to seize Frankenstein.

D
anielle noticed the smell of smoke even before she saw the torchlight flickering in the forest ahead of them.

A moment of apprehension gripped her, but she didn’t share Hawker’s overriding suspiciousness of everything and she thought there could be a chance that meeting other people out here would be helpful. Certainly the men and women of Oco’s village had been fundamental to their initial success.

Still, she shielded Yuri by stepping in front of him as she waited for the oncoming party to reach them.

“I’m telling you,” Hawker said, “we should get out of here.”

“It’ll be all right,” she replied. “I’m almost
sure
of it.”

McCarter stood by expectantly. He turned on a flashlight and waved.

The train of torches changed direction, heading straight for them.

“There must be a town around here,” McCarter said. “If we’re looking for another Mayan ruin, the locals might know about it. There are hundreds of structures
hidden in the jungle, most never seen by outsiders. This could be a stroke of good luck.”

The torches grew closer, winding down a slight hill, until several men came through the brush and trained a series of powerful flashlights on the NRI group. The glare blinded Danielle and she put a hand up.

“Nos puede ayudar usted, por favor?”
she said. Can you help us, please?

The lights continued to shine in her eyes.

“Necesitamos ayuda,”
she said. We need help.

A rough voice answered her.
“Ponga los manos,”
the man said. Put up your hands.

And then she heard a sound that needed no translation: the pumping of a shotgun and the racking of the slides on several other guns.

Danielle raised her hands, trying hard not to look in Hawker’s direction.

In a minute they were surrounded by a group of eight men, several of whom had weapons. They were led by an older, shorter man with a full beard and mustache who carried a flashlight and a pistol.

While one of the men searched the plane, another took her backpack and McCarter’s. A third man patted them down and confiscated a black handgun from Hawker.

The man with the beard walked around them, making a wide, slow circle. He seemed to be studying them, at the moment focusing on Yuri. Finally he put his pistol away.

“What are you doing here, señorita?”

That, Danielle thought, she could not explain without sounding crazy.

“We crashed here,” she said. “My husband was trying to fly us over to Puerto Vallarta. But he forgot to check winds or to fill the tanks before we took off.”

The man came closer, looking into her face and then at her hands. “If he is your husband, then where is your ring?”

Before she could answer, he added. “And if you had not circled overhead for an hour, you could have easily made it to the coast. So I think maybe you have a different story to tell. No?”

Danielle felt a sense of fury at getting caught in the lie. It was a stupid lie, easy to see through. She wondered why she’d even thought it would work.

Hawker leaned over to her. “I told you we should have run.”

“Now is really not the time,” she said.

“I’m just pointing it out.”

“Point it out later,” she shot back.

The bearded man turned to the others. “Hmm … maybe they are married after all.”

The men laughed. And the leader stepped over to McCarter. He shone the light in McCarter’s face, studying him for a long time.

“Could you please lower the light?” McCarter said. “It’s hurting my eyes.”

The man turned the beam away, aiming it at Hawker’s face in a similar manner. Hawker squinted into the light as if it were some kind of challenge. He said nothing.

The man who’d gone to search the plane popped out of the cabin.
“Nada aquí,”
he said. Nothing here.

Another man had been going through their backpacks. He handed the satellite phone and the spherical, glasslike stone to the bearded man.