He felt Maddy’s hands on his shoulders and reached up to her, clutching the door frame. He hauled himself in and tumbled into the co-pilot’s seat on top of Maddy.
“Shut the door!” Hunt bellowed. Maddy pulled it closed and then Hunt yelled to Jayden.
“Remind me to get you a pair of those pilot wings they hand out to kids on the commercial airliners. You did good,” Hunt yelled.
“Flying’s for the birds, you know that?” Jayden said, sliding out of the pilot’s seat with a last adjustment to the control stick. He moved to the back seat and began firing a pistol from the window at the patrol boats, aiming for the engines, hoping to disable them without hurting anyone.
The first thing Hunt did was to glance at the altimeter: 500 feet. Not bad! Then he banked the plane left, toward the beach and the Cuban jungle beyond.
Chapter 34
Hunt found the seaplane to be eerily silent as he guided it through the air as an overweight, cumbersome glider. He couldn’t help but glance back through his window as he passed over the empty beach and a thick stand of jungle. The patrol boats cut power as they entered the shallow water fronting the beach, with no way to pursue their prey. Hunt knew they had radios, though, and cursed himself for not at least incapactitating the one on board the boat they had taken over.
A question from Jayden interrupted his thoughts. “This is a pretty lonely stretch of coast. What are the chances those police just happened to come across us?”
Hunt pulled up slightly on the stick before answering. “I put them conservatively at slim to none.”
“So Daedalus called the Cuban authorities?” Maddy asked from the back seat.
Hunt nodded. “I think so. They probably knew they could cause more trouble for us that way without having to do hardly anything themselves. But there’s something else, something about Atlantis.”
“There’s always something about Atlantis, isn’t there?” Jayden quipped.
Hunt went on. “Like Maddy showed us, this area does fit the raw physical description, when sea levels were lower. But there are no remnants of it left. So maybe Treasure, Inc. knew that already and that’s why they didn’t want to bother coming down here.”
“That would put them a step ahead of us in the search, though,” Maddy said, “and yet they didn’t know about the Bimini Road pyramid.”
“It’s not a linear search,” Maddy said. “It’s more like a tangled web, with dead-ends and loops all interconnected in a sprawling maze.”
Hunt eyed the jungle through the windshield, not seeing any break in the greenery. “Not to put a damper on the discussion, but this hunk of steel is not going to stay aloft forever with no gas, and so we need to figure out how to land this thing.”
“Not liking the landing options,” Jayden said, not mincing words as usual. Indeed, there was nothing but unbroken greenery in all directions except for behind them, where the ocean was rapidly receding from view.
“There’s something else I don’t like, even if we spotted a road we could land on.”
“A road we could land on sounds pretty good to me right about now,” Jayden said. “What wouldn’t you like about that?”
“Attracts too much attention. A candy apple red seaplane landing on the street in some small town? They’d know exactly where we landed.”
Jayden again turned to look out the window. “It’s all just jungle, except for the ocean behind us. And in front of us, as you can see a couple of miles or so away, there’s what I would call a big hill or a small mountain, also covered in jungle.”
“Mountain…” Maddy said, trailing off as if in thought. Then she mumbled something unintelligible and took the rolled-up Critias scroll from her backpack, hastily removing it from its plastic bag and unfurling it. “Wait a minute…”
“We don’t have a minute,” Hunt said glancing at the altimeter. They now flew at 250 feet and were losing altitude. “We’re losing the coastal updrafts that kept us aloft over the beach. I’m afraid it’s all downhill from here.”
Jayden looked out the window to his right, then behind them out Maddy’s window, then back through the windshield. Then he turned around again and saw the crumpled up parachute lying on the floor. “Hey Carter, you think that ‘chute will hold all three of us?”
Hunt pursed his lips in a grim line before replying, “Looks like it’s going to have to since I left my wingsuit at home. Get it ready.”
Jayden moved to the rear of the plane and began untangling the parachute. “Maddy, you gotta pack up your novel there, it’s time to go.”
“There should be another pyramid. That’s what I was missing! That’s what this is saying. Another big one.” She looked ahead through the windshield while Jayden shook his head as he fumbled with the unwieldly parachute in the confines of the plane.
Hunt turned the plane sharply to the left to avoid the looming mountain now filling the plane’s windshield. “150 feet and dropping,” he called out, eyeing the tops of the jungle canopy below. He could see the occasional tall palm tree poking out of the more ubiquitous leafy trees that made up the bulk of the canopy. It was a thick, wild forest, with absolutely no gaps through which the ground was visible; there was no possibility of landing the plane here.
And yet gravity was taking it down. There was no avoiding that. It was like a bad dream, Hunt thought, where you kept hoping you would wake up, except that it was all too real.
“Need that parachute, Jayden!”
“I got it sorted as ready as it can be. It’s going to be a little weird because I had to cut some of the cords to make the sea snchor, but it is what it is. We’ll need to bail out this door back here.”
“Is it ready?” Hunt glanced out the window at the treetops below, then to his altimeter: 100 feet. He pulled back on the stick and was relieved to see and feel the nose of the beleaguered aircraft incline slightly, buying them a bit more altitude. He was well aware that a parachute needed some height for it to be effective, and that it would be triple overloaded as it was.
“Ready!” Jayden called form the back.
“Maddy ready?” Hunt confirmed. He didn’t want to leave the controls of the plane a second earlier than he had to. But when she replied in the affirmative, he knew it was time. He turned the plane slightly to the left, away from the base of the mountain so that it would coast as long as possible over the jungle, hopefully crashing some distance away from where they landed. Then he clicked out of his seatbelt and jumped into the back with the others.
Jayden was sitting next to the open door, trees visible rushing by outside of it. The ‘chute was bunched up on the seat next to him, the paracord neatly laid out so as not to get tangled. He held the single harness in his hands and handed it off to Hunt. “You take the actual harness, and Maddy will hold on to you. I figure you two lovebirds would appreciate it.”
“What, in case we don’t make it!” Maddy nearly screamed, panic more than evident in her voice.
“We’ll make it if we go now.” Hunt fought to keep his voice level while gawking at the rapidly approaching forest outside the window. Jayden got into makeshift web of paracord fashioned into a crude harness while Hunt stepped into the original harness,
“I know it doesn’t inspire confidence, but it’s the best I could do for—”
“Great, let’s go!” Hunt said, grabbing the bundle of cord. Then he pulled Maddy to him and wrapped her arms around his midsection. “Hold on to me, Maddy, hard. Squeeze.” Then, to Jayden: “Go, go, go!”