“It sounds like you’re saying ‘pretty good’ should be enough for me?” The words came out as if she were challenging him, but she hadn’t meant them to sound that way.
“I’m saying I’d settle for half decent and no one trying to kill me.”
“And what if I don’t want to settle at all?”
“Then maybe it’s not leaving that made you feel guilty,” he said. “Maybe it was wanting to leave in the first place.”
His words hit close to the mark, closer than she’d been able to get on her own. Prior to Moore’s call for help there’d been no reason for her to go anywhere, but in a way she’d already begun to feel trapped. Had she just run to the NRI to escape that? Based on some glamorous selective memory of how good life had been there? Maybe Hawker was right: Maybe she was throwing away a chance at happiness, whether it was with Marcus or someone else. She wasn’t sure, but suddenly she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
“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.”
CHAPTER 46
Hawker’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.