After a day of rest at the hotel, maybe a little senorita overnight, he would fly his own plane to Birmingham the next day for another hero’s welcome — and a $5 million payday. A yacht. Yes, a yacht would look good parked next to their condo in Orange Beach. He would go to Miami next week and make a down payment on a 53-footer. Once the purchase was sealed, he would make a house call on a former augmentation client — to perform an important post-op examination, of course. That client, and many, many others, inspired the name with which he would christen his new yacht: Two for the Show.
A sudden whoomm on his right startled him. He studied the eastern horizon but saw nothing but ghostly clouds overhead — no lighting flash. He held his gaze and strained his eyes for several seconds. Nothing. He wished this airplane, expendable or not, had weather radar in it and cursed the cheap screw narcotrafficales for not getting him a suitable plane for a long, overwater flight. Instead they had put him in this rattle-trap to save overhead dollars. He checked the INS and noted he was making 265 knots ground. The wind must have shifted to the east. And, for the umpteenth time tonight, he checked the fuel, doing a mental time-distance calculation.
What was that? he thought. A bird? Did I hit a bird? The airplane hadn’t twitched, so he reasoned it may have been an engine surge… but all seemed normal. There were no indicator lights. He shifted in his seat uncomfortably, wishing he had a blow right now, and turned his thoughts back to Miami.
Suddenly, he flinched as if electrically jolted by loud pops coming from the right engine. Wheeler let out an involuntary Fuck me! as the airplane rolled hard right and the right engine, mere feet away, exploded into flame. Oh, God, please! he cried, instinctively pulling the airplane left and up, away from the water below. Red and yellow lights flared on the instrument panel, and the annunciator bleated shrill warnings of danger. He pushed the throttles forward and felt heavy vibration from the right side, so he retarded the right throttle to idle and fed left rudder to stay balanced. He was already passing 1,000 feet, hyperventilating, and was nearly paralyzed with fear at the persistent flames coming from the right engine nacelle. Whimpering in confusion, he noted airspeed rapidly passing through 120 knots. Don’t stall the damn thing! He let out another involuntary sound as he pushed the yoke down.
His heart pounded as his hand lifted the right throttle around the detent to shut down the engine. Mayday! he cried without thinking, then realized he was truly alone over the invisible sea, the nearest land over 100 miles away. Should he turn right to Cuba? Left to Mexico? He hit the right engine fire light, which mercifully doused the flames, and turned the yoke easy left. What the fuck? Still breathing hard through his mouth, his eyes went to the RPM gauge in an attempt to identify why the right engine had burst into flame. He was in a positive climb — even a shallow 100 foot per minute rate of climb was welcome — and he calmed down enough to think about a divert into Cancun. As he rifled through the maps to find the low altitude chart and dial up Cancun’s VOR/DME, he made a decision. This was it, no more trips to South America, ever.
With a deafening series of staccato hammer blows, the right side of the cockpit erupted into fragments. As the instrument panel exploded in front of him, Wheeler drew his hands and arms in by reflex to defend himself from the flying debris. The windscreen shattered, then caved in from the airspeed. Wheeler was conscious of only three things: the rubbish and forced air swirling about him, the loud roar of the left engine permeating the cockpit, and the fact he was crying out in terrified shock.
Bullets? Is someone shooting at me? Why? Who? Mexicans? Cubans? Out here, at this hour? Then, without warning Wheeler was slammed against the left side of the cockpit with more force than he had ever experienced. A metallic wrenching sound accompanied a violent roll right, and he realized he was upside down and still rolling. An aileron roll in a King Air! His control inputs were powerless to stop it, and sensing flames again, he began to scream, Please, God, no! This can’t be happening! Watching the altimeter unwind, not knowing what caused it, not knowing what to do, Wheeler feared the unspeakable. Not now! Not here!
Pinned as he was amid the churning chaos, Wheeler’s charmed life flashed before his eyes. Brian, his childhood best friend, smiling at him, hair flowing behind as they rode their sting-ray bikes down a steep hill. Tammy’s loving brown eyes looking up as they walked hand-in-hand to her dorm. A group of med school classmates laughing as he told a joke at the pub near the hospital. A beaming five-year-old Cullen running up to him as he got out of his car after a day at the clinic. Sitting in the church pew during Easter Sunday services, looking up at his mother — his beautiful young mother in a smart suit, her smooth skin and dark hair in its sixties flip highlighted under a pillbox hat. Her red lips forming a tender smile as she took his hand. “God loves you, Leighton.”
The King Air, one wing gone, corkscrewed through the darkness in a near vertical dive. Trapped by the force of it, Doctor Leighton Wheeler, tears pushed back toward his temples, was filled with regret.
“I’m sorry, God,” he shouted with eyes closed. “I’m sorry.” He cracked open his eyes in time to see the yellow light from his burning plane reflected on the surface of the Caribbean as it rushed up to meet him.
Part I
Just say no.
CHAPTER 1
In his summer white uniform Jim Wilson, Commanding Officer of the VFA-16 Firebirds, walked briskly through the hangar bay to the fantail. He carried a small overnight bag and was happy to be getting off the ship.
St. Thomas! How many years had it been? Fourteen, he figured. The view of the island through the El 4 opening brought back the excitement he had experienced as a JO at this, his first “foreign” port. The island jutted out of the blue Caribbean, lush and green. The mountaintops were dotted with homes, and brilliantly lit soft cumulus clouds hovered above them in the late afternoon sky.
Join the Navy and see the world. Exotic and tropical, St. Thomas was one of the nicer ports the Navy visited.
Navy ships, however, rarely called on St. Thomas or any of the Virgin Islands. And since the late 90s, when Wilson was here as a new-guy — a “nugget”—it had become rarer still for a carrier to “drop the hook” in the roadstead. During that time, the demise of the Atlantic Fleet Weapons Training Facility had been precipitated by a fatal live-fire training accident — one that involved a civilian target range worker on the nearby island of Vieques. The lives of the naval aviators who crashed in these waters during their training over the years were seldom given a second thought by the press or by the people of the United States, the stories typically buried on page six as events involving a “routine training mission,” the aircrew “not identified pending notification of next of kin.” Yet, public pressure about this one civilian death had caused the Navy to withdraw, and with the inability to use Vieques for training, the Navy had stopped coming to the region. The result was a second-order effect that dawned on the local populace too late: the Navy also closed the massive training base of Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico.