“Hey, you guys! Wake up! There’s trouble!”
The other two came around slowly at first, but then awoke all at once when they realized their situation. They thrashed around in panic.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said an unfamiliar voice. “That line will slice you to ribbons.”
A stranger walked into the room from the kitchen and sat on the couch. He was wiry and casual, sitting there with a leg crossed, reading a Tampa Tribune. On the front of the newspaper the thieves saw a big headline, “Keys Killer Sought,” and a large photo that matched the man holding the paper.
“Who are you?” said the first thief. Then he stopped and studied the stranger. Something familiar. “Hey-you’re that guy we jumped last night coming out of the warehouse.”
Serge set the paper down. He leaned forward on the edge of the sofa cushion and spoke softly. “Where’s my money?”
“What money?”
Serge reached around the side of the couch and slid a toolbox into view. He opened it and removed a pneumatic staple gun.
“Oh, that money. We don’t have it anymore. Some guy took it.”
Serge’s voice was understated: “Where’s my money?”
“I told you, we don’t know where it is.”
Serge didn’t say a word. He got down on the floor and sat cross-legged next to the men.
“What are you going to do to us?”
Serge raised a single finger to his lips for them to be quiet. Slowly and with deliberate theatrics, he removed items from the toolbox and set them on the floor. The men lifted their heads the best they could to get a better look. A roll of metal wire, tubes of commercial solvents and epoxies, arsenical soap, gauze, highly elastic putty, steel wool and quick-dissolve surgical suture. The three faces went white. One of the thieves fainted, and his head hit the wooden floor with the clack of a billiard break.
Serge went into the kitchen and came back with two buckets and a large plastic mat, which he unrolled on the floor. He turned on a small electric air compressor.
Serge went to work with diligence, industry and master craftsmanship. Before the hour had passed, Serge had been told every single detail the thieves could remember about the money, and a few more they made up. Serge knew they weren’t holding back. But it was too late; nothing could stop him once he was into one of his hobbies.
“Ever been to Ocklawaha?” Serge asked as he turned off the compressor.
Wide stares in response.
“You haven’t? You don’t know what you’re missing-gotta go sometime. It’s just up the road a ways between Orlando and Ocala. Famous four-hour shootout. That’s where Hoover ’s G-men finally tracked down the notorious Ma Barker Gang. They raided their empty hideout in Chicago and found a map of Florida with Lake Weir circled. On January sixteenth, 1935, they surrounded the house. A two-story antique wooden place with a traditional cracker porch. It was a crime in itself that they put three thousand bullets in it. Afterward, they found Fred Barker and Machine Gun Kate dead, and the locals later sold postcards showing their bodies at the morgue.”
The car thieves continued staring in blank terror as Serge put down a tube of epoxy and picked up the staple gun. “What?” said Serge. “None of this registers? And you call yourselves criminals?”
Serge sighed in disappointment as he made a deft cross-stitch with the suture. “What about Giuseppe Zangara? Ring any bells?”
Still nothing.
Serge threw up his arms. “If we can’t remember our own history, what kind of state will we have to live in?”
He began rubbing with the arsenical soap. “Okay, but I’m only going to go through this once, so listen up. It was 1933, the place: Miami. Zangara was an unemployed bricklayer who had a chronic stomachache that he blamed on capitalism. To me, it sounds like he had some other problems, if you get my drift. Anyway, on Monday, February thirteenth, Giuseppe buys a pistol in a pawnshop. He’s just about to leave for Washington to shoot Hoover when he hears FDR is planning to visit Florida, so he decides to save gas money. President-elect Roosevelt is giving a speech in Miami ’s Bayfront Park. Giuseppe is only five feet tall, and he gets a chair to stand on. Suddenly he yells, ‘Too many people are starving to death,’ and opens fire. But he picked a crappy chair to stand on, and it wobbled. He missed Roosevelt and hit five other people, mortally wounding Chicago mayor Anton Cermak…”
Serge made a final suture stitch and sat back to admire. “There!” he said, and smiled proudly at the three men, seeking approval.
Four hours later, the trio lay on the floor, quiet, still alive for a little while longer. Three disbelieving mouths frozen open.
One of the thieves had a late resurgence of survival instinct, and he began to twitch on the floor.
“See, now you’re wiggling around! Ruining all my work!” Serge let out a frustrated sigh and picked up the staple gun again.
7
On July 27, 1943, in a small tavern in Bryan, Texas, a group of English and American pilots sat around the tables knocking back drafts in tall, cold mugs and talking about the approaching hurricane. Someone suggested evacuating the AT-6 Texan trainers because the planes were so delicate. A few of the pilots had flown heavier planes in combat-Spitfires, Corsairs, Helldivers-and the discussion turned into a trashing of the little Texan.
Many of them had a good laugh, but not Major Joe Duckworth. The Texan was his plane, and he said the AT-6 was good enough to fly right through the middle of the hurricane.
He had just walked into the ambush of the barroom dare.
As the storm approached, the only navigator on the airbase was Ralph O’Hair, and he soon found himself sitting behind Duckworth in the tiny single-propeller plane as they took off from southeast Texas and into the Gulf of Mexico. They rose to five thousand feet. Just off the coast the sky darkened, and the lashing rain drummed the metal fuselage like they were in a kettle. The plane rocked and vibrated, and there was less and less light outside the cockpit until it was completely black. The men became quiet. The worst was the unknown-they were in uncharted territory. Nobody knew what happened to an aircraft as it neared the churning core of a hurricane. The plane’s body oscillated like both wings were about to snap. Then, an explosion of bright light all around. They were in a large, clear circle of sky, and the wall of the storm ran all the way around. They were in the eye. Duckworth and O’Hair had just made aviation history. The Hurricane Hunters were born.
F ifty-four years later, Major Larry “Montana” Fletcher of the 403rd Air Wing piloted his plane across the twenty-fifth parallel, heading over the Atlantic toward the Cape Verde Islands. The aircraft was the pride of the Hurricane Hunters’ fleet, a magnificent silver Lockheed-Martin WC-130 Hercules, and Montana was their best pilot.
They were three hours out of Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, and the sky was bright and cloudless.
The crew of seven from the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron was a tight-knit but sundry lot. Major Fletcher was from the beaches of Southern California -the steady, all-American leader type with blond hair, a close shave and a square, dependable jaw. The copilot was ex-Lieutenant Colonel Lee “Southpaw” Barnes, a crusty and foul-mouthed veteran with hangover stubble and a footlocker of vintage Playboys who had been demoted for moral turpitude so unsettling that the Air Force conveniently lost all records. His job was to repeatedly tell Montana he “couldn’t fly for shit.” The flight engineer was Milton “Bananas” Foster, the highly excitable yet gifted mechanical wizard. Marilyn Sebastian was the plucky aerial reconnaissance officer, as tough as any man, but every bit a woman. The navigator was Pepe Miguelito, the forlorn youth with a pencil mustache and unending girl troubles. The weather officer was “Tiny” Baxter, the massive country boy from Oklahoma with simple but strong values. The instrument operator was William “The Truth” Honeycutt, a former all-services bantamweight champion.