Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
This felt like a movie. A movie Alden really didn’t want to be in.
Their plane plummeted. Or glided with a vengeance. However he wrote it in his head, the Cessna descended at an alarming rate. We aren’t high enough, he thought.
Sebastian confirmed his fears.
“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. November one seven niner Bravo Romeo. We’ve lost the engine. Can’t make the strip. We’re going to ditch in the river west of Comet Cove.” Sebastian’s delivery was crisp as he called out on the radio, adding their coordinates and direction.
Alden turned his head and caught Roz’s eye, reached a hand back to her. She grabbed it.
He wasn’t ready to lose Roz.
“Hold on to your harness,” Sebastian ordered, terse and urgent, and Alden reluctantly released Roz’s hand and complied, grabbing the vertical belts on his restraints.
“Going flaps full,” the pilot said in the radio callout voice again.
Then to them: “I’ve got to go in as slow as I can.
Don’t worry. Ninety percent of water landings are nonfatal. ”
“Fantastic,” Alden muttered, and Roz emitted one of those brief, hysterical giggles that happen when everything is going to hell.
He hoped they could laugh about this later.
What happened to the engine? How deep was the water here? Would they make it?
“Roz, grab the life jackets under your seat and give one to Alden,” Sebastian said. “Put them around your necks.”
Alden glanced back as she searched. “They’re right there. Yellow and flat,” he told her.
“Oh, OK.” She grabbed them, the type he’d seen demonstrated on airline flights countless times. “I was thinking of those fat life jackets. Not the inflatable ones.” She handed one to Alden and put another around her neck.
“Do you want one, Sebastian?” she called.
“Busy right now,” he growled in the headset.
The surface of the lagoon still rushed toward them, but the rate of approach slowed slightly. The flaps doing their work, Alden thought. He had a dim sense of the distant shorelines on either side as a blur in his peripheral vision.
Sebastian, to his astonishment, turned the lever on his door and cracked it open. “Crack open your door if you can.”
Alden did as he was told, the open doors adding a new rattle to the rushing noise of their descent.
Alden’s mind worked over Sebastian’s reasoning.
The plane was going to crash-land in the water.
He supposed it was like a car that drives into a lake.
When a car goes under, water pressure can keep the occupants from opening the doors.
So they were opening them in advance. That had to be it.
Also, this is madness.
The water was so close now. The plane’s angle tilted up as Sebastian flared the wings a bit, then leveled them, and the Cessna leveled too.
With a bone-shaking shudder, the plane half skimmed, half plowed into the water.
Water felt soft when you swam around in it. But when you slammed into it at highway speeds, it felt more like half-dry concrete.
The force of impact threw Alden forward against the belts, then backward as the plane’s nose tipped up.
There were a couple of breathtaking moments when he wondered if it would keep going and somersault forward, or flip to its back on the rebound.
But to his relief, when the plane rocked back, it stayed right side up as it settled in the water.
Which rushed in the open doors, swarming around his feet.
The headrest, the harness—both had kept him from launching. But now they had a deluge to contend with.
He took a second to look back. Roz seemed shaken but OK. She gave him a thumbs-up. In her other hand, she still carried her camera, the strap wrapped tightly around her wrist. Fear flashed in her eyes as she took in the water swirling around their legs.
First thought: She’s alive. We’re alive!
Second thought: I should’ve recorded this on my phone for the paper.
Third: This water isn’t good, is it?
“We have to get out.” Sebastian, already free of his harness, spoke in fast, clipped tones as he grabbed a GoPro camera off its overhead mount and stuffed it and his tablet computer into a small bag.
“The water’s pretty shallow here, but I’m not exactly sure how deep.
We don’t want to be in here if the plane sinks.
” Alden got out of his restraint fast, too—past experience—and reached back to help Roz, but she managed to release hers a second later without his help.
The rising water was a strong motivator.
He yanked off his headset and started pushing on his door. It resisted.
Roz, who’d also shed her headset, tried to help Sebastian fully open the port-side door while keeping her camera above the water.
“What are you doing with that stupid camera?” said Alden, who could now about wedge himself through the door.
“It’s practically brand new! I don’t want to lose it to the river.”
“Just get out!” Sebastian said, and he plunged through the door and into the river proper.
“Please!” Alden added.
She squeezed through the door after their pilot, and then she was out the other side, so Alden half fell out his, stumbling in the water.
Stumbling. Yes! His feet touched the silty floor of the Indian River Lagoon. The cool water sloshed around his chest. At least they weren’t in over their heads, and there wasn’t a current to speak of. He didn’t even have to inflate his life vest.
Not yet.
“Roz?” he called out.
“Over here with Sebastian!”
Alden took a few steps and looked around, getting his bearings. Roz and Sebastian were angling east in the river, away from the plane, Roz still with her camera hand in the air. He laughed to himself. That was so Roz.
Then again, maybe he could save his phone. He pulled it out of his pants pocket and held it higher as he sloshed away from the Cessna.
The plane faced south, and he was pretty sure the nose was lower than it was a moment ago. Comet Cove and the airfield, wherever it was, were to his left, the direction Roz and Sebastian were moving.
He made a wide, awkward circle around the nose of the Cessna, then waded through the chest-high water toward the other two, sluggish and heavy in his drenched clothes. He guessed the shore was less than a mile away.
The water depth decreased by a few inches, hitting him just above the waist as he neared Roz and Sebastian. The bedraggled pair had stopped and turned to face the plane. Roz snapped pictures of the wreck. Sebastian was on the phone, probably calling emergency services.
Alden wanted to touch Roz, maybe out of an urgent need to assure himself she was really there. That they really were OK. But she was busy. There’d be time later.
He looked back at their ride. The nose had tipped forward now and was mostly submerged—they were lucky to get out before it was inundated. The tail stuck up and looked distressed, but it was hard to make out all the damage he knew was there.
There was certainly invisible damage that might explain why they were standing in the middle of the river in their clothes. Crash investigators would have to find out why the engine died. Alden wanted to know, too.
Someone killed Wayne. And now Sebastian had almost died, along with his two hapless passengers.
If this was a coincidence, it was a mighty unnerving one.
All three of them just stood there in the river as the plane settled. Roz took her photos, and Sebastian, holding his bag above the water, made another phone call—to his wife, judging by his soothing tones and the screeches on the other end of the line.
Alden checked his phone. To his relief, it had also survived. He shot John a quick text:
Roz and I OK after Cessna 172 crash in river. Engine died suddenly, approx ten minutes after takeoff from Comet Cove airport. Pilot Sebastian Esquivel also OK. No other passengers. Emergency services contacted. More later.
There you go. John could make a story out of that. Alden turned on the camera app and shot several seconds of video of the plane and his fellow survivors, along with a few photos, which he texted to John.
Who wrote back with a torrent of words that included, “When were you going to tell me you were getting on a plane with your subject?”
Yeah, maybe they should’ve thought that through.
Alden would talk to him later. In the meantime, he held his phone above the water instead of returning it to his pocket.
No sense in pushing his luck. Roz, seeing him, mouthed a silent curse, pulled her phone from an underwater pocket and peered at it. Then she smiled.
Hooray for modern technology.
Now that they’d paused in documenting the crash, Alden looked at Sebastian, who’d ended his call. “Nice landing.”
“Thank you.” A corner of Sebastian’s mouth turned down. “Sorry to put you through that.”
“I’m sorry you lost your plane,” Alden replied. “What do you think happened?”
“I damn well better find out.” Sebastian sneezed. “The engine died, obviously. I don’t know why. Oil pressure seemed OK. A blocked valve? I don’t know. I did all the checks. It almost sounded like—nah, it couldn’t be. I checked the fuel, too.”
“You think it was the fuel? Water in it, maybe?”
Sebastian threw an intense look at Alden. “You fly?”
“My dad had a small plane.”
“Well, I don’t know. I just don’t know. It looked OK when I sumped it …” Sebastian hesitated, as if he were thinking it over. “We’re going to have to get the carcass back to shore, and then the NTSB is going to want to take a look. What a royal pain in the potato.”
Alden almost smiled. “I want to know what happened, too.”
“Of course,” the builder replied.
“Should we start walking back?” Alden hoped there weren’t holes deeper than the four feet of water they were currently in.
A walk wasn’t going to be pleasant, and he wasn’t sure where they were.
He looked more closely at the shore. Was that a marina?
Not big enough to be Star Harbor, and they weren’t looking at the inlet. Southside Wharf, then.
A blinking light caught his eye. A blinking blue light attached to the shape of a boat, which was getting bigger.
Roz was looking now, too. “I think it’s Duke.”
Alden groaned.
“Duke?” Sebastian asked.
“Deputy Duke. Duke Dawson.” Alden added wryly, “Roz’s boyfriend.”
“He is not!” she exclaimed. “Alden’s teasing me. We had a few dates in high school, that’s all.”
Sebastian actually laughed. “Well, I’m glad that’s all, because you two looked pretty friendly back there at the movie studio.”
Roz gave Alden a cross look, and he laughed, too.
The happy thought came again: We’re alive!
And now damnable Deputy Duke was going to rescue them. Didn’t Comet Cove have other police officers? Alden was kind of fuzzy on how many. Not his beat. It was a small department, that much he knew. But Duke seemed to have an instinct for being wherever Roz was.
At least they wouldn’t have to wade all the way home.
“That’s lucky,” Roz was saying. “I wasn’t looking forward to slogging to shore.”
“We could have been luckier,” Alden groused. A shiver ran through him as he tried to ignore the seaweedy smell of the chilly brine. “Next time I’m having dessert first.”