The sunset sky was glowing like a sheet of gold leaf by the time Gannon reeled in everything and got all the gear and tackle packed up and stowed tight.
After he washed up in the head, he went back up into the flying bridge and set the GPS for Cooperstown on Little Abaco to the south. Cooperstown was actually a little out of his way as he lived farther south and east out on Eleuthera Island. But with the radio antenna MIA, he wanted to be near shore by the time it got too dark.
He slipped his face shield up and his Costa polarized shades on and opened the boat wide to about thirty knots. Through the breeze, the sky began to lose its glow, and the endless plain of water took on the dark metallic tone of tarnished silver. Even for a Monday, the fishing lanes northwest of the Bahamas were deader than normal, the horizon empty in every direction. In fact, the only other vessel he got a glimpse of all day was a faint outline of a container heading west to Florida that morning when he started out.
His thoughts drifted to dinner. There was leftover lasagna in his fridge that he could nuke. Instead of fresh-grilled swordfish, he thought, shaking his defeated head in the rush of the wind. Oh, well. At least the beers would be cold.
It was about fifteen miles due east of Cooperstown when he saw something low in the sky off in front of the boat. He thought it was just a shine of light off a cloud. But then he saw that the light was moving, and he jacked up his shades onto his forehead, cupping his hands above his eyes.
Out from the postcard-Caribbean gold of the sky to the left came a plane, a small corporate jet plane, sleek and shiny and pale white. He watched it coming steadily due west at a right angle to the bow. He gauged it to be about four miles to the south. It seemed to be flying quite low. He waited for it to pull up, but it didn’t. It kept zipping westward going fast, low and straight as a line drive.
He eased off on the throttle and grabbed his binoculars, putting his elbows up on the console to steady the view. Then he thumbed in the focus and something in the pit of his stomach went cold.
The plane was too low, flying maybe a hundred feet off the deck. It was also going way too fast like a stunt jet plane at an air show. It almost looked like a guided cruise missile rocketing just above the surface of the water.
Where had it come from? Gannon wondered, turning at the waist to keep it in the glass. There weren’t any airports to the east. Hell, there wasn’t anything east of the Bahamas. Maybe it had just left out of Marsh Harbour Airport?
It was directly off the front of his bow when he realized he couldn’t hear its engines. Instead of a rumble, there was only a kind of whistling, a low whisper very faint in the distance of metal scratching air.
Gannon watched as the plane descended even lower. It had to be twenty feet off the water now. Maybe the pilot was being a hot dog, and in a moment, it would pull up, he thought hopefully.
Then the eerily whispering plane finally ran out of sky.
Its left wingtip touched down first, sending up a huge fountaining spray of water. In another moment, he watched as its belly struck down. Through the white water it threw up, you could see the fuselage vibrating violently. As it skidded along, a rough crunching, grinding sound started in the distance, like denim tearing. Fragments of metal began to shed off into the air behind it.
Even as Gannon watched this, he hoped dumbly that maybe it would be okay.
Like the Sully guy in NYC, he thought, as the back of the plane suddenly began to fishtail.
It swung all the way around backward and kept going. It was about to complete a full three-sixty when there was a rise in the tearing sound’s pitch, and the plane went airborne again.
In the frozen silence, Gannon winced as he watched the spinning hundred-foot-long aircraft wobble up through the air sideways like a boomerang flung by a drunk.
Then there was a sound like a bomb going off, and all he could see in the binoculars was a hanging column of pure blinding white.