“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” Gannon called into his radio as he immediately throttled up, wheeling toward the crash site. “This is Donegal Rambler, Donegal Rambler, Donegal Rambler. VA number three eight seven five. I am at GPS heading twenty-seven point one-four-nine by seventy-seven point three-one-five. A plane is down! I repeat. A small commercial jet plane has crashed. How many people involved is unknown. Send help. Donegal Rambler is a forty-foot diving boat. Over.”
He let off the handset’s thumb key. There was nothing but choppy static. He checked to make sure that he was on the Channel 16 distress band then spun the volume dial as high up as it would go. The static only came in louder.
“Mayday! Mayday!” he was saying again when he remembered the snapped antenna.
He cursed as he roughly clipped the useless handset back into its holder. When he glanced forward over the dip and rise of the console, he made out the plane’s tail fin on the horizon. Seeing that it was upright, a brief flutter of hope rose in his chest.
Then he looked with the binoculars.
No!
The plane had snapped in half. You could see its pale white tail section with its huge high fin and about twenty feet of it. Other than that, there was nothing. He panned over the water left and right. There was no nose, no wings. The whole front part of the aircraft was completely gone.
He was still trying to reckon this terrible fact when he began to encounter debris. A cluster of water bottles went by. A white garbage bag. A snapped piece of varnished wood paneling with drink holders in it. A man’s black Nike sneaker.
On the other side of a swell to starboard appeared a huge white drumlike object. It was bouncing up and down in the water like a giant fishing bob. He couldn’t think what the hell it was. Then he came close enough to smell the jet fuel and see the glistening steel turbofan blades still rotating inside of it.
A football field beyond the ripped-free jet engine lay the plane’s dissected rear fuselage. Gannon eased the throttle back. He looked up at its aerodynamic rear stabilizers as he came alongside it. G550 was written in high-sheen blue paint upon its pale side.
He slipped the boat into full idle as he came around to the front, where the cross-sectioned fuselage had breached asunder. From its top hung a spaghetti of aluminum framing and electrical wiring and tattered fiberglass. Yet through these ragged streamers, the rear interior of the aircraft was almost perfectly intact. There was cream-colored carpet on the floor, a window seat covered in bungee-corded luggage, a highly varnished wood sideboard.
Behind the sideboard was the open doorway of a restroom. Gannon stared into it, mesmerized. The white marble sink basin within it looked like something from a five-star hotel.
“Hello!” Gannon called into the fantastic floating ruin. “Hello! Is anyone in there?”
Gannon closed his eyes, listening intently. Thirty seconds passed. A minute. There was nothing. The only sound was the low chugging of his diesels.
He retrieved his binoculars and pointed them to the south. Far off beyond the wreck at ten miles or more, he could just make out the dark coast of one of Little Abaco’s tiny uninhabited outer islands.
“What in the hell?” he said angrily as he scanned a three-sixty.
Why were there no boats in the water? he thought. Or choppers in the sky? Hadn’t the pilot called in a mayday? Hadn’t the airport in Little Abaco seen it disappear off the radar?
He went back up into the flying bridge and did another slower, tighter sweep with the binoculars. About another football field north of the tail section, he spotted a thick clump of objects floating in the water. It was quickly getting darker now, so it was hard to know what they were. Just five or ten black lumps bunched together, rising and falling in the calm swells.
“Please don’t be what I think you are,” he said to himself as he levered at the throttle and turned the wheel.
He’d chugged the Rambler in close enough to see that the items were only a cluster of floating pillows and seat cushions when he spotted something below in the clear water beneath them.
It was something large and pale.