part0027

Diamond’s eyes were glued to the Beaver as Cody left the safety of the cove. She tried to see his face through the windshield, but the splashing surf and sea mist made it impossible.

“Who are all these kids?” Maggie wanted to know. “What’s wrong with them? Didn’t anyone feed them?”

“I’m not sure,” Kennedy said, wiping saltwater off her face. “Some of them look sick.”

“Those are the kids that you and Maggie would have been locked up with eventually,” Diamond told them. “Some of these kids have been here for nearly a year. They’ll need a long time to recover.”

“How long do they keep you if you get sent here?”

“Maggie, sweetie, you don’t get sent here. This place was run by bad people. That’s why Cody and Victor had to . . . had to make sure they would never do this to children again.”

Kennedy frowned. “You aren’t like I thought you’d be, Diamond. I like you better this way.”

“What way is that, Ken?”

“See, that’s what I’m talking about. I told you my friends call me Ken, and you called me Ken.”

“Your friend? Of course. Both of you.” She put her arms around them again.

“See there?” Kennedy said. “We never thought we’d actually meet you, and we never dreamed you’d be so . . . so much like a real person.”

“Friends for life, right?” Diamond shivered.

“That’s right, ma’am.”

Kennedy realized Diamond’s arm felt cold. “Ma’am, maybe we can move farther back from the water.”

Then a shirtless teenage boy approached, carrying his t-shirt. “Ma’am, would you like to wear my shirt?”

Diamond looked up in time to see three more young men offering their shirts. She politely thanked them and refused.

The selfless gesture moved the girls to tears. “That bikini top is really muddy,” Maggie said. “And it doesn’t look warm.”

“You have scratches on your arms,” Kennedy told Diamond. “I’m gonna ask that Josh dude if he knows where we can get a first-aid kit.”

She got up and made her way through the crowd. What she saw stifled her. The critically ill younger children were all together in one area. Three had bites on their legs and feet. Teeth marks were clearly visible, the bites red, enflamed. One was vomiting and looked emaciated. She wanted to turn away, but kept going. Diamond needed first-aid.

When she finally spotted Josh near the shallow water on the other side of the cove, she called out to him. “Josh! Do you have a first-aid kit?” She moved toward him.

He was tall and wiry with passionate gray eyes. His dark hair was long and unkempt, his fair skin splashed with saltwater. Before he could respond to her, a powerful concussion rattled the ground. This time, the explosive rumble was deafening, giving way to an escalating roar, and the violent shaking seemed to worsen with every passing second.

Smoke came swirling into the cove, defying the winds by moving in the opposite direction and hugging the water. The children screamed, their cries ignored by the powerful forces that threatened to bring the world down on top of them.

Kennedy fell into the shallows and could not get up. An undertow began pulling her toward the open sea like a hungry monster from the deep. She tried to grip the bottom, hoping to halt her slide, but the slippery sand went through her fingers. When she tried to yell for help, she swallowed a mouthful of water.

Just then, she felt two strong hands take hold under her arms. She coughed and gasped for breath as she noticed two big feet attached to two lanky legs back pedaling with her toward the dry shore. Finally, he let go.

“Can you breathe?” the person shouted. “I was getting your first-aid kit when I saw you fall in the water.”

She rolled onto her back and looked up, but he was gone. Then she spotted a small boy sitting on the ground crying.

“Mr. Cody! Mr. Cody!”

Kennedy crawled to the child and put her arms around him. “Shhhh. Do you know Cody too? He’s my friend and he’ll be back. Shhhh . What’s your name, little guy?”

The boy had dark hair with sharp brown eyes and round cheeks. He was soaked through and through, shivering. “My name is Freddy. Freddy Reyes. Mr. Cody always goes away. When will he come back?”

Maggie and Diamond were struggling against the quaking ground, huddled with a pile of screaming children. “This will be over in a minute.”

But Diamond’s assurance seemed hollow in the midst of such uncontrolled earth palpitations.

Maggie was still clutching Pablo’s dirty dungarees. She had repeatedly ignored the temptation to look inside the pockets, but Cody had said to keep up with them, and she had done just that.

During the shaking, she spotted an unfortunate victim, an unexpected bystander fighting for life near the base of a rock on the edge of the cove. It was a single, long-stemmed red rose. The tremoring ground had caused the head of the rose to repeatedly strike the rock, bruising the petals and knocking some to the ground. She freed herself from Diamond’s grasp and crawled to the rescue. When she returned, she slipped the battered rose into the only unoccupied pocket of the pants. “I want to give this to Cody.”

The violent tremors continued. The air became noticeably warmer. The smoke yielded larger ashes, and the hot sulfur smell made the kids cough. The winds shifted, sending black swirlwinds humming and circling across the waves. Even the wind did not know which way to run.

Cody and Victor had to chase the landing craft over five miles before they could devise a way to get Victor aboard. After that, Victor would be forced to manually operate the craft in rough seas and execute an amphibious landing in a confined area. It would have been a challenge for the usual four-man crew, but with only one inexperienced operator it could prove beyond difficult.

Cody had elected to not become airborne after leaving the cove because the tailwind would have created excessive landing speed, making it extremely hazardous to set the plane down again in the crowning waves. He simply added enough power to pull the Beaver over the water at a few knots faster than the boat. The Beaver was now reduced to a boat with wings.

But once they had pulled alongside the landing craft, they realized that an attempt by Victor to step from the floating Beaver directly to the boat would be out of the question. The seas were too rough, and the wing kept the aircraft at a twenty-foot arm’s length, meaning that Victor would be forced to dive into the water and attempt to board the landing craft with no one on the vessel to pull him up. Without proper boarding gear and the help of another, that would likely be a fatal mistake.

“I have one idea,” Cody said. “It’s wild and crazy, and it’s never been tried. So I’ll leave it to you, since you’re the one who’ll have to make the jump.”

“Jump?” Victor tightened his jaw, then grinned. “Wild and crazy? That’s never stopped you before.”

Cody nodded, and bit his lip. He prayed his wild and crazy scheme would not get his friend killed. But what choice did they have? He told Victor his plan, which involved some dangerous and tricky precision flying on a less than ideal day, and a daring jump from the aircraft to the boat.

“Okay, Gunfighter. I’m game. I have one question. Why didn’t a crew show up with this boat?”

“It’s classified. Trust me, Vic, I’d tell you if I could.”

“Let me guess. Your contact is able to transfer solid objects inter-dimensionally with satellite support, but cannot transfer living human tissue, right?”

Cody lowered his eyebrows. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Victor tightened his life vest. “I just wanna say that I’ve been on two airplane flights with you, and I haven’t enjoyed myself either time.”

“Yeah, you never know who you’ll meet on a plane these days.”

“Ain’t that the truth!” Vic rolled his eyes toward the bobbing boat . “Now, finally, we get to do something fun.”

They both instinctively looked toward the island. Lightning bolts now electrified the air and the mountain was erupting. Huge puffs of gray smoke exploded into the upper reaches, intermingling with fast-moving black clouds overhead. Bits of flaming magma shot forth like Roman candles. Even from five miles away, the scene made them wonder if anyone at the cove would still be alive when and if they returned.

Cody and Victor bore down on their mission. Cody applied thrust and lifted the Beaver a few feet above the water. He flew on a northeasterly course until they were about a half mile from the boat, then turned left and circled back toward the landing craft on a 30 degree intercept angle, flying into the face of a forty-knot headwind.

Victor pulled the door pins and let the passenger door fall into the water. He released his safety belt and stepped onto the float below the door, then waited.

With most of the fuel used up, the stall speed of the Beaver was 50 knots. If Cody could keep the airspeed at 55 knots, the aircraft would not stall, and the 40-knot headwind would slow the aircraft to a speed of only 15 knots relative to the water. Add the speed of the boat at 5 knots, and that would mean an intercept speed of only 20 knots — a marginal, but viable plan.

“Okay, Vic, we got one shot at this. Boat intercept in thirty seconds.”

As the pitching boat neared, Cody maneuvered directly over the bow.

“For the kids!” Victor yelled, stepping off the float of the Beaver. He landed on the deck and rolled to break his fall. Perfect execution.

Cody’s exuberance ended when the aircraft suddenly fell from beneath him. The left float caught a railing on the boat which spun the Beaver around and sent it plunging tail-first off the port side.

Cody rolled out of the cockpit beneath the troubled waters, then popped his head above the surface and signaled thumbs-up. Victor yanked off his life vest and threw it to Cody, then gave him a lifeline and pulled him aboard.

As Cody stood on the deck dripping wet and out of breath, he glanced again at the mountain. The smoke was now backing up, hiding most of the island from view. The winds had changed.

“You look wet, Gunfighter. Let’s go below and try to figure out how to start the engines on this floating boxcar.”

The men gained control of the boat and began sailing back toward the island. The engines whined at high speed and propelled the landing craft at 15 knots with the bow pitching up and down like a seesaw. In twenty-five minutes they turned into the cove to the cheers of everyone, and coasted onto the sand.

Josh Scott, having received instructions from Victor, had just informed everyone that Cody and Victor would be arriving with the boat. He kept everyone out of the way until the boat was secured and the front ramp was opened. There was no time to waste.

“The injured go on first,” Josh yelled. “They’ll be taken to the rear, where medical supplies will be found. That area is designated Sick Bay .”

“The next group will be children under the age of seven. The third group to board will be everyone else. If you do not know your age, take a good guess.” His deep eyes and assertive voice calmed the fearful chatter.

“After you are aboard, sit in one of the seats and fasten your safety belt. There will be a life vest under your chair. If you do not know how to put it on, ask for help. No panic, but we gotta expedite, people!”

In light of the urgency and confusion, thirteen-year-old Josh Scott had been the voice of confidence needed. Cody and Victor had depended on him to step up. He did.

Maggie and Diamond noticed that during Josh’s remarks, Kennedy worked her way close to him and would not take her eyes off him.

After everyone was aboard, they closed the ramp and prepared to churn backward off the sand and make a run for the open sea.

Lightning flashed from cloud to cloud while smoke and floating ash brought on an eerie darkness.

Finally, just as the boat pushed off the sand, the ground shook so violently that rocks began to slide from the surrounding hills down on to the beach. It took only a few seconds for the cove to become a pile of rocky rubble as the boat slipped away with 92 souls aboard.