AJ Bailey had her Mermaid Divers 36-foot Newton custom dive boat up on plane and aimed for where she last saw the seaplane before it slipped below the surface. Her best point of reference was the large section of wing still floating nearby.
With six customers aboard, she’d slowed to an idle for them all to watch the seaplane take off, intending to cross behind its path on her way south to the Nicholson wreck off Sunset House. That was the plan, until the single-engine seaplane hit something, and cartwheeled to a stop in spectacular fashion.
Her first mate and sole full-time employee, local man Thomas Bodden, franticly called in the accident over the marine radio as she held Hazel’s Odyssey’s throttles to the stops.
“My gear’s already set up,” AJ shouted to Thomas, with the wind carrying her soft English accent. “You’ll have to stay aboard as the boat will be live.”
“I ain’t seen nobody in da water,” Thomas fretted, his voice uncommonly sullen. “Doubt anyone survive dat crash, Boss.”
AJ let out a long sigh, her shoulder-length purple-streaked blond hair blowing in the wind. “Gotta look, right? Maybe there’s an air pocket or something.”
Easing back on the throttles, the boat immediately slowed, coming off plane and dropping lower into the water.
“Over there!” AJ shouted, pointing to a man clinging to a piece of wreckage a hundred yards off their starboard side.
“No way,” Thomas muttered in amazement. “I tink dat fella’s still alive. But dat can’t be da pilot.”
“Here, take over, Thomas,” AJ said, stepping back from the fly-bridge helm. “As soon as I splash, pick that guy up, okay?”
“Got it, Boss,” he said, taking her place.
AJ peeled off her long-sleeved Mermaid Divers sunshirt and tossed it on the boat’s dash as she headed to the ladder.
“Be careful,” Thomas added, before she slid down the ladder without using the steps.
On the spacious aft deck, she quickly weaved past the customers to the stern where her gear was already mounted to a tank. There was no time to don a wetsuit, so her bathing suit would have to do, her toned arms decorated in beautiful underwater scene tattoos. Questions flew her way from the customers, and as she pulled on her fins and slipped into her BCD, she spoke firmly and loudly.
“Doug, aren’t you a doctor?”
The group quieted and a large man in glasses nodded. “I’m an anesthesiologist, actually,” he replied in a southern American accent.
“Close enough,” AJ replied. “Everyone, please stay on the boat. I’m going in to check the wreck, then Thomas will pick up the guy we spotted in the water. Help Thomas, but please follow his directions.” She looked at the doctor as she pulled her mask in place. “Do what you can for the guy, doc, help will be here soon.”
AJ stood, shuffled to the swim step, and took a giant stride off the stern, dropping under, and with no air in her BCD, continued down. Above, she heard the engine note pick up as Thomas left to help the guy on the surface.
* * *
Deek was beside himself. Once again, he was left trying to convince someone that he wasn’t a lunatic, and that the guy he’d been following was working for Şeytan Taciri and planning a terrorist attack at the Great American Boat Show in Fort Myers. Constable Sommer’s expression hadn’t changed at any point during his rambling tale as she escorted him from the bank.
She’d been about to send him on his way when they’d both heard it. A low drone to which he hadn’t really paid any attention to had abruptly stopped, followed by a cacophony of loud voices drowning out the sounds of traffic on the frontage road.
“Don’t cause any more trouble,” the constable said, as she took off in a sprint toward the harbor front.
Deek immediately followed, although he soon discovered he couldn’t keep up with her long, athletic legs. He was unsure exactly why he was choosing to stick with the policewoman who didn’t seem the least bit interested in his plight, but he sensed the commotion they’d heard was important.
A mixture of locals and tourists crowded along the railing of the harbor, many with cell phone cameras raised in the air, filming something over the water. Deek reached the edge of the crowd as Constable Sommer was quizzing an older man over the incident.
“Bloody awful,” the man said in an English accent which reminded Deek of the presenters on BBC America’s news shows. “He was taking off towards us, then all of a sudden the plane flipped into the air and hit the water with an almighty thump!”
“A seaplane?!” Deek blurted, pushing people aside to get to the railing.
“Of course it was a seaplane,” the man said, frowning at him. “How else would it be taking off from the water?”
“Where is it?” Deek asked, looking at the people next to him.
“It sunk,” a young woman said excitedly. “Got the whole thing on my camera, too. Already uploaded to my Insta.”
“That dive boat raced over,” the old man added. “I saw a diver jump in, then the boat went looking for something. Survivors I expect.”
“He hit a kayaker,” another man shouted. “That’s what flipped the plane!”
Sirens wailed in the background and local accented voices streamed from Constable Sommer’s handheld radio on her belt. To their left, a Joint Marine Unit police boat shot away from the dock with its lights flashing.
Deek whipped around. “See! That has to be the sea…”
The blond constable was already walking away, so Deek jogged after here. “Wait up! Don’t you see? This has to be the plane belonging to the guy I’ve been following.”
“Just because you saw a seaplane in the harbor this morning and added it to your story, doesn’t make you any more believable,” she said, marching toward the dock where the police boat had departed from.
“What if I could tell you the tail number?” Deek said, still half jogging to keep up.
The young policewoman rolled her eyes.
“Right, I could have seen that this morning too,” he muttered. “What if I put you in touch with a woman from the sheriff’s office in Fort Myers? She’s the one who was hanging from the pontoon thingy of the same seaplane. Although it had a different tail number then, because they peeled the stickers off like I told you…”
“Look, are you reporting a crime here on the island?” she asked sternly without slowing.
Deek thought for a moment and dodged around a light pole just in time to avoid running into it. “I bet you’ll find money on that plane!”
“Do you have money in your wallet?”
“Not much,” Deek scoffed.
“Should I arrest you for having money in your wallet?”
Deek groaned and trotted to catch up again. “Of course not. I’m saying, I bet the pilot was just in the bank, took out a bunch of cash, and you’ll find it on the plane.”
They reached a group of other policemen and women who’d gathered by the dock, where a tall, slender man in a suit was directing them. The constable stopped and turned to Deek.
“Still no crime committed,” she said. “Besides, he’s probably dead, so you won’t have to worry about your terrorist anymore.”
Deek looked out across the water where several more boats had now gathered. She had a point.
* * *
The seaplane sat upright in the sand, tilted on its port side, leaning against the tip of the remaining wing. The water had already cleared from the wafting sand that would have billowed from the wreck when it settled on the bottom at 65 feet. AJ was one of the local divers on call when the police required them, so this wasn’t her first crash site, although she’d usually have a dive buddy with her.
She finned straight for the cockpit and shone her dive light through the front window. Her body tingled in nervous anticipation, and AJ held her breath, waiting to be startled by the vision of the dead pilot.
Seeing no one, she kicked along the starboard side, noting the twisted struts and wrinkled float beneath her. The cabin door was ajar, and she eased it open, reeling backwards as something leapt at her from inside. AJ caught her breath once more and cursed into her regulator as she watched the seat cushion ascend towards the surface.
Playing her light beam around inside, the cabin appeared undisturbed and intact, beyond several more cushions pinned to the ceiling where a thin air pocket remained trapped. There was no sign of a body, and certainly no one gasping at the last traces of air, but she still considered going inside. Could a body be caught, out of sight behind a seat? Maybe. Instead of penetrating the wreck, AJ moved along the side of the plane, aiming her light through the series of round windows, checking each row. Nothing. No luggage, no cargo, no body.
She finned away from the wreck and looked up. She’d heard more motors, and could see the hulls of three boats above her. She needed more divers to organize a proper body search, but she’d take a quick look around the immediate perimeter. The pilot wasn’t inside, and the cabin door was open, so he must have left the plane at some point. She hadn’t heard a metallic banging from the surface which would be the diver recall signal, so she presumed he hadn’t been spotted floating up top either. That left the seafloor. If he’d managed to escape the plane but ran out of breath on his way up, the chances were he’d have sunk to the bottom with his lungs full of water.
It took a couple of minutes to make her first lap around the wreck, keeping the plane at the edge of her visibility so she didn’t miss anything in between. At ten feet off the seafloor, the remnants of stirred up sand made that distance about 40 feet, resulting in 80 feet of coverage as she checked to her left and right.
With no body in sight, AJ slowly ascended and used the automatic countdown on her Shearwater Teric dive computer watch to perform her three-minute safety stop at 15 feet.
* * *
Angler gathered several rocks from the seafloor as he kicked toward shore. He needed the ballast as the depth shallowed and the surrounding water pressure diminished, or he’d pop to the top like a cork. Between the depth lessening and a reading on the compass hanging from his BCD, he knew he was heading toward the island instead of deeper water, but exactly where, he had no clue. Running into the side of the cruise ship wouldn’t help his already unravelling cause, and neither would surfacing amongst a sea of law enforcement vessels that would surely be on the water by now.
As the depth on his gauge showed 25 feet, the duffel bag felt like a balloon tugging against his BCD, keeping him rolled over on one side. He’d run out of places to stash rocks and hands to carry them. Below him was now mostly ancient dead coral forming a pitted and jagged rock formation called ironshore, and he knew he must be nearing the coastline. His next problem would be waltzing out of the water in scuba gear, wearing jeans, a polo shirt, and carrying the bag. With people’s attention already focused on the water from the plane crash, he feared too many eyes would be watching from the shore.
At 15 feet, Angler couldn’t stay down any longer, and rose to the surface like a breaching submarine. Clutching the bag to his chest, he rotated upright, letting his head innocently pop above the surface. To his right, a hundred feet away, was a small parking lot and a business signed Eden Rock Dive Center. A few people stood by the seawall looking over his head toward the crash site. To his left, about the same distance away, was a house, and straight ahead was an empty lot.
Angler waited, thinking. If he was spotted emerging from the water in civilian clothes, he’d be reported in some manner at some point when it became clear the pilot of the plane was missing. Jeans and a big duffel bag weren’t standards in the warm water recreational diving world. He looked over at the people in the parking lot. Two families, he guessed, by the adult to children head count. Probably there to rent snorkeling gear from the dive shop, until a seaplane cartwheeled across the sea and sank.
Beyond the people, at the seawall in front of the shop, a set of steps with a metal railing led into the water. Bobbing on the surface nearby were snorkelers in bright orange vests and two divers, surface swimming away to deeper water.
“Damn it,” he muttered, and unzipped his jeans.
Cramming the bag between two larger rocks at the edge of the empty lot, Angler swam toward the steps, hoping his boxer shorts looked enough like board shorts for no one to pay attention. Two minutes later, keeping his dive mask in place to obscure his face, and fins in hand, he walked up Eden Rock Dive Center’s steps, and out of the water. A bench with tank racks offered him a place to sit and remove his gear, before snatching someone’s towel they’d left nearby and wrapping it around his waist.
The hot asphalt of the parking lot burned his feet as he slipped behind the cars, looking in the back windows as he passed by. Stopping at an SUV, he prayed his luck would change, and tried the tailgate. He stepped back and almost let out a cheer when it opened. The divers had changed into their wetsuits, leaving behind their shirts and dry shorts for when they came out of the water.
Fitting in easily with the beach vibe in board shorts, Hawaiian shirt, and flip-flops, Angler retrieved his bag from the water’s edge. The two families had lost interest and moved on, so he paused to take a look across the ocean. He felt a mixture of despair and elation. The unending obstacles that seemed to be constantly thrown in his path were relentless, and yet he’d just survived a spectacular plane crash.
He looked away from the frenetic scene on the water and refocused himself. If he could find a private flight off the island, he could still get back on track and be in Fort Myers by Friday.