“Get in,” I said, climbing into the pilot’s seat and starting the engine.
It revved quickly, enough so that I could throttle up and power away from the beach out into the lagoon.
I heard gunshots.
More power and we moved farther from land.
“Give me my gun,” she said.
I handed it over.
She popped open the passenger-side door and returned fire as I turned the plane so her side faced the fort. As we continued to taxi I studied the instruments. Nothing unusual. Standard issue.
More gunfire came from shore.
She curled back inside and slammed the door. “Get us in the air.”
We were now far enough out in the bay to be safe from any bullets. Valdez’s boat sat five hundred yards away, but I wasn’t going anywhere near that, either. I turned toward the east so the breeze I’d noticed on shore would be to our back. I throttled up the engines and sent the pontoons skimming across the surface. The controls tightened and I gripped the yoke in a hard embrace. I only needed a few hundred feet before the wings caught air and the plane lifted. No rotating or climbing, just a rise, as if in an elevator. Not bad, if I did say so myself. Certainly no tougher than landing a fighter on a pitching carrier deck, at night, which I’d done several times.
I banked into a long turn, eased off on the throttle, and adjusted course toward the northeast. The sky had turned a soothing cobalt blue with only a few puffs of scattered clouds. Fort Jefferson, the Dry Tortugas, Jim Jansen, and Juan Lopez Valdez all lay behind us. I checked the fuel gauge and saw that we carried three-quarters of a tank. I’d flown many a Cessna and knew that the range on a full tank was around 850 miles. I had no intention of heading for Key West—that would be the first place Jansen would look. What I needed was to contact Stephanie Nelle and now I could do that by radioing to shore, with someone there placing a call.
Coleen was busy checking out the cabin, seeing what was behind us.
“What did the case look like that you brought up from the wreck?” she asked.
I told her.
She sat back in her seat. “We hit the jackpot. It’s sitting in the back.”
I couldn’t help but smile.
Lady Luck had finally dealt me a good hand.
I was alive, in a plane, with the case, the coin, and a radio.
All in all, not a bad first day as a special operative with the Justice Department.
Chapter Thirteen
I reached for the radio, but Coleen stopped me.
“You can’t do that,” she said. “They’ll be listening, and you do realize this plane can be tracked.”
Of course, but thanks to my fighter-piloting days I had a few ideas on how to minimize that problem. I had already decided to vector toward Florida’s western Gulf shore. The Cessna’s range was enough to get us to Tampa, but I saw no reason to fly that far north. Jansen had probably already radioed the mainland and alerted the appropriate folks, and Coleen was right: We were surely being tracked on air traffic control radar. The trick would be to land quick and then get away before they, whoever they might be, could find us on the ground. The Everglades stretched fifty-plus miles up Florida’s southwest coast. Landing anywhere along that wilderness would be easy, offering perfect isolation and plenty of places to hide, but it would also be difficult to traverse without a boat or car.
“I was thinking of heading to somewhere between Naples and Fort Myers.”
She shook her head. “Can you make it to Lake Okeechobee?”
That was miles inland, toward the center of the peninsula, a massive expanse of fresh water that drained into the Everglades.
“We can get there, but there’s a lot of land between the lake and the coast. Somebody along the way is going to want to know who we are and where we’re headed.”
South Florida was notorious for drug trafficking, and an unidentified aircraft not responding to radio requests would raise nothing but red flags The situation would only escalate if Jansen called in reinforcements. I had not, as yet, mentioned the former agent to her.
“Does the name Jim Jansen mean anything?”
She stared across at me and shook her head.
“That’s the guy who brought me in the boat, then left in the plane and tried to kill me. He was also the one shooting at you from the beach.”
She still held the gun, in a way that I noticed wasn’t casual or with any apprehension. Instead, it signaled someone familiar with firearms.
“Are you a cop?” I asked.
She nodded.
I should have been surprised, but she’d handled herself under pressure like someone with training. “Is this official?”
“Personal. It concerns my father.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone back there at the fort you were a cop?”
“I was debating that when you showed up to rescue me.”
I caught the touch of sarcasm.
“Who is your father?”
“The Reverend Benjamin Foster, of the Christian Faith Baptist Church, Orlando, Florida.”
“How does Valdez know him?”
She reached into her pocket and found the coin. “This is yours. But those files in the back are mine. That was the deal I made with Valdez.”
She slipped the coin into my shorts pocket.
“I don’t work for Valdez,” I pointed out.
She shrugged. “A deal’s a deal. And I don’t want that coin anymore.”
I decided now was not the time to tell her that I wasn’t about to allow her to keep that waterproof case. Though I had no idea what it contained, it apparently was important enough for Valdez, Jansen, and this woman to all want it. I already knew Stephanie Nelle wanted it, and what better way to impress my new boss than by delivering the coin and the case? But something told me outsmarting Coleen Perry was not going to be easy.
“Where are you a cop?”
“Orange County Sheriff’s Department. Orlando. What do you do?”
“Until yesterday, I was a Navy lawyer. Now I’m not sure what I am. Bait, I think.”
Jansen’s duplicity still bothered me and I wondered how much information Stephanie Nelle had also withheld. Out the window I saw only ocean. We were still miles away from the Florida coast.
“See if there’s a chart anywhere.”
She searched the compartments and found one.
Thank goodness. Dead reckoning would have eaten up a lot of fuel. “What’s at Lake Okeechobee?”
“I have relatives. I was headed there tomorrow.”
That would have been after she made the deal with Valdez and had the files in her possession. But things had changed. As they had for me, so I assessed my options. Landing anywhere on the coast could be a problem. Lots of people and police. Okeechobee had people, too, but it was off the beaten path and its rural location would offer a measure of privacy, one that might be advantageous. The problem was that landing anywhere near where we were ultimately headed would be like dropping a trail of bread crumbs.
So I made a decision.
“We’re going to set down away from your relatives,” I told her. “Then head that way.”
The fuel gauge was near empty as Lake Okeechobee came into view. I’d dropped down low once we’d found the Everglades in the hope of staying off any prying radar. So far, no radio contact had been made and no other planes or helicopters had been spotted.
The lake was enormous.
About forty miles long and thirty wide. Over seven hundred square miles of pristine water, the second-largest lake in the continental United States. A mecca for fishermen and water sports enthusiasts. It also served as a divide among five counties, which meant a ton of local law enforcement from every direction.
“Head east,” she said.
I stayed low and followed her instruction. A highway ran north to south, near the eastern shore.
“That’s U.S. 441. Track it north.”
I banked left and kept going, glancing at the fuel gauge, realizing that we needed to get down soon.
A town came into view.
“Port Mayaca,” she told me.
A string of houses began to populate the shoreline like islands in a chain. Huge oak trees draped with vines shielded most of them. A few alligators basked in the sun on the shore.
“My family’s place is five miles farther north.”