Free Top Ten by Ryne Douglas Pearson Page B

seater looked up.
    “What?”
    “He made us,” the pilot said, and adjusted his course to match the turn the Beech had just made.
    “How the fuck did he make us?”
    “I don’t know, but he just firewalled it and is scraping those waves.” The pilot shook his head. “What’s the weather between here and the coast?”
    “Clear,” the right seater told him. “He’s got nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”
    “He’s sure as hell trying,” the pilot said, knowing his co-pilot was right on the money. Over land and in clouds, maybe this guy could lose them. Eyeballing had its limits, and even radar didn’t like low-flying objects mixed in with ground clutter, but on the open ocean under clear skies, well, all this guy was asking for was—
    “Whoa! Whoa!” the right seater yelled, looking down and right as they came upon the Beech fast. Or what was left of the Beech. “He bought it into a wave. Son of a bitch.”
    The pilot shook his head. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen this, and it wouldn’t be the last. He slowed the Citation and put it into a slow orbit around the watery crash site. The foamy point of impact glowed atop the black and barren sea.
    “Did he get out?” the pilot asked, concentrating on his own flying. He wasn’t going to end up swimming, or sinking, like the stupid bastard two hundred feet below.
    “Don’t see a thing,” the right seater said. “Not a thing.”
    The pilot nodded to himself and keyed the radio. “Tiger Lima Four, you on?”
    “Do we have a swimmer?” the P3 pilot asked. “We lost radar contact with your boy.”
    “Negative on the swimmer,” the Citation’s pilot told him. “Maybe a floater until the sharks get him. Is there any Coast Guard presence close by?”
    “Neg-a-tive,” the P3 pilot informed him. “Three hundred miles north is about the closest.”
    “Roger that.” The Citation pilot looked past his right seater now for a gander at the crash site, what there was of it. “He sank like a stone.”
    “Like a big ol’ stone,” the right seater agreed. “So what’s the plan?”
    Plan? What plan could there be. A Coast Guard cutter would take ten hours to get there. By then the guy would be chum crumbs. Plankton would be bigger than him in ten hours.
    Unless, of course, he didn’t get out of the Beech, which in that case meant he’d be a meal for a whole different class of sea creatures. The kind that lived in dark world, say, twelve thousand feet down.
    Plan? Did he have a plan? He sure did.
    “Wish his sorry ass good riddance and let’s see if we can’t beat Tiger Lima Four back to Jacksonville,” the Citation’s said. His right seater gave the water below a wave and the bird as the plane leveled out and headed for home.

Four
    Dead Men Walking
    Thirty hours after it had left one field in Florida, the twin engine Beech was back at another, touching down this time on a strip of wild land in Suwannee County with the sun low behind it in the eastern sky. The rugged earth played havoc with the tires, chewing the right side main almost to a pulp, and the loose stone thrown up during landing left dozens of pits and nicks in the undercarriage from the wings back to the tail. When it finally came to a stop near where Gareth Dean Hoag and two of his associates stood, chances were it was going to have a hard time taking off again.
    Then again, it wasn’t going anywhere in any case.
    The pilot’s door tipped up and Mills DeVane gave the trio a wave. None of them waved back.
    Something was wrong.
    “Gareth,” Mills said, stepping onto the wing. The morning breeze tossed his hair in his eyes. He’d have to remember to get it cut soon.
    “Number five,” Gareth said, and Mills came down from the wing.
    “What’s wrong?” Mills asked his employer.
    “Skunky never showed up,” Nita Berry told him.
    Worry settled on Mills’s face. His look danced between Gareth and Nita and Lionel Price. Spent a fair amount on Lionel, actually, because he