Free Mirrors by Karl C Klontz Page B

didn’t look like it. It sat at a thirty-degree angle and had soot lines staining its dented fuselage behind twin propellers.
    “DC-3,” Winrod continued. “Few still remain, but for decades they served as workhorses for the aviation business.”
    “We’re not flying one, are we?”
    He grinned. “Nope, that Cessna over there is ours.”
    A far cry from the DC-3, it was sleek and new. Winrod opened a rear compartment. “Throw your gear in.”
    He assigned Muñoz and me to the rear, closed the doors, and revved the engines.
    “No drinks, no lavatory,” he called. “Puke into your shirt if you get sick.” He donned a headset.
    Before reaching the runway, we paused to let a Boeing 767 pass. It made me feel like a minnow beside a whale. Before long, we took off, and I gazed at the lights of Quito shining through a crystal clear sky.
    We made a long, smooth arc to the southwest to cross the Andes. To the east, a snow-capped Mt. Cotopaxi came into view, its dome draped in moonlight. To my dismay, the stars soon disappeared and we bounced through clouds. Lightning cracked and thunder shook the plane. I clutched an armrest as the Cessna dove. Within seconds, Winrod steadied the plane in an eerie calm.
    “That’s nothing,” he called. “Mild turbulence from cold Pacific air colliding with hot inland currents; happens all the time.”
    Outside, a range of low-lying hills came into view through thinning clouds while, beyond them, the Pacific appeared as a vast expanse of foreboding dark. As we descended, I cleared my ears with a gaping yawn, refusing to release the armrests.
    “Keep your eyes peeled,” Winrod advised. “We’re going to buzz the shrimp farm.”
    He made a turn that brought us over the coastline, so low I saw brown pelicans flee their nests. The junction of water and land was blurred by mangroves that formed an endless patchwork of islands with interlacing inlets.
    Redondo addressed Muñoz, who interpreted for me. “He says the entire coastline used to look like this before the shrimp farm dredged the mangroves and dug earthen holes for shrimp pools. It’s an environmental nightmare because the mangroves serve as a sanctuary for marine life—especially juvenile fish—and when they’re destroyed, the fish leave. Before the shrimp farm came, he used to catch all the fish he needed along the coast, but now he has to go far out to sea. Not only that, but the farm has soiled the sea with fertilizer, antibiotics, and chemicals.”
    Below, a series of rectangular pools appeared along the coast, each a bit larger than a basketball court. A silver sheen reflected from all but one, a solitary round pond apart from the others that emitted a bioluminescence. A warehouse and trailer shot by, and then the shrimp farm disappeared, replaced by a trash heap with a plume of smoke rising from its center. An instant later, we flew over a collection of shacks, a plaza, and a church whose steeple almost pierced us.
    “El Coco,” Winrod called.
    A small bay came into view, its periphery rimmed with fishing boats, and then, inland, a villa on a hill. As I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of a swimming pool beside the villa, my stomach shot to my chest as the airplane swooned onto a knobby pasture.
    “Gentlemen,” Winrod said, “please remain in your seats until the seat belt sign has been turned off and the airplane has come to a complete halt at the terminal.”
    Some terminal, I thought: a hole-ridden hut with a windsock.
    Winrod killed the engine on Redondo’s side but left the opposite one running for a quick getaway. “Out you go,” he ordered.
    I hopped out into a blast of equatorial air.
    “This way,” Muñoz yelled, following Redondo’s lead.
    As we made our way to a flatbed truck, the Cessna purred into the night. I jumped into the middle seat of the cab, and after a short ride through a banana plantation, we arrived at the
Hotel Buenos Sueños
, which, despite its name, was anything but a dream