Red Thunder

17

WE TURNED EAST on the Tamiami Trail and drove on into the night. We were in three vehicles: Travis’s Hummer, Blue Thunder, and a Ferrari demonstrator Kelly had chosen because it would piss off her dad to find it gone all night and the next day. The thing would go like a bomb, but what with the traffic we picked up around Palm Beach we never got a chance to open her up. The long, low, infernal machine seemed to be pouting most of the way.

It was one in the morning when we pulled into Everglades City, which was an exaggeration if there ever was one. Most of the few hundred inhabitants were snug in bed as we bounced over mud and shell roads until we stopped in front of an old Airstream trailer set up on cinder blocks. The porch light was on. Flowering plants hung from the awning and from poles.

As Travis pulled the Hummer in beside the rusting hulk of a pickup truck, a dog I later learned was a black-and-tan coonhound lifted his head and bounded down the steps. Half a dozen more came out from under the deck. The dogs didn’t bark, but circled the vehicles nervously. Travis held his hand out and the dominant male sniffed it, then started running in circles, wagging his tail. On the other side of the Hummer [167] Jubal was getting out, laughing and tussling with two other dogs, who were so happy to see him I thought they might have a little urinary accident, but they didn’t.

“I figure we stay in the car until we’re introduced,” Kelly said.

“Good plan.”

The screen door flew open and a huge man came out, followed by a woman almost as big. Not fat, either of them, just built large and powerful. I could see immediately that the man was related to Jubal. They had the same eyes and the same mouth. One of his many brothers?

He shouted something at the dogs and they all came to him and sat, quivering.

“Y’all can come out now,” Travis called to us. “Let the dogs sniff your hands and you’ll be okay. They’re hunting dogs, not guard dogs. Cousin Caleb breeds the best black-and-tans in the state of Florida.”

“Georgia and Mississip’, too,” the big guy bellowed. Then he had his arms around Jubal and was pounding him on the back hard enough to kill a normal man. Travis embraced the woman, then they switched and did it all over again.

Introductions were made all around. Caleb was officially Celebration Broussard, but like all but one of his brothers, he had simplified his name “when Pappy went away.” His wife was Grace. Behind the two of them a boy-young man, really, about fourteen or fifteen-had come out of the trailer and was introduced as Billy, their son.

“Lord have mercy!” Caleb shouted when all that was out of the way. “If that ain’t the finest rig I ever did see. You do all that work yourself, Dak?” Dak allowed as how he had, and the two of them talked pickup trucks while Billy’s eyes went straight to the red Ferrari… and the gorgeous woman who had been driving it. The pimply-faced little jerk. He blushed when Kelly shook his hand. Out here in Everglades City, he probably never saw a pretty female except on television.

“Y’all been driving a long time,” Grace said. “You must be real hungry.”

“We had some ham sandwiches at a 7-Eleven,” Travis said. “Don’t put yourself out, we’re fine.”

[168] Well, I wasn’t all that fine, I was famished. But I was far too polite to say so.

It didn’t matter. Grace would have stuffed food into our mouths with a funnel, if that’s what it took. Pretty soon we were sitting around a big table groaning with fiery, rich, fattening Cajun food, and there’s no finer food in the world.

Jubal was on my right, and he jabbed me with an elbow. He had a twinkle in his eye and was practically wriggling with suppressed joy.

“Watch dis, Manny,” he said, then bowed his head, but looked up under his brow.

“Would somebody say grace?” Jubal asked.

“Grace,” Travis said.

“Yes?” Grace said.

Jubal giggled, and soon we were all laughing. Not much of a joke, I guess you had to be there. Jubal could be so childlike and innocent, and when he laughed it was almost impossible not to laugh with him.

“… and tell my peckerwood little brother not to let another five years go by ’fore he visits us again,” Caleb finished.

“Amen,” Jubal said, with feeling. Travis nodded, looking a bit guilty. Well, he should have been, if the brothers hadn’t seen each other in that long.

Then we all dug in.

I’d already demolished a plateful before I realized the big table was actually too big. Too big for the trailer, anyway. I saw then that Caleb and Grace had added on to the rig, tearing out one side, welding a second trailer to the one out front and then adding a structure on behind that. No telling what all was back there. Welding was one of Caleb’s many professions, along with carpentry and plumbing and “anything needs doing around here.” It looked like very good work to me, not the sort of redneck chaos I’d expected when we pulled up in front.

When we had each turned down a third invitation to eat more, Grace got up and called me and Kelly and Dak and Alicia to the doorway leading further into the trailer-building. We found ourselves in a narrow hallway with doors on each side.

[169] “We’d all love to sit around and chat with y’all all night,” she said, “but Travis says he wants to get an early start, so I figure y’all better catch a little rest. When Travis says early, he means early.”

It turned out all the doors were bedrooms. Grace opened a door and beckoned. On the other side was a room clearly belonging to a girl. From the rock star posters on the wall my guess was she would be twelve or thirteen. The room was immaculate, and smelled slightly of a floral air freshener. There were towels and washcloths neatly folded on the double bed.

“This is Dottle’s room,” Grace said. “She’s my eleven-year-old. The bathroom’s down at the end of the hall.”

“Oh, Grace,” Kelly said, “we don’t want to put your daughter out of her room. We’ll be all right just to-”

“Don’t you worry about Dottie, honey. She’s stayin’ over, slumber partyin’ with friends, and I’m sure they’re havin’ a ball. Probably all still awake. Y’all get some rest now, hear?”

She closed the door, and Kelly leaned close to my ear and spoke softly.

“I should have known nobody in the Broussard family would have only one child,” she said. We tried to laugh quietly since the walls were thin. It turned out there were eight bedrooms in the rear extension, one for each child, with Caleb and Grace’s bedroom in the original trailer. “Just added a room on every time a new one was born,” Travis told us later.

We sat on the bed and fooled around a little, then admitted to each other that we were worn out from the long drive. We got into bed, and I was asleep instantly.

BREAKFAST WAS RUSHED. Travis kept us all moving. Me and Dak and Kelly were bleary-eyed, Dak muttering that if he never saw another crawfish it’d be too soon as he carefully sipped at a glass of milk. Alicia was one of those hateful people who woke up with a spring in her step and a song in her heart. She hummed as she made one of her horrible concoctions in Grace’s blender, adding who-knows-what that [170] she’d brought along herself to whatever fruit Grace had handy, then even got Grace to taste it. Grace was either an accomplished liar or she actually dug the stuff.

Travis and Jubal had been up all night and didn’t look the worse for wear. They each downed cups of strong coffee while I nibbled on the buttered toast Grace had made when she couldn’t persuade me to let her get out her skillet. We all drank lots of coffee.

I got in Blue Thunder and Kelly sat in the back of the Hummer with Jubal. That was Kelly’s idea. We’d decided we didn’t want to leave the two of them alone unnecessarily or they might cut us out of the spaceship project. I didn’t know what Kelly could do to prevent that, but if someone could, she was the one.

When Caleb started his pickup it shuddered hard enough to rain flakes of rust down on the dirt. He put it in gear and started out… and the whole tailpipe and muffler and cat converter assembly fell off. Caleb sprang out of the truck, grabbed the pipe, and tossed it on the side of the road.

“Dak, that is the sorriest truck I ever saw that could actually move,” I said.

“He done used it hard, all right,” Dak said. “Especially when you consider it’s only four years old.”

I looked again, and saw he was right.

“Running through salt water, carrying heavy loads down roads ain’t much more than deer tracks… it takes it out of a vehicle. But don’t be fooled. That engine is excellent, he’s got good struts and good rubber, heavy-duty power train. Caleb just don’t give much of a… flip what the thing looks like.”

We got under way as the sun was just breaking over the eastern horizon. I hoped we weren’t trying to sneak up on anybody, since Caleb’s truck with no muffler was now about as loud as an armored invasion.

We had left the Ferrari at the Broussards’ and I could soon see why. That Italian terminator would have high-centered out within the first quarter mile as we bounced over a deeply rutted road into the swamp. [171] Actually, further into the swamp, as daylight had made it clear that Caleb and Grace’s place was already well into it.

“Don’t worry about your car none, Kelly,” Caleb had told her as he climbed into the cab of the pickup. “Anybody looks at that whiz-banger crooked, Billy’ll wrap a gun barrel round his fool head. Slept out here on the porch last night with a shotgun ’crost his lap. Lucky thing a dog didn’t bark or he’d of blowed off a toe.”

Much of the vastness of the Florida Everglades is roadless, trackless, “where the hand of man has never set foot,” as the saying goes. The Jeep tracks that lead into it, like the one we’d used to reach the Broussard abode, tended to peter out in a few miles. Then, here and there, the passage of a few four-wheel-drive vehicles a week has made some informal routes along what little ground isn’t four feet deep in quicksand or gumbo mud. Some of them are indicated on maps, others aren’t. But we didn’t need any maps with Caleb leading the way. He knew them all, or claimed to.

This was not the Florida I knew. I could identify some of the plants from seeing tamer versions in people’s yards or in city parks. They grew differently out here. But I’m a city boy, don’t know much about plants even in town.

Don’t know much about birds, either, but this was the place to come if you wanted to learn. I never saw so many birds. They’d explode from the reeds and moss-hung trees when they heard us coming. Big birds, little birds, great big flocks of black birds, thousands of egrets or cranes or something like that who just stood there and watched us go by.

Me and Alicia both craned our necks the first time Dak pointed out a big old alligator sunning himself beside a ditch. We watched him glide powerfully into the water and vanish up to his eye sockets. Wow!

Two miles later it was here a gator, there a gator, everywhere an alligator. Ho-hum. We actually had to wait for one to get out of the road in front of us. The gator probably thought of it as a gator track… and he’d be right. He was here first, he’d watched the dinosaurs come and go, and maybe he’d be here still once this critter calling itself “humanity” killed itself off.

[172] They say the Everglades are in trouble, what with the water being siphoned off up north, Miami advancing from the east, pesticides, global warming, I don’t know what all. And I believe them. But just driving through for the first time, I was in awe at the sheer numbers of the wildlife we saw.

Unfortunately, among that wildlife you had to count the mosquitoes.

Billions of mosquitoes.

Now we knew why Caleb had tossed a big plastic bottle of Off! on the front seat of Blue Thunder. We coated ourselves with the stuff, Alicia slathering it on Dak as he drove. Blue Thunder didn’t have an air conditioner-one of the few vehicles in Florida without one-but it wouldn’t have mattered, because we all knew we’d be out in the open soon enough, whenever Caleb got where he was taking us.

The repellent helped, but about one in a hundred of those critters seemed to think Off! was just there to oil up their bloodsucker, make it easier to slide it into the skin. It appears we’re breeding a better, stronger skeeter out there in the swamps, and when their kids grow up, look out!

OUR DESTINATION TURNED out to be the rotting remains of a dock, smack in the middle of nowhere. I know, because somebody had put up a sign: middle of nowhere. Redneck humor, I guess. The sign was about to fall over.

A flat-bottom Cajun pirogue could have made it through the shallow channels we saw winding around the hammocks and cypress knees and mangroves, but you’d have to pole it. An outboard propeller would have stuck in the mud.

Caleb and Travis pulled a big canvas tarp off a big lumpy thing sitting next to the dock and I wasn’t too surprised to see it was an airboat. Where the four-wheel tracks end, that’s where the airboat trails begin.

It was a wide, flat-bottom aluminum hull, extremely shallow draft, designed to skim over the water rather than cut through it. At the back was an aircraft engine mounted high in a safety cage. In front of it, almost as high, was a sort of crow’s nest seat for the pilot to sit in, way [173] up where he could more easily pick out his route. An airboat didn’t need much water under the hull. An inch was plenty. If you had a good head of steam and kept going, it would glide right over mud, too. Even dry land, for a while. “Don’t need no more water’n a skeeter can spit,” Caleb said as we boarded.

This one had once been a tourist boat. There were four rows of comfortable bench seats, with pads faded and cracked open by the relentless sun over the years, yellow foam stuffing showing here and there.

We all piled out of the vehicles, the mosquitoes swarming again now that we’d stopped. We put on more repellent, but nothing was going to make them go away completely, so we worked quickly, hoping to get moving again soon.

Travis and Jubal lifted a big cardboard box out of the back of Blue Thunder. It didn’t appear too heavy. They opened it and for the first time we saw the experimental test vehicle Jubal had cobbled together.

I can’t really say that it looked too impressive.

It was a five-foot tube of heavy-duty six-inch gray PVC pipe, the kind you’d buy for an ordinary plumbing project. A tapered nose cone had been fitted on the top of it. Below were three metal fins that also acted as legs for it to stand on. Under the tube was a spherical metal cage, the only part of the contraption that looked as if a fair amount of work had gone into it. Without knowing about Jubal’s Squeezer dingus, I’d never have known what it was for. It was intended to hold a silver bubble about the size of a softball.

I’d seen better rockets at the school science fair.

They put it on its side on the front bench of the airboat and tied it down with bungee cords. Two aluminum suitcases were set on the floor in front, and we were ready to go. Caleb climbed up into the pilot’s seat and started the engine.

Soon we were flying along on the smooth water.

THE WIND IN our faces whipped away even the steroid-pumped Everglades mosquitoes. The day had not yet begun to get hot. The water below us was the color of weak tea and the sky above blue and [174] cloudless. We barreled along through a primeval world where I could easily imagine duck-billed dinosaurs browsing in the trees. Kelly squeezed my hand and smiled at me. I’d had worse days.

ON A MAP you can see hundreds of what they call hammocks scattered through the Everglades. There are also islands, streams, creeks, sloughs. The hammocks on the maps could be miles long, but even the smallest-scale maps didn’t indicate the ones that were only an acre or two, because they weren’t very permanent features.

Caleb finally beached the airboat on a bare knuckle of cracked mud that might have had enough room to park a dozen cars… if you didn’t mind seeing them sink like mammoths in the La Brea Tar Pits. We had to step carefully when we got out. My first step cracked through the skin of dried mud and I almost lost a shoe. The footing was a bit firmer in the center of the little island.

Looking around, I wasn’t sure why Caleb had selected this place, an hour’s ride from where we’d left the vehicles. Most every mile of swamp we passed through seemed just as isolated as any other mile, though I knew this wasn’t strictly true. We saw other airboats passing in the distance, and once came close enough to wave at the driver.

We quickly saw that we were basically just along for the ride, and because Jubal wanted us there. Travis and Jubal set the rocket on its end near the center of the hammock, then started placing other devices around it. Neither of them had anything to say, they just worked steadily stringing wires, plugging things into other things, sweat dripping off their foreheads. The rest of us stood around, slapping at mosquitoes.

It occurred to me that, if this thing worked, we might be about to witness something as historic as the Wright brothers’ first flight. But to tell the truth, all I wanted to do was get it done and get out of there. I was getting eaten alive!

I mentioned the Wright brothers analogy to Kelly, and she slapped her forehead and dug around in her purse. In a moment she found a pink throwaway PrettyPixel camera and started snapping pictures as [175] fast as she could click the shutter. Travis frowned, and told her those pics would have to be considered classified information for the time being.

“Yes, sir, Colonel Broussard,” she said, and kept snapping away. “And stupid me, I left my vidcam home sitting on my desk.”

Which is why there is no video of the maiden-and final-flight of the good ship Everglades Express, and why Kelly appears in only one picture taken that day, when Caleb insisted the six of us pose in front of the completed rocket setup, a bug-bitten family looking like they’d rather be anywhere else but this hellhole.

They had it all ready in no more than half an hour. Jubal stood looking at it, his fists on his hips, nodding in satisfaction. He put his hand on the conical nose cone. There was a round piece of glass set into it.

“Dis eye,” Jubal said, “dis eye find de sun, yes she does. Lock on to de sun, den keep herself in dat attitude fo’ all de flight. Dat way she go straight up.”

We all piled back in the boat and Caleb eased us off the mud flat and back through the shallow water as Travis paid out a cable from a Radio Shack reel.

At two hundred feet Travis looked at Jubal.

“Far enough, Jube?”

I didn’t like the frown I saw on Jubal’s brow. He muttered, then looked around, and smiled when he found what he was looking for.

“Ovah dere,” he said. He was pointing at another hammock, this one a bit bigger than Rocket Hammock. Caleb moved the boat over there, and we could see on the other side there was a small eroded bank, maybe three feet high, with a fallen tree trunk lying on top of it. Now we could crouch down behind the bank and the tree and be protected if the rocket should blow up.

Travis and Jubal took another five minutes plugging the ends of the wires into an old laptop computer and then they were ready. Travis handed out safety glasses and hard hats from the boat, and we all put them on.

“I think we should all get down behind the bank,” Dak said.

[176] “Can’t we peek over the top?” Kelly asked. “I want to get pictures.”

We all looked at Jubal, who was again looking nervous.

“Go ahead on,” he said. “Peek. But be careful, cher.”

Travis had the remote control in his hands. I put my arm around Kelly. Then I looked at Jubal. He grinned, and shrugged.

“T’ree, two, one, an-”

He flicked the launch switch as he said “zero,” and the world exploded.

There was a shock wave that blew my helmet off, an explosion that sounded like a bomb going off. And directly ahead I saw a wall of mud rushing toward me.

“Oh, me oh my,” Jubal said, and the wall hit us.

It was actually a wall of water, a big wave maybe four feet high, but it was thicker than water had any right to be. It was full of mud, decaying leaves, twigs. We all tried to fall back in front of it, but there was nothing but more water behind us. I staggered a few steps before sitting down in the glop, and the wave crested over the bank we’d been sheltering behind, then over us.

For a few seconds everything was dark, then my head broke through and I was gasping… and that’s when the water and mud that had been blown into the air started to rain down on us. I don’t think the planet has often seen a filthier rain. A bullfrog landed on me and sat in my lap for a moment, stunned.

Travis was shouting something I couldn’t hear clearly, something about covering our heads. My hardhat had been swept away. I found Kelly and we huddled together, hunched over, hoping the explosion hadn’t been powerful enough to throw any sizable rocks or tree trunks into the air.

It was over in a few seconds, though it seemed a lot longer. The water settled down, the mud stopped falling from the sky.

“Did it blow up, Jubal?” Alicia shouted.

“No ’splosion, cher,” he said, then pointed into the air. “Look!”

We did, and saw a straight white line rising from the launch site, already twisted a little as the air currents caught it. Far, far away the line was still growing as the tiny rocket reached the upper levels of the [177] atmosphere. Kelly and I stood up unsteadily and watched the line dwindle and lengthen… and suddenly it stopped.

“What happened?” I asked Jubal. “Run out of fuel?”

“No, Manny.” Jubal entered some numbers on the mud-covered computer. “Outta de atmosphere. She up ’bout eight mile now.”

Caleb was standing in the boat, bailing with a galvanized metal bucket. He looked up and tossed me a plastic bait bucket.

“Bail, son,” he said. “We gotta get outta here. This tub don’t fly too good with two ton of mud in her, and she got no scuppers.”

I didn’t know a scupper from a yardarm, but I could see what he meant. I got to work, and was soon joined by all the others using their hard hats, except Travis, who was reeling in cable as fast as he could wind it. We worked like a road gang in hell.

One good thing about the mud. The mosquitoes couldn’t bite through it.

We had the boat about as dry as it was going to get when Travis pointed into the sky and shouted. Squinting into the glare, I saw four contrails way, way up there. They were flying close, then they moved apart and circled around the remains of the rocket’s vapor trail like bloodhounds casting for a scent.

“Fighter group,” Travis said. “Probably from the base at Boca Chica Key.”

“Navy jets,” Dak said.

“You think they’re looking for us?” Alicia asked.

“They ain’t counting alligators, hon. What else is there out here they might want to see? I never thought the sucker would go up so fast!”

“I t’ink I mighta dropped a-”

“Later, Jube. We got to get outta here. Try to look like tourists!”

We scrambled in and Caleb got us moving. Look like tourists? How were we going to do that, covered in mud?

Kelly started scooping handfuls of water and splashing it over her hair and her face. The rest of us did, too. I dipped a plastic bucket into the water… and promptly lost it, snatched right out of my hand when I let it go too deep. I held on to the next one better, and dumped it over Dak’s head. He sputtered and grabbed the bucket from me.

[178] “I don’t need cleaning up!” he shouted. “I don’t show the dirt like you whiteys do!” And he dumped a bucketful on me. Pretty soon we were mostly free of mud, though we were ankle deep in chocolate-colored water. Even though the air was humid, I figured the rushing wind would dry us pretty soon.

“Over there!” Travis yelled in my ear, and I looked where he was pointing. Far away three elongated specks were moving through the air at treetop level. Travis reached up and tapped Caleb’s leg. Caleb nodded. Travis pointed to a thicket of mangroves, and Caleb arrowed straight for it. He turned off the engine and the silence surrounded us. After a moment we could hear the sound of the distant helicopters.

“Hueys,” Travis said, quietly.

“Did we do something wrong?” Kelly whispered.

“Why are we all whispering?” Alicia whispered. Dak laughed.

“We probably broke some federal laws about fireworks in a nature preserve, something like that,” Travis said. We knew he wouldn’t be behaving like this if that was all that was the matter. “I don’t want to get noticed by the military. Or even the Everglades rangers, for that matter. This has all got to stay secret.”

Before long the Hueys were too far away to see or hear. Caleb backed us out of the briar patch and headed us back home. But soon he was slowing again. He waved, and I stood up and could see another airboat piloted by a grizzled old conch who must have been seventy. There was a tangle of weeds and vines between us, keeping us about twenty yards apart. A tourist couple was sweltering in pants and long-sleeved shirts, wearing safari hats with netting veils. They waved happily to us and we waved back, smiling. Kelly snapped their picture, and the woman snapped right back at her.

“Broussard!” the old man shouted over the idling engines. “Did you hear an explosion, ol’ hoss?”

“Heard something, McGee,” Caleb allowed. “Back yonder, I think.” He pointed at an angle at least ninety degrees away from where the launch had actually happened.

“Saw something takin’ off like a rocket, too.”

“Probably just some kids. You know how they are.”

[179] “Yeah… in my day it was cherry bombs.”

“These days, it’s likely to be an H-bomb,” Caleb laughed.

McGee leaned over and spit in the water, which didn’t make his female passenger too happy. “Y’all take care, now, y’hear?”

IT WAS FUNNY how, on the way out, I figured we were probably the only human beings for twenty miles in any direction. Coming back, I thought somebody needed to install a traffic light.

I’m exaggerating. But we saw maybe a dozen other airboats. There were pickups and SUVs and ATVs on the dirt roads, and small planes overhead. None of them gave us any reason to believe they were looking for us.

We made it back to the Middle of Nowhere in about an hour, then to Caleb’s trailer-home in fifteen minutes. Travis was in a big hurry. We took hasty showers, said our good-byes, thanked Grace for the food-and accepted a picnic basket crammed with more of it-then piled back into our vehicles and hit the road.

When Kelly saw that Nephew Billy had washed all the road grime and bugs off the Ferrari she kissed him on the cheek. I shook his hand anyway.

IN WHAT I thought was an excess of paranoia, Travis insisted the three vehicles not drive together, but maintain a five-minute separation. We were taking Alligator Alley back to Fort Lauderdale, so it wasn’t hard.

“I’ve been asleep at the wheel as far as security goes,” he told us during a cellular conference call. “From now on, we’re going to be more careful than we’ve been. You gotta remember-”

“Travis,” I interrupted. “If we’re going to be careful… do you think we should be discussing these things on cell phones?”

There was silence for a moment. Kelly looked over and gave me a thumbs-up.

“Manny, you’re a genius and I’m a jerk-off idiot. Everybody hang up and meet me at Bahia Mar in Lauderdale. We’ll have lunch.”

[180] BAHIA MAR IS one of your nicer marinas. About a zillion dollars’ worth of rich folks’ playtoys were tied up at the finger piers, motor and sail, blinding white and those deep blue tarps they wrap sails in. We found each other easily enough, and Travis led the way to a pretty city park and we all unloaded Grace’s lunch onto a picnic table. There was a bucket of fried chicken and a big Tupperware box of potato salad and scratch buttermilk biscuits and a watermelon for dessert. There was also a red-and-white checkered tablecloth to put it all on, heavy plastic plates and spoons, and a big thermos of grape Kool-Aid.

“I have screwed up just about everything I’ve tried so far,” Travis said after the food had been distributed. “You notice my crazy neighbor lately? He’s ready to take off on a flying saucer with Jesus. Which is what he saw the day I landed you all in the pool by fiddling with something I didn’t understand.

“As for today’s fiasco… what was I thinking?”

“I’m sorry, Trav-”

“Not your fault, Jubal.”

“It was a decimal point, jus’ a little-”

“I know, Jube, I know. But I can’t afford to drop any more decimal points. Friends, Jubal did a search while I was driving… show ’em, Jube.”

Jubal went to http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/RealTime/JTrack/3D/ JTrack3D.html on his computer. I knew the site. It kept track of all satellites in orbit. We saw a display of the Earth surrounded by thousands of dots, many of them in a ring at the geosynchronous distance of 22,500 miles. Jubal zoomed in on Florida, then the southern tip of Florida, and entered the time of the launch. We saw a handful of satellites and lines representing their orbits. Jubal moved the cursor over one.

“Dat be Friendship Station. She were ’bout two hunnerd miles away when de rocket go shootin’ by.”

“Jes… You mean we could have hit it?” Alicia asked.

“It would have been a trillion-to-one shot to hit it,” Travis said. “That doesn’t worry me. No, the thing that worries me is that our bird would [181] have showed up on their radar. Also this satellite, and this one. Not to mention ground radars. Now some people in our government know there’s something out there that can outperform any rocket in their arsenal. I mean, our bird was accelerating at twenty gees, and it would have kept it up until it was out of radar range. When they lost it, it was traveling faster than any man-made object has ever traveled. Ever, in the history of the world.”

We all digested that for a while. Suddenly I didn’t feel so hungry.

“Now our government knows there’s somebody out there with a powerful new technology. I’m sure they’re going to want it. And what I worry about is our alphabet soup of intelligence agencies. FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA.”

“What about SMERSH?” I asked, joking. Travis didn’t laugh.

“I’ve often asked myself that question,” he said. “Is there a super, super secret agency in the government, accountable to no one, licensed to kill, like in a James Bond movie? I hope not, but there’s no way for us to know. By its nature nobody would ever have heard of it.”

“ ‘If I told you, I’d have to kill you,’ ” Dak said.

“Exactly. So it’s a waste of time to worry about something like that. I’m worried enough about the ones we do know about.

“By triangulating the radar signatures they know where we did it. I can’t think they would learn much from the launch site. It’s hard digging in the ’Glades. That hole in the ground filled up with muddy water before we even left.

“What worries me most is that I stupidly let us drive into a small, isolated town in three of the most memorable vehicles in Florida.”

I looked at our little automotive fleet. It was so obvious once he’d said it, but it hadn’t occurred to me. Even now, there were half a dozen neighborhood kids standing around the vehicles, gawking.

“They’ve got satellites that can read a license plate from orbit, and it was a clear day, but I strongly doubt they took any pictures. Why would they?”

“But people will talk,” Kelly murmured.

“You said it. Old man McGee saw us, and so did those tourists. As for McGee, he wouldn’t be apt to have much to say to a federal agent, [182] on account of the five years of federal time he did behind a marijuana smuggling conviction back in the ’70s. Not to mention that he’d assume they were revenuers out to find his still.

“We drove straight through town. Those folks aren’t inclined to gab, but it will come out, and it may be linked to Caleb.”

That was the worst news I’d heard so far. How far would those snoops go, if they suspected Caleb and his family had something to do with the launch?

“What’s done is done,” Travis said. “We can’t take it back. But we can lie as low as we are able for a while, and we can be more careful in the future. Deal?”

We all agreed… and pretty soon Dak wished he hadn’t.

“Kelly,” Travis went on, “I guess you’ll be putting that Roman firebomb back in your father’s lot. Not much we can do about it, I guess. I’m hoping that anyone comes snooping around won’t figure a Ferrari demonstrator was likely to be the one showed up in Everglades City today.”

Kelly looked thoughtful for a moment.

“I can probably do better than that. Let me think on it.”

“Good enough. Dak…” I could see Dak hadn’t gotten it yet. “Dak, could you… could you garage that blue beast for a while?”

Dak’s eyes widened with surprise, then he gave a deep sigh.

“Sure, Trav. For a while. You got a bicycle I could borrow?”

“No, but I’ve got another bike somewhere. You could use that.” Dak looked a lot happier. “Manny, you keep the Triumph for a while.”

“Oh, gosh, do I have to?”

“Such a sacrifice,” Alicia laughed, and slapped my back.

Kelly held out the chicken wishbone, hooked around her greasy pinkie finger, I took the other end and pulled.

Oh, please, let us build this thing.

Short end.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” she said. “Maybe we wished for the same thing.”