The Cannibal Queen by Stephen Coonts Read Free Book Online Page B

air. I level at 1,000 feet and turn to the southeast.
    The bases of the broken clouds are another thousand or so feet above and the visibility is about a dozen miles. The low flat country spreads away in all directions.
    When Monroe Departure turns us loose, I climb to 1,500 feet and flip on the intercom. David has his head resting on the right side of the cockpit. “Sleeping already?”
    “Playing a game.” He brought his Nintendo Game Boy along on this trip. What did I do to entertain myself at age fourteen, back in the dark ages before electronic games?
    I address myself to the chore of holding 135 degrees on the wet compass. It flops around as usual and I remind myself it rotates backward. The airspeed is more or less steady at 95 indicated.
    Today I annotate the chart with the time as we pass prominent villages and road intersections. Back to basics. There will be no repeat of yesterday.
    After 40 minutes of flying we strike the Mississippi River between Chamblee and Waterproof. I carefully annotate the chart and mark the time, 11:50.
    I turn the flying over to David and tell him to keep us over the river heading south. “Where are all the boats and barges?” he asks.
    “We’ll see some.”
    In less than a minute we do, a group of fifteen barges pushed by one tug heading upriver. And another barge-tug combination a half mile behind the first.
    David peers out one side of the cockpit, then the other. Ahead of us dark clouds are building. The forecast was for thunderstorms after one o’clock. They’re early. Low, flat, wet terrain in every direction, a varying mixture of mud and water that would be tempting fate to try an emergency landing on. I survey the levees. Maybe on a levee if the engine quits.
    The town of Natchez, Mississippi, comes into view ahead. I search off to the left for the airport and find it. We swing over the northern edge of town and I tell David to follow the four-lane going east. We had planned to go 30 miles east following this highway to a little grass field called Dixie, but now the clouds ahead loom a dark gray, almost black. It still looks pretty good to the south, down the river toward Baton Rouge.
    “I think we better land here at Natchez and get some gas. Look at those clouds.”
    A woman answers our call on Unicom. I fly a left downwind and land on runway 18. We have been airborne only 1.2 hours, but when the weather gets crummy a fellow can’t have too much gas.
    Three black men help us fuel the Queen: a heavyset man in his late fifties, a young man in his twenties, and a teenage boy. The young man laughs when he sees the artwork on the right side of the plane. “Come look at this,” he tells the older man. “She’s all right,” he assures me with a broad grin.
    “Snack bar upstairs,” the older man informs me after a look at David, the bottomless pit. He had breakfast just two and a half hours ago, but he is indeed hungry again. The snack bar is a short-order grill manned by a large black woman with a friendly smile. The odor of grease is heavy in the air. David orders a hamburger and fries and gets a coke from the pop machine.
    She cooks it to his order. No McDonald’s, this. Pickles, onion and mustard on a big juicy burger. I watch him eat it with a touch of envy. All burgers were like this when I was a youngster. I didn’t see my first McDonald’s until I was twenty years old, but I refrain from making this remark to David. He would just shake his head and mutter “old geezer” with a grin to take the sting off.
    On the way back to the airplane he looks at the grass. “Not the same as Colorado,” he announces.
    “Too much rain and heat.”
    The black cloud is still obscuring the sky to the southeast, so we plan to fly south around it, down toward Baton Rouge. As we clear Natchez I see the highway leading south and point it out to David. With the plane cruising at 1,500 feet he takes over the flying and moves the plane to the left so as to keep the highway