I was out of the copilot’s seat and at the window before he finished the sentence. Hargrove banked right and dropped another two hundred feet and I pressed my forehead against the glass and searched the surface until I saw it. Something yellow and orange, partially deflated, riding low in the swells about a mile off our starboard side. My heart rate tripled. My hand went up against the window, acting as a sun visor as I peered. I stopped breathing because I knew what it looked like. It looked like an inflatable life raft.
“Lower,” I told Hargrove. “Get us lower.”
“Mr. Banks, at this altitude I need to maintain?—”
“Lower. Now.”
He brought us down to five hundred feet and circled. The object came into focus as we passed over it and I could see it clearly now. It was a raft. Yellow and orange. Emergency grade, standard issue on small aircraft. It was partially collapsed, riding the current. Nobody in it.
My chest caved in and expanded at the same time because an empty raft was the cruelest kind of evidence. It meant they were out here. It confirmed the crash, confirmed the water landing, confirmed that Quest had done what I knew he would do and gotten them out of that plane alive. But it also meant they weren’t on the raft anymore. They’d either made it to land somewhere or the ocean had taken them and the raft was all that was left. Or it may not have been theirs at all. But something told me that it was.
“That could be theirs,” Prime said from behind me. His voice was careful, measured. He was reading my face and calibrating his tone to match whatever I needed to hear.
“It’s theirs.” I didn’t need confirmation. I knew my brother. He would’ve inflated that raft the second the plane hit water, gotten Mehar on it, and paddled toward anything that looked like land. Quest was a lot of things but he was not a man who satin the middle of the ocean waiting to die. He moved. He acted. He survived. That empty raft didn’t mean they were dead. It meant they’d found somewhere to go.
“Mark the coordinates,” I told Hargrove. “Log them. Every detail. Position, current direction, time stamp. I want to know exactly where that raft was when we saw it so I can calculate drift patterns and figure out which islands are within paddling distance.”
Hargrove started logging the data and I stood in the cockpit doorway staring at the raft as we circled and felt something shift inside me. The current down here flows south and west. That raft had been drifting for weeks. Which meant wherever it started was north of here, probably deep in the Grenadines. That was our search area. That’s where Quest took Mehar to land.
They were out here. Close. On one of these islands. Alive and waiting for someone to come get them.
That’s when the sky ahead of us started to change.
The western horizon, which had been clear all morning, was stacking up with clouds that looked heavy and compressed and tinged with green at the edges. The wind had been shifting for the last twenty minutes but I’d been too focused on the water to notice. Now I noticed. The plane shuddered once, a hard lateral jolt that made Prime brace against the cabin wall, and Hargrove’s hands tightened on the controls.
“Mr. Banks, we’ve got a problem. Hurricane Beatriz has shifted track. It was supposed to pass south of us but the latest advisory has it turning northwest. We’re looking at Category 3 conditions within the next four to six hours and the outer bands are already reaching our position. I need to put us on the ground.”
“No. We stay up. We keep searching.”
“Sir, I can’t fly a visual search pattern in sixty-knot crosswinds with a hurricane bearing down on us. If we getcaught in the eyewall we’re looking at conditions that this aircraft is not rated for. We need to land. Now.”
I looked at the sky. Looked at the ocean. Looked at the raft getting smaller as we circled away from it. Quest and Mehar were down there somewhere on one of those islands and a hurricane was about to hit them and they had nothing. No shelter, no supplies, no communication. And I was up here in a plane being told to run from the same storm that was about to try to kill my brother for the second time.
“If they’re out there, this storm could kill them,” I said.
Hargrove looked at me. He was a professional. Calm, competent, ex-military. And he chose the worst possible words. “Mr. Banks, if they’re still alive after weeks in the open with no supplies and no medical care, this storm may very well finish what the crash started. I’m sorry, but we need to be realistic about the situation.”
I leaned into the cockpit and put my face close enough to his that he could see exactly what was behind my eyes. “Your job is to fly this plane. Not give me your opinions. Next time, keep that bullshit to yourself.”
Hargrove held my gaze for about two seconds. Then he looked away and started plotting a course southeast. “There’s a private airstrip outside Caracas. I can have us on the ground in forty minutes.”
“Then do that.”
I walked back into the cabin and sat down. Prime was watching me with the faintest trace of a smile on his face. Bryce was nodding slowly, arms crossed, looking at me with an appreciation that didn’t need words.
“I’ve never seen you like that,” Prime said.
“Get used to it.”
Prime pulled out his phone and started scrolling through contacts. “I got somebody in Caracas. Name’s Diego. He runs amarina on the coast, private charters, fishing boats, some other things that don’t come with receipts. If we need a boat to get back out there once this storm clears, Diego can make it happen within hours.”
“Call him. Tell him we need a vessel with enough range to cover the Grenadines. Every island, every cay, every strip of sand between Grenada and St. Vincent. That’s where they are. I know it.”
“Already dialing.”
The plane banked southeast toward Venezuela and the storm swallowed the sky behind us. Through the rear window I could see the clouds churning and stacking, a wall of grey and green that stretched from the water to the top of the atmosphere. Hurricane Beatriz. Category 3. The same storm that was about to hit every island in its path with a hundred-and-twenty-mile-per -hour winds and enough rain to turn solid ground into a river.
Quest was down there. Mehar was down there. Their baby was down there. And I was flying in the opposite direction because a pilot told me the math didn’t work.
