A minute later Sam turned the nose slightly off center to let the thickly forested island pass beneath the starboard wing. “Out the side window,” he said.
Rivera leaned sideways and looked down. “This is it?” he asked incredulously. “It’s tiny.”
“Three hundred yards across and two hundred feet off the water.”
“It’s not big enough to be an island.”
“An islet, then. Either way, it’s what you’ve been looking for.”
“Why is the center concave?”
“It’s called a caldera. You’re looking at an extinct volcano,” replied Sam. “You still don’t see it, do you?”
“See what?”
“Remi?”
With a nod of approval from Rivera, Remi leaned over his shoulder and looked out the window.
Sam said, “Squint. Think ‘big hollowed-out flower.’”
A beaming smile spread across Remi’s face. “Sam, you found it.”
“We’ll soon find out. Do you see it yet, Rivera?”
“No.”
“You’re familiar with the traditional illustration depicting Chicomoztoc? Imagine that illustration viewed from above. Now imagine the points of the island rounded and more pronounced.”
After a few moments Rivera murmured, “I see it. Amazing. Amazing! Take us down!”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, damn it, take us down!”
“Whatever you say.”
Passing through two hundred feet, Sam banked the Ikarus one last time, following the bay’s western shoreline until the plane’s nose was again pointed north. Thirty seconds later, the pontoons kissed the surface; the Ikarus’s fuselage shivered and the windows rattled. Sam kept a slightly nose-up attitude, bumping over the surface as his speed bled off.
He watched the needle drop to sixty knots, then fifty. When it slid past forty knots, he said, “Remi, how many sleeping bags do we have?”
She leaned forward in her seat, picked up the pile of bags, and placed them in her lap. “I’ve got three.”
“And I’ve got one,” Sam replied, pointing to the bag stuffed between his seat and the passenger seat. “Rivera, how many do you have?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Sam’s eyes flicked to the dashboard. The needle hit thirty-five knots. He turned toward the man in the passenger seat. “How about you?”
The man opened his mouth to reply but the words never came out. In one fluid motion, Sam dropped his right hand diagonally down, punched the man’s seat-belt release, then grabbed the sleeping bag, brought it to his chest, and shoved the stick forward.
The Ikarus nosed over and slammed into the water.
CHAPTER 47
HAVING NEVER INTENTIONALLY CRASH-LANDED BEFORE, SAM had a plan that was a combination of gut instinct and a fair grasp of physics. Traveling at thirty knots—roughly thirty-four miles per hour—the Ikarus had enough kinetic energy to throw everyone inside violently forward against their seat belts but not enough to throw the seaplane into a nose-over-tail tumble.
The impact was also enough to rip the passenger seat and the seat behind it free of the mounts that Sam had preloosened before leaving the airstrip.