They broke out of the soup at 6,000 feet, but into rain, not the clear. The ground was again visible, if not as clearly as before. The problem now was how far the area of rain extended; if it was part of an electrical storm; and-if it was raining in Santo Tome-what the rain would do to the dirt landing strip.
He leaned forward and looked out and upward through the cockpit window, then confirmed what he suspected by banking steeply and looking out the win-dow by his side.
The three-quarter moon, which had been clearly visible from the time they took off, was no longer clear. They were entering some kind of soup, perhaps even bad weather. He was flying in the clear above clouds at 4,000 or 5,000 feet, and below a layer of clouds at maybe 15,000 feet.
The glow that had to be Sao Luis Gonzaga appeared again, faintly.
I h
ave two options. I can stay on this course, dropping down to see if I can get under that cloud layer at 5,000, and follow the road-turning onto it-from Sao Luis Gonzago to Sao Borja. But to do that, I need the headlights on the road. If I can't see them, I won't know where the hell I am.
Or I can continue on this course, fix past Sao Luis Gonzaga, and try to find the Rio Uruguay. If I can find the river, I can drop down to 500 feet and fly down the river until I hit Sao Borja and Santo Tome. And if I get lucky, and there is, say, 1,500-feet visibility under the cloud layer, I can probably find that glow of their lights and just steer toward it until it breaks in two. The glow on the right will be Santo Tome.
The decision was made for him. As he dropped down, visibility worsened and the glow of Sao Luis Gonzaga vanished.
Rain began to beat against the cockpit windshield.
There was nothing to do but lose more altitude and pray that the clouds he was flying through were not rock-filled. The needle crept past 5,000 feet to 4,000 to 3,500.
A quick glance at the Hamilton confirmed his suspicion that by now he had flown past Sao Luis Gonzaga without seeing it.
He did not to have to remind himself that he was 3,500 feet above sea level, which was not the same thing as 3,500 feet above the ground; a chilling experi-ence in the Hawaiian Islands-a pineapple plantation on Maui had suddenly appeared out of the soup fifty feet below him with his altimeter indicating 2,500 feet-had burned that detail of aviation lore permanently in his brain.
According to Delgano, the field in Santo Tome was 950 feet above sea level. Call it a thousand. He was actually 2,500 feet above the ground.
Very, very slowly, he lost more altitude, until the altimeter indicated 2,500 feet. It was now getting turbulent, and, if anything, darker.
And then the cloud cover above him opened for a moment, and the light from the moon provided just a little more visibility. For a moment he could make out a light on the ground.
There was nothing to do but see what it was.
I will not go lower than a thousand feet! If I can't get through this, I'll just do a one-eighty and head back for Porto Alegre.
With the altimeter indicating a little less than 2,000 feet, the light he was approaching became clearer and then divided into two lights: red and green.
Navigation lights.
A boat! Or a ship!
It didn't matter. If it was a boat or a ship, it has to be the river!
What he could not afford to do was lose those navigation lights. He dropped lower.
There was no longer any reason to look at the altimeter. Altimeters worked on atmospheric pressure, and there was a built-in dampening system. The alti-tude indicated on the dial was the altitude the aircraft had held two, three sec-onds-he had heard as many as seven seconds-before.
He could now make out the outline of the vessel he was approaching. It was a freighter, a vessel capable of sailing the high seas. He flashed over it no more than 200 feet over its masts.
"I think you probably scared hell out of whoever was steering that," Ashton said dryly.
Clete considered that.
Hell, yes, he had scared whoever was at the wheel of the freighter. He had turned off his navigation lights as soon as he broke ground at Porto Alegre. The people on the ship certainly heard his engines, but they couldn't see anything, and it is virtually impossible to determine the direction of an airplane at night by the sound of its engines.
And then, all of a sudden, this great big sonofabitch with 2,400 unmuffled horsepower roars overhead at 220 knots.
"Serves him right," Clete said idiotically, and then started to chuckle, then giggle.
"I'm glad that someone finds this situation amusing," Ashton said, and for some reason Clete found that hilarious too.