Rolly King George, wearing only sunglasses and a pair of black swimming trunks, looked across the portside rail of his boat with powerful binoculars. His huge black arms were beginning to dry the chalky white of sea salt. One of several dive tanks was strapped to his buoyancy compensator and regulator and dropped carelessly like the flippers and mask at his feet. Two stiff wahoos lay against the wall of the transom, dark holes trickling blood from their silvery sides and pooling on the fiberglass floor, eyes wide and glazed, staring toward his bare feet as he contemplated what he had just seen.Rolly King George, senior investigator of the Jamaica Constabulary Force, was on holiday and spearfishing in the shallows south of White Bay when he first heard the airplane’s growl. It was an old plane, a Douglas DC-3, and it was flying south in cloudless skies. Heading toward the mainland of South America when he first saw it. Pushing one of the wahoos over the side of his boat, he’d slipped back in the water, put a shot of air into his buoyancy compensator to keep him afloat, and used a hand to shade his eyes from the sun as he watched the plane’s approach.Unmarked planes were hardly unusual in the Caribbean; plenty of islanders maintained personal planes on private airstrips, not to mention that DC-3s were the favorite of drug runners—old and gutted of their seats, they could be bought cheap at thirty or forty thousand dollars and disposed of once their job was done.But something about the plane kept him looking up and treading water as it came overhead, and then he saw the black outline of an open door and suddenly a body came out, arms flailing, legs kicking as it plummeted to the sea.It seemed to take forever but at last he saw a small spray by green shallows.The plane banked hard, circling low over the place where the body had dropped, then it changed direction and headed southeast.
