The Divine World Read online

The Divine World

  By William Young

  *****

  PUBLISHED BY:

  The Divine World

  Copyright 2011 by William Young

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Epilogue

  Original Short Story Version

  Television Pilot Episode

  Sample Chapter from Of Monsters and Men, sequel to The Divine World

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  The UH-1 “Huey” helicopter chopped through the air over the clear blue waters of the Caribbean, the small island from which it had taken off diminishing into a dark smudge on the horizon behind it. On the surface below, it passed over a pleasure boat, and David Arris smiled as he looked down through the door window at the deck of a small yacht. A bikini-clad woman lying on a blanket shielded her eyes to gaze at his helicopter flying above her. Pleasure craft, indeed, Arris thought as he adjusted his course toward a much more malevolent type of surface vessel.

  Arris turned his head over his shoulder and looked into the cargo area. Two DEA agents were consulting a map and pointing binoculars out the windows trying to find the day’s target. One of the agents keyed his microphone switch and asked, “Are we on the right course? There’s supposed to be a small chain of islands coming up soon.”

  Arris toggled the button on his cyclic stick to engage his mic, “Yeah, we’re on course. Another couple of clicks and we should hit the first checkpoint.”

  A couple of minutes passed in silence and the islands in question emerged as dark specks dead ahead of them. The plan was to approach the islands, circle them as if sight-seeing, and then climb back up and look for the Norwegian Tjeld class torpedo boat they were after. The Huey was painted blue and yellow, with a large logo on each side’s sliding cargo door advertising the helicopter as “Island Tours,” but the paintjob was only days old, cover for the mission the government agents and Arris were now flying. Somewhere out amidst the islands of the Caribbean, a half-dozen ships of various sizes were lying in wait for the right moment to move north toward America and unload millions of dollars in illegal drugs.

  At least that was what the official mission brief declared. Arris didn’t believe it: the drug cartel operation was too large, the ships too noticeable for this to be the work of a drug cartel. Those guys liked to stay under the radar; the operation Arris was trying to find looked as if it were a private navy on maneuvers, intent on being noticed as if it were sending a message to somebody.

  Arris pushed the collective stick down and adjusted the cyclic between his legs, feeling the aircraft descend as he turned toward the little islands ahead, marveling at their emptiness and noting the swirls of fish in the shallow waters off the empty narrow beaches. He circled around a larger island and noticed an oversized bungalow-style house on it. A man and a woman walked out from some tree cover and stared up at the helicopter, their hands shading their eyes from the sun. Arris smiled: everyone always looked up at helicopters.

  “I wonder whose private island that is,” Agent Porter asked over the intercom.

  “Doesn’t Mick Jagger have an island somewhere out here?” Agent Jones said.

  “Jagger? I dunno. Probably,” Porter said.

  Arris imperceptibly shook his head as he adjusted the collective and cyclic to gain altitude and change course: envious government bureaucrats. Arris brought the Huey up to 1,000 feet and began scanning the horizon for the target when Jones’ voice broke over the intercom.

  “Yo, I think that’s the ship over there on the left, moving left-to-right by that island about a mile away.”

  Arris turned and looked, and sure enough, it was the Tjeld torpedo ship, modified to look like a generic cargo vessel. Just then, Agent Porter tapped Arris on the shoulder and pointed out the window.

  “We need to make some sort of looping pass-by to confirm that’s what we’re after. Not too close, just so we can see it well enough through the binos,” Porter said.

  Arris nodded and stared at the air space. “Alright, I’m going to dip down low over this next series of islands, pull back up to altitude and make a lazy turn toward them that indicates we’re going to make another pass of the islands. Then we’re going to have to pull up and head somewhere else where we can anticipate them, because sitting up here watching them isn’t going to cut it after that. There’s nothing else to look at around here.”

  The islands they flew over barely qualified as islands, being little more than lumps of rock and sand with a smattering of scrub grass, retreats only for sea birds. Arris pulled the helicopter up into the air in a turn that brought it within a quarter-mile of the suspect ship. Agent Jones was looking through his binoculars out the cargo doors the entire time and pressed his mic switch.

  “Yeah, that’s them, you can see them standing on the back of the ship looking at us.”

  Arris furrowed his brows. Everyone looks at the helicopter … but still.

  Agent Porter moved to the window of the helicopter and lifted his binoculars for a view. What he saw astounded him. He failed to key his microphone switch as he shouted out, “A guy just came on deck with an anti-aircraft missile,” but Jones was close enough to hear the muffled shout through his headphones.

  “What did you say?” Jones said over the intercom.

  “There’s a guy on the deck with binoculars pointed right at us, and there’s a guy standing right next to him with an AA rocket,” Porter said.

  Arris turned his head quickly to look out the side window just as the anti-aircraft missile was launched, a quick burst of fire followed by a line of white smoke being drawn through the air directly to his aircraft. Arris pulled the collective stick up to full power and maneuvered the cyclic stick between his legs, trying to turn the helicopter into some sort of defensive posture. There was no chance he’d be able to fly the helicopter behind any cover on the nearby island before the missile hit, so his only chance was to make it miss. Instinctively, he pressed the chaff button on the side of the collective stick and turned his head to look out the window to see if it was deploying.

  “Shit!” Arris said to himself as he realized the small metal bits of chaff were not deploying: of course there was no chaff box on the tail rotor boom of his sight-seeing helicopter. He turned the aircraft through the sky for the next few moments and looked through the co-pilot’s window,
watching the missile streak closer.

  “Hold on tight, this is going to be loud and full of fire,” Arris said over the intercom.

  Arris made one last maneuver with the controls to try to shake the oncoming missile, to no avail. It pierced the left side cargo door with a deafening boom before puncturing the ceiling behind the rear cargo wall and ripping it off, quickly sucking the air out of the cabin. The Huey rocked violently in the air, but there was no explosion, no fireball. The red Master Caution light on the dash panel flicked on immediately, followed by a half-dozen other system caution lights, and Arris instinctively reacted to the drop in engine and rotor RPMs by slamming the collective stick down and adjusting the other flight controls for a glide down to the sea surface.

  Arris glanced quickly into the cargo bay while keying the mic switch on the cyclic, but aside from a lot of blood and a left arm, it was empty. Both agents had been blown out of the helicopter. Arris returned his attention to the task of ditching the helicopter and began to broadcast an emergency call on the radio.

  “Mayday, mayday, this is Victor Six Echo Niner Five, a sight-seeing helicopter—“ Arris glanced down to his kneeboard to look at his position on the map, but the map was gone, sucked away in the non-explosion. He only knew he was over water, a hundred or so miles north of Anguilla and south of a small chain of sandbars, coral reefs and unpopulated scrub-grass-covered protuberances of ground that barely qualified as islands. He had to say he was somewhere: “— going down in the sea about fifteen clicks south-southeast of the Lorenzo Islands.”

  And then Arris put the aircraft in the water, pushed the cyclic stick to the left and felt the helicopter shudder as the blades chopped into the water and forced the transmission to a halt. Seawater rushed in and the weight of the ocean began to pull the aircraft down. Arris unclipped his seatbelt, opened the door and climbed out of the aircraft, frog-paddling away from it and turning to watch it slip beneath the surface of the water, another craft gone to a watery grave. He pulled the cord on his life preserver and felt it inflate against his body, buoying him.

  Arris looked around at the vast expanse of sea and wondered if the smugglers were going to investigate their kill, but his mind turned quickly to sharks. He scanned the water for fins and saw none. He looked farther out for signs of the smuggler’s boat and realized the ocean current had already pulled him out of reach of the small islands he had just flown over. He was going wherever the sea took him.