"What did he say?" I asked, not quite catching the burst of rapid-fire
Spanish from the cockpit. The explosion of expletives had included the
word _navegacion_. Something about malfunction.
God help us.
Alan Dupre's helicopter reminded me of the disintegrating taxis on
Guatemala City's potholed streets. The vibration in the passenger
compartment was so violent it made my teeth chatter. My stomach felt
like it was in a cocktail shaker, and the deafening roar could have
been the voice of Hell.
I was staring out the smudgy plastic window, where less than three
hundred meters below I could just make out the top of the Peten rain
forest of northwest Guatemala sweeping by beneath us. So this was what
it looked like. Dense and impenetrable, it was a yawning, deciduous
carpet enveloping the earth as far as the eye could see--if something
ten stories high could be called carpet. I'd been in the forests of
India's Kerala and seen some of the denser growth in southern Mexico,
but this was like another planet.
The main problem was, a violent downpour, the leading edge of the
hurricane, was now sweeping across the Yucatan, stirring up the
treetops of the jungles below. The rain, which had begun in earnest
about ten minutes after we got airborne, had been steadily increasing
to the point it was now almost blinding.
This was the risk I'd chosen to take, but let me admit right here: The
weather had me seriously scared, my fingernails digging into the
armrests and my pulse erratic. And now was there something else? We'd
only been in the air for thirty-five minutes, and already we had some
kind of mechanical issue looming? What was left to go wrong?
"Some of the lights went out or something." Dupre tried a shrug. "I'm
not sure. No big deal, though. This old bird always gets the job done."
His pilot, Lieutenant Villatoro, formerly of the Guatemalan Army, had
just shouted the new development back to the cabin. "Probably nothing.
Don't worry about it."
Don't worry about it! His "tourist" helicopter was a Guatemalan
candidate for the Air & Space Museum, an old Bell UH-1D patched
together with chicle and corn masa. Surely the storm was pushing it far
beyond its stress limits.
"Right, but what exactly--?"
"Sounds like the nav station." He clicked open his seat belt.
"Something . . . Who knows? If you'd be happier, I'll go up and look."