“Wait a minute, now,” said Axel. “How in the heck are they going to land a Cessna 310 on Maravovo, let alone take off again? Is there a nice, big, two-thousand-foot landing strip on this deserted atoll? That’s what it would take. Fifteen hundred feet at the absolute minimum.” As the only person with flying experience in the room, Axel’s word carried weight. He had learned to fly fifteen years or so ago, briefly serving as the ranch pilot before discovering that, as much as he enjoyed the navigational calculations, he didn’t much like flying itself. “I think maybe Felix is right, sweetheart; we’d better find an outfit in Honolulu.”
But
“Really? I didn’t know there was anybody on the Big Island who could do that kind of work.”
“They did it themselves,” Malani explained. “They also serve as their own pilots, which saves considerably on the cost.”
“Oh, brudda,” Keoni said, “I’m just glad nobody’s asking
Undeterred, Malani went on, meticulously referring to the neat, columnar notes—she wrote in tiny uppercase letters—that she had made on a note pad. “The Cessna’s cruising speed is about two hundred miles an hour, so to be on the safe side they’re allowing a total of five hours for the eight-hundred-mile round trip, plus an hour for landings and takeoffs, and five hours for the work itself. Eleven hours altogether.”
At this point, the grilled steaks, brought in by a perspiring, aproned cook, drew everyone’s attention. There were no inquiries as to rare, medium, or well-done; the perfectly charred, two-inch-thick tenderloins were simply plopped onto the plates (all except Hedwig’s) with a simple accompaniment of spinach and baked potato that was served in bowls, family style. No steak sauce, ketchup, or mustard; the only condiments on the table were salt and pepper. Gideon was surprised to see that the steaks were all medium-well-done, a barely pink-tinged brown at the center, and said as much to Axel.
“Oh, yeah,” Axel said. “You won’t find too many ranchers who like their steaks rare.” He wrinkled his nose. “Smells too much like cow.”
“You don’t suppose,” said Hedwig, digging into the plate of couscous, kohlrabi, and gingered squash that the cook had plopped in front of her with undisguised contempt, “that might be because it
“
“—but it’s impossible to reach any kind of higher consciousness—”
“Oh, put a cork in it, Hedwig,” Felix shouted amiably, his jaws grinding audibly away on flesh and fat.
“Cannibals,” sighed Hedwig. “Surrounded on all sides by ravening carnivores.”
“You can thank ravening carnivores for everything you have,” Dagmar said, chewing.
“Actually, I’d have thought Marti would get along pretty well with Hedwig,” Gideon whispered to John.
“Actually, she does.”
Over coffee and a dessert of baked apples and cream, Malani gave them the rest of the details: Ocean Quest’s plane was loaded with equipment and ready to go, but it was currently hangared at the Honolulu airport, where it had just gotten a new paint job. In the morning they would put two of their salvage divers, who would double as the Cessna pilot and co-pilot, on the first Aloha inter-island flight from Kona to Honolulu, where they would pick up the Cessna and take off for Maravovo, hoping to touch down in the lagoon by nine or ten a.m. They would expect to finish up by two in the afternoon at the latest and be back in Honolulu with the remains in time for one of the commercial evening flights to Kona. The estimated fee would be $16,000. “They think that’s a maximum. It’ll probably be less.”
Keoni pretended to choke on a chunk of baked apple. “Sixteen thousand dollars for one day’s work? And I thought Felix was the expert on screwing his clients.”
“Damn it, Keoni,” Felix said, “if that’s supposed to be humorous—”
“The largest single cost is the plane,” Malani cut in. “Nine hundred dollars an hour flight time and three hundred dollars an hour wait time. Add that to the divers’ hourly rate of five hundred dollars, the air fare to and from
Honolulu—”
“Still—” Keoni said.
“I don’t want to argue about it,” Dagmar said. “I’m sure they’re not overcharging us. You go ahead and tell them to do it, my dear.”
“Don’t forget about getting permission from the Kiribati government,” John said.
“They say they’ll take care of all that,” Malani said. “They’ve dealt with the Kiribatis before.”
“They’ll need to file a flight plan,” Axel said. “They’ll have to—”
“They know all about that; they’ll get started as soon as I call back.” She paused, chewing on her lip for a moment. “Oh, there is one other thing. They’ve never recovered human bones before, and they’re nervous about how they’re supposed to handle them, and even how to recognize them. So you can imagine how excited they got when I told them that we had the world-famous Skeleton Detective himself staying with us”—she turned a brilliant smile on Gideon and actually batted her eyelashes—“and he just might be willing to...” With a teacherly motion of her hand she encouraged him to finish the sentence for her.
“Go with them?” Gideon said. “I’d...be happy to help out any way I can.” He’d been on the narrow edge of exclaiming “I’d love to!”, which would hardly have been appropriate in the circumstances, but the fact was that he’d been hoping they’d ask him ever since John had told him about the find.
What he had told Axel about being interested in cattle-ranching was true enough, but when it came to real, gut-level interest, cows didn’t hold a candle to bones. For Gideon, as for every other forensic anthropologist he knew, the skeleton was a source of inexhaustible fascination, and to sit down with the bony remains of some anonymous, long-dead human being was to accept a challenge: What could be told from them about the person’s
