The emerald dawn caught him by surprise...
 

Green Sun
Chapter 2

by Donna Lamb

The ultralite came up over the desert mesa just before dawn, skimming low but avoiding downdrafts from the cool walls of canyons and bluffs to preserve minimum altitude and save fuel. The hundred and ninety pounds of man and gear did not strain the capabilities of the little machine, nor did the extra ten kilos of cargo. Funny, Hobie Carson reflected, to think of my own weight in pounds and the stuff I'm hauling in metric. He chuckled.

He'd been doing this for months; drive to the rural airfield in southern Arizona, fly down to Mexico in the ultralite with money and come back with.... He didn't like to think about that part. The money was good though. Very good. His original price had been two thousand per trip but with success, he figured the risk climbed each time and he'd asked for more. They never balked. This little sortie would net him twelve thousand dollars minus the piddling amount for gas and parking his camper at the KOA.

The risks weren't piddling, though. Besides criminal charges if he were caught, Carson could get shot down by anyone of a number of government agencies, up to and including the National Guard who sometimes patrolled these desert areas in post-9/11 paranoia. Knowing that put a wonderful fine edge on life. Carson enjoyed the savor that risking his life gave him. It wasn't enough just to fly a tiny plane across a forbidding landscape, he reveled in the added danger of doing something illegal, taking additional risk.

The desert scrolled toward him like the scenery in a video game. Miles and miles, empty of any habitation and for the most part, unmarked by any evidence of human existence. Here and there he spotted the trail of a four-wheeler or a dirt bike or the even rarer water dumps of another sort of smuggler--coyotes, travelers in humanity itself, who would sneak people across the border into the USA for a fee. Often a larger fee than what Carson collected, and one that was paid by each of several immigrants--it might amount to ten times what the drug lords paid their little dragonfly.

And if the coyotes thought they might be caught, they abandoned their human cargo in the wasteland below--just as Carson had rigged his own payload for a quick cut away and drop. The difference being that twenty kilos of cocaine--or whatever the stuff was, Carson didn't actually know and didn't want to know--would not suffer and die of thirst in the Sonora Desert.

The desert, beautiful in the pre-dawn twilight at an altitude of less than three hundred feet could be deadly. Carson did not doubt that. Most of the weight of his gear, minus himself and his cargo, amounted to twelve one-liter bottles of water. The remaining items--clothes, helmet, goggles, navigation computer, radios, phones, toolkit, trail knife, medical supplies, sleeping bag and snacks--weighed less than twenty pounds. Other than the multi-purpose knife, a tool really, he carried no weapons. He hadn't been paid to die in defense of the shipment and if anyone tried to rob him, he would meekly hand it over if it ever came to that.

Sand and scrub stretched away for miles with here and there an arroyo or wash where a palo verde or mesquite tree might thrive on hidden water. Iconic fork-shaped saguaro cacti stuck prickly fingers into the pinkening sky. Off to the east, a spot of horizon brightened. The emerald dawn caught him by surprise; for a moment, Carson thought he might have got something on his goggles. It lasted less than two seconds but for that brief frame of time, the desert turned a marvelous shade of living green.

Stunned by the wonder in the sky, Carson did not see the juvenile redtail hawk rising from a hidden arroyo with its breakfast, a desert vole, in its claws. The bird did not see Carson either or did not expect the tiny aircraft to suddenly dive in the grip of a downdraft from the cool arroyo wall. The hawk struck the left wing of the ultralite, tearing through the plastic fabric and snapping three important structural wires before striking the rear boom and ripping off the elevator on that side.

Hawk, vole and Carson were all dead--but only Carson knew it.

continued...