Island of the Sequined Love Nun

the bathroom, and emptied his stomach into the bowl with a trumpeting heave.

40 – Unfriendly Skies
    Tuck spooled up the jets as he watched the guards `, scramble around the Lear. Each time one walked past the nose, Tuck flipped on the radar and chuckled. The microwave energy wasn't enough to boil the guards in their skins, which was Tuck's fantasy, but he could be reasonably certain that they would never have any children and he might have planted the seeds of a few choice tumors. Once in Houston a maintenance man made the mistake of walking in front of Mary Jean's jet with an armload of fluorescent bulbs meant for the hangar, and Jake Skye had shown Tucker a little trick.
    "Watch this," Jake had said. He flipped on the radar and the bulbs, bombarded by the microwaves from the radar, lit up in the maintenance man's arms. The poor guy threw the bulbs in the air and ran off the field, leaving a pile of glass shards and white powder behind. It was the second-coolest thing Tucker had ever seen, the first being the time they had used the Gulfstream's jets to sandblast the paint off a Porsche whose owner insisted on parking on the tarmac. Tuck was waiting for one of the guards to walk behind the jets when Beth Curtis came on board.
    She wore her business suit and carried the briefcase and the cooler, but this time she sat in one of the passenger seats in the back and fell asleep before they took off. Tuck took the opportunity to suck some oxygen from the emergency supply to help cut through his hangover.
    When they were five hundred miles out over the Pacific, Tuck peeked into the passenger compartment to make sure Beth Curtis was still sleeping. When he was sure she was still out, he checked the fuel gauges, then pushed the yoke forward and dropped the Lear down to level off at a hundred feet.
    Traveling at almost six hundred miles per hour at only a hundred feet off the water did exactly what Tuck had hoped it would. He was absolutely ecstatic with an adrenaline rush that chased his hangover back to the Dark Ages. He dropped another fifty feet and laughed out loud when some salt spray dashed the windscreen.
    It was a clear sunny day with only a few wispy columnar clouds rising off the water. Tuck flew under and through them as if they were enemy ghosts. Then a speck appeared on the horizon. A second later Tuck recognized it as a ship and pulled the jet up to two hundred feet. Suddenly something rose off the ship's deck. A helicopter, going out to spot and herd schools of tuna for the factory ship. Tuck pulled up on the yoke, but the helicopter rose directly into his path. There wasn't even time to key the radio to warn the pilot. Tuck threw the Lear into a tight turn while pulling the jet up and whizzed by the helicopter close enough to see the pilot's eyes go wide. He could just make out men shaking fists at him from the deck of the factory ship.
    " Eee-haa!" he shouted (a bad habit he'd picked up in Texas cowboy bars, and if this wasn't cowboy flying, what was?). He steered the jet back on course and leveled off at two hundred feet. He was still dangerously low and burning fuel four times faster than he would at altitude, but hell, a guy had to have some fun. He wasn't paying for the fuel, and there hadn't been much low-level flying when he'd worked for Mary Jean. People on the ground might have trouble remembering the numbers on the side of the plane to report to the FAA, but you don't soon forget a pink jet flying close enough to the ground to cool your soup.
    "What in the hell was that?" Beth Curtis appeared in the cockpit doorway. "Why are we so low?"
    A wave of panic akin to being caught smoking in the boys' room swept over Tuck, but he couldn't think fast enough to come up with a viable lie. He said, "You haven't surfed until you've surfed in a Learjet."
    Much to his amazement, Beth Curtis said, "Cool!" and strapped herself into the copilot's seat.
    Tuck grinned and eased the jet down to fifty feet. Beth Curtis clapped her hands like an excited child. "This is great!"
    "We can't do it for long. Burns too much fuel."
    "A little while longer, okay?"
    Tuck smiled. "Maybe five more minutes. We can catch a tailwind at altitude that'll save us some time and fuel."
    "Is this what you were doing the night you crashed?"
    Tuck winced. "No."
    "Because I could understand if it was. What a rush!" She reached out and grabbed his shoulder affectionately. "I love this. How could you let me sleep through this?"
    "We can surf