Montana raised his chin and spoke solemnly into the headset. “It has been a privilege flying with all of you.”

Then nobody spoke. The violent shaking of the fuselage seemed to go on forever.

When they had almost given up hope, there was a bright flash and the Hercules punched through the interior wall of the hurricane and into the calm, clear eye of Rolando-berto. A cheer went up in the cockpit. Baxter hugged a tearful Miguelito; Barnes hugged Foster. Sebastian unexpectedly found herself in Honeycutt’s arms. They looked deep into each other’s eyes, remembering that weekend in Baton Rouge. Marilyn’s eyebrows raised up in poignancy and she opened her mouth, but Honeycutt shook his head. “No, don’t say anything.” They let go and went back to their stations.

Montana radioed Miami with news of their success.

Way up north in the Gulf of Mexico, the very tip of Florida ’s panhandle meets the Alabama border on a remote barrier island named Perdido Key. In the middle of the island, right at the state line, is a ramshackle roadhouse built in 1962 called The Flora-Bama Lounge. It is an outpost of sorts-a peculiar, isolated place standing in relief against the bright, flat landscape of shore and ocean. It takes persistent driving and a good map to get to, and the people who make it there are not in a hurry to get anywhere else. An old peach windsock flaps over the roof to aid customers who arrive by parachute and seaplane.

On an uneventful day late in the year, at exactly noon, a burly old man with white hair and beard sat on the last barstool at the Gulf end of The Flora-Bama. He looked out the back door at the waves and laughing gulls. His name was Jethro Maddox, and he was on his eighth Bud.

Jethro’s tired eyes scanned the Redneck Riviera. “This is like Paris in the twenties,” he told the bartender, who was distracted by a TV tracking map showing a newly formed hurricane.

“A man can be destroyed but not defeated!” Jethro lifted his beer and drained it all at once and then looked at the can. “I have drunk you, beer, and I thank you. We are now one…”

Jethro smacked the empty can on the bar and burped with abandon. “There is no shame in a belch if it is the truth…” And he promptly toppled backward off his stool and disappeared from sight.

The bartender heard muttering from the direction of the floor-“Ouch! Galanos! I will kill you!”-and he leaned over the bar looking for Jethro. “Are you okay?”

Jethro stood and whisked off his sweater and fit his fishing cap back on his head. “I am fine,” he said and remounted the stool. “A man will hurt, but he must forget his hurt. The great DiMaggio played with hurt, and there was a grace when he struck out that others do not possess when they connect hard… We will drink to DiMaggio. Another cold one…”

As the bartender popped the top on another can, he heard a deep drone high above and stepped over to the window and looked up. “Must be a hurricane plane returning to Keesler.”

“Ah, brave aviators. They are a noble crew filled with the vigor of their youth,” said Jethro, “and they will never feel more alive and proud than when they face the knowledge of death.”

W e’re all gonna die!” screamed Bananas Foster in the cockpit of the WC-130 Hercules ten thousand feet over The Flora-Bama Lounge.

Nobody paid any attention. They were all reading books, writing letters or doing tedious chores on the boring return flight over the Gulf of Mexico. Ex-Lieutenant Colonel Barnes scraped diligently with a quarter on an ancient scratch-and-sniff foldout in one of his magazines, but instead of an arousing bouquet from the southern female glands, all he got was a musty attic.

Sebastian and Honeycutt stared together out the lower windows in the cargo hold, tracing the shoreline with their eyes. They tried to identify the features of the Florida panhandle. Santa Rosa Island, Pensacola Bay, the Naval Air Station, Perdido Key. There was a scattering of cotton-puff clouds far below, throwing shadows on the ground, and they could make out the white wake of a shrimp boat in the Gulf. They could even see teeny-tiny cars driving along the coast, and they wondered where those people’s lives were headed.

A red Alfa Romeo convertible sped east along the shore of the Gulf of Mexico on Route 292, Free’s “All Right Now” blasting from the stereo. Two tall, athletic, college-age women looked up at the plane in the sky and wondered what was going on in those lives.

They were the kind of women who were sexy at a range of a quarter mile, and their loose hair blew and snapped in the wind with a wild coquettishness. They wore big T-shirts over bikinis, and their sunglasses were cheap and cool. They gave off wanton vibrations. The scene could have been from a devil-may-care, coming-of-age independent flick that takes the jury award at Cannes, or maybe a tragedy-strikes-good-kids-in-a-small-town made-for-TV movie that opens with Meredith Baxter Birney staring through drizzling rain on a windowpane, popping pills and wondering when it all started to go so horribly wrong.

The driver was Ingrid Praline, a twenty-one-year-old blonde from Alabama with Scandinavian blood, and in the passenger seat was LaToya Olsen, a military brat from the Bronx.

Ingrid’s hair and cheekbones recalled Ursula Andress in Dr. No. She often braided her hair into pigtails and wore denim bib overalls, and the giant Lolita package gave men hemorrhagic fever. LaToya favored a young Lena Horne; she had the face of an angel, especially the eyes, and she often kept her hair pulled back in a bun, but now it was down.

The two had most recently worked at a Piggly Wiggly in Tuscaloosa, where their boss was a spitting-mean little bumper car of a woman. She hated Ingrid and LaToya on sight because they had potential, and she gave them all of the most undesirable chores. The pair first met on rubber-glove duty corralling an errant bowel movement in the men’s room.

They immediately became inseparable. LaToya was the talkative one and Ingrid was the mental sponge. Ingrid was far from dumb, but she had grown up in a crippling parochial environment. Her mother was Olga Svjörlvladablatt, a hardworking third-generation Swedish immigrant, but her father was Jebediah “Jeb” (“Bo”) Praline, fifth-generation Jim Beam, and global knowledge was viewed in their home as a new strain of syphilis that the line of Praline men had yet to build up a natural resistance against.

In contrast, LaToya had seen it all. She had been everywhere as a Navy kid. Subic Bay in the Philippines; Rota, Spain; and Naples, Italy, before spending her teen years at an intelligence station near London, where she picked up her British accent. She talked a streak about the outside world, and Ingrid could never get enough.

That’s how the nicknames started. After a month, they stopped using their given names altogether. Instead, Ingrid always called LaToya “City,” and LaToya always called Ingrid “Country.”

“ Pensacola is actually older than St. Augustine, but it wasn’t a continuous settlement, so St. Augustine gets all the attention,” said City. “There’s a bar over on the mainland called Trader Jon’s. It’s a freakin’ aviation museum, but Trader is getting on in years and they may have to close it down. The customers are trying to save it…”

They passed a pile of shells outside an oyster shack and a man at the shoulder of the road using a tire iron to take out his frustration on a broken-down Pontiac Firebird. City called attention to the sea oats and boardwalks and dunes of sugar-white sand. “The sand is so white because it’s finely ground quartz.” They passed a “Welcome to Florida ” sign.

City pointed at the beach side of the road. “That’s The Flora-Bama Lounge, home of the Interstate Mullet Toss…”