WINDWARD

A blue-collar pilot cuts his teeth among Miami’s pirate airlines in McDonald’s latest novel, the second in a series.

Texas pilot and occasional smuggler Ray Van Leeuwen came to Miami for a fresh start. He’s hoping to find work at Corrosion Corner, a section of Miami International Airport through which tiny shoestring airlines shuttle cargo to and from the Caribbean and elsewhere. Ray isn’t interested in anything illegal—his last job, in Texas, resulted in a few months’ stay in Mexican federal prison—just a steady paycheck and a light flying schedule. It turns out the pickings are slim. He takes a part-time gig flying a DC-6 and finds a room in the home of Lance Bonesteel, a retired Lockheed engineer in need of a skilled carpenter to fix up the place. One night, while sitting in the pilot bar, Ray is approached by a shady figure, a man known among the regulars to deliver arms to places like Haiti and Suriname. The man, Sam Johnston, has an offer for Ray: $18,000 for a few weeks flying “down south.” What’s the cargo? “Boxes, crates,” Sam tells him. “You don’t care what’s in ‘em.” The legality is questionable—it depends, Sam says, on which side ends up winning the war—but the money is good, and Ray came to Miami to fly. McDonald offers a realistic portrayal of a pilot’s life, with great attention paid to the details of aircraft and flight routes. Here, Ray gets his bearings inside the cockpit of a Constellation: “The side window was over-engineered. Instead of simply sliding it back like on a DC-6, you rotated a clamp and pulled the bottom of the window inward and fitted it into a channel….The thing that bothered Ray was that it was not big enough to easily go through.” Neither the plot nor the characters are quite as wild as the reader expects them to be, but serious flight fans will enjoy this realistic portrayal of a colorful corner of the industry.

A richly drawn novel about a pilot on the murky borders of his trade.