by Jack Du Brul
Sykes was the first to discover it. He made a sharp pointing motion to catch Mercer’s attention. He’d uncovered something smooth and curved that was covered in a film of scum. He brushed it away to reveal dull metal.
Mercer felt his heart trip. They’d done it on their first dive! They’d found the plane. He helped Booker move more loose rocks, and his elation suddenly turned to dismay—then disappointment. They hadn’t found the wing or fuselage of a Lockheed Electra. Instead it was a steel-hulled open boat, like a lifeboat, and judging by its age it had been down here for decades. It took five more minutes to realize it had once been loaded with bags of cement. The paper sacks had long since rotted away, leaving loaves of hardened concrete piled five deep on the boat’s flattened keel.
Book tapped Mercer’s shoulder and pointed up. They’d reached their limit and would have to ascend. They made two decompression stops on the way to the surface and breached a quarter mile from Rory Reyes and the Suva Surprise. He spotted them even before they started waving. He’d already unshipped the Zodiac and jumped aboard it. A cloud of blue exhaust erupted from the motor, and in seconds he was planing across the sea.
Sykes spat out his regulator. “You should never leave a boat unattended like that.”
“He must figure it’s only for a second and we’re close enough to shore that we could swim it.”
“Pull that stunt in the military and you’re scrubbing toilets on a garbage scow for the rest of your hitch.”
Reyes chopped the throttle when he neared them and began to coast. The inflatable lost all headway just as he came abreast of the divers. He helped Mercer over the gunwale with a strong pull to his tank harness, and together they heaved Book into the boat. It was a little crowded with the three of them and their gear, but they made it work.
“How’d it go?”
“We found something promising,” Mercer said. “But it turned out to be an old inter-island trader that sank with a load of cement bags, I’d guess sometime in the 1940s or ’50s.”
“You gonna dive again?”
Mercer looked to Book.
Sykes said to Reyes, “We’ll give it a few hours first, but we can hit it again before sunset if you want.” Book then turned to Mercer. “Or are we breaking out the side-scan sonar and playing sea sleuth?”
An interesting thought had occurred to Mercer. “That fractured rock has me really intrigued. It makes me wonder if there’s something under that old boat, and it also makes me think its captain and crew might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“The boat was sunk by lightning?”
“It’s possible. We’d need to see the bottom of the hull, but it seems awfully coincidental that it’s in the exact spot where we were looking.”
They returned to the Surprise, and while Book refilled their scuba tanks, Rory made them a lunch of broiled early-season wahoo he’d caught. He used the perfect amount of spicy piri piri to complement the fruity chutney he’d slathered on the fish.
An hour later there was an anxious moment when Mercer heard the sound of an approaching aircraft. He couldn’t see the propeller-driven plane because the bulk of Alofi Island was in the way, but they could all hear it clear as a bell. The sound suddenly ceased. Mercer shot a look to Sykes, who ducked below. He didn’t come back on deck but lurked just out of sight.
“Rory?” Mercer asked.
“Relax, mate. That’s the supply plane come down from Wallis Island. Give it twenty minutes, half hour, and it’ll take off again.”
Mercer strained his senses for the twenty-five minutes it took for pilot and crew to unload the aircraft over on Futuna and pack in whatever meager wares the natives had to sell to the outside world. When he finally did spot it, the plane was a retreating silver flash climbing hard to the north in the otherwise cloudless sky.
“No worries, mate,” Reyes assured them.
“No worries,” Mercer repeated, uncertain but unable to justify a heightened sense of paranoia.
At four, Book determined that any dissolved nitrogen had cleared their bloodstreams, and the two men got back into their diving gear. Reyes had already moved the boat to the spot where they’d found the sunken dory, so all they’d need to do was follow the anchor chain to the bottom. On this dive, they also brought a pry bar to lever aside the heavy cement blocks.
Mercer and Sykes descended quickly and got to work right away. The light was murkier now that the sun was setting out beyond Futuna Island, but visibility remained excellent. The rounded blobs of cement each weighed close to a hundred pounds, and even with the help of the water’s buoyancy, moving them was exhausting. Forty minutes into the job, as Book was giving thought to ending the dive because of the additional exertion, Mercer heaved out one of the last cement chunks and let it fall off the gunwale and into the rocks. He looked back to see a hole in the bottom of the boat, about a hand’s span wide. The hole clearly had been blown out of the bottom, as opposed to being punctured inward.
What caught Mercer’s attention even more was what lay under the sunken dory. Through the hole, which appeared blackened as if it had been struck by lightning, was another metal surface. This one was as shiny as a mirror. Mercer reached down to brush his fingers on its smooth surface, and he felt the little bumps of aircraft-grade rivets. He motioned for Book to come close, and pointed.
Booker Sykes’s eyes went wide when he saw what appeared to be part of an aircraft, either its wing or the top of its fuselage. He shot Mercer a questioning glance. Mercer nodded. They had emptied enough of the cement nodules to be able to move the sunken boat, but with so much debris around it now there was no place to tip it over. Sykes studied the problem for a moment and gave Mercer the okay sign followed by a signal that they should surface. Mercer wanted to keep working, but he deferred to Sykes’s experience.
This time when they breached they were able to cling to the dive platform hanging off the Suva Surprise’s transom and climb the ladder that Reyes had folded out underneath it.
“Tell me you’ve got an idea,” Mercer said as soon as he’d removed his regulator.
“I’ve got an idea,” Booker said to him.
Reyes helped Mercer off with his tank. “What’d you guys find?”
“There’s something under the old boat,” Mercer told him. “Something made of riveted aluminum.”
“A plane?” the Aussie asked.
“Pretty sure,” Mercer said.
“Pretty sure, my black behind,” Book said. “The rivets are ground flat. It’s a damned plane and you know it. What we’re going to need to do is drag the boat off the plane. It’s too big for us to move by ourselves, but we should be able to tow it if you’ve got enough line aboard.”
“No problem. I keep about five hundred feet. It’s only half-inch line, but we can triple it up. That ought to hold.”
“Perfect,” Booker said. “We’ll dive at first light and with any luck finish this up by noon.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Reyes said. “If that really is Amelia Earhart down there, shouldn’t there be some experts here, professional underwater archaeologists and preservation people?”
“Tell you what,” Mercer said, toweling off his hair. “We just want to get a crate stored in the nose of the plane. We grab that and our interest in this thing is over. Take us back to Suva so we can go home, and you can come back here with a crew and claim you found the plane with the help of an American friend of yours.”
Reyes wasn’t sure if he understood what Mercer was saying. “Friend? What do you mean a friend?”
“His name is Jason Rutland. He’s the NASA egghead who pinpointed this location. I promised him a piece of the discovery. You two can make up some story about how you’ve collaborated on the search for some time now, and presto you become as famous as Bob Ballard, the guy who found the Titanic.”
“You two don’t want the credit for this?”
“I certainly don’t,” Mercer said. “Book?”
Sykes thought
for a second, and then shook his bald head. “Last thing I need in my life are a bunch of aviation geeks asking for my autograph. Pass.”
“There you go, Rory. This ought to be a boon to the charter business. If you want to be really creative, you can probably sell the right to finding the plane.” Mercer made air quotes around the word finding. “You must have some rich client who would love to be in on this.”
“I could name a few,” Reyes said noncommittally.
“Bet one of them would pay some serious coin to be able to brag that he was there when Amelia Earhart was finally found.”
“I’ll have to think about it.”
Mercer could already see the gears churning in the Aussie’s mind, and he imagined that this time next year, the Suva Surprise II would make the current boat look like a pile of junk.
While Mercer and Booker rinsed their dive equipment in freshwater, Rory took them in closer to shore. At a new anchorage, just far enough off the beach that the mosquitoes wouldn’t find them but close enough to enjoy the sound of the surf, Rory beer-steamed five pounds of shrimp. After the men ate their fill, they passed around a bottle of cognac. They drank sparingly, since two of them were diving in the morning and technically Rory was on duty, but the spirits helped mellow the mood and they talked about the lure and mystique of America’s most famous aviatrix.
In the end they agreed on one point: Earhart would not have been as famous if she’d actually completed her circumnavigation. Dying on the flight made her an aviation martyr, while surviving it would have just made her a historical footnote. Mercer put the final punctuation on that point by asking the other two who was the first female pilot to successfully fly around the globe. His question was met by silence.
24
Mercer and Booker were back in the water by seven o’clock the next morning. It took just a few minutes for them to tie off the nylon lines to the sunken boat and get into position for Rory’s attempt to drag it free. They had devised a simple signal system using colored balloons that the divers could inflate with their air regulators. When they were ready they would release a white balloon to float up to the surface. A yellow balloon meant the divers wanted to pause for five minutes before attempting to move the boat again. And if more than two balloons surfaced at or around the same time, the charter captain would stop entirely and wait. Either the maneuver had worked or there was trouble and the divers were on their way back to the boat to rethink their strategy.
Sykes filled a white balloon from his regulator’s purge valve and tied it off with a deft twist his big hands seemed incapable of. It floated up to the surface like a jellyfish, and only seconds after release they heard and felt the Suva Surprise’s engine ramp up.
Reyes used a careful hand on the throttle. He already knew which bearing to keep to avoid dragging the boat sideways, so it was really just a matter of finesse over the diesels. The Surprise edged forward, making minimal headway, and he knew in an instant when she came up against her tether. A touch more throttle and the stern started to bite deep, crouching lower into the sea as the horses fought a half century of muck adhering the boat to the bottom. He kept an anxious eye on the stern bits. They really weren’t designed for this kind of strain, but he’d tied off the lines in such a way that the weight of the tow was well distributed.
Reyes opened the taps another notch. That first hit of power had merely stretched the nylon lines to their fullest. Now he was really fighting the sunken boat. The Surprise began to slew from side to side. Reyes kept one eye on the compass to make sure he didn’t sheer too far off the towline and the other on the water where the first balloon had shown itself in case there was a problem down below.
Mercer and Sykes were well back and to the side of the dory as the sportfisher above exerted its considerable power. Because of water’s density there was little danger of a whip-back if the line parted, but it was best to be prudent. They could both look up out of the undersea chasm and note how the Suva Surprise was pulling in the right direction. The lines linking the two appeared as taut as rebar.
For what felt like many long minutes but was actually less than one, nothing appeared to happen. The fifteen-foot dory remained stuck in place, and Mercer was beginning to think, pessimistically, that they might need to return with more dedicated salvage gear. He’d never anticipated the plane would be trapped under a sunken wreck.
In a silent burst of silt boiling up from under its hull, the bow pulled free of the ooze and rose several feet. Almost immediately its stern was dragged across the seabed, bouncing and shaking as it jostled over debris that had fallen from above, and the lumps of cement Booker and Mercer had so laboriously heaved over its side. Sykes let Reyes tow the boat well clear of their area of interest before releasing the two balloons he’d already inflated. Mercer might have doubted but Book never did.
The old open boat was twenty yards from its initial resting place when the signal was received topside and Captain Reyes throttled back on the twin engines. Silt wafted around it like smoke coiling from a fire, and it took several moments for the weak current to clear it away enough for them to see the open craft sitting upright on the bottom. It was rusted and banged up and had seen a lifetime’s worth of abuse in its day, but it somehow maintained a plucky defiance even here on the ocean’s floor.
After that initial look, the two men didn’t give the former lifeboat a second’s thought. Their attention went immediately to what the boat had so effectively hidden for all these years.
They swam to where the boat had spent the decades. The dory’s outline was clearly visible as an area of pure sand in the otherwise rock-strewn canyon bottom. And in the middle of the boat-shaped space was the shining aluminum curve of an aircraft’s wing. Other than some scratches where the boat had marred the aluminum, it looked to be in remarkable shape.
Mercer felt a lump in his throat as he looked at it. Normally he wasn’t all that sentimental, but he couldn’t help thinking what this moment represented. One of the most enduring mysteries of the twentieth century had just been solved, revealing the final resting places of two brave souls.
Book felt no such reverence. He swam over the wing to orient himself to where the Electra’s fuselage would be, and he set about moving more rocks out of the way.
Mercer looked up to see if their actions had disturbed the cliff just above, and he noted that the canyon wall was bulging more than it had. His instinct was to shout to Booker, but that didn’t work underwater. Instead he darted forward, kicking hard and pulling with his arms so that he crashed into his friend and spun them both out of the way a few seconds before the bulge of rock gave way. It came down in fractured chunks that trailed streamers of silt, so the whole mass looked like something shot from hell. Even underwater the sound of the crashing rocks was concussive. The downpour crashed onto the plane’s wing with enough force to peel away hunks of coral that had used the fuselage as an anchor for a new colony.
Tons of rubble and debris fell away from the plane, disappearing down the newly exposed sinkhole, and all at once the wing wasn’t the only part of the plane they could see. From her nose to the wing root, the plane was now exposed. The wing itself wasn’t attached to the Electra’s hull but had been torn back during its water landing. The big engine nacelle remained in place, but the two-bladed prop had been lost in the crash. They could see the cockpit windows but couldn’t see into the cockpit because of marine growth on the inside of the glass.
Most important for them, they had easy access to the nose cargo door.
They waited ten minutes for everything to settle, and for the water to clear enough for them to work. Amelia Earhart’s Electra looked to be in far better shape than the old boat that had shielded it for so many years. The broken wing was the only obvious sign of damage. The fuselage, or as much of it as they could see, appeared intact. None of the cockpit glass had even broken, and thirty-odd feet back from the cockpit, they could see the vertical stabilizer part of her twin tail sticking out of the c
anyon wall.
Book tried to peer into the cockpit from several angles but could see nothing in the beam of his small dive light.
Mercer went to the nose and tried the cargo hatch. Neither the handle nor the door itself would budge. Book came over and together they tried again. Mercer didn’t want to disturb the site more than necessary, so he didn’t want to rip the hatch clean off, but it seemed they might not have a choice. It was jammed tight.
And then, without warning, the door flew open, sending both divers tumbling. Booker was the first to regain his equilibrium, and he steadied Mercer. Together they returned to the downed aircraft and used Book’s light to reveal the interior of the cramped forward hold.
A tin trunk was the only obvious piece of cargo—a trunk that looked like it was ready to fall apart after sitting immersed in the ocean for the best part of a century. Mercer took the light from Sykes and played it around the bottom of the hold. Even in such a tightly sealed space as this, the living seas had encroached. The floor was covered in a layer of brown and green slime. He reached a hand in and felt along the floor. No matter how slowly or carefully he moved, he kicked up tendrils of organic matter. But Mercer’s fingers also felt something else. He grasped it and pulled it out into the light.
The crystal was dull brown, lifeless and uninteresting, and yet it had driven men to kill. It was the size of a banana, octagonal and blunted at both ends. It was something any self-respecting gemologist would dismiss out of hand—and yet it might just be the most valuable crystal on Earth.
Mercer met Booker’s eyes and nodded. The African American grinned around his regulator and flashed Mercer the okay sign.
Sykes carried a large nylon bag folded into a pouch attached to his dive belt. He unfurled it and anchored it on the seafloor next to the open hatchway. It was tight confines, but he and Mercer managed to wrestle the small trunk close enough that they could lift it out of the plane and settle it into the bag. The case had cracked during the crash, and a string of crystals fell free as they maneuvered it. Rather than try to deal with preserving Dillman’s old steamer trunk, Book tore off its lid and let the whole thing collapse into the bag. He picked out larger chunks of the disintegrating trunk, including sheets of copper that had so dissolved over the years they were little more than a film of verdigris.