by Daniel Wyatt
“I hear someone yelling for help! That way!” a neighbor yelled, pointing.
Cameron, Les, and Robert ran three houses down the street. An elderly woman was trapped inside her collapsed living room. It took twenty minutes to remove the wood splinters, but they finally pulled her out, with the help of two other neighbors. Gail ran up with a first-aid kit and two flashlights, handing one to Les, as the woman lay on the grass of her littered property. Darkness had set in now. Several other flashlights were seen up and down the street.
“Les, Captain MacDonald is on the phone,” she said, as she tended to the woman.
“For me?”
“Yes, you. He said it was important.”
“You mean the telephone lines are working?”
“I guess so.”
Back at the house, Les grabbed the receiver off the counter. “Yes, sir.”
“Lieutenant, this is Captain MacDonald. Thank God the phones are up. Anyway, can you get over to the base, pronto?”
“Now, sir?”
“Yes, right now.”
“But, sir, we’re cleaning up. Our neighborhood was hit hard.”
“Is your family fine?”
“Yes, they are.”
“Good. Lieutenant, this is more important than Matilda. It has to do with the Mary Jane.”
“In that case, maybe I should invite General Cameron and my father along.”
“What? Are they still on Guam?”
Les chuckled. “We weathered out the storm at the house. All of us.”
“You’re joking! All of you? Geez, why didn’t you go to one of the shelters?”
“There wasn’t time, sir.”
MacDonald let out a whistle. “Yeah, bring them along too. Right away! I’ll wait by my office in the administration building.”
* * * *
MacDonald met them in a long hallway and led them to a restricted area where a guard was posted opposite a door. “You guys won’t believe it. I won’t say anything else. Just get a load of this.”
He opened the door. Inside were eight young men in World War Two flying gear, all watching a video, the sound up high.
“Hi, Phil,” one of the men said. “Turn it down, somebody,” he demanded.
Cameron’s mouth began to quiver. Robert held his breath for a moment. Time itself seemed to stop. The two war vets studied each face in the large room. Each person stared back. It was the crew of the Mary Jane, all seated on couches, watching a navy video about the F-18 Hornet! Clayton, Marshall, Lunsford, Emerson, Crosby, Schwartz, and Brown.
“I said, turn it down,” Clayton repeated, as he stood. “In fact, shut it off. Does somebody know how to do that?”
Marshall reached for the video machine, punched a couple buttons, and pulled the cassette out. “There we go.”
“Look who’s here,” Clayton said, grinning. “It’s Bob and Phil.”
Robert finally found his voice. “This can’t be,” he said to MacDonald behind him.
“Oh, but it is,” MacDonald replied, letting Les in the room before closing the door.
“What are they doing here?” Cameron asked MacDonald. “Why aren’t they back in 1945, where they belong?”
“Geez, those F-18s,” Clayton said, wide-eyed. “Jet fighters twice the speed of sound. Remarkable! Look, Phil, we didn’t want to believe it, either. That is until Captain MacDonald showed us 1990 calendars, his driver’s license, this video, newspapers, magazines, television.”
Cameron had a lump in his throat. “How did you guys get here?”
MacDonald tapped the general on the shoulder. “When the typhoon reached the island, lo and behold, there was the Mary Jane attempting an emergency landing at our base. Tinian was socked in. The buggers flew right through the typhoon to get here. They had already landed and jumped out when me and two security guards got to the runway. My mind told me one thing — the crew had to return to the Mary Jane and take off, otherwise they would never see 1945 again. But before they could, the Mary Jane vanished before our eyes, leaving the crew. So, here they are.”
Cameron frowned at MacDonald. “That probably explains why the Mary Jane was found intact forty-five years ago on Guam, minus the crew.”
“Seems so,” MacDonald answered.
The reality setting in now, Robert reached out to shake Clayton’s hand. “Ian, it’s good to see you. But you’re still a damn pain in the ass, yuh know that.”
Clayton laughed, thinking of the times he had hounded his ground crew. “If this was 1945, I’d have you court-martialed for that, sergeant. Why should you be so happy to see me? It was just twenty-four hours ago that we attended the Kyoto briefing on Tinian.”
“But to me that was forty-five years ago,” Robert said, stating the obvious.
“True. I see you got a lot of gray hairs. I knew all that hard work and worry about us would take its toll.” The others laughed. “And who might you be?” Clayton asked, pointing at Les Shilling.
Les grinned. “Captain Clayton, I’m Lieutenant Les Shilling.”
“My son,” Robert added.
“I was your escort, sir, over Japan. In the F-18.”
“Well, I’ll be... All that time, it was Bob’s son. Shit!”
“That’s quite the fighter,” Lunsford said. “And those rockets!”
“AIM-7 Sparrows,” Les answered with the proper name.
“I hear they’re radar-guided, is that right?”
“Yes, they are.”
“You a baseball fan, captain?” Les asked Clayton.
“I am. Why?”
“Remember, you asked me over the radio how many home runs Babe Ruth hit in 1927.”
“Yeah, I had to check if you were one of us.”
Les smiled. “I’m a baseball fan, too, sir. In 1961, a Yankee outfielder by the name of Roger Maris hit 61 homers to break the Babe’s record.”
“No kidding. Somebody finally did it.”
Then MacDonald opened the door and waved a finger to an NCO down the hall. In seconds, Jack Runsted appeared at the doorway, stepping inside.
“Tiger?” Les said, surprised to see his wingman and so bruised and red-faced. “You’re back!”
The two pilots grabbed each other by the shoulders.
“Quite the shock to the system, eh?” Tiger declared. “I see you met the crew.”
“Yeah, we did. But you. What the hell happened?”
The pilots released their grip on each other.
“It’s like this,” Tiger began. “I bailed out near Osaka Bay after shooting up a base. I set the fighter on auto-pilot and sent her out to sea. I got captured by the Japs. After interrogation and a few lumps” — he rubbed the bruises and cuts to his face — “I escaped Japan with a Zero. What a jalopy! But it had the range. They’re light as a feather so they hardly use any fuel. I flew the same return course as the Mary Jane, hoping to find her. Luckily, I did, before she descended to Tinian. I slid under her and together we came out in 1990, in the middle of the typhoon. By that time I was nearly out of gas and without a parachute. I broke away and plunked her in the water just off a beach near Tinian. The Zero sank, and the air-sea rescue picked me up swimming for shore. I damn near drowned.”
Cameron gently put his hand on MacDonald’s shoulder. “Can Bob and I see you a moment, captain? Alone.”
“Sure, I guess.”
* * * *
Standing in a closed-door, glassed-in room down the hall, Cameron burst out, “What are we going to do with them?”
“It’s a navy problem. We’ll brief them on what’s happened the last forty-five years. They’ll be given navy jobs here on Guam, for the time being. After that, I don’t know. Eventually, they’ll end up in the States. I really don’t know. Things like this don’t occur every day.”
Cameron heaved a sigh. “It’s finally over. It took forty-five years to solve the Mary Jane mystery, why she was sitting out there in 1945, intact, in the Guam jungle. Wait a sec, the log. Did you get the log from Marshall?”<
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“I sure as hell did,” MacDonald answered. “I know how incriminating it would be with the Kyoto notations in it. I threw it in the incinerator.”
“Good idea.” Cameron remembered that the log was one of the first items he had searched for aboard the Mary Jane back in 1945. “Hold on. Knowing Marshall, he probably would have plotted the bomb drop. There’s a plutonium bomb dropped at the bottom of the Pacific somewhere!”
“I looked through the log before I threw it away and copied down the position. Approximately 200 miles off the Japan coast.”
“Yes, but was it dropped in 1945 or 1990?”
“What does that matter?”
“If it was dropped forty-five years ago, then it’s certain to be a health hazard today because the salt water will have corroded the casing.”
“There’s nothing we can do about that, general.”
“Hey, I just thought of something,” Robert said. “One of the crew members is missing?”
“Who, Bob?”
“Ainsworth, the explosives expert who armed the bomb.”
“Yeah, Four Eyes,” Cameron said.
“He’s dead,” MacDonald replied, bluntly. “Shot.”
“What!”
“He was a Russian spy, general,” MacDonald explained. “According to the crew, he tried to skyjack the Mary Jane over Japan by ordering Clayton to fly to Vladivostok. But he didn’t get too far. They overpowered him, turned his own gun on him and shot him after he fired a few shots through the fuselage. Then they dumped him out with the unarmed bomb over the ocean.”
“He probably made a good meal for the sharks,” Cameron chuckled.
“There’s something else I better fill you in on, you two. I received a cable just twenty minutes ago from Commodore Prentice in Yokosuka. Colonel Mason died of heart failure. Your son, Mr. Shilling, was lucky to find Mason when he did.”
“You’re right.”
Cameron’s thoughts quickly returned to 1945 and the Mary Jane in the jungle. The pieces were falling into place. The blood stains and glasses he found were Ainsworth’s. He was shot and dragged to the bomb bay. And the rags stuffed into the fuselage metal were not due to an enemy attack. They were from Ainsworth’s gun, fired wildly during a struggle. It all made sense now. Except for...
“I have a few questions, captain.”
“Go ahead, general.”
“When I found the Mary Jane, she was resting in jungle just inside the Agana base compound. Where was she when she disappeared in 1990?”
“The far end of one of the runways.”
“But–”
“Let me finish. I did some checking. The naval base had one of the runways, the same one Mary Jane landed on in 1990, extended some fifteen years ago. You get one guess what the engineers were forced to clear to extend it.”
Cameron smirked. “Jungle, I bet.”
“Right on, general. That’s why she was found undamaged in the jungle in 1945.”
“I see. I have another question.”
“Shoot.”
“The tail gunner–”
“Schwartz?”
“Yes, Gabe Schwartz. Did you grab the film from him?”
“You don’t miss a trick, do you? The timing couldn’t have been more perfect.” MacDonald looked through the glass to the hall and waved a young man to enter. “Here comes our man from the lab right now.”
An NCO opened the door and placed a large manila envelope in MacDonald’s hand. “Here they are, sir. Where on earth did you find 620 film? That stuff’s as old as the hills. Kodak hasn’t made it for years. I played around with the developing times a bit. Luckily, it was black and white, where there was lots of room for error. The shots are a bit on the blurry side, but not that bad, I guess.”
“Thanks.”
The NCO left and MacDonald shut the door. He, Robert and Cameron sat at the table inside. MacDonald pulled out three 8 x 10 black-and-white nose shots of an F-18 Hornet in flight, taken through what appeared to be Plexiglas.
“That’s my son’s fighter!” Robert exclaimed, catching the callsign HULK on the fuselage.
“In 1945, I found an opened box camera near the Mary Jane’s tail gun seat,” Cameron recalled. “Just think, if Gabe hadn’t removed the film when he and the others left the Mary Jane, I would have had those same shots in my possession the last forty-five years. Amazing!”
“Now that it’s all over, for good, let’s have a cold beer to celebrate,” MacDonald said.
“There’s one other thing,” Cameron went on.
“What now?”
“The cultural shock on these guys if and when they reach the States will be tremendous. How about Crosby, for example, the radar operator? In 1945, he was married. The last time I heard his wife was alive. My wife and I exchanged Christmas cards with her. She and Mark were childhood sweethearts from a small town outside Omaha. She still lives there with her second husband. They had four kids. If Mark should meet up with her, it would be catastrophic for the both of them. The other crewmembers have brothers and sisters. What if–”
“We’ve thought of that already,” MacDonald assured the general. “I’m sure the crew will not want to jeopardize their unique situation. If we send them back to the States under assumed names they will face orders to stay away from family and friends. They will just have to cope. But they do have age on their side. They can start all over again. Make new friends, get married, start a family.”
Cameron laughed lightly. “I forgot about their ages. Do you really think it’ll work?”
“What else can we do? We can’t send them back to 1945.”
“No, I guess not. Although you did try at gunpoint.”
* * * *
In a separate room, Les and Robert stood facing each other.
“I’m really proud of you, son.”
Les was surprised. “You are?”
“Of course I am. When I saw your fighter up close on the carrier deck, I suddenly realized that was your fighter. Commodore Prentice thinks very highly of you. He told me that it took guts to turn away from the Mary Jane, knowing it would drop a nuclear bomb on David and Kyoto.”
Les forced a grin. “I had my orders.”
“I feel badly for how I treated you. My silent treatments. I’ve had to live with the Mary Jane and her disappearance since the war. As crew chief, I felt responsible. I thought for sure they had been shot down. They were my friends. I hated the war. I hated the Japs. I still do. They started the war. Because of them, many of my friends never came back. I just wanted to do my job and go home. It was a difficult time. After all these years, we know what happened to the Mary Jane. Finally!”
“Dad, are you proud of David, too?”
Robert took several seconds to answer. “That’s something I’m going to have to work on.”
“Let’s face it, dad. David lives in Japan and may even marry a Japanese girl. I hope you’ll accept her into the family as graciously as you did Gail.” Les put his hand on his father’s shoulder. “When you see David and his girlfriend, just turn on the old Robert Shilling charm. Gail thinks you’re the best and can do no wrong.”
* * * *
Back in the other room, MacDonald had brought in cold beer for everyone.
Nevin Brown finished his first. “Quite the cans. Kinda flimsy. Light beer, huh? By the way, colonel, I picked up a Jap radio station. It was playing the strangest song I ever heard. A band called Haley’s Comet or something like that.
“You mean Bill Haley and the Comets,” Les said.
“Yeah, that’s them. Rock Around the Clock. A bouncy arrangement. Is that the kinda music they play now?”
Les grinned. “Not really. That song is a golden oldie, as we call them. It’s over thirty years old.”
“So what do people my age listen to in 1990?”
“Well...” Les wondered how he’d answer that. Where would he begin? Michael Jackson. Madonna. Phil Collins. MC Hammer. The Rolling Stones. “You’ll have some catchin
g up to do in that department. Maybe you should start with Elvis Presley... then take it from there.”
Les, Cameron, Tiger, MacDonald, and Robert all laughed.
“Now, wait a damn minute here,” Mark Crosby cut in. “Maybe some of you guys can laugh off these changes and have a good time talking about... these movies and these fancy beer cans and those crazy songs... and Elvis whoever-he-is. But what about me? Hell, I’m a married man. I got a wife to go home to.”
“Not any more you don’t,” Cameron answered stiffly, stepping forward. “Dini remarried in 1947.”
Crosby shook his head. “1947? I don’t get this–”
“Our family has been exchanging Christmas cards with her and her husband for years.”
“I’m back now! I’m back! I’m going home to Omaha.”
“No you’re not. Sergeant Mark Crosby, radar operator, does not exist. To you, you’ve only been gone a year or so. But to your wife... well, it’s been forty-five years. What do you hope to accomplish? Dini’s almost seventy. You’re, let’s see–”
“Twenty-five,” Crosby fired away.
“You’d destroy her.”
Clayton approached Crosby. “Face the facts, Mark. We were all reported missing in action. Dini’s not your wife. Mary Jane isn’t my girl any longer, either, wherever she may be. We’re stuck. We’re all in the same boat, Mark. Let’s make the best of it.”
“I told you before, the navy will look after you, men,” MacDonald informed them. “Hang in there. We’ll get you back into society.”
Crosby fumbled in his front pocket. He lit a cigarette and puffed, his hands shaking. “This is ridiculous.”
Chapter twenty
KYOTO
David, Toshika, and Edna stood in the busy arrival area at the airport, waiting for the plane carrying Robert, Les, and his family to land.
On the screen above them, David saw their flight number flash ARR — arrival. In a few minutes, the entire Shilling family would be together again. Les, Gail, and the kids came into view first, waving as they came down the escalator to a glassed-in open area that separated them from the onlookers. The automatic door opened and Gail ran through first.