Jack Du Brul
The Lightning Stones
For Cathy and Jim Saunders
No husband has had better in-laws
PROLOGUE
Here she lay, in a tumbledown hotel on the edge of a jungle at the far end of the world. The knocks came soft and timid.
“Who is it?” she called, her voice husky with the sleep she so desperately craved.
“Miss Earhart?” a man asked tentatively.
Married to publishing magnate George Putnam for the last six years, she resigned herself to the fact that she would forever be known as Amelia Earhart, America’s flying darling.
“Yes?” From her tone, she was clearly irked.
“Bert Hoover sent you a telegram and said I need to see you. I’m Mike Dillman.”
It took her a few seconds to place the names. She’d received dozens of telegrams upon her arrival from Australia, mostly from George, but there were others as well, fans wishing her well. The cable the stranger just mentioned had taken her by surprise.
“Give me a moment,” Amelia said, and slid out of bed.
She grabbed up her robe, a thin, diaphanous garment that weighed but a few ounces and was one of her few feminine conceits during the circumnavigation. She slipped it over her shoulders and looked to see her reflection in a small mirror by the silvery moonlight filtering through the hotel room’s only window. She didn’t think she looked much like America’s flying darling just then, but there was little she could do about it.
She opened the teak door, a relic salvaged off an old steamer with slats on the bottom that allowed tropical air to circulate throughout her room.
Just enough light from the downstairs lounge reached the hallway for Amelia to see that Mike Dillman looked like he’d just crawled from the grave. His hair was lank and plastered to his sunken-cheeked skull. His eyes were nestled deeply in dark, bruised sockets, and while he was probably past fifty, his skin sagged like that of a man twice that age. She couldn’t fathom a circumstance where this man and Bert Hoover traveled in the same circles, and yet Bert had vouched for this cadaverous stranger and had asked that she perform a favor for them both. She would have ignored the request had it come from a less important person, and seeing Dillman firsthand, she still might.
“We don’t have much time, Miss Earhart,” Dillman said, and coughed. He tried to suppress the rattling rail in his chest by hacking into the sleeve of his tattered shirt. When he moved it from his mouth, blood stained the cloth and a little clung to his lip.
She was instantly concerned. “Are you all right?”
“Not really,” the shell of a man replied with a tired, resigned smile, “but it doesn’t matter. Can you please get dressed and take me to your plane?”
Uncertain, a little frightened, and yet intrigued, she nodded. “I’ll just be a minute.”
She left Dillman in the hallway while she threw on a clean pair of riding britches and pulled her flying boots up along her calves. The boots were custom made. A gift from George, much like the entire heady existence she called her life. It was no secret that he used her fame as an aviatrix to sell newspapers, and she used the money he gave her for these wild expeditions to feed her addiction to flying. For surely that was what infected her so terribly and yet so fulfillingly. Wasn’t that the definition of addiction, the unbreakable desire to do something you know is wrong, or dangerous, or immoral?
That was how she felt about being in the cockpit. She should be home raising a family, and not halfway around the globe from her husband attempting to be the first person, not just woman, but the first person to circumnavigate the earth near the equator. She had been the second person to solo the Atlantic, but the record books would tout her being the first woman, as if gender had anything to do with the ability to fly an airplane. Well, this time she’d have both titles and would make damn sure the headlines didn’t commodify her sex.
She shrugged into a shirt over a bra that hadn’t yet dried from its earlier washing. It felt like clammy hands were cupping her barely-there breasts.
Dillman was leaning against the wall, asleep on his feet and startled when she reopened her door. He suppressed another cough.
“I know this place seems like a backwater, but they do have a doctor here,” Amelia offered.
“No,” the disheveled man said. “I’ll be fine.”
Earhart shook her head and then led him downstairs and through the Hotel Cecil’s quiet lobby. Men were still drinking in the adjoining bar, but none saw the pair exit out into the moonlit night. The hotel was located on the waterfront of this sleepy coastal fishing village. Earhart started walking north, where an airstrip had been carved out of the jungle and Guinea Airlines had erected a hangar. It was late enough that all of the houses were dark. Water lapped turgidly on the nearby beach.
“We have to go to my boat first,” Dillman called, and preceded Amelia Earhart down to a lone jetty about two hundred paces east of the hotel.
Tied to the bamboo and teak dock was a thirty-foot single-masted sloop with a darkened hull and off-white deck. It looked as dilapidated as the man who had sailed it here. The deck was covered in various stains, and the hull looked like it was home to every barnacle and wood-worm in the South Seas. She had no idea where he had sailed from, but she wouldn’t trust this tub to take her across the lagoon.
“You’re braver than you look, Mr. Dillman.”
He looked at her queerly, not getting the joke. “I need a hand with the chest.”
That’s when Amelia noticed a tin steamer trunk resting on the deck next to the spindly ship’s wheel. The case was battered and dented, and whatever color it had once been painted was chipped clear off. Parts of the trunk were blackened as though it had been rescued from a fire. It seemed fitting luggage for both sailboat and sailor.
“Is that what Bert wants me to fly to Hawaii?”
“Yes, a representative from the navy will meet you when you land and take possession of the trunk.”
“I could fly it all the way to Oakland,” she said.
“No. There will be too much publicity when you land there. Crowds can be controlled easier in Honolulu. Also, this needs to be put in safekeeping as soon as possible. It attracts lightning, Miss Earhart. I have it shielded as best I can, but you must avoid electrical storms.”
“No problem there,” she said, stepping aboard the sloop after Dillman. “I’ve been doing that since leaving the States in May. What’s in the trunk?”
“Geological samples.”
They both bent and lifted the case.
“Geesh, fella, I kinda have a weight limit, you know.”
“This weighs sixty-four pounds exactly.” He said this solemnly, because these sixty-four pounds had been his constant companion as well as hated burden for the better part of a month. And in all that time he’d fled from dark forces who wanted the contents of the trunk for themselves. “Can you make allowances for it?”
His voice was pleading, and his eyes were even more haunted. At that moment she understood that the responsibility of transporting the trunk, from wherever his journey had started, was likely what had so wasted the man. When he had started out, Mike Dillman had probably been a robust individual and not the withered husk standing before her. She also recognized that he no longer had the strength to continue and that she was the last hope for getting the contents of the trunk into the hands of the United States Navy. Bert had cabled that this was of utmost importance to national security, but it was the fact that this man had sacrificed himself, and not the patriotic call to duty, that convinced her to see his labor completed.