“Sure, we can figure something out. Heck, I’m a good ten pounds lighter since starting this jaunt. Finding another fifty pounds should be a cinch.”
They carried the trunk off the pier and through the sleepy village and finally into the metal-sided hangar at the edge of a primeval jungle. Her Lockheed Electra gleamed like a silver shark even in the dim light of the stars and low moon. Because she was a tail-dragger, her nose was pointed upward at an angle that reminded Amelia of a dog sniffing the air. The plane’s big radial engines were nestled in cowlings along the wings and looked big enough to power a bomber. She loved this plane as no other before and still felt guilty about damaging it in Hawaii last spring on her first circumnavigation attempt.
Working by torchlight, Dillman assisted Amelia in removing some gear from the aircraft’s nose storage locker. Some would need to be left behind, while other items, like the dozens of stamped souvenir folios, could be moved into the main cabin she shared with Fred Noonan. It took them about a half hour.
He escorted her back to the hotel, shook her hand, thanked her, and wished her a pleasant journey. He moved off into the darkness and allowed the night to swallow him whole.
Amelia felt an odd sense of superstitious dread, not for her safety but for Dillman’s. She felt certain he was slated to die. She shook herself to dispel the chill and stepped back into her hotel.
“I thought you went to your room,” Fred Noonan, her navigator, said. He was just leaving the bar and headed for the stairs to retire for the night.
Amelia studied him for a moment. Fred had a reputation as a heavy drinker, but she could see no obvious sign he had gotten himself drunk before the most dangerous leg of their trip. His eyes weren’t glassy, he wasn’t swaying, and his speech had the crisp diction of a trained aviator.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she replied. “I thought a walk would help.”
Noonan smiled. “Nervous about tomorrow’s hop?”
She laughed. “I have no reason to be nervous. All I have to do is fly the kite. It’s you who has to find Howland Island, a speck in the otherwise endless Pacific Ocean.”
“Piece of cake,” he said with a cocky twinkle in his eye.
This truly would be a test of the navigator’s arcane ability to discern their location. Howland Island, some twenty-five hundred miles away, was a coral atoll that sat by itself in one of the most uninhabited stretches on the planet. Off by even a fraction of a degree, they would fly on until their fuel ran out and die crashing into the ocean. Their lives were literally in his hands once they took off.
They climbed the stairs together, and Fred saw her to her room. She undressed in the darkness and slipped back between the sheets, making sure the mosquito netting was properly draped around her bed. Sleep was elusive. She tossed and turned until midnight before drifting into unconsciousness. Her dreams weren’t of flying but of battling a massive storm in Mike Dillman’s dilapidated sloop. He was with her but said nothing as wave after wave broke over the bows and sluiced through the cockpit.
She woke with a start when in the dream another in the endless series of swells doused her and Dillman, but when she cleared her eyes of stinging salt water, the cadaverous man was gone. She heaved in fast breaths while wrestling to get her heart under control.
Knowing how grueling the upcoming flight would be, she willed herself to calm down and at least rest until dawn.
She managed a few hours more sleep, but when the sun rose, she rose with it. She padded to the shared bathroom and got herself presentable before dressing and heading downstairs, where Fred was having breakfast with James Collopy, the regional director for Australia’s civil aviation agency.
She greeted both men and ordered tea and eggs from Mrs. Stewart, the Hotel Cecil’s genial owner.
“Looks like a good day to make some history, Miss Earhart,” Collopy said in his melodious Aussie accent.
“What say you, Fred?”
“All the meteorological reports look good. The Coast Guard has the cutter Itasca in position off Howland to provide radio direction signals, so I say today is a fine day to make history.”
Two hours later they watched as men from Guinea Airlines pushed the fully fueled Electra from their hangar. In the sunlight her skin gleamed like a mirror. She was loaded with over a thousand gallons of fuel, more than enough for the eighteen-hour flight even with the headwind they anticipated. Both pilot and navigator took one final turn in the restroom next to the airline office inside the hangar and then climbed atop the aircraft. The cabin doors had been sealed for added aerodynamics, so they had to crawl through a hatch cut into the roof above the cockpit and behind the direction finder’s loop. Fred lowered himself first and plopped down into the navigator’s station. Amelia waved one last time at the dozens of well-wishers lining the grass airstrip and slid into the pilot’s chair.
In minutes she had the two radial engines humming nicely, with the props blurred to near invisibility. It was coming up on ten o’clock local time or midnight GMT. She waited until Fred gave a signal that his freshly calibrated chronograph read the hour, and she eased on more power. The overloaded plane waddled at first and then picked up speed. Though it was a grass field, it felt as smooth as tarmac. The plane continued to accelerate, and when they hit the spot where a road crossed the runway, the Electra bounced into the air and Amelia managed to keep her aloft. They flashed over the shoreline so low that the propellers threw rooster tails of water in their wake. Slowly and with patience beyond her thirty-nine years, the Lady Lindy flew the Electra up to a cruising altitude of eight thousand feet.
About ten miles from shore, the plane was still clawing to gain altitude when Amelia saw smoke rising from the ocean below. She grabbed a pair of binoculars and focused the lenses. It was a ship on fire — a sloop, in fact — and motoring away from it was another, larger sailing ship. She needed no imagination to realize the burning sloop was Mike Dillman’s and that the haunted man was doubtlessly dead. It was quite likely that someone valued the samples Dillman had entrusted her with not in dollars and cents, but in human life.
She was torn. She should turn around and report what she’d seen, but an investigation would take days, or even weeks, and the military was waiting for the trunk. She allowed a debate to run back and forth in her head for a solid fifteen minutes, until she was far enough away from the burning sloop that she could justify her inaction and continue on. She didn’t feel good about what she’d done — or not done — and rationalized it by telling herself it was what Dillman would have wanted. In truth it was her desire to finish the world-record circumnavigation that kept her from doing what she knew was right.
Fred was in the back of the cabin at the navigator’s station, where he would be able to shoot the sun and stars out of a special window. He never suspected a thing.
At various times during the flight, Amelia would take the Electra down to five hundred feet so Noonan could judge their true speed over the water versus the airspeed indicated in the cockpit. All this was necessary to pinpoint their location relative to Howland Island, which was getting roughly a hundred and fifty miles closer with each passing hour.
After nightfall, he made his first star shot and calculated their position. He wrote a slight course correction with a grease pencil on a whiteboard, and flicked it toward the cockpit on the pulley cable rigged between his seat and hers. That was one of the things that so surprised people when they landed at the various airports they’d used around the world — the two of them didn’t talk to each other during the flight. All communications were written down and passed back and forth.
Hours elapsed and the sun began to rise. Everything was going according to plan — everything, that is, except for the fact that they couldn’t find their destination. Amelia had been able to communicate with the Coast Guard cutter Itasca a couple of times, but she could not get a radio direction signal on the predetermined frequency. She asked them to change to an alternate frequency, but the ship didn’t respond.