“Meaning?”
“Meaning it can take an electromagnetic signal and amplify it a thousandfold — or conversely, I think, diminish it to nothing. And it could work as a propagating cascade effect. It’s hocus-pocus stuff.”
“Jason, first…slow down. You’re talking way too fast. Second, you’re using physics on a simple geologist. And third, I am less interested in what it can do now than in what it did back in 1937.”
“Got it.” The physicist took a deep breath. “In a nutshell, your hunch was right. These crystals would have warped Earhart’s radio transmissions, as well as the signals reaching her radio direction finder. Also, with the amount of crystal on board, about twenty-three kilos, it would have messed with the navigator’s chronometer. When he took sun and star shots and compared them to his charts, his faulty timepiece would have sent them hundreds of miles off course, and they never would have known it. We know her radio kept receiving signals from the USS Itasca anchored off Rowland Island, and they could occasionally hear her, but their communications were distorted by the lensing effect of the crystal stored in the plane’s nose.”
“Here’s the million-dollar question,” Mercer said. “Were you able to tell by the amount of crystals aboard just how badly Fred Noonan’s navigation was off?”
“I had to run about a million simulations to get a mean that made sense, but I did it. The real trick was estimating how much of the electromagnetic disturbance effect Dillman was able to block with whatever he shielded the sample in. I went by the KISS principle and figured he’d do just enough to keep from getting pounded by lightning, but would not have known to block the effects at shorter distances, wavelengths, and frequencies. This is the stuff that would have messed with the jewels in a chronometer or the crystals in an old radio set.”
“That gave you a hard number?”
“No, but solid estimates. That’s why I needed so many runs on the Goddard mainframe. You were right. She was nowhere near Howland, their intended destination. I estimated they started flying northeast as intended, but over time they would have arced more east than north.”
“Putting them where exactly?” Mercer had already made travel arrangements covering most of the South Pacific. He’d booked through to Fiji, Tarawa, Nauru, and Majuro in the Marshall Islands, not knowing the aviatrix’s final flight path. And if pilot Earhart and navigator Noonan had really screwed up, he also had tickets for Auckland. Jason’s answer would narrow that list down to one destination.
“Best I can tell they would have run out of fuel near Wallis and Futuna.”
“Who?”
“Wallis and Futuna are islands, not people. They’re French. Wallis is more northerly than Futuna, and I think they went down near the latter.”
“What’s the closest international airport.”
“I’d go with Fiji. Samoa is closer to Wallis, but Fiji’s closer to Futuna.”
“Now for another million-dollar question. Did she get close enough to see the island and attempt to land, or did she run out of fuel short of there and ditch in the ocean?”
“That I can’t tell you, Mercer. But the tallest peak on Futuna is about seventeen hundred feet. They could have seen that for forty or fifty miles, depending on visibility. If she had the gas she would have beelined there.”
“Populated?”
“What am I, Wikipedia?” Jason asked. “I found the place for you. You want its full history, too?”
Mercer smiled. “I suspect by now you are the world’s foremost authority on Wallis and Futuna, even if you’ve never been there.”
Rutland looked sheepish and prideful at the same time. “I like to be thorough.”
“Populated?”
“Yes. Today about five thousand, most of whom live in just two towns. Back when Earhart crashed I bet there were half that number. Interestingly there’s an uninhabited island just off of Futuna called Alofi. Rumor has it cannibals ate the people who lived there sometime in the nineteenth century, and no one has ever gone back. So to answer your unasked question, yes, it is remote enough to have kept her crash site secret for eighty years.”
Mercer paused as he remembered something. He fished out his phone and dialed.
“Nine-one-one. What is the nature of your emergency?” a woman answered.
“There was an incident within the past few minutes at the Pentagon Metro stop.”
“Yes, sir, we are aware of it. Do you have something additional to report?”
“Yes. The injured man, the one whose hand was cut up, is a person of interest in the attack at Hardt College in Killenburg, Ohio.” The gunfight on campus had been featured prominently on the national news. “Show his photograph to witnesses. They will recognize him as the driver of the Honda that tore through the science building.”
“Who is this, please?”
“I was on campus when the attack occurred and saw the same man again today at the Pentagon. It looked like he tried to knife someone, but he was the one who ended up being injured.”
“Your phone is coming up blocked on my screen, sir. May I have your name?”
“No. I’m sorry. Contact Special Agent Kelly Hepburn or Nathan Lowell out of the FBI D.C. field office — they’ll be able to piece together the chain of events. I’m positive the man wounded today at the Pentagon, and the Honda driver at Hardt College, are the same person. Thank you, and good-bye.” He slipped the phone back into his pocket, then said to Jason, “That should keep him off the streets for a while even if no one can make the identification. Where were we?”
Jason shook his head slightly at Mercer. “We were discussing Amelia Earhart being on or near either the island of Futuna or Alofi, and how Fiji is your best bet flying from the States.”
“Already arranged,” Mercer said, grateful that it was one of his preselected jumping-off points.
“Wish I could go with you,” Jason said, a bit enviously. “It would be the chance of a lifetime to be in on this.”
“You can have all the credit, I promise. The last thing I want in my life is fame. What about the stuff we let them take when they grabbed your purse?”
“Satchel!”
“Kumquat,” Mercer parried. “And you wouldn’t have used it if you didn’t want it swiped. Now you have a legitimate excuse when Felicia asks.”
“Touché,” Jason conceded. “You mentioned the bad guys have some of the mineral already, so I couldn’t fudge its electromagnetic qualities since that’s something they can test for themselves. What I did was distort the pictures you sent of the empty geode so that it looks like the amount of recoverable crystals is about ten percent less than what was really there. Even if they rerun my numbers they will come up with the answer I want them to.”
“They won’t be able to tell the pictures were doctored?”
“Please,” Jason said, obviously insulted. “We’ve got photo equipment at Goddard that Hollywood doesn’t have yet. I could make images that show the geode filled with leprechauns, and the best computer analysis in the world would say they’re genuine.”
“Okay, okay. Where are you sending them?” In case his adversaries had access to airline databases, which was likely given their sophistication and reach, Mercer planned to cancel all his flight reservations except the destination Jason had chosen for his ruse. Of the flights he’d arranged under Booker Sykes’s name, he’d keep the two tickets to Fiji.
“They’ll think the plane went down at a place called Gardner Island. It’s part of the island nation of Kiribati, formerly the Gilberts, of which Tarawa is the most famous. Gardner is more in line with Earhart’s intended course than Futuna, and has the added bonus of being an atoll where people claim they’ve found clues that she did indeed crash.”