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.