Sykes filled a white balloon from his regulator’s purge valve and tied it off with a deft twist his big hands seemed incapable of. It floated up to the surface like a jellyfish, and only seconds after release they heard and felt the Suva Surprise’s engine ramp up.
Reyes used a careful hand on the throttle. He already knew which bearing to keep to avoid dragging the boat sideways, so it was really just a matter of finesse over the diesels. The Surprise edged forward, making minimal headway, and he knew in an instant when she came up against her tether. A touch more throttle and the stern started to bite deep, crouching lower into the sea as the horses fought a half century of muck adhering the boat to the bottom. He kept an anxious eye on the stern bits. They really weren’t designed for this kind of strain, but he’d tied off the lines in such a way that the weight of the tow was well distributed.
Reyes opened the taps another notch. That first hit of power had merely stretched the nylon lines to their fullest. Now he was really fighting the sunken boat. The Surprise began to slew from side to side. Reyes kept one eye on the compass to make sure he didn’t sheer too far off the towline and the other on the water where the first balloon had shown itself in case there was a problem down below.
Mercer and Sykes were well back and to the side of the dory as the sportfisher above exerted its considerable power. Because of water’s density there was little danger of a whip-back if the line parted, but it was best to be prudent. They could both look up out of the undersea chasm and note how the Suva Surprise was pulling in the right direction. The lines linking the two appeared as taut as rebar.
For what felt like many long minutes but was actually less than one, nothing appeared to happen. The fifteen-foot dory remained stuck in place, and Mercer was beginning to think, pessimistically, that they might need to return with more dedicated salvage gear. He’d never anticipated the plane would be trapped under a sunken wreck.
In a silent burst of silt boiling up from under its hull, the bow pulled free of the ooze and rose several feet. Almost immediately its stern was dragged across the seabed, bouncing and shaking as it jostled over debris that had fallen from above, and the lumps of cement Booker and Mercer had so laboriously heaved over its side. Sykes let Reyes tow the boat well clear of their area of interest before releasing the two balloons he’d already inflated. Mercer might have doubted but Book never did.
The old open boat was twenty yards from its initial resting place when the signal was received topside and Captain Reyes throttled back on the twin engines. Silt wafted around it like smoke coiling from a fire, and it took several moments for the weak current to clear it away enough for them to see the open craft sitting upright on the bottom. It was rusted and banged up and had seen a lifetime’s worth of abuse in its day, but it somehow maintained a plucky defiance even here on the ocean’s floor.
After that initial look, the two men didn’t give the former lifeboat a second’s thought. Their attention went immediately to what the boat had so effectively hidden for all these years.
They swam to where the boat had spent the decades. The dory’s outline was clearly visible as an area of pure sand in the otherwise rock-strewn canyon bottom. And in the middle of the boat-shaped space was the shining aluminum curve of an aircraft’s wing. Other than some scratches where the boat had marred the aluminum, it looked to be in remarkable shape.
Mercer felt a lump in his throat as he looked at it. Normally he wasn’t all that sentimental, but he couldn’t help thinking what this moment represented. One of the most enduring mysteries of the twentieth century had just been solved, revealing the final resting places of two brave souls.
Book felt no such reverence. He swam over the wing to orient himself to where the Electra’s fuselage would be, and he set about moving more rocks out of the way.
Mercer looked up to see if their actions had disturbed the cliff just above, and he noted that the canyon wall was bulging more than it had. His instinct was to shout to Booker, but that didn’t work underwater. Instead he darted forward, kicking hard and pulling with his arms so that he crashed into his friend and spun them both out of the way a few seconds before the bulge of rock gave way. It came down in fractured chunks that trailed streamers of silt, so the whole mass looked like something shot from hell. Even underwater the sound of the crashing rocks was concussive. The downpour crashed onto the plane’s wing with enough force to peel away hunks of coral that had used the fuselage as an anchor for a new colony.
Tons of rubble and debris fell away from the plane, disappearing down the newly exposed sinkhole, and all at once the wing wasn’t the only part of the plane they could see. From her nose to the wing root, the plane was now exposed. The wing itself wasn’t attached to the Electra’s hull but had been torn back during its water landing. The big engine nacelle remained in place, but the two-bladed prop had been lost in the crash. They could see the cockpit windows but couldn’t see into the cockpit because of marine growth on the inside of the glass.
Most important for them, they had easy access to the nose cargo door.
They waited ten minutes for everything to settle, and for the water to clear enough for them to work. Amelia Earhart’s Electra looked to be in far better shape than the old boat that had shielded it for so many years. The broken wing was the only obvious sign of damage. The fuselage, or as much of it as they could see, appeared intact. None of the cockpit glass had even broken, and thirty-odd feet back from the cockpit, they could see the vertical stabilizer part of her twin tail sticking out of the canyon wall.
Book tried to peer into the cockpit from several angles but could see nothing in the beam of his small dive light.
Mercer went to the nose and tried the cargo hatch. Neither the handle nor the door itself would budge. Book came over and together they tried again. Mercer didn’t want to disturb the site more than necessary, so he didn’t want to rip the hatch clean off, but it seemed they might not have a choice. It was jammed tight.
And then, without warning, the door flew open, sending both divers tumbling. Booker was the first to regain his equilibrium, and he steadied Mercer. Together they returned to the downed aircraft and used Book’s light to reveal the interior of the cramped forward hold.
A tin trunk was the only obvious piece of cargo — a trunk that looked like it was ready to fall apart after sitting immersed in the ocean for the best part of a century. Mercer took the light from Sykes and played it around the bottom of the hold. Even in such a tightly sealed space as this, the living seas had encroached. The floor was covered in a layer of brown and green slime. He reached a hand in and felt along the floor. No matter how slowly or carefully he moved, he kicked up tendrils of organic matter. But Mercer’s fingers also felt something else. He grasped it and pulled it out into the light.
The crystal was dull brown, lifeless and uninteresting, and yet it had driven men to kill. It was the size of a banana, octagonal and blunted at both ends. It was something any self-respecting gemologist would dismiss out of hand — and yet it might just be the most valuable crystal on Earth.