With a quiet resolve, Noonan said, “I’ll go prepare the life raft.”
Amelia shook her head and grinned. “Not just yet. I think I see something up ahead.”
Noonan squinted his eyes. All he could see was the eternal sea all the way to the horizon, where a tiny sliver of blue turned white. “I don’t see anything.”
Amelia pointed toward the horizontal line on the horizon. “That’s whitewater up ahead!”
“My God, you’re right!” He took a deep breath in. “That means there’s a reef! And the only reef in this region is part of the Phoenix Islands!”
Amelia flew a clockwise circuit around the island, searching for a suitable landing site. The island was roughly 5 miles long by 1.5 miles wide and appeared uninhabited, or at least, their flyover didn’t elicit any persons from the dense forest. The island itself was shaped like a somewhat elongated, triangular coral atoll with profuse vegetation and a large central marine lagoon of striking turquoise, dark blues, and opaline.
If need be, they could always land on the shallow lagoon and then swim to shore. It might prove to be the safest option, given the danger of landing near the breaking reef.
At the end of the circuit, Noonan spotted the intact remains of a large shipwreck on the reef to the northwest side of the island. There, the broad shelf running out to the reef edge had little to no water on it.
Noonan met her eye. “Are you planning on staying up here all day?”
“You’re right, that’s as good a landing spot as we’re ever going to get.”
She brought the Electra down, setting up for a low-level circuit, flying past the whitewash in the downwind run in a counterclockwise direction. In the process, they both studied the reef. It was dry and years of constant waves had smoothed it to a perfect landing strip.
Amelia pulled on the landing gear lever, followed by the flaps. “Landing gear down. Flaps fully extended.”
Noonan looked at her. His jaw set firm. “You know, if you pull this off, there’s still time for the Itasca to locate us. Then we’ll get refueled, and we might just be in Honolulu by the end of the week.”
She smiled. “You bet we can!”
Amelia set the fuel mixture to full rich and the propellers to high RPM as she banked onto their final approach.
She pulled the twin throttles back to idle.
The Electra glided gently toward the landing site.
Noonan gripped the side of the cockpit for support. Their lives depended on the outcome of the next thirty seconds. His heart raced and he found himself unintentionally holding his breath.
Amelia pulled the wheel toward her chest causing the Electra to flare. A moment later, the wheels touched down on the smooth reef.
She applied the brakes and the Electra came to a complete stop. She shut off the fuel mix, and the engine sputtered and conked out, leaving them in the silence of the distant waves.
Noonan hugged her. “Well done!”
“It’s not Howland Island, but it will do,” Amelia replied, her eyes wide and her relaxed face filled with teasing. “Now, you had better work out just where we are.”
Amelia Earhart climbed out of the Electra.
A crepuscular ray pierced the cloud overhead, turning the dark water of the reef to emerald. She breathed in the warm air. At 10:32 a.m. the tropical air was already racing toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
At 5 feet 8 inches, she had a lanky build and proportionate features. She squatted down and climbed beneath the wing. Her blonde hair, which she kept short for convenience, blew in the endless westerly sea breeze. She ducked down under the fuselage, running her hands along the landing gear. She took her hands back and glanced at them. They were clean. The struts were intact and there was no leaking oil.
She stepped out the opposite side and stared at the aircraft.
Her gaze traced the wings and propellers, across to the nose of the Electra as she circled around, before finally settling on the twin tails and rudder mechanism — everything was intact.
Amelia’s cheeks dimpled as her lips formed a wide grin.
Noonan met her eye. “Well, Amelia… what do you think? Will she fly?”
“You bet she will.” Amelia picked up a smooth rock from the beach and skimmed it across the shallow water of the inside reef. Turning to face him directly, she asked, “Any idea where she’s going to fly from?”
“No. But I do know something.”
“What?”
“If she’s ever going to fly again, it will need to be within the next week.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“I have the tide charts for the Phoenix Islands.”
“And?”
“They show it’s currently a neap tide.”
She arched her trim eyebrow. “Meaning?”
“It’s the lowest point in the multi-day tidal cycle.” Noonan sighed heavily. “There’s no water on the broad shelf running to the outer reef, but there will be. Just have a look at the previous watermarks.”
“Are you telling me, after all this, the damned tide is going to come in and steal the Electra from us?”
Noonan squinted, running his eyes across the waves breaking across the distant reef. “In time. But by now the Itasca will have initiated a search and rescue. If I know your husband, already damn near half the fleet stationed at Honolulu will be on their way south to help. They’ll stay nearby Howland at first, but soon enough, someone will make the obvious connection and follow the 157–337 sunline, taking them straight to us. The question is how long it will take them to reach that conclusion?”
Amelia smiled and started walking to the end of the reef where the beach reached the jungle. “One way or another, we’d better make sure we’re out of here by that time.”
“Where are you going?”
“To get out of this damned heat. Come on, let’s see what this island offers in terms of food and water.”
“I’ll stay here and see if I can get the radio to work.”
Amelia ran the palms of her hands through her hair, wiping away the perspiration that was already beading up on her forehead. She met his gaze and shook her head. “Not now. We’ll need to conserve our energy and water supply. It’s too hot out here in the direct sun. Besides, we’ll need to start the engines to power the radio. We’ll try again tonight.”
“Agreed.”
It became quickly apparent that the island on which they had become castaways was far from the dreamy islands of Robinson Crusoe.
The desert atoll had no fresh water and temperatures which exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. The island was like many of those Amelia and Noonan had seen throughout the Pacific, wooded in indigenous forest dominated by the Buka, a large tropical softwood tree, feral coconut, and shrubs known as Scaevola frutescens — which made it hard to penetrate let alone search for food and water.
Tired and weary, they took turns to rest throughout the heat of the day. By early afternoon, they split up and searched the outskirts of the island. Along the northwestern reef laid the remains of a large freighter that appeared to have run aground. A nameplate, still visible, gave the name SS Norwich City. The internal hull had been savaged by fire while the exterior had been bombarded by the sea, leaving nothing of value.
They returned a couple hours later to the Electra. Noonan reported that he’d made it to the southern tip of the reef, and that he’d discovered a small trail leading into the dense forest of the island about midway. He’d followed the trail and found that it ended shortly at the saltwater lagoon that encompassed the interior of the atoll.
They agreed to search the island’s interior in the morning.
In the cool of the night, Amelia started the engines and attempted to use the HF radio to call for help. After failing to receive any response after fifteen minutes, she killed the engine and went to sleep.
In the morning she woke up in the gray of predawn. Noonan was already awake, staring out at the ocean.
She said, “Good morning.”
“Morning.”
“Shall we make an early start of it?”
“Yes. We’d better. What if someone comes by?”
Amelia glanced at the remains of the nearby shipwreck. “If anyone does a flyover they’re bound to spot the Electra.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“The wreck of the SS Norwich City. It’s an obvious scar on the otherwise untainted reef. It was the first thing I spotted at a thousand feet. Anyone flying overhead would spot it, and a second later, their eyes would recognize the Electra on the reef next to it.”
“Good thinking.”
She smiled. “I’d like to say I thought that far ahead, but it was just luck. I only realized when I looked back at the two stranded vessels from the shore.”
“What if the Itasca sends a search party?”
“What if?”
“We’ll be gone all day.”
“They’ll wait for us. Just in case, I left a note in the cockpit to say that we’d gone to explore the southeastern end of the island.”
“All right. I see you’ve thought of everything. Let’s go.”
They followed the trail Noonan had taken the previous afternoon to the atoll’s lagoon. The ground was flat and porous, leaving no freshwater for their consumption. There were enough supplies on board the Electra to keep them alive for about a week, but they wouldn’t make it much longer than that.
At the lagoon, Amelia spotted something dark hidden in the underbrush of the dense forest in the southwestern region. “What is that?”
Noonan stared at the place where she was pointing. “I don’t know. It could be an old hut.”
“Let’s go find out.”
They followed the outskirts of the lagoon in a counterclockwise direction until they reached the southern end, where the shallow water of the lagoon ended in a long white stretch of sand. Where the lagoon met the forest was a thick rockery of black pumice.
Amelia stopped.
Noonan asked, “What?”
“Let’s make an SOS sign here on the white sand. With the black stones on the white sand this will stand out like a giant signpost.”
Noonan shrugged. “Okay, let’s double up on our chances.”
They worked until midday to lay the black pumice stones side by side to form the letters SOS in thirty feet high lettering. Afterward, they rested beneath the shade of a forest of coconut trees, carefully drinking small amounts of their precious water.
When the worst of the heat had subsided, they continued following the lagoon until it reached a decidedly man-made waterway leading into the forest. At a glance, Amelia knew someone had intentionally carved a path into the jungle for the waterway.
They stepped into the warm water, following it beneath the thick vegetation. The water was shallow, no more than a foot deep, and roughly six wide.
Sixty feet into the makeshift canal, they both stopped.
There, in front of them was a large shed with a tin roof. The canal entered the storage facility and inside were hundreds of drums of aviation fuel.
“What is this place?” Amelia asked.
“It looks like a fuel depot,” Noonan replied, pointing out the obvious. “It looks like someone’s been using the lagoon as a landing site and refueling station for seaplanes.”
Amelia glanced at the tin roof, painted in greens and yellows to form a tropical camouflage. “Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to heavily conceal this place from the air.”
“It would seem so. The question is, why?”
Amelia looked at the side of the first drum of aviation fuel. Oriental writing that she couldn’t decipher lined the edge of it. “What is this writing, Chinese?”
Noonan shook his head. “Japanese.”
She stared at the depot through narrowed eyes. “Why would the Japanese be storing hundreds of drums of aviation fuel in secret out here?”
“There’s only one reason I can think of.”
“What’s that?”
Noonan swallowed. “In prelude to war.”