Electra

Chapter 4

An hour later, Maddock, Bones and Bugsy stepped aboard an inflatable Zodiac boat tied to one side of the small pier Maddock had seen from the helicopter. A blue seaplane was tied to the other side of the pier. A squat, muscular Asian American man greeted them from behind the boat’s steering console.

“Bruce Watanabe, pleased to meet you.”

“Likewise,” Maddock shook his hand. Undercover or not, the boat operator was the guy who would be driving them to and from the dive site, and they wanted to be on good terms with him if at all possible.

“It’s not the Love Boat but it’ll do, right?” Bones offered his infectious grin, which Watanabe returned.

“Hey, if we confirm this plane is actually Earhart’s, we all plan to have a celebration at one of the resort islands — drinks on Spinney!”

“Sounds good to me,” Bones returned. And it did. But he felt a pang of regret since he knew those drinks would never come, at least not with anyone from Spinney’s team. His job was to get those assets off the plane and return them to the U.S. Navy. Only then would he be celebrating.

“That the break in the reef, there?” Maddock pointed to a notch in the atoll brimming with whitewater. Like Bones, he too was thinking forward to the mission and getting it done.

Watanabe nodded and Bugsy responded.

“Water in the lagoon has been calm for us in the morning with a light wind kicking up by afternoon. There’s a passage in the atoll through the surf line. Once we get through that the dive site’s usually not too choppy. But the currents underwater are wicked. Let’s get out there and I’ll brief you some more when we’re on site.”

Watanabe put the boat into gear and they raced across the calm lagoon at a good clip. The water here was shallow and gin-clear. To Maddock it looked as though they were about to hit various coral formations growing on the bottom. Watanabe and Bugsy were obviously used to it, not appearing concerned in the least. Maddock and Bones enjoyed the feel of the salt spray on their faces as the boat glided across the lagoon.

In a couple of minutes Watanabe eased back on the throttle and the Zodiac slowed as it approached a cut in the coral ring. Fast-moving water sloshed around in the opening, waves splashing against its sides.

“Hold on!” Watanabe gunned the outboard and they rocketed through the channel into open ocean. A couple of minutes later they approached an orange marker buoy.

“Wreck’s a little ways out there,” Bugsy said, pulling on his wetsuit, “but we’ll follow the buoy line down to the shallow reef and get situated. From there we’ll swim out to the edge of the drop-off and head down to the wreck.”

“Sounds good.” Maddock and Bones pulled their gear on.

“So like we discussed, as soon as we come within sight of the airplane, I’m going to head back to the boat. I’ve done too many deep dives lately and I’ve got to go again tomorrow. But you two will stay down there to check out the site.”

Maddock and Bones completed a check of each others’ gear and said they were ready.

“So you’ve used the full facemasks with comm gear before, right?”

The masks Maddock and Bones wore were not standard dive masks, and not helmets either, but something in between. They were rubber and covered the entire face, but not the whole head. This meant that the divers could breathe through their noses, and talk through integrated transmitters, while underwater. Bugsy moved to a box lying on the deck containing some electronic gear. He keyed a transmitter while looking at Maddock and Bones.

“You hear me in there?”

“Get out of my freaking head, man!” Bones joked. Both he and Maddock were intimately familiar with underwater communications gear, but he played the part of someone for whom it was still somewhat of a novelty.

“I hear you loud and clear.” Maddock’s voice was audible not only to Bugsy and the boat driver, but also to Bones.

“Great, so we’ll be able to talk during our dive, and Bruce will be able to hear us up here. Ready?”

Maddock and Bones moved to one side of the boat while Bugsy went to the other. The three of them flopped backward into the water. As soon as the bubbles from their splashes cleared, they could see the bottom of the ocean thirty feet below as though they stood in the shallow end of a swimming pool.

“Nice clear water,” Maddock said, testing the comm channel.

“Like a Jacuzzi, too, only with you two clowns instead of a couple of babes and some champagne,” Bones said. After San Diego, the tropical ocean felt like a warm bath.

Bugsy’s voice came over the frequency. “Yeah, up here we’re practically burning up, but believe me, two hundred feet down you’ll be glad for the suits. Bruce, you hear us?”

“Copy that, I hear all three of you.”

Bugsy nodded at Maddock and Bones as he wrapped a hand around the buoy line. “Down we go. And we may not have champagne, but if you’re not careful the nitrogen narcosis will give you a nice buzz.” In addition to the bends, another danger of deep diving was the narcotic effect nitrogen could have on the brain; like having a few beers in a short amount of time, it affected judgment. Bugsy jerked a thumb downwards and the trio vented the air from their buoyancy compensator vests and began to sink.

They reached the bottom and Bugsy pointed down the slope. “This way.” The flat sandy bottom studded with patches of coral now gave way to a steep incline covered in a riot of hard corals and sea fans, like an underwater garden. Small, colorful fish darted about, and exotic-looking shrimp and crabs scuttled between coral formations. Maddock looked up one last time before the slope transitioned to a near-vertical incline and saw the silhouette of their boat limned against the tropical sun.

“Now we drop down the wall.” Bugsy led them over the edge. Maddock felt the pressure increasing in his ears. His full-face mask making it impossible to “equalized” them with the so-called Valsalva Maneuver, pinching his nose closed and blowing into it, he made do by flexing his jaw muscles while thrusting the jawbone forward. It was less effective than the Valsalva, but the best he could do. He felt his ears pop and instantly the pain stopped.

“Nice jaw work,” Bones said. “My grandmother had a bulldog that used to make the exact same face.”

“No, that was my barracuda imitation,” Dane said, and then laughed when Bones, clearly feeling the pressure, worked his own jaw in the same fashion. They’d have to do it every few seconds from here on out.

“You guys know a bit about diving, I see.” Bugsy sounded impressed.

The light grew dimmer as they descended. When they reached a depth of one hundred feet, a large form startled them by swimming out from a crevice just beneath them.

“Grouper.” Bugsy pointed to the large fish as it swam off.

“Gotta be the size of my old VW bus.” Maddock shot Bones a warning look. He really did used to have a VW bus, which Maddock knew from all of the sordid tales he’d regaled his fellow SEALs with. They were under cover and divulging any details about their true identities was a risk. Bones gave him a subtle nod to indicate he understood. “Deep undercover” may have seemed like a joke back in the commander’s office, but now it was as real as ever.

They descended in silence until, at a depth of 185 feet they reached a large coral overhang. At this depth the growth was more stunted, due to the low ambient sunlight.

“Lights on.” Bugsy flipped on his powerful halogen dive light and Maddock and Bones did the same. They swept their beams around the uneven shelf. Bugsy stood and walked backward, waving as he dropped over its edge. “Down we go again!”

Maddock and Bones swam over the ledge, shining their light beams down, watching Bugsy sink into a black void. Once beneath the overhang, Maddock swept his beam toward the wall and saw that an opening extended many yards back.

Partially blocking this opening was an airplane.

Parts of it still appeared silver in color, but most of it was encrusted with dark-colored marine growth. Maddock shone his beam along the fuselage toward the nose of the plane, which extended into a tunnel in the coral wall. He judged the plane to be about forty feet in length, which, according to the briefing material he’d read on the flight over, was about right for the Lockheed Electra the aviatrix was flying when she vanished.

“Okay, boys. This is it. It’s definitely an Electra, but we have yet to confirm that it’s Earhart’s with a serial number. We already looked under the wings where the numbers are painted but they’re totally encrusted over with barnacles and crap. But there’s a brass number plate up in the cockpit that should have held up well enough that we can clean it up enough to read it. Thing is, as you can see, the cockpit is way up into a depression in the rock, there, almost as if there was a collapse of the wall around the plane at some point, possibly during an earthquake.”

They heard the rasp of Bugsy’s breathing as he sucked in the dense air at this depth.

“We’ll check it out.” Maddock motioned for Bones to scout the right side of the plane while he took the left. Before long Maddock could hear Bones’ labored breathing as he rounded the plane’s nose.

“Kicking almost as hard as I can to get around this thing,” Bones’ voice came over the comm unit.

“Roger that,” Bugsy said. “It’s something you’re going to need to get used to. I’m headed back topside. Watch your air gauges, guys, you don’t have a lot of time down here, especially fighting that current.” The deeper a diver went and the more he exerted himself, the less time his air supply lasted. This dive was very deep, almost at the limit of where scuba divers using air could go.

Maddock acknowledged the response. “Copy that. See you topside in a few.”

Bugsy waved as he swam toward the distant sunlight, leaving Maddock and Bones alone with the plane wreck.

Was it Earhart’s?

“You’ve got to see this,” Bones said from the other side of the plane. Maddock continued his path a bit farther before confirming that the cockpit was indeed not accessible from this side.

“Copy that, coming around.” He also stopped at the rear cargo door but it was encrusted shut. When they had left for the boat they’d been warned by Steve Carlson, the researcher, not to cause any damage to the plane, by prying at it with a dive knife, for example.

“See what?” Bugsy’s voice reminded them that they were not on a private channel.

“Bullet holes. Looks like this thing was strafed by machine gun fire. I don’t think Amelia Earhart was a dogfighter, was she?”

Maddock paused to hold his dive knife, which had ruler markings etched onto the blade, and held it across one of the holes. “Looks like it to me.” Privately, he thought the holes consistent with 50-caliber slugs, but he didn’t want to raise suspicion by appearing too knowledgeable. He then made his way around the plane’s tail section toward Bones.

“Let’s not rule anything out.” This from Bugsy, swimming somewhere above. “Until we have that serial number, we won’t take anything for granted.”

Normally Maddock would agree that evidence of aerial warfare made it unlikely to be the plane Earhart was flying. But when combined with being asked to look for weaponized smallpox in conjunction with her aircraft? He wasn’t so sure. There was one thing he was certain of, though, and that was that he had to keep these thoughts from Bugsy, so he said nothing of the sort over the comm line.

Maddock swam over to Bones, who was brushing a gloved hand over the bullet holes in the plane’s fuselage. Maddock swam past him toward the nose of the plane on the right side. He couldn’t see any way to penetrate inside it yet. This far back beneath the ledge it was very dark, and he depended almost exclusively on his dive light to be able to see any detail. A few fish swam by him but there was not nearly as much life down here as up on the shallow reef. He swept his light beam around the airplane’s cockpit, the doors wedged in between two walls of a narrow cave-like space. No way in without damaging the plane. He was hoping to be able to reach the cockpit windows, which were likely broken, but they were farther up into the tight space.

“Jim, what’s your pressure gauge read, buddy? I’m getting low, myself.”

Maddock was looking up and to the right of the plane, where there was a tunnel-like opening near the back of the overhang’s ceiling.

“Jim, you copy?”

Maddock knew that Bones would think he wasn’t recognizing his cover name. He was already feeling a little tipsy from the heavy nitrogen loads at this depth. But that wasn’t it. He scanned his light beam at the opening near the ceiling. Looks like a tunnel that might lead somewhere…

“Jim!”

“Sorry, Keith, I copy.” He started to tell Bones how he had found what might be a passage through the coral back into where the plane’s cockpit was, but checked the impulse. Bugsy and Bruce were listening.

“Copy that. Read your pressure gauge.”

Maddock checked his air gauge. “One thousand psi. Time to go.” Exploring the opening would have to wait.

“Copy. Meet me at the tail and we’ll head up together.”

“On my way.”

Bones was waiting in front of the Electra’s tail section when Maddock got there. Both of them were breathing hard to avoid being swept off the ledge into the open void.

Maddock gave Bones the thumbs-up signal, signifying he was ready to ascend. The two of them pushed off the ledge toward the light, over two-hundred feet above. As soon as they did, Maddock felt something brush against his wetsuit. He turned to the left, away from the wall, in time to see a large, sleek torpedo shape shoot past them, arcing out into open water.

“What was that?”

“Did you see that?” Maddock and Bones spoke at the same time, over one another. Maddock saw a glint of metal in his light as Bones freed his dive knife from the sheath on his calf, but they saw no sign of whatever it was that had rushed past them.

“See what?” This from Bugsy.

“Not sure.” Maddock kept moving up, with Bones right beside him. Low on air with large creatures in the vicinity was no time to hang around at two-hundred feet.

“We’re heading back to the reef now.”

They reached the shallow, flat reef without further incident and there they performed a decompression stop, simply breathing their air at a shallow depth for several minutes, to avoid the bends. That completed, they ascended the buoy line and surfaced next to the waiting boat.