Chapter 46

The man renting boats was just about to close when Archer reached him. At first, he didn’t want to provide Archer a boat so late in the day, but when Archer waved a sawbuck in front of his face and said he was only going about three miles out, the man took the bill and said, “Okay, mister, just dock it nice and tight in the same slip when you come back, ’cause I ain’t hanging around.”

Archer filled out the necessary paperwork, and the man led him to the boat with a set of keys and a navigation map of the area. Along the way he grilled Archer on his seamanship and came away satisfied.

“Even three miles out weather can turn fast, so stay alert. And use your running lights. Shipping lanes out there. It’s marked on the map. You don’t want to get swamped by a tanker.”

“Right, thanks.”

“And what’s so special about three miles out anyway?” said the man. “Nothing but water. Anacapa’s a lot farther than that.”

“Just checking out a tip I got on a fishing spot.”

The man eyed him with skepticism. “Yeah, right. You ain’t no smuggler, are you?”

Archer tapped his pockets. “Well, if I am, whatever I’m smuggling is really small.”

The varnish was so freshly applied and smelled so strongly that Archer felt like he’d been lacquered as soon as he stepped foot on board the trim nineteen-foot Chris-Craft Barrelback with an American flag flapping from a post set on the stern. He stowed his hat, powered up the motor, flicked the switch for the running lights, and steered the boat due west. As he sped up the wind increased and the ocean followed this nudge, with the result that foot-high seas confronted him about a half mile out.

Archer pushed the throttle forward a bit more, and the heavy wooden boat handled the chop with ease. He kept his eye on his compass and then took a minute to look over the laminated map the fellow had provided, using a flashlight that had been clipped to a holder set on the dashboard. The island he was heading to was not marked on this map.

After confirming his route he put the map away and kept his eye on the compass, holding his heading steady at 271 degrees. He was cruising along at twenty-four knots and figured he would be at the island in less than ten more minutes. He let his gaze run from left to right and then behind him, just in case. The seas became heavier at around the two-and-a-half-mile mark, and he throttled down a bit to compensate, working the bow at a forty-five-degree angle into the oncoming waves to cleave their power in half. The moon was up and visibility was good. Everything was going his way so far. He knocked on the wooden dash for luck.

He had learned to pilot powerboats in these very same waters during his training back in 1942. The Army had worked with the Navy, and amphibious landings were going to be in his future, Archer learned. Thus, he had been given the skill set necessary for this, never realizing it would come in handy so many years later, and in American waters. He had been in far worse seas than he was currently in, but, like the boat rental man had cautioned, things could change quickly if the weather turned.

He slowed the boat as he approached a dark mass rising up out of the Pacific. He swung the light mounted on the side of the boat, much like a prowler’s beam, so that it strafed the contours of the island he was heading toward. He turned north and navigated down the island’s length, doing a rough calculation of its size and dimensions. Once he had returned to his starting point, he throttled down even more and pointed his bow at an enormous dock that his searchlight had revealed previously. There was another, smaller dock, about a half mile down on that side. He snagged two fenders and placed them on hooks on the gunwale on the port side to cushion the boat from the current pushing it against the wooden dock.

He glided in at an angle, then cut the wheel hard toward the dock, killed the motor, and jumped out as the stern swung landward. He quickly tied up the boat, grabbed his hat and the flashlight, and walked off the dock and onto the island.

He looked around, aiming the beam here and there. He was also wondering why, if the military still owned this piece of land, no one was here to challenge him for trespassing.

He walked in a westerly direction, shining his light over the dirt. The land was reasonably flat but then elevated to about forty or so feet as he drew closer to the middle of the island, which made sense to protect against flooding. There had clearly been structures here, large ones, if their remaining foundations were any indication. Like an archaeologist he could roughly determine what had been here by what had been left behind. He saw discarded cables, stacks of used lumber, chunks of concrete, and an empty crate that had RADAR stenciled on the side. There were old tires, the remains of a Jeep buried in the mud, empty boxes that had been filled with C rations, a sailor’s white cap, an empty ammo chain for a machine gun, and a fifty-gallon oil drum that was labeled PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES NAVY. A little ways away he saw the rusted undercarriage of a Mark VI railway gun mounted on a rotating platform. He had seen these guns while training on the Channel Islands. They could move around in a circle and take on both enemy aircraft and ships.

Under the illumination of his light he spotted something interesting. He walked over and knelt next to a hole in the ground with a stake driven in next to it. Some number and letter markings were on the wooden stake, but he didn’t know what they meant. This very same thing was also at several other places, all on the elevated portion of the island.

Then he saw another post in the ground with a name on it.

LANCET SURVEYORS AND ARCHITECTURAL GROUP, BAY TOWN.

There wasn’t a phone number or any other information on the post, but he wrote down the name in his notepad.

Archer performed a run-fast walk until he reached the water on the other side of the island. He had measured his strides and gauged the island as being about three miles in width. He had earlier calculated it was about twice that in length. Three miles by six miles, or eighteen square miles in total. Not a lot of land, but certainly big enough to do something with, as the Navy apparently had. And it was an engineering marvel that they had created an island from basically a shallow spot in the ocean. And to his knowledgeable eye, the large dock located here could have handled the biggest destroyers the Navy had.

Farther out there was a long, shadowy form. It took Archer a few moments to figure it out.

A breakwater.

That would make sense when you were docking ships out this far from the mainland.

He looked up at the sky as the blinking lights of a plane buzzed overhead. Its angle of ascent showed that it had probably just taken off from the coast. It continued in a westerly direction, maybe on its way to Hawaii, he thought. To his practiced ear, it was a four-engine aircraft, and it would need all that horsepower to make it that far.

He trudged back to the boat, feeling disappointed. He hadn’t really accomplished much of anything, and it had cost him ten bucks. Archer picked up his pace as a flash of lightning appeared far out over the ocean to the west. A storm was rolling in.

He jumped into the boat, fired up the engine, untied his lines, and pulled away from the dock. He pointed his bow east and throttled up. He could feel the wind at his back, and then the barometric pressure dropped with a rush. This was nature’s warning sign of foul weather coming.

He pushed the throttle down further, and the Chris-Craft’s powerful engine thrust the boat through the increasingly heavy seas. Archer listened to the cracks of thunder as the storm chased him all the way back to the California mainland. He slid the boat into its slip, tied it up, left the key under the seat as the man had instructed him, and hustled back to the Delahaye. He got the top on and the windows rolled up a few seconds before the rain began to fall in buckets. He sat in the car with the engine off and stared out to sea. Three miles out was an island. And he was pretty sure that that was where Sawyer Armstrong and those other men had gone. Now the question was why.

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