Electra

Epilogue

Commander Roberts almost wished he hadn’t seen the prints that were made from the exposed but undeveloped film his two SEALs had brought back from the island. They had done one hell of a job, he had to admit. Be that as it may, he wished the whole mess would just go away, and he believed it would now that this whole thing was over.

He walked with the Records Clerk in a humongous, hangar-like building between massive stacks of warehoused objects, files, articles and reports from classified cases spanning decades’ worth of administrations. He could have delegated this task but he wanted to personally make sure that it was done right. The clerk made a left turn down another three-story-high stack and Roberts followed close behind.

For all the sensationalism of the EARHART group’s press conferences, media blitzes, and threats of lawsuits against the Mizuhi Development Corporation, they had been able to produce very little in the way of solid proof that they had discovered the final resting place of Amelia Earhart. Visitors to the island coming to investigate Spinney’s claims had left underwhelmed. They had no airplane. No significant artifacts. Only an ecologically compromised island and a lot of finger-pointing between them and Mizuhi, who had filed a lawsuit of their own in a Honolulu circuit court against Fred Spinney’s group claiming extensive property damage.

Roberts shook his head as he recalled the most haunting of the black-and-white photographs to come out of the film his SEALs had recovered.

It was a shot taken from inside the rear cargo area of what had been verified to be a Lockheed Electra 12 airplane. The image depicted Amelia Earhart in the pilot’s seat, her head facing to the right. In the co-pilot’s seat, a Japanese solider, his face locked in a determined grimace, aimed a pistol at her.

“Commander? Are you all right?”

Roberts shook himself from his reverie. The clerk had stopped in front of a towering stack.

“Yes, I’m fine. So this is where it goes?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll take it up.” The clerk stepped onto a mechanized lift necessary to reach the higher shelves.

Roberts took one last look at the sealed envelope containing the negatives and handed it over. The clerk pressed a button on the lift and up he went into the stacks; ten feet…twenty feet high, then placed the envelope on a shelf between many, many more, stretching out almost endlessly to either side of them.

The commander wondered if anyone would ever lay eyes on the material again. He certainly couldn’t be sure of it. Now that they had the smallpox safely secured in a Level Four biosafety facility, there wasn’t really a need to revisit it.

Amelia Earhart’s Electra had been lost again.