The Lightning Stones

PROLOGUE

Here she lay, in a tumbledown hotel on the edge of a jungle at the far end of the world. The knocks came soft and timid.

“Who is it?” she called, her voice husky with the sleep she so desperately craved.

“Miss Earhart?” a man asked tentatively.

Married to publishing magnate George Putnam for the last six years, she resigned herself to the fact that she would forever be known as Amelia Earhart, America’s flying darling.

“Yes?” From her tone, she was clearly irked.

“Bert Hoover sent you a telegram and said I need to see you. I’m Mike Dillman.”

It took her a few seconds to place the names. She’d received dozens of telegrams upon her arrival from Australia, mostly from George, but there were others as well, fans wishing her well. The cable the stranger just mentioned had taken her by surprise.

“Give me a moment,” Amelia said, and slid out of bed.

She grabbed up her robe, a thin, diaphanous garment that weighed but a few ounces and was one of her few feminine conceits during the circumnavigation. She slipped it over her shoulders and looked to see her reflection in a small mirror by the silvery moonlight filtering through the hotel room’s only window. She didn’t think she looked much like America’s flying darling just then, but there was little she could do about it.

She opened the teak door, a relic salvaged off an old steamer with slats on the bottom that allowed tropical air to circulate throughout her room.

Just enough light from the downstairs lounge reached the hallway for Amelia to see that Mike Dillman looked like he’d just crawled from the grave. His hair was lank and plastered to his sunken-cheeked skull. His eyes were nestled deeply in dark, bruised sockets, and while he was probably past fifty, his skin sagged like that of a man twice that age. She couldn’t fathom a circumstance where this man and Bert Hoover traveled in the same circles, and yet Bert had vouched for this cadaverous stranger and had asked that she perform a favor for them both. She would have ignored the request had it come from a less important person, and seeing Dillman firsthand, she still might.

“We don’t have much time, Miss Earhart,” Dillman said, and coughed. He tried to suppress the rattling rail in his chest by hacking into the sleeve of his tattered shirt. When he moved it from his mouth, blood stained the cloth and a little clung to his lip.

She was instantly concerned. “Are you all right?”

“Not really,” the shell of a man replied with a tired, resigned smile, “but it doesn’t matter. Can you please get dressed and take me to your plane?”

Uncertain, a little frightened, and yet intrigued, she nodded. “I’ll just be a minute.”

She left Dillman in the hallway while she threw on a clean pair of riding britches and pulled her flying boots up along her calves. The boots were custom made. A gift from George, much like the entire heady existence she called her life. It was no secret that he used her fame as an aviatrix to sell newspapers, and she used the money he gave her for these wild expeditions to feed her addiction to flying. For surely that was what infected her so terribly and yet so fulfillingly. Wasn’t that the definition of addiction, the unbreakable desire to do something you know is wrong, or dangerous, or immoral?

That was how she felt about being in the cockpit. She should be home raising a family, and not halfway around the globe from her husband attempting to be the first person, not just woman, but the first person to circumnavigate the earth near the equator. She had been the second person to solo the Atlantic, but the record books would tout her being the first woman, as if gender had anything to do with the ability to fly an airplane. Well, this time she’d have both titles and would make damn sure the headlines didn’t commodify her sex.

She shrugged into a shirt over a bra that hadn’t yet dried from its earlier washing. It felt like clammy hands were cupping her barely-there breasts.

Dillman was leaning against the wall, asleep on his feet and startled when she reopened her door. He suppressed another cough.

“I know this place seems like a backwater, but they do have a doctor here,” Amelia offered.

“No,” the disheveled man said. “I’ll be fine.”

Earhart shook her head and then led him downstairs and through the Hotel Cecil’s quiet lobby. Men were still drinking in the adjoining bar, but none saw the pair exit out into the moonlit night. The hotel was located on the waterfront of this sleepy coastal fishing village. Earhart started walking north, where an airstrip had been carved out of the jungle and Guinea Airlines had erected a hangar. It was late enough that all of the houses were dark. Water lapped turgidly on the nearby beach.

“We have to go to my boat first,” Dillman called, and preceded Amelia Earhart down to a lone jetty about two hundred paces east of the hotel.

Tied to the bamboo and teak dock was a thirty-foot single-masted sloop with a darkened hull and off-white deck. It looked as dilapidated as the man who had sailed it here. The deck was covered in various stains, and the hull looked like it was home to every barnacle and wood-worm in the South Seas. She had no idea where he had sailed from, but she wouldn’t trust this tub to take her across the lagoon.

“You’re braver than you look, Mr. Dillman.”

He looked at her queerly, not getting the joke. “I need a hand with the chest.”

That’s when Amelia noticed a tin steamer trunk resting on the deck next to the spindly ship’s wheel. The case was battered and dented, and whatever color it had once been painted was chipped clear off. Parts of the trunk were blackened as though it had been rescued from a fire. It seemed fitting luggage for both sailboat and sailor.

“Is that what Bert wants me to fly to Hawaii?”

“Yes, a representative from the navy will meet you when you land and take possession of the trunk.”

“I could fly it all the way to Oakland,” she said.

“No. There will be too much publicity when you land there. Crowds can be controlled easier in Honolulu. Also, this needs to be put in safekeeping as soon as possible. It attracts lightning, Miss Earhart. I have it shielded as best I can, but you must avoid electrical storms.”

“No problem there,” she said, stepping aboard the sloop after Dillman. “I’ve been doing that since leaving the States in May. What’s in the trunk?”

“Geological samples.”

They both bent and lifted the case.

“Geesh, fella, I kinda have a weight limit, you know.”

“This weighs sixty-four pounds exactly.” He said this solemnly, because these sixty-four pounds had been his constant companion as well as hated burden for the better part of a month. And in all that time he’d fled from dark forces who wanted the contents of the trunk for themselves. “Can you make allowances for it?”

His voice was pleading, and his eyes were even more haunted. At that moment she understood that the responsibility of transporting the trunk, from wherever his journey had started, was likely what had so wasted the man. When he had started out, Mike Dillman had probably been a robust individual and not the withered husk standing before her. She also recognized that he no longer had the strength to continue and that she was the last hope for getting the contents of the trunk into the hands of the United States Navy. Bert had cabled that this was of utmost importance to national security, but it was the fact that this man had sacrificed himself, and not the patriotic call to duty, that convinced her to see his labor completed.

“Sure, we can figure something out. Heck, I’m a good ten pounds lighter since starting this jaunt. Finding another fifty pounds should be a cinch.”

They carried the trunk off the pier and through the sleepy village and finally into the metal-sided hangar at the edge of a primeval jungle. Her Lockheed Electra gleamed like a silver shark even in the dim light of the stars and low moon. Because she was a tail-dragger, her nose was pointed upward at an angle that reminded Amelia of a dog sniffing the air. The plane’s big radial engines were nestled in cowlings along the wings and looked big enough to power a bomber. She loved this plane as no other before and still felt guilty about damaging it in Hawaii last spring on her first circumnavigation attempt.

Working by torchlight, Dillman assisted Amelia in removing some gear from the aircraft’s nose storage locker. Some would need to be left behind, while other items, like the dozens of stamped souvenir folios, could be moved into the main cabin she shared with Fred Noonan. It took them about a half hour.

He escorted her back to the hotel, shook her hand, thanked her, and wished her a pleasant journey. He moved off into the darkness and allowed the night to swallow him whole.

Amelia felt an odd sense of superstitious dread, not for her safety but for Dillman’s. She felt certain he was slated to die. She shook herself to dispel the chill and stepped back into her hotel.

“I thought you went to your room,” Fred Noonan, her navigator, said. He was just leaving the bar and headed for the stairs to retire for the night.

Amelia studied him for a moment. Fred had a reputation as a heavy drinker, but she could see no obvious sign he had gotten himself drunk before the most dangerous leg of their trip. His eyes weren’t glassy, he wasn’t swaying, and his speech had the crisp diction of a trained aviator.

“Couldn’t sleep,” she replied. “I thought a walk would help.”

Noonan smiled. “Nervous about tomorrow’s hop?”

She laughed. “I have no reason to be nervous. All I have to do is fly the kite. It’s you who has to find Howland Island, a speck in the otherwise endless Pacific Ocean.”

“Piece of cake,” he said with a cocky twinkle in his eye.

This truly would be a test of the navigator’s arcane ability to discern their location. Howland Island, some twenty-five hundred miles away, was a coral atoll that sat by itself in one of the most uninhabited stretches on the planet. Off by even a fraction of a degree, they would fly on until their fuel ran out and die crashing into the ocean. Their lives were literally in his hands once they took off.

They climbed the stairs together, and Fred saw her to her room. She undressed in the darkness and slipped back between the sheets, making sure the mosquito netting was properly draped around her bed. Sleep was elusive. She tossed and turned until midnight before drifting into unconsciousness. Her dreams weren’t of flying but of battling a massive storm in Mike Dillman’s dilapidated sloop. He was with her but said nothing as wave after wave broke over the bows and sluiced through the cockpit.

She woke with a start when in the dream another in the endless series of swells doused her and Dillman, but when she cleared her eyes of stinging salt water, the cadaverous man was gone. She heaved in fast breaths while wrestling to get her heart under control.

Knowing how grueling the upcoming flight would be, she willed herself to calm down and at least rest until dawn.

She managed a few hours more sleep, but when the sun rose, she rose with it. She padded to the shared bathroom and got herself presentable before dressing and heading downstairs, where Fred was having breakfast with James Collopy, the regional director for Australia’s civil aviation agency.

She greeted both men and ordered tea and eggs from Mrs. Stewart, the Hotel Cecil’s genial owner.

“Looks like a good day to make some history, Miss Earhart,” Collopy said in his melodious Aussie accent.

“What say you, Fred?”

“All the meteorological reports look good. The Coast Guard has the cutter Itasca in position off Howland to provide radio direction signals, so I say today is a fine day to make history.”

Two hours later they watched as men from Guinea Airlines pushed the fully fueled Electra from their hangar. In the sunlight her skin gleamed like a mirror. She was loaded with over a thousand gallons of fuel, more than enough for the eighteen-hour flight even with the headwind they anticipated. Both pilot and navigator took one final turn in the restroom next to the airline office inside the hangar and then climbed atop the aircraft. The cabin doors had been sealed for added aerodynamics, so they had to crawl through a hatch cut into the roof above the cockpit and behind the direction finder’s loop. Fred lowered himself first and plopped down into the navigator’s station. Amelia waved one last time at the dozens of well-wishers lining the grass airstrip and slid into the pilot’s chair.

In minutes she had the two radial engines humming nicely, with the props blurred to near invisibility. It was coming up on ten o’clock local time or midnight GMT. She waited until Fred gave a signal that his freshly calibrated chronograph read the hour, and she eased on more power. The overloaded plane waddled at first and then picked up speed. Though it was a grass field, it felt as smooth as tarmac. The plane continued to accelerate, and when they hit the spot where a road crossed the runway, the Electra bounced into the air and Amelia managed to keep her aloft. They flashed over the shoreline so low that the propellers threw rooster tails of water in their wake. Slowly and with patience beyond her thirty-nine years, the Lady Lindy flew the Electra up to a cruising altitude of eight thousand feet.

About ten miles from shore, the plane was still clawing to gain altitude when Amelia saw smoke rising from the ocean below. She grabbed a pair of binoculars and focused the lenses. It was a ship on fire — a sloop, in fact — and motoring away from it was another, larger sailing ship. She needed no imagination to realize the burning sloop was Mike Dillman’s and that the haunted man was doubtlessly dead. It was quite likely that someone valued the samples Dillman had entrusted her with not in dollars and cents, but in human life.

She was torn. She should turn around and report what she’d seen, but an investigation would take days, or even weeks, and the military was waiting for the trunk. She allowed a debate to run back and forth in her head for a solid fifteen minutes, until she was far enough away from the burning sloop that she could justify her inaction and continue on. She didn’t feel good about what she’d done — or not done — and rationalized it by telling herself it was what Dillman would have wanted. In truth it was her desire to finish the world-record circumnavigation that kept her from doing what she knew was right.

Fred was in the back of the cabin at the navigator’s station, where he would be able to shoot the sun and stars out of a special window. He never suspected a thing.

At various times during the flight, Amelia would take the Electra down to five hundred feet so Noonan could judge their true speed over the water versus the airspeed indicated in the cockpit. All this was necessary to pinpoint their location relative to Howland Island, which was getting roughly a hundred and fifty miles closer with each passing hour.

After nightfall, he made his first star shot and calculated their position. He wrote a slight course correction with a grease pencil on a whiteboard, and flicked it toward the cockpit on the pulley cable rigged between his seat and hers. That was one of the things that so surprised people when they landed at the various airports they’d used around the world — the two of them didn’t talk to each other during the flight. All communications were written down and passed back and forth.

Hours elapsed and the sun began to rise. Everything was going according to plan — everything, that is, except for the fact that they couldn’t find their destination. Amelia had been able to communicate with the Coast Guard cutter Itasca a couple of times, but she could not get a radio direction signal on the predetermined frequency. She asked them to change to an alternate frequency, but the ship didn’t respond.

By even her dead reckoning they had passed the tiny island a half hour ago. They were still picking up scraps of communication, but she couldn’t raise the ship. She jotted a note asking what Fred thought they should do — keep going in the belief that the headwinds had been stronger than estimated and hope the island was still ahead of them, or double back and try to approach on a different vector. She also wrote down that they had an hour of fuel remaining.

Noonan took a few minutes to reply, but soon enough the pulley squealed behind her. He’d written, “I didn’t screw up. Howland is ahead of us.”

That was good enough for her. They continued onward, even after the chatter from the Coast Guard ship eventually faded to a static-laced silence.

Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan flew into the pages of history and remain one of aviation’s most enduring legends. Earhart flew true that leg of the flight, taking her modified Lockheed twin-engine beauty on the exact route Noonan provided. And for his part, Fred Noonan, once a navigation instructor for the storied Pan Am flying clippers, directed them exactly right according to the equipment he had.

What he didn’t know, what he couldn’t have known, was that an electromagnetic force was acting on his mechanical chronographs. Without accurate time, his sun and star shots were off by well over a degree within the first hour of the flight, and the error increased throughout the journey. The radio signals they’d picked up from the cutter Itasca had reached them over a freak skip across the ionosphere. They were never even close to Howland. And all this was caused by their cargo — what Mike Dillman had called “geological samples.” They emitted the subtle electromagnetic force that turned what would have been a moderately interesting milestone in aviation history into an event of almost mythic proportions.