The Lightning Stones

24

Mercer and Booker were back in the water by seven o’clock the next morning. It took just a few minutes for them to tie off the nylon lines to the sunken boat and get into position for Rory’s attempt to drag it free. They had devised a simple signal system using colored balloons that the divers could inflate with their air regulators. When they were ready they would release a white balloon to float up to the surface. A yellow balloon meant the divers wanted to pause for five minutes before attempting to move the boat again. And if more than two balloons surfaced at or around the same time, the charter captain would stop entirely and wait. Either the maneuver had worked or there was trouble and the divers were on their way back to the boat to rethink their strategy.

Sykes filled a white balloon from his regulator’s purge valve and tied it off with a deft twist his big hands seemed incapable of. It floated up to the surface like a jellyfish, and only seconds after release they heard and felt the Suva Surprise’s engine ramp up.

Reyes used a careful hand on the throttle. He already knew which bearing to keep to avoid dragging the boat sideways, so it was really just a matter of finesse over the diesels. The Surprise edged forward, making minimal headway, and he knew in an instant when she came up against her tether. A touch more throttle and the stern started to bite deep, crouching lower into the sea as the horses fought a half century of muck adhering the boat to the bottom. He kept an anxious eye on the stern bits. They really weren’t designed for this kind of strain, but he’d tied off the lines in such a way that the weight of the tow was well distributed.

Reyes opened the taps another notch. That first hit of power had merely stretched the nylon lines to their fullest. Now he was really fighting the sunken boat. The Surprise began to slew from side to side. Reyes kept one eye on the compass to make sure he didn’t sheer too far off the towline and the other on the water where the first balloon had shown itself in case there was a problem down below.

Mercer and Sykes were well back and to the side of the dory as the sportfisher above exerted its considerable power. Because of water’s density there was little danger of a whip-back if the line parted, but it was best to be prudent. They could both look up out of the undersea chasm and note how the Suva Surprise was pulling in the right direction. The lines linking the two appeared as taut as rebar.

For what felt like many long minutes but was actually less than one, nothing appeared to happen. The fifteen-foot dory remained stuck in place, and Mercer was beginning to think, pessimistically, that they might need to return with more dedicated salvage gear. He’d never anticipated the plane would be trapped under a sunken wreck.

In a silent burst of silt boiling up from under its hull, the bow pulled free of the ooze and rose several feet. Almost immediately its stern was dragged across the seabed, bouncing and shaking as it jostled over debris that had fallen from above, and the lumps of cement Booker and Mercer had so laboriously heaved over its side. Sykes let Reyes tow the boat well clear of their area of interest before releasing the two balloons he’d already inflated. Mercer might have doubted but Book never did.

The old open boat was twenty yards from its initial resting place when the signal was received topside and Captain Reyes throttled back on the twin engines. Silt wafted around it like smoke coiling from a fire, and it took several moments for the weak current to clear it away enough for them to see the open craft sitting upright on the bottom. It was rusted and banged up and had seen a lifetime’s worth of abuse in its day, but it somehow maintained a plucky defiance even here on the ocean’s floor.

After that initial look, the two men didn’t give the former lifeboat a second’s thought. Their attention went immediately to what the boat had so effectively hidden for all these years.

They swam to where the boat had spent the decades. The dory’s outline was clearly visible as an area of pure sand in the otherwise rock-strewn canyon bottom. And in the middle of the boat-shaped space was the shining aluminum curve of an aircraft’s wing. Other than some scratches where the boat had marred the aluminum, it looked to be in remarkable shape.

Mercer felt a lump in his throat as he looked at it. Normally he wasn’t all that sentimental, but he couldn’t help thinking what this moment represented. One of the most enduring mysteries of the twentieth century had just been solved, revealing the final resting places of two brave souls.

Book felt no such reverence. He swam over the wing to orient himself to where the Electra’s fuselage would be, and he set about moving more rocks out of the way.

Mercer looked up to see if their actions had disturbed the cliff just above, and he noted that the canyon wall was bulging more than it had. His instinct was to shout to Booker, but that didn’t work underwater. Instead he darted forward, kicking hard and pulling with his arms so that he crashed into his friend and spun them both out of the way a few seconds before the bulge of rock gave way. It came down in fractured chunks that trailed streamers of silt, so the whole mass looked like something shot from hell. Even underwater the sound of the crashing rocks was concussive. The downpour crashed onto the plane’s wing with enough force to peel away hunks of coral that had used the fuselage as an anchor for a new colony.

Tons of rubble and debris fell away from the plane, disappearing down the newly exposed sinkhole, and all at once the wing wasn’t the only part of the plane they could see. From her nose to the wing root, the plane was now exposed. The wing itself wasn’t attached to the Electra’s hull but had been torn back during its water landing. The big engine nacelle remained in place, but the two-bladed prop had been lost in the crash. They could see the cockpit windows but couldn’t see into the cockpit because of marine growth on the inside of the glass.

Most important for them, they had easy access to the nose cargo door.

They waited ten minutes for everything to settle, and for the water to clear enough for them to work. Amelia Earhart’s Electra looked to be in far better shape than the old boat that had shielded it for so many years. The broken wing was the only obvious sign of damage. The fuselage, or as much of it as they could see, appeared intact. None of the cockpit glass had even broken, and thirty-odd feet back from the cockpit, they could see the vertical stabilizer part of her twin tail sticking out of the canyon wall.

Book tried to peer into the cockpit from several angles but could see nothing in the beam of his small dive light.

Mercer went to the nose and tried the cargo hatch. Neither the handle nor the door itself would budge. Book came over and together they tried again. Mercer didn’t want to disturb the site more than necessary, so he didn’t want to rip the hatch clean off, but it seemed they might not have a choice. It was jammed tight.

And then, without warning, the door flew open, sending both divers tumbling. Booker was the first to regain his equilibrium, and he steadied Mercer. Together they returned to the downed aircraft and used Book’s light to reveal the interior of the cramped forward hold.

A tin trunk was the only obvious piece of cargo — a trunk that looked like it was ready to fall apart after sitting immersed in the ocean for the best part of a century. Mercer took the light from Sykes and played it around the bottom of the hold. Even in such a tightly sealed space as this, the living seas had encroached. The floor was covered in a layer of brown and green slime. He reached a hand in and felt along the floor. No matter how slowly or carefully he moved, he kicked up tendrils of organic matter. But Mercer’s fingers also felt something else. He grasped it and pulled it out into the light.

The crystal was dull brown, lifeless and uninteresting, and yet it had driven men to kill. It was the size of a banana, octagonal and blunted at both ends. It was something any self-respecting gemologist would dismiss out of hand — and yet it might just be the most valuable crystal on Earth.

Mercer met Booker’s eyes and nodded. The African American grinned around his regulator and flashed Mercer the okay sign.

Sykes carried a large nylon bag folded into a pouch attached to his dive belt. He unfurled it and anchored it on the seafloor next to the open hatchway. It was tight confines, but he and Mercer managed to wrestle the small trunk close enough that they could lift it out of the plane and settle it into the bag. The case had cracked during the crash, and a string of crystals fell free as they maneuvered it. Rather than try to deal with preserving Dillman’s old steamer trunk, Book tore off its lid and let the whole thing collapse into the bag. He picked out larger chunks of the disintegrating trunk, including sheets of copper that had so dissolved over the years they were little more than a film of verdigris.

Mercer swept the hold for more loose stones and picked out dozens. No wonder, he thought, that the crash site attracted so much lightning. The minimal shielding Mike Dillman had devised was now worthless, and Sample 681’s bizarre affinity for electricity could be fully realized. He thought, too, that any curious islander or Western diver hoping to explain why this one spot of ocean attracted so much lightning would have found the sunken boat and deduced it was somehow the reason.

He placed handfuls of crystals into the bag until he’d recovered them all. He backed out of the hold while Booker cinched the dive bag tight. He attached a flotation balloon and inflated it enough so the bag was neutrally buoyant. Book jerked a thumb upward. Mercer held out one finger and finned up and over the cockpit windows. To access their plane, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan had to climb in through a hatch cut into the top of the fuselage. Mercer scraped away some bits of stone and sand and found it easily.

He wasn’t sure why he wanted to do this. He’d told himself moments earlier that he didn’t want to disturb the site, and yet he couldn’t stop himself from opening that hatch. The hatch popped loose effortlessly in his hands. Visibility was excellent in the cabin, which had been sealed for eighty years, though Mercer knew if he entered, his movements would stir up the detritus covering every horizontal surface. He rotated his dive light to look forward. Additional light filtered in through the slime on the windows, so he could see nothing but vague shapes and shadow. Aft he could clearly see the remains of a seat that had seen its cushion long ago consumed by some sea creatures. On the floor below it were buttons that had once adorned Fred Noonan’s now-dissolved shirt and other smaller lumps hidden in the slime.

Out of respect, Mercer wasn’t going to enter the cabin through the roof hatch to determine what remained of the fabled pilot. He liked the images through which the world knew her — a sexy, determined tomboy type, smiling as she stood next to an airplane — and not what he knew was hidden from his view by the tall-backed command chair before him.

Running between the cockpit and navigator’s seat was a stainless-steel cable, and he recalled from the little research he’d done since first learning of Earhart’s involvement that this was how the pilot and her navigator communicated during the flight. They passed notes back and forth written in grease pencil, on an early form of whiteboard.

Gingerly he reached out and grasped the wire. It was a little slack, but when Mercer pulled it came freely. The board had been next to Amelia during the end of the flight, those frantic minutes before the plane struck the ocean and sank. She had to have known it was coming and would have had time to think about what would be her final words, as the fuel gauges slowly spun down to empty and the Pratt & Whitney starved.

He pulled ever so gently until the board came gliding out of the gloom. He dared not touch it, so he craned his head awkwardly into the cabin and cast his light on the board. Whatever it was made of had repelled the slimes and molds that were flung like cobwebs around the cabin. The white slate was clean except for the following words:

Somehow he knew that’s how she signed their most intimate notes and felt like he’d just read the most honest and beautiful thing ever written. He never knew a person could tear up in a diving mask and realized ruefully that he couldn’t wipe away their stinging saltiness.

He returned the board to where it belonged next to the pilot’s seat and eased out of the plane. He closed the hatch reverently, rethinking his decision to let the world know about his discovery.

Book was there, waiting. Mercer gave him a slow nod, and together they returned to the surface, the bag of crystals in tow.

Rory was on the dive platform when they reached the surface. Mercer spat out his regulator, having used the slow ascent to process his feelings. For the time being he was going to focus on the fact that he’d recovered the last cache of the lightning stones, and he knew now he could use them as a lure to finally flush out his enemy.

“Well?” the Aussie asked in that peculiar twang.

“One Lockheed Electra Model 10,” Mercer said, now grinning like the Cheshire cat, “circa 1937 or so.”

“It’s her?”

“Positive,” Mercer assured him. “We’ve found Amelia Earhart after all these years.”

“I’ll be buggered,” Reyes said. “I had my doubts about you two, but no more.”

Sykes handed up the bag, and Reyes had to strain to haul it clear. Water poured out of it until it was light enough for him to lift it over the transom and manhandle to the deck. The stones weighed more than fifty pounds, and the bag still leaked gallons of water. He then helped each man out in turn, giving them the high five and a hearty slap on the back.

While they were shucking their gear, Rory came back with a bottle of Dom Pérignon. “I keep a few aboard so if a charter catches a big one they don’t mind shelling out some extra coin for the good champers. This one’s warm, but who gives a tinker’s toss.”

He popped the cork over the side like he was firing a starter’s pistol and held the frothing eruption of sparkling wine to his lips before passing the bottle to Mercer. Mercer took a mouthful of foam and gave Book his turn. By the time the bottle had gone around a second time, the carbonation had relaxed enough so they could enjoy the wine’s sublime taste and texture.

They finished the bottle and Reyes broke out the Foster’s. He gave the men a hand with their gear and asked if they wanted lunch before returning to Fiji, and when they said no he climbed to the flying bridge to start the long haul back south and home.

With the twin engines getting on line, Mercer went below to rinse the salt from his body — but he quickly detected another sound that was distinct from the throaty diesels’ roar. It was a higher-pitched note, and he knew what it was. He’d heard it the day before, and it had raised his hackles then.

Mercer grabbed a pair of tennis shoes from his cabin floor and raced back out onto the rear deck. Booker was lolling in the fighting chair, his broad chest rising in the slow rhythms of a man already asleep. But even before Mercer could slap his shoulder to wake him, Sykes’s eyes flashed open as he, too, detected something.

“What?” Sykes said, coming alert.

“Not sure,” Mercer said, scanning the skies above Alofi Island.

The plane didn’t come over the top of the isle. It flashed around the flank instead, barely skimming above the waves. So low, in fact, that its propellers kicked up spray in its wake.

They hadn’t heard the regular supply plane out of Wallis Island the day before, Mercer realized. It was a twin-engined flying boat they’d heard land on the far side of Alofi. It had taken off again as part of the illusion, presumably after dropping off an observer to watch the men aboard the sport fisherman that was anchored in the spot where Jason Rutland had calculated Amelia’s plane would be. And now the venerable PBY Catalina, a World War II — vintage workhorse that was still in wide use throughout the Pacific, was rounding the island again and charging straight at the Suva Surprise.

Mercer already had a good idea how they’d been found out.

“Will you look at that,” Rory Reyes shouted down from the bridge, delighted at seeing the ungainly old warbird with its high wings and engines like Dumbo’s ears. He didn’t understand the danger they were all in.

The PBY was considered a slow aircraft even back in its heyday, but the lumbering plane still ate the distance between itself and the fleeing boat in seconds. Booker was already in motion, dashing down into the cabin space. Mercer shouted for Rory to take cover an instant before the plane rocketed past, no more than fifty yards off their starboard rail and at a height of twenty feet.

A side hatch was open in the aircraft’s hull, and from the darkness came the continuous flash of a gun on full auto. Despite the speed and the instability of the shooting platform, half the bullets from the thirty-round clip raked the side of the Suva Surprise. Fiberglass exploded with each impact, wood splinters blew free, and aluminum and polished brass were holed by the blast. The plane immediately pulled up into a sharp turning bank, nearly as tight as an Immelmann, to come back for another pass.

Mercer knew Reyes had survived because the engines were suddenly throttled up to everything they had, and he started turning the wheel erratically.

Booker appeared with a bundle wrapped in a beach towel.

“Plan B,” Mercer told him. “Just like we talked about.”

“How’d the bastards find us?”

“Doesn’t matter right now.”

Booker left his mystery package on the fighting chair and helped Mercer with the Zodiac. The Surprise was running hard, so the wind across the deck was savage, but they managed to get down and tie the crystal-laden dive bag to the Zodiac’s integrated oarlock.

“They put a spotter on the island,” Mercer said as they worked. “As soon as he saw us heave a bag over the side and start celebrating like a bunch of idiots he called in the cavalry.”

“I always thought the cavalry were the good guys.”

“Willing to bet these guys see themselves on the side of the angels, same as us.” Mercer finished the triple knot. “Make sure Reyes stays out of it. This isn’t his fight.”

The Catalina finished its turn and started back for another strafing run. There wouldn’t be enough time to get clear, so Mercer and Sykes threw themselves flat as the plane came directly overhead. The gunman didn’t open fire this time, but he did hurl something out of the door. It hit the deck inches from Booker’s head and smashed, peppering him in glass.

Mercer looked up in time to see what had shattered. It was a Mason jar, which had contained a hand grenade whose spoon had now popped free. It was an old Vietnam-era trick used by chopper crews to keep their grenades from exploding before they hit the ground. Mercer lunged forward, grabbed the rounded incendiary, and flicked it over the side. It exploded in their wake two seconds later, throwing up a geyser of water as if they’d just released a miniature depth charge.

“You know what to do,” Mercer said and got ready.

Booker nodded, pressed something into Mercer’s hand, and climbed up to the bridge while the flying boat came around for yet another attack. Book laid his bundle onto the floor at his feet and shouldered Rory aside. “Sorry, Cap’n.”

He chopped the throttles and turned to see Mercer shove the Zodiac over the transom and leap in after it. He kicked the engines back up to speed, leaving the inflatable bobbing in his wake.

Then Sykes started swinging the boat around in a desperate bid to return to the islands and the illusory safety of the town of Kolotai on nearby Futuna.

“What the hell is going on?” Reyes bellowed.

“Apparently our ruse didn’t work.”

“And what’s in the bundle?”

Sykes bent to retrieve it. The towel fell away, revealing a wicked-looking contraption that was a cross between a carpenter’s nail gun and a science fiction laser blaster.

“Jesus,” Reyes gasped. “What the bloody hell is that thing?”

“It’s called a Vector, and it’s built by Kriss. It fires forty-five-caliber ACP. This is only a semiautomatic, but I can still lay down cover fire as effectively as a machine gunner.”

The weapon was a bullpup design with the magazine behind the trigger assembly to keep it compact but still give it some barrel length for accuracy. It was considered one of the best close support weapons ever built, though Sykes had chosen it for this mission because of its incredible compactness.

They had smuggled the gun into the country by putting it and extra ammo into a metallic pouch developed for American Special Forces troops who needed to smuggle weapons through civilian customs. The pouches were part of an antidetection system that could fool most modern X-ray machines. Book had access to the pouches but not the special carrying cases operators were also issued, so he’d improvised. He’d wrapped the pouch in coils of copper wire. The old scanner back at the Nadi airport’s customs house hadn’t stood a chance. That first day out of Suva, Book had sat in his cabin peeling back the wire to get at the weapon. The wire would then be repurposed as swaddling to shield the bag of gems once they’d found them.

The plane had straightened out for another run at them, and Reyes eyed it nervously. “Shoot that damned plane!” he yelled.

“Waste of ammo,” Sykes replied calmly. “I’d never hit it, let alone anything vital enough to slow their attack. Trust me on this. Mercer and I considered this and have a plan.”

Booker looked back and saw that Mercer was racing the Zodiac toward Alofi as fast as he could go. He was still less than a mile off their beam, but the distance was widening with each passing second.

Booker ordered Rory to go below, but the Aussie stubbornly refused. The PBY swooped by their starboard side, flying only a few miles per hour above the plane’s astonishingly slow stall speed. The gunner’s door was open and the machine gun spat again, a long raking barrage that tore up more of the boat. This time the shooter concentrated on the stern in hopes of knocking out the engines or starting a fire. The combination of engine noise and autofire was a hellish cacophony that filled the air, relenting only when the plane passed by. Book fought the urge to grab the Kriss and return fire. At that slow speed he could have laid in a few well-placed shots, but then the PBY would have just stayed out of range and picked them off from a distance.

The fourth pass was another bombing run, and this time there was nothing they could do about the glass jar that bounced off the windshield, shattering it. The grenade popped free and seemed about to fly over the rail when a wave tipped the boat just enough for the explosive device to catch the railing and drop back onto the aft deck.

Mercer was a mile and a half away, pushing the little one-cylinder for everything it had, when he heard the crump of an explosion over the dragonfly whine of the Evinrude. He turned in time to see greasy smoke and torrents of fire rising from the fishing boat’s stern. He swore. That hadn’t been part of the plan. The attackers should have figured out that the lone man in the Zodiac had the stones, not the big sportfisherman. He and Book had exaggerated their actions for the sake of the guy manning the observation post so that he would then pass on that information to the pilot.

Then he got it. His adversary was as ruthless as they came. He’d forgotten that Sherman Smithson hadn’t been spared out of any sense of kindness. He was alive because he was needed to pass on information. There was no way these people were going to leave any witness, innocent or otherwise.

Mercer kept racing for Alofi Island, but he also kept looking back to see the Catalina circling again, like a buzzard waiting for its intended meal to die. He couldn’t believe this was happening. Book was supposed to get clear with Rory Reyes, not end up taking the brunt of the attack.

Sixty seconds after the first explosion, a second massive detonation ripped across the ocean’s surface. The Suva Surprise’s diesel tanks lit off in a towering plume of orange, red, and black. Moments later, the sea was peppered with flying debris — shards of fiberglass and wood and steel that had once been the beautiful sportsfisherman. Anyone left aboard would have been carbonized by such a massive fireball.

Not satisfied with its first victims, the antique seaplane maneuvered around, low to the water, and turned toward Mercer. Its engines were pitched so it sounded like a dive-bomber dropping out of the sky. It wasn’t a vulture now, but a screaming bird of prey.