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Mother Lode Tucker looked around, trying to find something familiar. They had moved a few miles at what must have been Christmas Island. Slashing their way to the towers on the ridge had moved them from the place they first landed, which was not far from the deserted little Dickenson ghost town. The place had seemed like a dream, it just didn’t belong. Nothing about this Island had made sense to Tucker. The idea of having an immigration detention center on an island made sense, it dawned on him that Ellis Island was used the same way in America, before entering the country illegally had become an international pastime.
Maybe they would get back there and learn some more. Right now, he needed to figure out the next move. If Luke was going to be able to help them at all he would have to know where they would be but there was no pattern to the jumps. An impossible rescue from nothing they had experienced and from a place they could not anticipate narrowed the odds to zero.
Molina had scouted around and decided they were back at the same island where he had killed the ambushing Japanese soldier; just on the opposite shoreline. There was a gigantic grey dome of concrete. This island had been inhabited at some time in the past. The project was like a freakin’ circus tent; it had to have taken tens of thousands of yards of concrete to build it, thought Molina. It looked like a monument to a mushroom. Taking the surviving prisoner and Captain Taylor to interpret, they set out to see if any landmarks were available. They finally saw through the mist a shard of sunlight shining on a rusted hull. It was the shipwreck where they had discovered the three others. His loud shout was lost in the wind, so he risked wasting one of their bullets. Tucker’s group heard the blast from the 45-military automatic. They started running toward the sound and were soon aware they had, in fact, landed on the crescent shaped island. Tucker vowed they would see if the submerged plane had any other salvageable equipment. They found the Japs grave and their camp fire pit, with an opened can; there were remnants of carrots left. The ants had been storing the harvest in a nest somewhere.
“Still got my Bic, Louie?” Tucker asked. The junior pilot grinned and flipped it. “Let’s eat something but stay close, in case we take off again. I’m going to try to figure why we are back at this particular place.” The little stick sun dial What the Hell had made was still standing, with ant tracks in a trail around it. It almost looked to be a clock.
“It’s still noon-er one, hardly a thing has changed. The grave mound looks fresh.” Walter noted.
The man they had freed from the metal wreck, Mother named him POW, put his hand in the fire pit, and yanked it quickly back. “Hot.” That was his first word. Tucker remembered how he had brightened up both times when Walter declared the time on the dial. Nooner one. He had looked expectedly at the commodore again.
“POW can talk,” announced Louie.
Ho decided to engage the old fellow while Molina and Louie got the fire and grub started. Some bark in the pit and a little fanning and the fire was going. The pit still had coals from when they were here. Tucker had no way of gauging time in this energy field, or whatever it was.
Sitting down by the man, he said. “POW, you are not like old Slocum there. I reckon he has forgotten how to talk or never knew. On the other hand, she had warts...” POW smiled at the horrible pun. “You jist won’t talk. What ya’ll been through that has clammed you up? What cat has got yer tongue, fella?”
The man just shook his head. Mother Lode had heard of trauma patients who sometimes forgot things or deliberately blocked things in their past, in an effort to trick their minds into thinking it had never happened. He was sure this odd acting fellow had been through something, something that had made him mute. He was not dumb, he was intelligent and interested in what was happening, he just couldn’t or wouldn’t talk. Mother got thinking about why he was here, of all places. He either was captured elsewhere by the Japanese soldiers, and forced to this place, or had fallen into their hands because he was already on the island.
The more Tucker wrestled with the problem, the more he was convinced he might have been here when the soldiers arrived. He wanted to open the vault, so to speak, that the man had sealed.
“Hey mister,” Tucker offered conversationally, “I’ve noticed you acted a little different when ‘What the hell’”, Mother yanked his thumb in the direction of the commodore, “told us the time on this here jerry-rigged sun clock. He said ‘Noon or one’, twice he has said that, and y’all looked up, like maybe he was talkin’ to you.” Tucker studied him awhile; POW stared at his inquisitor a moment then looked at the sand, doodling with a stick, while Tucker continued, “You know, POW, a man went missing years ago somewhere here in the South Pacific, his name was Noonan.” The man flinched and looked up at Mother Lode, startled, then his eyes fell and he adopted his shut-in style or attitude.
“Tell me, do the words Lady Lindy mean anything to you?” They did. A stirring in his eyes and some kind of recollection but it was suppressed. “I know you can talk, friend, yer jist hidin’ it; what is the reason you won’t say things?”
The man scratched a single wing cartoon plane in the sand. Tucker shook his head in wonder.
“Wal, I’ll be diddle damned. Nod yes,” he worked his chin up and down, like he would for a child, “if your name is Fred Noonan.” The head bobbed slightly, his eyes watered up and a tear slowly rolled down a leathery cheek.
That explains the trauma, thought Wade Tucker. This man has a mental block on the tragedy of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance. I’ll bet they got caught in the same vile vortex energy that trapped the rest of us.
“You two just vanished in about 1936 or ‘37, in decent weather. You only had 7200 hundred miles left to complete the first female around the world flight. You were flying a new, what was that model, I know, dang nabbit it, read about it; “E” something.” Tucker was searching his memory when the soft voice of the lost navigator, Fred Noonan, said his next two other words. “Electra. Lockheed Electra.”
With his head down on his chest he whispered, “Lady Lindy...they never came...” Still doodling in the sand, a couple tears splashed on the little airplane. Capt. Taylor and Walter Heil knelt in the sand, spellbound. The prisoner was talking.
Almost as if in a trance, the voice sounded as a radio distress call...“flying west from Howland Island...lost radio contact, compass gyrating counter clockwise...no storm warning...have circling grey fog. Earhart Lockheed...thirty minutes of fuel—no landfall...” The heartbroken survivor looked up with a horror fresh on his face, stricken with grief...“Melly...Mel—don’t leave me—they will come...I know they’ll come.”
Mother Lode knew in his gut this poor old POW was the navigator on the ill-fated last flight of Amelia Earhart. The group was too stunned to react, to comment or to fully understand, but old senile Slocum sat in the sand and the two broken men wept. Slocum put an arm around his shoulders and sat benignly oblivious to the real problem, just reacting to the grief of this other marooned soul.
The Commodore was the first to speak. “Equatorial route, 29,000 miles, she was married to a rich businessman, George Putnam. He worshipped her and paid for the trip...also nearly went broke searching for her for years. A huge mystery...maybe this poor chap can clear it up.”
Mother Tucker interrupted, “nuthin’ to clear What the Hell, they hit the same force we did. He made it...she must have been injured.” Molina brought them tins of food. “Beaner, we need you to dive to that plane wreck again. Gotta know if it was an Electra model built by Lockheed, ‘bout 1936.”
“That’s right, make the Latin race do the work...” he complained again.
“Our military trained ya fer things like that...gotta start payin’ it back, son,” chided Mother.
“Later Don Taskmaster...I gotta eat...we gots frijoles...con carne. Louie lucked into a can of chile, mucho bueno served hot.” They all sat in the sand and feasted on hot chile and excitedly traded snippets of history. Fred would nod and sometimes shake his head no to theories and questions. It was good to have him join the crew. It was good to call him Fred. The trauma induced amnesia was broken.
Mother Lode made a speech, trying to put the discovery into perspective.
“What we have here, is another clue about where we are. Knowin’ about where Amelia’s plane went down tells us we are somewhere around the Marshalls or Howland. Maybe they flew east, or maybe west—because of the compass problem, but they still had to be four or five hundred miles from the Island they were supposed to land on, putting us smack in the middle of the South Pacific. We jist left Christmas, I think, because of the radio contact, which is near Australia. I swear we were in Indochina somewhere, a little before that. You know what, fellers? If’n I know anything about geography, that is a huge triangle.”
“Like the one in the Caribbean, you think we all were caught in?” asked Commodore Heil.
“We been movin’ around in that triangle, too.” Tucker declared, “Wish I had a map to study. We got at least three places in both hemispheres we land on and leave instantly. Don’t those little geographic similarities beat all hell?”