David Wood, Rick Chesler
Electra
This book is dedicated to all my friends who make up Maddock’s Minions. You are the best!
Prologue
What was real and what was a trick of the light? From an altitude of one thousand feet, the shadows of cumulus clouds on the ocean appeared the same as the low-lying island Amelia Earhart was looking for. Her plane was about to crash. Nothing she could do would change that. She needed somewhere to land and somewhere to land fast.
Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were on the most difficult leg of their journey after having flown two-thirds of the way around the planet in their Lockheed Electra airplane. Earlier that day they had departed Lae, New Guinea en route to tiny Howland Island, where they were to make a refueling stop before traveling on to Honolulu. From there, San Francisco represented the completion of their goal — a circumnavigation of the globe at the equator, piloted by a woman, an almost unimaginable accomplishment.
Things had not gone as planned since Lae, however, and now Earhart was forced to make a choice: she thought that dark patch below and to the right was part of an island — probably not Howland or even nearby Baker, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. It offered what looked like enough flat ground on which to try a crash-landing, but if she was wrong she wouldn’t be able to regain altitude to try somewhere else.
She smiled to herself in spite of the situation, recalling good times spent with her pilot mentors. “Any landing you can walk away from…” She could hear them laughing across all the miles and all the years. This once humble farm girl, born in America’s heartland in 1897, six years before the pivotal Wright brothers’ first flight, had come farther than she had ever dreamed, both literally and figuratively.
Now, as the waves of the Pacific rushed up to greet her, it all came down to this. She squinted through her goggles at the outline below—there! A white line indicating breaking waves on a reef. It was real land and not just a cloud shadow. She would at least have a chance. But there was yet another problem.
She needed desperately to communicate with Noonan, who sat ten feet behind her in the cargo area, rather than in the co-pilot’s seat, to accommodate his navigation equipment. The combined noise of air rushing into the plane and its twin Pratt & Whitney turboprop engines made it very loud, however, making normal conversation impossible. To overcome this, they had devised a crude clothesline system where they clipped a paper with a written message to a clothespin and slid it back and forth on a pulley. In this way they could communicate during the long hours in the air. Right now, though, there was no time for that. But with her engines out, there wasn’t as much noise as usual and by shouting she could make herself heard. She craned her neck to face backward and yelled, “Secure the payload, Fred! Secure it now!”
She could just make out his reply. “Okay!”
Earhart quickly glanced to her right and frowned, then focused her full attention on the little island below. Much of it was forested and offered no hope of a real landing. On the far side of the island she picked out a pathetically small strip of sand or crushed coral, and she nosed her plummeting craft toward that.
She was not sure she would be able to reach it.
Chapter 1
“Remember, only one member of your dive team needs to avoid detection for that team to be declared the winners of this exercise!” The U.S. Navy underwater warfare trainer spoke forcefully, almost shouting, as he addressed the two Navy SEALs who stood before him, as well as a dozen others who sat on the dock nearby.
For Navy SEAL Dane Maddock, the statement offered little consolation. He and the SEAL he had been paired with, Uriah “Bones” Bonebrake, would be the last team to attempt the exercise, which so far none of their peers had been able to complete. Maddock stood on a floating dock at the entrance to a military harbor, surveying his surroundings. He squinted against the bright morning sunlight as he focused on their goaclass="underline" a destroyer ship docked in the harbor about one hundred yards away, a large red flag draped over one side indicating its training target status. The SEALs were supposed to act as enemy combatants infiltrating the harbor, by SCUBA diving through it and sticking a mine on the warship’s hull. Maddock felt the pouch on his weight belt that contained the mine to make sure it was fastened securely. Bones also gave his equipment a last-second inspection. Their task would be difficult enough without any gear failures.
“Divers ready…”
Their warfare trainer spoke through a megaphone now, alerting those in the vicinity about what was taking place. Maddock sized up their foes — the two opponents whose job it would be to stop the SEALs from placing a mine on the ship. They were superior swimmers, much better than Maddock and Bones, and they always seemed to wear annoyingly cocky grins on their faces. This would be a test for them, too.
“Mark 7 team, ready…”
The two bottlenose dolphins circled in their enclosure, an underwater pen with a sliding door which their handler, a marine mammal specialist, now lifted and held open. The United States Navy Marine Mammal Program had been in quiet, low-key operation since the early 1960s, with significant deployments during the Vietnam War and other conflicts. The long-classified program trained dolphins and sea lions to perform useful underwater tasks such as mine detection, the recovery of underwater objects, and, as would be demonstrated in this exercise, the protection of harbors from attacks by scuba divers.
Bones glared at one of the animals as if he could intimidate it. It outweighed him, out-swam him, had additional senses he did not possess, and, depending on whom one asked, was possibly even smarter than him. Unlike the trainers at public dolphin facilities like Sea World who constantly cooed in soothing tones to their charges while wearing brightly colored outfits, this trainer conveyed instructions to his dolphins almost exclusively by hand signals, wore military uniform, and never seemed to offer fish as treats. The dolphins were well-cared for and knew they would be fed well at the end of the day. A word of praise was reward enough.
Maddock, who had been staring at the destroyer, lost in tactical thought, snapped out of it. He flexed his knees in the wetsuit he wore to ward off the chilly water. The suit limited mobility somewhat, but it was important not only to retain body heat in a medium that transferred heat away from the body twenty-five times faster than air, but also to shield their bodies from accidental blows the dolphins might deliver. They could easily kill a man with blunt force, but were trained only to tag the divers by placing a magnetic disc which would deploy a buoy marker when activated. When these yellow markers floated to the surface, Navy officers would then make a decision about how to intercept the potential threat. Maddock observed the dolphin handler closely as he communicated with his mammalian subjects.
“Mark 7 team, set, go.”
The handler blew two short blasts from his whistle and the pair of cetaceans burst from their pen into the open water of the harbor entrance. They would be given three minutes to swim to the destroyer at the other end of the harbor before the dive team hit the water. Maddock and Bones watched the sleek animals recede into the harbor until they were no longer visible.
“And to think I used to like that show Flipper when I was a kid.” Bones shook his head. Of American Indian descent, his six-foot-six frame and muscular build intimidated many a human warrior, but would matter little to the dolphins.