“Now we drop down the wall.” Bugsy led them over the edge. Maddock felt the pressure increasing in his ears. His full-face mask making it impossible to “equalized” them with the so-called Valsalva Maneuver, pinching his nose closed and blowing into it, he made do by flexing his jaw muscles while thrusting the jawbone forward. It was less effective than the Valsalva, but the best he could do. He felt his ears pop and instantly the pain stopped.
“Nice jaw work,” Bones said. “My grandmother had a bulldog that used to make the exact same face.”
“No, that was my barracuda imitation,” Dane said, and then laughed when Bones, clearly feeling the pressure, worked his own jaw in the same fashion. They’d have to do it every few seconds from here on out.
“You guys know a bit about diving, I see.” Bugsy sounded impressed.
The light grew dimmer as they descended. When they reached a depth of one hundred feet, a large form startled them by swimming out from a crevice just beneath them.
“Grouper.” Bugsy pointed to the large fish as it swam off.
“Gotta be the size of my old VW bus.” Maddock shot Bones a warning look. He really did used to have a VW bus, which Maddock knew from all of the sordid tales he’d regaled his fellow SEALs with. They were under cover and divulging any details about their true identities was a risk. Bones gave him a subtle nod to indicate he understood. “Deep undercover” may have seemed like a joke back in the commander’s office, but now it was as real as ever.
They descended in silence until, at a depth of 185 feet they reached a large coral overhang. At this depth the growth was more stunted, due to the low ambient sunlight.
“Lights on.” Bugsy flipped on his powerful halogen dive light and Maddock and Bones did the same. They swept their beams around the uneven shelf. Bugsy stood and walked backward, waving as he dropped over its edge. “Down we go again!”
Maddock and Bones swam over the ledge, shining their light beams down, watching Bugsy sink into a black void. Once beneath the overhang, Maddock swept his beam toward the wall and saw that an opening extended many yards back.
Partially blocking this opening was an airplane.
Parts of it still appeared silver in color, but most of it was encrusted with dark-colored marine growth. Maddock shone his beam along the fuselage toward the nose of the plane, which extended into a tunnel in the coral wall. He judged the plane to be about forty feet in length, which, according to the briefing material he’d read on the flight over, was about right for the Lockheed Electra the aviatrix was flying when she vanished.
“Okay, boys. This is it. It’s definitely an Electra, but we have yet to confirm that it’s Earhart’s with a serial number. We already looked under the wings where the numbers are painted but they’re totally encrusted over with barnacles and crap. But there’s a brass number plate up in the cockpit that should have held up well enough that we can clean it up enough to read it. Thing is, as you can see, the cockpit is way up into a depression in the rock, there, almost as if there was a collapse of the wall around the plane at some point, possibly during an earthquake.”
They heard the rasp of Bugsy’s breathing as he sucked in the dense air at this depth.
“We’ll check it out.” Maddock motioned for Bones to scout the right side of the plane while he took the left. Before long Maddock could hear Bones’ labored breathing as he rounded the plane’s nose.
“Kicking almost as hard as I can to get around this thing,” Bones’ voice came over the comm unit.
“Roger that,” Bugsy said. “It’s something you’re going to need to get used to. I’m headed back topside. Watch your air gauges, guys, you don’t have a lot of time down here, especially fighting that current.” The deeper a diver went and the more he exerted himself, the less time his air supply lasted. This dive was very deep, almost at the limit of where scuba divers using air could go.
Maddock acknowledged the response. “Copy that. See you topside in a few.”
Bugsy waved as he swam toward the distant sunlight, leaving Maddock and Bones alone with the plane wreck.
Was it Earhart’s?
“You’ve got to see this,” Bones said from the other side of the plane. Maddock continued his path a bit farther before confirming that the cockpit was indeed not accessible from this side.
“Copy that, coming around.” He also stopped at the rear cargo door but it was encrusted shut. When they had left for the boat they’d been warned by Steve Carlson, the researcher, not to cause any damage to the plane, by prying at it with a dive knife, for example.
“See what?” Bugsy’s voice reminded them that they were not on a private channel.
“Bullet holes. Looks like this thing was strafed by machine gun fire. I don’t think Amelia Earhart was a dogfighter, was she?”
Maddock paused to hold his dive knife, which had ruler markings etched onto the blade, and held it across one of the holes. “Looks like it to me.” Privately, he thought the holes consistent with 50-caliber slugs, but he didn’t want to raise suspicion by appearing too knowledgeable. He then made his way around the plane’s tail section toward Bones.
“Let’s not rule anything out.” This from Bugsy, swimming somewhere above. “Until we have that serial number, we won’t take anything for granted.”
Normally Maddock would agree that evidence of aerial warfare made it unlikely to be the plane Earhart was flying. But when combined with being asked to look for weaponized smallpox in conjunction with her aircraft? He wasn’t so sure. There was one thing he was certain of, though, and that was that he had to keep these thoughts from Bugsy, so he said nothing of the sort over the comm line.
Maddock swam over to Bones, who was brushing a gloved hand over the bullet holes in the plane’s fuselage. Maddock swam past him toward the nose of the plane on the right side. He couldn’t see any way to penetrate inside it yet. This far back beneath the ledge it was very dark, and he depended almost exclusively on his dive light to be able to see any detail. A few fish swam by him but there was not nearly as much life down here as up on the shallow reef. He swept his light beam around the airplane’s cockpit, the doors wedged in between two walls of a narrow cave-like space. No way in without damaging the plane. He was hoping to be able to reach the cockpit windows, which were likely broken, but they were farther up into the tight space.
“Jim, what’s your pressure gauge read, buddy? I’m getting low, myself.”
Maddock was looking up and to the right of the plane, where there was a tunnel-like opening near the back of the overhang’s ceiling.
“Jim, you copy?”
Maddock knew that Bones would think he wasn’t recognizing his cover name. He was already feeling a little tipsy from the heavy nitrogen loads at this depth. But that wasn’t it. He scanned his light beam at the opening near the ceiling. Looks like a tunnel that might lead somewhere…
“Jim!”
“Sorry, Keith, I copy.” He started to tell Bones how he had found what might be a passage through the coral back into where the plane’s cockpit was, but checked the impulse. Bugsy and Bruce were listening.
“Copy that. Read your pressure gauge.”
Maddock checked his air gauge. “One thousand psi. Time to go.” Exploring the opening would have to wait.
“Copy. Meet me at the tail and we’ll head up together.”
“On my way.”
Bones was waiting in front of the Electra’s tail section when Maddock got there. Both of them were breathing hard to avoid being swept off the ledge into the open void.