Amy screamed.
“Are you hit?” I yelled, putting myself between her and the chief.
“No! I’m scared!”
I fired again and this one caught him either in the chest or the shoulder, I wasn’t sure which, but the gun fumbled from his fingers and was swallowed into the sludge. The chief just stood there, arms limp, weaving, whether from liquor or pain, who could say?
But what was worse, what was much worse, was Lord Jesus.
He was lumbering toward us, his right arm raised, hand filled with the machete, eyes showing the whites all ’round, teeth bared in a ghastly grimace of a smile. Lightning turned the street white and winked off that wide wicked blade.
I was still moving forward when I fired back at him, fired twice, hitting him once, somewhere in the midsection but it didn’t even slow him down. Behind him I could see the wounded chief waddling like a penguin, heading back toward the Nangetsu, no doubt to call in the alarm signal, goddamnit! Still running, pushing Amy out in front of me, I fired back behind me again and this time caught Jesus in the left shoulder. He felt it, he yowled, but he was still coming.
We were on the cement now, and stretching before us, beyond the concrete jetty, were choppy but not impossible waters, rough wild waters but a sailor like Captain Irving Johnson could maneuver on them...
Only there was no sight of him.
Maniagawa Island beckoned; you could almost reach out and touch it... but no motor launch in sight. Just rolling waves and angry sky.
And Jesus had made it to the cement, and his machete was poised to strike and my muddy feet slipped as I fired, the bullet taking a piece of his ear off but not important enough a piece of anything to stop him from lunging in and swinging that blade, and Amy screamed as I felt that blade carve through my clerical collar and the front of my suitcoat and cut the cloth and cut me, a gaping wide C from my right collarbone to my left hip bone and it was wet and stung but I could tell it wasn’t deep, and I fired a round into the bastard’s stomach and his yelp of agony was the sweetest fucking sound I ever heard. He tumbled face first to the cement, like a huge catch onto the deck of a fisherman’s boat, and I turned with my upper lip peeled back over my teeth in what must have been one frightening demented smile, because Amy drew back from me in alarm.
Then she moved close to me, looking at the front of me. “He cut you! He hurt you!”
“I cut myself shaving worse than this.” Gulping for air but getting mostly rain, unrelenting goddamn rain, I looked out into the restless waters and saw nothing but waves and dark sky; then lightning illuminated those waters, seemingly to the horizon, and showed me nothing new — no rescue craft. Had Johnson double-crossed me, at Miller’s behest?
“Either we’re early,” I said, “or they’re late.”
“Or they’re not coming!”
Out of breath, panting, I said, “That nice chiefy of yours is probably calling out the guard. We have to get out of here. Got any ideas?”
Breathing hard, too, she nodded. Thunder exploded as her arm thrust past me and I followed her pointing finger to the nearby, unguarded seaplane dock. The two flying boats floated there, tied at the ramp.
Right out in the open.
“Can you fly one of those things?” I asked.
She tossed her head; moisture beads flew. She was smiling, proud. “I’m Amelia Earhart,” she reminded me.
“Oh yeah,” I said.
And we ran, leaving the body of Lord Jesus behind, with no resurrection in the plans, ran across the cement, feet splashing, kids playing in the rain, and climbed a ridiculous little waist-high chain-link fence and scooted down the ramp. I untied the moorings, and she was already wading out into where the planes bobbed in the rough water. Then I was doing the same, climbing up onto the pontoon on my rider’s side, as she climbed on her pontoon to get access to the cockpit.
That was when the shots started flying.
The police station was only a few short minutes’ walk from the waterfront, even in the rain, and the chief’s reinforcements were streaking toward us, getting their white uniforms wet, bullets zinging and careening off the flying boat’s green fuselage.
The sound of a motor — and it wasn’t the flying boat’s, she wasn’t in that cockpit yet — drew my attention back out to the water, despite the bullets I was ducking. A glowing light seemed to be coming around Maniagawa Island — a lantern! A kerosene lantern in Hayden’s hand, the skipper riding the motor...
“Forget the plane!” I yelled, looking across at her — her eyes were wild. “Swim for the boat!”
She hesitated, as if hating to miss the opportunity to fly once again, then a bullet whanged into the metal near her head and she swallowed and nodded, and dove in; so did I. I swam with my nine-millimeter clenched in my fist, but I swam.
We swam toward the launch as it moved over the bumpy waters toward us, and bullets made kisses around us in the waters. And then somebody, Hayden, was hauling me into the boat, and I gulped air, air with rain in it but air, and looked toward the water, looking to reach down for Amy, and she was swimming toward us when the bullets caught her, danced across the back of her leather jacket.
And then she seemed to slump forward into the water, and soon the jacket was all we could see of her, several boat lengths away, sort of puffing up, its weathered brown leather blossoming red, hanging there as if it were a floating flower; then it, too, disappeared, sucked down under.
Gone.
I was halfway out of the boat when the kid hauled me back in, yelling, “It’s too late! Too late for her!” Bullets were flying all around us, and we were moving away from where Amy and her jacket had been, away from the little white figures on the jetty who were shooting at us, jabbering at us almost comically, tiny insignificant jumping-up-and-down figures that got lost first in the rain, then in the darkness, until they were gone, just a bizarre bad memory, a coda to an escape that almost happened.
Johnson’s voice said, “How is he?”
Hayden’s voice said, “Nasty cut.”
That was the last voice I heard, except I thought I heard Amy’s voice, one last time, saying the last thing I heard her say, so proudly, right before she ran toward that seaplane, a final plane she never flew.
“I’m Amelia Earhart,” she said.
Rain on my face.
Darkness.
Epilogue
Return to Saipan — March 1970
Chapter 20
Late in June 1940, Captain Irving Johnson reported to Elmer Dimity of the Amelia Earhart Foundation as follows: “It is my opinion that the search be considered finished and that everything humanly possible has been done to find any trace of Miss Earhart.”
Nevertheless, Elmer and Margot did not give up on their plans and a ship the Foundation had commissioned was waiting in the Honolulu harbor on December 7, 1941. The Foundation’s Pacific expedition, interrupted by World War II, was never resumed, although successful businessman Dimity — and the Foundation — continued on for many years, extolling Amelia Earhart and researching her disappearance.
Captain Johnson was working at Pearl Harbor in the War Plans Office when the Japanese attacked; the Yankee’s last cruise ended in the spring of 1941, Johnson selling the ship and entering the Navy. He spent the war on the survey ship Summer, charting the islands and waters of the South Pacific for the United States government; perhaps this was merely a continuation of what he’d already been doing on the Yankee.
After the war, Johnson — looking for a new sailing ship — was alerted by his old first mate of a German brigantine seized by the British and held in England; called the Duhnen, the ship was purchased, renamed the new Yankee, and Johnson and his wife and family resumed their round-the-world cruises and continued to record their adventures (well, some of them) in bestselling travel books into the 1960s.