As arranged by phone during the night, Jim Dobler was waiting for them twenty minutes later in the appointed cove. Scott flew overhead, confirming the identification, before pulling up for a tight turn back into the wind. They touched down smoothly in the protected waters of the little inlet.
There had been no sign of any fighters out searching for them and no more radio calls on the guard frequency, but Scott had kept the radar and his transponder off just in case.
“You want me to get the bow line this time?” April asked as he reached to the overhead panel and brought the mixtures to full lean, killing both engines.
“Yeah, thanks.”
She pulled the Velcro-ed curtain back from the small alcove in front of her copilot seat and released her seat belt, ducking under the instrument panel into the tiny passageway to the nose and popping open the hatch in time to catch the line Jim threw to them. Scott slid back the pilot’s-side window as Jim waved.
“I brought the tarp, Scott.”
“Tarp?” April asked as she stood up in the nose hatch.
“To cover the airplane. We’ll tie ’er up to my tug.”
“We’re towing the airplane?” she asked.
“No. We’re going in the small boat.” Jim pointed over his shoulder to an eighteen-foot-long wooden whaling boat sitting suspended in a sling held by a deck crane. Compared to the tug or the Widgeon, which was thirty-nine feet long, the boat looked puny and dangerous. April recalled the discussion on the satellite phone, but somehow had expected a larger vessel for the open ocean.
“The Coasties can’t see this one on radar.”
It took twenty minutes to secure and cover the Widgeon. Jim and Scott cranked the wooden-hulled boat into the water, and Scott climbed aboard to load the gear and check the GPS and the satellite phone, as well as test the portable Honda generator. After several minutes of intensive effort he stood up and flashed Jim the thumbs-up sign.
The temperature was hovering around sixty and the winds were light, but with the boat pushing through the waves at fifteen knots, April had to zip her parka to stay warm, and Scott noticed.
“You’d be warmer back here, April,” he called out. April turned from her position in the front of the open boat and shook her head.
“This most wonderfully clears the mind,” she said, smiling at him.
“Ah, Samuel Johnson. Seventeen hundred something.”
She nodded, her smile even larger. “An educated man. I’m impressed.”
“Impressed, huh? Guess that’s better than being surprised,” Scott said out of the side of his mouth to Jim. He got up and moved forward with two paper cups and one of the Thermos bottles Jim had prepared. He sat down beside her and poured two steaming cups of coffee.
“As I recall,” he said, handing her a cup, his eyes on the gray of the horizon as the boat pitched gently up and down. “Johnson’s exact quote was, ‘Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’ I don’t know exactly what year that was spoken, but it came from a book about him called Life of Johnson.”
“It was written by a fellow named Boswell,” she said. “I know. I was taking liberties with the quote.”
“Shameful.”
She sipped the fragrant liquid, wondering why coffee always tasted so much better in the open, even in a paper cup.
“Where did you go to college, Scott?”
“Oh, a little liberal arts school on the upper East Coast.”
“Did it have a name?”
He nodded.
April chuckled. “Scott, there’s nothing wrong with getting your degree from some unknown little liberal arts school. Sometimes they can be better than the big expensive schools.”
“Okay.” He turned away from the horizon to look at her all hunkered down over her coffee cup, her raven hair blowing in the steady breeze, her eyes sparkling. “Where’d you go to school, April?” he asked.
“University of Washington. But tell me yours.”
“Is it important?”
“No. But now you’ve got me curious.”
“It didn’t affect me much. I managed to forget most everything I learned when I got my commission.”
“Aha! Navy ROTC?”
“No.”
“Annapolis?”
“Please! Do I impress you as Annapolis material?”
“You never know. You could be in rebellion.”
“No. I barely made it through officer school. Emphasis on the ‘barely.’ I was in the I-hate-regimentation division. They’d order me to make my bed so they could bounce a quarter off it, and I would, and then sleep on the floor for six weeks so I wouldn’t have to disturb my work.”
“You were going to tell me the name of your alma mater,” April prompted again, “even if it was small and obscure, I’m sure it was a very good school.”
“It was.”
“So, what was the name?”
“Princeton.”
“Princeton?”
“Yeah.”
“The Princeton?”
“I think probably there’s just one.” He smiled.
“And I was starting to feel sorry for you for being academically deprived.”
Jim called from the stern and they turned to see him pointing to the left.
“Large vessel over there.”
“What kind?” Scott called.
“Too small for a tanker. Not the right size for a Coast Guard cutter. Might be that same ship out of Adak you recognized Thursday.”
“Can they see us?” April asked in some alarm.
Jim shook his head. “Not if we hold this course. But if they’re patrolling, they’ll spot us if we take too long over the wreck.”
Scott had moved back to check the handheld GPS receiver Jim was watching. “Another three miles?”
Jim nodded. “Why don’t you two get the generator going and make everything ready, then drop the camera and light bar over the side to about two hundred feet and start the video recorder. That way when we get there, we’ll save a bunch of time.”
April was looking up and pointing.
“What?” Scott asked.
“Blue sky.”
He followed her gaze, noting the ragged end of the overcast rapidly blowing east and leaving a vista of higher cumulus clouds admitting a brilliant shaft of sunlight.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she prompted, her eyes on the sky as his refocused on her.
“Sure is,” he said, mostly under his breath.
The electrical generator was running and the color TV camera holding at a depth of two hundred feet as they closed on the point where the Albatross had sunk.
“Another thirty yards, Jim,” Scott said, calling down the numbers. “Reverse her.”
Jim slowed the outboard and shifted to reverse, throttling up until the GPS velocity readout hit zero.
“Perfect.”
“We’re there?” Jim asked.
“Dead over where we were before.” He moved to April’s side. “Why don’t you watch the monitor now while I let the camera down to the same depth. When we spot the wreckage, we’ll work it around to see that right engine and prop.”
April seated herself in front of the color monitor and draped a small tarp over her head and the entire unit while Scott finished playing out the line. Jim began moving the boat at dead-slow speed, watching the GPS screen and crisscrossing the targeted coordinates.
“Anything, April?” Scott called.
Her disembodied voice came from beneath the tarp. “I see ocean floor, fish, and weeds, but no sign of the airplane.”
Jim reversed course and came back fifty yards to the north, parallel to their first pass, reversing again on the other side. Still April could spot nothing resembling the Albatross wreckage.