duty—we were bivouacked a half-mile away—we heard an explosion, over at the airfield. Bunch of us went over there and this plane, a Lockheed Electra, civilian plane, was the hell on fire. Like somebody’d poured gas on and lit her up like a bonfire. Still, I could make out an ID number—NR16020—which meant nothin’ to me at the time.”
That was the registration number of Amelia’s Lockheed Electra, the one she’d taken on her final, ill-fated flight around the world. She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, had taken off on the last leg of the landmark flight, from Lae, New Guinea, on July 2, 1937. Their destination was tiny Howland Island, 2,556 miles away. It was the most famous unfinished trip in history.
“Jap sabotage?” I asked, referring to the burning plane. “There would’ve been plenty of our little yellow friends left on the island, in the hills and trees and caves.”
“I don’t think so,” he said, shaking his head, no. “I think somebody was destroyin’ evidence. That fella I saw? In the white shirt? He had a real familiar face. I recognized him from the papers, or anyway I knew I should have recognized him from the papers. He was somebody.”
“Did it ever come to you, who he was?”
He snorted a laugh. “Only the goddamn Secretary of the Navy. Remember that guy? James Vincent Forrestal!”
Names from the past can have a funny effect on you. Sometimes a warm feeling flows through you; my stomach had just gone cold. Colder than my wife’s coffee could ever cure.
The blue eyes tightened. “You all right, Nate?”
We’d gone to first names, a long time ago. Sometimes I’m not all that easy to read; but I guess the blood had drained out of my poker face.
“Yeah. Sure. Get back to your story, Buddy. Trying to reclaim those old warbirds.”
He grinned again; dentures, I’d decided. “I guess I am gettin’ ahead of myself, jumpin’ around…. Anyway, while we were on Majuro, misguidedly mountin’ a machete expedition into the jungle to try and liberate one of the better-preserved Zeros, this fella…he was in charge of this heavy equipment yard where we were rentin’ some stuff? This fella asked me the same question you did.”
“What question is that?”
“He asked if we were looking for Amelia Earhart’s plane. Then he told us how in 1937 he’d worked for a company supplying coal to the Japanese Navy. How one night he was refueling a ship called the
“That was his whole story?”
He gestured with a Lucky Strike in hand, making smoke streaks. “That was it, but it was enough, coming when it did. I mean, we were stuck in the Marshall Islands, about to throw in the towel on my warbird expedition. My friend who gave me the lead on the abandoned planes? Well, he’d also told me about these islanders, hundreds of miles apart, all with the same story to tell…a story of two American fliers, a man and a woman, captured by the Japs and held as spies, before the war.”
“You were an Earhart buff already, Buddy. You’d read the books.”
“Sure, casually. I knew the stories of her and Noonan windin’ up on Saipan, the theory that Amelia was on some sort of secret spy mission, and got shot down and captured. Never took it too seriously, though. ’Course I kinda liked the romance of it. Right out of the movies, you know?”
“And you were in the neighborhood, so you decided to see for yourself.”
“Yes, I did. Got an ashtray?”
“Use your saucer.”
He put his Lucky out, then sat forward, the coolness of his blue eyes at odds with an expression that had grown intense. “And I talked to all sorts of people…on Majuro, Mili, and Jaluit, three little atolls in the middle of the South Pacific.”
He told me of some of the islanders he’d spoken with.
Bilimon Amaron, a respected storeowner on Majuro, related that as a sixteen-year-old medic, at Jaluit, he was called to a military cargo ship, where he tended to two Americans, “one lady, one man.” The man had some minor injuries from a plane crash, and the woman was called, by the Japanese, “Amira.”
Oscar De Brum, a high-ranking Marshallese official, told of hearing from his father (in 1937, when De Brum was in the first grade) of the capture of a lady pilot who was being taken to the Japanese high command office in Jaluit.
John Heinie, a prominent Majuro attorney, recalled attending a Japanese school as a child in 1937 and witnessing, one morning, just before school, a ship towing a barge with a silver airplane on it, into the Jaluit harbor.
Lotan Jack, a Marshallese working in 1937 as a mess steward at the Japanese naval base on Jaluit, told of hearing officers discuss Amelia’s plane being shot down between Jaluit and Mili-atolls; that she’d been routed to Kwajalein and on to Saipan.
On Saipan, a respected local politician, Manuel Muna, told of talking to a Japanese pilot who claimed to have shot the Electra down, and also took Buddy for a tour of the ruins of Garapan Prison, where he said the American prisoners—Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan—had been held.
“We’ve made three trips to Saipan,” Buddy said, “with limited results. At first, the Saipanese, the Chamorros, seemed less willing to talk than the other islanders.”
“Why do you suppose that is?”
“Well, for one thing, they still fear reprisals from the Japanese.”
“Even now?”
“There’s still a strong Japanese presence on Saipan, Nate, strong economic ties. Then there’s a general
