“Military guard?”
“Army. But I saw the plane when it was delivered over to our hangar, in fact I was there when Amelia saw it for the first time, and was she teed off! She said, ‘Why did they have to do this? I loved my old plane. Who’s paying for this?’ Hell, all she wanted was some adjustment in front to make it easier to operate the rudder pedals.”
“What did she get, Ernie?”
Now his eyes were wide. “A different fuckin’ plane. Bright and shiny and new, from the nuts and bolts to the tires. You gotta understand about Electras, there’s two basic types, the Model 10 Electra and the Model 12 Electra Junior. The Model 12’s a little smaller, but faster, lighter…. This was a Model 12.”
I frowned, leaned forward. “Didn’t anybody notice? Didn’t any reporters comment?”
He grinned and shook his head, no. “The similarities between the two models outnumber the differences, and besides, these’re hand-built planes, no two alike. Lockheed tailors these birds to the specific needs of the customer; every ship’s a hybrid. For example, this Electra had the advanced, constant-speed props of the Model 12, but overall it had the size and outward appearance of the Model 10—and the bigger engines I started to tell ya about, they probably made the gross weight similar…these were larger engines designed for military use, Pratt and Whitney Wasp Seniors, five-hundred-and-fifty-horse-power jobs. That baby had a greater effective payload than the original bird.”
“You’re saying Lockheed didn’t repair her plane—they gave her a new one.”
“Right.” He chomped on the egg roll, chewed as he talked. “And a new one designed with a different purpose than the first one.”
“A military purpose, you mean.”
He nodded. “That change of flight plan doesn’t make any sense from an aviator’s slant—but it makes all the sense in the world if she was on a military mission.”
“What sort of mission?”
A parrot in the courtyard asked the question again:
He drew a breath, a deep one, then he leaned into the flickery light of the half-coconut; it turned his face shades of orange and yellow. “I wasn’t over at Lockheed, when this ship was bein’ put together—understand? What I’m gonna tell you now is secondhand, and don’t ask me for the guy’s name. I need your word on that, or I’m through talkin’.”
“You got my word.”
He settled way back in his chair, folded his arms; now his face was in the shadow of a palm blade. “I was askin’ my friend, who’s an airframe technician at Lockheed, about how things was goin’, while the ‘repairs’ were under way? I was wonderin’ what was takin’ so long. Anyway, we were out drinkin’, and he was in his cups…”
“You feed
His smile flashed in the darkness. “No. This was boilermakers. And maybe what I’m about to tell you was the boilermakers talkin’, maybe it’s pure bullshit. But I don’t want to get my friend in trouble.”
“Understood.”
“First off, there’s the ping-pong balls.”
“Ping-pong balls.”
“That Electra had ping-pong balls stuffed in every nook and cranny—nowhere they’d get in the way, but where controls go out to wing flaps, in wing spars, and so on.”
“The point being?”
“Added buoyancy, in case they were forced to ditch in the open sea. I heard of that practice before, it’s a little unusual, Dick Merrill did it once, but I just mention that to show you the extremes they was going to.”
“That just sounds like a precaution to me.”
He moved forward a touch, into the light. “Here’s somethin’ my friend told me about that wasn’t no precaution. He said he cut two holes, sixteen to eighteen inches in diameter, to be used for installin’ cameras.”
“Cameras? What kind of cameras?”
“A pair of Fairchild, electrically operated aerial survey cameras that got mounted in the lower aft fuselage bay. Some Navy guys, technicians or engineers or something, installed ’em, and photoflash bombs in the aft.”
I blinked. “Bombs?”
A thick hand waved that off. “They’re not destructive, they just provide light for nighttime aerial photography.”
“More good reason to use a lighter plane.”
“Hey, the Lockheed Electra, either model, can fly high and fast, even without special modifications, like bigger engines. The plane I saw was a long-range reconnaissance aircraft with all the latest gadgets and goodies. With that customized bird, Amelia could climb higher and faster than the first Electra, zip off her official course and return on route without anybody the wiser; she can cruise at speeds up to, hell, two hundred and twenty miles per hour.”
“As compared to what?”
He shrugged, rocked in the wicker chair. “One hundred and forty.”
Alarmed, I said, “Then this elaborate sea search that’s under way, all the rescue projections are based on the wrong aircraft specifications!”
He shrugged again. “Maybe not. After all, the military knows the real specs. But look, this finally makes the west-east flight plan change make sense.”
