Vanished

by Wil S. Hylton

  “What we wanted to do,” Lambert said later, “was find the wreck, make the movie, and sell the documentary to raise funds for the treasure hunt.”

  If the whole thing sounded vaguely cartoonish, the divers and historians on Lambert’s team put Scannon’s doubt to rest. The leader of the group was Dan Bailey, a renowned historian of the islands, whose most recent book, WWII Wrecks of Palau, had already become the definitive guide to the island waters. It was Bailey who came up with the mission photos, from a Navy photographer named Bob Stinnett who flew in Bush’s squadron. At seventy, Stinnett couldn’t join the mission himself, but he was closely involved in the planning. The team also included a scuba pro named Dave Buller, who’d helped discover some of the most famous shipwrecks in Palau, along with several notable sites off the California coast, where he spent his free time scouring the continental shelf for abalone snails as large as a soccer ball, prying them loose while holding his breath and hauling them up for supper. Both of the Lamberts were also coming, and had spent enough time in Palau that the cover of Bailey’s book was actually a photo of Pam gliding past the gear shaft of a sunken destroyer. The team had even secured a TV crew to film underwater.

  When Lambert suggested that Scannon tag along, Scannon found himself grinning and nodding. He didn’t have much to offer the team, but he didn’t much care. As a doctor, he could always bandage a scraped knee. But what really mattered to Scannon was that, after a decade of working sixty-hour weeks, which had brought his first marriage to an end and left little time for his second, he finally had a way to break up the routine with a shot of adventure. In fact, his second wife, Susan, was an accomplished diver herself, and he convinced her to join him after the mission for a few days of sightseeing on the islands. So, on a cool summer afternoon, Scannon headed west—through Hawaii, then Guam, before landing on Palau, where he joined the team on the beachfront estate of a resort hotel to watch the red sun cannonball into a sea of surprises.

  —

  BUT THE MISSION was already changing. Through a bizarre coincidence, on the same week that Scannon landed in Palau, the September issue of Harper’s Magazine was landing on newsstands with an article that would throw his vacation into headline news.

  The story consisted of just two pages, which were mostly filled with a reproduction of the mission report from Bush’s attack on the trawler. But in a series of pullout annotations, a writer for the magazine claimed that the old document offered “strong circumstantial evidence that George Bush committed a war crime as a rookie Navy pilot.”

  As Scannon gathered with Lambert, Bailey, and the rest of the team for breakfast in the open-air lobby of the hotel, they huddled over the Harper’s story to figure out what the reporter meant. Though Bailey had a copy of the mission report and had read it dozens of times, he was baffled by the suggestion that it revealed anything nefarious. In most respects, it seemed to him like a thousand other wartime documents. There was a brief description of the 250-mile flight from an aircraft carrier to the islands; a list of the planes in Bush’s squadron, known as VT-51; and a terse account of the strike on the trawler, noting that Bush scored the vital hit. The final sentence concluded, “The trawler sank within five minutes, with its crew taking to two life boats, which VT strafed.” Except for the brief reference to a future president, nothing about the document struck Lambert, Bailey, or the rest of the team as unusual.

  But for the Harper’s writer, the line about lifeboats was crucial. Depending on how one interpreted it, the attack could have been illegal. If, as the Harper’s writer suggested, the language implied that Japanese soldiers boarded their lifeboats without weapons, and then Bush swooped down to strafe “defenseless combatants,” it would indeed be a war crime. But the document said nothing of the sort. Like so many wartime reports, it had been hurried together by a harried officer who was already focused on the next day’s events, and it left out far too many details to draw such precise conclusions. It didn’t say, for example, that the Japanese soldiers were defenseless. They might just as easily have climbed into the lifeboats with their sidearms for protection, or even the lightweight Nambu machine guns common to the period. Nor did the mission report say which pilot strafed the lifeboats. Maybe it was the same pilot who sank the trawler, Ensign George Bush. Then again, maybe not.

  As it happened, those very questions had been circulating in Washington for several months. During the final weeks of the 1992 presidential campaign, nine months earlier, the mission report materialized in the mailboxes of several prominent reporters. Though the timing reeked of an October surprise, the allegations were serious, and some of the most venerable names in news, including the Los Angeles Times, U.S. News & World Report, and Newsweek, launched investigations. As their reporters scoured the US and Japanese archives in search of clarifying detail, they came up empty. By Election Day, not a single magazine or newspaper had discovered enough evidence to justify a story. Nor had the Harper’s writer uncovered anything new. The closest he came was a single quote from a gunner on the mission, who said he couldn’t remember the incident but allowed that “it might have happened.”

  Still, with the Harper’s article on newsstands, the floodgates were open for other news groups to “follow up” on the story. While Scannon was on his way to Palau, a deluge of television reporters had been tracking down veterans of Bush’s squadron, including Bob Stinnett, who pointed them toward the team in Palau. As phone calls lit up the switchboard of the waterfront resort, Bailey and Lambert found themselves inundated with media requests. By the time they boarded a flat-bottomed boat for their first day of diving, three days had passed and they’d struck a deal with Nightline to provide video for an exclusive segment.

  All of which Pat Scannon watched in a state of dazed amusement. According to Bailey and Buller, the most striking thing about Lambert’s friend was how utterly disengaged he was—a cheerful spectator who wandered the hotel grounds while the rest of the team scrambled to take phone calls, secure gear, and coordinate logistics. “If Chip wanted him along,” Bailey said later, “that was fine. But he wasn’t a major part of the team.”

  “He didn’t really contribute,” Buller added. “He just came along.”

  As the boat finally sped north toward Kayangel, Scannon stared west to where the shallow water of the archipelago plunged into the fullness of the sea. The whole peculiar madness of the journey seemed written upon the landscape—these lost islands, a thousand miles from anywhere, filled with buried treasure and sunken warships and rumors of a president’s crimes. Who cared how much of it was true? He had come to the islands to recharge himself with change, and whatever else he might see or discover, he had already found that. It was everywhere around him, in the gleaming iridescent ocean, the teeming jungle, the screech of wild birds, and the pile of mesh scuba bags strewn across the floor of the boat beside boxes filled with video equipment and the long, torpedo-shaped magnetometer.

  After two hours, the boat slowed down and Kayangel came into view, a tiny cluster of four mint-green islets poking through the water’s surface. Bailey dug into his bag for the mission photos. He raised them up against the horizon, squinting as he compared the images with the landscape before him. He turned the photos left, then right, and frowned. The pictures didn’t match. Where they showed a long, continuous arc of coral, the reef before him was mostly flat with a bulging promontory in the middle. The reef could change in fifty years, but not by that much.

  The sun was creeping past its zenith as the small boat puttered through the water. Bailey laid the photos down and pulled out a map. He studied the surrounding landscape as a realization hit him: The photos didn’t match Kayangel because they weren’t Kayangel. There was another atoll just five miles north and nearly the same size. The islanders called it Ngaruangel (ner-angle'), but it was virtually unknown to the outside world. In fact, it probably did not appear on World War II maps. If the trawler had gone down on Ngaruangel, aviators lik
e Bush would have written down the name of the nearest atoll. That would explain why, in fifty years of diving Kayangel, no one had seen the ship. It was never there.

  It took only a few minutes to speed north to the Ngaruangel reef. As the boat drew close, Dave Buller dropped his magnetometer into the water, crouching over the handheld monitor to watch for signs of metal. Bailey picked up the photos again, comparing them with a new horizon. They motored slowly along the edge of the shoal, and as they moved, Bailey saw the transformation unfolding. Like the shifting lines of a kaleidoscope, his perspective on the landscape morphed until it matched the pictures.

  “Hey!” he cried out to Buller, “we’ve gotta be almost on top of it!” But even as the words came out, he heard Buller calling back: “I’m getting hits!”

  There was a palpable tension as the boat pulled to a stop and the team began to suit up. It’s almost too easy, Bailey thought. They had been on the water just a few hours, and in Ngaruangel for only a few minutes. But the combination of pings on the magnetometer and a match with the photos made it difficult to tamp down expectations. As the team stretched into neoprene wetsuits, strapped on weight belts, and slipped into tanks, Pam Lambert hit the water first. Scannon dropped in behind her, swimming down hard through the darkening water to maximize his time on the bottom. After forty feet, he saw the seafloor and righted himself in the water. He blinked and stared at the landscape around him.

  The wreckage was unmistakable; it was everywhere. A dusty haze drifted across the massive hull of the ship, ripped open by the blast from Bush’s bomber, with its gear strewn in all directions and encrusted in half a century of staghorn coral. Scannon saw Bailey and Buller a few yards away, moving across the debris field together. He drifted over to join them, following as they pointed out the telltale signs. Not only was the ship fitted with mounts for a seventy-five-millimeter cannon, but the cannon shells were packed into a ready box nearby, and the seafloor was strewn with thousands of rounds of linked machine-gun ammunition. So they were armed, Scannon thought. In hindsight, it seemed obvious. Only a fool would throw down his weapon as he boarded a tiny lifeboat with enemy planes circling overhead and an ocean of sharks below.

  For thirty minutes, the team swept through the twisted metal, finally coming to the surface with whoops of joy. None of them doubted what they’d found. Whatever else the Japanese sailors had been—young, naïve, filled up with nationalistic bravado, even honorable in their own way—they had clearly been armed. By finding the wreckage, Bailey and his team had solved a fifty-year mystery and, they were now certain, exonerated a president. In the days ahead, as they returned to the States, they would broadcast their discovery on Nightline for the world to see. Only Scannon would stay behind.

  He picked up Susan at the airport, and over dinner on their first night, they nursed a pair of beers while Pat leaned across the table, whispering excitedly about the rush of discovery and having felt so close to history. By the time they returned to their hotel that night, they had decided to scrap their plans to visit tourist sites like the Blue Holes and Blue Corner. Instead, they would spend the next four days exploring World War II wreckage on the islands.

  They hired a local guide, Hudson Yalap, to drive them into the hills and jungle, stopping to wade through elephant grass, past the ruins of Japanese encampments and the cindered spires of old radio towers that rested like dinosaur bones in the damp earth. And on their final morning, they boarded a small boat with Yalap and a second guide, Lucky Malsol, to visit underwater wrecks. Neither of the Scannons had any idea where the guides planned to take them, and as the boat slipped away from the dock, they stared forward at the open water, never imagining how long the journey ahead would be.

  —

  EVEN AFTER HALF A CENTURY, the waters of the archipelago were strewn with relics of war. In shoals that were sometimes just a few feet deep, a casual snorkeler could drift away from a hotel beach through the glimmering surf and discover a pile of unspent ammunition, or the barrel of a ship’s cannon, or even a whole Japanese seaplane resting on the sandy bottom. With a scuba tank, it was possible to swim inside the plane, climbing into the cockpit to tug at the controls and shoot down passing fish like a pilot in some aquatic fantasy.

  With so many wartime wrecks to choose from, Yalap and Malsol might have taken the Scannons to one of the popular sites: maybe the Japanese mine-laying ship filled with stacks of military helmets, or one of the Mitsubishi Zero fighter planes crumpled in the shallows. But instead, the guides steered the boat to a bay just south of Koror Island, weaving a course between small islets before slowing to a crawl. Malsol guided the boat to the edge of a little island, not much bigger than a house. In the waist-deep water, colorful fish darted away from the hull. Scannon frowned. It didn’t look like a wreck site; it looked like a typical tropical beach. This is nice, he thought, but why are we here?

  Then he saw the wing. As Malsol pulled around a bend in the coral, the whole thing came into view at once: a massive strip of metal, at least fifty feet long and gleaming in the sun. The aluminum skin was peeled back in places to reveal a lacework of struts inside, and as Malsol lowered the throttle to approach it, Scannon called over the engine, “What kind of plane?” But the guide only shook his head.

  There was a long silence as Malsol flipped off the engine and retrieved an anchor from the foredeck. Wavelets lapped against the boat. Scannon stared at the wing. As soon as the anchor hit water, he leaped over the gunwale, striding quickly toward the wing. He heard Susan behind him.

  There was a propeller mounted on the leading edge, and as Scannon got closer, he could see that the blades were bent and fractured from impact with the coral. A few feet away, there was a second engine attached to the wing, and Scannon felt his heart pound as the significance sank in. “This was a four-engine plane,” he whispered when Susan caught up. She nodded, and walked toward the second engine, crouching for a look.

  “Pat,” she said. She pointed at the engine mount. He stepped over and peered in. There was a number stamped on a bolt—a number, he realized, not a character—and beneath it, an ID plate with clear black lettering said “eneral Electric.”

  Scannon felt a chill wash over his body. He was surprised by how much it really felt like a chill—as if the temperature of the water had plunged to nearly freezing. It began with numbness in his lower legs, then crept into his thighs, through his waist, and up his torso to his neck, until the skin on the crown of his head felt tight and his hair stood at attention, all the feeling in his body draining away. This was an American plane, he thought. Then he corrected himself. This is an American grave.

  As Susan moved toward the wide end of the wing, where the metal was gnarled from breaking free, Scannon circled to the opposite end and searched the shallow water for pieces of debris. Where was the rest, he wondered. There had to be more. He drifted into deeper water, where the reef dropped into a channel, and he followed the edge of the channel west for 150 yards. There was no sign of the plane. He turned and headed east, but still found nothing: not a fragment, not a scrap of metal, just fish and sand and coral. He glanced back at Susan, who was still inspecting the root of the wing, and he dropped into the water to swim a few yards into the channel, scanning the bottom for signs of the wreckage, but there were none. By the time he turned back, Susan was climbing into the boat.

  For her, he realized, it’s just another wreck. Of course it was—she’d grown up in Singapore and Bangkok, where her father worked as an oil executive. For years she had spent summers and holidays swimming through debris fields in the Gulf of Thailand, the South China Sea, and little inlets and waterways so remote they didn’t have names. Since then, she’d been on wreck sites from Tahiti to South Africa. She had joined an archaeological expedition to study shipwrecks in England from the fourteenth century. By the time she and Scannon met in the 1980s, she had a collection of cannonballs from her travels. She would later say that she found the wing
interesting, and Palau pleasant enough, but she didn’t particularly care to see either again.

  As Susan settled into the boat, Scannon’s gaze drifted back to the wing. Nothing about the experience was familiar to him. He glanced at the small island just behind the metal, its limestone cliffs rising fifteen feet to a tangle of vines and small trees on top. Without knowing where he was going or why, he called for Susan to wait; then he was splashing toward the island and scrambling up, grabbing clumps of dirt and roots until he reached the top and, with a final surge, rolled forward into the jungle.

  It was another world. Under a thick canopy of leaves, the air was wet and cool, and it was streaked with narrow blades of light that sliced past fluttering birds and giant spiders looming on five-foot webs. The roots and vines were so thick, he could only crawl through on his belly, and he slithered deeper into the island, studying the ground as he went. Even a strip of aluminum, he thought, even a single bolt would show the wreckage was there. He wriggled across sharp branches, through piles of fallen leaves, his fingers biting into the soil, his knees dragging in the mud, but he found nothing more than an old wooden crate filled with green sake bottles.

  After thirty minutes, Scannon turned back. He dragged himself to the edge of the island and splashed down into the water. On the boat, Susan and the guides were watching him and shaking their heads. Mud caked his face and wetsuit, and his hands were scraped raw. He scrambled back through the water and climbed into the boat. Malsol started up the engine and began to pull away.

  Scannon flashed an apologetic smile, then stared back at the wing, watching as it disappeared behind the island. Then he slid into his seat, oblivious to the cheerful patter of Susan conferring with the guides.

  Something inside him was changed, but he couldn’t place what. He had come to the islands to escape the pressure of daily life, yet he found himself overcome by an even greater sense of purpose. Somewhere nearby, young men died. They had come spiraling down in a plane with one wing and probably either died on impact or drowned in the sea. Did anyone know? Was there a record of what happened? Had someone come to find them? Or were their remains still resting in the carcass of the fallen plane? And where was the plane? Did their families know? Did they even care?