Vanished

by Wil S. Hylton

  Emery yanked at his seat belt as the water rushed in. He still wasn’t sure what had happened. He glanced around and saw Faucher kicking open the door, but Emery’s seat belt was jammed. He felt the water creeping higher as the chopper slid down. He pounded the buckle and pulled frantically at the strap, trying to wriggle free, but the water was rushing into his mouth. He held his breath. Then he gasped. Then the world went dark.

  Outside, Faucher paddled furiously to stay on the surface in heavy clothes. He glanced around in search of Emery and saw the other team member and the pilot. Faucher shouted to see if either of them had a knife, and when the pilot called that he did, Faucher swam over to grab it. He tried to ignore the pain in his back. It was broken in two places, and his trachea was crushed, but he turned back toward the chopper with the knife, heaved a breath, and dove.

  Faucher swam down to the door of the sunken bird. He saw Emery’s lifeless body inside, tangled in canvas, wire, and metal. He grabbed Emery’s seat belt and began to saw through it with the knife, but the material was thick and he was running out of air. His lungs surged. His back spasmed. When he couldn’t take any more, he shot up for another breath, then plunged back down, back to Emery, hacking and sawing at the seat belt until at last it tore apart. He grabbed Emery and pulled him free, kicking his way to the surface.

  Time seemed to have stopped. It might have been five minutes or twenty; Faucher would always wonder. Looking at Emery’s body, one thing was clear. Emery was gone. “He was gray,” Faucher said, “and his eyes were open and fixed. That was the worst part.”

  Treading water, Faucher began to blow air into Emery’s mouth, a scuba-rescue technique he’d learned in training. Between breaths he studied Emery’s dead eyes for any sign of life. Finally, a trickle of water bubbled through Emery’s lips, and his eyes began to blink frantically with confusion. Faucher dragged Emery to shore. Other members of the team rushed over to wrap them in blankets. Faucher could not stop staring at his friend. He had not only saved a life; he had brought Emery back from the dead.

  They spent a final night on the mountain, and in the morning a new chopper came to get them. After two weeks fighting off infection at an Ecuadorean hospital, Emery went home.

  That’s when Eric Emery decided to give up. To give up archaeology—to give up his studies, his plans, and the sense of purpose he’d felt in his life since the day he saw that flyer. He felt lost. He felt mistaken. He had always believed that life was a journey of calculated risk, but to risk his life on a jumble of ruins and broken pottery at the bottom of a lake? “You know how they say your whole life flashes before you?” Emery said. “Well, the thing that flashed in front of me was ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ After that, I pretty much decided that I was getting out of archaeology.”

  —

  BACK IN TEXAS, Emery retreated from the world. Kevin Crisman had left town for the summer, and offered Emery the keys to his house. Emery stayed inside for weeks, quietly nursing his wounds.

  Physically, he felt fine. A few cracked ribs, and his left hand was numb from nerve damage, but nothing like the back brace strapped to Faucher. “The long-term effect for me was psychological,” he said. “I just withdrew that summer. I needed time to regroup and think.” Periodically, he would leave the house to collect groceries, or to wade tentatively through Crisman’s pool, but it wasn’t until the end of the summer, when his classmates returned to town, that Emery began to tell them about the crash. At a party one evening, he found himself sitting with another student, Rich Wills, who was a few semesters ahead in the program. To the outside eye, Emery and Wills seemed to have little in common. Where Emery had a weather-beaten air and the sturdy build of a 1940s boxer, Wills was slim and lanky, with a goofy smile and a vaguely adolescent mien. But when Emery confided that the disaster in the Andes had shaken his passion for archaeology, Wills nodded. “You should look into this place in Hawaii,” he said. For two years, he’d been helping the CIL on jungle recoveries, and it had given him a radically different view of what archaeology could be. “It just feels like it has a purpose,” he said.

  Emery was skeptical but intrigued. He had no experience in the military and, if he was honest with himself, no talent for following orders. The thought of answering to a formal chain of command rubbed every fiber in his body the wrong way. But Wills told him the unit was hoping to develop a program for underwater operations, and there was something about the idea that Emery couldn’t shake. Just a few years earlier, everything in his life had seemed to align toward a future in underwater archaeology. The most painful result of the helicopter crash was the loss of that purpose, the nagging sense that the pieces of his life no longer added up. But the prospect of helping to liberate men trapped in a watery grave, and to bring their remains back to the surface as Faucher had done for him, well, that was a purpose Eric Emery still understood.

  He sent an application to the lab, only half expecting a call, and while he waited to hear back, he took a job as a history teacher on a tall ship that doubled as a school. Over the next year, he sailed from Amsterdam through the Strait of Gibraltar, around the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic to Panama, past the Galápagos and Easter Island, and around Cape Horn, then back across the South Atlantic to the Cape of Good Hope. When he finally received an email from the CIL at an Internet café in South Africa, offering to hire him as a staff archaeologist and let him build the water program, Emery was only half sure he still wanted the job. He wrote back that he would need a few months to finish sailing around the world. Then he continued up the coast of Africa and back across the North Atlantic, pulling down the Saint Lawrence River from Nova Scotia to Montreal, where he docked less than one hundred miles from his childhood home. He hopped ashore with four bags of luggage and caught the next flight to Hawaii. Two weeks later, he was leading a recovery operation in the jungle of New Guinea.

  Over the next three years, Emery would remain in motion—scuttling, like so many CIL employees, from one mission to the next. On his shortest year, he spent five months traveling; on his longest, he was gone for ten. But as the months crept by, he stayed entirely on land. “I was brought in for underwater work,” he said, “but there weren’t any underwater sites.” Whenever he had a few months in Hawaii, he would make plans for the underwater program—drawing up a list of the gear he’d use, and how he would adapt the unit’s methods to the water, and waiting, year after year, for an underwater grave to recover.

  EIGHT

  COMBAT

  Most crews landing in the South Pacific during the summer of 1944 did not receive a bomber of their own. After two years of combat operations, with planes constantly in for repair, the commanders of the Long Rangers had discovered that it was easier to rotate the working ships than to assign a dedicated plane to each crew. On any given morning, the airmen arriving at Mokerang airfield might be given a shiny, silver Liberator that was fresh off the line at Willow Run, or an old, green, tattered warhorse like the Babes in Arms.

  Even among veteran planes, the Babes stood apart. Early in her career, she had been the regular ship of two different crews, who adorned her fuselage with symbolic art. There were three dozen bomb icons painted below the cockpit, marking successful combat missions, a collection of painted Japanese flags to indicate enemy planes shot down, and near the tip of her nose, her name was scripted lovingly in white.

  Early on the morning of June 24, Norman Coorssen climbed aboard the Babes to lead his first mission. Less than twenty-four hours had passed since his observation flight to Yap, and the sight of the Fifth Bombardment Group plane disintegrating on the ocean was still with him. He was the only man on his crew who had seen the war, and the memory would not fade quickly.

  The sky was overcast and a light rain fell as the Big Stoop crew settled on the Babes—the new radioman, Ted, at his console; the gunners, Jimmie and Johnny and Earl and Leland, all checking their positions; and Frank Arhar, the Big Stoop himself, c
rouched by the navigation table before a mountain of maps.

  In the cockpit Norman watched other planes fill with men, then he fired up the engines and steered the Babes down the coral taxiway, turning at the roundabout and streaking up the runway to the sky.

  In theory, each plane in the squadron was designed to carry eight thousand pounds of bombs, but in practice, it was all a question of where the bombs were going. For a short flight, it was possible to carry a good deal more; on a longer flight, the plane needed extra fuel, which had to be stored inside the bomb compartment, cutting into the space for munitions. For a record-setting distance like the flight to Yap, there was so much extra fuel on the plane that the bomb load was drastically reduced. That morning, each plane in the squadron carried only three midweight bombs. Accuracy was everything.

  The five-hour flight was mostly over water, and the Big Stoop boys waited in the cabin. Any journey into hostile territory was attenuated by the unknown, but for a crew on their first combat mission, crossing an unprecedented distance, the anticipation was as thick as the clouds outside. Did the Japanese garrison know they were coming? Would they have their fighter planes ready to scramble? Of course they would, and it didn’t help to think about it, but you did, and there you were.

  An hour slipped by, then another, in the roar of the four-engine plane. Outside, the storm clouds darkened and the rain picked up. It pelted the airframe in a loose, tinny drumbeat, and the Babes shuddered, then slumped in the air. Something was wrong. The plane was slowing down. It was falling out of formation.

  Norman worked the throttle to pick up speed but it was useless. One of the left engines was running weak. It was probably the supercharger—an easy fix, but not at seventeen thousand feet. The only thing he could do was reduce power on the right for balance, but that would slow the plane even more. There was no chance of catching the formation, which left only one good option. On the radio, Ted hailed the squadron leader and made a plan: while the rest of the formation disappeared over the horizon, the Big Stoop boys hurtled forward on a mission of their own.

  The day before, bomb crews on their way to Yap had seen a small radio tower on the rendezvous point at Sorol Island. There couldn’t be more than a few Japanese troops guarding it, but if they used the tower to call Yap, it would give the Japanese garrison an hour to prepare for the raid. If the Big Stoop crew couldn’t join the attack, at least they could protect it. They would fly to Sorol and drop their payload on the tower. With three bombs in the belly of the plane, they would have three chances to nail it.

  Streaking forward to Sorol, the Babes was alone in the sky. Suddenly, Frank Arhar’s role as navigator took a deadly turn. Sorol was nearly as far away as Yap, across hundreds of miles of undifferentiated water. It was a daunting challenge for a navigator on his first mission. As Frank huddled over his maps, checking and rechecking the course, Art Schumacher tried to decide what to do about the bombs. For the flight to Yap, he had set the fuses with a slight delay. That would allow the bombs to penetrate a building or bunker before they detonated. But for a tower, it made more sense to rig the bombs with instantaneous fusing. Then he could aim for the top of the tower, and if the strike was perfect, the bombs would explode at the very tip, with a downward blast that would shatter the tower and wipe the island flat.

  Trying to re-fuse a bomb could be risky under any circumstances. Doing so in the middle of a flight was borderline lunacy. To reach the bombs in the belly of the plane, Art would have to squeeze down the catwalk, stretching and contorting himself around fuel tanks to reach them.

  Within minutes, he was there.

  By the time Sorol appeared on the horizon, the fusing was complete. Art scrambled back to the bombardier’s compartment, while Jimmie and Johnny clipped into their guns and Norman pushed forward on the throttle, nosing closer to the water as the tower came into view. It began as a black speck on the horizon, then grew into a spike, and kept growing, metastasizing, as Art clutched the bomb lever in one hand. His thumb hovered over the release button as he counted silently, and when the tower was about to pass below, he punched the button to release the first bomb—watching in horror as all three trailed down. They exploded 150 feet from the tower.

  Art stared in shock. It was almost too much to believe. After months of training on US bases and weeks of waiting for a mission, after an engine failure in midflight and a sudden change of target, after being forced to leave the formation and navigate alone, after climbing through the pitch-black bomb bay to re-fuse the payload, they had finally crept over the tower and missed by a hair—but instead of having two more chances to hit it, they would have none. The release mechanism had failed and dropped all three bombs at once. The mission was already over. The tiny island disappeared behind them as Norman looped south for the long flight home.

  On their second mission, they returned to Sorol and laid waste to the island, and on the third, they flew west across the rim of New Guinea to cover MacArthur’s men at Numfoor. Then they turned north again to join the assault on Yap, returning for three consecutive missions through an endless string of fighter planes that churned the sky around them. One day, the Japanese planes came so close that two of the Liberators collided, torching the clouds as they plummeted down, while Johnny Moore stood at the left waist window, scanning the sky for something to shoot. When he saw a dark black fighter plane racing toward him, Johnny held his fire. He waited, watching, tracking the plane until it was almost on him, then he unleashed a barrage that burst the fighter into a thousand pieces, the Japanese pilot waffling down like a rag doll tossed from a skyscraper.

  The more action the Big Stoop saw, the more alien their return to base each night. In the sky, in the glow of phosphorus bombs and the streams of anti-aircraft artillery, there was no time to question where they were, or why. But the return to Los Negros after a mission, slinking back to camp in the horizontal evening light, to spend another night in the sluggish mist of drink, could be even more disorienting than the missions themselves.

  Even the movies became a reminder of their dislocation. Stretched out together before the big white sheet, they were neither at war nor at home, but in some vapid purgatory between. One night, they might see a mind-numbing musical like Footlight Serenade. The next, it would be a gritty war drama like Journey for Margaret. Then it would be a farce like Blonde Trouble, and they would find themselves laughing drunkenly, a bottle of warm beer propped beside them in the sand, half-ashamed at the spectacle of themselves loafing on the beach at war.

  The Fourth of July came and passed and Johnny dreamed of home, of the wagons and horses down by the river in Des Arc, the crowds milling through town. “First time I was ever away from home on the fourth,” he wrote to his sister Mary. “Next year—I hope.” He and Jimmie spent the afternoon wandering through the surf at low tide, collecting shells in shallow water. They split the largest one in half, promising that someday the shells would be matching ashtrays in their homes, a reminder of the islands and each other.

  Then they were back in flight, surging through hostile airspace; then on the beach again, or picking coconuts, or chasing another lizard. In the middle of July, when their top-turret gunner fell ill, they took on a replacement, Robert Stinson, and they all lined up for a new crew photo in their combat uniforms, with the old Babes in Arms behind them, Johnny’s hair swept up in a pompadour, Ted’s mustache finally coming in, and Norman Coorssen kneeling in the front with a surly stare, while Frank Arhar’s face lit up with a huge, buoyant grin. In the back row, Jimmie Doyle squinted at the camera, eyebrows arched, a tiny smirk playing at the corner of his mouth. He was the only man who’d forgotten to wear a belt.

  On a good day, mail lit up the camp with encouraging news from home. “The only thing that saves boys out here from flipping the lid is the mail from home,” Bob Hope commented from a nearby island. “When they get a letter, they get a new personality.” But when the mail brought bad news, the transfor
mation was not so welcome. Some men discovered that their children were sick, or their parents dying. Others learned that their wives were pregnant, or leaving them, or both.

  Jimmie and Myrle were not immune to the strains of distance. During his training in Fresno, Jimmie had become friendly with a gunner named William Crum, but when Jimmie transferred to the school in Tonopah, Crum’s girlfriend began writing him letters. She was intrigued by Jimmie, she wrote, and wanted to get to know him. Jimmie immediately wrote to Crum, letting him know about the letters, and when Myrle came to Tonopah for a visit, he let her read them. At the time, Myrle had been unconcerned, but now the distance crept in; now she was writing Jimmie to ask if there was anything he hadn’t told her.

  Jimmie could feel the suspicion emanating from Myrle’s letter and it left him ill. Sitting in his bunk, he lit a candle and spread out four sheets of airmail paper to respond. “Darling,” he began, “you know how very glad I was to hear from you, but you also can’t know how surprised I was for you to write about that ‘correspondence,’ as you put it. Dearest, I can understand how you feel about it, but I thought that you knew what I told you was all there was to it. I never dreamed you had thought any more about it, and I’m sure I never have. As you know, I have never met the girl, who is probably Mrs. Crum by now, and all I ever heard about her was just from the talk Crum put out, and he was pretty crazy about her. I am very sorry you ever thought there was anything important about the matter at all, and I’m sure I never thought for a minute that you would think I was keeping any thing from you.”

  “I have no secrets from you,” he added, “and I hope you know by now that I never will have.”