Ghosts of the Pacific

by Philip Roy

  The jungle was growing out of rocky ground, very different from the sandy beaches that surrounded most of these atolls. Probably the rock was the remains of an old volcano. For such a tiny jungle, it was surprisingly difficult to get through. At one point I thought I had discovered a cave, but it was just an overhanging rock. It made a good shelter from the storm. Everything was moving in the wind. I had to tell myself to ignore the leaves and bushes because it looked so much like there were creatures running through them. And then, I made a discovery.

  First, my foot struck what I thought was a heavy rock but turned out to be a chunk of metal. It was badly rusted but I could tell it was part of a machine, possibly an engine. Then, I found a cable. It had been here for a very long time. Next, I found part of a sheet of metal. And then, against the rock above thick bushes, I saw a propeller. My heart raced with excitement. It was an airplane.

  It was a twin-engine plane. Amelia Earhart flew a twin-engine plane. I was so excited my heart was thumping in my chest. But the plane was difficult to reach, especially with Hollie in my arms and the storm blowing everything around. I decided to return to the sub, leave Hollie there and come back with the camera.

  It grew darker as we returned to the sub. I hoped it wouldn’t rain before I could take some photos. Hollie met up with another crab on the way back. This time he was determined to stare it down, but the crab got too close and grabbed hold of his fur with its pincers. The next thing I saw was the crab flying through the air. It was the most ferocious thing I had ever seen Hollie do, next to fighting off the snake. Seaweed would have ripped the crab apart.

  Hollie was content to join Seaweed in the sub, especially as he brought a new stick in with him. I grabbed the camera and a plastic rain poncho that fit in my pocket, climbed out and shut the hatch behind me. I paddled over to the beach, tied up the dinghy and took off towards the jungle. It struck me: some years ago—day or night—the pilot of that plane had crashed here. He, or she, must have run out of gas. Why else would they have tried to land in a place with nowhere to land? Perhaps they had tried to land in the lagoon. It would be hard to see at night, impossible in fact, unless it was a clear night and there were stars and the moon. Then the atoll would look like a black horseshoe on a dark sea. Was I the first one to find the plane? Maybe. I was excited.

  The little jungle swallowed me up. I learned that you can’t hurry through a jungle; it is too thick. You have to climb over, around and under things. Hopefully there were no dangerous snakes. I couldn’t see them if there were. There was nothing for them to eat here anyway, except crabs. I wondered what the crabs ate.

  When I reached the rock face where the plane was, I started taking pictures right away. With the zoom lens I could see the frame of the cockpit. I had to get over there.

  But it wasn’t easy, especially with my sore arm. What a nuisance! I climbed up the rock, holding on to leaves and plant stems, but couldn’t see where my feet were landing, as the plants were too thick. It was slippery too. If I fell, I probably would have landed in bushes, but many of them had sharp thorns. I wondered if there were dangerous ants here, as in the movies. I hadn’t seen a single ant yet.

  The plane was very beaten up. It must have hit the rock pretty hard. Perhaps it had exploded on impact. Plants grew tightly around it and right through the middle of it. I climbed on top. It was broken in two. I didn’t see any markings anywhere as everything was so badly rusted. I couldn’t even tell if it was a military or civilian plane. There probably wasn’t a big difference back in the 1930s. I climbed forward towards the cockpit and saw that the glass was missing from the windows. I looked for remains of the pilot but there was nothing. The jungle was slowly eating the plane; perhaps something else had eaten the pilot. Then, I saw a boot. It was squashed into one corner. I pulled off a metal strip sticking up and stuck it into the corner and pulled the boot out. It was a small leather boot, all crumpled up. The pilot hadn’t been very big. I opened up the boot and turned it upside down. Out fell dirt and a small pile of bones. They were the bones of a foot. I looked for the other boot but it wasn’t there.

  I took more photos from inside the plane and out. While I was aiming the camera, a heavy drop of rain splashed on my face. Shoot! It was time to go. I focused on the pilot’s seat one last time and noticed something underneath it. I climbed in again, stuck my hand under the seat and pulled out a small leather bag with a strap. Black marks on the front of the bag looked like Japanese letters. I opened it and found badly faded maps and papers. The writing was in Japanese. It probably wasn’t Amelia Earhart’s plane. Too bad. Oh well, it was still a pretty cool discovery. It started to rain. I wrapped the camera and bag in the plastic poncho and climbed out of the plane. I left the boot behind.

  Chapter 21

  THE SEA WAS BUILDING swells slowly but steadily, as if it were taking its good old time preparing a typhoon. Rain fell on and off and the wind howled constantly. After a few days, riding the waves became exhausting and the vibration from storm choppiness was starting to wear on my nerves. So, we slipped beneath the waves and continued sailing in a northwest direction. Sailing submerged was slower, but so much more comfortable. We were not in any hurry anyway. I didn’t want to miss the circus, but Pierre the strongman said they wouldn’t set up until after the typhoon and clean-up were over. I wondered how you cleaned up after a typhoon.

  We motored along at a hundred feet, coming up every four hours or so to charge the batteries and check the storm. The seafloor dropped below us to deeper than two miles, then, almost as soon as it bottomed out, it started up again. I watched it rise steadily on sonar. Although the horizon showed nothing in our path, we knew an island was coming, or at least a seamount.

  We were at sea so long I was once again losing the feeling of sleeping in the night or day. It didn’t really matter. It was too much to fuss over whether it was light or dark when I laid my head down. The sun set around seven in the evening and rose around seven in the morning every day here; that much I knew. I figured that was because we were so close to the equator.

  The seamount continued to rise until radar told me it had broken the surface ten miles in front of us. There was an atoll ahead. This time it was much bigger. Likely there would be people. Perhaps we could settle on the bottom offshore, or perhaps we could find an isolated lagoon and take shelter.

  Not a chance. The seamount rose into a jagged and dangerous reef all around the atoll, and the atoll was too big to bother circling for a safe entrance to its lagoon. Oh, well, I thought, we’ll just settle outside the reef and sleep.

  So we did. But while I slept, I heard sounds, soft scraping sounds, as if the sub were gently brushing against coral and debris on the bottom. But we were sitting at a hundred feet. There couldn’t be an undertow at a hundred feet, could there?

  I drifted in and out of sleep and heard the scraping sounds as if they were far away. And then, there was a louder bang, and a clang, and a rumbling, like the sound of something sliding down a hill. I jumped to my feet, staggered over to the observation window and hit the floodlights. The water was murky with debris from the storm but it was clear enough to see movement outside. Where was this current coming from? And what were we banging into?

  I climbed onto the bike and pedalled a little to change our position. Then I went back to the observation window. Looking down, I was staring at an airplane. I must be dreaming, I thought. But no, I wasn’t. The plane looked similar to the one I had seen in the little jungle—a twin engine, but maybe a little bigger. It was hard to tell. Things look distorted underwater. The nose of the plane was missing. It looked jagged just like the rock around it. One of the engines was still attached and the other was nearby. The rest of the plane looked more or less intact.

  I stood up, rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and tried to figure out what to do. Hollie stood up too and stared at me. We were a hundred feet down. There was a storm above and a dangerous reef in front of us. There was a flow of water coming from somewhere but I
couldn’t figure out where. I had just discovered another plane. Was this one Amelia Earhart’s?

  I put the kettle on, fed the crew, engaged the batteries and started exploring the area. We turned around and moved very slowly. Soon I discovered where the flow was coming from. There were holes in the reef. The water was channelling through them and creating a deep undertow.

  I discovered something else. The reef was littered with machines and metal from the war. There must have been a battle here. I saw pieces of broken landing craft, the kind that carried soldiers onto the beach. I saw barrels, rods, cables and ripped sheets of metal that looked as though they had been torn apart by an angry giant.

  And the plane? It was probably not Earhart’s. It was probably another Japanese fighter. I had read that Japanese pilots often left their bases or aircraft carriers without enough fuel to return. After they had shot all their ammunition at the enemy they would crash their plane into an enemy ship or island. But some probably ran out of gas before they could do that. How many such planes were lying on the seafloor or in island jungles? Probably thousands of them.

  World War Two started in 1939 and ended in 1945. But the Japanese and Americans only started fighting each other in 1941, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. They took the Americans by surprise. This was the beginning of four years of vicious fighting in the Pacific, which ended only when the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But before the Americans could take the bomb all the way to Japan, they needed to find an island suitable enough for building an airfield from which their big bombers could take off. The island had to be close enough to Japan that the bombers could fly over, drop their bombs and fly back. That island turned out to be Tinian, right beside Saipan, an island in Japanese possession. To turn Tinian into an airfield—the biggest one in the world in 1945—the Americans first had to take Saipan. And so they did. But it took a whole month of really bloody fighting.

  For two more days we battled the storm. I was so tired of it now. Then, suddenly, the wind just died. That was strange. It disappeared too quickly. It left an eerie stillness in its wake that I didn’t trust. The sea still flowed in large swells but the swells lost their crests and we could ride them comfortably. I cranked up the engine and made a beeline for Saipan. The typhoon was still on its way; I could feel it. Even though the air was motionless, it was full of energy, sort of like the stillness before lightning strikes. How different this was from back home. At home, you might know a few days before a bad storm would hit or you might not know at all. In the Pacific, typhoons seemed to take weeks to form. They built in stages, then they moved around looking for somewhere to strike.

  Chapter 22

  WE WERE SITTING IN the water off Saipan, on the northeast side of the island. The wind and sea were throwing everything they had at it. The island looked like the dark green top of a giant’s head sticking out of a steamy bath. Saipan had a small mountain in its centre that rose fifteen hundred feet. The typhoon might hit hard but the island wasn’t going anywhere.

  Finding a place to hide the sub might be a lot more difficult than I had thought. In the first place, I hadn’t expected to come in the middle of a typhoon. We would need a very sheltered cove. But Saipan was highly populated for a Pacific island. There were about ninety thousand people here, according to my guidebook.

  I couldn’t search on the surface. The waves were too high, the wind too strong and the sky too dark. There was a lagoon on the east side but that was where all the people were. The north side was the least populated. It was also the hilliest. I would have to search here.

  The undertows around the island were powerful and dangerous. I had never seen undertows like this before, not even in a storm. Something about the shape of the rock underwater was creating currents like in a washing machine. Maybe there were underwater tunnels. I felt an undertow pull us back and forth and had to be very careful not to smash into the reef. I sat at the sonar screen and studied the seafloor. After a while, I discovered something very cool. There were caves seventy-five feet down. I hovered above them, rushed to the observation window and looked down. There was a faint light coming through one of them. I stared at it and tried to figure out why. I could only guess that it was a cave on both sides. The water tunnel must have led to an open cave in the hillside where daylight was coming through. The tunnel looked big enough for the sub to squeeze through if we were careful. I decided to try it.

  It was a tight squeeze. The tunnel led to a water-filled cave, like a giant well. There was plenty of light coming through the observation window. It must have been open above us. I rose very slowly. What if there were people sitting around the water at picnic tables? I didn’t think it would be like that, especially with a typhoon developing, but it could have been.

  We came up as slowly as possible. I raised the periscope, stopped and looked around. It was a cave all right, but one wall was completely open. I saw a small group of people huddled together and smoking in one corner. They didn’t see us. I pulled the periscope down and we went back down just as slowly. We had to let air out of the tanks to submerge, and that made bubbles, so I did it as gently as possible not to draw attention. We couldn’t hide in this cave, above or below, the water was too clear.

  It was a tight squeeze getting out. Without sonar we would never have gotten in or out of that tunnel. As soon as we were out I found a second one. But there was no light coming from it. Should we check it out? I looked at the crew. Sometimes I wished they could talk. I decided to explore it.

  It was longer and had a turn, which I didn’t like. We scraped the sides coming through. It opened into an underwater cavern smaller than the other one. There was just enough room to turn the sub around. That was good; it would have been really hard to back up. I turned the sub as slowly as I could. I didn’t want to hit the rock and cause a cave-in. I just hoped this cavern rose into a cave above water. If there was a cave above, there might be a way out of it.

  We rose a little at a time. If we were going to hit a ceiling, I didn’t want to hit it hard. Up, up, up we came. I raised the periscope gently. It broke the surface without striking anything but it was pitch-black. We were definitely in a cave. I surfaced completely and searched with the periscope again. I turned it around three hundred and sixty degrees. It was like being in outer space, except without stars.

  I was nervous to open the hatch. What if the air in the cave was stale? What if it was filled with poisonous gas? What if there were thousands of screaming bats, or poisonous spiders? I grabbed my guidebook and flipped through it. No, there were no dangerous spiders or snakes in Saipan. There was only the sea snake, an extremely venomous snake, but it was only in the water and it didn’t like to bite. It preferred to swim inside dead bodies. That was nice.

  I decided to open the hatch just a crack, shut it quickly, and hold my breath. I grabbed the flashlight, unsealed the hatch and readied myself. I pushed it up a tiny bit and shut it. Nothing happened. I heard nothing and smelled nothing. I opened it again a little further and pointed the flashlight out. It bounced off smooth stone walls. I took a breath. It was a little stale but okay so I opened the hatch and stuck my head out. I heard water drip. I swung the flashlight around in a circle. My mouth dropped. There were skeletons in here.

  I didn’t know if it was safe to flick on the floodlights. They were so bright. I didn’t want to let anyone know we were here. But this cave must have been deep inside the ground. In fact, it must have been inside a hill. The presence of skeletons meant that nobody had been in here for a very long time. It was like a tomb. I decided to flick on the floodlights.

  When the light burst into the room I saw five skeletons. They were in uniform. They weren’t completely skeletons because they still had some skin on their bones—I could see it on their faces and hands—but it was dry and brown, sort of like the skin on mummies. They must have been Japanese soldiers. They weren’t very big. They were spooky, but not incredibly spooky. I was more fascinated.
I wondered what had happened to them. Had they come into the cave and couldn’t get out? When I looked closer I saw that they all had white hair. Had they been here so long they had grown old? Or did their hair turn white because they had been frightened to death?

  There were weapons here too. I saw rifles, pistols, boxes, cans and bottles. The skeletons were sitting around a card table. They must have gotten all of these things in here somehow, which meant that there must be a way out. I didn’t think they could have come in the way we had come. But maybe they had. I could swim it, if I had to, if it were a matter of life and death. It was seventy-five feet down, fifty feet or so through a twisting tunnel and seventy-five feet back to the surface. And it was dark. Still, it was possible. Perhaps they had wrapped everything in plastic and swum through the underwater tunnels like a relay swimming team, passing their stuff from one person to another. Or maybe they pulled it through with ropes.

  On one side of the cave was a ledge, like the boardwalk inside a boathouse. That’s where the skeletons were, with their boxes and things. The ceiling was about fifteen feet high. There was a rock at the back of the cave that looked as though it was blocking the entrance to a tunnel, but I couldn’t tell. I’d have to go over there. To do that, I’d have to step past the skeletons.

  I inflated the dinghy and shut off one of the floodlights. We didn’t need that much light and I wanted to save power. Seaweed sat on the hull and watched as Hollie and I climbed into the dinghy and paddled ten feet to the ledge. The ledge was only five or six feet wide. Hollie jumped out. Then he stopped and stared at the skeletons. They were sitting at a card game, but beneath their uniforms they were just bone, hair and a little bit of skin. It was really weird. Their bones must have been balancing like wooden sticks that would collapse with the slightest touch or breeze, but there was absolutely no wind in the cave. I took a closer look at their faces. The leathery skin on their bones was as thin as a plastic bag pulled tight. I would have thought that skeletons all looked the same but they didn’t. The holes of their eyes and noses were different sizes. Their cheekbones and foreheads were different. One looked braver than the others and one looked kind of funny. I wished Ziegfried was here. He would figure out what had happened to them and explain it to me.