by R. A. Jones
Since very nearly her first day on this desolate island, Amelia had made every attempt that presented itself to let the outside world know of her whereabouts.
She thought all of those efforts had been in vain, ‘til yesterday. Then, an unmarked plane had swooped low over the island, dropping a small canister that landed near her lean-to. The canister, which was inscribed with symbols matching those on her ring, had contained only a small piece of paper; but to Amelia, it had been like manna from heaven. On it was written five simple words.
Help is on the way.
She now joyfully skipped off the rocks and back to shore, trotting back to the clearing where sat her lean-to. She had no possessions save those on her person, of course, so there was no real packing to do. (“Except my books,” she thought. “I mustn’t forget my books.”) All that she needed now was a little more patience. Soon, very soon, her people would come.
She stood looking at the simple lean-to that had been her shelter from the elements all these months. This three-sided affair of metal and palm fronds was one “home” she would certainly not miss.
Amelia cocked her head to one side as a sound came faintly to her ears. Almost afraid to believe it was the sound of approaching voices, still she turned toward the source.
She was rewarded with the sight of a lone man, swinging rather wildly with a machete, stumbling out of the jungle and into the end of the clearing opposite to her.
He appeared to be a soldier of some sort, though Amelia could not recognize his steely gray uniform as any she had ever seen before. When the soldier regained his footing and straightened to look at her, she could see that he appeared to be Asian.
He turned his head and shouted out a few loud words over his shoulder. Moments later, several more uniformed men pushed their way into the clearing.
One of the soldiers who, judging by his bearing, the insignia on his jacket sleeves and the deference paid him by the others, was the leader of this small band, began to walk toward Amelia. The others, strung out in a line, followed close behind. Amelia frowned slightly as she noticed that each of his followers was clutching a rifle in his hands.
As they drew closer though, the apparent leader began to smile broadly. Amelia relaxed and felt the corners of her own mouth begin to turn up at the corners.
“Hello,” she said, walking forward to meet them.
In reply, the commanding officer of the soldiers raised his right arm – and fired a single shot from the semiautomatic pistol he had been holding behind his back.
Amelia gasped as a heavy weight seemed to strike her over her breastbone and she staggered backward a step or two.
Looking down, she saw a small hole in her flight suit, from which both smoke and blood were now seeping. Stunned, confused, she looked up at the soldiers, who were still advancing toward her.
“Why?” she asked softly.
Lowering his firearm, the officer merely stared at the woman for a long moment before barking out a command in his foreign tongue.
Obeying the order, his soldiers raised their rifles to their shoulders and commenced firing.
As a volley of metal-jacketed slugs slammed into the frail woman, she jerked like a mad marionette was pulling her strings.
Mercifully, Amelia was dead even before her body hit the ground.
That didn’t stop the officer from firing two more rounds into her as he stepped forward. He showed no emotion as he stared down at her inert form, nor was he fazed by the pleading look in her still-open eyes.
Lowering himself to one knee, he reached for the Flying Cross medal and brutally ripped it from her throat. Dropping the medal into a side pocket of his jacket, he rose and turned his back on her.
“Dispose of her,” he said coldly.
Two of his soldiers sprang forward. Each grabbed one of Amelia’s arms and began to roughly drag her through the sand. They tossed her body into her crude lean-to as if it was no more than a bag of garbage being deposited on a curb.
One of them produced a cigarette lighter from his pants’ pocket and used it to set the shelter on fire.
Given the dryness of its palm frond latticework, it took only a minute for the entire structure to be engulfed in the hungrily consuming flames.
“There’s no need to stay and watch this,” the lead soldier said. “We have what we came for. Let’s get back to the boat.”
The soldiers had not yet made it across the clearing to the spot where they had emerged from the jungle when their commander abruptly halted. He turned to look back the way they had come, and his squad followed suit.
At first they saw nothing. But they all heard the unfamiliar noise that had caused their commander to pause. It was a sound like, yet also unlike, that made by the whirling propeller of an aeroplane.
The commander’s eyes widened, then narrowed to slits as he at last saw the source of the sound.
Seeming to simultaneously rise up and soar forward over the swaying palms came a small aircraft, painted black as a moonless night. The body of the craft was small and to its top, aft of the cockpit, was attached a short tower upon which was attached a horizontal propeller, spinning furiously.
This autogyro, for such it was, swooped up before starting to slowly descend earthward. Though ungainly in appearance, it landed gracefully in the center of the clearing with the lightness of a feather.
The propeller atop it had barely stopped spinning when a lithe figure leaped up out of its cockpit and dropped to the ground.
It was a lone man, wearing clothing that in no way resembled that of an aviator. Like the autogyro, his outfit was all black, or nearly so. This included a fitted suit, a wide slouch hat and a long overcoat that swirled behind him like a billowing cape.
There were only two splashes of color in his dark ensemble. The first was a red mask that hung down loosely over the front of his face like a curtain, with holes for his eyes.
The second came from the bone-white ivory handles of twin Colt .45 semiautomatic pistols worn in special holsters under each arm.
The man paid no heed to the burning lean-to behind him, but immediately set out at a brisk walk toward the soldiers.
“Who’s that?” one of them asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” his commanding officer replied. “Kill him. Then burn his machine.”
Like thoroughly programmed automatons, the soldiers leapt forward to obey. So focused were they on their target that they failed to notice that their commander was not joining them.Instead, he stepped back into the jungle, turned and ran toward their waiting escape craft.
The man in black showed neither fear nor hesitance as the soldiers rushed him, screeching a fierce battle cry.
His gloved hands flashed to his guns, which seemed to be blazing away less than a heartbeat later.
The first two soldiers went down before they could even raise their rifles, both drilled dead center.
Those behind them did get off shots, but their intended target had left his feet, his long coat swirling hypnotically as he spun in mid-air while still firing his pistols.
One soldier went down as a hollow-point slug shattered his left femur. Another took a bullet to the throat and died choking on his own blood.
Landing lightly in a crouch, the man in black instantly sprang upward, somersaulting forward. The air sizzled beneath him with the passage of more bullets fired by the soldiers.
While still upside-down, he snapped off several more shots. By the time he completed the somersault and landed back on his feet, he was the only man still standing in the clearing.
The soldier with the shattered leg was attempting to rise, with little success. The masked man stopped those efforts with a bullet to the brain.
With a flick of his wrists, he ejected the now empty ammunition clips from his pistols, quickly and effortlessly replacing them with fresh ones.
He had taken two steps back toward the burning lean-to on the other side of the clearing when he stopped. The sound of a motor turning ov
er came to his ears faintly but distinctly.
Holstering his pistols, he plunged into the jungle at the point from which the soldiers had originally emerged. Tree branches slapped at his head and body, while tangled roots sought to seize his feet. With unwavering speed he brushed past the one and leaped over the other.
His mind still controlled his body, though, and brought it to a skidding halt when he saw the jungle ahead of him about to give way to another open space. The twin Colts again seemed to leap into his hands as he pressed his back against the bole of a tree.
Easing his head around its curve, he saw that the clearing ahead was in fact a stretch of beach leading down to the sea. There was no sign of men or movement, so he cautiously edged out onto the sand.
By the time he reached a spot where the waves were lapping at the shore, he lowered his guns to his side. In the distance, nearly out of sight, he could just make out the shape of a sleek boat flying at incredible speed across the swell of the ocean.
Clearly, this was a special craft. Given the speed with which it had vacated the island, he knew it would be beyond capturing by the time he could return to his autogyro and get it airborne.
With measured speed, he returned to the clearing where he had landed. The lean-to was still burning, and as he approached it a horrid smell wafted to him. It was an odor with which he had become all too familiar during the course of the late Great War. It sickened him no less now than it had the first time in a bombed out trench in northern France.
“I’m so, so sorry, Meeley,” he murmured softly, using Amelia’s family nickname. “I came as quickly as I could.”
At that exact moment, thousands of miles away, Amelia’s husband G.P. Putnam was leaving a Los Angeles probate courtroom. He wasn’t happy about what he had done, but he saw no other course open to him.
The official search for Amelia had cost $4 million before it was called off. Putnam had then drained his own personal wealth to finance a private search for his wife.
Finally, seeing no other alternative, he had petitioned a judge to waive the standard seven-year “death in absentia” waiting period. If Amelia were declared legally dead, Putnam would be able to access her bank accounts and use the money to continue the search for her.
He would go to his own grave never knowing that Amelia Earhart had indeed died on this very day.
Back on Gardner Island, the man in black was inspecting his autogyro before take-off. He stepped back away from it and looked upward as a deep humming sound suddenly began to thrum the air above him.
As he watched impassively, an image began to appear out of thin air. Swirling strands of ethereal energy spun in an oval before coalescing into the form of a single, giant eye hovering in the still air.
“We were too late,” declared a deep, sepulchral voice that seemed to emanate from the clear pupil of the eye.
“I was, yes,” the masked man sighed.
“Don’t blame yourself, my friend,” the eye said. “Clearly, we are faced with a most formidable foe … and the first victory is his.”
“We’ve got to make sure it’s his last.”
“Yes. If we can.”
With that, the floating eye faded from sight, its departure accompanied by the same pulsing sound that had announced its arrival.
Before returning to the cockpit of the autogyro, the masked man walked over to where the soldiers he had slain were still sprawled awkwardly in the sand.
Already, the crabs that infested the island were boldly making their skittering way toward the corpses. Within days, the man knew, there would be little left of the soldiers’ bodies.
He felt no sympathy for them.
Reaching into a pocket inside his overcoat, he withdrew a small calling card and tossed it onto one of the fallen soldiers. He then strode back to the waiting autogyro and lifted into the air.
Had there been a living person remaining on the island to study what he had left behind, they would have seen that the calling card was mainly black in color. To one side of it was printed the white outline of a watch face, with the hands pointing to nine and twelve.
Next to it, in ink as darkly red as blood, was printed this grim message:
“The Clock has struck.”
CHAPTER IV
January 13, 1939
The whole world was on fire.
At least that’s the way it seemed to Rex Wiley. Flames spread as far as the eye could see, nearly from horizon to horizon.
Oily clouds of smoke pushed skyward, blotting out the sun. The Australians would come to call this “Black Friday” with good cause. Wiley didn’t know what had sparked what had become the largest and most devastating brush fire in the history of the island continent, but the results were already plain: scorched earth, displaced citizens, dead animals whose blackened carcasses littered the landscape.
It had been a long and adventurous road that brought the American to this place. Wiley had led quite the colorful life, beginning when, at age fifteen, he successfully lied about his age and finagled his way into Blackjack Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force when it set out for France to join in the Great War.
After serving with conspicuous bravery in the trenches and on the blasted ground of the No Man’s Lands of half a dozen battlefields, he returned home to a hero’s welcome.
Having already reached his full height of six feet, three inches and with matinee idol good looks, it was not surprising that the budding moguls of Hollywoodland sought him out.
Intrigued by this safer yet equally thrilling new challenge, Wiley quickly took to the role of screen actor, appearing in dozens of silent films as everything from a pirate to a cowboy to what he really had been: a player in the War to End All Wars.
Unlike some of his unfortunate fellow actors, Rex Wiley was also possessed of a deep and resonating voice. So while others fell into obscurity on the sidelines, he rode the sound wave of talking pictures to an even higher level of stardom.
He had appeared on the silver screen with some of the biggest celebrities in the world: Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Cary Grant. He had wooed such beauties as Jean Arthur, Katherine Hepburn and Thelma Todd – some only in front of the camera, but some off screen as well as on.
Having recently signed an exclusive contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (home to “more stars that there are in the heavens”), Wiley was in Australia on the first leg of what was planned to be a worldwide tour to promote his first starring vehicle for MGM: a swashbuckler entitled “Ghost of the Barbary Coast”.
Wiley and his studio appointed handler, a public relations hack named Dexter Cooper, had been on the way to a prearranged photo op with the children of a state run orphanage when they found the road ahead of them had been blocked off.
The fire fighter manning the roadblock, who identified himself as being Captain Cole, had explained the situation to them. Wiley could barely see the man’s eyes as tiny pinpricks of light nearly lost in the soot-blackened skin of his face. His shoulders were slumped with fatigue, for he had been on the front line trying to contain the fire for six hours before he was relieved and sent to man this post.
“What about the orphanage?” Wiley asked him. The actor had exited the car and was staring at the chain of smoke columns rising to the west.
“It’s done for,” the fire fighter replied. “There’s no way we’ll be able to stop the fire from reaching it.”
“C’mon, Rex,” Dexter Cooper said, tugging at Wiley’s sleeve. “Let’s get this thing turned around and get out of here.”
Wiley ignored him.
“What about the children? Are they all right?”
Before the Aussie could respond, both men turned to the sound of running feet coming up the road behind them. A dozen men, bereft of any protective clothing and bearing only shovels and pickaxes, were trotting toward them.
“Just follow your eyes and nose, boys,” Captain Cole said. “Pick a spot and start shoveling dirt.”
The volunteers didn’t even pau
se, but kept moving forward.
“What about the kids?” Wiley persisted.
“I don’t know,” the fireman admitted, lowering his gaze so as not to look Wiley in the eyes. “We sent someone to warn them to evacuate, but I haven’t seen any of them yet.”
“Can you use more help?” Wiley asked, already beginning to peel off the jacket of his suit.
“We sure can, boyo,” Cole replied, holding out a shovel.
“Hold it!” Dexter yelped, grabbing Wiley by one arm. “Are you nuts, Rex? You can’t go into that … that hell!”
“Watch me, Dex,” Wiley replied. He smiled and winked at the PR man even as he pulled out of his grasp.
“All you’ll do is get yourself killed, man!”
“Not to worry, old boy,” Wiley assured him. He tapped the side of his head lightly with his knuckles.
“Did I ever tell you about the time a Hun bullet hit me right in the noggin? Bounced right off my helmet.” He smiled at the memory.
“The other doughboys took to calling me ‘Iron Skull’ after that, ‘cause they said I was too hard-headed to be hurt by a simple piece of lead!”
“And are you fireproof, too?” Dexter asked glumly.
“I guess we’ll find out, Dex,” Wiley replied softly. “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”
“What about me, Rex? What do I do?”
Wiley was already running toward the foreboding clouds of smoke. Slowing only slightly, he turned back toward the handler and trotted backwards.
“Stay right where you are, Dex. When the kids get here, load as many of them as you can into the car and get them to safety.” He then swung back and set out at a full run to catch up with the other volunteers.
“Your friend’s a brave man,” the weary Captain Cole said to Cooper.
“Yeah. No doubt about that.” Dexter anxiously ran the fingers of his left hand through his hair. “I just hope he’s not also a dead man.”
