Night Moves (4 page)

The search efforts that December night would only compound the tragedy when a long-range Martin Mariner, a “flying boat,” was launched and exploded in midair, killing its crew of thirteen volunteers.

Half an hour later, when Futch returned to the lab, I looked up from my second pass through his summary to say, “You believe Taylor’s version, don’t you? You think he was right about being over Florida Bay, not the Bahamas. That’s what this is all about.”

Straddling a lab stool, Dan gave it some thought before replying. “I’m not convinced of anything. But I find it damn interesting that a seasoned flight instructor who’d spent nine months flying the Keys would say, ‘I’m sure I’m over the Florida Keys,’ unless he was
sure
. But that’s just one piece of a mixed-up puzzle. There’s been so much misinformation printed about what happened that day and night—including the military’s official six-hundred-page report. And dozens of bullshit magazine stories and ‘documentaries’ that include outright lies. Hell, one of those so-called writers even claimed to have piloted a sixth Avenger on Taylor’s flight but survived. Which is total fantasy, but it’s still repeated today.”

“All because your nephew found this.” I touched the throttle assembly. “Or were you already interested?”

“It lit a fire under me, but that’s not the reason. I’m a pilot. I don’t know how many hundreds of times I’ve flown that Lauderdale–Bahamas route. And there wasn’t a single trip I didn’t think about those fourteen guys—plus the thirteen others who died trying to save them. They all volunteered for what they knew was hazardous duty. Men like that deserve to be found—don’t you think?”

I couldn’t disagree. So I listened to Futch explain that for the last ten years he’d been trying to piece the real story together. Not working on it full-time, of course. He was too busy fishing Boca Grande Pass during tarpon season and flying charter clients all over the Caribbean the rest of the year.

“It’s more of an occasional hobby. Doc, you’d be surprised how many men who served at Lauderdale Naval Air Station during the second war ended up retiring to Florida. Some who flew Avengers on that exact same training route never had the first problem. Even a few who were actually there the day Flight 19 disappeared.

“I’m lucky. I fly clients all over the state. When I get the chance, I visit these old pilots in person—a couple times, it was only a few months before they died. I’d look at their scrapbooks and listen to their stories.” Futch grinned. “My god, it’s fun listening to an eighty-year-old guy who used to be a hotshit Avenger jock get all fired up over some of the crap that’s been written about Flight 19. Most of ’em believe government investigators were more interested in placing blame than in nailing down what actually happened that night. So they’re eager to help once they know I’m a pilot.

“One thing they’re all convinced of, Doc, is those fourteen sailors and Marines were competent men. They weren’t a bunch of screwup rookies, like some accounts say. Several were combat veterans from the Pacific war. Some highly decorated heroes, the flight instructor included—despite some of the bullshit that’s been written about Charles Taylor. They didn’t fly into a time warp, and they weren’t the victims of some shady government conspiracy. The men I’ve talked to are convinced their squadron mates got so damn lost, so turned around in a storm, they didn’t have a clue where they were. Didn’t even know if they were over land or water. You saw the time line I made of radio transmissions?”

I had. Once the pilots were lost, they began a series of course changes, desperately searching for mainland Florida. Even after sunset, they continued to zigzag their way into oblivion—thus the title of Gian Quasar’s book.

Futch said, “It was a black night. A storm ceiling of less than a thousand feet, in planes that had primitive electronics compared to today. No landing lights, no gyro compasses—that’s a key detail—and very limited radio range. At a time when Florida was one of the most sparsely populated states in the union.”

“No gated communities,” I offered. “No bright lights from shopping malls and football stadiums.”

“Between Palm Beach and Jacksonville, not many ground ranges to fix on,” Dan agreed. “And if they turned inland? Even Orlando was just citrus and cattle. Hardly any lights at all, coast to coast. I mentioned no gyro compasses? I’ve flown those old warplanes at air shows. Make a sharp bank and the compass spins like a damn top. Even after you level off, they’re squirrelly as hell. Which is just one reason our air bases lost
fifteen thousand guys
to training missions. You believe that?”

I said, “That can’t be true.”

It was. “In only five years,” Futch continued, “there were more than seven thousand plane crashes on U.S. soil! I had no idea ’till I did the research—most of those guys never even got a chance to face the damn enemy! Hell, the Gulf and Atlantic are littered with wreckage from old Avengers, B-52s, Mustangs—the whole list. People today don’t realize that, to be a fighter jock back then, you’d better have balls of brass and nerves of steel.”

Futch named some of the steely men he’d interviewed—several were important players in the Fort Lauderdale Avenger squadron. Then he’d methodically listed a couple of facts that, although historically accurate, only made the story more inexplicable.

At 5:30 p.m. on that December day, land-based radar stations, unable to pinpoint the squadron’s location, triangulated a probable location as a hundred fifty miles north of Lauderdale and forty miles out to sea. This information was not passed on to the lost pilots because of poor radio reception, or human oversight.

At 6:20 p.m.—nearly an hour after sunset—Air Station Lauderdale logged its last transmission from Flight 19. Lt. Taylor was heard radioing his squadron, “Close in tight, we’ll have to ditch unless landfall. When the first plane drops below ten gallons, we’ll all go down together.”

Automatically, my brain did the math. The Avengers had taken off at 2:10 p.m. They’d gotten lost. At 6:20 p.m., when the flight instructor’s last transmission was intercepted, the planes should have had almost two hours of fuel left. At 160 mph, even one hour in the air was a substantial amount of time. Where the hell had those fourteen fliers ended up?

There was another fact that Futch found perplexing.

“Three weeks after the Avengers went missing, the brother of one of the crewmen received this.
You
figure it out.”

Futch had placed a photo of a yellowed Western Union telegram in front on me. The typeface was faded but legible:

Jacksonville Flo Dec 26 10:15 am

Cpl Joseph Paonessa

Marine Barracks 6th and Eye St. Southeast

YOU HAVE BEEN MISINFORMED ABOUT ME. AM VERY MUCH ALIVE. GEORGIE

Before I could ask, Futch explained. “George Paonessa was a radioman aboard one of the lost Avengers. His brother, Joe, was stationed at Jacksonville Marine Base the day that telegram arrived. That’s a verified fact, by the way, not fantasy. Something else: only the family called George ‘Georgie.’ And Paonessa’s father and mother both said that no one knew that nickname outside the family. Some say until the day she died Mrs. Paonessa was convinced that George sent that telegram.”

If Futch expected me to be mystified, he was bound for disappointment. I’d told him, “When a disappearance makes headlines, the kooks and cranks come out of the woodwork. The telegram’s a hoax or a cruel joke. Georgie is the common, familiar form of the name, so someone made an obvious guess.” Looking through the north window, I paused. Puttering toward my stilthouse was Tomlinson in an inflatable dinghy, his sailboat,
No Más
, floating pale gray at anchor just beyond. He was shirtless, a bottle of beer in his free hand, and wearing a monkish-looking hat he’d woven from palm fronds.

“A very sick joke,” Futch agreed. “It hits home, though, because I’ve been checking the source code. You’re going to like it.” His tone became confidential as he tapped the paper in front of me. “There’s a chance this telegram was sent from
here
. Not Sanibel, but just across the bridge. The old telegraph office is still there, even after they built the condos. You know the place—that little yellow shed off to the left when you leave the island? It was one of the few Western Union stations between Key West and Tampa. No wireless in those days. Everything had to be hardwired.”

He was talking about tiny Punta Rassa, just across the bay. Today the spot is adjoined to the Sanibel Causeway, plus a cluster of high-rises and a resort hotel. For two centuries, the village had been the primary cattle port between Cuba and Florida. When the battleship
Maine
was sunk in Havana Harbor, the first distress message was sent to Punta Rassa, not Key West or Miami. Now Punta Rassa isn’t even shown on most maps.

I told Futch, “There’s someone coming who’ll appreciate this telegram a lot more than me.”

A few minutes later, Tomlinson was drinking my last beer while he listened to Futch retell his story. It was no surprise that he—a devotee of the paranormal—loved the connection between a local one-room telegraph station and Flight 19. So the three of us had spent the afternoon discussing details, probabilities and possibilities. Before leaving, Futch loaned us his dog-eared copy of
They Flew Into Oblivion
, assuring us it was the most carefully researched book on the subject.

“You’ve got the salvage gear and the experience. I know planes,” Futch told us. “If you’re interested, it’s something we can work on independently. You know, get together when there’s a reason. Start by talking to fishing buddies, the ones willing to trust us with their private GPS numbers. Chart the unidentified pieces of structure out there and match the locations with Army Air Corps logs. In the meantime, when the water clears up, we’ll dive the place where my nephew found this.” Futch tapped the briefcase where he’d stowed the throttle mechanism.

Finally, I asked the obvious question, but in the most general of ways. “I assume he found it in the Gulf, not the Atlantic. But was it north of here or south?”

My shotgun tactfulness amused Futch. “If I didn’t trust you, I wouldn’t be here. My nephew found the throttle in a mangrove creek south of Marco Island. Hawksbill Creek, it’s called on the charts. There’re a couple of Indian mounds way back in. And something else I’m going to trust you with—is that okay?”

Tomlinson nodded while I waited.

“Near the mounds there’s a marl flat there I call the Bone Field. Human bones. They’re scattered all over the place, stuck in the roots of trees, sticking right out of the mud. My daddy and I found it too many years ago to remember. We always figured it was an Indian burial ground, so we didn’t report it. Now I’m not so sure.”

I’ve known Tomlinson a long, long time, but I’d never seen his eyes glow a brighter shade of turquoise than when he heard the words
Bone Field
.

Futch added, “Tell you what. We’ll keep a close watch on weather around Lauderdale. Next time it’s similar to the night those Avengers went missing, we’ll hop in my plane and fly the area. I’ve got a theory about what happened to those pilots. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve flown a thirty-knot tailwind east to Lauderdale. Then, on the return trip, I climbed a couple thousand feet to catch a northeast tailwind home. Best way to convince you is show you.”

“You did this on the same day?” I’d asked.

“Same afternoon. Couple years ago, in the worst kind of weather, I gained sixty knots of airspeed riding one of those northeast storms home. Wind on the ground was southwest, but, man, I was like a rocket ship going the opposite direction. If it wasn’t for my GPS, I’d have been fifty miles out in the Gulf when I dropped down through the clouds instead of over Boca Grande.” The pilot’s smile asked
See how easily it could happen?

Which is why the night before something went
BANG!
in the tail section of his plane Dan Futch had bunked on the porch outside my lab. The skies over Sanibel Island were flawless, but NOAA Weather Service was predicting a near repeat of December 5, 1945: next-day squalls along the Atlantic Coast; southwest winds expected to turn by afternoon and blow heavy from the northeast.

“I didn’t expect this kind of luck until hurricane season. Maybe even as late as November,” Futch remarked that morning as we buckled ourselves into his little Maule floatplane.

The man was right, in a way. Dying in an Everglades plane crash was unexpected luck, indeed.

3

THE PLANE WAS DOING A HUNDRED-PLUS WHEN I FELT
the first jolt of our pontoons snagging sawgrass, yet Futch didn’t reduce speed. It caused me to wonder if he had frozen at the throttle—damn disappointing to lose my life at the same instant I lost confidence in a legendary pilot. Then a second jolt, much harder, caused a frictional roar and slammed me forward, my belt harness the only thing that saved me from the windshield and the blur of propeller.

Finally, finally, Dan levered the throttle back, concentration fixed on controlling the plane, his feet very busy at the steering pedals. Our pontoons skipped like flat rocks on water, causing us to fishtail wildly between the pond and a wall of cypress trees. Then we began a slow-motion skid that lasted an improbable span of seconds and threatened to dip the portside wing, which would have flipped us upside down.

It didn’t happen. Instead, the plane stabilized and began to slow, which stilled the world around us and allowed my hearing to return. By the time sawgrass had clawed us to a halt, I had the door open and was ready to bail. But Futch stopped me, yelling, “We’re okay, stay put!” meaning there was no fire, no threat of an explosion, so I pulled my legs in while he killed the engine. Then the pilot leaned back in his seat and took a huge breath, releasing it as a whistle. In the abrupt silence, the plane made creaking, cooling noises. Frogs resumed their steel drum thrumming. Birds chirped. Sun was shining, life was being lived, and the Earth still turned on a solid axis, indifferent to what had just happened.