Aaron Elkins - Where there's a will

“I would think so,” said Gideon. “Paper wouldn’t last, but plastic might. Metal would.”

“Doc, how about I go along with you, if that’s okay?” John said. “Maybe I could help.”

“Sure,” Gideon said, pleased. “I’d appreciate the company.”

“Listen, you two,” said Felix, “you’ll be bushed by the time you get back to Honolulu from there. I don’t think you should have to get on another plane to come here. Let me put you both up for the night in Waikiki. Someplace nice. You can have a good dinner, get a good night’s sleep, catch a plane back to Kona the next day.”

“I appreciate that, Felix,” Gideon said, “but it’s not necessary, we can-”

“Hey, speak for yourself, Doc,” John cut in. “It’d be nice-”

Felix talked-shouted-right on through them. “My condo doesn’t have a guest room, unfortunately, but I can book you a room at the Royal Hawaiian. It’s just a few blocks from where I live. You like the Royal Hawaiian, don’t you? Of course you do, who wouldn’t?”

“Yes, sure,” Gideon said, “but my wife is coming here to the Big Island the next day-”

“Not till one-fifteen,” John said. We’ll be back in Kona ourselves before that, and we can meet her plane. Better yet, we can catch her at the airport in Honolulu and fly the last leg in with her.”

“Well-” Gideon began.

“Oh, let him do it for you, for God’s sake,” Auntie Dagmar said. “He can afford it.”

Felix whacked the table with a paw-like hand. “It’s settled then. I’ll take care of everything. I’ll look forward to dinner with the two of you in Waikiki tomorrow night.”

“Fabulous,” said John.

“Thanks, Felix,” Gideon said, having run out of arguments. “It’s nice of you.”

“And now,” commanded Felix, “I think we ought to let these two fellows get some rest. They’ll have to be up early tomorrow. First flight is five-fifteen.”

“Five-fifteen!” whispered John, horrified. He was not an early riser.

“That’s right,” Inge said. “Sad but true. If you two want to get through security and make the plane, you’d better be on your way to the airport by four A.M. At the latest.”

“Four… A.M.!” John could barely get the words out, but he stuck gamely, stalwartly, to his guns.

His chin came up.

He’d said he would go, and he would go.

Seen from an altitude of fifteen hundred feet, Maravovo Atoll lay at one end of a curving archipelago of tiny islands, the first land they’d seen since leaving Hawaii. Maravovo itself was the largest, or at least the longest, of them-an elongated, C-shaped island, its spine thickly covered with vegetation, and perhaps a mile from end to end and no more than a hundred yards wide at its broadest point. The inside rim of the “C” was a narrow sliver of white sand bordering a lagoon of the brightest, greenest aquamarine imaginable, strikingly different from the deep blue of the sea that surrounded it. The only signs that man had ever set foot on the atoll were a floating pier and a couple of small, new-looking structures on one horn of the “C,” at the mouth of the lagoon, built by the cruise line for their picnicking day-trippers.

On the ocean side of the low coral reef that formed the outer border of the lagoon two brown-skinned, loinclothclad men paddling an outrigger canoe waved as the plane passed over them.

“I thought the island was uninhabited,” Gideon said.

“It is,” said Lyle Shertz, one of the two salvage divers, who was in the co-pilot’s seat. “But according to the CIA Factbook, there are some people living on a couple of nearby islands, and they come here to fish along the reef. Hey, what do you know, there’s the Grumman. Up ahead, about one o’clock, right in close to shore. Boy, that didn’t take long!”

“Well, you were right; we’re sure not gonna need the sonar,” the pilot, Harvey Shertz, said to him. “That’d be pretty hard to miss.”

The two men were brothers; identical twins in their thirties, with husky, well-padded frames. Although they dressed similarly-tank tops, baggy khaki shorts, and flip-flops-they had resorted to different techniques for disguising their receding hairlines. Lyle’s head was shaved, although he was overdue for the razor, so that his rippled, globular skull was coated with black stubble. Harvey wore his equally black hair long enough to comb it forward over his forehead, where he cut it straight across. From Gideon’s point of view, it gave them a worrisome resemblance to two-thirds of the Three Stooges.

Sitting in the seats behind them, John and Gideon peered around them and through the front windows. “But it’s plain as day,” John said. “Even if the tail wasn’t sticking up out of the water. How could it take ten years for anybody to find it?”

Harvey answered. “It took ten years because we’re a hundred and fifty miles from any commercial airline route and four hundred miles from the nearest land. No one flies over it. No one sails to it; not on purpose, anyway.”

“What about those natives down there? They must have seen it,” Lyle said.

“Sure they did, dumb ass,” his brother answered. “So what were they supposed to do, call 911? Even if they had cell phones, which they don’t, there aren’t any communication satellites down here to tap into. Oops, sorry about that,” he said as the floats hit the water more heavily than they might have and the four men were jounced in their seats. “I haven’t landed this baby very much.”

“I’m the regular pilot,” Lyle volunteered.

“Now they tell us,” John said.

Two more long, slow, glancing skips, much softer, and the Cessna settled onto the surface of the lagoon, turned, gunned its engines, taxied to within a few yards of the wrecked plane, and let out its “lunch hook,” a small anchor that immediately snagged in the sandy floor of the lagoon. With the water as clear as glass and the cabin roof of the downed plane only a few feet below them, it was perfectly visible: a smaller craft than Gideon had anticipated, white with dark blue trim, lying right-side up but tipped forward onto its nose cone and listing to the left, the collapsed strut of its nose wheel twisted to the side and both ends of the propeller blade bent straight back. A few unidentifiable chunks of metal and plastic lay scattered on the bottom nearby.

Gideon had been expecting a rusting hulk thickly encrusted with sea life, but in fact, other than a heavy layer of dull green algae on those windows that were intact, the encrustations were minimal and the oxidation was pretty much limited to the damaged areas, to seams in the metal, and to the regions around the rivets. (The corrupters of metal, it occurred to him, operated on the same principle as the putrefiers of flesh: go for the weak spots first; the weak spots and the natural openings.) The fuselage number, N7943U, painted on the horizontal blue stripe, seemed as bright as the day it had been put there. The tail, which was in the open air, seemed to have weathered a bit more than the submerged part.

From the Cessna it was impossible to see inside, even with the Grumman’s right window broken out-a patch of almond-colored seat trimmed with blue plastic, a glimpse of the rightmost rudder pedal, nothing more.

Lyle and Harvey tethered a small wooden raft to the Cessna and set it on the water loaded with a few pieces of equipment: an oxyacetylene torch and an open toolbox with some simple implements in it-a cold chisel, a hammer, a hand axe, a couple of pry bars, a few pairs of pliers, and some unfamiliar-looking wrenches. Then, not bothering with wet suits, they strapped on their scuba gear and weight belts. “This is gonna be easy,” Harvey said.