Daniel Wyatt - The Mary Jane Mission

“For me?”

“Yes, you. He said it was important.”

“You mean the telephone lines are working?”

“I guess so.”

Back at the house, Les grabbed the receiver off the counter. “Yes, sir.”

“Lieutenant, this is Captain MacDonald. Thank God the phones are up. Anyway, can you get over to the base, pronto?”

“Now, sir?”

“Yes, right now.”

“But, sir, we’re cleaning up. Our neighborhood was hit hard.”

“Is your family fine?”

“Yes, they are.”

“Good. Lieutenant, this is more important than Matilda. It has to do with the Mary Jane .”

“In that case, maybe I should invite General Cameron and my father along.”

“What? Are they still on Guam?”

Les chuckled. “We weathered out the storm at the house. All of us.”

“You’re joking! All of you? Geez, why didn’t you go to one of the shelters?”

“There wasn’t time, sir.”

MacDonald let out a whistle. “Yeah, bring them along too. Right away! I’ll wait by my office in the administration building.”

MacDonald met them in a long hallway and led them to a restricted area where a guard was posted opposite a door. “You guys won’t believe it. I won’t say anything else. Just get a load of this.”

He opened the door. Inside were eight young men in World War Two flying gear, all watching a video, the sound up high.

“Hi, Phil,” one of the men said. “Turn it down, somebody,” he demanded.

Cameron’s mouth began to quiver. Robert held his breath for a moment. Time itself seemed to stop. The two war vets studied each face in the large room. Each person stared back. It was the crew of the Mary Jane , all seated on couches, watching a navy video about the F-18 Hornet! Clayton, Marshall, Lunsford, Emerson, Crosby, Schwartz, and Brown.

“I said, turn it down,” Clayton repeated, as he stood. “In fact, shut it off. Does somebody know how to do that?”

Marshall reached for the video machine, punched a couple buttons, and pulled the cassette out. “There we go.”

“Look who’s here,” Clayton said, grinning. “It’s Bob and Phil.”

Robert finally found his voice. “This can’t be,” he said to MacDonald behind him.

“Oh, but it is,” MacDonald replied, letting Les in the room before closing the door.

“What are they doing here?” Cameron asked MacDonald. “Why aren’t they back in 1945, where they belong?”

“Geez, those F-18s,” Clayton said, wide-eyed. “Jet fighters twice the speed of sound. Remarkable! Look, Phil, we didn’t want to believe it, either. That is until Captain MacDonald showed us 1990 calendars, his driver’s license, this video, newspapers, magazines, television.”

Cameron had a lump in his throat. “How did you guys get here?”

MacDonald tapped the general on the shoulder. “When the typhoon reached the island, lo and behold, there was the Mary Jane attempting an emergency landing at our base. Tinian was socked in. The buggers flew right through the typhoon to get here. They had already landed and jumped out when me and two security guards got to the runway. My mind told me one thing — the crew had to return to the Mary Jane and take off, otherwise they would never see 1945 again. But before they could, the Mary Jane vanished before our eyes, leaving the crew. So, here they are.”

Cameron frowned at MacDonald. “That probably explains why the Mary Jane was found intact forty-five years ago on Guam, minus the crew.”

“Seems so,” MacDonald answered.

The reality setting in now, Robert reached out to shake Clayton’s hand. “Ian, it’s good to see you. But you’re still a damn pain in the ass, yuh know that.”

Clayton laughed, thinking of the times he had hounded his ground crew. “If this was 1945, I’d have you court-martialed for that, sergeant. Why should you be so happy to see me? It was just twenty-four hours ago that we attended the Kyoto briefing on Tinian.”

“But to me that was forty-five years ago,” Robert said, stating the obvious.

“True. I see you got a lot of gray hairs. I knew all that hard work and worry about us would take its toll.” The others laughed. “And who might you be?” Clayton asked, pointing at Les Shilling.

Les grinned. “Captain Clayton, I’m Lieutenant Les Shilling.”

“My son,” Robert added.

“I was your escort, sir, over Japan. In the F-18.”

“Well, I’ll be… All that time, it was Bob’s son. Shit!”

“That’s quite the fighter,” Lunsford said. “And those rockets!”

“AIM-7 Sparrows,” Les answered with the proper name.

“I hear they’re radar-guided, is that right?”

“Yes, they are.”

“You a baseball fan, captain?” Les asked Clayton.

“I am. Why?”

“Remember, you asked me over the radio how many home runs Babe Ruth hit in 1927.”

“Yeah, I had to check if you were one of us.”

Les smiled. “I’m a baseball fan, too, sir. In 1961, a Yankee outfielder by the name of Roger Maris hit 61 homers to break the Babe’s record.”

“No kidding. Somebody finally did it.”

Then MacDonald opened the door and waved a finger to an NCO down the hall. In seconds, Jack Runsted appeared at the doorway, stepping inside.

“Tiger?” Les said, surprised to see his wingman and so bruised and red-faced. “You’re back!”

The two pilots grabbed each other by the shoulders.

“Quite the shock to the system, eh?” Tiger declared. “I see you met the crew.”

“Yeah, we did. But you. What the hell happened?”

The pilots released their grip on each other.

“It’s like this,” Tiger began. “I bailed out near Osaka Bay after shooting up a base. I set the fighter on auto-pilot and sent her out to sea. I got captured by the Japs. After interrogation and a few lumps” — he rubbed the bruises and cuts to his face — “I escaped Japan with a Zero. What a jalopy! But it had the range. They’re light as a feather so they hardly use any fuel. I flew the same return course as the Mary Jane , hoping to find her. Luckily, I did, before she descended to Tinian. I slid under her and together we came out in 1990, in the middle of the typhoon. By that time I was nearly out of gas and without a parachute. I broke away and plunked her in the water just off a beach near Tinian. The Zero sank, and the air-sea rescue picked me up swimming for shore. I damn near drowned.”

Cameron gently put his hand on MacDonald’s shoulder. “Can Bob and I see you a moment, captain? Alone.”

“Sure, I guess.”

Standing in a closed-door, glassed-in room down the hall, Cameron burst out, “What are we going to do with them?”

“It’s a navy problem. We’ll brief them on what’s happened the last forty-five years. They’ll be given navy jobs here on Guam, for the time being. After that, I don’t know. Eventually, they’ll end up in the States. I really don’t know. Things like this don’t occur every day.”

Cameron heaved a sigh. “It’s finally over. It took forty-five years to solve the Mary Jane mystery, why she was sitting out there in 1945, intact, in the Guam jungle. Wait a sec, the log. Did you get the log from Marshall?”

“I sure as hell did,” MacDonald answered. “I know how incriminating it would be with the Kyoto notations in it. I threw it in the incinerator.”

“Good idea.” Cameron remembered that the log was one of the first items he had searched for aboard the Mary Jane back in 1945. “Hold on. Knowing Marshall, he probably would have plotted the bomb drop. There’s a plutonium bomb dropped at the bottom of the Pacific somewhere!”