Her Last Flight(51)

The Centauri wasn’t in bad shape, all things considered. There was no apparent structural damage. The engines and the wheels had come through the hard landing fine, except for a blown tire. The only destruction came to the longwave radio antenna, which had broken off, leaving them unable to communicate.

“But they know we’re here,” said Sam. “That was my last transmission, that we had sighted land and were headed down.”

“To Baker Island. And they’ll sail on over to Baker Island and find no trace of us, and they’ll think we ditched at sea and drowned.”

“Baker’s not so far away. We’ll see a ship and signal. Anyway, they’ll look for us here, if they don’t find us on Baker.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Positive.”

It was almost noon. After landing, they had crawled out of the ship and taken their bearings, had drunk some water and settled under the shelter of a wing and slept several hours, while the equatorial sun rose at last and carpeted the landscape in heat. Irene had woken first and shook Sam. Now that it was light, she saw that he had cut his forehead, which was smeared and crusted with dried blood. They had gone down to the beach and washed it with salt water, and now they were staring at the empty horizon.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

“Sorry for what?”

“Panicking.”

He lay back in the sand and shaded his eyes. “You did just fine.”

“But why did you make me do it? We could have been killed.”

“Because I knew you could do it. You’re a natural. Anyway, I figured you needed the practice.”

“The practice?” She hit his shoulder. “The practice?”

He opened one eye at last and squinted at her. “One day you’re going to be flying solo, and you’re going to have to crash some bird somewhere, and I want you to know how to do it. I want you to live.”

I want you to live. Irene looked up at the hot sky. She wanted to say something, but her throat was stiff and dry. Sam lay back in his flight suit, tanned and relaxed, hair damp, one blue eye squinting in her direction. As if they were on some kind of vacation! The air was hot and dry and smelled of the ocean. Irene heaved herself to her feet and strode back to the airplane.

According to the charts, Howland Island was about twice as big as Baker, a thousand acres or so, made of coral sand and surrounded by reef. Nobody lived there, except birds. You couldn’t live there. The surface was flat and nearly barren, just scrub grass and a few trees huddled atop a small rise near the middle. Irene had a dread feeling that there was no fresh water of any kind.

At least its desert qualities made it easy to land on. The Centauri had dug ruts into the sand and grass, but it hadn’t spun or crashed or been damaged by trees. Just an intact shell of an airplane with no fuel. Irene ducked under the tail and kept walking westward. The sun was high above her, beating down on the brim of her hat. The ocean rushed against the reef. The tide was low, exposing the shallows, and Irene thought they could probably catch some fish there, some crustaceans or something.

Water was a bigger problem. Irene had packed a makeshift distilling kit among her equipment, but distilling seawater was a lot of work for meager reward. Still. Enough water to keep them alive, if they needed it.

If they needed it?

My God, they were marooned! They were shipwrecked on a deserted island! They were alive. They were lost! They were not lost. They were only stuck.

She stopped and folded her arms and stared at the western shore. The waves washing up and tumbling around the coral. No surfing here. Sam came up beside her and stood too.

“You should get out of the sun,” he said.

“How long, do you think? Until we’re rescued?”

“Shouldn’t be long. A few days.”

“What if it’s longer?”

She meant survival. But as they stood there together, side by side, watching the empty ocean, gathering sunshine, nothing but grass and sand and rocks and salt water and the two of them, the question took on something else, some untoward quality. Some intimacy that answered itself.



By the summer of 1928, the Pacific Command of the U.S. Navy had grown accustomed to assisting American flyboys on their harebrained adventures. After all, it was in the nation’s interest to promote aviation and thereby encourage the development of the world’s best airplanes and pilots; you never knew when another war might break out and such things would be required without delay. Last year there was the Dole Air Derby to Honolulu—what a circus that was—and before that you had several individual attempts to span the Pacific from San Francisco to Hawai’i, some of them foolhardy and some of them heroic, and some of them both at once. So the navy knew how to communicate with men in the air, and it knew how to fish them out of the water.

Tracking them down on some scrap of an island in the middle of the Pacific, now. That was a new one.

As it happened—and this should come as no surprise to those familiar with the pattern of threads linking just about every paid-up member of the American Anglo-Saxon aristocracy with all the others—Admiral John Smith, the officer in command of the South Pacific fleet in the middle of 1928, was an old friend of Mr. George Morrow, the two of them having prepped together at St. Paul’s in the first decade of the century. They had worked closely together in the arrangements for the landmark Mallory–Foster flight to Australia, and when the first garbled Morse code came through to the USS Farragut at 0323 local time on the morning of the second of August (something about an engine, possible detour) Admiral Smith immediately sent a relay on to Mr. Morrow, who had been delivered to Sydney by ocean liner a day earlier.