Vanished (22 page)

“
1100—Now on Pacific
,” he began. “I cannot but think of men shipping out 60 years ago, with uncertainty, in the same direction. Many had time to think about it, zig-zagging their way from San Francisco or San Diego. Others flew their bombers and had less time to think, a lot less. Now I am peacefully making my way in a much less circuitous direction to Palau—where a few men found and never left. Do they know we are coming or that we are there? Are their spirits waiting to be remembered, or at least not forgotten? Or do their spirits live through their families, embedded in the DNA they left behind? To whom does this matter? In the end, it matters to me, and it matters to a few folks—incredible folks crazy in their own right—who sacrifice their time/money to get beat up in the jungles, in the waters, on the coral, by the sun—to freeze in the rain.”

At Honolulu International Airport, he met up with Reid Joyce, who had been traveling since 3 a.m. After a quick hello, they found their seats and settled in for the seven-hour flight to Guam, each man retreating to his thoughts. They were briefly interrupted when a passenger two rows up had a seizure and Scannon helped stabilize and monitor him. Then he was back in his seat, the cabin lights dimmed, gazing through the window to the eternity of night.

The airport on Babeldaob was a single runway that stretched toward the water in darkness, but inside the terminal, Scannon and Joyce found three Palauan friends waiting. Joe Maldangesang (
mal-dang'-uh-sang
) was a scuba guide at the local dive company Neco Marine. He’d first met Scannon in 1996, on the mission with Chip and Pam Lambert and Scannon’s daughter, Nell. With a limited English vocabulary, Maldangesang had spent the week wondering what kind of crackpot Scannon was. “I’m thinking, ‘
Maybe this guy is crazy
,’” Maldangesang recalled. “Why does he want to dive here? It’s so ugly!”

But Scannon had taken an instant liking to Maldangesang. Unlike some of his earlier guides, Maldangesang was never in a rush, and he projected a quiet joy on the water, throwing in a line to yank out fish or chomping on betel nut until his grin was brilliant orange. Scannon had hired him as a boat driver each year since.

Like many islanders, Maldangesang had a deep affection for the American fliers of World War II. The relationship between Palau and Japan had grown strong since the war, but many Palauans still regarded the US victory in the Pacific as their moment of liberation. As Maldangesang returned to the waterways with Scannon each year, he witnessed the discovery of Corsairs and Avengers, and soon he began to join the search himself—taking a position in the underwater grid, humping through the jungle, and interviewing tribal elders about their wartime memories. His wife, Esther, was a princess in Palau’s matrilineal society, which only added to the value of his support. Some of the islanders who had once scratched their heads at Scannon, wondering if he was just another treasure hunter looking for Yamashita’s gold, began to pass him information through Maldangesang. By 2004, Maldangesang had become central to Scannon’s project. Scannon presented him with a BentProp coin, and named him in reports to the lab as a team member.

Now Maldangesang was at the airport with Esther and a Palauan friend. They exchanged hugs and handshakes and Esther draped a floral lei over Scannon’s head. Then they piled into a car out front and sped toward Koror. Along the way, Scannon and Joyce explained about the photos.

—

A
S
S
CANNON AWOKE
the next morning, he resisted the urge to rush to the water. There was equipment to unpack, gear to set up, and paperwork to submit at the Historic Preservation Office. He also wanted to review his plans with Maldangesang, view the new search area from a small plane, and track down Ricky Speis, the Palauan elder who had first
pointed to the site two years earlier. In between, he and Joyce would pick up the other team members at the airport, including Jennifer Powers, who was filming a documentary about BentProp with SkyDance founder Dan O’Brien and a videographer they had asked to join them on the islands, Pete Galli.

Over the next three days, while the rest of the team coordinated permits and equipment, Galli showed Scannon a trick with the program Photoshop. He imported the new archival photos and superimposed them over a current map of Palau, stretching and angling the images to see where the white specks fell on the modern landscape. With a line-drawing tool, he could extend the trajectory of the dots to predict exactly where they were heading. Scannon had never seen Photoshop before, and he was amazed at the possibilities. On the fourth day, he and Galli went to the airport to lease a private plane. The pilot who had once flown Scannon over the channel, Spike Nasmyth, was no longer on the islands. But a pilot named Matt Harris agreed to remove the back door of his twin-engine Islander plane so that Galli could lean out and shoot photos of the water. Then Galli and Scannon retreated to the hotel, huddling over Galli’s laptop to add the new images to the Photoshop overlay.

On the fifth day, Scannon brought the team to meet Ricky Speis. He was a short, squat man with a light dust of gray hair and deep copper skin. At his home on southern Babeldaob, he welcomed the group to sit on his front porch below a sign that said “God Bless Our Home.” With a peach-colored polo shirt and loose khaki shorts, Speis was hardly the conventional image of a tribal elder, but his memory stretched across sixty years to the day in 1944 when, as a seventeen-year-old student on his way to visit his parents, he saw the 453 cross the sky.

“
I was on the hill at Aimeliik
,” he said, gesturing west with a weary frown. “I was on my way home but it became hard from the Japanese shooting up and the planes bombing Koror. Koror was smoking, and then all of a sudden, I saw the plane being hit and losing part of its tail, then spinning down and impacting on the reef.” He paused, and Scannon
asked if he would show them where the plane landed. Speis nodded. Sure, he said. Come back in the morning.

On the water, Maldangesang motored expertly through narrow passages that cut between the coral heads. One wrong turn, and the boat would run aground in water just inches deep. About a mile offshore, they passed the propeller that Scannon had first seen in 1993. After all the years of seeing the propeller, it suddenly looked different to Scannon. The possibility that it might have come from the 453 chilled him. Speis gazed past the propeller to a spot just a few yards north. That, he said, pointing, was where the plane went down.

Everything was beginning to converge on a single region. Scannon and Galli spent another two days mapping the area for a search. Using the Photoshop overlay, they drew a grid on the coral heads, noting the boundaries of each square and the best way to reach it. While they plotted the approach, Maldangesang chased down yet another lead. Speis had mentioned a fisherman who knew the area well, and Maldangesang wanted to ask if he’d ever seen anything strange in the water. To his surprise, the fisherman was tight-lipped. He didn’t want to get involved, he said, or spend hours motoring around the coral on a boat filled with Americans. But when Maldangesang promised to keep his identity secret, the fisherman said yes: he’d seen a huge jumble of metal embedded in one of the coral heads. Using a verbal shorthand, he explained to Maldangesang where it was. When Maldangesang returned to Scannon’s hotel, he pointed to the spot on a map. It was right near the center of the grid that Scannon and Galli were mapping.

Finally, on the morning of January 26, the BentProp team boarded a boat for their first dive. It had taken ten days, but between the Photoshop overlay, the tip from Speis, and the fisherman’s advice to Maldangesang, they had collected enough information to launch a systematic search. They would begin with the fisherman’s directions.

When they reached the site, Maldangesang handed the wheel of the
boat to Galli. Two pairs of divers would make the first sweep: Scannon with Maldangesang, and Joyce with Powers. They would descend together and move across the coral as a group. But when Scannon reached the bottom, he looked around and saw only Maldangesang. After a few minutes, he raised his hands in a gesture of questioning annoyance. Maldangesang returned the gesture. They waited, dangling in the translucent blue to the sound of their own breathing, but Joyce and Powers did not come back. Finally, Scannon pointed up. Maldangesang nodded. They surfaced to the sound of Pete Galli shouting.

“
They found something
!” he called. “Reid just came up for his camera! He’s heading back down!”

Scannon and Maldangesang glanced across the water to where Joyce’s air bubbles were rising, and they dove back under, following the trail through a column of deepening blue, descending farther into the void until the surface no longer shimmered above them and the shapes of two figures began to materialize gently in the darkness. The first was Joyce, floating at the side of a steep rise of coral. The second was Powers, holding on to something tall and thin. It was a propeller. As Scannon approached, he could see that she had both arms wrapped around the blade, her eyes wide, bubbles streaming up from the edges of a grin she couldn’t contain.

“
I was not letting go
!” Powers said later. “I dropped right onto it and I said to myself, ‘I’m staying here until someone finds me.’”

Scannon felt his heart drum against his chest as the rhythmic whoosh of his regulator rose and fell. He drifted close to Powers in a daze. With trembling hands, he reached out for the chalkboard attached to her waist, writing in large, blocky letters:
ARNETT
.

Powers nodded. She pointed down the sloping coral to a tangled mass of metal resting by the seafloor. It was an engine, with a second propeller attached to it, and below that, the unmistakable profile of a B-24 wing. The whole front half of the plane stretched out before him.

Scannon drifted down. He passed through the wreckage of the Liberator in awe. He saw the nose-turret bracket resting on a ledge, surrounded by hoses and wires and warped aluminum skin, and he paused to study a small metal box. There were four thin rods protruding from it, with a knob on the end of each. It was a throttle. The throttle. Jack Arnett’s throttle. Each of the sticks controlled one engine, and they were all stuck in position by the growth of coral. Two of the sticks were pushed forward, and two pulled back, and it occurred to Scannon that this might be exactly the movement a pilot would make to compensate quickly for the loss of power on one side. He stared at the quadrant as a flood of emotion coursed through him. In ten years of searching, he had experienced many sensations at the wreckage of lost craft—the excitement of discovery, the chill of mortality, the overpowering sense of debt and duty to the missing. But as he gazed at the throttle he felt overcome with the low ache of loss. It was as if, in that final position of the throttle, Arnett’s will to survive was recorded forever. “It was the last correction Arnett made,” Scannon said later. “I can’t explain why, but that was the thing that struck me the hardest.”

As the BentProp team rose to the surface and climbed aboard the boat, there were hugs and shouts, then Scannon asked for a moment of silence. From his backpack, he pulled out a small American flag, and then a Palauan flag, asking Joyce, Powers, and Maldangesang to help stretch them over the foredeck. He quietly recited two stanzas of the Laurence Binyon poem etched on the BentProp coin:

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,

Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.

They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;

They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.

In the hotel that evening, Reid Joyce fought back tears as he tried to capture the experience in his journal. “When you’re part of a group that spends time searching like this,” he wrote, “you tend to tell and re-tell the stories of the people for whom you’re searching. And you begin to be pulled back in time, in your mind, to the events that led to the disappearance of these brave souls. You see and hear anti-aircraft fire exploding around you. You feel the aircraft bucking. You feel the adrenaline rush as the deadly explosions get closer. You feel at least a shadow of the terror that must have followed, as the aircraft was hit and the left wing came off, and those eight men who weren’t able to get out knew in their hearts that there’s no way they’d survive the violent, spinning plunge toward the water, in this beautiful corner of the world so far from home. That’s pretty intense, personal stuff, and you find yourself talking to these guys. Many times, aloud or just to myself, I’ve said, ‘Hey, guys—we’re here. We want to find you. Where are you? How about a sign? Something? Anything? Is this latest magnetometer anomaly the one that’s going to lead us to you? Are we really about to close the circle?’
I finally got the answer
today.”

—

B
ELCHER
.
T
HAT’S WHAT
Scannon was thinking as he returned to the hotel. Bill Belcher was on the islands. The recovery team was
already there
. With a few phone calls, he tracked the anthropologist down and raced through the day’s events. Listening, Belcher tried to process the jumble of information hurtling through Scannon’s grin. “
It was pure joy
,” he recalled later with a laugh.

For Belcher, the B-24 did raise complications. It was the first time he had been on the islands at the moment of discovery, which brought a host of new responsibilities. Though he wasn’t an underwater archaeologist
himself, he was fiercely protective of any archaeological site, and the lab would expect him to monitor BentProp and ensure that they didn’t tamper with the wreckage. It had taken three years for Belcher to get permission for the dig on Police Hill, and one wrong move on the B-24 could jeopardize the lab’s support for both. Belcher also had to make sure that Scannon didn’t contact families with the news. That part, he knew, would be the hardest for Scannon to resist.