Vanished (3 page)

Nancy stopped reading and stared forward, trying to grasp what it meant. There seemed to be a new letter almost every day, most of them several pages long, but Tommy’s mom had never shown them to anyone or even hinted that she had them. When Tommy got home, Nancy found herself crying as she said, “Oh, Tommy, just look,” but Tommy turned away, his eyes welling up and his big hands shaking. So Nancy came back to the box for a few hours each night, curled up on the sofa to drift through Jimmie’s words. She read V-mail cards from training in Nevada, and eight-page descriptions of the islands and the ocean, and long professions of his love signed with that word,
Forever
.

“
Darling
,” he wrote at the end of his first week, “there aren’t any words to tell you how much I love you. But you know that our love can stand this being apart.” A few weeks later, he wrote from the combat zone, “
It gives me a feeling of serenity
knowing there will be a place waiting for me, a place where I can settle for good, and try to make up to you in part for all of the things you have had to put up with. There are times when I get to feeling pretty low about the whole business, but then when I realize that it is tough for you too, and how uncomplaining you have been about it all, it makes me feel pretty cheap.”

The more Nancy read, the more bewildering the letters seemed. Looking at them, it was impossible to imagine that Jimmie had abandoned Tommy and his mom—but then, why did Jimmie’s brothers insist that he had? Why did they swear he’d called them from California, and that they’d driven out to see him, arriving at Jimmie’s apartment just as he slipped away—leaving his neighbors to confirm that he was alive?

Nancy tried to ask Tommy what else he knew, but Tommy just winced and shook his head. He knew nothing, he said. He wished he knew less. He wasn’t even sure of his dad’s rank, let alone what sort of man he was. Every time Tommy saw the letters, his throat closed up.

“
I just couldn’t look at them
,” he said. As the months went by, he never did.

Neither did Casey. “
I was against my mother bringing all this up
,” he
said later. “You just didn’t talk about this. You didn’t talk about it because Dad didn’t want to. So when Mom started reading all the letters, I was like, ‘Mom, please don’t bring it up. Dad doesn’t like it.’”

But Nancy wouldn’t stop. She wasn’t even sure she could. There had to be an answer, some way to make it all make sense. She started placing phone calls to learn more about Jimmie. She called the Department of Veterans Affairs to see if they knew his combat history. She called the Army’s human resources office to request his service records. She even called a local Army recruiter to find out if there was anything left from his enlistment—some scrap of paper or hidden detail that might point toward an answer. But no matter where Nancy looked, she came up empty. The Army didn’t have a personnel file, they said. They had no record of his enlistment, no file on his missions, no information on his squadron or his crash. In fact, they didn’t have much more than his name in a database. Everything else about Jimmie Doyle, they said, had disappeared—probably burned up in
a fire in Saint Louis
.

“I was skeptical,” Nancy said. “I kept telling them to look, but they kept telling me everything burned. I thought,
Everything?
”

A year passed, then another, and Nancy’s hunt trailed off. She knew only fragments, and they didn’t add up. From the letters, she could see that Jimmie’s unit moved across several islands in the South Pacific, and she gathered from Tommy that Jimmie had been a tail gunner on a B-24 bomber, manning a machine gun at the back of the plane. But where did he fly? What targets did he hit? How much combat did he see? And why did his return address show a promotion to sergeant in midsummer? Nothing in the letters explained what Jimmie might have done to earn the rank. There were only vague references to the war. “
I can’t tell you any details
,” he would write, “but the Japs are sorry I’m here.”

Nancy found a few other letters in the trunk, written by Jimmie’s friends after he disappeared. But those letters brought up more questions than answers. “
I have talked to some of the fellows
who flew the same day and saw what happened,” one man wrote. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you
now the whole story. But when I return to the States, I am coming to see you.” There was no sign he’d ever come.

As Nancy’s search faltered, so did her confidence. Maybe it had been a mistake to read the letters. Maybe Tommy and Casey were right. Maybe it was better to live with the scar than to reopen the wound. She’d wanted to make sense of Tommy’s past, but now it made less sense than ever.

By May 2000, six years had passed since Nancy first opened the trunk. She’d stopped making calls and asking questions about Jimmie, but she was always on the watch. As she skimmed through the newspaper over Memorial Day weekend, she spotted an article in
Parade
magazine. Some doctor in California named Pat Scannon was searching for missing airplanes. He was tracking down men like Jimmie who disappeared in Palau. There was a picture of Scannon on the opening page, a leathery figure with a gray beard, who stood before a vintage bomber with a climbing rope tossed over his shoulder. The article described him as “
the Indiana Jones of military archaeology
,” and Nancy practically ran to the computer to find his phone number. She left a message at his office, and a few days later, Scannon called back. His voice sounded weary. He’d been flooded with calls, he said. He wanted to get back to everyone, but it was hard.

Nancy swallowed. “Well,” she said, “I just wanted you to know that my husband’s name is Tommy Doyle and his father was Jimmie Doyle . . .”

Scannon’s voice perked up. “And his plane went down on September 1, 1944,” he said, “and the tail number ended in 453, and the pilot was Jack Arnett, and . . .”

Nancy listened in disbelief as Scannon rattled off a dozen details she’d never heard. When he paused, she whispered, “But how did you
know
all that?”

“Because,” Pat Scannon said, “I’ve been searching for that plane for six years.”

WRECKAGE

T
he first time Pat Scannon went to Palau, he wasn’t sure what he was searching for. He wasn’t even sure why he’d come. Officially, he was part of a scuba expedition looking for a sunken Japanese ship, but Scannon wasn’t a very good scuba diver, he didn’t know much about the ship, and he hadn’t even heard of Palau until a few months earlier.

It was 1993, and Scannon was not the kind of guy who typically disappeared on exotic vacations. He was a medical researcher in his midforties who worked for a small biotech company in a suburban office park in California, and he was sufficiently disinterested in the great outdoors that
his wife, Susan, had long since
given up asking for his help in the garden—where instead of pruning or planting or weeding he tended to stare into the distance, thinking about work. Though he was licensed as a physician, held a PhD in chemistry, and had actually founded the company
where he worked, Scannon also had little interest in corporate affairs. Years earlier, he’d given up control of the company to a team of experienced executives, preferring to focus his own attention on esoteric research into therapeutic monoclonal antibodies. He sometimes confessed to his friends that he’d only built the Xoma Corporation because he wanted a job there, and having built it, he arrived for work each morning with his plastic ID tag dangling from a lanyard around his neck, disappearing inside his office to spend ten or twelve hours under the fluorescent lights. A typical workweek for Scannon consisted of sixty hours at Xoma, plus the hour’s drive to and from his stucco home on a dead-end street in town.

Like most things in Scannon’s life, the invitation to Palau came while he was at work. One of his colleagues at Xoma was a man named Chip Lambert, who ran the company’s infectious disease program. Like Scannon, Lambert had spent his career studying the intersection of chemistry and medicine, but their similarities ended there. Where Scannon was shy and unassuming, with a light, airy voice that tended to wash away in a crowd, Lambert was tall and burly and strode the hallways of Xoma with a gruff exuberance. He had a mop of curly hair and a brushy mustache that danced above a mischievous grin, and he was a world-class scuba diver who’d spent much of the 1970s tooling around the Middle East—
working for the king’s hospital
in Saudi Arabia, then briefly at the World Health Organization, while zipping away each weekend to dive the earth’s finest waters, from Scotland to New Zealand and throughout the Red Sea. Now that Lambert was back in California, he and his wife, Pam, ran a small scuba shop on the weekends. When Lambert offered diving classes to his colleagues at Xoma, Scannon was among the first to sign up. Over a few weekends, he earned a basic scuba certification, but mostly enjoyed soaking up Lambert’s stories about Cyprus, Vanuatu, and the Poor Knights Islands, a world that Scannon could hardly imagine. Then Lambert started talking about Palau, and Scannon wondered if they were both imagining it.

There was gold on the islands
, Lambert said. Hidden gold, mountains of it, stolen by the Japanese during World War II and buried in secret hideaways throughout the Pacific. For half a century, treasure hunters had been tracking down various deposits. They called it “Yamashita’s gold,” after a notorious Japanese general, and the total value was said to be $100 billion. There were books on the treasure, and lawsuits over it, and more than a few ruined lives. A year earlier, Imelda Marcos of the Philippines confessed that most of her own fortune came from the gold, but a man named Rogelio Roxas claimed that Marcos had stolen it from him, after he uncovered a secret bunker in the Philippine hills full of gems and swords and a golden Buddha whose head was stuffed with diamonds. That case was making its way through the US courts, which would soon award Roxas $22 billion in damages.

Meanwhile, several of Lambert’s friends were tracking another deposit of the gold. They had sources in the Japanese government who said that a hospital ship had been sunk in 1945 while ferrying some of the treasure past Palau. By studying old maps and documents, Lambert and his friends hoped to find the ship and bring home the gold. But first they were planning a preliminary trip to generate publicity and funds.

Scannon listened with his jaw hanging open. It sounded like something from a serial film, or a comic he might have read as a child.
Tintin and the Golden Buddha
. But Lambert was just beginning. The preliminary trip, he explained, was a search for the first combat kill of President George H. W. Bush. During the summer of 1944, Bush was a young naval aviator flying photographic reconnaissance missions over the islands. One day in July, he sank his first enemy vessel, a 150-foot trawler. The mission report placed that strike on a northern atoll called Kayangel (
kayh-ang-el'
), but after half a century of diving and fishing in the area, no one had found the trawler. Now
Lambert’s team had come across photos
taken during the mission, which showed the ship going down beside a distinctive patch of coral. They planned to bring the photos to Palau, locate the patch of coral, and drag a magnetometer through the water to
pinpoint the ship’s metal. Then they would shoot underwater video of the sunken wreck, and produce a documentary on the forty-first American president’s virgin kill. They would use all the money and publicity from the documentary to fund the search for Yamashita’s gold.

“
What we wanted to do
,” Lambert said later, “was find the wreck, make the movie, and sell the documentary to raise funds for the treasure hunt.”

If the whole thing sounded vaguely cartoonish, the divers and historians on Lambert’s team put Scannon’s doubt to rest. The leader of the group was Dan Bailey, a renowned historian of the islands, whose most recent book,
WWII Wrecks of Palau
, had already become the definitive guide to the island waters. It was Bailey who came up with the mission photos, from a Navy photographer named Bob Stinnett who flew in Bush’s squadron. At seventy, Stinnett couldn’t join the mission himself, but he was closely involved in the planning. The team also included a scuba pro named Dave Buller, who’d helped discover some of the most famous shipwrecks in Palau, along with several notable sites off the California coast, where he spent his free time
scouring the continental shelf for abalone
snails as large as a soccer ball, prying them loose while holding his breath and hauling them up for supper. Both of the Lamberts were also coming, and had spent enough time in Palau that the cover of Bailey’s book was actually a photo of Pam gliding past
the gear shaft of a sunken destroyer
. The team had even secured a TV crew to film underwater.

When Lambert suggested that Scannon tag along, Scannon found himself grinning and nodding. He didn’t have much to offer the team, but he didn’t much care. As a doctor, he could always bandage a scraped knee. But what really mattered to Scannon was that, after a decade of working sixty-hour weeks, which had brought his first marriage to an end and left little time for his second, he finally had a way to break up the routine with a shot of adventure. In fact, his second wife, Susan, was an accomplished diver herself, and he convinced her to join him after the mission for a few days of sightseeing on the islands. So, on a cool
summer afternoon, Scannon headed west—through Hawaii, then Guam, before landing on Palau, where he joined the team on the beachfront estate of a resort hotel to watch the red sun cannonball into a sea of surprises.

—

B
UT THE MISSION
was already changing. Through a bizarre coincidence, on the same week that Scannon landed in Palau, the September issue of
Harper’s
Magazine
was landing on newsstands with an article that would throw his vacation into headline news.

The story consisted of just two pages, which were mostly filled with a reproduction of the mission report from Bush’s attack on the trawler. But in a series of pullout annotations, a writer for the magazine claimed that the old document offered “
strong circumstantial evidence
that George Bush committed a war crime as a rookie Navy pilot.”

As Scannon gathered with Lambert, Bailey, and the rest of the team for breakfast in the open-air lobby of the hotel, they huddled over the
Harper’s
story to figure out what the reporter meant. Though Bailey had a copy of the mission report and had read it dozens of times, he was baffled by the suggestion that it revealed anything nefarious. In most respects, it seemed to him like a thousand other wartime documents. There was a brief description of the 250-mile flight from an aircraft carrier to the islands; a list of the planes in Bush’s squadron, known as VT-51; and a terse account of the strike on the trawler, noting that Bush scored the vital hit. The final sentence concluded, “
The trawler sank within five minutes
, with its crew taking to two life boats, which VT strafed.” Except for the brief reference to a future president, nothing about the document struck Lambert, Bailey, or the rest of the team as unusual.

But for the
Harper’s
writer, the line about lifeboats was crucial. Depending on how one interpreted it, the attack could have been illegal. If, as the
Harper’s
writer suggested, the language implied that Japanese soldiers boarded their lifeboats without weapons, and then Bush swooped
down to strafe “defenseless combatants,” it would indeed be a war crime. But the document said nothing of the sort. Like so many wartime reports, it had been hurried together by a harried officer who was already focused on the next day’s events, and it left out far too many details to draw such precise conclusions. It didn’t say, for example, that the Japanese soldiers were defenseless. They might just as easily have climbed into the lifeboats with their sidearms for protection, or even the lightweight Nambu machine guns common to the period. Nor did the mission report say which pilot strafed the lifeboats. Maybe it was the same pilot who sank the trawler, Ensign George Bush. Then again, maybe not.

As it happened, those very questions had been circulating in Washington for several months. During the final weeks of the 1992 presidential campaign, nine months earlier, the mission report materialized in the mailboxes of several prominent reporters. Though the timing reeked of an October surprise, the allegations were serious, and some of the most venerable names in news, including the
Los Angeles Times
,
U.S. News & World Report
, and
Newsweek
, launched investigations. As their reporters scoured the US and Japanese archives in search of clarifying detail, they came up empty. By Election Day, not a single magazine or newspaper had discovered enough evidence to justify a story. Nor had the
Harper’s
writer uncovered anything new. The closest he came was a single quote from
a gunner on the mission, who said he couldn’t remember
the incident but allowed that “it might have happened.”

Still, with the
Harper’s
article on newsstands, the floodgates were open for other news groups to “follow up” on the story. While Scannon was on his way to Palau, a deluge of television reporters had been tracking down veterans of Bush’s squadron, including Bob Stinnett, who pointed them toward the team in Palau. As phone calls lit up the switchboard of the waterfront resort, Bailey and Lambert found themselves inundated with media requests. By the time they boarded a flat-bottomed boat for their first day of diving, three days had passed and they’d struck a deal with
Nightline
to provide video for an exclusive segment.

All of which Pat Scannon watched in a state of dazed amusement. According to Bailey and Buller, the most striking thing about Lambert’s friend was how utterly disengaged he was—a cheerful spectator who wandered the hotel grounds while the rest of the team scrambled to take phone calls, secure gear, and coordinate logistics. “
If Chip wanted him along
,” Bailey said later, “that was fine. But he wasn’t a major part of the team.”

“
He didn’t really contribute
,” Buller added. “He just came along.”

As the boat finally sped north toward Kayangel, Scannon stared west to where the shallow water of the archipelago plunged into the fullness of the sea. The whole peculiar madness of the journey seemed written upon the landscape—these lost islands, a thousand miles from anywhere, filled with buried treasure and sunken warships and rumors of a president’s crimes. Who cared how much of it was true? He had come to the islands to recharge himself with change, and whatever else he might see or discover, he had already found that. It was everywhere around him, in the gleaming iridescent ocean, the teeming jungle, the screech of wild birds, and the pile of mesh scuba bags strewn across the floor of the boat beside boxes filled with video equipment and the long, torpedo-shaped magnetometer.

After two hours, the boat slowed down and Kayangel came into view, a tiny cluster of four mint-green islets poking through the water’s surface. Bailey dug into his bag for the mission photos. He raised them up against the horizon, squinting as he compared the images with the landscape before him. He turned the photos left, then right, and frowned. The pictures didn’t match. Where they showed a long, continuous arc of coral, the reef before him was mostly flat with a bulging promontory in the middle. The reef could change in fifty years, but not by that much.