Vanished by Wil S. Hylton Page B

a moment it seemed to stabilize, but then a slight wobble tipped the right wing too low, snagging on the water’s surface and bowling the whole airframe forward on its nose. A geyser shot up as the wing broke off. Then the fuselage folded and snapped in half. There were five more Zeros bearing down. They tore through the air above the wreckage, spattering it with machine-gun fire.
    Norman felt a drop in his belly as his own plane lifted. They were over the enemy position and their bombardier was beginning to drop the payload. The 250-pound bombs plummeted toward the ground. From the cockpit, Norman could see explosions on the runway below. The first bomb struck the shoulder of an operations area, and the rest walked north toward the taxi loop, where a collection of parked planes dissolved in black smoke.
    Norman felt another surge and now the plane was dropping. The pilot had the controls forward, diving to 5,000 feet, then 3,000, then 1,200, then they were just 250 feet above the water, scooting over the surface in search of the downed plane—but there was no plane, just fragments of wing and landing gear sinking into a yellow stain of foam, while a lone survivor floundered madly in the oily surf. There was a commotion in the back of the 453 as crewmen tossed a life raft through the rear door, but there was nothing else they could do, no way to land or help. They turned the Liberator back toward Los Negros for the journey home.
    Night was falling as Norman climbed down to the white coral runway. He made his way back to camp, disappearing inside his tent. In the morning, he would have to return to the airfield. He would have to return to those islands. He would lead his crew on a mission that he knew they could not yet imagine. They had missed his first day of war, just as he would miss their last.

SIX
    ARNETT

    A
rnett.
Scannon stared at the name. It was the last B-24 on his list, but like the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle, it made the whole project feel incomplete. The more Scannon studied the islands, the more mysterious the Arnett plane seemed.
    For one thing, it was the only one for which he had no pictures. According to the mission report, there had been six aerial photographers flying on other planes that day. Their job was to document bomb strikes, but during the Dixon and Custer crashes they turned their cameras to record the planes going down. In fact, some of same photographers who shot the Dixon crash had been on the Arnett mission three days later. So why did they photograph the first crash and not the second?
    It was also curious that the mission documents placed the Arnett wreckage between Koror and Babeldaob. Now that Scannon was morefamiliar with the islands, he knew how improbable that was. The narrow channel, Toachel Mid, was not just any passage. It cut between the two primary islands in the chain and served as one of the busiest throughways of the archipelago. Hundreds of boats passed through Toachel Mid on any given day, and it was striking that, over half a century of regular traffic, no one had ever caught a glimpse of the Arnett wreckage, and no stray line had ever snagged it, and no fisherman’s sonar pinged it.
    Other aspects of the report were equally bewildering. The witness statements were only a few words long, and they made no effort to describe the crash in detail. Staring at the fifty-word summaries, it was tempting to read between the lines for clues, but Scannon had seen firsthand on the Bush trawler how dangerous that could be—how easy it was to imagine hidden meanings that weren’t there. The men who wrote those wartime reports had done the best they could, but with the benefit of time and distance it was clear how much they’d left out. Scannon would never forget that the Bush report listed the wrong atoll, and he knew that if he wanted to find Arnett it wouldn’t be enough to keep searching the same old documents for details. He needed new documents, new information, and new