And the Sea Will Tell Read Online Free Page A

the parking lot, she pulled out a bottle of yellow pills from her purse. Her doctor had promised they would help. She gulped one tranquilizer and willed it to work quickly.
    Alone in the car, Muff felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather.
     
    “I WAS BASED on Palmyra for almost two years. January ’42 to ’44.” Hal Horton, sipping his cocktail, pointed a beefy finger at the map of the Pacific spread out on the dining-room table and kept talking. “It’s that little speck about a thousand miles south of Hawaii. I swear, it’s like one of those South Pacific movie islands. Right out in the middle of goddamn nowhere. And uninhabited. That is, except for a few ghosts, maybe.”
    The paunchy former Navy officer went on without missing a beat. “Once, one of our patrol planes went down near the island. We searched and searched but didn’t find so much as a bolt or piece of metal. It was weird. Like they’d dropped off the edge of the earth. Another time, a plane took off from the runway, climbed to a couple hundred feet, and turned in the wrong direction. They were supposed to go north and they went south instead. It was broad daylight. We never could figure it out. There were two men aboard that plane. We never saw them again. We had some very bad luck on the island. Old salts in the Pacific called it the Palmyra Curse.”
    Muff winced.
    Hal made another round of drinks at the wet bar.
    Fascinated, Mac flipped through one of his host’s old Navy photo albums. He learned there had been five thousand men and a few nurses stationed on Palmyra during World War II. The island had been a naval air facility, with several PBY seaplanes and a dozen or so SBD dive-bombers based there, primarily for long-range patrol. The single enemy action of the war occurred less than three weeks after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. A lone Japanese submarine surfaced three thousand yards offshore and began firing its deck guns at a dredge operating in the island’s lagoon. A five-inch-gun battery on the island chased off the would-be raider. After that, the Empire of the Rising Sun expressed no interest in the isolated atoll.
    “Pan Am had used it before the war for refueling its Clipper service to Samoa,” Hal went on. “Most of the structures went up after Pearl Harbor, though. We even built a hospital on one end of the island. It was a good location for an emergency airfield, because so many aircraft were heading south out of Hawaii to other island chains. Problem was, Palmyra—with its islets, lagoons, and reefs forming a perfect horseshoe—is very small. You can fly over it at ten thousand feet and not see it if there are a few clouds in the sky. Once we heard a plane overhead trying to find us, but he crashed in the drink before he could find the runway. We didn’t get to the poor guy fast enough. Sharks found him first.”
    “Oh, my God,” Muff said, making eye contact with Marie.
    “This Palmyra doesn’t sound like such a wonderful place to me,” Marie said loyally.
    “How deep is the channel?” Mac asked, ignoring the women.
    “Fifteen feet,” Hal answered. “Plenty big enough for a sailboat. We used to get medium-sized cargo ships inside the lagoon. We built a loading dock for them. The West Lagoon, which is the main lagoon, is over three quarters of a mile long and over a half mile wide.”
    “I bet there’re lots of places to explore,” Mac said with boyish anticipation.
    “Oh, yeah,” Hal agreed. “Machine-gun bunkers, underground tunnels and storage areas—the works. I heard that the Navy left a lot of stuff behind when they pulled up stakes after the war. It was cheaper than shipping it all back. You’d find all kinds of relics, I bet.”
    “Sounds like it’s worth spending some time there,” Mac said.
    “There’s nothing there anymore in the way of docking facilities or usable equipment, I’m sure,” Hal cautioned. “You’ll have to bring everything with you.”
    “Our boat