Night Moves (Doc Ford)

2




I WOULD NOT HAVE WASTED A MINUTE SEARCHING for the iconic Flight 19, let alone a day flying around Florida, if Dan Futch hadn’t asked me to get involved. Dan comes from Old Florida waterman stock, a fourth-generation fishing guide, when he’s not flying charters, and he’s as solid and smart as they come.

It didn’t matter that Futch had convinced me there was a statistical chance the torpedo bombers had disappeared in the Gulf or the Everglades, not in the Atlantic as most believed. It didn’t matter that out of all the so-called experts on Flight 19, few had done enough original research to be credible. And those few, with rare exception, agreed that there were so many variables, so few facts, that it was impossible to reach an unimpeachable conclusion about the fate of those five planes.

I joined the hunt because Dan is Dan Futch. True, he’d helped me land a controversial tarpon project in nearby Boca Grande Pass, so I owed him a favor. But he is also among the most competent men I know—a quality that runs in his family.

Between Orlando and Key West, the name Futch has the ring of blue-collar royalty. It is a family that has earned, over the decades, the instant respect accorded by those who appreciate boats, gutsiness, mechanical savvy, and saltwater. Since the 1800s, the family has been associated with the banyan-shaded village of Boca Grande on Gasparilla Island, forty miles south of Sarasota. World’s Tarpon Capital, as the village is known. But generations of Futches have excelled as fishing guides, boatbuilders, and hardworking innovators throughout the state. The reputation of the patriarch grandfather, Daniel Webster Futch, remains near mythic, even years after his death, and the man’s exploits as a rum smuggler and tough-guy fisherman are still a favorite topic around the docks. Dan, the legend’s namesake, is Futch to the bone, from his horn-rimmed glasses to his big-shouldered appetite for life.

A month ago, Futch had landed his seaplane in Dinkin’s Bay and appeared in the doorway of my laboratory carrying a briefcase. I assumed it had something to do with the tarpon study I had recently completed. Wrong. Nor was it a purely social call, but that was okay. We’ve been friends for years, and he has arrived carrying all sorts of odd objects—from a small brass cannon he had salvaged to a hydraulic oyster shucker—but a leather briefcase was unexpected.

“Take a look at this, Doc,” he’d said, unbuckling the hasps. “One of my nephews found it snorkeling. What do you think?”

I’d been making notes on a gravid stingray penned outside because the animal was too big for the aquaria that line the walls of my lab. But I stopped what I was doing and said, “What’d you find this time?”

On the marble top of the chemical station, Futch placed a triad of levers affixed to a metal plate. Beneath a patina of barnacles, the levers were forged of brass and stainless, still solid but frozen by corrosion. On the plate was die-stamped MIXTURE in military block letters. Enough barnacles had been sanded away that I could also read AUTO LEAN/AUTO RICH/FULL RICH on a tracking rim that guided the levers. In what might have been yellow paint, remnants of numbers were barely visible along the aft edge of the plate. Serial numbers? Possibly. The apparatus had the weight and feel of something that had been precisely machined, engineered to meet demanding specs and tolerances.

“You want those numbers checked under a microscope?” I’d asked. “It won’t fit, but I can drop the viewing tray, or maybe we can rig something. At lowest power, we might get more detail. It’s from the controls of an old airplane, right?”

What Dan’s nephew had found was the throttle assembly from a World War II torpedo bomber, an Avenger. The Avenger, as Dan would explain, was the largest single-engine warplane of that era. The ship carried a crew of three—pilot, radioman, and gunner—plus a single thousand-pound torpedo, along with a lot of clunky radio equipment that today would have been distilled into something the size of an iPod. The plane had a thirty-yard wingspan, a range of a thousand miles, and cruised at one hundred forty knots, or about one hundred sixty mph. Fully fueled, even carrying a payload, the plane could stay aloft at cruising speed for six hours or more.

“That’s key to what makes this interesting,” Dan had told me. “Six hours of flight time and a range of a thousand miles. Remember that—it’ll help you keep an open mind.”

The comment piqued my curiosity, yet I failed to make the connection with the fabled Flight 19. No reason I should. Why would Futch be interested in a bomber squadron that, according to who you listened to, had either been abducted by aliens or disappeared into a time warp? For him, it would have been as out of character as expressing an interest in aromatherapy or vampires.

Twenty minutes later, I looked up from my Wolfe Stereomicroscope and said to him, “I’m sure of three numbers—the second, fourth, and fifth. The next number might be a one, or a seven . . . or a letter. But that’s unlikely, knowing the military. The rest of the paint is too far gone. There are some high-tech methods of recovery, but that’s the best I can do.”

I wrote the numbers on a yellow legal pad and slid it in front of Futch, who had been arranging research material and photos of Avengers on my stainless steel dissecting table. He looked at the pad, cleaned his glasses, then opened a book to do a comparison. The book, I noticed, was They Flew Into Oblivion, by someone with the unlikely name of Gian J. Quasar. Minutes later, a slow smile told me Futch liked what he’d found.

“It’s a stretch, but these could be serial numbers . . . and they might match up,” he said. “Not with Taylor’s plane . . . but maybe one of the five.” He spun the open book around. “Take a look.”

That was my first serious introduction to Flight 19’s flight instructor, Lt. Charles C. Taylor, and the few verified facts regarding five missing warplanes and a crew of fourteen men. Futch had done so much research that he could have recited the data verbatim, but he’s not the sort to lecture. Instead, he had handed me his own written summary and offered comments as I read.

On 5 December 1945, 2:10 p.m., five TBF-1 Avengers left Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station on a training flight known as Navigation Problem #1.

Their orders: Fly east (91°) for 141 statute miles. Turn northeast (346°) and fly 84 statute miles. Turn southwest (241°) and return to Lauderdale 140 statute miles away.

All aircraft had been checked in preflight and were fully fueled per operational procedure. Weather was reported as “Clear.” Wind 15-20 knots out of the southwest. A “perfect” day for flying, one report noted.

The route was to have covered 365 statute miles in approximately two hours and fifteen minutes. But the squadron never returned. No trace of the crew or planes was ever found despite the largest land-and-sea search in the nation’s history . . .

I had looked up from my reading long enough to reassure myself by saying, “You’re too smart to believe in the Bermuda Triangle thing. What happened to those men might be a mystery. But there’s nothing mysterious about planes or ships disappearing at sea, which no one knows better than—”

“You’re preaching to the choir,” Futch had interrupted. “Even in shallow water, there’s nothing harder than finding a small chunk of anything in a big chunk of ocean. Doc, the only reason those planes haven’t been found is because no one’s found them. Sounds simpleminded, I know, but there you go. At least, no one realizes they found them.”

The emphasis implied an interesting possibility. Modern fishermen use electronics to scan the ocean’s bottom for what they call “structure.” It is a generic term that applies to any rock, hole, ledge, or three-dimensional object that provides shelter and prey for fish. Fishermen don’t much care what constitutes the structure, and the locations are kept secret, always logged by precise GPS coordinates. These coordinates are known as numbers.

Every offshore fisherman accumulates a list of known structures, and those numbers are hard currency in fishing circles. Numbers are jealously guarded, although sometimes traded and occasionally sold. The lucky few who stumble onto an undiscovered piece of structure, however, keep their mouths shut. They trust no one. The smart ones use all sorts of trickery to disguise their true destination when they head offshore. Rather than be seen fishing a new number, the smart ones will drift the site, engine cowling open as if they’ve broken down. A virgin chunk of structure is a fishing gold mine to its discoverer—and also its claim jumpers.

“I see what you’re getting at,” I said. “Particularly over the last ten years. Digital sonar is a dozen times better than the old white-line recorders, and GPS is more accurate than ever. Could be that one, maybe all five Avengers have been found, but no one’s bothered to dive the numbers and see what’s down there. That’s what you’re thinking?”

“The odds are even better if they went down in less than two or three hundred feet of water,” he’d responded. “Back in the seventies, when Mel Fisher’s bunch finally found the Atocha, divers had to dodge all sorts of fishhooks and lures snagged on stacks of silver bars. Wouldn’t be the first time an important wreck has been found but not identified.”

I nodded, familiar with the story. I told Dan I’d had a similar experience a few years back when Tomlinson and I formed a little salvage company to recover the manifest of a wreck we’d found off Sanibel Island. Anglers had been working the spot for years—lots of broken leaders and hooks—but we were the first to actually see what was on the bottom.

“It’s kind of funny when you picture it,” Futch had observed. “Some poor fisherman cussing his bad luck, pissed off ’cause he’s lost a three-dollar lure, not a clue in the world he’s just snagged a fortune in Spanish treasure. Whole time, it was right there under his feet.” Futch had paused, anticipating my reaction to what he said next. “But that’s only if the planes ditched at sea. Which has never been proven.”

It was a pet theory of his, I could tell. So I motioned to the throttle plate. “But you said your nephew found this thing snorkeling. Even if he was close to land, it couldn’t have been that deep. How much water?”

What I wanted to ask was where the throttle had been found. But such a question is a breach of protocol in every branch of saltwater discipline: fishing, diving, and salvage recovery. So I tried to narrow it some by adding, “The planes ditched in the Atlantic, from everything I’ve heard. Even Palm Beach, where the Gulf Stream sweeps in close, it still had to be within a few miles offshore.”

Futch was smiling—he knew I was getting into it. “The Atlantic is another ‘fact’ that’s never been proven. Keep reading. I’ve got a box of Pine Island grapefruit promised to the ladies aboard Tiger Lilly. And a bag of stuff your sister wanted from the Bahamas. I’ll be back in fifteen and tell you what’s on my mind.”

I don’t have a sister. The man was referring to my cousin, Ransom Gatrell, who introduces me as her brother because I’m her closest blood relative. The woman is quirky, wonderful, and sometimes tricky. Rather than correcting him, I’d offered good advice. “Don’t let Ransom talk you into anything stupid. What’d she make you sneak through customs this time?”

Futch dismissed the question by motioning to the stack of research. “I tried to separate confirmed facts from the bullshit and then summarize—all numbers in civilianspeak so it would be easier to share. Read through it and see what you think. Oh, there’s one more thing”—he paused in the doorway—“there was no moon that night. You’ll understand what I mean. And military logs confirm the planes all left Lauderdale with a full load of fuel.”

My curiosity spiked.

So I read, skimming through bios of the fourteen dead airmen, then a weather report out of Miami dated 12-5-47 that suggested flying conditions were not ideal as commonly believed. On that long-gone day, there were scattered squalls along the coast, some generating winds in excess of fifty knots, with clouds that limited ground visibility to less than a thousand feet. Worse, after sunset—which was at 5:36 p.m.—a massive cold front was expected from the northeast. Instead of ideal conditions, the fourteen aviators had, presumably, been aloft when a meteorological collision had occurred: a high-pressure mass met a low-pressure phalanx of thunderstorms.

I leafed through two pages of diagrams, several maps, then began to read more carefully.

The first indication the squadron was in trouble came ninety minutes after takeoff, 3:40 p.m. A senior flight instructor in an unassociated aircraft intercepted a radio exchange that suggested Flight 19’s pilots were confused about their location and their heading. The senior instructor reported hearing the following from one or more of the squadron’s pilots: “I don’t know where we are . . . We must have gotten lost after that last turn . . . Anyone have suggestions . . . ? What’s your compass heading?”

After several attempts, the senior officer made brief contact with the squadron’s flight instructor, Lt. Charles Taylor. Reception was poor, often garbled, but the senior instructor reported Taylor as saying, “Both of my compasses are out. I’m sure I’m over the Florida Keys, but I don’t know how far down. And I don’t know how to get to Lauderdale.”

According to logbooks, the instructor told Taylor, “Put the sun on your port wing and fly north until you see Miami”—good advice IF the squadron was over the Keys.

Later, investigators would conclude that Taylor had badly misjudged his location. How could five planes have gone so far south when their mission consisted of a route that took them due east, then northwest, then southwest? Investigators were quick to dismiss the possibility, even though Taylor had served as flight instructor in Miami and Key West during the previous nine months and had logged nearly two hundred hours flying over Florida Bay and the Keys.

The search efforts that December night would only compound the tragedy when a long-range Martin Mariner, a “flying boat,” was launched and exploded in midair, killing its crew of thirteen volunteers.

Half an hour later, when Futch returned to the lab, I looked up from my second pass through his summary to say, “You believe Taylor’s version, don’t you? You think he was right about being over Florida Bay, not the Bahamas. That’s what this is all about.”

Straddling a lab stool, Dan gave it some thought before replying. “I’m not convinced of anything. But I find it damn interesting that a seasoned flight instructor who’d spent nine months flying the Keys would say, ‘I’m sure I’m over the Florida Keys,’ unless he was sure. But that’s just one piece of a mixed-up puzzle. There’s been so much misinformation printed about what happened that day and night—including the military’s official six-hundred-page report. And dozens of bullshit magazine stories and ‘documentaries’ that include outright lies. Hell, one of those so-called writers even claimed to have piloted a sixth Avenger on Taylor’s flight but survived. Which is total fantasy, but it’s still repeated today.”

“All because your nephew found this.” I touched the throttle assembly. “Or were you already interested?”

“It lit a fire under me, but that’s not the reason. I’m a pilot. I don’t know how many hundreds of times I’ve flown that Lauderdale–Bahamas route. And there wasn’t a single trip I didn’t think about those fourteen guys—plus the thirteen others who died trying to save them. They all volunteered for what they knew was hazardous duty. Men like that deserve to be found—don’t you think?”

I couldn’t disagree. So I listened to Futch explain that for the last ten years he’d been trying to piece the real story together. Not working on it full-time, of course. He was too busy fishing Boca Grande Pass during tarpon season and flying charter clients all over the Caribbean the rest of the year.

“It’s more of an occasional hobby. Doc, you’d be surprised how many men who served at Lauderdale Naval Air Station during the second war ended up retiring to Florida. Some who flew Avengers on that exact same training route never had the first problem. Even a few who were actually there the day Flight 19 disappeared.

“I’m lucky. I fly clients all over the state. When I get the chance, I visit these old pilots in person—a couple times, it was only a few months before they died. I’d look at their scrapbooks and listen to their stories.” Futch grinned. “My god, it’s fun listening to an eighty-year-old guy who used to be a hotshit Avenger jock get all fired up over some of the crap that’s been written about Flight 19. Most of ’em believe government investigators were more interested in placing blame than in nailing down what actually happened that night. So they’re eager to help once they know I’m a pilot.

“One thing they’re all convinced of, Doc, is those fourteen sailors and Marines were competent men. They weren’t a bunch of screwup rookies, like some accounts say. Several were combat veterans from the Pacific war. Some highly decorated heroes, the flight instructor included—despite some of the bullshit that’s been written about Charles Taylor. They didn’t fly into a time warp, and they weren’t the victims of some shady government conspiracy. The men I’ve talked to are convinced their squadron mates got so damn lost, so turned around in a storm, they didn’t have a clue where they were. Didn’t even know if they were over land or water. You saw the time line I made of radio transmissions?”

I had. Once the pilots were lost, they began a series of course changes, desperately searching for mainland Florida. Even after sunset, they continued to zigzag their way into oblivion—thus the title of Gian Quasar’s book.

Futch said, “It was a black night. A storm ceiling of less than a thousand feet, in planes that had primitive electronics compared to today. No landing lights, no gyro compasses—that’s a key detail—and very limited radio range. At a time when Florida was one of the most sparsely populated states in the union.”

“No gated communities,” I offered. “No bright lights from shopping malls and football stadiums.”

“Between Palm Beach and Jacksonville, not many ground ranges to fix on,” Dan agreed. “And if they turned inland? Even Orlando was just citrus and cattle. Hardly any lights at all, coast to coast. I mentioned no gyro compasses? I’ve flown those old warplanes at air shows. Make a sharp bank and the compass spins like a damn top. Even after you level off, they’re squirrelly as hell. Which is just one reason our air bases lost fifteen thousand guys to training missions. You believe that?”

I said, “That can’t be true.”

It was. “In only five years,” Futch continued, “there were more than seven thousand plane crashes on U.S. soil! I had no idea ’till I did the research—most of those guys never even got a chance to face the damn enemy! Hell, the Gulf and Atlantic are littered with wreckage from old Avengers, B-52s, Mustangs—the whole list. People today don’t realize that, to be a fighter jock back then, you’d better have balls of brass and nerves of steel.”

Futch named some of the steely men he’d interviewed—several were important players in the Fort Lauderdale Avenger squadron. Then he’d methodically listed a couple of facts that, although historically accurate, only made the story more inexplicable.

At 5:30 p.m. on that December day, land-based radar stations, unable to pinpoint the squadron’s location, triangulated a probable location as a hundred fifty miles north of Lauderdale and forty miles out to sea. This information was not passed on to the lost pilots because of poor radio reception, or human oversight.

At 6:20 p.m.—nearly an hour after sunset—Air Station Lauderdale logged its last transmission from Flight 19. Lt. Taylor was heard radioing his squadron, “Close in tight, we’ll have to ditch unless landfall. When the first plane drops below ten gallons, we’ll all go down together.”

Automatically, my brain did the math. The Avengers had taken off at 2:10 p.m. They’d gotten lost. At 6:20 p.m., when the flight instructor’s last transmission was intercepted, the planes should have had almost two hours of fuel left. At 160 mph, even one hour in the air was a substantial amount of time. Where the hell had those fourteen fliers ended up?

There was another fact that Futch found perplexing.

“Three weeks after the Avengers went missing, the brother of one of the crewmen received this. You figure it out.”

Futch had placed a photo of a yellowed Western Union telegram in front on me. The typeface was faded but legible:

Jacksonville Flo Dec 26 10:15 am

Cpl Joseph Paonessa

Marine Barracks 6th and Eye St. Southeast

YOU HAVE BEEN MISINFORMED ABOUT ME. AM VERY MUCH ALIVE. GEORGIE



Before I could ask, Futch explained. “George Paonessa was a radioman aboard one of the lost Avengers. His brother, Joe, was stationed at Jacksonville Marine Base the day that telegram arrived. That’s a verified fact, by the way, not fantasy. Something else: only the family called George ‘Georgie.’ And Paonessa’s father and mother both said that no one knew that nickname outside the family. Some say until the day she died Mrs. Paonessa was convinced that George sent that telegram.”

If Futch expected me to be mystified, he was bound for disappointment. I’d told him, “When a disappearance makes headlines, the kooks and cranks come out of the woodwork. The telegram’s a hoax or a cruel joke. Georgie is the common, familiar form of the name, so someone made an obvious guess.” Looking through the north window, I paused. Puttering toward my stilthouse was Tomlinson in an inflatable dinghy, his sailboat, No Más, floating pale gray at anchor just beyond. He was shirtless, a bottle of beer in his free hand, and wearing a monkish-looking hat he’d woven from palm fronds.

“A very sick joke,” Futch agreed. “It hits home, though, because I’ve been checking the source code. You’re going to like it.” His tone became confidential as he tapped the paper in front of me. “There’s a chance this telegram was sent from here. Not Sanibel, but just across the bridge. The old telegraph office is still there, even after they built the condos. You know the place—that little yellow shed off to the left when you leave the island? It was one of the few Western Union stations between Key West and Tampa. No wireless in those days. Everything had to be hardwired.”

He was talking about tiny Punta Rassa, just across the bay. Today the spot is adjoined to the Sanibel Causeway, plus a cluster of high-rises and a resort hotel. For two centuries, the village had been the primary cattle port between Cuba and Florida. When the battleship Maine was sunk in Havana Harbor, the first distress message was sent to Punta Rassa, not Key West or Miami. Now Punta Rassa isn’t even shown on most maps.

I told Futch, “There’s someone coming who’ll appreciate this telegram a lot more than me.”

A few minutes later, Tomlinson was drinking my last beer while he listened to Futch retell his story. It was no surprise that he—a devotee of the paranormal—loved the connection between a local one-room telegraph station and Flight 19. So the three of us had spent the afternoon discussing details, probabilities and possibilities. Before leaving, Futch loaned us his dog-eared copy of They Flew Into Oblivion, assuring us it was the most carefully researched book on the subject.

“You’ve got the salvage gear and the experience. I know planes,” Futch told us. “If you’re interested, it’s something we can work on independently. You know, get together when there’s a reason. Start by talking to fishing buddies, the ones willing to trust us with their private GPS numbers. Chart the unidentified pieces of structure out there and match the locations with Army Air Corps logs. In the meantime, when the water clears up, we’ll dive the place where my nephew found this.” Futch tapped the briefcase where he’d stowed the throttle mechanism.

Finally, I asked the obvious question, but in the most general of ways. “I assume he found it in the Gulf, not the Atlantic. But was it north of here or south?”

My shotgun tactfulness amused Futch. “If I didn’t trust you, I wouldn’t be here. My nephew found the throttle in a mangrove creek south of Marco Island. Hawksbill Creek, it’s called on the charts. There’re a couple of Indian mounds way back in. And something else I’m going to trust you with—is that okay?”

Tomlinson nodded while I waited.

“Near the mounds there’s a marl flat there I call the Bone Field. Human bones. They’re scattered all over the place, stuck in the roots of trees, sticking right out of the mud. My daddy and I found it too many years ago to remember. We always figured it was an Indian burial ground, so we didn’t report it. Now I’m not so sure.”

I’ve known Tomlinson a long, long time, but I’d never seen his eyes glow a brighter shade of turquoise than when he heard the words Bone Field.

Futch added, “Tell you what. We’ll keep a close watch on weather around Lauderdale. Next time it’s similar to the night those Avengers went missing, we’ll hop in my plane and fly the area. I’ve got a theory about what happened to those pilots. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve flown a thirty-knot tailwind east to Lauderdale. Then, on the return trip, I climbed a couple thousand feet to catch a northeast tailwind home. Best way to convince you is show you.”

“You did this on the same day?” I’d asked.

“Same afternoon. Couple years ago, in the worst kind of weather, I gained sixty knots of airspeed riding one of those northeast storms home. Wind on the ground was southwest, but, man, I was like a rocket ship going the opposite direction. If it wasn’t for my GPS, I’d have been fifty miles out in the Gulf when I dropped down through the clouds instead of over Boca Grande.” The pilot’s smile asked See how easily it could happen?

Which is why the night before something went BANG! in the tail section of his plane Dan Futch had bunked on the porch outside my lab. The skies over Sanibel Island were flawless, but NOAA Weather Service was predicting a near repeat of December 5, 1945: next-day squalls along the Atlantic Coast; southwest winds expected to turn by afternoon and blow heavy from the northeast.

“I didn’t expect this kind of luck until hurricane season. Maybe even as late as November,” Futch remarked that morning as we buckled ourselves into his little Maule floatplane.

The man was right, in a way. Dying in an Everglades plane crash was unexpected luck, indeed.