Night Moves (Doc Ford)

31




WHEN TOMLINSON AND I TIED UP AT TIN CITY MARINA, downtown Naples, Dan Futch and the Brazilian were waiting with the taxi they’d hired, a Mercedes Sprinter van that, the driver said, usually only shuttled between hotels and Southwest Regional, so it was up to us or his Garmin to find Faith Village Hospice.

“Never heard of the place,” he said.

“Only ten minutes from here,” Dan assured us, then we sat in the back, talking in low voices, while the driver turned left onto Fifth Avenue and took us north, past all the pretty shops, then turned right onto Goodlette, a faster six-lane, the sky behind us mixing winter gray with sunset rust—6:25 p.m. Just in time to catch Mr. Angel Sampedro, ninety-one years old, before modern medicine funneled him one night closer toward his everlasting sleep.

Or maybe not from the subdued moods of the two pilots among us.

“Candice is worried because of the way Mr. Sampedro reacted,” Dan said. “We haven’t seen him, of course, but the monitors he’s hooked up to, I guess the nurses came running because they thought he was having a heart attack.”

“The granddaughter,” Tomlinson said, “she showed him the photos?”

“No,” Dan said. “But she told him what we found. I didn’t want to blindside the old guy. Shit, I don’t know . . . just got too much respect for what he did, okay? The old need-to-know-basis guys. Doesn’t matter the age, the training’s still there, and I can’t mislead a man like that.”

The photos we’d taken were not yet printed, but they were on Futch’s laptop: the tail fin of an Avenger, enough moss and mud cleaned away to show a number the old pilot would have recognized: a big white 11 stenciled portside on the tail, a 3 aft on the starboard side: Fort Lauderdale Torpedo Bomber 113. The same aircraft the man had posed with seventy years earlier.

For us, the discovery had been a disappointment, at first, but we’d rallied. We hadn’t found remnants of the iconic Flight 19, true. But what we’d found had played a role in the life of a man we hoped to meet.

Now even that seemed in jeopardy.

“We’ve got to play it by ear,” Dan continued. “It’s all up to Candice and the doctors—and Mr. Sampedro, of course. If they do let us in, we have twenty minutes, no more. Oh—something else. We aren’t allowed to record what he says, no photos either. Especially no photos. Not even notes. That comes from Mr. Sampedro himself, so nothing tricky, okay?”

For some reason Dan looked at Diemer when he said it. The Brazilian’s reaction was typically aloof. “He’s dying—a man of ninety years. What could it possibly matter what he tells us? Or even a few photos?”

Tomlinson and Diemer had spent the last two days treating each other with congenial indifference, but my pal now leveled a hard look at the man. “There are people who believe photographs snip away pieces of their spirit.”

Diemer countered, “Perhaps you’ve forgotten the photos of Lieutenant Sampedro as a young man.”

“People change—takes a while to figure out who they really are. It’s an individual choice, man. Doesn’t matter a man’s age. His spirit’s still in there, so we’ve got to respect that.”

The Brazilian muttered, “Silly superstition,” which Tomlinson talked over, saying, “It might help if I write the old gentleman a note. Let the granddaughter or a nurse take it in first. If he reads it and trusts us, then it’s his decision.” He looked around. “Any objections?”

Last night, by firelight, Tomlinson had played catch-up by going through photos he had yet to see, the old scalloped Kodaks of a young Lieutenant Angel Sampedro and his fellow aviators. Unlike me—Dan, too, probably—he had also plumbed the depths of the Sampedro family scrapbook, Christmas parties, dried flowers and all, often smiling at some fragment of the clan’s history. Obviously, he had felt a connection—but didn’t he always? I didn’t mind him sending a note, nor did Dan, but the Brazilian couldn’t resist commenting when Tomlinson folded the paper after only a second or two, pen in hand.

“So few words?” Diemer asked, amused. “Such eloquence!”

“Only two words,” Tomlinson replied, flicking a look at me. “We don’t want the old guy to kick off before he’s finished reading. Right?”

—

NOW WE WERE with the aviator, the four of us, sitting or standing next to a bed that cradled the remnants of what had been a decorated Avenger pilot, a cocky flyweight Latino in the old photos, his combat-ready smile replaced by translucent lips and a tremor.

“Is . . . she . . . gone?”

Tubes in his nose, needles taped to onionskin forearms, gray veins beneath, Mr. Sampedro had ordered his nurse, then his granddaughter, from the room—a surprise to all. There had been no debate because he had issued the orders by refueling his lungs with a breath after each word or two. Decades of Camels—a lethal war wound shared by his generation—had left the man only one other option: a voice synthesizer that vocalized his two-fingered typing. Sampedro, a proud man, had yet to risk humiliating himself.

“We brought pictures, sir. Would you like to see a few? The tail off an Avenger we uncovered yesterday. Torpedo bomber”—Dan hesitated—“well, like your granddaughter said, the ship was out of Lauderdale. The tail section is from a ship you might remember: Avenger number 113.”

Yes, the old man had been told, but Dan’s offer still caused one skeletal fist to clench while eyelids slammed tight—a reaction of sudden pain. But then Sampedro gathered himself, tapped the bed, and said, “Put . . . here. Glasses . . . damn things. Need ’em to see.”

I fetched his reading glasses from a table that held flowers in a vase, a few get well cards, and Tomlinson’s note, still folded. Maybe the message had done the trick, but I doubted it. Angel Sampedro, even near death, was determined to find out what we’d found—the man’s last chance for an update from his old training squadron. Candice, the granddaughter, was the reluctant one, but 1st Lieutenant Sampedro, U.S. Navy, would not be bullied. So here we were, the old man’s hands shaking while Tomlinson helped get him situated, then Sampedro tugged the laptop closer, his way of demanding privacy while he leafed through the images we’d shot. One by one, the photos were mirrored by his thick bifocals.

Tomlinson, Dan, Diemer, and I also, one by one, pretended not to notice when the aviator’s eyes flooded and a tear traced a glycerin path to his jaw. I studied a painting on the wall from the 1930s I recognized—South Moon Under by Eugene Savage. Tomlinson chewed at his hair while throats were cleared.

Peeved by our transparency or irritated with himself, the man sniffed and found the breath to tell us, “Dumb . . . punks. Allergies. Stinkin’ . . . flowers,” then glared at the vase on the table.

A joke, Dan was the first to realize, and we all laughed too hard, but a barrier had been broken. A slow dialogue then began, only the three pilots involved, so Tomlinson and I melted into the background and listened to Dan, a Southern gentleman in the presence of his superior, and Vargas Diemer, the military historian, make the best of what remained of our twenty minutes.

“Is this the tail section from your ship, sir? We saw an old photo, and Candice told us you’d had a training accident.”

Bifocals mirroring photos that were bringing it all back, Sampedro shook his head. “One thirteen. My wingman’s ship. Unlucky . . . we told him.”

“His wingman’s plane, that’s what we found,” Dan translated. He was getting excited but waited for the aviator to finish:

“His name . . . Coach . . . Coachie . . . Oxendine and . . . his gunner. Coachie flew 113. Just him and . . . one crewman.”

I wasn’t following. Tomlinson stiffened, equally confused but alerted by something, yet the Brazilian understood. “Fighter pilots all went by nicknames,” he explained to us, then asked, “Lieutenant Sampedro”—Diemer rolled his r but without the aristocratic bullshit—“what caused Avenger 113’s crash? We found it listed in Army Air Corps records but absolutely no details. Another ship went down that day, too, neither ever found—”

“Night!” the old man interrupted, the word barked like a cough. “Storm . . . viz-a-bility zero! Hundred feet . . . shit . . shit soup. Out of . . . out of . . .” He tried to sit up but then lay back, his breathing labored. “Out of nowhere, that storm. Lost . . . we were all . . . lost.”

Concerned, Dan knelt by the bed and said, “Five planes in your group and two went down. Definitely one hell of a storm, sir. But, listen, we don’t need to hear all the details now. We’d love to come back. Tomorrow, anytime. Name the day and we’ll—”

Sampedro cut him off with a shake of the head. “Two ships . . . two—not five. Special . . . training mission. Just me and Dakota—my radioman, gunner. Coachie flying wing with . . . his guy, Harley.” Frustrated, out of air, the man’s eyes closed, then flickered open. He lay there for several seconds, alone in his head, then sighed and chose Tomlinson to demand, “Hand me that damn thing!”

A plastic keyboard, oversized letters, that worked the voice synthesizer, an unseen speaker close enough to create the illusion that Angel Sampedro was a ventriloquist when he straightened his glasses and began drumming two index fingers on the keys:

Hate this gaddamn thing cant spell or type worth shit awful to get old jest you wait You two boys really pilots what you fly?

A digital voice tweaked to the pitch of a healthy male robot, so exactingly phonetic that misspellings became idiomatic—a clever program designed to make the terminally ill sound damn-near human.

The Brazilian looked at Dan, both men surprised less by the question than this unexpected chance to communicate without sapping the life from the aviator’s lungs.

“Fifteen minutes,” I reminded Dan, who got right to it, telling Sampedro, “Civilian pilots, sir. This gentleman’s big-time—” Diemer, he was talking about. “Swissair. Me, mostly seaplanes. I flew a Mustang once at an air show. My god, you pilots back then, there wasn’t room in the cockpit for balls the size of yours.”

Sampedro liked that. Squinted at the keyboard and said, “Tell nurse box ’em up. If she finds ’em.” Gave Diemer a sharp look, then began an ironic exchange: “From Swit-zer-land?”

“No, Lieutenant.”

“Good. Cowardly shits.”

“My grandfather was Luftwaffe. Flew Junkers, then Messerschmitts.” Which made it okay for Diemer to squat near the old man and point at a photo. “This is from your wingman’s ship. You must have been flying the other Avenger. Torpedo Bomber 54? Tell us what happened, perhaps we can find the remains of your ship, too.”

Sampedro swallowed, his mind drifting again. There was a reason he had never told his family what had happened that night—guilt, I suspected. Or something so scarring he refused to relive it. Share details now or take the truth to his grave? That was the decision the man was wrestling with—a decision he seemed to postpone by typing. “You have chart? Show where found Coachie’s ship. No deal unless show me.” Looked up at Diemer and Futch—a fierce look—then his synthesized voice explained, “Mission classified!”

“Uhhh, sure. Understood, sir.” Dan began unrolling charts he’d brought along with his briefcase. Selected one of the largest—Captiva to Cape Sable—and enlisted Tomlinson and me to hold it open for the man to see. “You recognize the area, sir? It’s changed a lot—”

Sampedro rasped, “Point to spot!” using his own voice, head off the pillow now, excited by the shapes of islands he had once viewed from his own aircraft. Then reached out a pale hand. “Near Estero Bay . . . has to be. Damn it, I . . . told them!”

Dan didn’t respond for a moment, then said, “No, sir. We found the wreckage way to the south.”

The aviator grimaced, not wanting to believe it, but listened while the younger pilot touched a finger near the top of the chart and worked his way down, saying, “Sanibel . . . Estero Island, Bonita Springs, and we’re here, Naples. But we found the tail section and some other wreckage all here—about twenty-five miles southeast. A little place called Hawksbill Creek.”

The expression of dismay on the old man’s face communicated disappointment, pain, loss. His head fell back on the pillow. “Can’t be. No! Was . . . so sure.”

I was ready to ring for the nurse—the old guy had been through enough. But Tomlinson took charge by sitting on the bed, patting the man’s leg. “We can come back another day—if you want us. But there’s something you should know before we split.”

The man lay staring at the ceiling. “So damn sure,” he said again. Sniffed, blinked, tired of something, then stole a glance at the note on the table and asked, “How did . . . you know?’

“Your wife’s scrapbooks,” Tomlinson replied, “and your nicknames, I found a list,” which confused everyone in the room, but not Angel Sampedro, who simply nodded while my pal added, “Pawn Man, that’s what your crew called you.”

“Pawny,” the man smiled, thinking back.

Tomlinson gave me a look that meant something. “Yeah—makes even more sense. Trust me on this, Mr. Sampedro, we haven’t told anybody anything yet. Use the keyboard, save your air. As far as we’re concerned, unless you tell us different, what you say will stay in this room.”

Tomlinson had no right to make such a promise, although it contained a kernel of truth: sitting around the breakfast fire that morning, the four of us had agreed to protect the Bone Field and shell pyramid until we had settled on which experts to contact. The tiny amount of wreckage we’d found—so far, anyway—didn’t justify revealing the location of a place that resonated with the weight of history, an archaic nucleus that would attract every artifact hunter and Flight 19 kook within Internet range.

The old man had no reason to believe Tomlinson. My impression was that it didn’t matter. Sampedro had lived with some secret he had carried for too many years. He was dying. We were his last contact with aviators he had once known, with the man he had once been, and it was time to cut the secret free. He reached for the keyboard and began typing, allowing a computer chip to speak to us from a long-gone night in February 1944.

—

“MY FAULT, NAVIGATION SNAFU. Killed three buddies, you sure about location?”

Our expressions confirmed the truth, so the digitized voice continued, “Board of inquiry right, then. Sent me South Pacific not as pilot, kept wings but reassigned. Thought Japs would kill me on Saipan, second marines ground unit, wish they had. Never told my son or family, not Candice. Ashamed.” The old aviator shut his eyes, no way to joke about the tears now.

Dan said softly, “You won the Bronze Star, a Purple Heart. You’re a hero, sir. My god, a fighter pilot on the ground!”

“Killed my buddies. Lost my ship.” His eyes frantic, Sampedro looked at a photo of the tail section, 113, then typed, “Not worst of it. Classified. All cause that damn storm.”

A training exercise that had gone wrong, is what he meant, then let the keyboard explain in phrases that had the ring of confession:

Two Avengers, training for a special mission, had left Lauderdale an hour after sunset, each carrying only two men, not three. Sampedro flying FT-54, his radioman and gunner, nicknamed Dakota, sitting aft beneath a glass bubble, no contact between the two but for the intercom. Flying wing to wing with Torpedo Bomber 113, they had crossed the Everglades, bound for a target they had mock-bombed almost nightly, three weeks straight. Details were etched by rote into the old man’s mind: 98 nautical miles from Lauderdale, course 263 degrees.

The voice synthesizer explained to us, “Off Key Marco, feds had anchored three, four barges size of a battleship. No lights, shit, you imagine? Coachie Oxendine, me, Dakota, his radioman, Harley—like the motorcycle. All my friends special picked. Private quarters like kings, best chow. Fly nights, sleep days. Damn best at what we did, that’s why, and scheduled to fly Pearl late June. Then Guam in July. Special mission, didn’t know what. Feds in charge, all hush-hush.”

The digital voice paused, which gave Diemer the opportunity to tell us, “Mid-July, Guam. The Americans—you—were assembling the bomb.”

There are many ways to say that word, but the atomic bomb has earned a unique inflection.

“It was delivered in pieces,” the Brazilian continued, “most of it by one ship. A heavy cruiser, not a battleship. She carried your entire supply of enriched uranium. Lieutenant, I have to ask: were you training to escort that ship?”

“Classified!” Sampedro hissed, his real voice less tolerant than the synthesizer. The man looked at Tomlinson, which seemed to relax him, then switched the subject to the storm that had caught the Avengers from the southeast and ended it all. The two planes had lost visual contact. Storm thermals made it impossible for Sampedro to maintain heading or altitude. He had climbed to eight thousand feet, as required by procedure, and attempted to alert Lauderdale and Key West—no response.

Despite the digitized monotone, what came next was chilling.

“Lightning bolt hit our wing. Saint Elmo’s fire in the cockpit—blue like Hell, a nightmare. Didn’t know if we were over Everglades or Gulf. Told Dakota, ‘I’m taking us down to check.’ Second later, my windshield is full of Coachie’s ship. Going too slow, that’s what I remember, why the f*ck he goin’ so slow? White strobes blinding me . . . can still see tail fins coming at my head—those damn big numbers!”

Torpedo Bomber 113. The tail section we’d found buried in the earth like a hatchet, the wreckage we had used sponges to clean one slow layer after another, appeared to brighten on the computer screen and caused the old man to cover his eyes.

The planes had collided. Chaos followed . . .

Ten minutes wasn’t enough time to finish the story. The nurse knocked and entered, Sampedro’s bedtime meds in an IV bag. When he refused, Candice returned with the nurse to plead with her grandfather, the nurse telling us, “Mr. Sampedro needs his sleep! Days here move right along. We keep our guests busy!”

The aviator zapped the woman with a sour look that only Candice noticed, so she kissed her grandfather’s cheek, saying, “Don’t tire yourself, paw-paw. For me?” then left us alone.

In his own raspy voice, Sampedro waited until the nurse was gone to comment, “Bullshit, days don’t move when you’re dying. Only the nights. That’s when I’m alive . . . memories . . . she doesn’t understand.”

Then he returned to the keyboard, still unsure, seventy years later, what had happened after his Avenger had knocked the tail off his wingman’s plane.

Sampedro remembered a night spent alone, adrift in the Gulf of Mexico, his Mae West inflated. He remembered telling his rescuers he had seen a flare to the east—another survivor! The storm had certainly blown their ships northwest, so he shared the logical guess: the collision had occurred north of Marco Island.

For three days, planes and boats had searched, and Sampedro was still bitter—and suspicious—about why it had been called off so soon. Nothing close to the massive efforts he read about one year later when the Flight 19 Avengers vanished. “War was over by then,” he reasoned. “Life not as cheap—too late now to worry.”

Vargas Diemer, the historian, keyed in on the old man’s suspicions when he said, “The heavy cruiser that carried the bomb to Guam—the world’s total stock of enriched uranium in one container. You haven’t wondered about that, Lieutenant?”

“Yes . . . many times.” Sampedro spoke the words, his eyes moving to Tomlinson, who had reached for the note he had written.

“Night torpedo runs,” Diemer continued, “that had to strike you as odd. On barges—barges the size of a battleship, you said. Why train to bomb anything bigger than a sub? Unless your government was worried the Japanese might disable or capture the ship carrying the atomic bomb. That they might have to order specially trained pilots to bomb the—”

“No!” Sampedro said. Coughed the word, as he did earlier, angry, but then calmed himself to concede through the synthesizer, “Thought about that, sure. Still do. Order us to sink our own ship—but would never happen. Not us. Not me, Coachie, Dakota, and Harley. Jap subs got her anyway, but later. Still feel guilty maybe could have protected her, Japs would’a been so confused by our talk. Could’a sunk that f*ckin’ sub! Instead thousand sailors dead on the . . .” The man’s finger hesitated—a naval aviator still mindful of his training—then wrote, “Still dream ’bout saving those men on the Indianapolis.”

Jesus Christ—Dan and I both stunned by what we’d just heard, but not Vargas Diemer, the historian, who was now even more suspicious and started to ask another question, but I cut him off, saying, “Stow it!”

The USS Indianapolis . . . my god, a war ship on a mission so secret that sailors who’d survived the sub attack had spent days adrift before radio silence was broken. Sharks had found them the first night among the blood and oil. By the fourth or fifth day, sharks were feeding in mass, killed six or seven hundred screaming men—I couldn’t remember the numbers—before the first rescue plane touched down.

Tomlinson stood, slipped the note into his pocket, and took charge of the laptop as he reseated himself at the old man’s shoulder, the old man weeping now. Gave the Brazilian a warning look, Enough! and put a hand on Sampedro’s shoulder. “Mr. Sampedro, you haven’t seen where we found the wreckage.” Waited several seconds, then said, “We were sent to tell you—help give you some peace about what happened, that’s what I think. Please . . . look at these photos.”

“Should have . . . died,” the man said, but Tomlinson wouldn’t let him push the computer away. Instead, one after another, he clicked through photos of the shell pyramid, pottery shards, ancient shell tools. “Look . . . what do you think this is?” until he had the aviator’s attention.

Then explained, “There is where we found the wreckage—where your three brothers died. A power spot. Sacred ground! Last night, going through your wife’s scrapbooks, it all came together in my head and I knew why the spot had called to us. Harley, Cochise, the others, they’re still there, man.”

Coachie had been the wingman’s nickname, not Cochise, but Sampedro, sitting upright while Tomlinson stuffed a pillow behind him, was suddenly interested. Looked at a few more shots, then asked, “Bones . . . they died . . . in an . . . Indian place?” His face, his tone, wanting to believe. There was a sadness in his manner, though, and I knew he was thinking about the flare he’d seen—seven decades spent wondering if one of his men had survived.

Tomlinson picked up on it, too, so closed the computer, sparing the man photos of a parachute harness and a tube of morphine, telling him, “From what we found, the crash happened so fast, none of them suffered. It was the right time for your brothers.”

“An Indian place,” Sampedro murmured, his mind drifting again.

“Not Pawnee or Dakota,” Tomlinson replied to Pawn Man, the aviator. “Ancient, though. See what I’m saying? You didn’t kill your friends. Angel—they were leading you home.”

As we exited the building, Tomlinson showed me his note, a two-word question: Code Talkers?