Ghosts of the Pacific (13 page)

THE SEA WAS BUILDING
swells slowly but steadily, as if it
were taking its good old time preparing a typhoon. Rain fell
on and off and the wind howled constantly. After a few
days, riding the waves became exhausting and the vibration
from storm choppiness was starting to wear on my nerves.
So, we slipped beneath the waves and continued sailing in a
northwest direction. Sailing submerged was slower, but so
much more comfortable. We were not in any hurry anyway.
I didn't want to miss the circus, but Pierre the strongman
said they wouldn't set up until after the typhoon and clean-up were over. I wondered how you cleaned up after a typhoon.

We motored along at a hundred feet, coming up every
four hours or so to charge the batteries and check the storm.
The seafloor dropped below us to deeper than two miles,
then, almost as soon as it bottomed out, it started up again.
I watched it rise steadily on sonar. Although the horizon
showed nothing in our path, we knew an island was coming, or at least a seamount.

We were at sea so long I was once again losing the feeling
of sleeping in the night or day. It didn't really matter. It was
too much to fuss over whether it was light or dark when I
laid my head down. The sun set around seven in the evening and rose around seven in the morning every day here;
that much I knew. I figured that was because we were so
close to the equator.

The seamount continued to rise until radar told me it
had broken the surface ten miles in front of us. There was
an atoll ahead. This time it was much bigger. Likely there
would be people. Perhaps we could settle on the bottom
offshore, or perhaps we could find an isolated lagoon and
take shelter.

Not a chance. The seamount rose into a jagged and dangerous reef all around the atoll, and the atoll was too big to
bother circling for a safe entrance to its lagoon. Oh, well, I
thought, we'll just settle outside the reef and sleep.

So we did. But while I slept, I heard sounds, soft scraping
sounds, as if the sub were gently brushing against coral and
debris on the bottom. But we were sitting at a hundred feet.
There couldn't be an undertow at a hundred feet, could
there?

I drifted in and out of sleep and heard the scraping sounds
as if they were far away. And then, there was a louder bang,
and a clang, and a rumbling, like the sound of something
sliding down a hill. I jumped to my feet, staggered over to
the observation window and hit the floodlights. The water
was murky with debris from the storm but it was clear
enough to see movement outside. Where was this current
coming from? And what were we banging into?

I climbed onto the bike and pedalled a little to change
our position. Then I went back to the observation window.
Looking down, I was staring at an airplane. I must be dreaming, I thought. But no, I wasn't. The plane looked similar to
the one I had seen in the little jungle—a twin engine, but
maybe a little bigger. It was hard to tell. Things look distorted
underwater. The nose of the plane was missing. It looked
jagged just like the rock around it. One of the engines was
still attached and the other was nearby. The rest of the plane
looked more or less intact.

I stood up, rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and tried to
figure out what to do. Hollie stood up too and stared at me.
We were a hundred feet down. There was a storm above and
a dangerous reef in front of us. There was a flow of water
coming from somewhere but I couldn't figure out where. I
had just discovered another plane. Was this one Amelia Earhart's?

I put the kettle on, fed the crew, engaged the batteries and
started exploring the area. We turned around and moved
very slowly. Soon I discovered where the flow was coming
from. There were holes in the reef. The water was channelling through them and creating a deep undertow.

I discovered something else. The reef was littered with
machines and metal from the war. There must have been a
battle here. I saw pieces of broken landing craft, the kind
that carried soldiers onto the beach. I saw barrels, rods,
cables and ripped sheets of metal that looked as though they
had been torn apart by an angry giant.

And the plane? It was probably not Earhart's. It was probably another Japanese fighter. I had read that Japanese pilots
often left their bases or aircraft carriers without enough fuel
to return. After they had shot all their ammunition at the
enemy they would crash their plane into an enemy ship or
island. But some probably ran out of gas before they could
do that. How many such planes were lying on the seafloor or
in island jungles? Probably thousands of them.

World War Two started in 1939 and ended in 1945. But
the Japanese and Americans only started fighting each other
in 1941, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
They took the Americans by surprise. This was the beginning of four years of vicious fighting in the Pacific, which
ended only when the Americans dropped the atomic bomb
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But before the Americans could
take the bomb all the way to Japan, they needed to find an
island suitable enough for building an airfield from which
their big bombers could take off. The island had to be close
enough to Japan that the bombers could fly over, drop their
bombs and fly back. That island turned out to be Tinian,
right beside Saipan, an island in Japanese possession. To
turn Tinian into an airfield—the biggest one in the world in
1945—the Americans first had to take Saipan. And so they
did. But it took a whole month of really bloody fighting.

For two more days we battled the storm. I was so tired of it
now. Then, suddenly, the wind just died. That was strange.
It disappeared too quickly. It left an eerie stillness in its wake
that I didn't trust. The sea still flowed in large swells but the
swells lost their crests and we could ride them comfortably.
I cranked up the engine and made a beeline for Saipan. The
typhoon was still on its way; I could feel it. Even though the
air was motionless, it was full of energy, sort of like the stillness before lightning strikes. How different this was from
back home. At home, you might know a few days before a
bad storm would hit or you might not know at all. In the
Pacific, typhoons seemed to take weeks to form. They built
in stages, then they moved around looking for somewhere
to strike.

WE WERE SITTING IN
the water off Saipan, on the northeast
side of the island. The wind and sea were throwing everything they had at it. The island looked like the dark green
top of a giant's head sticking out of a steamy bath. Saipan
had a small mountain in its centre that rose fifteen hundred
feet. The typhoon might hit hard but the island wasn't
going anywhere.

Finding a place to hide the sub might be a lot more difficult than I had thought. In the first place, I hadn't expected
to come in the middle of a typhoon. We would need a very
sheltered cove. But Saipan was highly populated for a Pacific
island. There were about ninety thousand people here, according to my guidebook.

I couldn't search on the surface. The waves were too high,
the wind too strong and the sky too dark. There was a lagoon on the east side but that was where all the people were.
The north side was the least populated. It was also the hilliest. I would have to search here.

The undertows around the island were powerful and dangerous. I had never seen undertows like this before, not even
in a storm. Something about the shape of the rock underwater was creating currents like in a washing machine. Maybe there were underwater tunnels. I felt an undertow pull us
back and forth and had to be very careful not to smash into
the reef. I sat at the sonar screen and studied the seafloor.
After a while, I discovered something very cool. There were
caves seventy-five feet down. I hovered above them, rushed
to the observation window and looked down. There was a
faint light coming through one of them. I stared at it and
tried to figure out why. I could only guess that it was a cave
on both sides. The water tunnel must have led to an open
cave in the hillside where daylight was coming through. The
tunnel looked big enough for the sub to squeeze through if
we were careful. I decided to try it.

It was a tight squeeze. The tunnel led to a water-filled cave,
like a giant well. There was plenty of light coming through
the observation window. It must have been open above us. I
rose very slowly. What if there were people sitting around
the water at picnic tables? I didn't think it would be like that,
especially with a typhoon developing, but it could have been.

We came up as slowly as possible. I raised the periscope,
stopped and looked around. It was a cave all right, but one
wall was completely open. I saw a small group of people
huddled together and smoking in one corner. They didn't
see us. I pulled the periscope down and we went back down
just as slowly. We had to let air out of the tanks to submerge, and that made bubbles, so I did it as gently as possible not to draw attention. We couldn't hide in this cave,
above or below, the water was too clear.

It was a tight squeeze getting out. Without sonar we would
never have gotten in or out of that tunnel. As soon as we
were out I found a second one. But there was no light coming from it. Should we check it out? I looked at the crew.
Sometimes I wished they could talk. I decided to explore it.

It was longer and had a turn, which I didn't like. We
scraped the sides coming through. It opened into an underwater cavern smaller than the other one. There was just
enough room to turn the sub around. That was good; it
would have been really hard to back up. I turned the sub as
slowly as I could. I didn't want to hit the rock and cause a
cave-in. I just hoped this cavern rose into a cave above water.
If there was a cave above, there might be a way out of it.

We rose a little at a time. If we were going to hit a ceiling,
I didn't want to hit it hard. Up, up, up we came. I raised the
periscope gently. It broke the surface without striking anything but it was pitch-black. We were definitely in a cave. I
surfaced completely and searched with the periscope again.
I turned it around three hundred and sixty degrees. It was
like being in outer space, except without stars.

I was nervous to open the hatch. What if the air in the
cave was stale? What if it was filled with poisonous gas? What
if there were thousands of screaming bats, or poisonous spiders? I grabbed my guidebook and flipped through it. No,
there were no dangerous spiders or snakes in Saipan. There
was only the sea snake, an extremely venomous snake, but it
was only in the water and it didn't like to bite. It preferred to
swim inside dead bodies. That was nice.

I decided to open the hatch just a crack, shut it quickly, and
hold my breath. I grabbed the flashlight, unsealed the hatch
and readied myself. I pushed it up a tiny bit and shut it.
Nothing happened. I heard nothing and smelled nothing. I
opened it again a little further and pointed the flashlight
out. It bounced off smooth stone walls. I took a breath. It
was a little stale but okay so I opened the hatch and stuck my
head out. I heard water drip. I swung the flashlight around
in a circle. My mouth dropped. There were skeletons in here.

I didn't know if it was safe to flick on the floodlights. They
were so bright. I didn't want to let anyone know we were
here. But this cave must have been deep inside the ground.
In fact, it must have been inside a hill. The presence of skeletons meant that nobody had been in here for a very long
time. It was like a tomb. I decided to flick on the floodlights.

When the light burst into the room I saw five skeletons.
They were in uniform. They weren't completely skeletons
because they still had some skin on their bones—I could see
it on their faces and hands—but it was dry and brown, sort
of like the skin on mummies. They must have been Japanese
soldiers. They weren't very big. They were spooky, but not
incredibly spooky. I was more fascinated. I wondered what
had happened to them. Had they come into the cave and
couldn't get out? When I looked closer I saw that they all
had white hair. Had they been here so long they had grown
old? Or did their hair turn white because they had been
frightened to death?

There were weapons here too. I saw rifles, pistols, boxes,
cans and bottles. The skeletons were sitting around a card
table. They must have gotten all of these things in here somehow, which meant that there must be a way out. I didn't think
they could have come in the way we had come. But maybe
they had. I could swim it, if I had to, if it were a matter of
life and death. It was seventy-five feet down, fifty feet or so
through a twisting tunnel and seventy-five feet back to the
surface. And it was dark. Still, it was possible. Perhaps they
had wrapped everything in plastic and swum through the
underwater tunnels like a relay swimming team, passing their
stuff from one person to another. Or maybe they pulled it
through with ropes.

On one side of the cave was a ledge, like the boardwalk inside a boathouse. That's where the skeletons were, with their
boxes and things. The ceiling was about fifteen feet high.
There was a rock at the back of the cave that looked as though
it was blocking the entrance to a tunnel, but I couldn't tell.
I'd have to go over there. To do that, I'd have to step past the
skeletons.

I inflated the dinghy and shut off one of the floodlights.
We didn't need that much light and I wanted to save power.
Seaweed sat on the hull and watched as Hollie and I climbed
into the dinghy and paddled ten feet to the ledge. The ledge
was only five or six feet wide. Hollie jumped out. Then he
stopped and stared at the skeletons. They were sitting at a
card game, but beneath their uniforms they were just bone,
hair and a little bit of skin. It was really weird. Their bones
must have been balancing like wooden sticks that would
collapse with the slightest touch or breeze, but there was
absolutely no wind in the cave. I took a closer look at their
faces. The leathery skin on their bones was as thin as a plastic
bag pulled tight. I would have thought that skeletons all
looked the same but they didn't. The holes of their eyes and
noses were different sizes. Their cheekbones and foreheads
were different. One looked braver than the others and one
looked kind of funny. I wished Ziegfried was here. He would
figure out what had happened to them and explain it to me.

They must have all died at the same time; otherwise, the
ones who were living would have buried the ones who were
dead. Skeletons are a lot scarier in movies than in real life.
In real life they look more interesting than scary. It's probably because in the movies they make skeletons look as if
they're alive, and that's frightening. In real life they're just
dead. When something's dead, it's just dead, and it's not
that scary if you look at it closely.

“It's okay, Hollie. But don't touch them.”

He sniffed at the pant legs of two of them, sneezed, and
we moved past. I wondered what they had died of. There
were little tin cans on the table that looked burnt. Maybe
they had been candles. Or had they, maybe, contained poison? Had the soldiers killed themselves? Had this been a
planned suicide? From what I had read, it was more honourable for the Japanese to commit suicide than it was to
surrender or get caught. I saw melted wax on the floor. There
were kerosene lanterns too. I picked one up and shook it.
Empty. I supposed they had run out, though it could have
evaporated. What a dark and gloomy place this would have
been to die. I sure was glad there were no signs of cannibalism.

Behind the rock was a passageway. You couldn't stand up
in it unless you were really short. I shone the flashlight inside. The passage went straight a little bit then turned up.
Hmmm. I looked at Hollie. He was sniffing it. He was curious. I looked behind us and saw Seaweed floating in the
water. He looked content. I supposed we could investigate a
little. I told myself: don't go farther than you know the way
back. Don't get carried away with exploring and get lost.

Where the passageway went up there were edges of rock
to hold on to, but I couldn't carry Hollie at the same time,
so I went back to the sub and grabbed the tool bag. I took
another flashlight too, just in case, and put it in a pocket in
the side of the bag. Stepping past the skeletons each time
was a little tricky. I tried very hard not to touch them but the
tool bag slipped on my back, I lost my balance and gently
bumped one. His skull rolled off his body and hit the rock
with a sound like a hollow block of wood. “Sorry!” I said. I
wondered if maybe I should put the skeletons into the
water. That would be a kind of burial at sea. That's what I
would have wanted. I would think about it first.

Where the passageway turned up I could use my hands and
feet and go as slowly as I liked, which made it easier and I
didn't have to use my sore arm as much. Holding the flashlight was tricky though. Once we made the first turn it became just as black behind us as in front of us. It was hot too.
My hands started to sweat and that made them slippery.

The passage went up about ten feet and levelled out again.
Now I had to crawl. It was only a couple of feet high. I didn't
like that. But I was so curious I couldn't stop. I shone the
light all around to make certain this was the only tunnel back
to the cavern we came from. If we ever came to a section
with two directions I would go back and do it all over again
and make a map. I was
not
going to get lost.

It was stuffy because it was so hot. The slightest bit of work
made you sweat. Hollie was panting in the bag. We crawled
along for about twenty feet and went up again. It wasn't too
hard because I moved slowly. You wouldn't want to come
through here in a hurry. This time we went up farther, may
be twenty-five feet or so, and we had to climb around a rock
in the centre. It was a tight squeeze. I felt shivers go up my
spine. I would rather be under water than rock. I was more
comfortable in water.

The passageway straightened once again and widened,
which was a relief. It went about twenty feet then opened up
into a cavern. Now I could stand up. I pointed the flashlight
around the room. This was a cache. There were rifles, pistols,
boxes, bottles, rolls of wire and leather bags. Happily, there
were no skeletons. I took a good look around, although it
was hard because the darkness ate up the light of the flashlight. You could only see where the light was pointing; the
rest of the room was black. I sat down and rested. Climbing
through caves was hard work, especially because it was so hot
and stuffy. I decided to go back to the sub, get something to
drink, clean up a bit, start a map and come back. I wanted
to do everything in a calm, orderly way. It would keep me
from getting too nervous.