Night Moves (Doc Ford) - By RandyWayne White Page 0,38

realities and obligations that, if not handled properly, could bite us in the butt. Possibly even put us in jail or nail us with a heavy fine. Early on, he had stepped away from the tail section and made that clear, saying, “Let’s think this through before we do something really stupid. We’re on government-owned land, okay? The government still owns this plane—what’s left of it, anyway. So let’s take a minute and talk.”

This was before we’d searched the area for more wreckage, but after we had cleaned away enough foliage for Dan to be certain he’d found a tail rudder off an Avenger. On his iPhone were photos of Avengers in flight, and he’d waited while Tomlinson and I compared them with the buried monolith.

Yes . . . we were looking at the aft section of a tail fin, minus the wings, elevators, and the tail. The fin’s top edge was flat—distinctive. Same with the contour of the aft edge. According to photos, Avengers carried ID numbers on the tail and rudder, numerals painted in white, two yards high. There was too much moss and mud to see if paint had survived.

The shape of the tail matched, though. Tomlinson was convinced. I was willing to be convinced. There were certainly similarities.

Dan had explained, “I’ve read books on aviation archaeology. I don’t claim to be an expert, okay, but I know that amateurs can screw up everything by changing the context of a crash site. We’re not going to do that. Just like back there”—he had tilted his head toward the Bone Field—“we look, we take all the photographs we can. But we don’t touch. At least, we don’t move anything. Not yet, anyway.”

The temptation to see more of the tail rudder, though, was overpowering, and the pilot wanted to remove the detritus that cloaked it. Were we okay with that?

“If there’s a number,” I’d asked, “it might confirm the plane’s from Flight 19?”

“Helpful, but no,” was his answer. Confirmation required something called a data plate.

“It’s sort of like a ship’s bell when a diver finds a wreck. Positive proof. On a plane, the data plate’s under the fuselage, port side, on the stabilizer. But a tail number would narrow it down. So I say we clean off what we can—not all of it. Then search for the fuselage. After that, the photograph-only rule applies.”

So we did it. Wearing gloves and using dollops of freshwater, we took turns peeling the decades away. Soon, a faded numeral was revealed: 3. Only the top half, though—the tail rudder had hit the earth like a spear, so the rest was buried.

When Futch had seen enough to be convinced, he stepped away and began to pace, ignoring Tomlinson’s rapid-fire questions about the significance.

He’s hiding something. That was my impression. Or Dan, too, realized that a section of paint might have been sheared away by the crash. In the military, letters and numerals are segmented because paint is applied over a stencil. Instead of a 3, it could have been an 8.

All Futch would say is, “It’s not bad news, I can tell you that much. In my flight bag, I’ve got the squadron list, numbers for all five planes. Judge for yourselves when we get back. Right now, we spread out and search. Doc, do you have a notebook? I wish to hell I’d brought a measuring tape!”

Each small discovery had been photographed, then dutifully paced off, all bearings anchored to the Avenger’s tail rudder. Then the spots were given a tagline and added as waypoints in the handheld GPS.

We didn’t find the fuselage. We didn’t find much, in fact: fragments of metal, the remains of a gigantic tire, a cache of .50 caliber cartridges, unfired, in a rusty linkage belt. And a piece of fabric that might have been an airman’s inflatable vest, a Mae West. A couple of other objects that had less to do with an airplane than the men aboard: what might have been a survival kit, the metal husk too fragile to touch. A collage of straps, buckles, and a sheath of leather that had been lifted off the ground by a tree and was now embedded in the bark. Several more bits and pieces that while undoubtedly man-made had disintegrated beyond identifying. Not recognizable in the field, anyway, but photos might yield something if we did the research.

Combined, the things we found confirmed that an Avenger had crashed in the area or—as I was already thinking—had exploded or