The Einstein Code (3 page)

The
Victoria
was in a very poor state. It had been an old ship when it had sunk and the warm waters and rich marine life in these parts had not treated it kindly. The timber hull and
decks had gone completely. All that remained was the steel framework of the vessel resting on the reef like the carcass of a dead animal. Around it was strewn a miscellany of objects, clumps of
coral-encrusted metal boxes, steel crates and remnants of the main mast.

The safest way to enter the wreck was from directly above, in through the bow. From here they could see the ship’s metal skeleton stretching out across the coral and sand floor of the
continental shelf. At a depth of seventy feet almost ninety per cent of light from the surface was absorbed, but large powerful lights on Kate and Lou’s helmets and arms illuminated the
site.

‘I’m going to take it slowly,’ Lou said through his comms.

‘Right behind you,’ Kate replied.

Lou flicked his comms to link with
Inca.
‘Gustav? Connor? Everything OK with you?’

‘No probs, Lou.’

‘We’ve reached the wreck and are about to go in through the bow end.’

‘Copy that.’

The bow was pointing south-west and raised slightly above the rest of the ship. This part of the old vessel was nothing but a metal lattice and the beams of their helmet lights cut through the
dark to reveal an interior coated in multicoloured oxides and crustaceans.

They moved back along
Victoria
’s spine and found the remains of a deck framework covered with corroded steel sheets. Here there was an opening about ten feet across leading into
the bowels of the ship. They swept their lights about trying to understand the layout of the interior. Slowly, they swam down to the bottom of the ship to what had once been the vessel’s
hold.

Lou scanned the hold with his helmet light then moved down to swim two feet above the base of the hull.

‘Well, what d’ya know?’ he said through his comms.

Kate was there beside him, staring down. ‘No mistaking that.’ She moved in close to inspect a row of corroded steel shackles, ankle and wrist braces connected to the remains of the
floor by thick crumbling chains. They ran in two lines, twenty-four pairs along the spine of the ship. ‘Daniel and Alfred were telling the truth.’

She removed a camera from a pouch on a utility belt and started to photograph the objects. Lou had a video camera built into the sleeve of his suit and began filming, beaming the images directly
to
Inca
seventy feet above their heads.

‘You guys getting this?’ he asked through his comms.

‘Crystal clear, Lou,’ Gustav replied.

Kate was the first to sense the vibration in the water, a strong current pulling her away from the floor where she was taking close-ups. ‘What the hell! Lou, you feel that?’

He straightened and lowered the video camera. ‘Yes.’

Kate swung her light beams around cutting through the gloom. They could see the water filled with rust and flecks of metal. Something had shaken the wreck and dislodged loose oxides coating the
framework.

‘Up to the main deck . . . now!’ Kate hollered and turned away from the metal shackles, Lou immediately behind her.

‘Guys, can you see anything unusual?’ Lou called through the comms as he swam fast through the water back up to the hatch and the open framework of the wreck above.

‘No, Lou,’ Connor replied. ‘What’s up?’

They did not answer, just propelled themselves upward, emerging through a gap in the deck. Ten feet from the edge of the wreck they could see a huge metal object protruding from the sand and
sediment of the ocean floor.

The debris-filled water foamed wildly. Pebbles and small pieces of detritus landed on them as they scrambled under the cover of a ragged piece of steel.

‘What was that?’ It was Connor aboard
Inca.

Kate and Lou panted into their masks as the water convulsed silently around them.

‘Guys? You OK? Kate, Lou, come in.’

‘We’re all right . . . I think,’ Lou managed to gasp.

‘What’s happened?’

‘Not sure,’ Kate said. ‘Some sort of object has emerged from the ocean floor close to the wreck. Don’t know what it is. We need to let the sediment and sand settle before
we take a look.’

‘How about you come straight back up?’ Gustav suggested.

Lou looked at his chronometer. ‘We’ve got nearly ten minutes. Now we’re down here, we should try to see what happened.’

He turned to Kate and they peered over the edge of the steel cover. The water had begun to clear. Still turbid, the larger pieces of material had settled. Pulling out from the shelter, Kate took
the lead.

It was only as they came within ten yards of the side of the thing they could make out what it was.

‘My God!’ Kate exclaimed through her comms. ‘It’s the fuselage of a plane.’ They floated a few yards away from the starboard side of the object.

‘Look, its wings have been ripped off almost back to the engines.’ Kate manoeuvred through the water to reach within arm’s length of the shattered aeroplane, pointing to a
bundle of frayed and tangled wires.

Lou turned towards the cockpit, pulling himself up from under the side of the plane and grappling his way over the curved metal. He glanced round, spotting Kate immediately behind him.

‘I recognize the shape of this plane,’ she said. ‘It’s a Lockheed Electra. Twin engine.’

‘Looks pretty old.’

‘First used in the 1930s.’

They reached the glass of the canopy. The hatch was unlocked and vibrated a little in the current. The top was shattered, an opening about a foot wide ran halfway across it. The insides of the
rip were discoloured with green slime.

Lou leaned over and peered inside. He was silent for a few seconds then pulled back. ‘No bodies.’

He tugged carefully at the jagged glass. The canopy crumbled at his touch, shards of glass tumbling away, falling slowly through the water and exposing the inside of the old cockpit.

It was in surprisingly good condition. ‘I think most of the damage to the canopy was recent,’ Lou commented. ‘Look.’ He picked up a dagger of glass left jammed in the
metal edging around the rim where it joined the fuselage. ‘No slime or any other organic material along the joins. The break in the top is old, smeared with the usual crap.’

‘That split would have been enough to have let marine life in to consume the bodies. Wouldn’t take long.’

‘The hatch of the canopy was open though,’ Lou observed.

‘Oh yes, strange.’

Kate pulled herself up through the water and turned so she could get a good look inside the cockpit. Lou filmed her and Kate used her camera to get some close-ups.

Lou checked his chronometer. ‘Two minutes, max,’ he said.

It was a wide, shallow cockpit; two seats, two control wheels, a pair of throttle levers. The instruments looked old-fashioned: large, round dials, heavy Bakelite switches. The leather of the
chairs had been almost completely eaten away, just a few slimy brown patches left untouched. Kate poked around the control panel. It was covered with crustaceans.

‘Definitely no trace of human remains,’ Lou observed, panning the micro camera around to take in the details. ‘Better go,’ he said.

Lou saw Kate tuck her camera away, then glance back at the inside of the old plane.

‘Hang on . . . there’s something caught in the footwell.’

‘Kate. Gotta go.’

‘One sec.’ She slipped head-first into the cockpit until she had almost vanished, only her feet remaining above the canopy rim. Lou could hear her breathing heavily through the
comms.

‘Damn it!’ she hissed.

‘Kate . . . please! I don’t want you spending the rest of our honeymoon in the tank.’

Kate had reached the footwell and stretched to reach her quarry. ‘Almost . . . Got it.’

She curled round gracefully and came into view. Lou could see her smiling through the visor. She was holding up a corroded metal cylinder about the size of a relay runner’s baton.
‘What’re we waiting for?’

‘I don’t think there’s any doubt whose plane it was.’ Kate surveyed the faces of the three men around the table at one end of the lab aboard
Inca.
At the other end of the small room stood workbenches, specialized equipment bolted down, files in high-sided containers, three swivel stools firmly attached to the deck. Gustav
Schwartz was flicking through some stills of the wreck on an iPad.

‘You really think it is Amelia Earhart’s plane?’ Connor Maitland said.

‘It stacks up,’ Lou said.

Kate flicked on a flat screen on the wall above Lou’s head and clicked a remote. The monitor lit up with the film they had shot of the tangled remains of the aeroplane unearthed beside
Victoria.

‘It is definitely a Lockheed Electra. Both wings have very nearly been sheared off, but the engines are still in place. You can see, here and here.’ Kate tapped the screen with her
fingernail.

‘What about the age of it though, Kate? You said when we were down there that the Electras were first put into service in the 1930s. When did Earhart’s plane crash?’

‘The morning of the 2nd of July 1937, about 8.30. She and her co-pilot Fred Noonan were attempting to land on Howland Island. Their last known position was close to here.’

‘You seem to know an awful lot about Amelia Earhart,’ Lou commented.

‘Early teenage obsession,’ Kate replied. ‘My mother kept these wonderful old annuals.
The Crackerjack Girl’s Own Book, 1959
had this brilliant feature about the
great heroine, Amelia Earhart. I was hooked!’

‘Cute.’ Lou grinned at her.

‘So, this is a Lockheed Electra. But there were a lot of different models, right?’ Gustav asked.

‘I did some checking on Google.’ Kate brought up a new screen. It showed the schematic of a twin-engine, stub-nosed aeroplane. ‘A 1936 Electra,’ she said and superimposed
it on a picture they had taken of the wrecked plane. They matched almost perfectly.

‘This is a model 10E. Earhart and Noonan were flying a heavily customized model 10E. But here’s the clincher.’ She clicked the remote to show a picture of Amelia Earhart
standing beside her plane taken just before she left Darwin to begin the final stages of her attempted circumnavigation.

‘The serial number of Earhart’s plane was NR 16020. It was written on each wing. You can’t see the wing markings here, and of course the aircraft we’ve found has lost
most of its wings anyway. But look . . .’

She pointed to the screen.

‘What?’ Lou asked.

‘I’ll close in.’

Kate tapped at the remote and the image expanded. Then she closed in on a portion of the picture just to the right of Amelia Earhart’s hip. They could all see a designation painted into
the fuselage. ‘NR 16020’.

‘Now look at this.’ Kate brought up some of the film they had shot. Freezing it on a frame showing the damaged fuselage side on, she refocused the image and zoomed in. They could all
see a ragged line of corroded metal running diagonally across the monitor, and to the right, degraded, but still legible a letter ‘R’ followed by a distorted ‘160’.

‘Shit!’ Lou exclaimed and pushed back in his chair, bringing his palms down on the table. ‘This is the discovery of the century, Kate!’

She beamed.

‘So what now?’ Gustav asked. ‘Another trip down?’

Lou opened his mouth to reply but Kate cut across him. ‘Unfortunately . . .’

‘Unfortunately what?’ Lou and Connor said in unison.

‘I put a probe down there a couple of hours ago. Everything is now too shaky down there. The Electra has destabilized the wreck of
Victoria.
It could fall apart at any moment. Way
too dangerous to go down to the plane or the ship again, at least for now.’

‘Damn it!’ Lou exclaimed. ‘You sure, Kate?’

‘Well, yeah . . .’

‘Sorry, of course you’re sure. So, what do we do? Use remote probes like the one you sent down? Get the best images we can? Maybe samples?’

Kate nodded and looked around at the three men. ‘That’s about it.’

They fell silent for a moment, then Gustav said, ‘What caused the plane to rise out of the silt?’

‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ Lou replied and gazed around at the others. ‘The Chinese.’

‘The explosions we heard,’ Kate said.

Gustav looked confused.

‘Amelia Earhart’s plane must have come down close by,’ Lou explained. ‘The Chinese testing during the past twenty-four hours could have dislodged it.’

*

‘Amazing,’ Kate said. She got up and walked over to the bench at the other end of the lab. When she returned to the table she was holding a sealed plastic bag
containing the metal cylinder she had retrieved from the cockpit.

‘What have you and Gustav found out about this?’ she asked turning to Lou.

‘Well, there was no way we could open it,’ he replied and glanced at his assistant. ‘That’ll have to wait until we get back to the States. But we did every test we could
on it.’ He slid an iPad across the table and she studied a collection of graphs and tables of data.

‘It’s a standard steel cylinder, 10.4 inches long, 8.1 inches in circumference. No exterior markings. Plenty of corrosion, as you’d expect, ferrous oxide primarily. As you can
see, we stripped away the crustaceans and the rust to look for markings and took detailed photos and film footage every step of the way.’

Kate nodded and looked up, rested her chin on her hand, elbow on the table. ‘You took X-rays?’ She returned her gaze to the iPad screen.

‘Yep, full spectroscopic analysis and thermal imaging. The cylinder is hollow, the steel shell less than an eighth of an inch thick, and there’s only one thing inside.’

Kate looked up again.

According to the analysis, there is a single sheet of paper inside the cylinder. It looks to be in good condition. From the dimensions, it appears to be a page from a regular stationery
pad.’

‘No chance you could read anything on the paper?’ Kate asked. They could tell from her tone that she expected nothing.

‘Well actually . . .’

‘No!’