Free Vanished by Wil S. Hylton

flames to land here.
    Scannon examined the cockpit for several minutes; then he sloshed toward the shore. He was exhilarated by the discovery and yet unnerved by the presence of death. William Dixon had probably died in this spot. In fact, he was probably still there, along with his navigator, Duncan, their bombardier, Tenton, and who knows how many of the crew. There had been a young lieutenant flying with them as an observer. He was probably in the cockpit, too.
    When Scannon reached the shore, he glanced down at the sand. There was a glint of half-buried metal, and he reached to pick it up. It was a seventy-five-millimeter shell. He turned it over in his hands, confused. It was the same kind of shell used by the anti-aircraft guns on Koror, the kind that would have shot Dixon down. But those shells would still be in the hills with the guns, not here with the wreck. Scannon glanced back toward the water and did a double take. Directly over the crumpled nose, there was a rainbow forming. He laughed to himself and shook his head. He was a chemist, a physician—a lifelong empiricist. He stared at the rainbow a long time. Later, he wrote in his journal, “ It was almost too much .”
    In the morning, he and March met up to follow another lead. The same two elders who knew about the Dixon cockpit also knew a man named Ichikawa Tadashi, who had seen another B-24 go down. It was, they said, somewhere in the southern bay. From his research, Scannon knew it had to be Custer.
    They stopped by Tadashi’s home on Koror. He was a frail man with tentative legs and a long scar down his forehead, but he agreed to take a boat to the site where he’d seen the plane go down. As they barreled toward the dock in Scannon’s rental car, Tadashi recalled the crash.
    Like many Palauans, he’d fled the city during the war. The only shelter he could find was a cave. It was carved into the limestone wall of a small island in the southern bay, where he could see the daily formation of Liberators as they came on the horizon. Most of the time, he would wait out the bomb strikes inside his cave, but one day in May 1945, the bombers arrived while he was foraging on Koror. From the shoreline, he could see his cave across the water, but there wasn’t enough time to swim back. All he could do was duck into the mangroves and watch the US bombers sweep overhead, laying a string of bombs across Koror while the Japanese gunners lit up the sky.
    As he crouched in the mangroves, Tadashi recalled, he saw one of the American planes take a hit on its left wing, and he watched as the wing floated down to land on an island near his cave. The rest of the fuselage was coming straight toward him, a stream of smoke and fire that hit the earth with a concussive blast as shards of metal rained down, slicing into Tadashi’s arm and thigh and carving the long, deep scar that Scannon had noticed on his forehead.
    Scannon searched for words to respond, but found none. Tadashi had nearly been killed by Custer and his men, the very airmen he was now taking Scannon to find. As they pulled into the marina, Scannon glanced outside, suddenly overcome by another memory. It was the same dock where he and Susan had met their guides on the day they found the Dixonwing. Now, as he watched Tadashi hobble from the car toward the pier, he couldn’t shake the feeling that everything he had seen since then, from the discovery of the wing, to the photographs at Maxwell, to the crumpled cockpit in the water, even the scar on Tadashi’s face, was all part of some invisible path that he was merely following.
    When March had secured a boat, he and Scannon helped Tadashi aboard and pulled into a channel. They steered past the southern promontory of Koror and around to the southern bay, passing a series of small islands, including the one that held the Dixon wing, which Scannon now knew as Ngetkuml. Just to the north, there was an even smaller island, Iberor. It was where Tadashi had seen the