Vixen 03

by Clive Cussler

  "And if one turns up missing?"

  "The FAA will launch an official investigation into the mystery," Dolan said. "And then we'll see what turns up."

  Pitt spent the next two days in a chartered helicopter, crisscrossing the mountains in ever-widening search-grid patterns. Twice he and the pilot spotted crash sites, but they turned out to be marked and known wrecks. After several hours in the air-his buttocks numb from sitting, the rest of his body exhausted from the engine's vibration and from the buffeting by surging drafts and crosswinds-he was genuinely thankful when Loren's cabin came into view and the pilot set the copter down in a nearby meadow.

  The skids sank into the soft brown grass and the blades ceased their thump and idled to a stop. Pitt unclasped his safety belt, opened the door, and climbed out, luxuriating in a series of muscle stretches.

  "Same time tomorrow, Mr. Pitt?" The pilot had an Oklahoma twang, and a short-cropped haircut to go with it.

  Pitt nodded. "We'll angle south and try the lower end of the valley." "You figuring on skipping the slopes above timberline?" "If a plane crashed in the open, it wouldn't go missing for thirty years." "You can never tell. I remember an Air Force jet trainer that smacked the side of a mountain down in the San Juans. The impact caused an avalanche and the plane's debris was buried. The victims are still under the rock."

  "I suppose that's a remote possibility," Pitt said wearily.

  "If you want my opinion, sir, that's the only possibility." The pilot paused to blow his nose. "A small, light plane might fall through the trees and become hidden till eternity, but not a four-engine airliner. No way pine and aspen could conceal wreckage that size. And even if it did happen, some hunter would have surely stumbled on it by now."

  "I'm open to any theory that pans out," said Pitt. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Loren running across the meadow from the cabin. He slammed the door and waved off the pilot, turning and not bothering to look back as the engine whined into life. The craft lifted and droned over the tops of the surrounding trees.

  Loren leaped into his arms, breathless from her dash in the thin air. She looked alive and vibrant in tight white slacks and red turtleneck sweater. Her.elegantly molded face seemed to glow in the late-afternoon sun, the slanted light heightening the effect by tinting her skin to gold. He twirled her around and pressed his tongue through her lips, staring into a pair of liquid violet eyes that stared right back. It never failed to amuse Pitt that Loren forever kept her eyes open when kissing or making love, claiming that she didn't want to miss anything.

  At last she came up for air and pushed him away, wrinkling her nose. "Whew, you stink."

  "Sorry about that, but sitting behind the plastic bubble of a helicopter all day is like dehydrating in a greenhouse."

  "You don't have to make excuses. There's something about a masculine musk smell that turns women on. Of course, the fact that you also reek of gas and oil doesn't help any."

  "Then I shall immediately pass Go and proceed to the shower."

  She glanced at her watch. "Later. If we hurry, you might still catch him."

  "Catch who?"

  "Harvey Dolan. He called."

  "How? You have no telephone."

  "All I know is a forest ranger came by and said you were supposed to call Dolan at his office. It was important."

  "Where do we find a phone?"

  "Where else? The Rafertys'."

  Lee was in town, but Maxine was only too happy to show Pitt to the telephone. She sat him down at an old-fashioned rolltop desk and handed him the receiver. The operator was efficient, and in less than ten seconds Dolan was on the other end of the line.

  "Where in hell do you get off calling me collect?" he grumbled. "The government can afford it," Pitt said. "How did you get word to me?"

  "The citizen-band radio in my car. I bounced a signal from the public-communications satellite to a ranger station in the White River National Forest and asked them to relay the message."

  "What have you got?"

  11

  "Some good news and some not-so-good news."

  "Lay it on me in that order."

  "The good news is, I heard from Boeing. The nose gear was installed as original equipment on air-frame number 75403. The not-so-good news is, that particular aircraft went to the military."

  "Then the Air Force got her."

  "It looks that way. At any rate, the National Transportation Safety Board has no record of a missing commercial Stratocruiser.

  I'm afraid that's as far as I can take it. From here on in, if you wish to pursue your investigation as a private citizen, you'll have to go through the military. Their air safety is out of our jurisdiction."

  "I'll do that," Pitt replied. "If nothing else, to settle any fantasies I have about ghostly aircraft."

  "I hoped you'd say something like that," said Dolan. "So I took the liberty of sending a request-in your name, of course-for the current status of Boeing 75403 to the Inspector General for Safety at Norton Air Force Base, in California. A Colonel Abe Steiger will contact you as soon as he finds something."

  "This Steiger, what's his function?"

  "Basically he's my military counterpart. He conducts investigations into the causes of Air Force flying accidents in the Western region."

  "Then we'll soon have the answer to the riddle."

  "It would seem so."

  "What's your opinion, Dolan?" Pitt asked. "Your honest opinion."

  "Well. . ." Dolan began cautiously. "I won't lie to you, Pitt. Personally, I think your missing aircraft will turn up in the records of some wheeler-dealer who trades in government-surplus salvage."

  "And I thought we had the beginnings of a beautiful friendship."

  "You wanted the truth. I gave it to you."

  "Seriously, Harvey, I'm grateful for all your help. Next time I come to Denver, I'll pop for lunch."

  "I never turn down a free feed."

  "Good. Ill look forward to it."

  "Before you hang up"-Dolan took a deep breath-"if I'm right, and there's a down-to-earth reason for the nose gear being in Miss Smith's garage, what then?"

  "I have this strange feeling that isn't the case," Pitt replied.

  Dolan set the receiver back in its cradle, sat and stared at it. A strange chill crept up his back and turned his skin to gooseflesh.

  Pitt's voice had sounded as though it came from a tomb.

  Loren cleared away the supper dishes and carried a tray with two mugs of steaming coffee out to the balcony. Pitt was sitting tilted back in a chair with his feet propped on the railing. Despite the cool September-evening air, he wore a short-sleeved sweater.

  "Coffee?" Loren asked.

  As if in a trance, he turned and looked up at her. "What?" Then, murmuring, "I'm sorry, I didn't hear you come out."

  The violet eyes studied him. "You're like a man possessed," she said suddenly, without quite knowing why.

  "Could be I'm going psycho," he said, smiling faintly. "I'm beginning to see aircraft wreckage in my every thought."

  She passed him one cup and cradled the other in her hands, soaking up its warmth. "That stupid old junk of Dad's. That's all you've had on your mind since we've been here. You've blown its significance out of all proportion."

  "I can't make any sense out of it either." He paused and sipped the coffee. "Call it the Pitt curse; I can't drop a problem until I find a workable solution." He turned toward her. "Does that sound odd?"

  "I suppose some people are compelled to find answers to the unknown."

  He continued to speak in an introspective way. "This isn't the first time I've had a strong intuitive feeling about something."

  "Are you always right?"

  He shrugged and grinned. "To be honest, my ratio of success is about one in five."

  "And if it is proven that Dad's salvage did not come off an airplane that crashed near here, what then?"

  "Then I forget it and reenter the mundane world of practicality."

&nbs
p; A kind of stillness settled upon them and Loren came over and sank into his lap, trying to absorb his body heat in the cool breeze that drifted down from the mountains.

  "We still have twelve more hours before we board a plane back to Washington. I don't want anything to spoil our last night alone. Please, let's go in now and go to bed."

  Pitt smiled and kissed her eyes tenderly. He balanced her weight in both arms and rose from the chair, lifting her as easily as he would a large stuffed doll. Then he carried her inside the cabin.

  He wisely decided that now was not the time to tell her that she would be returning to the nation's capital alone, that he would stay behind and continue his search.

  Two evenings later, a subdued Pitt sat at the cabin's dining table and scrutinized a spread of topographical maps. He leaned back in the chair and rubbed his eyes. All he had to show for his effort was a distraught girl friend and a hefty bill from the company that had rented him the helicopter.

  The sound of feet thudded up the stairs to the front balcony, and soon a head that was completely shaved and a face with friendly hazel eyes and an enormous Kaiser Wilhelm mustache peered through the window in the Dutch door.

  "Hello, the house," hailed the voice that seemed to come from a pair of size-twelve boots.

  "Come in," Pitt answered without rising.

  The man's body was squat and barrel-chested and must have sagged the scales, Pitt judged, at close to two hundred twenty pounds. The stranger shoved out a beefy hand.

  "You must be Pitt."

  "Yes, I'm Pitt."

  "Good. I found you on the first try. I was afraid of taking a wrong turn in the dark. I'm Abe Steiger."

  "Colonel Steiger?"

  "Forget the title. As you can see, I came dressed like an old pack rat."

  12

  "I hardly expected you to answer my inquiry in person. A letter would have done just as well."

  Steiger gave a wide grin. "The fact of the matter is, I wasn't about to let the price of a stamp cheat me out of a prospecting trip."

  "A prospecting trip?"

  "I'm killing two birds with the same stone, so to speak. One, I'm scheduled to speak next week at Chanute Air Force Base, in Illinois, on aircraft safety. Two, you're sitting in the heart of Colorado mining country, and since I have a raving fetish for prospecting, I took the liberty of stopping over in hopes of getting in a little gold panning before continuing on to my lecture."

  "You're more than welcome to bunk with me. I'm baching it at the moment anyway."

  "Mr. Pitt, I accept your hospitality."

  "Did you bring any luggage?"

  "Outside, in a rented car."

  "Bring it in and I'll fix some coffee." Then, as an afterthought, "Would you like some supper?"

  "Thanks, but I had a bite with Harvey Dolan before I drove up."

  "You saw the nose gear, then."

  Steiger nodded and produced an old leather briefcase. He unzipped the sides and passed Pitt a stapled folder. "The status report on Air Force Boeing C-ninety-seven, number 75403, commanded by a Major Vylander. You might as well go over it while I unpack. If you have any questions, just holler."

  After Steiger was settled in a spare bedroom, he joined Pitt at the table. "Does that resolve your curiosity?"

  Pitt looked up over the folder. "This report states that 03 vanished over the Pacific during a routine flight between California and Hawaii during January of 1954."

  "That's what Air Force records show."

  "How do you explain the presence of the nose gear here in Colorado?"

  "No great mystery. Sometime during the aircraft's service life the gear assembly was probably replaced with a new one. It's not an uncommon occurrence. The mechanics found a flaw in the structure. A hard landing cracked the strut. Perhaps it was damaged while being towed. There are a dozen different reasons that would require a replacement." "Do the maintenance records show a replacement?"

  "No, they do not."

  "Isn't that a bit peculiar?"

  "Irregular, maybe, but not peculiar. Air Force maintenance personnel are noted for their skill at mechanical repair, not for administrative bookkeeping."

  "This also states that no traces of the aircraft or its crew ever turned up"

  "I'll concede a puzzler on that score. The records indicate the search was an extensive one, much larger than the normal air-sea rescue procedures called for by the book. And yet, combined units of the Air Force and Navy drew a big fat zero." Steiger nodded thanks as Pitt handed him a steaming cup of coffee. "However, these things happen. Our files are crammed with aircraft that have flown into oblivion."

  " 'Flown into oblivion.' That's very poetic." There was no concealing the cynicism in Pitt's voice.

  Steiger ignored the tone and sipped at his coffee. "To an air-safety investigator, every unsolved crash is a thorn in the flesh.

  We're like doctors who occasionally lose a patient on the operating table. The ones that get away keep us awake nights."

  "And 03?" asked Pitt evenly. "Does that one keep you awake?"

  "You're asking me about an accident that occurred when I was four years old. I can't relate to it. As far as I'm concerned, Mr. Pitt, and as far as the Air Force is concerned, the disappearance of 03 is a closed book. She's lying on the bottom of the sea for all eternity and the secret behind the tragedy lies with her."

  Pitt looked at Steiger for a moment, then refilled the man's coffee cup. "You're wrong, Colonel Steiger, dead wrong. There is an answer and it's not three thousand miles from here."

  After breakfast Pitt and Steiger went their separate ways-Pitt to probe a deep ravine that had been too narrow for the helicopter to enter, Steiger to find a stream in which to pan gold. The weather was crisp. A few soft clouds hovered over the mountaintops and the temperature stood in the low sixties.

  It was past noon when Pitt climbed out of the ravine and headed back toward the cabin. He took a faintly marked trail that meandered through the trees and came out on the shore of Table Lake. A mile along the waterline he met a stream that emptied out of the lake, and he followed it until he ran into Steiger.

  The colonel was contentedly sitting on a flat rock in the middle of the current, swishing a large metal pan around in the water.

  "Any luck?" Pitt yelled.

  Steiger turned around, waved, and began wading toward the bank. "I won't be making any deposits at Fort Knox. I'll be lucky if I can scrounge half a gram." He gave Pitt a friendly but skeptical look. "How about you? Find what you were looking for?"

  "A wasted trip," Pitt replied. "But an invigorating hike."

  Steiger offered him a cigarette. Pitt declined.

  "You know," Steiger said, lighting up, "you're a classic study of a stubborn man."

  "So I've been told," Pitt said, and laughed.

  Steiger sat down and inhaled deeply and let the smoke trickle between his lips as he spoke. "Now, take me: I'm a bona fide quitter, but only on the matters that don't really count," he said. "Crossword puzzles, dull books, household projects, hooked rugs-I never finish any of them. I figure, without all that mental stress, I'll live ten years longer."

  "A pity you can't quit smoking."

  "louche," Steiger said.

  Just then two teenagers, a boy and a girl, wearing down vests and standing on a makeshift raft, rounded a bend in the stream and drifted past. They were laughing with adolescent abandon, totally oblivious of the men on the bank. Pitt and Steiger watched them in silence until they disappeared downstream.

  "Now, there is the life," said Steiger. "I used to go rafting down the Sacramento River when I was a kid. Did you ever try it?"

  Pitt did not hear the question. He stood gazing intently at the spot where the boy and the girl became lost to view. His facial expression transformed from deep thoughtfulness to sudden enlightenment.

  13

  "What's with you?" Steiger asked. "You look as though you've seen God."

  "It was socking me in the face all this time a
nd I ignored it," Pitt murmured.

  "Ignored what?"

  "It just goes to prove the toughest problems fall by the simplest solutions."

  "You haven't answered my question."

  "The oxygen tank and the nose gear," Pitt said. "I know where they came from."

  Steiger only looked at Pitt, his eyes clouded with skepticism.

  "What I'm getting at," Pitt continued, "is that we've been overlooking the one quality they share."

  "I fail to see the connection," said Steiger. "When installed in the aircraft, they work under two entirely different flow systems, one gas and the other hydraulic."

  "Yes, but take them off the aircraft and they both have one characteristic in common."

  "Which is?"

  Pitt gazed at Steiger and smiled and smiled. Then he spoke the magic words.

  "They float."

  8

  Alongside most sleek executive jets, the Catlin M-200 came off like a flying toad. Also slower in flight, it had one redeeming quality that was unmatched by any other airplane its size: the Catlin was designed to land and take off in impossible places with cargo loads twice its own weight.

  The sun gleamed on the aquamarine color scheme adorning the plane's fuselage as the pilot expertly banked the craft and settled it onto the narrow asphalt strip of the Lake County airport outside Leadville. It came to an abrupt halt with nearly two thousand feet to spare and then turned and taxied toward the area where Pitt and Steiger waited. As it neared, the letters NUMA could be clearly distinguished on the side. The Catlin rolled to a stop, the engines were shut down, and a minute later the pilot climbed down and approached the two men.

  "Thanks a lot, buddy," he said, and grimaced at Pitt.

  "For what, a carefree all-expenses-paid vacation in the Rockies?"

  "No, for prodding me out of the sack with a madcap redhead in the middle of the night to assemble a cargo and fly it out here from Washington."