Blue & Gold

by Clive Cussler

  Several doors led off the main hallway of the underground bunker. Austin flashed his light inside the rooms. Rusty bed frames and mattresses rotting with decay testified to the use of one space as a bunkroom. Farther along was a kitchen and pantry. The last chamber was a communications room.

  “They left in a rush,” Zavala said. The smashed vacuum tubes and radio cabinets looked as if they had been attacked with a sledgehammer.

  They continued along the passageway, skirting a large rectangular hole in the floor. The metal grating that once covered it had mostly rusted through. Austin pointed the flashlight down the deep shaft. “Some sort of ventilation or heating, maybe.”

  “I’ve been thinking about what Clarence Tinook said about mines,” Zavala said.

  “Let’s hope it was a concocted story they hoped would scare off hunters and fishermen,” Austin said. “Maybe he actually said mimes. ”

  “Now that would certainly scare me,” Zavala replied.

  The corridor eventually ended in a short set of stairs that led to another steel door. They guessed that they were under the hangar. Not entirely convinced of his own argument against booby traps, Austin took a deep breath, opened the door, and stepped through. Austin immediately sensed a change in atmosphere. The cold was less biting and musty than in the concrete bunker. The staleness of the air was overpowered by the smell of gasoline, oil, and heated metal.

  On the wall to the right of the door was a switch. A stenciled sign read “Generator.” Austin gave Zavala the go-ahead, and Joe yanked the switch down. Nothing happened at first. Then there was a click from somewhere in the darkness and a series of sputtering pops as a motor coughed reluctantly into life. High above, lights glimmered dimly then glowed brightly, illuminating the vaulted ceilings of a huge artificial cave. Zavala was too awestruck to speak. Illuminated at center stage was what looked like a black-winged avenger from a Norse myth.

  He walked over behind the scimitar-shaped craft, reached up, and tentatively touched one of the vertical fins extending down from the trailing end of the fuselage.

  “Beautiful,” he whispered as if he were talking about a lovely woman. “I’ve read about this thing, seen pictures, but I never dreamed it would be so magnificent.”

  Austin went over and stood beside him, taking in the broad sweep of sculpted aluminum. “Either we’ve stumbled into the. Bat Cave or we just found the long-lost phantom flying wing,” he said.

  Zavala walked under the fuselage. “I did some reading about the plane. These fins were added later for stabilization when they went from prop to jet power. She’s about a hundred seventy feet from wing tip to wing tip.”

  “That’s half the length of a football field,” Austin said.

  Zavala nodded. “It was the largest plane of its day even though she’s only about fifty feet from front to back. Check out these jet engines. In the original all eight were built into the fuselage. They slung these two underneath the wing to free up fuel space. Fits in with what you said about modifications to in crease range.”

  They walked around to the front of the plane. The swept back aerodynamic lines were even more impressive from this angle. Although the plane weighed more than two hundred thou sand tons, it seemed to balance lightly on its tripod landing gear.

  “Jack Northrop really had something when he designed this lady,” Austin replied.

  “Absolutely. Look at that slim silhouette. There’s hardly any surface for radar to bounce off. They’ve even painted it black like the stealth planes. Let’s go inside,” Zavala said eagerly.

  They climbed up a ladder through a hatchway in the plane’s belly and made their way along a short ramp. Like the rest of the plane, the flight deck was unconventional. Zavala sat in the rotating pilot’s seat and used a hand-operated mechanism to pump the seat four feet higher into a Plexiglas bubble. He peered through the cowling, which was to the left of the wing’s center line. The conventional switches and instruments were located between the pilot and the copilot, who sat at a lower level. The throttle controls were suspended from the overhead, similar to Navy flying boats such as the Catalina.

  “Fantastic visibility,” Zavala said. “It feels like being in a fighter plane.”

  Austin had settled into the copilot’s seat on the right. He could see through window panels in the wing’s leading edge. While Zavala ran his fingers lovingly over the controls, Austin went to explore the rest of the plane. The flight engineer sat in front of an impressive array of instrument gauges about ten feet behind the copilot facing the rear. He would have been unable to see out. Austin thought the layout was awkward, but he was impressed by the headroom and the small bunkroom, head, and kitchen that indicated the plane was built for long-range missions. He sat at the bombardier’s seat and stared out the window, trying to picture himself high above the bleak Siberian landscape. Then he crawled into the bomb bays. Zavala was still in the pilot’s seat, hands on the controls, when Austin returned to the cockpit. “Find anything back there?” he asked Austin.

  “It’s what I didn’t find,” Austin said. “The bomb bay racks are empty.”

  “No canister bombs?”

  “Not even a water balloon.” He smiled at Zavala. “Fallen hopelessly in love with the old girl, have we?”

  Zavala grinned lasciviously. “A case of love at first sight. Older women have always appealed to me. I’ll show you some thing. There’s still life in this baby.” His fingers played over the instrument console. The bank of dials and gauges in front of them glowed red.

  “She’s all gassed up and ready to go,” Austin said with disbelief.

  Zavala nodded. “She must be hooked up to the generator. There’s no reason this stuff wouldn’t still work. It’s been cold and dry here, and she was maintained in mint condition until they deserted this joint.”

  “Speaking of the joint, let’s take a look around.”

  Zavala reluctantly left the cockpit. They climbed down from the plane and walked around the interior perimeter of the hangar. The space was obviously planned to service the plane efficiently. Within easy reach of the aircraft were hydraulic lifts and cranes, test equipment, fuel and oil pumps. Joe stopped to marvel at a wall hung with tools. They were as clean as surgical instruments. Austin poked his head into a storage room. He glanced around and called for Zavala.

  Stacked from floor to ceiling inside the room were dozens of shiny cylinders like the one they had discovered floating in the water off the Baja. Austin carefully lifted a cylinder from the stack and felt its weight.

  “This is much heavier than the empty can back in my office.”

  “Anasazium?”

  “The unerring Austin homing instinct,” Kurt said with a smile. “You‘11 have to admit this is what we really came all this way to find.”

  “I suppose so. But I can see why Martin fell in love with that plane out there.”

  “Let’s hope it isn’t a similar case of fatal attraction. We’re going to have to figure out what to do next.”

  Zavala eyed the contents of the storeroom. “We’ll need something bigger than the Maule to move this stuff.”

  Austin said, “It’s been a long day. Let’s get back to Nome. We can call in for reinforcements. I’m not crazy about the way we came in. Let’s see if we can find another door.”

  They walked around in front of the flying wing again. The plane was positioned so that it pointed toward the broad side of the hangar, facing onto the airstrip. They tried a door that would have led to the outside, but it was overgrown with vegetation and wouldn’t open. A big section of wall apparently moved up and down like a garage door. Austin saw a wall switch marked “Door.” Since they had good luck with the generator, he gave it a yank. The hum of motors filled the air, then came loud creaks and rattles and the squeal of metal against metal. The motors strained to move the door against the vegetation that had taken over on the outside, but finally it ripped free and rumbled to a clanking stop in fully open position.

  It was near
midnight, and the sun had partially set, casting the tundra in a leaden light. The two men walked outside and turned around. As they gazed at the strange craft resting in what Buzz Martin’s father had called its hidey-hole, they heard an intrusive clatter from behind them. They turned to see a large helicopter dropping out of the sky like a raptor.

  The helicopter made a pass over the float plane, then stopped and hovered a short distance away. It did a three-hundred-sixty spin in place. There was a flash of light from the front of the chopper, and the float plane disappeared in a blinding explosion of yellow and red flames. A cloud of black smoke billowed from the funeral pyre that had been an air craft seconds before, and the tundra was lit up for hundreds of yards.

  “I think we just lost the deposit on our leased plane,” Zavala said.

  Finished with its first line of business, the chopper swiveled so that its nose pointed toward the hangar. Austin and Zavala had been dumbfounded in the seconds since the helicopter arrived and began its deadly work. Now Austin realized how vulnerable they were. They dashed for the open door as the chopper leaped forward. White bursts of flame flowered from the guns on either side of the speeding aircraft, and the bullets threw up geysers of water and mud as they stitched their way to ward the two running figures.

  They ducked inside, and Austin hit the door switch. There was another grinding of motors and machinery, and slowly the door began to close. The chopper landed a few hundred yards away. Armed men in dark green uniforms spilled out and advanced on the hangar with automatic weapons.

  Unfortunately Zavala had left his machine pistol in the plane. Austin’s Bowen revolver filled his hand, and he let off a couple of shots to give the attackers something to think about. Then the door clanked shut, and the gunfire became barely audible.

  “We’d better bolt the back door,” Austin said, sprinting for the rear of the hangar where they had come in.

  They ran along the corridor to the cellar hole. The bolt was rusted away, and they couldn’t secure the door. Hoping their attackers were as stupid as they were bold, they dragged one of the mattresses out of a bunkroom and covered the ventilation hole in the floor in a makeshift pitfall. Then they dashed back and secured the door leading directly into the hangar. All was silent, but they had no illusions about their security. It was obvious that the attackers didn’t want to damage the flying wing, but a few well-placed rockets or ex plosives could peel back the hangar’s metal walls like a sardine can.

  “Who are those guys?” Zavala said, trying to catch his breath.

  There was a sharp hammering on the metal skin of the hangar as if someone were testing it for weakness. Austin’s coral green eyes swept the hangar from one end to the other.

  “If I’m not mistaken, we’re about to find out.”

  Chapter 31

  The siege was announced with an ear-splitting explosion that echoed off every square inch of steel, as if the metal-enclosed space were a huge bell. Shards of hot metal and pieces of burning vegetation rained down from a hole high in the front face of the hangar. A patch of daylight opened, but the thick cushion of vegetation and earth that had grown up around the hangar over the decades had dampened the explosion.

  Austin looked up at the ragged hole and said, “They’re aiming high so they won’t hit the plane. Probably hoping to spook us.”

  “They’re doing a good job,” Zavala said. “I’m spooked.”

  In fact, Zavala looked anything but spooked. He would have retired from the Special Assignments Team long before if he succumbed easily to panic. His eyes calmly scanned the interior of the hangar looking for something that would give them even the slightest edge.

  The reverberations from the blast had barely faded when there was a loud hammering on the steel door at the rear of the hangar.

  “So much for our pitfall,” Austin said.

  They raced behind the plane and grabbed tool chests, benches, and storage lockers, anything they could move, stacking them against the door. The makeshift barricade would stall deter mined attackers only a few minutes. They were more concerned with the front of the hangar, where the main firepower appeared to be concentrated. As they darted under the plane’s fuselage Zavala glanced up at the jet engines. The yawning black exhausts protruding from the rear of the wing resembled cannon barrels lined up on a fort. He grabbed Austin by the arm.

  “Look, Kurt, those jets are pointed right at the rear wall. If we got the engines started, we could give those guys coming in the back door a warm welcome.”

  Austin calmly walked under the plane’s fuselage, seemingly oblivious to the steady thumping from the rear of the hangar. He stood in front of the plane, where the wing’s thin edge came to a point, his hands on his hips, and gazed up at the cockpit.

  “Even if we somehow made it out of the hangar, we’d have no place to go. Maybe I’ve a got better idea,” he said thoughtfully.

  Working with Austin had given Zavala insight into the un orthodox way his partner’s mind functioned. He caught Austin’s drift instantly. “You’re kidding,” he said.

  Austin’s eyes were deadly serious.

  “You said the systems are working. If we can crank up the engines, why waste fuel toasting a few bad guys when we can simply leave them in the dust? Admit it,” he said, catching the gleam in Zavala’s eye. “You’ve been itching to fly this thing.”

  “There are a lot of ifs here. The engines may not start, or the fuel could have gone sour,” Zavala said. He listed a few more un desirable possibilities, but from the way the corners of his mouth were turned up in a smile it was clear he was discounting disaster. Austin had tapped into Joe’s desire to fly every type of air craft that had ever been built.

  “I know it won’t be easy. Those trucks over there were probably used to tow the plane outside where it could take off. We won’t have that luxury. We’re going to have to make a running start.”

  “I’d be happy if we could make any kind of start. Those engines haven’t been cranked over in fifty years,” Zavala said.

  “Just keep thinking about the scene in that Woody Allen movie, where the Volkswagen starts right up after centuries in a cave. Should be a piece of cake.”

  Zavala grinned. “This isn’t exactly a Volkswagen,” he protested, although it was clear from his excitement that the idea had gone beyond a matter of life and death. It was now a challenge. “First I’ll have to see if I can get this old buggy cranked up. We’re not going anywhere with those flat tires. We’ll have to get air into them.”

  “I saw some air hoses, but we don’t have much time.”

  “We’ll start with the two outside tires under the fuselage and the nose wheel. We’ll get to the inside tires if we can.”

  They quickly uncoiled the air hose and fed the air into the tires. The rattle of the compressor was slightly slower than their heartbeats. Austin stopped pumping air and listened. The pounding had stopped although the back door was still firmly secured. Austin didn’t like it. The halt could mean the attackers were preparing to blow the door. He didn’t have time to worry. Another horrendous explosion came from the front of the hangar. The blast sent them both sprawling face-first onto the oil-soaked concrete floor. A second rocket had been fired to open up the gap below the first hole. Smoke from burning vegetation hovered near the ceiling.

  “We’re out of time!” Austin yelled. “We’ll have to stop for air at a gas station. Leave the belly hatch open. As soon as I hear the engines cranking I’ll hit the wall switch. While the door’s on its way up I’ll run for the plane.”

  “Don’t forget to detach the plane from its power umbilical,” Zavala said as he ran for the belly hatch.

  Austin took up his post next to the wall with his hand on the switch. He knew the odds were against them but hoped American wartime engineering would prove its worth.

  Zavala scrambled into the pilot’s high seat and peered through the plastic cowling. The dials blurred as he stared at the strange instrument panel. This was going to be a fa
st learning curve. He blinked his eyes and relaxed, trying to remember the procedure he used to fly the Catalina, trying not to look at every dial, only for needles that indicated trouble. All systems checked out fine. The center-line console between the two pilot stations contained the radio and the fuel and air speed gauges. His fingers flew over the switches, and the dials lit up like a pinball machine display.

  Holding his breath, he hit the ignition switches for the engines one at a time. The turbines began with a throaty rumble and worked themselves up to a high pitch. Satisfied that the engines were working, he waved at Austin, who stood next to the wall. Austin waved back.

  As Zavala jumped into the copilot’s seat and adjusted the fuel feed, Austin hit the wall switch. A thin line of daylight began to shine under the rising door. Kurt dashed beneath the plane and disconnected the umbilical. Then, using the sledge hammer he had set aside for the task, he knocked the wooden wheel chocks away. Austin groped his way through the smoke, pulled himself into the plane, and battened the hatch.

  The hot exhaust from engines blasted the rear of the building. Anything not nailed down was blown against the wall by the tremendous force or melted by the intense heat. The noise was so loud it was almost impossible to think, and hot, choking fumes and smoke filled the hangar.

  Austin crashed, gasping for breath, into the copilot’s seat. “She’s all yours, pal.”

  Zavala gave him the thumbs-up sign. “She’s a little cranky but not bad for an old gal.”

  Zavala’s eyes were glued on the rising door. He kept the brakes set and pushed each throttle forward until they were at full power. If they had the luxury of a full crew, Zavala would have relied on a flight engineer to tell him if the engines were running the way they should, but the best he could do was rely on his experienced ear. It was impossible to distinguish individual engines, but the unbroken roar was a good sign.

  The door seemed to catch for an instant, then it pulled free. He released the brakes, and the plane lurched forward. Zavala pushed the throttle levers smoothly forward and let out a rebel yell as the power from thousands of pounds of thrust pushed the plane out into the open, but his jubilation was short-lived.