The Scarlet Lake Mystery Part 20

"Now, I got a real good idea what game you boys are playin' and it's fine by me. Only don't get into my game. Stay on the base. You mean well, but you could cross me up when it would hurt most. Some day, after we have the one we want, we'll compare notes. Now let's get goin'. You kids are goin' to have a long, long drive. I'm sendin' you home by way of Pahrump Valley."

"It's shorter directly back to the base," Scotty objected.

"Sure. And you'll attract more attention that way. Go through the valley and back to Route 95, and you'll enter from the front gate. Then who'll know you didn't spend the night in Vegas?"

It took only ten minutes to get the parts from Deadrock's jeep, which was parked in a ravine, invisible to anything except a low-flying plane.

They said good-by to the "prospector" at the edge of town.

"Got the map in your heads? You won't get lost?" Deadrock asked.

"We'll be fine," Rick a.s.sured him.

"All right. Get goin'. And, boys--look out for sidewinders!"

CHAPTER XII

Servomotors Missing

Rick and Scotty took time to shower and change, then left on their prearranged errands. Scotty headed for his own department, to check all travel to the north since the Orion firing. Rick set out to find John Gordon.

The Spindrift scientist was not in his office, nor could Rick find him around the base. Finally he took the jeep and headed for the firing area.

There was considerable activity down on the lake bed. At a pad close to the blockhouse a tower was under construction. That was the launching tower for Cetus. But of even more personal interest to Rick was the presence of a gantry crane at a third firing pad where one of the special rocket-transport trucks was just putting the first stage of Pegasus into place!

It was at the Pegasus pad that he found Gordon, in conversation with Gee-Gee Gould, d.i.c.k Earle, Frank Miller, Cliff Damon, head of the instrumentation section, and Lars Jannsson, head of the Pegasus propulsion section.

"We'll start security immediately," Gordon was saying as Rick walked up.

"Tom Preston will arrange for a guard around the clock. We'll also arrange an exchange-badge system, so no one gets inside the fence without handing in his own badge and getting a special one. That way, we'll have absolute control on who comes and goes."

Gee-Gee Gould saw Rick and dropped a hand on the boy's shoulder. "Rick and I will do the final electronics check, just as we did on Orion."

Rick looked at Gordon. "Did you say something about a fence, sir?"

"I did. Look over there." Gordon pointed to a crew with a mechanical posthole digger that was just starting work, then gestured to sticks with red flags that formed a huge box around the pad. "That's where the fence will go. And there will be only one gate."

Rick took advantage of the brief exchange with Gordon to wink at the scientist. Gordon picked up the cue quickly. "Can I ride back to the base with you? I rode down with d.i.c.k, but he's not ready to leave yet."

"Glad to have you, sir," Rick replied.

On the way back to the base Rick told his story in detail, starting with Scotty's and his own first suspicions about Mac and Pancho and ending with their rescue by Deadrock Ogg.

John Gordon remained silent for long minutes after Rick had finished.

Finally he said, "You've certainly stirred up something, Rick, but I don't know how it fits into the over-all pattern. You and Scotty meet me in thirty minutes in my quarters and we'll see."

Rick dropped the scientist off at his office, then went to find Scotty.

His pal was just emerging from the big maintenance shed. "Anything new?"

Rick greeted him.

"Mac and Pancho took their truck out last night," Scotty reported. "The timing was right. They could have been driving the second vehicle that arrived while we were getting loose in the jail."

Rick looked at him curiously. "Funny. Why would they take a truck out? I mean, what legitimate reason could they have?"

"They made one. Mac told the dispatcher they'd left an important piece of gear at Careless Mesa."

So their hunch about Mac and Pancho had been right! But Rick still couldn't figure out how they were involved.

"How did you find out?" he asked.

"Easy. I checked the board. The dispatcher was sitting right there, so I just kind of wondered aloud what a tracking team would be doing off the base at night. He's a talkative sort, anyway, so he just handed me the dope."

Exactly twenty minutes later Rick and Scotty walked through the door into the barracks in which John Gordon had his quarters. They hadn't been inside before, although they had taken the precaution of locating it in advance. It wasn't like their barracks. Instead, it was divided into a series of individual rooms, occupied by the chief executives of the base.

Gordon was waiting, and with him was Colonel Tom Preston. Preston shook hands with them.

"Apparently John was right," he greeted them. "You two do have a knack of sniffing things out."

Rick looked at the thin part.i.tion. "Is it okay to talk here?"

"It is now. I've checked. The occupants of nearby rooms are out. We'll be able to hear if anyone comes in."

Rick immediately launched into a recital of their activities since arriving in Las Vegas. Now and then Scotty elaborated. A few times Preston interrupted to ask for clarification on a point or two.

"Good," he said when they had finished. "I'll see that Deadrock gets his parts back."

"Who is Deadrock Ogg?" Scotty asked.

Preston smiled. "Quite a character, isn't he? Normally he's a Forest Ranger. At the moment he's on loan to me, serving as my outside security officer. He did a good piece of work, getting that license number. We'll hand it to the FBI bureau in Las Vegas and they'll take it from there."

"He must have had advance information, to be at the right spot to get it," Rick observed.

"No more than you had," Preston told him. "We reached the same conclusion that you and Luis Hermosa did, about how stolen goods could get off the base. We've been watching from the inside, and Deadrock has been watching at the Steamboat end."

"Then you already knew about Mac and Pancho leaving last night," Scotty stated.

"Yes. But we really don't know any more than you two have found out.

We're no closer to finding out who sabotaged the rockets--or who stole the transistors and the servomotors."

"What?" the boys exclaimed in unison.

Tom Preston's eyebrows went up. "You haven't heard? But of course you haven't, because you weren't here when we finished inventory. We're missing ninety thousand dollars' worth of servomotors."

"Suffering s.p.a.cefish!" Rick groaned.

Scotty asked quickly, "When did it happen?"