Vixen 03 Part 10

"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 sh.o.r.e 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 cla.s.sic 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.

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

"It was socking me in the face all this time and 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."

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 a.s.semble a cargo and fly it out here from Washington."

Pitt turned to Steiger. "Colonel Abe Steiger, may I present Al Gior-dino, my sometimes able a.s.sistant and always chief bellyacher, of the National Underwater and Marine Agency."

Giordino and Steiger sized each other up like two professional fighters. Except for Steiger's cleanly shaved head and Semitic features, and Giordino's mischievous Italian grin and curly mop of black hair, they

could have pa.s.sed for brothers. They were built exactly alike: same height, same weight, even the muscles that fought to escape their clothing seemed poured from the same mold. Giordino extended his hand.

"Colonel, I hope you and I never get mad at each other."

"The feeling is mutual," Steiger said, smiling warmly.

"Did you bring the equipment I specified?" asked Pitt.

Giordino nodded. "It took some conniving. If the admiral finds out about your little back-door project, he'll throw one of his renowned temper tantrums."

"Admiral?" Steiger queried. "I don't see how the Navy enters into this."

"They don't," Pitt answered. "Admiral James Sandecker, retired, happens to be Chief Director of NUMA. He has this Scrooge hangup: he frowns on clandestine expenditures by the hired help that aren't included in the agency's fiscal budget."

Steiger's eyebrows rose with sudden realization. "Are you saying that you had Giordino take a government aircraft at government expense halfway across the country without authorization, not to mention a stolen cargo of equipment?"

"Something like that, yes."

"We're really quite good at it," Giordino said, deadpan.