Vixen 03 Part 27

"Guards!" Machita screamed, pointing frantically. "The river! Fire! For G.o.d's sake, fire!"

The security men's reaction time measured less than two seconds. Their shots exploded in Machita's ears and the water erupted a few feet from Lusana in a hundred shattered geysers.

Twenty feet of hideous brown scale burst through the surface and rolled over and over, its tail thrashing crazily as the bullets thudded into the thick hide like hail. Then the firing ceased and the great reptile made one more convulsive revolution and sank beneath the surface.

Lusana stood in his wading boots, his eyes wide, his body stunned into immobility. He stared dazedly into the clear water at the hulk of the crocodile, now gracefully tumbling along the riverbed in the current.

On the bank, Machita trembled, not so much at Lusana's narrow escape as at the satanic expression on Jumana's Neanderthal-shaped face.

The b.a.s.t.a.r.d had known, Machita thought. He had known the instant the crocodile slithered off the far bank and homed in on the general, and yet he had said nothing.

Chesapeake Bay, USA-October 1988

It was two hours before dawn when Patrick Fawkes paid the cabdriver and walked up to the floodlit gate of the Forbes Marine Sc.r.a.p & Salvage Company. A uniformed guard turned from a portable TV set and yawned as Fawkes pa.s.sed a small folder through the arched window of the gatehouse. The guard scrutinized the signatures and compared the photograph with the man before him. Then he pa.s.sed it back.

"Welcome to America, Captain. My employers have been expecting you."

"Is she here?" Fawkes asked impatiently.

"Tied up to the east dock," replied the guard, shoving a Xerox copy of a map of the salvage area through the window. "Mind your step. Since

the energy rationing, the yard's night lights have been shut off. It's darker than Hades out there." As Fawkes pa.s.sed under the giant derricks toward the dock, a wind swept in off the bay and carried a heavy odor to his nostrils: the pungent perfume of the waterfront. He inhaled the mingled aromas of diesel oil, tar,and salt water. It never failed to revive his spirits.

He came to the dock and glanced about for signs of human activity. The night crew had long since gone home. Only a seagull, perched on a wooden piling, returned Fawkes's gaze out of one beady eye.

After another hundred yards, Fawkes stopped at a huge spectral shape that loomed in the darkness beside the pier. Then he took the gangplank, stepped onto the seemingly endless deck, and unerringly made his way through the steel labyrinth to the bridge.

Later, as the sun crept over the eastern side of the bay, the mutilated shabbiness of the ship became manifest. But the peeling paint, the acres of rust, and the jagged torch marks of the salvage crew stood unseen in Fawkes's eyes. Like a father with a hideously disfigured daughter, he saw only her beauty.

"Aye, you're a bonny ship," he shouted across the silent decks. "You're gonna do just fine."

Part 3

Salvage

Washington, D.C. -November 1988

Steiger's superiors at the Pentagon sat on his report of the discovery of Vixen 03 for nearly two months before summoning him to Washington. To Steiger it was like sitting in the audience of a staged nightmare. He felt more like a hostile witness than a key investigator.

Even with the evidence before their eyes, in the form of videotape, General Ernest Burgdorf, chief of Air Force Safety, and General John O'Keefe, aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed doubts over the sunken aircraft's importance, and argued that nothing was to be gained by bringing it to light except sensationalistic play from the news media. Steiger sat stunned.

"But their families," he protested. "It would be criminal not to notify the crew's families that the bodies have been found."

"Come to your senses, Colonel. What good would dredging up old memories do them? The crew's parents are probably long since dead. Wives have remarried. Children raised by new fathers. Let all concerned go about their present lives in peace."

"There's still the cargo," Steiger said. "The possibility exists that Vixen O3's cargo included nuclear warheads."

"We've been all through that," snapped O'Keefe. "A thorough computer search through military-storehouse records confirmed that there are no missing warheads. Every piece of atomic hardware beginning with the bomb dropped on Hiroshima can be accounted for."

"Are you also aware, sir, that nuclear material was, and is still, shipped in stainless-steel canisters?"

"And did it also occur to you, Colonel," said Burgdorf, "that the canisters you say you found might be empty?"

Steiger sagged in his chair, beaten. He might as well have been debating with the wind. They were treating him like an overimaginative child who claimed he'd seen an elephant in a Minnesota cornfield.

"And if that actually is the same aircraft that was supposed to have vanished over the Pacific," added Burgdorf, "I think it best to let sleeping dogs lie."

"Sir?"

"The grim reasons behind the aircraft's tremendous course differential may not be something the Air Force wishes to publicize. Consider the probabilities. To fly a thousand miles in the opposite direction takes either the total malfunction of at least five different instrument systems aided by the blind stupidity of the crew, a navigator who lost his marbles, or a plot by the entire crew to steal the airplane, for what purpose G.o.d only knows."

"But somebody must have authorized the flight orders," said Steiger, puzzled.

"Somebody did," said O'Keefe. "The original orders were issued at Travis Air Force Base, in California, by a Colonel Michael Irwin."

Steiger looked at the general skeptically. "Flight orders are seldom kept on file more than a few months. How is it possible the ones in question were retained for over thirty years?"

O'Keefe shrugged. "Don't ask me how, Colonel. Take my word for it: Vixen 03's last flight plan turned up in old files at the Travis administration office."

"And the orders I found in the wreckage?"

"Accept the inevitable," said Burgdorf. "The papers you pulled out of that Colorado lake were too far gone to decipher with any degree of accuracy. You simply read something into them that wasn't there."

"As far as I'm concerned," O'Keefe said resolutely, "the explanation for Vixen O3's course deviation is a dead issue." He turned to Burgdorf. "You agree, General?"

"I do."

O'Keefe stared at Steiger. "Do you have anything else you'd like to put before us, Colonel?"

Steiger's superiors sat and waited for him to reply. He knew no words worth uttering. He had reached a dead end. The implication dangled over his head like a suspended sword. Either Abe Steiger forgot all about Vixen 03 or his Air Force career would come to a premature halt.

The President stood on the putting green behind the White House and stiffly swatted a dozen b.a.l.l.s toward the cup only five feet away. None dropped in, further proving to him that golf was not his game. He could understand the compet.i.tive challenge of tennis or handball or even a fast run of pool, but why one would choose to compete against one's own handicap escaped him.

"Now I can die content, for I have seen everything."

The President straightened and looked into the grinning face of Timothy March, his Secretary of Defense.

"It all goes to prove how much time I have on my hands now that I'm a lame-duck president."

March, a short, dumpy man who detested any sort of physical exertion, walked onto the green. "You should be happy with the election. Your party and your man won."

"n.o.body ever really wins an election," the President grunted. "What's on your mind, Tim?"