Vixen 03 Part 45

"I'll accept that," Sandecker said. "But who would want them in the first place? Christ, they weigh nearly a ton each, and they're easily recognizable in exterior appearance as obsolete naval sh.e.l.ls."

"The answer will also lead us to the murderer of Loren Smith's father."

"No corpus delicti, no crime," Sandecker said.

"I know what I saw," Pitt said evenly.

"It won't alter present circ.u.mstances. The dilemma staring us all in the face is how to get a tag on those lost warheads and do it before someone gets it in his head to play demolition expert."

Suddenly the exhaustion seemed to drop from Pitt. "Something you just said jogged a thought. Give me five days to flush out the warheads. If I turn up nothing, then it's your ball game."

Sandecker smiled tightly at Pitt's sudden show of intensity. "This happens to be my ball game, any way you look at it," he said sharply. "As the senior government official involved in this mess, it became my unwanted responsibility the day you hijacked a NUMA aircraft and underwater camera system."

Pitt stared back across the room but remained discreetly silent.

Sandecker left Pitt stewing for a moment while he rubbed his eyes. Then he said, "All right, against my better judgment I'll take the gamble."

"You'll go along, then?"

Sandecker caved in. "You've got five days, Pitt. But heaven help us if you come up empty-handed."

He hit the switch to the holograph and Pitt's image faded and disappeared.

It was just before sunset when Maxine Raferty turned from her clothesline and spied Pitt walking up the road. She continued her ch.o.r.e, pinning up the last of her husband's shirts before waving a greeting.

"Mr. Pitt, how nice to see you."

"Mrs. Raferty."

"Loren with you up to the cabin?"

"No, she had to remain in Washington." Pitt looked around the yard. "Is Lee at home?"

"In the house, fixing the kitchen sink." A brisk breeze was sweeping down the mountains from the west and Maxine thought it odd that Pitt was carrying his Windbreaker over his right hand and arm. "Just go on in."

Lee Raferty was sitting at the kitchen table, filing burrs from a length of plumbing pipe. He looked up as Pitt entered.

"Mr. Pitt. Hey, sit down; you're just in time. I was about to open a bottle of my private stock of grape squeezin's."

Pitt pulled up a chair. "You make wine as well as beer?"

"Gotta be self-sufficient up here in the high country," Lee said, grinning, and pointing a cigar stub at the pipe. "Take this. Cost me a fortune to get a plumber up here from Leadville. Cheaper to do it myself. Leaky gasket. Any kid could fix it."

Raferty laid the rusty pipe on an old newspaper, rose from the table, and produced two gla.s.ses and a ceramic jug from under a cupboard.

"I wanted to talk with you," Pitt said.

"Sure thing." Lee poured the gla.s.ses to their brims. "Hey, what do you think about all that commotion up at the lake? I hear tell they found an old airplane. Could it be the one you was askin' about?"

"Yes," Pitt answered, sipping from the winegla.s.s, which he held in his left hand. He was mildly surprised to find the wine quite smooth. "That's part of the reason I'm here. I was hoping you might enlighten me as to why you murdered Charlie Smith."

The only reaction was the slight lift of one gray eyebrow. "Me ... murder old Charlie? What on earth are you talking about?"

"A falling-out of partners who thought they'd discovered a pot of gold deep in a mountain lake."

He stared at Pitt and tilted his head questioningly. "You're talking like a crazy man."

"The last thing you expected was a stranger appearing on your doorstep asking questions about a lost airplane. You'd already made a mistake by not disposing of the oxygen tank and nose gear. I pay homage to you and your wife's theatrical talents. I swallowed your country-b.u.mpkin act with all the gullibility of a tourist. After I left, you covered my every move, and when you saw me dive in the lake, you were dead certain I had discovered the aircraft and Charlie Smith's bones. At that point you made an irreversible blunder: you panicked and removed Charlie, in all probability burying his bones deep in the mountains. If you'd left him strapped to that sunken cargo floor, the sheriff would have been hard pressed to tie you to a three-year-old murder."

"You'll pay h.e.l.l proving anything," Lee said, calmly relighting his cigar stub, "without a body."

"Not in a court of law," Pitt said casually. "Innocent until proven guilty, but the story is a worn cla.s.sic. Kill thy neighbor for profit; there's your t.i.tle. Suppose we begin at chapter one with an eccentric inventor named Charlie Smith who was testing his latest brainstorm, an automatic fishing-pole caster. On one cast the sinkers took the hook deep and it snagged on an object. Charlie, an experienced angler, thought he had

hooked a submerged log and expertly worked the line until the tension gave and it pulled free. But he felt a drag; something was surfacing with the hook. And then he saw it: an aircraft oxygen tank. Its mounts had torn loose, eroded over the years of submersion, and Charlie's tugs were all the tank needed to break away and rise to the lake's surface.

"The practical course would have been to call the sheriff. Unluckily for Charlie, he was the curious sort. He had to prove to himself there was a plane down there, so he scrounged a rope and grappling iron and began dragging the lake bottom. On one pa.s.s he must have caught and yanked up the shattered nose gear, which must have broken out of its housing. Suspicions confirmed, Charlie then became greedy and sniffed the sweet smell of treasure. So instead of playing Honest John Citizen and reporting his discovery, he headed straight for Lee Raferty."

"Why would Charlie come to me?"

"A retired Navy man, a deep-water diver; you were made to order. I venture to guess the diving equipment and air compressor you and Charlie scrounged are sitting in your garage right now. A hundred-and-forty-foot dive must have been child's play for a man of your experience, wearing hard-hat gear. The strange cargo in the aircraft stirred the juices of your imagination. What did you expect to find inside the canisters? Old atomic bombs, perhaps? I can only envision the backbreaking work it took for two men nearing seventy to dive in frigid waters and wrench weights of two thousand pounds from the lake depths to sh.o.r.e. I give you both credit for guts. I can only hope I'm in half the physical shape when I reach your age."

"Not so tough." Lee smiled; he seemed to have no fear of Pitt at all. "Once Charlie devised a small explosive charge to enlarge the already cracked opening on the fuselage, it was a simple matter for me to attach a cable to a canister while he towed it to sh.o.r.e with the four-wheel-drive."

"Where there's a will," Pitt said. "What then, Lee? Once the canister was removed, it was obvious to an ex-Navy man and a former demolitions expert that you were looking at a prize that could have only warmed the c.o.c.kles of an old battleship admiral's heart. But what was the value at today's prices? What was the demand for an outdated naval sh.e.l.l, except for sc.r.a.p?"

Lee Raferty casually resumed filing the rough edges of the pipe. "Pretty slick guesswork, Mr. Pitt. I admit it. Not one hundred percent, mind you, but a pa.s.sing grade. You underestimated a pair of foxy veterans, though. h.e.l.l, we knew them things in the canisters weren't

armor-piercing projectiles the minute we laid eyes on one. Took Charlie all of ten minutes to peg it as a poison-gas carrier."

Pitt was stunned. Two old men had made fools of them all. "How?" he asked tersely.

"Outwardly it looked like standard naval ordnance, but we saw it was rigged the same as a star sh.e.l.l. You know the kind: after reaching a preset alt.i.tude, a parachute is released while a small explosive charge splits the head, igniting a wad of phosphorus. Except this devil was set to unleash a bundle of tiny bomblets filled with lethal gas instead."

"Charlie figured they contained gas merely by looking at it?"

"He discovered the parachute-escape-hatch cover. That gave him his first clue. Then he came around front, dismantled the head, disconnected the charge, and peeked inside."

"Dear G.o.d!" Pitt murmured in near despair. "Charlie opened the warhead?"

"So what's the big deal? Charlie was a master at demolitions."

Pitt took a deep breath and pitched the obvious question. "What did you do with the warheads?"

"The way I saw it, it was finders, keepers."

"Where are they?" Pitt demanded.