Vixen 03 Part 7

"Not much to go on," said Dolan.

"But you can offer an educated guess."

Dolan shrugged noncommittally. "You might compare it to a policeman who's found a small lost child wandering the streets. The cop can see it's a boy with two arms and two legs, approximately two years old. The kid's clothes are J. C. Penney, and his shoes are Buster Browns. He says his first name is Joey, but he doesn't know his surname, address, or phone number. We're in the same boat, Mr. Pitt, as that cop."

"Could you translate your a.n.a.logue into factual detail?" Pitt asked, smiling.

"Please observe," Dolan said with a professional flourish. He produced a ball-point pen from a breast pocket and probed it about like a pointer. "We have before us the frontal landing gear of an aircraft, an aircraft that weighed in the neighborhood of seventy or eighty thousand pounds. It was a propeller-driven craft, because the tires were not constructed for the stresses of a high-speed jet landing. Also, the strut design is of a type that has not been built since the nineteen fifties. Therefore, its age is somewhere between thirty and forty-five years. The tires came from Goodyear and the wheels from Rantoul Engineering, in Chicago. As to the make of the aircraft and its owner, however, I'm afraid there isn't too much to go on."

"So it ends here," Pitt said.

"You throw in the towel too early," said Dolan. "There is a perfectly legible serial number on the strut. If we can determine the type of ship this particular nose-gear model was designed for, then it becomes a simple matter of tracing the strut's number through the manufacturer and establishing the parent aircraft."

"You make it sound easy." i

"Any other fragments?"

"Only what you see."

"How did you come to bring them here?"

"I figured that if anybody could identify them, it would.be the Federal Aviation Administration."

"Putting us on the spot, huh?" Dolan said, grinning.

"No malice intended," Pitt said, grinning back.

"Not much to go on," Dolan said, "but you never can tell; we might get

lucky"

He made a thumbs-down motion toward a spot circled with red paint on the concrete floor. The forklift operator nodded and lowered the pallet holding the parts. Then he wheeled the forklift backward, cut a ninety-degree right turn, and clanked off toward another corner of the hangar.

Dolan picked up the oxygen tank, turned it over in his hands in the manner of a connoisseur admiring a Grecian vase, and then set it down. "No way in h.e.l.l to trace this," he said flatly. "Standardized tanks like this are still produced by several manufacturers for any one of twenty different aircraft models."

Dolan began to warm to his task. He got down on his knees and examined every square inch of the nose gear. At one point he had Pitt help him roll it to a new position. Five minutes went by and he didn't utter a word.

Pitt finally broke the silence. "Does it tell you anything?"

"A great deal." Dolan straightened up. "But not, unfortunately, the jackpot answer."

"The odds favor the proverbial wild-goose chase," said Pitt. "I don't feel right putting you to all this trouble."

"Nonsense," Dolan a.s.sured him. "This is what John Q. Public pays me for. The FAA has dozens of missing aircraft on file whose fates have never been solved. Any time we have an opportunity to mark a case closed, we jump at it."

"How do we go about laying our fingers on the make of aircraft?"

"Ordinarily I'd call in research technicians from our engineering division. But I think I'll take a stab in the dark and try a shortcut. Phil Devine, maintenance chief over at United Airlines, is a walking encyclopedia on aircraft. If anyone can tell us at a glance, he can."

"He's that good?" asked Pitt.

"Take my word for it," Dolan said with a knowing smile. "He's that good."

"A photographer you ain't. Your lighting is lousy." A nonfiltered cigarette dangled from the lips of Phil Devine as he studied the Polaroid pictures Dolan had taken of the nose gear. Devine

was a W. C. Fields-type character-heavy through the middle, with a slow, whining voice.

"I didn't come here for an art review," replied Dolan. "Can you put a make on the gear or not?"

"It looks vaguely familiar, kind of like the a.s.sembly off an old B-twenty-nine."

"That's not good enough."

"What do you expect from a bunch of fuzzy pictures-an absolute, irrefutable ID?"

"I had hoped for something like that, yes," Dolan replied, unruffled.

Pitt was beginning to wonder if he was about to referee a fight. Devine read the uneasy look in his eyes.

"Relax, Mr. Pitt," he said, and smiled. "Harvey and I have a standing rule: we're never civil to each other during working hours. However, as soon as five o'clock rolls around, we cut the hard-a.s.sing and go out and have a beer together."

"Which I usually pay for," Dolan injected dryly.

"You government guys are in a better position to moonlight," Devine fired back.

"About the nose gear ..." Pitt said, probing quietly.

"Oh yeah, I think I might dig up something." Devine rose heavily from behind his desk and opened a closet filled from floor to ceiling with thick black-vinyl-bound books. "Old maintenance manuals," he explained. "I'm probably the only nut in commercial aviation who hangs on to them." He went directly to one volume buried among the ma.s.s and began thumbing through its pages. After a minute he found what he was looking for and pa.s.sed the open book across the desk. "That close enough for you?"

Pitt and Dolan leaned forward and examined an exploded-view line drawing of a nose-gear a.s.sembly.

"The wheel castings, parts, and dimensions"-Dolan tapped the page with his finger-"they're one and the same."

"What aircraft?" asked Pitt.

"Boeing Stratocruiser," answered Devine. "Actually I wasn't that far off when I guessed a B-twenty-nine. The Stratocruiser was based on the bomber's design. The Air Force version was designated a C-ninety-seven."

Pitt turned to the front of the manual and found a picture of the plane in flight. A strange-looking aircraft: its two-deck fuselage had the config-

uration of a great double-bellied whale.

"I recall seeing these as a boy," Pitt said. "Pan American used them."

"So did United," said Devine. "We flew them on the Hawaii run. She was a d.a.m.ned fine airplane."

"Now what?" Pitt turned to Dolan.

"Now I send the nose gear's serial number to Boeing, in Seattle, along with a request to match it with the parent aircraft. I'll also make a call to the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington, who will tell me if they show any lost commercial Stratocruisers over the continental United States."