“Sweet Jesus!” Giordino gasped. “A MATS transport.”
“Can you tell what model?” Steiger asked feverishly.
Pitt shook his head. “Not yet. The camera angle missed the more easily identifiable engines and nose section. It came across the left wing tip and, as you can see, is now moving toward the tail.”
“The serial number should be painted on the vertical stabilizer,” Steiger said softly, as though in prayer.
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They sat absorbed as the unearthly scene unfolded below. The plane had settled deeply in the mud. The fuselage had cracked open aft of the wings, the tail section twisted on a slight angle.
Giordino gently dipped his oars and towed the camera on a new course, correcting its vie wing field. The resolution was so clear that they could almost make out the flush rivets in the aluminum skin. It was all so strange and incongruous. It was difficult for them to accept the image the television equipment relayed to their eyes.
Then they held their breaths as the stenciled serial number on the vertical stabilizer began entering from stage right. Pitt zoomed in the camera lens ever so slightly so there would be no mistaking the aircraft’s identification. First a 7, then a 5, and a 4, followed by 03. For a moment Steiger stared at Pitt; the shattering effect of what he now knew to be true but was unable to accept turned his eyes as glazed as those of a somnambulist.
“My God, it’s 03. But that’s impossible.”
“What you see is what you get,” said Pitt.
Giordino reached over and shook Pitt’s hand. “Never a doubt, partner.”
“Your confidence in me is duly noted,” Pitt said.
“Where do we go from here?”
“Drop a marker buoy over the side and we’ll call it a day. Tomorrow morning we’ll go down and see what we can find inside the wreck.”
Steiger sat there, shaking his head and repeating, “It’s not supposed to be here … it’s not supposed to be here.”
Pitt smiled. “Apparently the good colonel refuses to trust his own eyes.”
“It’s not that,” Giordino said. “Steiger has this psychological problem.”
“Problem?”
“Yeah, he doesn’t believe in Santa Claus.”
In spite of the chilling morning air, Pitt was sweating inside the wet suit. He checked his breathing regulator, gave the thumbs-up sign to Giordino, and dropped over the side of the boat.
The icy water, surging between his skin and the interior lining of his three-sixteenths-inch-thick neoprene suit, felt like an electric shock. He hung suspended just below the surface for several moments, suffering the stabbing agony, waiting for his body heat to warm the entrapped water layer. When the temperature became bearable, he cleared his ears
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and kicked his fins, descending into an eerie world where wind and air were unknown. The line from the marker buoy angled off into the beckoning depths and he swam along beside it.
The bottom seemed to rise up and meet him. His right fin trailed through the mud before he leveled off, creating a gray cloud that mushroomed like smoke from an oil-tank explosion.
Pitt checked the depth gauge on his wrist. It read one hundred forty feet. That meant approximately ten minutes’ bottom time without worrying about decompression.
His primary enemy was the water temperature. The icy pressure would drastically affect his concentration and performance. His body heat would soon be drained by the cold, pushing his endurance beyond its borders and into the realm of excessive fatigue.
Visibility was no more than eight feet, but that factor did not hinder him. The marker buoy had missed the sunken plane by mere inches and he had but to extend a hand and touch the metal surface. Pitt had wondered what sensations would course through him. He was certain fear and apprehension would raise their tentacles. But they did not appear. Instead, he felt a strange sense of accomplishment. It was as though he’d come to the end of a long and exhausting journey.
He swam over the engines, the blades of their propellers gracefully bent backward, like the curled petals of an iris, the finned cylinder heads never to feel the heat of combustion again. He swam past the windows of the cockpit. The glass was still intact but coated with slime, cutting off any view of the interior.
Pitt noted that he had used up nearly two minutes of his bottom time. He quickly kicked around to the shattered opening of the main fuselage, squeezed through, and switched on his dive light.
The first things his eyes distinguished in the somber gloom were large silver canisters. Their tie-down straps had broken in the crash and they lay jumbled about the cargo-cabin floor. Carefully he snaked in and around them and glided through the open door to the control cabin.
There were four skeletons sitting in their assigned seats, held in their grotesque positions by nylon seat belts. The navigator’s bony fingers were still clenched; the one at the engineer’s panel leaned backward, its skull cocked to one side.
Pitt moved forward, more than a touch of fear and revulsion in his chest. The bubbles from his air regulator cascaded upward and mingled in one corner of the cockpit’s ceiling. What made the scene all the more unearthly was the fact that although the flesh of the bodies was gone, the
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clothes remained. The icy-cold water had held back the rotting process over the decades, and the crew sat as properly uniformed as at the instant they had all died.
The copilot sat stiffly upright, his jaws open in what Pitt imagined to be a ghostly scream. The pilot drooped forward, his head almost touching the instrument panel. A small metal plate protruded from his breast pocket, and Pitt gently retrieved it, pushing the small rectangle up one of the sleeves of his wet suit. A vinyl folder hung from a pocket next to the pilot’s seat, and Pitt took that also.
A glance at his watch told him his time was up. He didn’t need an engraved invitation to head for the surface and the friendly rays of the sun. The cold was beginning to seep into his blood and mist his mind. He could have sworn the skeletons had all turned and were staring at him through the empty sockets of their skulls.
He hurriedly backed out of the cockpit and turned around when space permitted in the cargo cabin. It was then he spied a skeletal foot behind one of the canisters. The body that belonged to the foot was secured by straps to several of the cargo tie-down rings. Unlike the remains of the crew forward, this one still had remnants of flesh adhering to its bones.
Pitt fought the bile rising in his throat and studied more closely what was once a living, breathing man. The uniform was not Air Force blue but rather a khaki similar to the old Army issue. He went through the pockets, but they were bare.
An alarm began to go off in his head. His arms and legs were losing all feeling and turning stiff from the relentless cold, and his movements came as though he were immersed in syrup. If he did not get some warmth to his body soon, the ancient aircraft would claim another victim. His mind was fogged and for a brief moment he felt the sharp knife of panic as he became confused and lost his sense of direction. Then he spotted his air bubbles, trailing from the cargo cabin and ascending toward the surface.
With great relief he turned from the skeleton and followed the bubbles into open water. Ten feet from the surface he could see the bottom of the boat as it wavered in the refracted light like an object in a surrealistic film. He could even make out Giordino’s seemingly disembodied head peering over one side.
He barely had the strength to reach out and grasp an oar. The combined muscles of Giordino and Steiger then hoisted him into the boat as effortlessly as if he were a small child.
“Help me get this wet suit off him,” Giordino ordered.
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“My God, he’s turned blue.”
“Another five minutes down there and he would have entered hypothermia.”
“Hypothermia?” asked Steiger, stripping off Pitt’s jacket.
“Profound body-heat loss,” explained Giordino. “I’ve known divers who died from it.”
“I am not … repeat … am not ready for a coroner’s slab,” Pitt managed between shivers.
The wet suit was peeled off and they rubbed Pitt vigorously with towels and wrapped him in heavy wool blankets. The feeling slowly came back to his limbs and the warm sun added to his sensual comfort by penetrating his skin. He sipped hot coffee from a Thermos jug, knowing its rejuvenating benefits were more psychological than physiological.
“You were a fool,” Giordino said, more out of concern than anger. “You damned near killed yourself by staying down too long. The water must be near freezing at that depth.”
“What did you find down there?” Steiger asked anxiously.
Pitt sat up, pushing the last of the fog from his head. “A folder. I had a folder.”
Giordino held it up. “You still do. It was clutched in your left hand like a vise.”
“And a small metal plate?”
“I have it,” said Steiger. “It fell out of your sleeve.”
Pitt relaxed against the side of the boat and took another swallow of the steaming coffee. “The cargo cabin is filled with large canisters-stainless steel, judging by the negligible degree of corrosion. What they contain is anybody’s guess. There were no markings on them.”
“How are they shaped?” asked Giordino.
“Cylindrical.”
Steiger looked thoughtful. “I can’t imagine what kind of military cargo would call for the protection of stainless-steel canisters.” Then his mind shifted gear and he looked at Pitt piercingly. “What of the crew? Was there any sign of the crew?”
“What’s left of them is still strapped in their seats.”
Giordino gently pried open one end of the vinyl folder. “The papers may be readable. I think I can separate and dry them back at the cabin.”
“Probably the flight plan,” said Steiger. “A few of the old die-hard Air Force pilots still prefer that particular type of folder to the newer, plastic ones for holding their paperwork.”
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“Maybe it will tell us what the crew was doing that far off course.”
“I for one hope so,” said Steiger. “I want all the facts in hand and the mystery neatly gift wrapped before I drop it on a desk at the Pentagon.”
“Ah … Steiger.”
The colonel looked at Pitt questioningly.
“I hate to bear tidings that will screw up your well-laid plans, but there’s more than meets the eye concerning the enigma of Air Force 03-much more.”
“We’ve found the wreck intact, haven’t we?” Steiger fought to keep his voice down. He was not to be denied a moment of triumph. “The answers lie only afew yards away. Now it’s only a matter of salvaging the remains from the lake. What else is there?”
“A rather unpleasant dilemma none of us counted on.”
“What dilemma?”
“I’m afraid,” Pitt said quietly, “that we also have a murder on our hands.”
Giordino spread the contents of the folder on the kitchen table. There were six sheets in all. The small aluminum plate Pitt had found in the pocket of the pilot was simmering in a solution Giordino had concocted to bring out the traces of etching in the metal.
Pitt and Steiger stood before a crackling fire and sipped coffee. The fireplace was built of native rock; its heat warmed the entire room.
“You realize the enormous consequences of what you’re suggesting?” Steiger asked. “You’re conjuring up a serious crime out of thin air, without a shred of evidence… .”
“Stick it in your ear,” Pitt said. “You act as though I’m accusing the entire United States Air Force of murder. I am accusing no one. Granted, the evidence is circumstantial, but I’ll stake my life’s savings that a forensic pathologist will bear me out. The skeleton in the cargo hold did not die thirty-four years ago with the original crew.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Several items don’t jibe. To begin with, our unaccounted-for passenger still has flesh on his bones. The others were stripped clean decades ago. This indicates, to me at least, that he died long after the
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crash. Also, he was tied hand and foot to the cargo tie-down rings. With a little imagination you could almost envision the earmarks of an old-fashioned gangland slaying.”
“You’re beginning to wax melodramatic.”
“The whole scene reeks of it. One mystery ties illogically to another.”
“Okay, let’s take what we know to be true,” said Steiger. “The aircraft with serial number 75403 exists not where it is supposed to. But nonetheless it exists.
“And I think we can safely assume the original crew sits down there in the wreck,” Steiger continued. “As to the extra body, perhaps the report neglected to mention his status. He might have been a last-minute assignment: a backup engineer or even a mechanic’who strapped himself to the cargo rings just before the crash.”
“Then how do you justify a difference in uniform? He was wearing khakis, not Air Force blues.”
“I can’t answer that any more than you can say for certain that he was murdered long after the crash.”
“There lies the catch,” Pitt said evenly. “I’ve got a solid idea who our uninvited guest is. And if I’m right, his demise by person or persons unknown becomes a fundamental certainty.”
Steiger’s eyebrows raised. “I’m listening,” he murmured. “Who do you have in mind?”
“The man who built this cabin. His name was Charlie Smith, Congresswoman Loren Smith’s father.”
Steiger sat there silently for a few moments, digesting the enormity of Pitt’s statement. Finally he said, “What proof can you offer?”
” Quite literally bits and pieces. I have it on good authority that Charlie Smith’s obituary says that he was blown to smithereens in an explosion of his own making. All that was ever found were a boot and one thumb. A nice touch, don’t you think? Very neat and precise. I must keep it in mind the next time I want to do somebody in. Set off a blast, then as soon as the dust settles throw a recognizable piece of footwear and a slice of the victim’s most identifiable anatomy at the edge of the smoking crater. Friends later identify the boot and the sheriff’s department can’t miss with a positive ID once they pull a print from the thumb. In the meantime I’ve buried the rest of the body where hopefully it will never be found-My victim’s death goes down as an accident and I go merrily on my way.”