Blue Gold (NUMA Files 2)

“Try saying ‘open sesame’ and hope for the best.”

Zavala stood back and bellowed the famous command from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. When nothing happened he tried again in Spanish, also to no avail.

“You know any more magic words?” he asked Austin.

“You just exhausted my entire repertoire,” Kurt said with a shrug.

They walked around behind the hangar. Sticking out of the permafrost were the foundations of several small buildings that could have been Quonset huts. A dump area revealed piles of rusty tin cans and broken glass, but no entrance to the mound presented itself.

It was Zavala who stumbled, literally, on the entrance.

Austin was walking several steps ahead of his partner when he heard a yell. He turned quickly. Joe had vanished as if the earth had swallowed him up. Confirming this possibility, Zavala’s disembodied voice, swearing in the tongue of his ancestors, issued eerily from the ground. Austin carefully backtracked and found Zavala in a cellar hole that had been covered over by vegetation. Austin had walked right by the hole without seeing it.

“Are you okay?” Austin called out.

More mutterings. “Yeah, the brush that covered this damned hole cushioned my fall. C’mon down. There’s a short set of stairs.”

Austin joined Zavala at the bottom of the hole, which was about eight feet deep. Joe was standing in front of a partially open door of heavily riveted steel.

“Don’t tell me,” Austin grunted. “The unerring Zavala homing instinct.”

“What else?” Zavala said.

Austin pulled a small but powerful halogen light from his pack. The door noisily opened with some persuasion from his shoulder. He stepped inside with Zavala close behind. A blast of cold and fetid air hit them in the face as if they were standing in front of an air conditioner for a mausoleum. The beam of light showed a corridor whose concrete walls and ceiling were inadequate insulation against permafrost and seemed to amplify the cold. Pulling their jacket collars tight around their necks, they started along the corridor.

Several doors led off the main hallway of the underground bunker. Austin flashed his light inside the rooms. Rusty bed frames and mattresses rotting with decay testified to the use of one space as a bunkroom. Farther along was a kitchen and pantry. The last chamber was a communications room.

“They left in a rush,” Zavala said. The smashed vacuum tubes and radio cabinets looked as if they had been attacked with a sledgehammer.

They continued along the passageway, skirting a large rectangular hole in the floor. The metal grating that once covered it had mostly rusted through. Austin pointed the flashlight down the deep shaft. “Some sort of ventilation or heating, maybe.”

“I’ve been thinking about what Clarence Tinook said about mines,” Zavala said.

“Let’s hope it was a concocted story they hoped would scare off hunters and fishermen,” Austin said. “Maybe he actually said mimes.”

“Now that would certainly scare me,” Zavala replied.

The corridor eventually ended in a short set of stairs that led to another steel door. They guessed that they were under the hangar. Not entirely convinced of his own argument against booby traps, Austin took a deep breath, opened the door, and stepped through. Austin immediately sensed a change in atmosphere. The cold was less biting and musty than in the concrete bunker. The staleness of the air was overpowered by the smell of gasoline, oil, and heated metal.

On the wall to the right of the door was a switch. A stenciled sign read “Generator.” Austin gave Zavala the go-ahead, and Joe yanked the switch down. Nothing happened at

first. Then there was a click from somewhere in the darkness and a series of sputtering pops as a motor coughed reluctantly into life. High above, lights glimmered dimly then glowed brightly, illuminating the vaulted ceilings of a huge artificial cave. Zavala was too awestruck to speak. Illuminated at center stage was what looked like a black-winged avenger from a Norse myth.

He walked over behind the scimitar-shaped craft, reached up, and tentatively touched one of the vertical fins extending down from the trailing end of the fuselage.

“Beautiful,” he whispered as if he were talking about a lovely woman. “I’ve read about this thing, seen pictures, but I never dreamed it would be so magnificent.”

Austin went over and stood beside him, taking in the broad sweep of sculpted aluminum. “Either we’ve stumbled into the Bat Cave or we just found the long-lost phantom flying wing,” he said.

Zavala walked under the fuselage. “I did some reading about the plane. These fins were added later for stabilization when they went from prop to jet power. She’s about a hundred seventy feet from wing tip to wing tip.”

“That’s half the length of a football field,” Austin said.

Zavala nodded. “It was the largest plane of its day even though she’s only about fifty feet from front to back. Check out these jet engines. In the original all eight were built into the fuselage. They slung these two underneath the wing to free up fuel space. Fits in with what you said about modifications to increase range.”

They walked around to the front of the plane. The swept-back aerodynamic lines were even more impressive from this angle. Although the plane weighed more than two hundred thousand tons, it seemed to balance lightly on its tripod landing gear.

“Jack Northrop really had something when he designed this lady,” Austin replied.