Blue Gold (NUMA Files 2)

“Absolutely. Look at that slim silhouette. There’s hardly any surface for radar to bounce off. They’ve even painted it black like the stealth planes. Let’s go inside,” Zavala said eagerly.

They climbed up a ladder through a hatchway in the plane’s belly and made their way along a short ramp. Like the rest of the plane, the flight deck was unconventional. Zavala sat in the rotating pilot’s seat and used a hand-operated mechanism to pump the seat four feet higher into a Plexiglas bubble. He peered through the cowling, which was to the left of the wing’s center line. The conventional switches and instruments were located between the pilot and the copilot, who sat at a lower level. The throttle controls were suspended from the overhead, similar to Navy flying boats such as the Catalina.

“Fantastic visibility,” Zavala said. “It feels like being in a fighter plane.”

Austin had settled into the copilot’s seat on the right. He could see through window panels in the wing’s leading edge. While Zavala ran his fingers lovingly over the controls, Austin went to explore the rest of the plane. The flight engineer sat in front of an impressive array of instrument gauges about ten feet behind the copilot facing the rear. He would have been unable to see out. Austin thought the layout was awkward, but he was impressed by the headroom and the small bunkroom, head, and kitchen that indicated the plane was built for long-range missions. He sat at the bombardier’s seat and stared out the window, trying to picture himself high above the bleak Siberian landscape. Then he crawled into the bomb bays. Zavala was still in the pilot’s seat, hands on the controls, when Austin returned to the cockpit.

“Find anything back there?” he asked Austin.

“It’s what I didn’t find,” Austin said. “The bomb bay racks are empty.”

“No canister bombs?”

“Not even a water balloon.” He smiled at Zavala. “Fallen hopelessly in love with the old girl, have we?”

Zavala grinned lasciviously. “A case of love at first sight. Older women have always appealed to me. I’ll show you something. There’s still life in this baby.” His fingers played over the instrument console. The bank of dials and gauges in front of them glowed red.

“She’s all gassed up and ready to go,” Austin said with disbelief.

Zavala nodded. “She must be hooked up to the generator. There’s no reason this stuff wouldn’t still work. It’s been cold and dry here, and she was maintained in mint condition until they deserted this joint.”

“Speaking of the joint, let’s take a look around.”

Zavala reluctantly left the cockpit. They climbed down from the plane and walked around the interior perimeter of the hangar. The space was obviously planned to service the plane efficiently. Within easy reach of the aircraft were hydraulic lifts and cranes, test equipment, fuel and oil pumps. Joe stopped to marvel at a wall hung with tools. They were as clean as surgical instruments. Austin poked his head into a storage room. He glanced around and called for Zavala.

Stacked from floor to ceiling inside the room were dozens of shiny cylinders like the one they had discovered floating in the water off the Baja. Austin carefully lifted a cylinder from the stack and felt its weight.

“This is much heavier than the empty can back in my office.”

“Anasazium?”

“The unerring Austin homing instinct,” Kurt said with a smile. “You’ll have to admit this is what we really came all this way to find.”

“I suppose so. But I can see why Martin fell in love with that plane out there.”

“Let’s hope it isn’t a similar case of fatal attraction. We’re going to have to figure out what to do next.”

Zavala eyed the contents of the storeroom. “We’ll need something bigger than the Maule to move this stuff.”

Austin said, “It’s been a long day. Let’s get back to Nome. We can call in for reinforcements. I’m not crazy about the way we came in. Let’s see if we can find another door.”

They walked around in front of the flying wing again. The plane was positioned so that it pointed toward the broad side of the hangar, facing onto the airstrip. They tried a door that would have led to the outside, but it was overgrown with vegetation and wouldn’t open. A big section of wall apparently moved up and down like a garage door. Austin saw a wall switch marked “Door.” Since they had good luck with the generator, he gave it a yank. The hum of motors filled the air, then came loud creaks and rattles and the squeal of metal against metal. The motors strained to move the door against the vegetation that had taken over on the outside, but finally it ripped free and rumbled to a clanking stop in fully open position.

It was near midnight, and the sun had partially set, casting the tundra in a leaden light. The two men walked outside and turned around. As they gazed at the strange craft resting in what Buzz Martin’s father had called its hidey-hole, they heard an intrusive clatter from behind them. They turned to see a large helicopter dropping out of the sky like a raptor.

The helicopter made a pass over the float plane, then stopped and hovered a short distance away. It did a three-hundred-sixty spin in place. There was a flash of light from the front of the chopper, and the float plane disappeared in a blinding explosion of yellow and red flames. A cloud of black smoke billowed from the funeral pyre that had been an aircraft seconds before, and the tundra was lit up for hundreds of yards.

“I think we just lost the deposit on our leased plane,” Zavala said.

Finished with its first line of business, the chopper swiveled so that its nose pointed toward the hangar. Austin and Zavala had been dumbfounded in the seconds since the helicopter arrived and began its deadly work. Now Austin realized how vulnerable they were. They dashed for the open door as the chopper leaped forward. White bursts of flame flowered from the guns on either side of the speeding aircraft, and the bullets threw up geysers of water and mud as they stitched their way toward the two running figures.

They ducked inside, and Austin hit the door switch. There was another grinding of motors and machinery, and slowly the door began to close. The chopper landed a few hundred yards away. Armed men in dark green uniforms spilled out and advanced on the hangar with automatic weapons.

Un

fortunately Zavala had left his machine pistol in the plane. Austin’s Bowen revolver filled his hand, and he let off a couple of shots to give the attackers something to think about. Then the door clanked shut, and the gunfire became barely audible.

“We’d better bolt the back door,” Austin said, sprinting for the rear of the hangar where they had come in.