Vixen 03 (Dirk Pitt 5)

"Sorry, I'm not through here yet."

"What's left to see?"

"Call it a pebble in the shoe of logic," he said. "Look here, at the fittings on the tank."

She leaned over his shoulder. "They're broken. What did you ex-pect?"

"If this was removed from an obsolete aircraft at a salvage yard, the mounting brackets and the fittings to the lines would have been disconnected with wrenches or cut with either a torch or heavy shears. These were twisted and wrenched apart by great force.

Same goes for the nose gear. The strut was bent and severed just below the hydraulic shock absorber. Strange thing, though: the break did not happen all at once. You can see that most of the ragged edge is weathered and corroded, while a small section at the top still has a new look to it. Seems as if the main damage and the final break occurred years apart."

"So what does all that prove?"

"Nothing earth shattering. But it does indicate that these pieces did not come from an aircraft-salvage yard or a surplus store."

"Now are you satisfied?"

"Not entirely." He easily lifted the oxygen tank, carried it outside, and deposited it in the Jeep. "I can't manage the nose gear by myself. You'll have to give me a hand."

"What are you up to?"

"You said we were driving down the mountains into Denver for a shopping spree."

"So?"

"So while you're buying out the town, I'll haul this stuff over to Stapleton Airport and find somebody who can identify the aircraft it came from."

"Pitt," she said, "you're not a Sherlock Holmes. Why go to all this trouble?"

"Something to do. I'm bored. You've got your congressional mail to keep you busy. I'm tired of talking to trees all day."

9

"You have my undivided attention nights."

"Man cannot live by sex alone."

She watched in mute fascination as he scrounged two long boards and propped them on the lowered tailgate of the Jeep.

"Ready?" he asked.

"I'm not exactly dressed for the occasion," she said, a chill in her voice and goose bumps on her skin.

"Then take off that thing so you won't get it dirty."

As if in a dream, she hung her peignoir on a nail, mystified as to why women instinctively indulge men in their juvenile idiosyncrasies. Then the two of them-Pitt in his shorts, Congresswoman Loren Smith in the nude-heaved and grunted the dusty nose gear up the makeshift ramp into the back of the Jeep.

While Pitt chained up the tailgate, Loren stood in the dawn's early light and gazed down at the dirt and grease smudged across her thighs and stomach and wondered what it was that possessed her to take a mad lover.

Harvey Dolan, principal maintenance inspector for the Air Carrier District Office of the FAA, lifted his glasses to the light and, detecting no smears, clamped them on a pyramid-shaped nose.

"Found them in the mountains, you say?"

"About thirty miles northwest of Leadville, in the Sawatch range," Pitt answered. He had to speak loudly to be heard above the roar of the forklift that was carrying the nose gear and oxygen tank from the Jeep through the huge, yawning door of the FA A inspection hangar.

"Not much to go on," said Dolan.

"But you can offer an educated guess."