Sahara (Dirk Pitt 11)

Pitt, spent and played out as he was, appeared magnificent. His rugged, severe face, his full stature, his incisive piercing opaline eyes, his nose thrust forward like a bird of prey, his head enveloped by a dusty white towel through which straggled the strands of his wavy black hair-none gave him the appearance of a man suffering defeat and facing certain death.

His gaze swept the bottom of the ravine in both directions and stopped, a puzzled expression forming in the eyes that peered through the narrow opening in his toweled turban. "My sanity is gone," he whispered.

Giordino lifted his head. "I lost mine about 20 kilometers back on the trail."

"I swear I see. . ." Pitt shook his head slowly and rubbed his eyes. "It must be a mirage."

Giordino stared across the great empty furnace. Sheets of water shimmered in the distance under the heat waves. The imagined sight of what he so desperately craved was more than Giordino could bear. He turned away.

"Do you see it?" Pitt asked.

"With my eyes closed," Giordino rasped faintly. "I can see a saloon with dancing girls beckoning with huge mugs of ice cold beer."

"I'm serious."

"So am I, but if you mean that phony lake out there on the flats, forget it."

"No," Pitt said briefly. "I mean that airplane down there in the gully."

At first, Giordino thought his friend had lost it, but then he slowly rolled back on his stomach and stared downward in the direction Pitt was facing.

Nothing manufactured by man disintegrates or rots in the desert. The worst that can occur is the pitting of metal by the driving sand. There, resting against one bank of the sterile streambed like an alien aberration, scoured and rustless, with almost no erosion or coating of dust, sat a wrecked airplane. It appeared to be an old high-wing monoplane that had lain in crippled solitude for several decades.

"Do you see it?" Pitt repeated. "Or have T gone mad?"

"Not if I've gone mad too," said Giordino in abject astonishment. "It looks like a plane all right."

"Then it must be real."

Pitt helped Giordino to his feet, and they stumbled along the brink of the ravine until they were standing directly over the wreck. The fabric on the fuselage and wings was amazingly still intact, and they could plainly read the identification numbers. The aluminum propeller had shattered when it came in contact with the bank, and the radial engine with its exposed cylinders was partially shoved back into the cockpit and tilted upward in broken mountings. But for that, and the collapsed landing gear, the plane seemed little damaged. They saw, too, the indentations on the ground, made when the plane made contact before running off the edge into the bottom of the dry wash.

"How long do you think it's been here?" croaked Giordino.

"At least fifty, maybe sixty years," Pitt replied.

"The pilot must have survived and walked out."

"He didn't survive," said Pitt. "Under the port wing. The legs of a body are showing."

Giordino's stare moved beneath the left wing. One old fashioned lace-up leather boot and a section of tattered khaki pants protruded from under the shadow of the wing. "Think he'll mind if we join him? He's got the only shade in town."

"My thoughts precisely," said Pitt, stepping off the edge and sliding down the steep bank on his back, raising his knees and using his feet as brakes.

Giordino was right beside him, and together they dropped into the dry streambed in a shower of loose gravel and dust. As in their initial excitement during their discovery of the cave of the paintings, all cravings of thirst were temporarily deprived of stimulation as they staggered to their feet and approached the long-dead pilot.

Sand had drifted over the lower part of the figure that lay with its back resting against the fuselage of the airplane. A crude crutch fashioned from a wing strut lay near one exposed foot that was missing a boot. The aircraft's compass lay nearby, half embedded in the sand.

The pilot was amazingly well preserved. The fiery heat and the frigid cold had worked together to mummify the body so that any skin that showed was darkened and smoothly textured like tanned leather. There was a recognizable expression of tranquility and contentment on the face, and the hands, rigid from over sixty years of inertness, were clasped peacefully across the stomach. An early flier's leather helmet with goggles lay draped over one leg. Black hair, matted and stiff and filled with dust after weathering the elements for so long, fell below the shoulders.

"My God," muttered Giordino dazedly. "It's a woman."

"In her early thirties," observed Pitt. "She must have been very pretty."

"I wonder who she was," Giordino panted curiously.

Pitt stepped around the body and untied a packet wrapped in oilskin that was attached to the cockpit door handle. He carefully pulled open the oilskin, which revealed a pilot's log book. He opened the cover and read the first page.

"Kitty Mannock," Pitt read the name aloud.