Vixen 03 (Dirk Pitt 5)

"And you, Lee?"

"I'm not hungry anymore," Raferty grumbled.

"Don't feel bad, Mr. Raferty," Pitt said consolingly. "It seems my imagination got the best of me also. Finding pieces of an aircraft in the middle of the mountains ... I naturally thought they came from a crash site."

"Men can be such children sometimes." Max gave Pitt a little-girl smile. "I hope you enjoyed your lunch."

"Fit for a gourmet," Pitt said.

"I should have cooked the Rocky Mountain oysters a little longer, though. They were a bit on the rare side. Didn't you think so, Lee?"

"Tasted okay to me."

"Rocky Mountain oysters?" asked Pitt.

"Yes, you know," said Maxine. "The fried bull testicles."

"You did say 'testicles.' "

"Lee insists I serve them at least two times a week."

"Beats hell out of meat loaf," Lee said, suddenly laughing.

"That's not all it beats hell out of," Pitt murmured, looking down at his stomach, wondering if the Rafertys stocked Alka-Seltzer, and sorry now he'd skipped the fishing.

At three o'clock in the morning Pitt was wide awake. As he lay in bed with Loren snuggled against him and stared through the picture windows at the silhouetted mountains, his mind was throwing images inside his skull like a kaleidoscope. The last piece of what had turned out to be a perfectly credible puzzle refused to fit in its slot. The sky was beginning to lighten in the east when Pitt eased out of bed, pulled on a pair of shorts, and quietly stepped outside.

Loren's old Jeep was sitting in the driveway. He reached in, took a flashlight from the glove compartment, and entered the garage. He pulled the drop cloth aside and studied the oxygen tank. Its shape was cylindrical, measuring, Pitt guessed, slightly more than one yard in length by eighteen inches in diameter. Its surface was scratched and dented, but it was the condition of the fittings that attracted his interest. After several minutes he turned his attention to the nose gear.

The twin wheels were joined by a common axle that was attached at their hubs like the head of a T to the center shaft. The tires were doughnut shaped and their treads relatively unworn. They stood roughly three feet high and, amazingly, still contained air.

The garage door creaked. Pitt turned and watched Loren peek into the darkened cavern. Heshinedthelightonher. She was wearing only a blue nylon peignoir. Her hair was tousled and her face reflected a mixture of fear and uncertainty.

"Is that you, Dirk?"

"No," he said, smiling in the dark. "It's your friendly mountain milkman."

She heaved a sigh of relief, came forward, and gripped his arm for security. "A comedian you're not. What are you doing down here, anyway?"

"Something bugged me about these things." He pointed the beam of light at the aircraft fragments. "Now I know what it was."

Loren stood and shivered in that dirty, dusty garage beneath the silent cabin. "You're making a big deal over nothing," she murmured. "You said it yourself: the Rafertys had a logical explanation for how this useless junk got here. Dad probably picked it up at some salvage yard."

'Tm not

so sure," Pitt said.

"He was always buying up old scrap," she argued. "Look around you; the place is full of his weird, half-finished inventions."

"Half finished, yes. But at least he built something from the other trash. The oxygen tank and the nose gear he never touched.

Why?"

"Nothing mysterious about that. Dad most likely was killed before he got around to them."

"Possibly."

"That's settled, then," she said firmly. "Let's get back to bed before I freeze to death."