" 'Flown into oblivion.' That's very poetic." There was no concealing the cynicism in Pitt's voice.
Steiger ignored the tone and sipped at his coffee. "To an air-safety investigator, every unsolved crash is a thorn in the flesh.
We're like doctors who occasionally lose a patient on the operating table. The ones that get away keep us awake nights."
"And 03?" asked Pitt evenly. "Does that one keep you awake?"
"You're asking me about an accident that occurred when I was four years old. I can't relate to it. As far as I'm concerned, Mr. Pitt, and as far as the Air Force is concerned, the disappearance of 03 is a closed book. She's lying on the bottom of the sea for all eternity and the secret behind the tragedy lies with her."
Pitt looked at Steiger for a moment, then refilled the man's coffee cup. "You're wrong, Colonel Steiger, dead wrong. There is an answer and it's not three thousand miles from here."
After breakfast Pitt and Steiger went their separate ways-Pitt to probe a deep ravine that had been too narrow for the helicopter to enter, Steiger to find a stream in which to pan gold. The weather was crisp. A few soft clouds hovered over the mountaintops and the temperature stood in the low sixties.
It was past noon when Pitt climbed out of the ravine and headed back toward the cabin. He took a faintly marked trail that meandered through the trees and came out on the shore of Table Lake. A mile along the waterline he met a stream that emptied out of the lake, and he followed it until he ran into Steiger.
The colonel was contentedly sitting on a flat rock in the middle of the current, swishing a large metal pan around in the water.
"Any luck?" Pitt yelled.
Steiger turned around, waved, and began wading toward the bank. "I won't be making any deposits at Fort Knox. I'll be lucky if I can scrounge half a gram." He gave Pitt a friendly but skeptical look. "How about you? Find what you were looking for?"
"A wasted trip," Pitt replied. "But an invigorating hike."
Steiger offered him a cigarette. Pitt declined.
"You know," Steiger said, lighting up, "you're a classic study of a stubborn man."
"So I've been told," Pitt said, and laughed.
Steiger sat down and inhaled deeply and let the smoke trickle between his lips as he spoke. "Now, take me: I'm a bona fide quitter, but only on the matters that don't really count," he said. "Crossword puzzles, dull books, household projects, hooked rugs-I never finish any of them. I figure, without all that mental stress, I'll live ten years longer."
"A pity you can't quit smoking."
"louche," Steiger said.
Just then two teenagers, a boy and a girl, wearing down vests and standing on a makeshift raft, rounded a bend in the stream and drifted past. They were laughing with adolescent abandon, totally oblivious of the men on the bank. Pitt and Steiger watched them in silence until they disappeared downstream.
"Now, there is the life," said Steiger. "I used to go rafting down the Sacramento River when I was a kid. Did you ever try it?"
Pitt did not hear the question. He stood gazing intently at the spot where the boy and the girl became lost to view. His facial expression transformed from deep thoughtfulness to sudden enlightenment.
13
"What's with you?" Steiger asked. "You look as though you've seen God."
"It was socking me in the face all this time a
nd I ignored it," Pitt murmured.
"Ignored what?"
"It just goes to prove the toughest problems fall by the simplest solutions."
"You haven't answered my question."
"The oxygen tank and the nose gear," Pitt said. "I know where they came from."
Steiger only looked at Pitt, his eyes clouded with skepticism.