Flight of the Serpent

by R. R. Irvine writing as Val Davis

As soon as the second of the 727s began rolling, he switched the radio to its command setting and asked the tower for clearance.

  Once it was given, he stood on the brakes and eased the throttles forward.

  “Manifold pressure at full military power,” Roberts said a moment later.

  Gault released the brakes and the Lady-A surged down the runway.

  Chapter 44

  Wiley and Voss had joined the crowd of bystanders lining the security fence adjacent to Gault Aviation. Their work clothes, complete with Delta Airlines logo, kept them from standing out. Only their designer dark glasses clashed with their present personas.

  As the B-24 started its takeoff run, they joined the applause.

  Wiley jerked his head, giving his partner the high sign to move away from eavesdroppers. They ambled away slouch-shouldered and shuffle-footed, as they thought befitted Delta’s rank-and-file union members. Only when they were beyond earshot did Wiley get down to business.

  “Have you ever worked on anything that old?”

  Voss shook his head.

  “I was thinking about planting a bomb if it ever comes to that.”

  “An engine’s always good, what with the wing tanks so close by.”

  Wiley nodded. He’d been thinking the same thing.

  “It might be easier,” Voss said, “if we requisitioned a missile.”

  “There are no handheld missiles in stock at the mesa,” Wiley pointed out. “Which means we’d have to wait God knows how long before taking delivery.”

  Voss squinted southwest toward the Oquirrh Mountains, the direction the B-24 had taken. “The bastard’s out of range now anyway.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Chances are if we have to go to work, it will be a straightforward job. Take the woman out and the rest of them will be running around like chickens with their heads cut off.”

  “I thought that bullet would do it,” Voss said. “With evidence like that, I figured they’d order us to kill everybody. But that damned truck is so beat-up the hole didn’t even show. And nobody has any guts anyway.” He shook his head. “I think they’re underestimating her.”

  Wiley nodded grimly.

  ******

  Six hundred and fifty miles away, in his office atop Mesa d’Oro, Frank Odell had his eyes on the Director’s Blackbirds.

  “Or a reasonable facsimile,” Odell muttered to himself, since what he was watching was their transponder signals. Their electronic blips, relayed via satellite, placed the pair somewhere in or near the airport in Salt Lake City. The tracking system was just one of the new gadgets that had been provided by the ISA.

  No doubt Chairman Smith was watching a similar blip on his screen in Washington, one representing Odell.

  Christ! All this because the bomb on that Cessna had a delayed fuse so the chopper could get clear after dumping its load in the canyon. A minute either way and the archaeologist wouldn’t have seen a damned thing. Sheer bad luck, that’s what Odell called it.

  Just then the secure phone rang. “This is Odell.”

  “Do you recognize my voice?”

  It belongs to the devil himself, Odell thought, but said, “Yes, sir.”

  “I see the next forty-eight hours as critical.”

  If Odell lived so long.

  “At the end of that time,” Smith went on, “one of two things will have happened.”

  Here it comes, Odell thought. The proverbial shoe about to drop.

  “In the meantime, I won’t tolerate any further broken promises from anyone. I hope you understand that, Frank.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ve been too tolerant, that’s the problem. As a result I’ve got four hundred thousand barrels of radioactive goo, and the Director’s unfulfilled promise to find me a solution. You see that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir,” Odell said.

  “Very well. As I said, the next two days are critical. Consider yourself on continuous alert until then. After that, either the matter will be settled without repercussions, or you and I will have to see to it ourselves. In either case, I’m afraid there will be extensive casualties.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you up for it?”

  “Yes, sir.” Anything was better than being among the casualties.

  Chapter 45

  Nick was surprised by the unrelenting noise. Flying by commercial jet was bad enough, but four twelve-hundred horsepower Pratt and Whitneys rattled every nut, bolt, joint, and hinge inside the Liberator. Communication was damn near impossible except on the intercom.

  Only when Gault leveled off at four thousand feet and throttled back to cruising speed, two hundred miles an hour, did the racket subside somewhat.

  “Well circle the basin once,” Gault said, “before heading over the lake.”

  He banked east toward the ten-thousand-foot Wasatch Mountains.

  “Why don’t we fly over them,” Christensen said. “You know how Matt loved the view.”

  “Did you check our oxygen system?”

  “You know better than to ask.”

  Gault half-turned in his seat to look at Nick. “What do you say? Are you game for a high-altitude run?”

  She answered with a nod.

  Gault wiggled the wings. On a jet Nick might have panicked, but here, flying a piece of history, she felt a sense of exhilaration. She felt like a pioneer. Modern planes were pressurized. The Lady-A was wide open. If they flew too high, they’d all be freezing without flight suits.

  She yawned to ease the pressure building in her ears.

  “You know something,” Roberts said over the intercom, “I think she flies better now than in the old days.”

  Christensen, who had his head cocked to port as if listening to the engines on that side, said, “Do they sound okay to you?”

  “Like music,” Gault answered.

  Exhilaration or not, Nick hoped he was right. She had no means of comparison, but one thing seemed certain. The B-24 didn’t so much soar as lumber along.

  “On oxygen, everyone,” Gault said a few moments later. “I want a full systems check.”

  By now the Wasatch Mountains looked very close.

  Roberts, carrying a portable oxygen bottle, immediately rose from his seat. Before leaving the cockpit to check on Paula and the rest of the crew, he pointed Nick into the copilot’s chair and plugged her into the oxygen supply. Then he and Christensen left the cockpit together.

  Beside her, Gault pointed to his oxygen mask. “It’s like the smell of an old friend.”

  To Nick, the smell of rubber was overpowering. The more she breathed, the queasier she got.

  “Matt would have loved this,” Gault went on. “He used to sit here in the cockpit and pretend to fly while I told him old war stories. Why don’t you give her a try, Nick. Go ahead. Take the yoke.”

  Very gingerly, she touched the copilot’s yoke in front of her.

  “Come on. Hold it like you mean business.”

  Mimicking his grip, she wrapped her hands around the yoke. Gault let go of his immediately.

  “Put your feet on the rudder pedals.”

  Nick held her breath and eased her feet into position.

  “You use your heel for brakes, your toes for the rudder,” he said. “But for the moment just hold her straight.”

  Nick’s arms shook with the strain.

  “Relax,” he said, “the Lady-A practically flies herself.”

  Vibrations, almost electric in their intensity, flowed through the yoke, into her arms, and through her body. The sensation triggered memories of the horror stories pilots told about the Liberator. It was nothing but a flying brick just waiting to fall out of the sky. It was an agony wagon, a pregnant cow. Its controls were sluggish and temperamental. Only maniacs volunteered to fly B-24s.

  She risked a quick glance at Gault. He had a huge smile and his face glowed with pleasure. He was in love. No doubt about it. They all were, Roberts, Yarbrough, Campbell, and Christensen. To them the Lady-A w
as a beautiful woman.

  The yoke bucked.

  “It’s only turbulence,” Gault assured her.

  But Nick had the uncanny feeling that it was the Lady-A who’d bucked, not some wind current. Probably she was jealous. Probably . . .

  Come on, Nick thought, be logical. This was a piece of machinery. The yoke shuddered again.

  Nick clenched her teeth. She was a scientist, a historian of artifacts. So act like one, she told herself. But her heart continued to pound. Her mind knew better but, like everyone else, superstitions persisted despite all her attempts at intellectual exorcism. This plane doesn’t like me, she thought.

  Christensen came on the intercom. “Try opening the bomb doors.”

  “You’d better let me take her back,” Gault said.

  She released the copilot’s yoke as soon as he took hold of his. An instant later one of his hands seemed to move instinctively toward the control panel.

  “Bomb bay doors coming open,” he said.

  “Again, please.”

  Gault glanced at Nick but spoke on the intercom. “Mechanics have to be humored.”

  “You won’t be laughing if you have to land with them open,” Christensen said.

  Nick kept her fingers crossed as Gault went through the procedure one more time, again without failure.

  “That’s my girl,” Gault said, his hand caressing the manufacturer’s plaque, a small brass plate on the pilot’s side of the instrument panel immediately left of the compass indicator.

  Nick remembered him making the exact same gesture the first time he had shown her the plane. How many times had he stroked that plaque? she wondered. The manufacturer’s name was almost worn away and she had to squint to make out the serial number, 5440.

  “I’m satisfied for now,” Christensen said.

  Gault glanced at Nick, then swung the B-24 north, following the ridge of the Wasatch. From their present altitude, fifteen thousand feet, Nick could see the great salt desert to the west, a white plain spreading all the way to the horizon. Out there, she knew, the ill-fated Donner Party had lost all hope of reaching California before the winter set in.

  Gault tapped her on the arm and pointed at the bleak landscape. “You told me you were an expert in desert survival. How would you do against that?”

  “In the desert, any desert, you carry water with you. That’s the first rule. You travel only at dusk and at night. You follow trails or roads if possible. If you know where water is, you head for it. And if you find water, even if it’s not drinkable, you soak your clothes with it. That helps preserve your own body moisture.”

  Nick raised her hand, ticking off points finger by finger. “Protect yourself from the sun during the day. Find shade or create it. Drink water at the rate your body is sweating. Rationing it won’t extend your life significantly. Without water, you’ll live only two or two and a half days even if you stay in the shade and don’t move. It’s good to be armed, too, so you can shoot your own food.”

  “I seem to remember you telling me you were a good shot,” Gault said.

  “My father taught me as soon as I was old enough to go on one of his digs.”

  Christensen came on the intercom. “All systems are functioning.”

  “All right,” Gault answered. “We fly the mission for Matt. You’d better get up here, Brad. Everybody else, take your stations.”

  As soon as Roberts was in his copilot’s seat again, Campbell checked in from the bombardier’s cubbyhole in the nose. Paula, Christensen, and Yarbrough were in the waist. Nick stayed put.

  “This is the life,” Roberts shouted at Nick, ignoring the intercom. “I feel like I’m home.”

  Looking at them calmly going through their check’ list, Nick decided that men like Gault and his crew were a special breed. The hardships they had endured in the war were beyond belief. Imagine flying six hours in an airplane like this with Germans trying to kill you every minute of the way.

  The intercom crackled to life.

  “Theron, we’ve got a problem,” Gault said. “Number three engine is overheating.”

  “I’m on my way,” Christensen answered.

  As soon as he edged past Nick and plugged into the intercom, the mechanic said, “I’m getting too old for this kind of thing.”

  “The temperature is still rising,” Roberts said, tapping the gauge.

  “What about cowl flaps?” Christensen asked.

  “Open,” Roberts said.

  “Then we’d better shut her down,” Christensen said.

  Gault nodded.

  Roberts went to work. A moment later he said, “Number three feathered and secure.”

  Christensen leaned forward to get a closer look at the instrument panel. “You should have fired me a long time ago, John. I’m over the hill. Maybe we should abort now, before we lose another engine.”

  “Relax, Theron. The other three are rock steady.”

  “We made it through the Nordhausen mission after they shot up one of our engines,” Roberts said. “Once we start across the lake we’ll be headed for the airport anyway. So I say we keep going.”

  Nick was dumbfounded. Here they were, flying a crippled plane over badlands the equal of anywhere on earth, and Gault and Roberts looked perfectly calm.

  “Do I get a vote?” Paula asked over the intercom.

  “Paula,” Gault replied, and Nick could hear the tenderness in his voice, “you may not be crew but you are family.”

  “Then, let’s finish what we started,” she said.

  Gault looked back at Nick.

  “Paula couldn’t have said it better,” she told him.

  Five minutes later, Gault announced, “Target dead ahead.”

  “I have it,” Campbell answered.

  “Engage the autopilot,” Gault said.

  The moment Roberts complied, the B-24 lurched. “She always did that on our missions,” he said for Nick’s benefit.

  Gault released the yoke, though his hands continued to hover at the ready. Campbell and his Norden bombsight were flying the Lady-A.

  Gault unbuckled his seat belt and stood up. “I’ll help Paula.”

  Rather than intrude, Nick stayed where she was, peering over Roberts’ shoulder.

  “Ready,” Gault reported a moment later.

  “Opening bomb doors,” Campbell answered.

  No one said a word for the next few minutes as the Lady-A lumbered on with her bomb doors open.

  Then Gault’s voice came over the intercom. “Matt, you know I’m not good with words, you were the one for that. But I kept the poem you gave me. I know you’ve slipped the surly bonds of earth and are up there in the burning blue. May your wings be laughter-silvered and I know you’ve touched the face of God.”

  Nick felt rather than heard the bomb bay doors close and she imagined Matt’s gray ashes made golden by the sun as they streamed across the burning blue of the desert air to fall as silent as tears on the face of the Great Salt Lake.

  Chapter 46

  Nick took one look at Gault, his pale face and red-rimmed eyes, the gray stubble on his cheeks, and knew that Matt’s farewell flight had taken a terrible toll.

  Paula, quiet and withdrawn, had returned to duty. The rest of them—Gault, Roberts, Yarbrough, Campbell, and herself—were seated around a worktable in the Lady-A’s hangar. As if afraid to make eye contact, the four men focused intently on Theron Christensen, who was atop a roll-away ladder working on the number three engine. He’d been at it ever since they’d landed. At the moment, banks of work lights had the hangar bright as day, despite the midnight hour.

  If the Lady-A had made her last flight, why bother? she wondered, but didn’t ask. She knew the answer already, she thought. They needed the Lady-A whole again. If she was fit for combat, so were they. If Christensen could make her young again, they would be young again.

  Nick shook her head. Someone had to be practical. “I think it’s time everybody got some rest,” she announced.

 
“That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard in hours,” Christensen called down from his perch. “Besides, my work would go a lot faster if I didn’t have so many kibitzers hanging around.”

  The mechanic wiped his hands on his overalls. “One thing’s for sure. Except for an overheating engine, the Lady-A is in better shape than her crew.”

  Gault, who’d been gazing at the Lady-A, tried to smile but only succeeded in looking sad, so sad that Nick walked out of the hangar to escape it.

  Gault caught up with her a few minutes later as she stood on the tarmac in front of the sliding doors.

  “My father knows each star by name,” she said, staring up at the sky.

  “And you?”

  “Enough to navigate at night if I have to.”

  He sighed. “I didn’t learn much navigation until after the war. In those days I trusted my navigator, Novak, to tell me where I was. You know what he’d say when I asked him where we were? ’Just east of Norfolk,’ or ’south of Le Havre,’ or Berlin, or wherever we were heading. Then he’d come back on the intercom a moment later and give me a more precise location. Swiss Novak, we called him, because he always ran an exact heading to neutral countries.

  “When our twenty-five missions were over, he finally admitted the truth. ’In navigator school,’ he said, ’they taught us to always give the pilot some answer, even if you had no idea where you were. That way, your pilot won’t get nervous.’ ”

  “Would you have been nervous?” she asked.

  “Terrified is more like it, but then we always were, except on our weekends in London when we were blind drunk. The day after was okay, too, because then you were too hung over and sick to be scared.”

  She laid a hand on his arm. “How long since you’ve had any real sleep, and I don’t mean on one of Theron’s cots?”

  “I get by on catnaps.”

  “You’re not twenty-one, John, no matter what you think.”

  “Christ, Nick, I’m not up to driving home at the moment. I’ll just flop here for a while.”

  “Give me the keys. Ill drive.”

  He directed her through town, ignoring the freeways, to an older section near the university. His house was a small-scale Victorian, more of a bungalow really, that reminded Nick of the student housing around Berkeley. Only in Berkeley this time of year, the fog would have everyone wearing sweaters. In Salt Lake, the one A.M. temperature was still hovering in the seventies.