Flight of the Serpent

by R. R. Irvine writing as Val Davis

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?” he said, his face gray with fatigue.

  “Don’t bother. What I need is a shower.”

  “I’ve got two bathrooms. You’re welcome to use one of them and the spare bedroom, too. I’d hate to think of you driving back to that airport hotel this time of night.”

  Her own feeling of exhaustion, plus the enticement of an immediate hot shower, overcame Nick’s reservations. After all they were both adults.

  Gault fetched clean towels. “If you want I can throw your dirty clothes in the washer,” he said. “They’ll be dry in an hour.”

  “They are a bit grubby.”

  “Just drop them outside the door. I’ll leave you something to wear.”

  Nick stood under the shower, wondering about her intentions. The safe thing to do would be to tuck him in and be on her way. Only now she’d have to wait for her clothes to come out of the dryer.

  She thrust her head under the spray. Thank God her hair was short enough to dry on its own.

  Twenty minutes later, wrapped in a robe many sizes too big for her, she opened the bathroom door. Her dirty clothes were gone.

  She found Gault in the kitchen, wearing a matching robe. He was standing next to a rumbling washing machine, drinking coffee.

  “You need sleep,” she told him, “not caffeine.”

  “It’s Postum actually, Mormon coffee we call it in Utah.”

  His hair, like hers, was still damp. A shower had changed his complexion from an exhausted pallor to ruddy, easing her concern somewhat.

  She took a sip and shook her head. “The Mormons might have something to say about the brandy you’ve added.”

  “I needed the courage.”

  “You?” She shook her head. “I don’t believe it.”

  He paused and silence between them grew. Finally, he said quietly, “I’d like you to stay.”

  Her blood heated, and she leaned forward to kiss him. A deep shudder ran through her and she found herself saying, “On the other hand, John, they say sex is the best kind of sleeping pill.”

  They were heading for the bedroom when the doorbell rang.

  “Stay where you are,” Gault said, “I’ll get it.”

  Nick was about to abandon her robe and slip under the covers when she heard Christensen’s voice. Figuring a visit this time of night meant trouble, she joined them in the living room.

  Her appearance widened Christensen’s smile.

  “I was just telling John the good news,” he said. “Number three’s running like a clock. She never was overheating. It was a faulty thermostat, giving us a bad temperature reading. Of course, I’ll run her up first thing tomorrow morning to doublecheck. I would have called but I couldn’t get through.”

  Gault looked sheepish. Nick could see the reason for herself. The phone was off the hook.

  “Sorry,” Christensen said. “I should have waited for morning.” He started for the door.

  “You did the right thing,” Gault called after him. “I would have worried all night about that engine.”

  Hesitating on the threshold, Christensen raised an eyebrow in Nick’s direction. “I doubt that, somehow.” Then he smiled and closed the door behind him.

  “Christ,” Gault said and collapsed onto the couch. “That’s a load off my mind. I want the Lady-A to be perfect.” He leaned back and closed his eyes. His entire body sagged with relief.

  Nick felt the same way. No doubt for different reasons they’d both let their guard down the moment they heard that the Lady-A was airworthy again.

  But Gault was anything but airworthy. Nick could see that for herself. If he didn’t rest, it wouldn’t matter how well the Lady-A’s engines were running. He’d be a danger to himself and everybody else if he tried to fly any kind of plane.

  Suddenly she realized he was snoring.

  “John?” she asked tentatively.

  She could see he was completely out.

  “I think we both need sleep,” she said, grabbing his legs and swinging them onto the couch.

  She took the single blanket off the bed and covered him. She’d make do with the sheet and bedspread.

  “I’m not letting you off the hook, John,” she said. “I hope you can hear me in your dreams.”

  She leaned over and kissed him.

  He stirred, and for a moment Nick was afraid she had wakened him, but he turned over on his side and murmured, “Goodnight, Annie.”

  Chapter 47

  Nick lurched upright in bed. The morning sun blazed in her eyes. But the light that had awakened her was inside her head, its message in fiery letters, ANNIE HAS JAMES K. POLK’S NUMBER. She knew the meaning of the cryptic comment on Matt’s laptop computer. Or at least she thought she did.

  She dressed quickly and went looking for Gault. She found him in the kitchen pouring coffee into cups that had been set out on a serving tray along with a sprig of geranium. His thoughtfulness touched her. So much so, that she decided that her rush to see the Lady-A could wait. After all, maybe she was wrong. Maybe Matt, the history buff, hadn’t left another message behind.

  “I was going to serve you coffee in bed,” he said as he handed her one of the brimming cups.

  She accepted the offering shyly, aware that perceptions change in daylight, especially when you’re sleeping in a man’s house, albeit in separate beds.

  He must have sensed her awkwardness, because he looked sheepish and said, “Maybe we’d better go. The Lady-A doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

  “I was thinking the same thing.”

  Gault looked at her quizzically.

  “I think the Lady-A might have something to tell us,” Nick said. “And no, I’m not going to explain myself here and now. You’ll have to wait and see for yourself.”

  And so will I, she added to herself, then realized that someone else had the right to be there too, Paula Latham, Matt’s fiancée.

  Thirty minutes later, armed with doughnuts from the office, she and Gault entered the Lady-A’s hangar. The huge sliding doors stood open, flooding the entire area with sunlight. Even so, Nick had the sense that the bomber stood in shadow. More than ever, its drab camouflage paint seemed to feed on light.

  At Gault’s insistence, they kept their distance from the plane while eating. But Nick no longer felt hungry. She forced a swallow, but the doughnut suddenly felt like a large lump. She gave up and handed the rest to Gault, who finished it off quickly. Then he dusted his hands free of crumbs and walked over to the plane.

  “Well, old girl,” he said, looking up into the airplane, “how do you feel this morning? Forever twenty-one?”

  “Is that how you feel?” Nick asked, coming up behind him.

  He kissed Nick gently. “I’m getting there.”

  “And the Lady-A.”

  “You heard Theron. He ran up the engine again and she’s as good as new and ready to go.”

  Nick stared up into the empty bomb racks and felt cold. Yet the temperature inside the hangar had to be well into the eighties already, on its way to a hundred and five, according to the weather report.

  She wondered if she wasn’t about to make a fool of herself. Maybe she’d misinterpreted the message on Matt’s laptop.

  Gault ducked under the open bomb doors and ran his hand along the fuselage. “I still love you, Annie. But you know that.”

  He beckoned Nick to follow as he worked his way toward the nose. “You don’t have to be jealous of Nick.”

  When Nick caught up he whispered into her ear, “Not yet, anyway.”

  “Aren’t you afraid she’ll read your mind?” Nick asked.

  “There were times during the war I had the feeling she could do just that. She seemed to anticipate my every move.”

  Nick smiled. Her father often spoke to his Anasazi relics, but not quite like John Gault. There was always something in Elliot’s tone of voice that said he was only half-serious when he communed with the long dead. In Gault’s case, the connection seemed more
personal. He treated the plane as if it were alive.

  They’d come to a stop beside the newly painted serpent. Gault took Nick’s hand. “You’re something, do you know that?”

  “Not in front of the Lady-A,” Nick teased, though part of her felt distinctly uneasy.

  Gault switched his hands from her to the B-24. “Never fear, Annie. No one will ever replace you. Nick knows that. She was with us yesterday. You must have felt her. She took your controls for a while.”

  And the Lady-A hadn’t liked it one bit, Nick remembered. Hold it, she told herself. Don’t start imagining things. An airplane was a machine, nothing more. It didn’t think. It didn’t hold grudges. It wasn’t a she or a he, just an it. Still, Nick couldn’t shake the sensation, even now, that the bomber had a jealous soul.

  “Aren’t you going to say something to her?” Gault asked.

  “I’m not sure she likes me.”

  Gault snorted. “You haven’t seen her mad. That’s when you know who she likes and who she doesn’t. Then she’s no lady at all.”

  Nick said, “We’re going to need a screwdriver for what I have in mind.”

  The anguished look on his face made her laugh. “Don’t worry, John, I’m not going to harm your beloved airplane.”

  Shaking his head, he grabbed a small tool set from one of Christensen’s work bench, and led the way into the bomb bay. Together, he and Nick worked their way forward to the cockpit and settled in, he in the left-hand seat, she in the copilot’s position.

  Before she could explain what she had in mind, he leaned forward to stare at number three, the inside engine on the starboard side.

  “We lost that engine once before,” he said, “during the Hamburg raid.” He let out a long sigh. “If you couldn’t keep up with the formation, you were like a stray sheep among Focke-Wulfs.”

  Nick repressed a shudder. Gault had too many ghosts haunting him as it was, so why add more? Because, she told herself, he deserved to know the truth. Besides, there was always the chance that she was imagining things. But she didn’t think so, not since the moment she’d entered the cockpit and checked the instrument panel.

  Gently, she laid a hand on Gault’s arm. “John, I think Matt may have left you a message here in the Lady-A.”

  “Where, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Only a history buff would know about fifty-four forty or fight.”

  “So?”

  “Look at the manufacturer’s plaque, John.” She pointed to the instrument panel. “There it is, the Lady-A’s number. And it’s not flush with the panel.”

  With a trembling hand, Gault removed the screws and exposed a square of tightly folded papers.

  “Son of a bitch!” he whooped.

  “That’s no way to talk to a lady,” Paula said from right behind them.

  Nick jumped, and for a split second, before reason took hold, she thought the plane had spoken.

  “Paula, I didn’t expect you,” Gault said.

  “I called her while you were scrounging doughnuts,” Nick explained.

  “She said she had a hunch about Matt’s message,” Paula added.

  “She was right,” he said, handing the papers to Nick. “I didn’t bring my reading glasses.”

  Nick stared at him, wondering if glasses were the real reason he was delegating the job. She unfolded the papers. There were three onion-thin sheets.

  “The first is a copy of a story from the New York Times,” she said. “The headline reads, ’Americans used as human guinea pigs in radiation tests.’ ”

  Both Paula and Gault moved closer to peer over her shoulder.

  “ ’In sworn testimony before a congressional oversight committee,’ ” Nick read, “ ’Dr. Karl Maitland, a research scientist from the Los Alamos Laboratory, stated, “We no longer conduct human tests. That stopped in the mid-1970s. Since then only animals have been used for experimental purposes, and all in accordance with accepted humane practices. He dismissed as irresponsible, news reports that had compared his work to Nazi experimentations at Buchenwald.’ ”

  “God damn it!” Gault said. “That’s the bastard Matt was after. I know it.”

  Gooseflesh climbed Nick’s spine. She remembered the cookies file had left a record that Matt had called up a biography of a Dr. Karl Maitland, who was now Director of the National Research Institute for Behavioral Statistics. She felt a horrible coldness overtake her. Congressman Hanlan had told them that Mesa d’Oro was the site for the Institute. And the holding area that had been so carefully sanitized at the base of that mesa, as the federal agent had put it, hadn’t been designed to pen in animals, humanely treated or otherwise, but men. She’d seen it for herself.

  The second page was a copy of another clipping, this one obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, from U. S. News and World Report. It connected Maitland with a government study entitled THE MORTALITY OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS TEST PARTICIPANTS. It detailed the incidence of leukemia among veterans who’d taken part in tests conducted in Nevada and at the Pacific Proving Grounds at Enewetak and Bikini.

  The final page was a personal letter to Gault.

  “You’d better read this one for yourself, John,” Nick said, handing it to him.

  Holding it at arm’s length, Gault scanned it quickly. For a moment, he said nothing, but only stared though the bomber’s windshield.

  Finally, he cleared his throat and said, “I think you’d both better hear this.”

  “ ’Dear Granddad, if you’re reading this, I’m in trouble, or worse.’ ”

  Gault’s voice cracked. He wet his lips before continuing.

  “ ’I’m on my way to a place called Mesa d’Oro in southeastern Arizona. It’s called the National Institute for Behavioral Statistics and is run by a Dr. Karl Maitland. 1 suspect him of conducting illegal medical experiments cm human beings. No, 1 take that back. 1 know that’s what he’s doing. I just can’t prove it yet. That’s why I’m on my way there, to meet an informant. I’m told that the experiments on the mesa involve illegal aliens. They are conducting terminal experiments on people against their will. I’m certain of it. This has got to be stopped if it’s the last thing I do.’ ”

  Gault looked away. “Matt signs off saying, ’Give my love to the Lady-A.’ ”

  “He always said that, in every letter he wrote to me,” Paula said.

  Carefully, Gault folded the letter and tucked it away in his wallet.

  Nick felt sick. The sight of Matt’s body flashed back to her. Again she saw the raw, angry-looking flesh, what she’d attributed to extreme sun exposure at the time. Now, she knew better. Now she knew that Maitland was still experimenting on human guinea pigs.

  She shook her head to dispel the monstrous images.

  “What is it?” Gault asked.

  She hesitated telling them. She’d seen John Gault’s anger at work in Ophir and feared what he might do. Yet her own anger demanded satisfaction. Because now, more than ever, she felt certain that the landslide that had nearly killed her and her father was no accident.

  “John,” she said as calmly as she could, “Do you remember me describing Matt’s body?”

  He nodded.

  “I thought he was sunburned at the time,” she explained to Paula. “Now, I think radiation killed him. I think he ended up as one of Maitland’s experiments.”

  Paula turned away and stifled a sob, but Gault didn’t say a word for a long time. He just sat there, staring through the Lady-A’s windshield. Finally, he took a deep breath, got up from his seat, and said, “I’m going to the office to call Bob Hanlan. I’ll be right back.”

  It was a waste of time, Nick thought. The last time they’d spoken to the congressman he’d advised them to back off. Like all gutless politicians, she said to herself.

  Nick and Paula sat in silence, Paula quietly crying, Nick unwilling to intrude on the younger woman’s pain. In a few minutes Gault returned.

  “Well?” Nick asked. His answer was aimed at Paula. “I’m go
ing to need some bombs.”

  “Don’t look at me, Dad.”

  “Your National Guard outfit is the only place I can get them.”

  “Hold it,” Nick told Gault. “You can’t be serious.”

  “You know me better than that. My entire crew has already volunteered for the mission.”

  “I take it the congressman wouldn’t help.”

  “I only got as far as one of his aides. ’The congressman has never heard of you,’ I was told. Now what about those bombs, Paula?”

  “They’re under constant guard. Even I can’t get at them without written orders.”

  “Then we’ll load the Lady-A with dynamite if that’s all we can get.”

  “Listen to me,” Paula said. “Matt wouldn’t want you playing kamikaze.”

  “That’s not my intention.”

  “I’m coming with you, then, to see that you don’t.”

  Gault grasped Paula’s hand. “Matt would never forgive me if I let something happen to you. As long as you live, something of him does too.”

  “And if I can get you the bombs?”

  “Working miracles won’t get you on board.”

  “I give up,” Paula said, turning to Nick. “Stubbornness runs in the family, you know. Matt was the same way. As for you, John, miracles don’t come into it. It’s a matter of supply sergeants. Don’t you remember your Air Corps days? Supply sergeants and their scrounging kept you flying, and supplied you with damn near everything else, too. In my experience, I’ve found that when it comes to juggling Air Force property, even losing a little of it, there’s nothing like a master supply sergeant. And our outfit’s got a beaut, name of Al Sawicki. A wheeler-dealer without peer. You’ve got to be prepared to trade though. That’s his life’s blood.”

  “He can have anything I’ve got left except the Lady-A.”

  “Okay, I’ll sound him out on the subject. But even if you get your bombs, that mesa sounds like a difficult target.”

  “We’ve got a Norden bombsight.”