Track of the Scorpion

by R. R. Irvine

  “What about my dig?” Elliot said.

  “Relax,” Guthrie told him. “I’ll fill in. Besides, how often do buried B-17s come along?”

  “Talk about obsessive,” Elliot said, unable to suppress a grin. “My daughter doesn’t have lovers, she has airplanes.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Nick arrived at Beckstead’s oasis at exactly six the next morning. Even so, half a dozen pickup trucks were there ahead of her, parked in a line adjacent to the burial mound. Being careful to stay in the well-worn tire tracks, she pulled her Trooper in behind the last truck and killed the engine. The moment she stepped outside, the rising sun hammered her; its glare started her eyes watering. When she blinked, waves of tears amplified the shimmering mirage lake that ran the length of the horizon. The temperature was way beyond yesterday’s though that didn’t seem possible.

  What was it Beckstead had said? Start early and get a jump on the heat. Some jump this was. They’d all fry their brains by noon.

  At the moment, Beckstead was standing with the mayor, who was flanked by his two councilmen and a stranger taking photographs. Four straw-hatted cowboys carrying rifles, her work crew no doubt, stood apart from the others.

  She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, “This is a dig, not a hunting party.”

  Mayor Ralph trotted forward to greet her, gesturing for calm. “This is Mark Douglas,” he said, indicating the man carrying a camera in one hand and a cane in the other. “He’s a reporter from the Albuquerque Journal.”

  Douglas jabbed his cane into the sand, freeing both hands to take Nick“s picture.

  She glared at Gus Beckstead. “I thought you wanted your picture in a national magazine.”

  “We’ve gone partners with Gus,” the mayor answered. “We’ll all be sharing the fame and fortune.”

  “They promised me a B-17,” Douglas said without taking his eye from the viewfinder.

  “I don’t know what we’ve got yet,” Nick told him. “Now, will somebody tell me why all the guns?”

  “Someone spotted a rattlesnake up on the mound where your plane’s buried,” the reporter said.

  The mayor nodded. “We were about to shoot it when you arrived.”

  Nick shook her head. “For Christ’s sake, it’s probably more scared than you are. All we have to do is chase it off.”

  The mayor lowered his voice. “If we don’t shoot it, the boys won’t like it. They’ll be looking around for it all day instead of doing their work.”

  Beckstead spoke up. “A little target practice will get our juices flowing, ain’t that right, boys?”

  “Nobody shoots at that mound,” Nick said. “Understood?”

  “We ain’t working here, lady,” one of the cowboys said, “not while that snake’s around.”

  She sighed. That’s what she got for dealing with amateurs. If she had any sense, she’d climb back into the Trooper and drive back the way she’d come. Except, of course, she’d have to creep in reverse if she didn’t want to get stuck in the sand.

  “You see a snake, you shoot it,” the cowboy added.

  “That way you won’t be stepping on it some other day. Just give us the word, lady, and bang, it’s all over.”

  A clear case of testosterone overload, she told herself. Experience had taught her there were two ways to counter such macho bullshit. One was to play the helpless female, the other was to attack right back, a prospect she found far more appealing.

  She retrieved the .30-.30 from the Isuzu. Expertly, she levered a shell into the rifle’s chamber. “Show me the goddamned snake.”

  The talkative cowboy obliged. The rattler, a five-footer, was coiled in the striking position but making no sound.

  She assessed her firing angle, found it acceptable in terms of site preservation, and snapped off a shot that cut the snake’s head off.

  The cowboy whistled his approval, then he and his cohorts quickly stowed their rifles in the window racks of their pickups.

  “Where the hell did you learn to shoot like that?” the mayor asked.

  “On my first dig. Now, let’s get to work. From now on, we do things my way or I walk away from here.”

  “If she goes,” the reporter said, “so does my story.”

  The mayor held up his hands in surrender. “Whatever you say. We need your help if we’re going to turn our B-17 into the mother lode.”

  “Confidentially,” Mayor Ralph went on, making certain the reporter could hear every word, “I’ve been talking to some of my Navajo contacts. We’re thinking of putting our plane on Indian land and turning it into a casino.”

  Deliberately, Nick turned her back on the mayor and returned her .30-.30 to its hiding place. When she faced him again, she said, “As of now, I want everyone out of here who’s not going to be using a shovel. Otherwise, you’ll just get in the way.”

  “Does that include me?” Douglas said.

  “She means us,” the mayor said, gesturing at his councilmen. “Like I said, Dr. Scott, you win. This is your dig. All we ask is that you keep us informed.”

  “I think you can count on Gus to do that.”

  As soon as the politicians were on their way, Nick waved over the cowboys and shook hands all around before escorting them to the exposed wingtip. “I want you to start here. We’ll work slowly until I think you’ve got the feel of things. Remember, once you hit metal, back off and use your hands. We want to preserve everything we can, especially serial numbers and any identification marks. If you spot anything unusual, give a holler.”

  “How long do you think this is going to take?” Douglas asked.

  Nick wiped the sweat band of her Cubs’ cap. “Long enough for you to get heatstroke if you don’t cover your head.”

  “I’ve got an old hat in my truck,” Beckstead said, and went to fetch it.

  While the men went to work on the wing, Nick positioned wooden stakes on the mound, estimating the location of the nose, the cockpit, and the tail, which, judging by the height of the mound, was no longer attached to the airplane. When enough of the wing was exposed for her to be absolutely certain that it was a B-17, she’d redirect her crew to the staked areas.

  By noon, with no shade at all, Nick had consumed more than a gallon of water, the diggers twice that. The temperature had been holding at one hundred and five degrees for the past two hours. The pace of work, at first enthusiastic, had slowed as the temperature rose. Now, seen through the shimmer of heat waves, the men looked as if they were moving underwater.

  “Take a break,” she shouted. While the men were seeking what shade there was beneath the tailgates of their trucks, she joined Beckstead and Mark Douglas, who was lying on the floor of the prospector’s stifling shack, fanning himself with a straw hat. “Tomorrow I want a tent out here,” she told Beckstead. “Without real shade, we’re all going to die of heat prostration.”

  The reporter’s face looked ashen. His limp, Nick had noticed, had grown worse as the day and the heat progressed. Her own head throbbed. The back of her sunburned neck had been rubbed raw by her collar. Her lips were cracked, and her tongue felt twice normal size. Only the prospect of finding a previously undiscovered relic kept her from saying to hell with the dig.

  “Why don’t you stay in town until we’ve unearthed the plane?” she told Douglas.

  He smiled grimly. “If it weren’t for this damned heat, I’d be enjoying myself. Besides, you never know when your story’s going to break.”

  She shrugged. “Suit yourself. Tomorrow, we’ll have some kind of cover, won’t we, Mr. Beckstead?”

  “I seem to remember that the mayor has an old army tent he uses when he goes hunting.”

  “We’ll need something better than that, something with open sides to provide ventilation and shade at the same time.”

  She moved to the open doorway, shading her burning eyes to study the site. Already the shape of the airplane was distinct, with the top of the aluminum fuselage exposed at the point where the dorsal aer
ial mast attached to the base of the tail. The remains of the upper turret, probably sheared away when the plane crashed, had also been exposed, as had the top of the cockpit. The windshield had yet to be cleared.

  From now on, as they exposed more and more of the plane, there’d be more dirt to shift. All that debris would also have to be hauled out of the immediate area so it wouldn’t clutter their work area.

  “In case you haven’t noticed,” she said, “we did more work in the first two hours today than in the next four. Tomorrow, when we have proper shade, we’ll take fifteen- minute breaks every hour.”

  “If you don’t want the mayor’s tent, what about attaching some kind of awning to the sides of our trucks?” Beckstead said.

  “Whatever works is fine with me. For now, I think we’d best knock off and get a fresh start in the morning.”

  “The men owe a couple of more hours.”

  “My day just ended,” Nick said.

  Shrugging, Beckstead left the shack to talk to his men.

  Douglas said, “This plane means a lot to you, doesn’t it?”

  “We live in a country that has little respect for history. Every day we tear down old buildings in the name of progress and profit.” Nick found herself getting angry. “We concrete over the land, losing archaeological sites forever. That’s where my job comes in, to save pieces of history every chance I get.”

  “You’re like me. Your job’s a bitch sometimes, but you love it anyway.”

  Love was part of it, most of it, at least Nick hoped so. But sometimes her motives weren’t clear, even to herself. Her mother had seen Nick’s fascination with airplanes and archaeology as a personal rebuke. In those moments when Elaine had escaped the silent pit of her black depression, she often said, “I know why you’re following in your father’s footsteps. It’s to get away from me. The same way you used to run away from home when you were a little girl.”

  “I always came back.”

  “You stayed away until your father went looking for you.”

  “I was never far away.”

  “I need you close to me,” her mother had said, “not out on some godforsaken dig.”

  Douglas touched her on the shoulder, interrupting her reverie. “If I do my job right,” he said, “my story is going to attract the publicity the mayor is counting on. I don’t think that’s what you had in mind for this particular piece of history.”

  “What are you going to write?”

  “I see it as strictly a nostalgia piece. Of course, everything depends on what kind of background information we come up with. How did the plane get here? What happened to the crew? That kind of thing.”

  “Formal identification ought to be easy enough, but tracking down the crew might be impossible after so many years.”

  Douglas adjusted his bad leg and began massaging it.

  She nodded at the leg and said, “Did you get that in the line of duty?”

  “Actually, the Surgeon General’s to blame, or maybe Philip Morris. You see, I grew up thinking newspapers were full of typewriters and cigarette smoke. Now it’s computers, spell checkers, and smoke-free zones. Try to light up in the newsroom and they throw you out in the rain. In my case, onto a slick metal fire escape. To make matters worse, I didn’t even have time to inhale before I bounced all the way to the bottom.”

  Nick couldn’t help laughing.

  “Breaking that leg was the best thing that ever happened to me. It stopped me smoking. Hell, I wouldn’t take another cigarette if the tobacco companies were giving them away.”

  Before Nick could respond, a car horn sounded in the distance. By the time she stepped out of the shack with Douglas right behind her, her father’s Trooper was pulling up behind her own vehicle. As always, Elliot seemed unaffected by the heat. Next to him, Clark Guthrie looked totally disheveled, with a layer of grime clinging to his sweat-soaked work shirt. The handkerchief that he was using to mop his face had turned as red as the sandy soil, leaving behind streaks that reminded Nick of fresh wounds.

  “Christ,” Guthrie said. “Look at this place. It makes hell seem like a garden spot. You’d think people would be more considerate and misplace their airplanes someplace nice, preferably with a Hilton nearby.”

  Guthrie pivoted slowly, studying the excavation. “What kind of plane is it?”

  “It’s definitely not Anasazi.” Nick raised an eyebrow at her father, who accepted her unspoken challenge and began pacing the long axis of the mound. When that was done, he climbed the slope to peer at the exposed portions of fuselage.

  “I’d say the plane was more than sixty feet long,” he called out finally. “Have you found the tail?”

  “Not yet, but the top of the cockpit area should have told you what it was.”

  Elliot rejoined them at the base of the mound. “You’re the expert, daughter.” “I think I can confirm that it’s definitely a B-17.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Beckstead said. “Why didn’t you say so before? Me and Douglas here have been holding our breath all day. Isn’t that right?”

  The reporter nodded but kept writing in his notebook.

  Elliot returned to his Trooper, climbed onto the hood, and then onto the top of the vehicle. When Nick joined him, the metal roof sagged precariously beneath their weight.

  After a moment he said, “Haven’t you noticed something unusual?”

  Nick stared at the site for a long time but didn’t spot anything new.

  “If your B-17 had crashed,” Elliot said, “the wreck-age should have been scattered over a larger area, not confined to a single mound.”

  She grimaced, knowing that a successful forced landing would have become common knowledge in the area. An unsuccessful one, with the possibility of an explosion, would have scattered debris to some extent at least. But as far as she’d been able to determine with Beckstead’s metal detector, everything was concentrated within the immediate area.

  Elliot scanned the horizon. “This would be a bad place to land if you had to walk out.”

  “Their navigator should have known where they were. They’d have water on board, enough to get them to Cibola on foot at least.”

  “Maybe the plane wasn’t worth salvaging, so the authorities just left it here. Have you found any identification numbers yet?”

  “The tail’s our best bet, but it’s not where it should be, as you can see.”

  “Let’s hope it’s not miles away.”

  “I was going to wait until tomorrow to uncover the nose, but as long as you’re here we could take a look now. Maybe that will give us a clue.”

  She climbed down off the Trooper and then offered her father a hand.

  “I can still work you into the ground,” he said, but accepted the help anyway.

  Nick waved over Beckstead. “I’d like to uncover the nose while my father’s here,” she told him.

  “It’s a good thing I didn’t send my men home like you wanted.”

  Nick directed the men to the port side of the nose, where she had them dig a shaft the size of a foxhole, being careful not to scrape the aluminum skin with their shovels. They’d gone down about three feet, when she spotted the edge of a painted emblem, faded but still showing color. “Hold it,” she said. “I’ll take over from here.”

  As soon as the men were out of the hole, she jumped in and began using her handkerchief to wipe away the dirt that was clinging to the aluminum.

  “We’re in luck. The nose art’s still intact.”

  Her father joined her in the hole. Together, they used their hands to clear away more of the dirt.

  “It’s a scorpion,” Nick said. “That has to be what the crew named their plane, the Scorpion.”

  She sat back on the lip of the hole to admire the artwork. Next to it, there was a jagged tear in the plane’s aluminum skin. “I’ll shoot some pictures of this, then we’ll cover it up again for the time being to protect the paint.”

  “Let me do the honors,” Douglas said. “I’l
l print you as many copies as you want.”

  Nick nodded.

  “What do you think caused that rip in the metal?” Douglas asked.

  “Who knows? That skin’s not much tougher than a tin can. Any caliber bullet would go right through these planes. The pilots used to scrounge themselves a piece of armor plating to sit on when they flew missions.”

  Douglas grimaced. “Will the scorpion help you identify the plane?”

  “Eventually perhaps, but a tail number would make it easier. That’s where we’ll concentrate tomorrow. With any luck, I’ll be calling the air force for an ID by the end of the day.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Air Force General Thomas Moreland, commanding officer of Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, SAC Headquarters, clenched his teeth as he reread the fax and accompanying memo. For Christ’s sake, didn’t his people know better than to talk to the news media? True, it was a newspaper reporter, not one of those damned hyenas from television, but newsmen could be dangerous at any level.

  Snatching up a felt-tipped red marking pen, the general circled the offender’s name: Roberts, Kenneth, Captain. Soon to be a civilian. As for Colonel Joseph Fortunato, he could spend his last few months of active duty freezing his ass off among the Eskimos.

  Moreland switched pens, exchanging red for blue. Polar blue, he decided. Or maybe ice blue.

  But at the last moment, he made no mark against Fortunato’s name. The poor bastard was only following orders, bucking the memo up the chain of command. But wouldn’t it be comforting to shoot the messenger for once?

  The general shook his head, a vicious snap back and forth. No, that kind of thinking could get him eaten by polar bears if he had to pass the information up the chain to the Pentagon. He hoped his superiors would be as forgiving as he was.

  He sucked a quick breath, forcing himself to relax, and opened his personal safe. He knew without looking that S-OPS17 would have a coded designation, but he checked the file just the same.