Journey of the Pharaohs - NUMA Files Series 17 (2020)

by Cussler, Clive

Gamay led the extra horse over to him. “You told us to watch for anything dangerous. You never mentioned midair acrobatics with you hanging from a helicopter.”

  “I probably should have skipped that part,” he admitted. “It was all for nothing anyway.” Draping his socks over his shoulder, Kurt slipped his bare feet into his boots, pulled them tight and then climbed onto the saddle. He was dog tired, had a pounding headache and was not at all interested in hiking back to Falcon Point. “Thanks for having enough faith to bring me my horse. How did Joe and Morgan fare? Are they all right?”

  This time Paul answered. “They secured the wreck site and radioed us about your stunt. We saw someone fall off a mile back. We were very glad to find out it wasn’t you. Then we saw you fall and feared the worst.”

  “Let it be known that I jumped,” Kurt said. “Just glad I didn’t belly flop.”

  “So what do we do now?” Gamay asked.

  “Ride back to Falcon Point and search that plane from nose to tail.”

  “Why?” Gamay asked. “Surely they took everything of value.”

  Kurt stretched and twisted around in the saddle, reveling in the glorious feeling of his back cracking and his spine realigning itself. “We’ll never know until we check. They could easily have missed something. If they did, it’ll probably be something small and hidden. But sometimes the smallest clue can make the biggest difference.”

  CHAPTER 39

  With everyone gathered back at the site of the downed aircraft, Joe explained what he and Morgan had already learned. “All-metal construction,” Joe said. “Twin engines.”

  “It’s in good condition?”

  “Part of it is,” Joe said. “It’s a tale of two parts, really. Everything that’s been buried over the years is well preserved. Everything that’s been exposed up top has been badly weathered.”

  The others looked on, following Joe’s hand as he pointed things out. The line of demarcation on the plane was remarkably clear.

  “It’s not going to search itself,” Kurt said. “Let’s get to it.”

  Gamay nodded and moved toward the front of the plane. “We’ll check the bow,” she said, including Paul in her statement. “I mean, the nose. It doesn’t look like they spent much time excavating that area.”

  “I’ll take a look inside,” Kurt volunteered.

  “I’ll join you,” Morgan said.

  “That leaves the rest for me,” Joe said.

  As the group spread out, Joe dropped down beside the fuselage to an area behind the wing. A section of the metal had been cut open and torn away.

  He aimed his flashlight into the opening. The lower section was filled with sediment, though much of it had been dug out. He saw handprints and telltale scoops where someone’s fingers had clawed through the soil. “Couldn’t get a shovel in here, so they must have dug by hand.”

  “Can you tell if they found anything?” Kurt asked.

  Joe studied the compartment. “Doesn’t look like there was any cargo back here, just fuel pumps, rotted hoses and a large metal container that must have been the gas tank.” He rapped his fingers on it. The tank reverberated like a muffled steel drum. It was half filled with sediment too.

  “Pretty big tank for such a small plane,” Joe said. “Whoever flew this wanted maximum range.”

  Kurt listened to Joe, but his mind was on his own effort. After climbing up onto the fuselage, he and Morgan gazed down into the cockpit. On its exterior, they spotted metal tracks indented in the sides.

  “These rails look like they were part of a sliding canopy,” Morgan suggested.

  Kurt nodded, pointing to a spar jutting out in front of the cockpit. “It would have connected here to this stub of metal where a windscreen would have been fixed in place.”

  They found no remnants of the canopy or screen. The loss had left the cockpit open to the elements for years and it had filled completely with sand until Kappa’s men shoveled it out.

  Looking again inside, Kurt saw what remained of the instrument panel and pilot’s seat, which was nothing more than some wooden framing, rusted springs and shreds of leather. The control stick had been broken off at the base and was missing. A layer of sediment covered the floor, far deeper in the corners than in the middle. Shovels had gouged the wooden boards beneath the seat, even breaking through it in places.

  “Didn’t exactly dig carefully,” Kurt said.

  “Something tells me they weren’t interested in preservation,” Morgan replied.

  Climbing over the edge of the fuselage, Kurt dropped down into the cockpit. He sat almost as the pilot would have, facing the instrument panel. It was largely intact, though most of the glass in the gauges was broken and the insides filled with sand.

  Touching the panel, he found it was also made of wood. On the right-hand side he found a series of vertical scratches that had been crossed through. They reminded him of the marks prisoners made on the walls of their cells to count off the days and weeks in captivity.

  “There’s something behind the seat,” Morgan said.

  Kurt twisted around in the confined space and spotted a small steamer trunk. Rectangular and constructed of wood and leather, it had metal rivets at the corners. Its thicker hide had survived the years in better condition than the leather of the pilot’s seat.

  Reaching around the remnants of the seat, Kurt found that the trunk had already been pulled forward as far as possible. It was now wedged between the base of the seat and the tubular framework of the fuselage.

  It was impossible to imagine that Barlow’s men had missed it, but Kurt pushed the lid up and looked into it anyway.

  “What do you see?” Morgan asked.

  “It’s empty,” Kurt said. “Except for a layer of mud at the bottom.”

  He reached down and dug through the residue, feeling for anything Kappa and his people might have missed. He searched for pockets or false compartments, then felt along the bottom of the trunk and in all the corners, turning the contents over with his fingers. The only thing he recovered were two chunks of stone, the largest one no bigger than a matchbox.

  Scraping the residue off, he exposed its brick red color.

  “Red stones,” Morgan said, looking on. “Just like the Writings of Qsn.”

  Kurt handed her one of the pieces and stuffed the other in his pocket. They would search every nook and cranny in the cockpit and even pull out the instrument panel and look behind it without finding anything else of interest.

  Having exhausted every possible hiding spot he could think of and coming up empty, Kurt climbed out of the plane. “Anyone else having any luck?”

  “Nothing up front,” Paul called out.

  “Nothing in the tail either,” Joe said.

  “I was hoping they’d have been less thorough.”

  “Maybe the plane itself can tell us something,” Morgan suggested. She turned to Joe. “You seem to be the aviation expert of the group. What do you make of this relic?”

  Joe stepped away from the plane and moved back a few feet. “From the maintenance logbook, we know it was built in ’26 or ’27. The fact that it’s all-metal construction tells us something too. Very rare for that era.”

  “Must be aluminum or it would have rusted,” Kurt said.

  “Good point,” Joe replied. “And the twin engines and large fuel tank mean it was designed for high speed and long range. Normally, that would suggest it was a mail carrier or a small passenger plane, but I haven’t seen any room for cargo and there’s only one seat.”

  “That’s not all that’s missing,” Paul added. “This thing doesn’t have any wheels.”

  Paul and Gamay had searched the front of the plane without finding any cargo, but they’d followed up by excavating farther beneath the aircraft.

  “No landing gear?” Morgan asked.

  “Just a skid under the belly,” Paul said.

  Kurt and Morgan hopped down and joined Joe. Together, the three of them moved to the front of the plane and crouche
d down to examine its structure.

  Joe ducked under the nose and ran his hand along a ski-like rail. He followed it back to a spot on the fuselage where a rectangular indentation had filled with sediment. Using his fingers to dig out the debris, he found a solid metal pin and a hook linked to a braided metal wire.

  “It looks like an attachment point for external equipment or munitions,” Morgan suggested. “Could this be a warplane?”

  Joe didn’t think so. He moved farther back and came to another set of hooks that were positioned just aft of the cockpit. “It might not have wheels now, but it did when it took off. The landing gear would have connected here and up front. These hooks allowed the pilot to eject it after getting up in the air.”

  “Why would any pilot want to eject their landing gear?” Gamay asked.

  “Because wheels and struts are heavy,” Joe said. “They’re also not very aerodynamic. They create large amounts of drag, which slows you down and burns up fuel in the process.”

  “They also help you land without crashing,” Gamay pointed out.

  “Actually,” Joe said, “the pilot seems to have landed fairly safely. There’s no sign of impact, no folds in the sheet metal, no compression in the nose or twisting of the wings. From what I can see, there’s very little damage to the plane at all, even to the underside. I’d say the skid helped him put it down in the sand. A set of wheels would have sunk in and caused him to tumble end over end.”

  “Then how’d he wind up with a broken leg?” Kurt asked.

  “Maybe he tripped and fell trying to walk out of here with a bag full of rocks,” Joe said.

  As Kurt and the others took that in, Joe stepped back from the aircraft. It dawned on him that this was more than a standard vintage aircraft. It was built for a specific task. “Maybe this was a racing plane,” he said more to himself than the others. “The pilot may have been trying to set an aviation speed record or …”

  His voice trailed off. He looked the plane over with a new perspective, studying it from the nose to what was left of the tail. He calculated the length and wingspan, then went over the other details in his head. “Two engines,” he said. “All-metal airframe. American pilot. Big, heavy fuel tank, for a plane this size, but a very small cockpit and throwaway landing gear.”

  He looked to the others as the truth dawned on him. “This plane was on a one-way trip,” he said. “With some damage upon landing considered an acceptable outcome.”

  “What kind of trip?”

  Joe didn’t respond. He was lost in his own thoughts once again. His gaze came back to the front half of the plane, where he saw a circular mark the size of a small dinner plate. It stuck out slightly from the aircraft’s aluminum skin and its coloring and corrosion were different than the rest and blackened.

  He stepped forward and began scraping at the corroded surface. “Why didn’t I see this before?”

  “See what before?” Paul asked.

  “This marker.”

  Gamay reached out and grabbed Joe by the arm. “Time for you to let us in on the secret,” she said sternly. “What do you know and how do you know it?”

  “I know what plane this is,” Joe said.

  “You mean what kind of plane, don’t you?”

  “No,” Joe said. “I know exactly what plane this is because it’s the only one of its kind ever built.”

  Using a knife, he pried chunks of corrosion from the disk. He then poured water from a canteen over it and, using his shirtsleeve, scoured it vigorously with a circular, polishing motion. Years of grime flaked off. And though the color didn’t change from its tarnished black, details began to emerge.

  The long nose of an animal appeared, first the nostrils and then the line of its mouth. Next came a sloped forehead and a single large eye. After more rubbing, Joe found what he was looking for—the curved shape of a ram’s horn depicted in profile. The whole image a stylized Art Deco design.

  “The Golden Ram,” Joe said, looking up.

  “The golden who?” Gamay asked.

  “The Golden Ram,” Joe repeated. “This is Jake Melbourne’s plane. It vanished after he left New York on an attempt to cross the Atlantic in May of 1927. He was trying to win the Orteig Prize. The one Charles Lindbergh won a week later.”

  Gamay shrugged. “Never heard of him.”

  “People only remember the winners,” Joe said. “No one remembers those who come in second or don’t come in at all. Dozens of others tried to win the prize. At least six men died in the effort. Others vanished and were never heard from again. A French plane known as L’Oiseau Blanc disappeared trying to make the journey from Paris to New York. They were trying to win the prize flying to the west. Melbourne’s plane disappeared a week later, heading east.”

  Kurt turned back to the plane, looking upon it with a newfound reverence. “Are you sure about this?”

  “Positive,” Joe said.

  Paul cocked his head to the side. “You said this plane disappeared a week before Lindbergh’s flight. Since it obviously made it to Europe, does that mean Melbourne deserved the prize instead of Lucky Lindy?”

  “Technically, no,” Joe said. “You had to make it to Paris to win the prize and—”

  “Still,” Kurt said, interrupting, “it would make Melbourne the first person to cross the Atlantic without stopping. That would make him a hero in his own right.”

  “You would think that,” Joe said cautiously. “But not really.”

  “Why not?”

  Joe looked around sheepishly. “Because Jake Melbourne’s body was found in a Brooklyn icehouse weeks after his plane took off. He’d had a gunshot wound to the chest and had been dead for a while. No one knows how long since the ice kept him, well, on ice.”

  Everyone’s eyes grew wide.

  Paul asked the obvious. “If he was killed in New York, then how’d the plane get here?”

  “Someone else flew it,” Joe said.

  “The big question is, who?” Kurt asked.

  Joe shrugged. “How should I know?”

  Morgan joined the conversation next. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “You’re telling me this man Melbourne was killed and then some other pilot—unknown to history—took his plane and disappeared, trying to fly it across the Atlantic, only to crash here in Spain, die anonymously and vanish from history?”

  “That’s the only explanation that makes any sense,” Joe said.

  “Talk about rotten luck,” Paul said.

  “And you’re sure this is his plane?” Morgan said, repeating Kurt’s earlier question. “Not another one of the same kind?”

  “There weren’t any others of the same kind,” Joe said. “Melbourne’s plane was designed and built specifically for the contest. The ram’s head embellishment proves it—that was Jake’s moniker, his persona. They called him the Golden Ram. He butted heads with everyone but always looked good doing it. Trust me, this is Melbourne’s plane even if Melbourne didn’t fly it.”

  “Well, that’s a very strange tale indeed,” Morgan said.

  “Stranger still,” Kurt pointed out, “whoever this pilot was, he had the Writings of Qsn with him. Which means those tablets made it all the way to the New World before coming back here to Europe.”

  Morgan took the next step. “If we can figure out what happened to Melbourne and who replaced him, it might lead us to whoever really discovered the Writings of Qsn and where.”

  The members of the group looked at one another soberly, each of them calculating the odds in their own way. “It’s a long shot,” Kurt said. “But at this point, it’s our only chance of beating the Bloodstone Group to the treasure.”

  CHAPTER 40

  MV Tunisian Wind, forty miles north of the Spanish coast

  Solomon Barlow stood on the bridge wing of an aging forty-thousand-ton bulk carrier that was partially filled with grain. The Tunisian Wind was registered in Panama, owned by an Albanian corporation that existed only on paper and used by the Bloodstone Gr
oup to ferry arms around the world.

  Upon purchasing the Handymax-sized vessel, Barlow had considered changing the name to something like Trojan Gift, but he figured that was too on the nose, considering how he and his people used the ship.

  The vessel itself chartered out to carry grain, filling its hold in various countries and delivering its product on time and intact, in a perfectly legal manner. It was crewed by professional seamen and passed all safety inspections.

  What the world’s authorities hadn’t put together was that the ship rarely made a delivery in the full amount of its cargo. Even when the holds were filled to the top, it routinely dropped off only half the total tonnage it was capable of hauling while down beneath all the remaining loose grain lay weapons wrapped in layers of protective plastic.

  The Tunisian Wind had delivered mobile missile systems, tanks and helicopters from the former Soviet republics. Thousands of assault rifles, armor-piercing rockets and antipersonnel grenades had traveled in the bottom of the hold, along with enough plastic explosives to level a small city.

  It had sailed this way for years. In all that time, the most anyone had ever done was open the hatch and test the grain for boll weevils.

  Currently in between runs, the ship was anchored and awaiting an important arrival. Barlow checked his watch and scanned the horizon repeatedly, his patience fading. Finally, he spotted a helicopter approaching. “That has to be Kappa,” he said. “Signal them with the lights.”

  The ship’s master, who had also been with Barlow for years, did as ordered without question. He wasn’t blind to the vessel’s purpose and knew they were maintaining radio silence for a reason. He aimed the high-powered lamp in the direction of the approaching helicopter and began opening and closing the shutter, sending a message that directed it to land on the forward hatch.

  A moment went by before the landing light beneath the helicopter flashed in response.

  “They confirm,” the captain said.

  “Good,” Barlow replied. “Weigh anchor. I want to be under way the moment they touch down.”