Flight of the Serpent Read online

  “I’d feel better renting it.”

  “I wouldn’t want it shot up by those two Neanderthals we met in the humvee yesterday.”

  “I don’t intend to make that mistake again,” Gault said.

  Buttoning her fresh work shirt, she emerged from behind the tarp. “So why do you need the truck?”

  “Have you forgotten? My plane’s in Mescalero. It’s a long walk. I need a ride.”

  “I’ll ask my father to take you.”

  “I thought you might like to fly with me,” he said. “We could take a look at the mesa from the air and see what the hell’s going on up there.”

  Nick licked her dry lips. More than anything she wanted proof that her helicopter existed. At the same time, finding it might be the worst thing that could happen to Gault.

  “That might not be such a good idea,” she said. “It’s still a no-fly zone on the map.”

  The look of disappointment on his face had her reaching out to him, but she stopped short of contact. It was better not to embarrass him, she thought, then realized that wasn’t why she’d shied away. There was something very appealing about him.

  Nick pulled her baseball cap hard down around her ears, flattening her hair. What the hell was wrong with her? She loved planes, so her interest in Gault had to be connected. It was as simple as that. After all, he was a pilot.

  Suddenly, she caught herself staring at him. To break the silence, she said, “Aren’t you forgetting something? You could lose your license for violating a no-fly zone.”

  “I can always claim I was off course. Besides, whatever happens, I’m taking a close look at the area around the mesa, starting with where we ran into that humvee.”

  Nick turned away to gaze toward the horizon. The desert sky was cloudless. Today’s predicted high temperature was 105, plus or minus five degrees.

  “I’ve never flown in a twin Cessna,” she said.

  “Does that mean you’ll fly with me?” Gault asked.

  Nick took a deep breath and nodded.

  “What about your students?”

  “I’m seeing them off right after breakfast. After that, my father and I are on our own.”

  “What’s he going to say about you endangering yourself?”

  “He’ll grumble for a while. But he knows how I feel about airplanes. After a while, he’ll calm down and be happy puttering around the dig, looking for buried treasure.”

  ******

  Nick watched Gault’s movements during takeoff with admiration. They were concise, with no wasted effort. His eyes shifted constantly, checking the sky one moment, the instruments the next. His hands seemed to move independently, touching and adjusting the controls. He set their radio to the Mescalero airport frequency.

  As the Cessna rose into the bright sky, Nick felt soaring excitement. The power of the twin engines vibrated through every fiber of her body. The speed of the plane seemed twice that of a commercial jet, though she knew it was an illusion because of their low altitude. They were hugging the ground at two hundred feet to stay under the detection of radar if there was any monitoring of the area.

  They were heading northwest toward the great mesa, which was invisible for the moment in the purple haze of the horizon.

  A few minutes later Gault tapped her knee. “Use the binoculars!” he shouted over the engine roar, though they both wore headsets. “Start looking for anything. Smoke, dust, anything unusual.”

  The binoculars brought the mesa into her field of vision. But at this distance, it looked as unreal as the shimmering mirage lake from which it rose.

  She checked the map in her lap, then held it up in Gault’s field of vision and tapped a finger against what she thought to be their position, Sulphur Flats.

  He took a quick look, compared it to the ground, and nodded. Sulphur Flats extended another thirty miles, all the way to the foothills of the Mescalero Mountains.

  “Hell must look like this,” he yelled.

  His comment had her nodding. Seen through the foreshortening of the binocular’s magnification, the desert floor looked like a thin veneer. Peel it away and the fiery pit beneath would be instantly revealed.

  The unremitting glare had her seeing spots. She rubbed her eyes, making matters worse. Tears ran down her cheeks.

  “Rest your eyes for a while,” he said.

  Even with her eyes closed, the bright desert sun shown through her lids. She tried to relax, but the engine throb made her tingle with anticipation. She risked a peek at Gault. He could have been sitting in a rocking chair for all the emotion he showed.

  She shifted her gaze and realized that the mesa was close now, filling the windshield and looming over them. Its height, according to the map, was just under two thousand feet.

  “I’m going over the top!” he shouted. “Even if they don’t have radar, they’ll sure as hell hear us.”

  It was like riding a roller coaster. The mesa was coming at them as if jet-propelled. She loved it. The feeling was pure exhilaration, more exciting even than the carnival rides she’d treasured as a child. Then and there, she vowed to take flying lessons the first chance she got.

  Light glinted from the top of the mesa. Gault pointed, but she’d already seen the flash.

  She brought the binoculars to her eyes. The flash had been sunlight reflecting off windows sunk into the side of a squat concrete building painted the same red sandstone color as the rest of the mesa. A similarly camouflaged radar dish was mounted on the building’s flat roof. In front of the building a large white X had been painted on a blacktopped courtyard.

  “Landing pad!” Gault shouted.

  Nick panned the horizon but saw no sign of helicopters.

  The mesa swept beneath them and Gault put the plane into a shallow dive toward the desert floor.

  “That place doesn’t show on the map,” she said. “Go around for another look.”

  He banked sharply. At the same time, two helicopters rose from behind the far side of the mesa.

  Nick pointed them out, but Gault had already spotted them. Both were painted black and showed no military markings. Nick realized that their chin-mounted cannons seemed to be aimed right at them.

  Gault shoved the throttles forward and dove. The helicopters followed.

  “We’re a little faster than they are,” he shouted. “If they give us enough time.”

  Nick’s headset crackled to life. “Cessna 340, identify yourself.”

  “This is November-three-four-seven-one-Zulu en route to Salt Lake City,” Gault answered. “Over.”

  “You’re off course and this is restricted airspace.”

  Gault banked the Cessna first one way, then the other, his eyes scanning the landscape below. Nick spotted the old army barracks the same time he did. Even from five hundred feet up, she could see the high chain-link fence that surrounded them. Seen through the binoculars, the fence was clearly topped with razor wire. Behind it stood half a dozen men, all looking up at her, none of them waving. A dirt road, probably the same one on which they’d encountered the humvee, ended at the fence’s double gate.

  “That looks like a detention camp,” she told Gault.

  “Out here in the middle of nowhere? It can’t be. It must be military.”

  Nick wasn’t so sure. Gault hadn’t seen the barbed wire. It looked more like a holding pen than barracks. They weren’t soldiers. Nick would have bet on that.

  Gault triggered his microphone. “Is this a military reservation?”

  “Leave the area immediately,” came the answer from one of the helicopters. “Failure to do so will be considered felony trespass.”

  Gault banked again, more steeply. By now they were heading south again, back toward Mescalero.

  “Four-seven-one-Zulu, Salt Lake is the other way.”

  “Go to hell,” Gault answered. To Nick, he said, “We’re out of cannon range now.”

  Nick realized she’d been holding her breath. She exhaled deeply. “One thing’s for sure, th
ere are helicopters around here. As to what they’re doing in this place, I can’t imagine. But that building on the mesa sure as hell looks expensive.”

  In fact, expensive was an understatement, she thought. The word fortune came to mind. Because of the mesa’s vertical walls, all the building materials would have to have been flown in by chopper.

  “Only the military has that kind of funding,” she added.

  They were silent for the rest of the flight. And as much as she loved planes, Nick was happy to be back on the ground when they landed.

  As soon as Gault cut the engine, she asked, “What kind of story was Matt after?”

  “I don’t know. He was always closemouthed about his work. ’Keep it to yourself,’ he liked to say, ’and nobody will beat you into print.’ ”

  “What kind of stories had he done in the past?”

  “Matt was a crusader. He said journalism was one of the few places the little guy, the guy without money or political clout, could get justice. That was his creed, that and his sense of history. He believed we’d better learn from it or we’ll be condemned to relive the atrocities.”

  “He sounds like a hell of a reporter.”

  “He was. He was always being threatened. That’s why 1 was relieved when he finally agreed to come into the business with me. His fiancée was joining us, too, eventually. She’s an Air Force pilot.”

  “Maybe she’d know what’s going on up on that mesa?” Nick said.

  “I couldn’t ask her, because whatever it is has to be classified. Otherwise, why the choppers?”

  “There weren’t any military markings on them,” Nick pointed out.

  “That doesn’t surprise me. If they’re testing some kind of secret weapons system, they’d want to keep a low profile. Maybe Mesa d’Oro is the Arizona version of Roswell, New Mexico.”

  Nick shook her head and smiled. “Complete with aliens and flying saucers, I suppose.”

  “Lady Luck, I know about. As for lights in the sky and the like, I’ve never seen them myself.”

  “Let’s assume you’re right about the testing. Would Matt go after a story if it was a military secret?”

  “Not without a lot of careful thought.”

  Nick closed her eyes and saw the men in the compound again. What kind of military secret could they be hiding?

  Together, they climbed out of the Cessna. The sunlight hammered Nick so hard her head began to throb instantly. Underfoot, the asphalt felt gooey.

  “Jesus,” Gault said. “It must be a hundred and ten.” He scanned the desert landscape beyond the runway. “You said you were an expert in survival. How long could you last out there?”

  “If I knew where I was, I could probably make it far enough to find help. With luck.”

  Gault nodded. “I know about luck. We pilots spend too much of it. Matt’s ran out in the wrong place.”

  “I could have accepted my luck running out,” he continued. “But Matt’s . . .” His shoulders slumped. “God, I remember him sitting with me in the Lady-A’s cockpit when he was a little boy. He’d pretend he was flying. It became a ritual with us, sitting in that old B-24, talking. The last time . . . God, it was only two weeks ago . . . he told me he’d been dreaming about flying her for real as long as he could remember. He said he used to wish for it all the time.” Gault sighed deeply. “Maybe I’ll do that. Maybe I’ll rebuild her engines and fly her one more time. No matter what the cost.”

  Looking at him, she knew he was a man capable of doing just that.

  Chapter 12

  Atop Mesa d’Oro, Frank Odell spoke without taking the binoculars from his eyes. “Do you think Gault will come back?”

  “My boys will shoot him down if he does,” the Director said, abandoning his own binoculars to pat Odell on the back. “Chances are he got the message from my Blackbirds and went home with his tail between his legs.”

  Odell lowered his glasses and eyed the Director skeptically. “And the archaeologist? Your boys said they saw her in the cockpit. What do we do about her?”

  “Look, Frank, I’m not happy about the overflight. This man Gault caught us napping today, that’s for sure. But what’s done is done. What we have to do now is to make sure it doesn’t happen again. As for this lady archaeologist of yours, she needs an artifact to do her work, doesn’t she? There’s nothing left of that Cessna but ashes, so no artifact, no fuss. That’s the end of it.”

  “Not quite,” Odell said, trying to hide the malice he felt. “I’ve done a deeper background check on her. Remember the Scorpion?”

  The Director turned away and for a moment Odell thought he hadn’t heard him.

  “The B-17 near Cibola,” Odell persisted, “the one that . . .” His voice trailed off. He cursed his own stupidity, remembering too late that the Director had been a close friend of the famous industrialist who had died trying to hush up the B-17’s discovery.

  The Director turned back with a faraway, almost dreamy expression on his face. Although he was now facing Odell, the public relations man wasn’t sure that the Director was even aware of who he was talking to.

  “They tell me that archaeology is a crowded field.” The Director suddenly seemed to notice Odell. “Too crowded. Isn’t that right, Frank?”

  Odell gulped. “The woman’s famous,” he replied. “We’ve got to be careful. Even National Geographic has featured her. They did a full-color spread on her when she found that bomber that had been lost in the jungle since World War Two. She spent months tracking it down. She’s not the kind to give up easily.”

  The Director’s expression darkened. “My friend was famous. What would a man like you know about true power, true fame? She’s had her fifteen minutes. My Blackbirds will see to it that her time is up.”

  Odell groaned inwardly. Blackbirds was the Director’s euphemism for his rabid two-man security team, Voss and Wiley.

  “Your expression tells me you don’t like the idea,” the Director said, smiling.

  Odell was fully aware that if he went too far, the Blackbirds would be pecking out his eyes. “They’ve made one mistake already.” He waited for the Director to explode.

  But he merely nodded. “For once, Frank, you’re right. Mea culpa. But who the hell could have foreseen that archaeologist of yours wandering into Sulphur Canyon like that? Plain bad luck, I call it.”

  Odell glanced at Voss and Wiley, who were standing near the edge of the mesa. He suspected they tempted fate that way, teetering on the edge, just to show how macho they were. Though why they bothered, he couldn’t imagine. No one in their right mind would question their abilities.

  The Director smiled at the pair of them. Both wore dark suits, white shirts and ties, and looked unruffled, despite the heat. Their eyes were invisible behind mirror-like dark glasses. They reminded Odell of FBI agents, or maybe even Mormon missionaries, until they took off those glasses and you saw their cold eyes.

  “Stop worrying, Frank,” the Director said. “My Blackbirds are a precaution only. They’ll be keeping tabs on things, that’s all. No big deal.”

  As far as Odell was concerned, Voss and Wiley were vultures. Certainly Voss had the mental markings, a redneck if ever he’d seen one. As for Wiley, his expression never changed; he never gave away his thoughts. And all he talked about, at least in Odell’s presence, were the tools of his trade. Odell suppressed a grimace. Did assassin qualify as a trade?

  “Are there any suggestions you’d like to pass on to my Blackbirds before I send them on their way?” The Director’s smile grew as he kicked a rock over the precipice. Despite the smile, his dark eyes remained flinty.

  “We don’t want them overreacting,” Odell cautioned.

  “My very words to them exactly.”

  The Director raised his binoculars to his eyes and peered down in the direction of Ophir. “You know, Frank, there’s overreaction and then there’s proper precaution. Look where Ophir sits, at the base of that crumbling old cliff.” He lowered his glasses and smiled
at Odell. “It’s an accident waiting to happen, Frank. An act of God, that’s what we need.”

  Odell shook his head.

  “Don’t worry, Frank, I’m not playing God.” The Director picked up a red rock and hurled it over the edge. “Not just yet anyway.”

  As always, Odell stood back from the edge. The mesa was an acrophobic nightmare come true. It was said to have been named by Coronado himself during his sixteenth-century quest for the fabled seven cities of gold. Access was by helicopter only, but Odell knew that the Director had once hired professional climbers to make the attempt. Halfway up the vertical face, they had triggered sensor alarms. A hundred feet later, they’d radioed for a rescue team. Odell had the impression that the Director would have preferred to watch fate take its course.

  “Now, why don’t you see Voss and Wiley on their way, Frank, while I get back to work. Otherwise, they might feel you didn’t like them. Besides, I have something cooking right now.”

  Odell grimaced at the thought of what the Director meant by cooking.

  “That’s what I like about you, Frank. You’re predictable.”

  With that, the Director turned on his heel and headed for the main building. As soon as he was out of sight, Voss and Wiley crossed the courtyard to the waiting helicopter, whose 20mm cannons were shrouded in canvas to make them look less deadly. Odell joined them, though he would have felt safer handling rattlesnakes.

  “Do you understand your brief?” Odell said. “No action is to be taken without authorization from either me or the Director.”

  “Whatever you say, Frank,” Voss said.

  “Remember,” he replied, “we don’t want any more problems cropping up.”

  Wiley, the taller of the two, drew an automatic pistol from his shoulder holster and studied it closely. “A silenced .22 is always best, Frank. There’s no fuss or muss, no splatter. A clean kill is the sign of a true professional. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Voss shook his head. “Give me a .357.” He drew out an enormous revolver. “The noise alone will keep bystanders from sticking their noses in where they don’t belong. And the impact—by God, that’s something to see.”