More mutterings. “Yeah, the brush that covered this damned hole cushioned my fall. C’mon down. There’s a short set of stairs.”
Austin joined Zavala at the bottom of the hole, which was about eight feet deep. Joe was standing in front of a partially open door of heavily riveted steel.
“Don’t tell me,” Austin grunted. “The unerring Zavala homing instinct.”
“What else?” Zavala said.
Austin pulled a small but powerful halogen light from his pack. The door noisily opened with some persuasion from his shoulder. He stepped inside with Zavala close behind. A blast of cold and fetid air hit them in the face as if they were standing in front of an air conditioner for a mausoleum. The beam of light showed a corridor whose concrete walls and ceiling were inadequate insulation against permafrost and seemed to amplify the cold. Pulling their jacket collars tight around their necks, they started along the corridor.
Several doors led off the main hallway of the underground bunker. Austin flashed his light inside the rooms. Rusty bed frames and mattresses rotting with decay testified to the use of one space as a bunkroom. Farther along was a kitchen and pantry. The last chamber was a communications room.
“They left in a rush,” Zavala said. The smashed vacuum tubes and radio cabinets looked as if they had been attacked with a sledgehammer.
They continued along the passageway, skirting a large rectangular hole in the floor. The metal grating that once covered it had mostly rusted through. Austin pointed the flashlight down the deep shaft. “Some sort of ventilation or heating, maybe.”
“I’ve been thinking about what Clarence Tinook said about mines,” Zavala said.
“Let’s hope it was a concocted story they hoped would scare off hunters and fishermen,” Austin said. “Maybe he actually said mimes. ”
“Now that would certainly scare me,” Zavala replied.
The corridor eventually ended in a short set of stairs that led to another steel door. They guessed that they were under the hangar. Not entirely convinced of his own argument against booby traps, Austin took a deep breath, opened the door, and stepped through. Austin immediately sensed a change in atmosphere. The cold was less biting and musty than in the concrete bunker. The staleness of the air was overpowered by the smell of gasoline, oil, and heated metal.
On the wall to the right of the door was a switch. A stenciled sign read “Generator.” Austin gave Zavala the go-ahead, and Joe yanked the switch down. Nothing happened at first. Then there was a click from somewhere in the darkness and a series of sputtering pops as a motor coughed reluctantly into life. High above, lights glimmered dimly then glowed brightly, illuminating the vaulted ceilings of a huge artificial cave. Zavala was too awestruck to speak. Illuminated at center stage was what looked like a black-winged avenger from a Norse myth.
He walked over behind the scimitar-shaped craft, reached up, and tentatively touched one of the vertical fins extending down from the trailing end of the fuselage.
“Beautiful,” he whispered as if he were talking about a lovely woman. “I’ve read about this thing, seen pictures, but I never dreamed it would be so magnificent.”
Austin went over and stood beside him, taking in the broad sweep of sculpted aluminum. “Either we’ve stumbled into the. Bat Cave or we just found the long-lost phantom flying wing,” he said.
Zavala walked under the fuselage. “I did some reading about the plane. These fins were added later for stabilization when they went from prop to jet power. She’s about a hundred seventy feet from wing tip to wing tip.”
“That’s half the length of a football field,” Austin said.
Zavala nodded. “It was the largest plane of its day even though she’s only about fifty feet from front to back. Check out these jet engines. In the original all eight were built into the fuselage. They slung these two underneath the wing to free up fuel space. Fits in with what you said about modifications to in crease range.”
They walked around to the front of the plane. The swept back aerodynamic lines were even more impressive from this angle. Although the plane weighed more than two hundred thou sand tons, it seemed to balance lightly on its tripod landing gear.
“Jack Northrop really had something when he designed this lady,” Austin replied.
“Absolutely. Look at that slim silhouette. There’s hardly any surface for radar to bounce off. They’ve even painted it black like the stealth planes. Let’s go inside,” Zavala said eagerly.
They climbed up a ladder through a hatchway in the plane’s belly and made their way along a short ramp. Like the rest of the plane, the flight deck was unconventional. Zavala sat in the rotating pilot’s seat and used a hand-operated mechanism to pump the seat four feet higher into a Plexiglas bubble. He peered through the cowling, which was to the left of the wing’s center line. The conventional switches and instruments were located between the pilot and the copilot, who sat at a lower level. The throttle controls were suspended from the overhead, similar to Navy flying boats such as the Catalina.
“Fantastic visibility,” Zavala said. “It feels like being in a fighter plane.”
Austin had settled into the copilot’s seat on the right. He could see through window panels in the wing’s leading edge. While Zavala ran his fingers lovingly over the controls, Austin went to explore the rest of the plane. The flight engineer sat in front of an impressive array of instrument gauges about ten feet behind the copilot facing the rear. He would have been unable to see out. Austin thought the layout was awkward, but he was impressed by the headroom and the small bunkroom, head, and kitchen that indicated the plane was built for long-range missions. He sat at the bombardier’s seat and stared out the window, trying to picture himself high above the bleak Siberian landscape. Then he crawled into the bomb bays. Zavala was still in the pilot’s seat, hands on the controls, when Austin returned to the cockpit. “Find anything back there?” he asked Austin.
“It’s what I didn’t find,” Austin said. “The bomb bay racks are empty.”
“No canister bombs?”
“Not even a water balloon.” He smiled at Zavala. “Fallen hopelessly in love with the old girl, have we?”
Zavala grinned lasciviously. “A case of love at first sight. Older women have always appealed to me. I’ll show you some thing. There’s still life in this baby.” His fingers played over the instrument console. The bank of dials and gauges in front of them glowed red.
“She’s all gassed up and ready to go,” Austin said with disbelief.
Zavala nodded. “She must be hooked up to the generator. There’s no reason this stuff wouldn’t still work. It’s been cold and dry here, and she was maintained in mint condition until they deserted this joint.”
“Speaking of the joint, let’s take a look around.”
Zavala reluctantly left the cockpit. They climbed down from the plane and walked around the interior perimeter of the hangar. The space was obviously planned to service the plane efficiently. Within easy reach of the aircraft were hydraulic lifts and cranes, test equipment, fuel and oil pumps. Joe stopped to marvel at a wall hung with tools. They were as clean as surgical instruments. Austin poked his head into a storage room. He glanced around and called for Zavala.
Stacked from floor to ceiling inside the room were dozens of shiny cylinders like the one they had discovered floating in the water off the Baja. Austin carefully lifted a cylinder from the stack and felt its weight.
“This is much heavier than the empty can back in my office.”
“Anasazium?”
“The unerring Austin homing instinct,” Kurt said with a smile. “You‘11 have to admit this is what we really came all this way to find.”
“I suppose so. But I can see why Martin fell in love with that plane out there.”
“Let’s hope it isn’t a similar case of fatal attraction. We’re going to have to figure out what to do next.”
Zavala eyed the contents of the storeroom. “We’ll need something bigger than the Maule to move this stuff.”
Austin said, “It’s been a long day. Let’s get back to Nome. We can call in for reinforcements. I’m not crazy about the way we came in. Let’s see if we can find another door.”
They walked around in front of the flying wing again. The plane was positioned so that it pointed toward the broad side of the hangar, facing onto the airstrip. They tried a door that would have led to the outside, but it was overgrown with vegetation and wouldn’t open. A big section of wall apparently moved up and down like a garage door. Austin saw a wall switch marked “Door.” Since they had good luck with the generator, he gave it a yank. The hum of motors filled the air, then came loud creaks and rattles and the squeal of metal against metal. The motors
