Sahara Read online

  They had lessened the loss of perspiration by walking in the cool of night and keeping their shirts on during the day to help control sweat evaporation without missing some of its cooling effects. But he realized that their bodies were badly desalinated, which contributed to their weakened condition.

  Pitt tried every trick he could dredge up from his memory on desert survival, including breathing through his nose to prevent water loss and talking very little, and only then when they took a rest.

  They came to a narrow river of sand that ran through a valley of boulder-strewn hills. They followed the riverbed until it turned north, and then climbed its bank and continued on their course. Another day was breaking, and Pitt paused to check Fairweather's map, holding up the tattered paper away from the brightening sky in the east. The rough drawing indicated a vast dry lake that stretched nearly unbroken to the Trans-Saharan Track. Though the level ground made for easier walking, Pitt saw a murderous environment, an open holocaust where shade did not exist.

  There could be no resting during the fiery heat of the day. The ground was too gravelly firm to burrow under its surface. They would have to keep going and endure heat with the ferocity of an open flame. Already the sun was bursting into the sky and signaling another day of hideous torture.

  The agony wore on and a few clouds appeared, hiding the sun, giving the men nearly two hours of grateful relief. And then the clouds drifted on and dissipated and the sun returned, hotter than ever. By noon Pitt and Giordino were barely clinging to life. If the heat of the day didn't conquer their agonized bodies the long night of intense cold surely would.

  Then abruptly, they came to a deep ravine with steeply sloping banks that dropped 7 meters below the surface of the dry lake, slicing across it almost like a man-made canal. Because he was staring down at the ground Pitt nearly walked off the edge. He staggered to a halt, gazing despairingly at the unexpected barrier. There was simply not enough left in him to climb down into the bottom of the ravine and struggle up the other side. Giordino stumbled up beside him and collapsed, his body sagging limply before sinking to the ground, his head and arms hanging over the rim of the ravine.

  As Pitt gazed across the crack in the dry lake at the vast nothingness ahead, he knew their epic struggle of endurance had come to an end. They had covered only 30 kilometers and there were another 50 to go.

  Giordino slowly turned and looked up at Pitt, who was still on his feet, but swaying unsteadily, gazing at the eastern horizon as if seeing the goal that was tantalizingly near but impossible to reach.

  Pitt, spent and played out as he was, appeared magnificent. His rugged, severe face, his full stature, his incisive piercing opaline eyes, his nose thrust forward like a bird of prey, his head enveloped by a dusty white towel through which straggled the strands of his wavy black hair-none gave him the appearance of a man suffering defeat and facing certain death.

  His gaze swept the bottom of the ravine in both directions and stopped, a puzzled expression forming in the eyes that peered through the narrow opening in his toweled turban. "My sanity is gone," he whispered.

  Giordino lifted his head. "I lost mine about 20 kilometers back on the trail."

  "I swear I see. . ." Pitt shook his head slowly and rubbed his eyes. "It must be a mirage."

  Giordino stared across the great empty furnace. Sheets of water shimmered in the distance under the heat waves. The imagined sight of what he so desperately craved was more than Giordino could bear. He turned away.

  "Do you see it?" Pitt asked.

  "With my eyes closed," Giordino rasped faintly. "I can see a saloon with dancing girls beckoning with huge mugs of ice cold beer."

  "I'm serious."

  "So am I, but if you mean that phony lake out there on the flats, forget it."

  "No," Pitt said briefly. "I mean that airplane down there in the gully."

  At first, Giordino thought his friend had lost it, but then he slowly rolled back on his stomach and stared downward in the direction Pitt was facing.

  Nothing manufactured by man disintegrates or rots in the desert. The worst that can occur is the pitting of metal by the driving sand. There, resting against one bank of the sterile streambed like an alien aberration, scoured and rustless, with almost no erosion or coating of dust, sat a wrecked airplane. It appeared to be an old high-wing monoplane that had lain in crippled solitude for several decades.

  "Do you see it?" Pitt repeated. "Or have T gone mad?"

  "Not if I've gone mad too," said Giordino in abject astonishment. "It looks like a plane all right."

  "Then it must be real."

  Pitt helped Giordino to his feet, and they stumbled along the brink of the ravine until they were standing directly over the wreck. The fabric on the fuselage and wings was amazingly still intact, and they could plainly read the identification numbers. The aluminum propeller had shattered when it came in contact with the bank, and the radial engine with its exposed cylinders was partially shoved back into the cockpit and tilted upward in broken mountings. But for that, and the collapsed landing gear, the plane seemed little damaged. They saw, too, the indentations on the ground, made when the plane made contact before running off the edge into the bottom of the dry wash.

  "How long do you think it's been here?" croaked Giordino.

  "At least fifty, maybe sixty years," Pitt replied.

  "The pilot must have survived and walked out."

  "He didn't survive," said Pitt. "Under the port wing. The legs of a body are showing."

  Giordino's stare moved beneath the left wing. One old fashioned lace-up leather boot and a section of tattered khaki pants protruded from under the shadow of the wing. "Think he'll mind if we join him? He's got the only shade in town."

  "My thoughts precisely," said Pitt, stepping off the edge and sliding down the steep bank on his back, raising his knees and using his feet as brakes.

  Giordino was right beside him, and together they dropped into the dry streambed in a shower of loose gravel and dust. As in their initial excitement during their discovery of the cave of the paintings, all cravings of thirst were temporarily deprived of stimulation as they staggered to their feet and approached the long-dead pilot.

  Sand had drifted over the lower part of the figure that lay with its back resting against the fuselage of the airplane. A crude crutch fashioned from a wing strut lay near one exposed foot that was missing a boot. The aircraft's compass lay nearby, half embedded in the sand.

  The pilot was amazingly well preserved. The fiery heat and the frigid cold had worked together to mummify the body so that any skin that showed was darkened and smoothly textured like tanned leather. There was a recognizable expression of tranquility and contentment on the face, and the hands, rigid from over sixty years of inertness, were clasped peacefully across the stomach. An early flier's leather helmet with goggles lay draped over one leg. Black hair, matted and stiff and filled with dust after weathering the elements for so long, fell below the shoulders.

  "My God," muttered Giordino dazedly. "It's a woman."

  "In her early thirties," observed Pitt. "She must have been very pretty."

  "I wonder who she was," Giordino panted curiously.

  Pitt stepped around the body and untied a packet wrapped in oilskin that was attached to the cockpit door handle. He carefully pulled open the oilskin, which revealed a pilot's log book. He opened the cover and read the first page.

  "Kitty Mannock," Pitt read the name aloud.

  "Kitty, who?"

  "Mannock, a famous lady flier, Australian as I recall. Her, disappearance became one of aviation's greatest mysteries, second only to that of Amelia Earhart."

  "How did she come to be here?" asked Giordino, unable to take his eyes off her body.

  "She was trying for a record-breaking flight from London, to Cape Town. After she vanished, the French military forces in the Sahara made a systematic search but found no trace of her or her plane."

  "Too bad she came down in the only
ravine within 1001 kilometers. She'd have easily been spotted from the air if she'd landed on the dry lake's surface."

  Pitt thumbed through the pages in the logbook until they went blank. "She crashed on October 10, 1931. Her last' entry was written on October 20."

  "She survived ten days," Giordino murmured in admiration. "Kitty Mannock must have been one tough lady." He stretched out under the shade of the wing and sighed wearily through his cracked and swollen lips. "After all this time she's finally going to have company."

  Pitt wasn't listening. His attention was focused on a wild, thought. He slipped the logbook into his pants pocket and began examining the remains of the aircraft. He paid no regard to the engine, checking out the landing gear instead. Though the struts were flattened out from the impact, the t wheels were undamaged and the tires showed little sign of rot. The small tail wheel was also in good condition.

  Next he studied the wings. The port wing had suffered E minor damage and it appeared that Kitty had cut a large; piece of fabric from it, but the right was still in surprisingly good shape. The fabric covering the spars and ribbing was t hard and brittle with thousands of cracks, but had not split under the extremes of heat and cold. Lost in thought, he laid a hand on an exposed metal panel in front of the cockpit and jerked his hand back in pain. The metal was as hot as a well-flamed frying pan. Inside the fuselage he found a small y toolbox that also included a small hacksaw and a tire repair kit with hand pump.

  He stood there in contemplation, seemingly untouched by the sun's blasting heat. His face was gaunt, his body parched and wasted. He should have been immobilized in a hospital bed being pumped full of fluids. The old guy with the hood and scythe was centimeters away from laying a bony finger on his shoulder. But Pitt's mind still smoothly turned, balancing the pros and cons.

  He decided then and there he wasn't going to die.

  He moved around the tip of the right wing and approached Giordino. "You ever read The Flight of the. Phoenix by Elleston Trevor?" he asked.

  Giordino squinted up at him. "No, but I saw the movie with Jimmy Stewart. Why? Your tires need rotating if you think you can make this wreck fly again."

  "Not fly," Pitt replied quietly. "I've checked out the plane, and I think we can cannibalize enough parts to build a land yacht."

  "Build a land yacht," Giordino echoed in exasperation. "Sure, and we can stock a bar and a dining room--"

  "Like an ice boat, only it sails on wheels," Pitt continued, deaf to Giordino's sarcasm.

  "What do you intend to use for a sail?"

  "One wing of the aircraft. It's basically an elliptical airfoil. Stand it on end with the wing tip up and you've got a sail."

  "We haven't enough left in us," Giordino protested. "A makeover like you're suggesting would take days."

  "No, hours. The starboard wing is in good shape, the fabric still intact. We can use the center section of the fuselage between the cockpit and the tail for a hull. Using struts and spars, we can fabricate extended runners. With the two landing gear wheels and small tail wheel, we can work out a tricycle gear system. And we have more than enough control cable for rigging and a tiller setup."

  "What about tools?"

  "There's a tool kit in the cockpit. Not the best, but it should serve the purpose."

  Giordino shook his head slowly, wonderingly, from side to side. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to cross Pitt's idea off to a hallucination, lie back on the ground, and let death peacefully carry him off to oblivion. The temptation was overwhelming. But deep inside him beat a heart that wouldn't quit and a brain that could not die without a fight. With the effort of a sick man lifting a heavy weight, he heaved himself to his feet and spoke, his words slurred from fatigue and overexposure to the heat.

  "No sense in laying around here feeling sorry for ourselves. You remove the wing mounts and I'll disassemble the wheels."

  <<43>>

  In the shade of one wing Pitt outlined his concept for building a land yacht, using bits and pieces from the old aircraft. Incredibly simple in scope, it was a plan born in a desert crypt by men who were dead but refused to accept it. To construct the craft they would have to reach even deeper within themselves to find the strength they thought was long gone.

  Land sailing was nothing new. The Chinese used it two thousand years ago. So did the Dutch who raised sails on lumbering wagons to move small armies. American railroaders often built small carts with sails to breeze along tracks across the prairies. The Europeans turned it into a sport on their resort beaches in the early 1900s, and then it was only a matter of time before Southern California hot-rodders, racing their souped-up cars across the Mojave Desert's dry lakes, picked up on the idea, eventually holding organized racing events that drew participants from around the world who attained speeds close to 145 kilometers or 90 miles an hour.

  Using the tools Pitt found in the cockpit, he and Giordino tackled the easiest jobs during the broiling afternoon and took on the heavier tasks in the cool of the evening. For men whose favorite pastimes were restoring old classic cars and airplanes the work went smoothly and efficiently with little wasted motion to conserve what little energy they had left.

  They remembered little about their efforts as they worked fervently toward a finality, driving themselves without rest, talking little because their swollen tongues and dust-dry mouths made it difficult. The moon lit their activities, casting their animated shadows against the bank of the ravine.

  They reverently left Kitty Mannock's body untouched, working around her without any display of emotion, sometimes addressing her as if she was alive as their thirst-crazed minds wandered in and out of limbo.

  Giordino removed the two large landing wheels and small tail wheel, cleaned the grit from the bearings, and relubricated them with sludge from the engine's oil filter. The old rubber tires were cracked and sun-hardened. They still retained their shape, but there was no hope of them holding air, so Giordino removed the brittle innertubes, filled the tire casings with sand, and remounted them on the wheels.

  Next he constructed runner extensions for the wheels from ribs he disassembled from the damaged wing. When finished, he cut the longitudinal spars attaching the center fuselage to the bulkhead just behind the cockpit with the hacksaw. Then he did the same with the tail section. After the midsection came free he began fastening the wider cockpit end to the fabricated wing extensions to support the two main landing wheels. The wheels now stretched 2.5 meters from the bottom side of the fuselage at its largest end. The opposite end that had tapered to the tail section was now the front of the land yacht, giving it a primitive aerodynamic appearance. The final touch to what now became the hull of the craft was the building of a runner bolted to the small tail wheel that extended 3 meters out in front. The nearly completed product resembled, to anyone old enough to remember the Our Gang and Little Rascals comedies, a 1930s backyard soapbox racer.

  While Giordino was knocking together the hull, Pitt concentrated on the sail. Once the wing had been detached from the plane's fuselage, he stiffened the ailerons and flaps and extended the heavier spar inside the leading edge so that it formed a mast. Together, he and Giordino lifted the wing into a vertical position, stepped the mast into the center of the hull and mounted it, a job made easy by the lightness of the desert-dried wooden spars and fabric covering of the old airfoil. What they had created was a pivoting wind sail. Next Pitt used the aircraft's control cables to attach guy wires from Giordino's side runners, and the bow to the mast as supports. He then fashioned a tiller steering apparatus from the interior of the hull to the front runner and wheel with the aircraft's control cables. Finally, he fitted out a rigging system for the wind sail.

  The finishing touches were the removal of the pilot's seats and their placement in the land yacht's cockpit, installing them in tandem. Pitt removed the aircraft's compass from the sand beside Kitty's body and mounted it beside the tiller. The tube he had used as a compass to guide their path this far,
he tied to the mast for a good luck souvenir.

  They completed the job at three in the morning and then dropped like dead men in the sand. They lay there shivering in the bitter cold, staring at their masterpiece.

  "It'll never fly," Giordino muttered, totally spent.

  "She only has to move us across the flats."

  "Have you figured out how we're going to get it out of the gulch?"

  "About 50 meters down the valley, the incline of the east bank becomes gradual enough to pull it onto the surface of the dry lake."

  "We'll be lucky to walk that far much less drag this thing up a slope. And at that, there's no guarantee it'll work."

  "All we need is a light wind," said Pitt, scarcely audible. "And if the last six days are any indication, we don't have to worry on that score."

  "Nothing like pursuing the impossible dream."