Clive Cussler - Treasure of Khan

"That's all we need, an extra side trip," Pitt said. "Shouldn't cost us more than a ruptured spleen or two."

"Who's to say there's not a Learjet waiting for us on the other side of that ridge?" Giordino countered.

They turned toward Noyon's dusty trail and spurred their horses to run, the animals eagerly galloping after the lead horse. They charged up to the base of the ridge, then flanked around its northern tip. The horses' hooves clopped loudly as they crossed a wide section of level sandstone. Winding around some large boulders, they finally caught up with Noyon, who sat waiting in the shadow of a rocky spire. To Giordino's chagrin, there was no jet or airport, or sign of any means of air transportation, for as far as the eye could see. There was just more flat gravelly desert, punctuated by the occasional rocky bluff. At least the boy was truthful in one regard, Giordino thought. They had in fact traveled only a short distance off their original path.

Pitt and Giordino slowed their horses to a walk as they approached Noyon. The boy smiled at them, then nodded toward the back side of the ridge behind him.

Pitt gazed at the ridge, noting only a rocky incline covered in a layer of red sand. A few of the rocks were oddly shaped and seemed to reflect a faint silvery hue.

"A lovely rock garden," Giordino mused.

But Pitt was intrigued and rode closer, noting two of the protrusions were proportionally shaped. As he drew near, he suddenly saw that they were not rocks at all but a pair of partially buried radial engines.

One was attached to the blunt nose of an inverted fuselage while the other was mounted to an accompanying wing that disappeared under the sand.

Noyon and Giordino rode up as Pitt dismounted and brushed away the sand from one of the buried cowlings. Looking up with amazement, he said to Giordino, "It's not a Learjet. It's a Fokker trimotor."

The Fokker F.VIIb lay where she had crashed, undisturbed for over seventy years. The inverted plane had collected blowing sand by the truckload, until her right wing and most of her fuselage was completely buried. Some distance behind, the port wing and engine lay hidden, crushed against the same rocks that had torn it off during the forced landing. The nose of the plane was mashed in like an accordion, the cockpit filled to the brim with sand. Buried in the dust, the crushed skeletons of the pilot and copilot were still strapped in their seats. Pitt brushed away a thick layer of sand from beneath the pilot's window until he could read the faded name of the plane, Blessed Betty.

"Heck of a place to set down," Giordino said. "I thought you said these old birds were indestructible?"

"Nearly. The Fokker trimotors, like the Ford trimotors, were a rugged aircraft. Admiral Byrd used one to fly over the Arctic and Antarctic. Charles Kingsford-Smith flew his Fokker F. VII, the Southern Cross, across the Pacific Ocean back in 1928. Powered by the Wright Whirlwind motors, they could practically fly forever." Pitt was well versed about the old airplane—his own Ford trimotor was wedged in with his collection of antique cars back in Washington.

"Must have been done in by a sandstorm," Giordino speculated.

As Noyon watched from a respectful distance, Pitt and Giordino followed the sand-scrubbed belly of the fuselage aft until they found a slight lip on the side. Brushing away a few inches of sand, they could see it was the lower edge of the fuselage side door. Both men attacked the soft sand, scooping away a large hole in front of the door. After several minutes of digging, they cleared away an opening around the door, with room to pull the door open. As Giordino scooped away a last pile, Pitt noticed a seam of bullet holes stitched across the fuselage near the door.

"Correction to the cause of crash," he said, running a hand across the holes. "They were shot down."

"I wonder why?" Giordino mused.

He started to reach for the door handle when Noyon suddenly let out a slight wail.

"The elders say there are dead men inside. The lamas tell us that we must not disturb them. That is why the nomads have not entered the aircraft."

"We will respect the dead," Pitt assured him. "I shall see that they are given a proper burial so that their spirits may rest."

Giordino twisted the handle and gently tugged open the door. A jumbled mass of splintered wood, sand, and broken pieces of porcelain tumbled out of the dark interior, settling into a small pile. Pitt picked up a broken plate from the Yuan Dynasty, which was glazed with a sapphire blue peacock.

"Not your everyday dinnerware," he said, recognizing it as an antiquity. "At least five hundred years old, I'd wager." Though admittedly no expert, Pitt had acquired a working knowledge of pottery and porcelain from his many years of diving on shipwrecks. Often times, the only clues to identifying a shipwreck's age and derivation were the broken shards of pottery found amid its ballast pile.

"Then we have the world's oldest, as well as largest, jigsaw puzzle," Giordino said, stepping back from the doorway to let Pitt peer in.

The interior of the plane was a mess. Mangled and splintered crates lay scattered over every square inch of the main cabin, their shattered porcelain contents strewn across the floor in a carpet of blue-and-white shards. Only a few crates wedged near the tail had survived the violent crash landing intact.

Pitt crawled into the fuselage and waited a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark interior. The dim cabin and stale dusty air inside lent an eerie feeling to the Fokker's interior, which was augmented by the rows of wicker seats hanging empty from the ceiling of the inverted aircraft. Ducking his head slightly, Pitt turned and moved first toward the intact crates near the tail section. The broken bits of porcelain crunched under each footstep, compelling him to move tentatively through the debris.

He found five crates that were still intact, with FRAGILE and ATTENTION: BRITISH MUSEUM

stenciled along the sides. The lid on one crate had been jarred loose, and Pitt grabbed the loose section of wood and pried it open. Inside was a large porcelain bowl wrapped in a loose cloth. Over seven hundred years old, the bowl had a serrated edge and was glazed greenish blue over the white clay base.

Pitt admired the floral artistry of the design, then placed the bowl back in the crate. As the debris on the floor seemed to confirm, the plane was carrying a packed cargo of antique ceramics and, thankfully, no passengers.

Pitt moved back up the inverted aisleway, where Giordino joined him at the side door.

"Any clue to the cargo?" he asked in a hushed tone.

"Just that it was headed to the British Museum. A few boxes survived in back. Appears to be all antique porcelain."

Pitt moved forward, creeping past the first row of seats and toward the cockpit bulkhead. Much of the cargo had been thrown forward when the plane crashed, creating a mountain of debris in the front of the cabin. Pitt stepped over a large fractured pot and spotted a dusty leather jacket lying amid some debris on the floor. Stepping around broken shards, he hoisted a broken crate out of the way to take a closer look, then froze in his tracks. Under the dim light seeping in from the doorway, he could see that the jacket was still occupied by its original owner.

The mummified remains of Leigh Hunt lay where he'd expired, decades after he pulled himself out of the crash in agonizing pain from a broken back. His left arm tightly clutched the yellow wooden box while his bony white right hand was wrapped around a small notebook. A wrinkled grimace was etched into Hunt's face, his features well preserved by the dry desert air and a thin layer of silica.

"Poor devil. He must have survived the crash, only to die later," Pitt surmised in a hushed tone.