Excited by the path of my conjecture, I pulled the second Twinkie from its wrapper, barely noticing when the sun finally slipped below the horizon.
Okay, so the co-pilot might not be the thief… Still, Devich’s theory wasn’t completely off-base. The theftwasan inside job, and the guilty partywasalready on the plane when it took off. Hell, John Allen had seen him get on the helicopter even before that.
Murdock, the deep-sea diver. It had to be. He’d gone onboard to help load the box, then…just never got off? With all the commotion at the dig site, chances were good that no one gave Murdock a second thought. Then, at the airport he could easily have snuck off the helicopter and onto the C130 along with the cargo. That was the only explanation that made sense. At least, as much sense asanyof it made.
Murdock. I had to find…Something-or-other Murdock. Devich would have the diver’s full name and contact information, of course, but if I asked for it, he might go after Murdock himself and decide I hadn’t earned my fee.
I’d call the foreman instead, as soon as I’d had a look at the plane.
I balled up my snack wrapper, pleased to have a working theory of the crime—until I uncovered the fatal flaw in my conjecture.
As the co-pilot had proved, getting off a plane in mid-air wasn’t that hard. All the thief would need was a parachute and iron-clad nerves. But what the hell had he done with the sarcophagus? He couldn’t very well have carried it on his back all the way down. Not and survive the impact.
Which meant I was back to my original theory—that both the thief and the box went down with the plane, then left on foot. Or on the back of a fucking flatbed truck, which would surely have left tracks at the crash site. Which Devich would have noticed.
Newly frustrated, I set off toward the wreckage, shiny new compass in hand.
Having lost the last rays of daylight, I had to turn on my flashlight to clearly see my own feet, not to mention the roots and vines constantly tripping them up. Nightlife accompanied the moon when it appeared above the treetops, lending occasional patches of light as it shone through gaps in the fall foliage. Crickets and cicadas chirruped all around me, so loud and continuous that I soon ceased to hear them. Owls hooted above me, and unidentified creatures scurried around my feet.
The temperature dropped quickly, and the murky panorama was no longer enough to feed my anticipation or inspire my good humor. I was fed up with the great outdoors and ready for a little more processed sugar, a lot more caffeine, and most importantly, central heat.
What I got instead was another fallen tree to climb over. A tree whose branches were broken into sharp points, and whose trunk was more than two feet in diameter.
Grumbling beneath my breath, I started to haul myself and all my luggage over the latest obstacle. But then the beam from my flashlight skimmed over a stretch of at leastthree dozenother toppled trees up ahead. They’d all fallen in the same direction, like a giant arrow pointing toward…
The plane. It had to be.
I hauled my bag higher on my shoulder as I climbed over the fallen tree, still staring at the moonlit path cleared before me. Seconds later, the caustic stench of airplane fuel flooded the pine-scented air with no warning, singing my nose hairs and tainting each breath with the taste of kerosene. An instant headache followed, ripping through my skull like a Van Halen guitar riff.
I hiked the rest of the way as fast as I could. The plane came into view minutes after I climbed over the fallen tree, and my back-of-the-mind fear that I might walk right past the wreckage without seeing it was put to rest. Definitively. I couldn’t have missed the plane if I’d tried, even with scant moonlight to assist my narrow artificial beam.
The metal exoskeleton rose from a bed of full-sized trees splintered like toothpicks. It was ugly: an industrial gray blemish on nature’s fall canvas. Trailing behind the wreckage, the path of torn and fallen trees was a gash on the earth itself, which would likely take years to heal. Maybe decades.
“Damn,” I whispered, stepping up onto one of the sheared tree trunks for a better look. I shined my beam of light slowly across the wreckage, inspecting it from a distance. Confirming my earlier suspicion that there was no way on earth a vehicle big enough to haul off a two-thousand-pound box could make it past all the debris and broken trees, even if it managed to navigate such dense woodlands on the way in.
The sarcophagus hadnotleft the crash site on a flatbed truck, or in any other large vehicle.
As I stared, something rustled in the shadows around the right wing, and my breath caught in my throat. I swung my light in that direction, but I saw nothing.
Cursing the bags I still carried, I climbed down from the tree trunk, my flashlight aimed at the plane. I grabbed a nearby branch to steady myself as I stumbled over a root hidden by a cushion of crunchy leaves, my gaze and light skimming the plane in tandem.
The C130 hadn’t blown up—a fucking miracle, considering how thick the kerosene fumes were, even two days later—but it had sustained significant damage. Even from nearly a hundred feet away, I could see broken tree trunks sticking up through the bottom of the fuselage and a long gouge dug all the way through one side.
At the edge of the newly-created clearing around the cargo plane, I hesitated, trying to decide where to begin. Like all C130s, Devich’s plane had started off with four propellers, two on each wing. At a glance, I could only see one of them, half-buried in the dirt. It was still attached to the shorn right wing, which lay several yards away from the fuselage, rising from the ground at a sharp angle like a small mountain in profile. The other wing was broken into several pieces, most of which had landed at least fifty feet to the west of the rest of the wreckage. I was betting that wing was responsible for shearing most of the damaged trees.
At the back of the plane was the cargo hold, currently open to the elements because the ramp was lowered beneath the raised tail section. Had that happened before the plane crashed, or after? I wasn’t sure how to tell.
I was halfway between the wing pieces and the fuselage before I realized something was wrong. Something other than the wrecked plane and missing sarcophagus. That knowledge came to me whole, creeping across my skin like a sudden awareness that you’re being watched on a dark street.
Someone else was here; someone sentient and not native to a woodland habitat.
I froze, my heart pounding. Cold sweat slid down my spine, despite the chill as I glanced around without moving my head, watching for any sign of movement. A sharp clang rang out ahead and to my left—something heavy clattering against the metal floor of a cargo plane’s freight hold. Metal creaked, as soft footsteps came closer.
Whatever it was, it was bigger than a coyote and walking on two legs.
For the moment, anyway.
FIFTEEN
