“That’s better,” he said over the helmet-mounted radio.
“Was wondering when you’d hit the accelerator,” Kurt said. He added more throttle and took the lead again.
Joe twisted the throttle on his machine and caught up a second time. “I’d be willing to put a wager on who gets there first, but if I left you behind, you’d probably get lost.”
Kurt laughed. “We’re about to hit the hard part. As far as I can tell, the route up toward the lake is more of a trail than a road.”
The road up to the lake was a dirt path that had been cleared by a logging crew in the summer, but by late November it hadn’t been used for months. They found the entrance to it using GPS. They drove around a gate that had been closed to keep cars out and accelerated up toward the higher ground.
The skiffs did their job in the thick snow, digging and turning and staying up on top of a twenty-plus-inch pile of the white stuff. As they neared the rim, they came out into the open. The skies were clear, and the starlight and waning moon were bright enough to make the path glitter. When they finally reached the top, thingsflattened out. A straight shot to the lake took them to the edge of the frozen surface.
Kurt brought his machine to a halt. Joe pulled up beside him once more and popped his visor. The cold air felt good on his face, refreshing and energizing him as he took a deep breath.
Kurt was getting his bearings. The GPS coordinates had them eight miles from the mound in the snow that might be the plane. “We have three hours till first light. Let’s try to be in and out and leave the plane burning like a funeral pyre before dawn.”
He slapped his visor down and took off.
Joe followed a hundred feet behind him.
It was a straight shot across the smooth surface. The drifts of snow that were visible on the satellite image were flatter and more spread out than they appeared. The thick snow itself was like a cushion of air beneath them. Joe could feel his mount rising as he picked up speed. The sensation was almost unnerving, as if they were flying and not connected to the ground. A few practice turns told him they couldn’t make a tight corner if they wanted to.
Ahead of him, Kurt pressed on, passing the middle of the lake and showing no signs of slowing until the lights from the snowmobiles picked up the rise in the distance. At range, the hill looked like a miniature chalk-white version of Ayers Rock in Australia. It was different enough from the wide snowdrifts that Joe began to think Kurt might be right.
The closer they got, the more he felt that way, but there was still no sign of the wings or tail.
Kurt raced up to it, heading for the south end of the hill. Instead of approaching the hill itself, he stopped a few feet away, next to a second object buried in the snow.
Hopping off his snowmobile, Kurt began clearing the snow away. With a last brush he stepped back.
Joe maneuvered so he could get his light onto whatever Kurt had found. “I guess I’ll never doubt you again.”
Sticking out of the snow was the unmistakable sight of an aircraft control surface in cross section, painted in standard Air Force gray. Joe parked his machine and walked over to the structure. He could see from the curve of the exterior that it was an airfoil, about sixteen inches thick. The edges were melted and burned. Molten drops of aluminum had run down the side, cooling and hardening back into solid form as they hit the snow.
“This looks like part of the tail,” he said to Kurt, admitting defeat. “Which means…”
“They cut it off after they landed.”
“But how? That’s a big job. You’d need a team of—”
“They used the laser,” Kurt suggested. “Sliced right through it and let it fall like a tree in the woods.”
Kurt had finished clearing enough snow to see part of an identification number. He didn’t need it. There weren’t any other missing planes out here on the lake.
“How’d you know?” Joe asked.
“I didn’t,” Kurt admitted. “But they had the laser, which gave them the means. And I remember one of the technical notes from the briefing suggesting that the EAGL’s only vulnerability was from behind, since they had to program the targeting system to avoid firing to the rear, so they wouldn’t accidentally blast their own tail off. But Ridley was one of the targeting programmers. I figure he could have easily changed the codes.”
Scanning the area, they could see other jagged flat shapes. “Looks like they cut it off in sections,” Joe said. “But what about the wings and the engines? C-17s have a high-mounted wing.”
“This plane isn’t just buried in the snow. It’s sitting half-submerged in the frozen lake. Either they used the laser to melt theice as well, or maybe the heat from the engines was sufficient. If we had time to dig, I think we’d find the engines half-embedded in the lake. The snowdrifts are deep enough to cover the rest.”
“Getting the engines down on the lake would rapidly cool them down,” Joe added. “Hiding any heat signature by the time the satellites passed over a few hours later. These guys had it planned out.”
“Or they took the Chinese plan and used it for themselves,” Joe suggested. “Either way, they got down safely and vanished in impressive style.”
Kurt moved to the back end of the snow hill, digging horizontally through the drift until he hit gray aluminum. He found himself looking at the top half of the tail ramp. The rest of it was icebound.
“No way we’re getting that open,” Joe said.
