Sahara (50 page)

Next he studied the wings. The port wing had suffered 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 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 toolbox that also included a small hack saw 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 hack saw. 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.”

“She’ll go,” Pitt said resolutely.

“What do you think she weighs?”

“About 160 kilograms or 350 pounds.”

“What are we going to call her?” asked Giordino.

“Call her?”

“A name, she’s got to have a name.”

Pitt nodded toward Kitty. “If we make it out of this pressure cooker, we’ll owe it to her. How about the
Kitty Mannock?”

“Good choice.”

They babbled vaguely and sporadically, whispered voices in a great void of dead space, until they drifted off into a welcome sleep.

The bleaching sun was probing the bottom of the ravine when they finally awoke. Just rising to their feet was a monumental task of will. They bid a silent goodbye to Kitty and then staggered to the front of their improvised hope of survival. Pitt tied two lengths of cable to the front of the land yacht and handed one to Giordino.

“You feel up to it?”

“Hell no,” Giordino spat out of a shriveled mouth.

Pitt grinned despite the pain from his cracked and bleeding lips. His eyes raked Giordino’s, searching for the glow that would see them through. It was there, but very dim. “Race you to the top.”

Giordino swayed as though like a drunk in a wind storm, but he winked and gamely said, “Eat my dust, sucker.” And then he slung the cable over his shoulder, leaned forward to take up the strain, and promptly fell on his face.

The land yacht rolled as easily as a shopping cart across the tile floor of a supermarket and almost ran over him.

He looked up at Pitt through red eyes, surprise on his sunburned face. “By God she moves light as a feather.”

“Of course, she had a pair of first-rate mechanics.”

With no more talk they pulled their hand-built land yacht down the middle of the wash until they came to a slope that angled 30 degrees up to the surface of the dry lake.

The climb was only 7 meters, but to men who were staring in the grave only eighteen hours before, the top edge of the slope looked like the summit of Mount Everest. They had not expected to live through another night, and yet here they were confronting what they were certain was the final obstacle between rescue or death.

Pitt made the attempt first while Giordino rested. He clasped one of the tow cables around his waist and began crawling up the incline like a drunken ant, edging upward a few centimeters at a time. His body was but a terribly worn-out machine serving the demands of a mind that had only the thinnest grip on reality. His aching muscles protested with shooting agony. His arms and legs gave out early in the climb, but he forced them to carry on. His bloodshot eyes were almost closed from fatigue, his face deeply etched in suffering, lungs sucking in air with painful gasps, heart beating like a jackhammer under the inhuman strain.

Pitt could not let himself stop. If he and Giordino died, all the poor souls slaving their lives away at Tebezza would die too, their true fate unknown to the outside world. He could not give up, collapse, and expire, not now, not this close to beating the old guy with the scythe. He ground his teeth together in a rage of tenacity and kept climbing.

Giordino tried to shout words of encouragement, but all he could rasp out was an inaudible whisper.

And then mercifully, Pitt’s hands groped over the edge and he summoned the will to pull his battered body onto the dry lake. He lay there a faint shadow away from unconsciousness, aware of only his hoarse gasping breathing and a heart that felt as if it was going to pound its way through his rib cage.

He wasn’t sure how long he lay fully exposed under the baking sun until his breathing and heart slowed to something close to a regular pace. Finally, he pushed to his hands and knees and peered down the slope. Giordino was sitting comfortably in the shade of the wing sail, and managed a weak wave.

“Ready to come up?” Pitt asked.

Giordino wearily nodded, took hold of the tow cable, and pressed his body against the slope, feebly working his way upward. Pitt slung his end of the cable over his shoulder and used the leverage of his weight by leaning forward without exerting energy. Four minutes later, half crawling, half dragged by Pitt, Giordino rolled limply onto flat ground like a fish that had been reeled in after a long struggle against hook and line.

“Now comes the fun part,” Pitt uttered weakly.

“I’m not up to it,” Giordino gasped.

Pitt looked down at him. Giordino already looked dead.

His eyes were closed, his face and ten-day beard powdered with white dust. If he could not help Pitt pull the land yacht out of the ravine both of them would die this day.

Pitt knelt down and struck him sharply across the face. “Don’t quit on me now,” he muttered harshly. “How do you expect to score with Massarde’s gorgeous piano player if you don’t get off your butt and pitch in.”

Giordino’s eyes fluttered open and he rubbed a hand across his dust-coated cheek. With a supreme effort of will, he hauled himself to his feet and tottered drunkenly. He stared at Pitt without any malice at all, and despite his misery, he managed a grin. “I hate myself for being so predictable.”

“Good thing too.”

Like a team of emaciated mules in harness, they took up the tow cables and pitched forward, their bodies too weak to do much more than take a few plodding steps as their combined weight slowly but immeasurably pulled the land yacht up the slope. Their heads were bowed, backs hunched over, minds lost in the delirium of thirst. Progress was heartbreakingly slow.

Soon they dropped to their knees and pitifully crawled forward. Giordino noticed that blood was dripping from Pitt’s hands where the cable had burned into his palms, but he was entirely oblivious to it. Then suddenly the cables slackened and the improvised land yacht was over the top and had bumped into them. Fortunately Pitt had the foresight to tie down the rigging of the wind sail so its trailing edge was now pointing directly into a light wind and did not generate any driving force.