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"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."
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.
