“What’s the verdict?” Fisher asked.
“He’s Turkana; they and the Samburu have already talked about our presence. As long as we do not hunt here, we have safe passage.”
“He didn’t want to know why we’re here?”
“I told him you were a…” Jimiyu paused and scratched his head. “The word does not translate so well. I told him you were a spoiled white adventurer.”
Fisher laughed, and Jimiyu gave a pained shrug. “Apologies. It was a convenience on my part. Better that than try to explain. I also asked about the plane. Both tribes are aware of the legend, but neither have seen any sign of it.”
They walked for another three hours, sometimes on well-worn paths, sometimes on narrow game trails, and other times through the thick of the jungle Fisher navigated via his GPS unit. The purist orienteer in him resented the gizmo, but the pragmatist in him knew it was a necessary evil. With limited time on his hands, a compass was a luxury he couldn’t afford.
Jimiyu, armed with a long Ghurka knife, sliced his way through the foliage with practiced swings of his long arms, ducking and weaving like a boxer as he stepped over roots and ducked under branches and pointed out various plants and animals beside the trail along with a running, colorful commentary: “Very rare… do not touch that… not poisonous… tasty, but hard to catch…”
At noon they swung back to the northeast, and after another hour’s walk Fisher heard the muffled roar of water through the trees. The landscape sloped downward until they were picking their way along switchbacked hillside. At last the slope evened out, the trees gave way to low scrub foliage, and they found themselves standing at the edge of a cliff.
Fifty feet below, the river surged down a narrow gorge. The water was a clear blue and in the still pools formed behind the boulders he could see the riverbed covered in smooth, round stones. A hundred yards to their right was a twenty-foot tall waterfall that split into three channels over a jagged rock face before splashing into a pool below.
Fisher studied the GPS unit. “This is the place.” He lifted his binoculars to his eyes and scanned the length of the gorge, tracking along both tree lines as far as he could see in both directions. “I don’t see anything,” he said.
“You are not looking in the right place,” Jimiyu murmured beside him.
“What?”
Jimiyu raised a bony hand and pointed straight ahead at a thick, vine-encrusted tree jutting from the edge of the cliff. Fisher stared at it, seeing nothing for a full thirty seconds, until finally his eyes detected a too-symmetrical shape hidden in the branches: a straight vertical line, another horizontal, a gentle curve…
Good God…
What he was seeing wasn’t a tree. It was the inverted tail section of an airplane.
Fisher was dumbfounded. Of course, the brother in Fisher had prayed Peter’s letter had been more than the ramblings of a sick and dying man, but with the thoughts so seemingly incoherent and far removed from the core of the Carmen Hayes/PuH-19 puzzle, he’d also had his doubts.
But here it was, exactly where the latitude and longitude indicated: a plane. Now seeing it for what it was, Fisher understood how even the Turkana and Samburu, so intimately familiar with the area, had missed it. While the jungle had long ago erased any sign of the impact itself, it was clear the Sunstar had crashed not far from here and ripped through the forest, slowing until the forward half of its fuselage had come to rest perched, hovering, at the edge of this cliff until finally, minutes or hours or days later, physics took over and it tipped over nose first and slid down the cliff face into the river below. Almost six decades of jungle foliage, mold, and lichens had enshrouded the aluminum fuselage, turning it into just another tree trunk.
Fisher dropped his pack and rifle, then pulled a sixty-foot coil of 10mm climbing rope from his pack. As Jimiyu secured the line to a nearby tree, Fisher looped together a makeshift rappelling rig. He stepped to the edge of the cliff and started down.
Pausing every few feet to poke through the vines and leaves with his knife, Fisher walked himself down the cliff until the jabbing of his knife returned not the hollow gong of aluminum, but the screeching of steel on glass. This version of Niles Wondrash’s plane, a Curtiss C-46 Commando, had four fuselage windows, starting at the wing and moving forward to the cockpit windows. The cabin door was set behind these, just forward of the tail fin. Fisher saw no wings, and he assumed they’d been sheared off during the crash.
Now with a point of reference, he scaled upward, again tapping his knife. The windows were set roughly ten feet apart, so… He stopped climbing and studied the fuselage, trying to discern angles and shapes until finally he could make out an up-sloping curve he felt certain was the rear vertical fin. He spun his body and wedged his feet into the vines, then began cutting at the foliage with his knife until slowly, foot by foot, a patch of fuselage appeared, followed soon after by an inset hatch handle and a vertical seam. He wedged the point of his knife into the seam and began prying, moving inch by inch as though prying open a paint can. After five minutes of work, he heard a groaning screech of metal on metal. The hatch gave way and fell open. Fisher pushed off, avoiding the swinging metal, then swung back and kicked his legs through the opening and wriggled forward until his butt was resting on the hatch jamb.
“I’m in!” he called up to Jimiyu.
On hands and knees the Kenyan leaned over the cliff face and offered him a smile and a thumbs-up. “Be very careful, Sam. Many creatures have probably made that their home, you know.”
Great, Fisher thought. He hadn’t considered that.
He pulled the LED headlamp from his belt, settled it on his head, and toggled the ON button. The beam illuminated the opposite cabin wall, its smooth aluminum surface mottled with mildew. He played the light down the vertical shaft of the cabin. The wall and floor were empty. No seats, no storage racks, no nothing. All of that, either knocked loose during the crash or simply loosened by time and gravity, had likely tumbled down the length of the cabin and into the cockpit below. Fisher did some mental measurements: The cliff was roughly fifty feet tall and about ten feet of the plane’s tail had been jutting above the rim of the cliff. The C-46 Commando was seventy-five feet long, which meant the forward fifteen feet of the craft, including the cockpit, was submerged in the river.
The interior was surprisingly clear of jungle growth. Sealed as it was, with the only breaches probably being the shattered cockpit windows, nothing had had a chance to take root. The Commando was a virtual time capsule. He aimed the headlamp down the length of the cabin, but the walls, having lost their sheen, reflected nothing back. It was like staring down a mine shaft.
Fisher reeled in the rope below him, bunched it in one hand, then tossed it into the cabin. The loose end gave a hollow ting as it bounced off the aluminum, then there was silence.
He lowered himself through the darkness, scanning the light over the walls as he went, until finally his feet touched a horizontal surface — a section of the cockpit bulkhead. Stacked in a jumble around him were the Commando’s seats. Through the tangle of braces and armrests and skeletal seat backs he could see the upper curve of the cockpit door opening; a few feet through that, his headlamp beam glinted off water. Just outside the plane’s thin aluminum skin he could hear the gurgle of the river’s current. The stench of mold was pervasive now, stinging his eyes and making it hard to breathe as though the air itself had grown thick.
It took fifteen minutes to shift and precariously restack the seats enough to allow him access to the cockpit. He lowered himself into a kneeling position, knees braced on either side of the door, rotated the rappelling rig around until it was facing backward, then he lowered himself again until he was lying splayed across the doorway.