Get him home, however, and it wasn’t long before Ridley would have to bail him out of jail for drunk and disorderly conduct after getting into a scuffle at the local pub.
Next to Lyon sat Orlando Perez. Ridley had found Perez in Colombia while retrieving a downed P-51 fighter that had crashed on a ferry mission from Brazil to the United States. Paulson had bought the old fighter, which had served in the Brazilian Air Force well into the 1950s. The aircraft had been abandoned, moderately damaged, on a logging road near the top of a mountain. Paulson had sent Ridley down to see if they could get it out of the jungle.
Mac had heard that the 25-year-old Perez was a whiz at metal-forming and had hired him to help repair the aluminum skin on the downed P-51. Ridley watched in amazement as Perez, using basic tools, had formed enough aluminum skin to patch and cover large holes in the wings and fuselage in short order. Once the P-51 had been repaired and flown out of Colombia, Ridley had offered him a job as a metal fabricator and airframe mechanic.
Since the B-29 bomber had made a belly landing with the gear up, there’d be significant aluminum skin damage on the bottom of the fuselage. That was the one part of the B-29 the satellite imagery couldn’t show, and although they suspected the bomber’s skin had been repaired, Orlando Perez would provide insurance.
Ridley gathered his personal gear from the overhead bins, and they quickly filed off the aircraft and into the general aviation section of the airport. He expected someone dressed casually to meet them; cargo pilots weren’t known for their polish.
When he spotted a man wearing a baseball style cap bearing the letters Intergalactic, AC, even Ridley was surprised. This character looked like he’d be more comfortable hanging out at a Hell’s Angels motorcycle convention. He stood at least six-foot-three and from the size of his biceps spent most of his leisure time in a gym. Where the sleeves of his black tee-shirt ended, the tattoos began. They stopped only at his wrist, in what could have been a colorful long-sleeved shirt.
Ridley stopped staring at the tattoos long enough to see two large gold-loop earrings hanging from the lobe of each ear. After a moment’s hesitation, he walked over and extended a hand. “I’m Mac Ridley.”
“Rooster Parker,” said the leather-clad biker. “Glad to meet you.”
Ridley introduced him to Angus Lyon and Orlando Perez. Rooster shook hands, and then pointed toward the stairway leading away from the gates. “I’ve got a truck parked in short-term. From here we drive around the airport to the InterGalactic hangar and office.”
Ridley nodded. “Can you point it out? I’m gonna have our pilots taxi over so we can unload our gear.”
Rooster walked Mac back out of the tarmac and pointed toward a dingy set of hangers on the opposite side of the field.
Ridley walked out and instructed the pilots to taxi over and shut down. They’d unload the gear and then send the Gulfstream back to New York ASAP.
“Are you one of the mechanics?” Ridley asked.
Rooster grinned. “When I have to be…. Mostly I’m the co-owner of InterGalactic with my brother, and the copilot.”
“You’re kidding,” said Lyon in his thick Scottish brogue.
Rooster shook his head and patted the Scotsman on the shoulder. “You know, I get that look just about every time I tell people their lives are going to be in my hands.”
“Well, I’ve learned better than to judge a book by its cover,” Ridley said with a grin. “Otherwise we’d all be out of a job.”
Rooster laughed so loud that it startled the conservative business travelers walking toward the terminal exit. “We’re going to have ourselves some fun on this trip,” he said, patting Ridley on the shoulder. “Flying down into that frozen hell and landing on a stretch of ice about as long as a football field; your boss must really want that old bomber.”
Ridley grimaced. “You have no idea.”
CHAPTER 28
Glen Janssen stared out the window of his office. It was just after seven in the morning, little more than 48 hours after he had discovered what was going to be one of the most extraordinary finds in Native American archeology.
It hadn’t taken long to find where the artifact hunters had chopped or fallen through the clay cover of the sub-cavern. Once at the bottom, after getting over the shock of seeing the human remains, he’d searched around for blood, in case one of the rogue climbers had been injured in the fall.
What he’d found were boot prints all over the bottom of the cavern, two samples of the mysterious red granite crystal, and a series of pictographs. He snapped several photos of the pictographs and the skeletal remains before pocketing the red stones and making his way back up to the main floor of the cavern. Janssen also found the makeshift alarm system and, thankfully, the exit, so he’d avoided more wall climbing.
Normally, the Park Service would have called the press and the local news stations and report a discovery of this magnitude. After all, this was the kind of find that boosted careers into the stratosphere, a park ranger diligently protecting America’s best archeological treasures by doggedly pursuing artifact thieves and then finding their cache before it could be plundered.
Instead, Janssen swore his rangers to secrecy and posted several to guard the mesa against accidental discovery. Then he had called his boss, the Director of National Parks, who immediately notified the director of the BLM in Washington.
The BLM managed more than 250,000,000 acres of nationally owned property, including national parks. The current director of the BLM, Teresa Simpson, said she wanted to fly out and assess the situation before making the discovery public. A National Guard helicopter crew was flying her directly to Gila from Kirkland Air Force Base.
The thwack of approaching helicopter blades cutting through thin air shook the windows of the park administration building, and Janssen, along with the rest of the rangers, walked over and watched the green Army Reserve Blackhawk flared onto the deserted parking lot with the sound of its rotors shaking the windows in the nearby offices. A crew member jumped out of the open door, pointed at Janssen, and then waved him toward the helo.
Janssen pasted on his best political smile, zipped his coat up against the cold, held his signature Stetson hat, and ran in a crouch toward the helicopter.
Teresa Simpson, dressed in a standard green one-piece jumpsuit, leaned over and shook his hand. Janssen hopped into the back of the helicopter and put on the headphones handed to him by the helicopter’s crew chief.
Janssen knew the BLM director was thought of as a maverick — at least in the current administration. She was African American, the former director of the Texas Department of Natural Resources, and a conservative. Her controversial views, including being a strong proponent of drilling for oil in a number of protected locations, including the Alaskan national wildlife preserve, hadn’t made her popular among the liberal elite.
Her appointment was thought to be a political move by the president because he wanted to bring a spectrum of management ideas and styles to the administration. Placing a conservative as BLM chief would make friends with business and landowners in the West, something the president, with his Ivy-League, New-England persona, badly needed: a conservative in a position of low visibility and limited power.
Teresa Simpson hadn’t stayed low profile. She publicly clashed with her boss, the Secretary of the Interior, on any number of issues concerning the public use of lands. She had a no-nonsense attitude, and it hadn’t surprised Janssen when she jumped on the next available military aircraft headed for New Mexico.