Stacked from floor to ceiling inside the room were dozens of shiny cylinders like the one they had discovered floating in the water off the Baja. Austin carefully lifted a cylinder from the stack and felt its weight.

“This is much heavier than the empty can back in my office.”

“Anasazium?”

“The unerring Austin homing instinct,” Kurt said with a smile. “You'll have to admit this is what we really came all this way to find.”

“I suppose so. But I can see why Martin fell in love with that plane out there.”

“Let's hope it isn't a similar case of fatal attraction. We're going to have to figure out what to do next.”

Zavala eyed the contents of the storeroom. “We'll need something bigger than the Maule to move this stuff.”

Austin said, “It's been a long day. Let's get back to Nome. We can call in for reinforcements. I'm not crazy about the way we came in. Let's see if we can find another door.”

They walked around in front of the flying wing again. The plane was positioned so that it pointed toward the broad side of the hangar, facing onto the airstrip. They tried a door that would have led to the outside, but it was overgrown with vegetation and wouldn't open. A big section of wall apparently moved up and down like a garage door. Austin saw a wall switch marked “Door.” Since they had good luck with the generator, he gave it a yank. The hum of motors filled the air, then came loud creaks and rattles and the squeal of metal against metal. The motors strained to move the door against the vegetation that had taken over on the outside, but finally it ripped free and rumbled to a clanking stop in fully open position.

It was near midnight, and the sun had partially set, casting the tundra in a leaden light. The two men walked outside and turned around. As they gazed at the strange craft resting in what Buzz Martin's father had called its hidey-hole, they heard an intrusive clatter from behind them. They turned to see a large helicopter dropping out of the sky like a raptor.

The helicopter made a pass over the float plane, then stopped and hovered a short distance away. It did a three-hundred-sixty spin in place. There was a flash of light from the front of the chopper, and the float plane disappeared in a blinding explosion of yellow and red flames. A cloud of black smoke billowed from the funeral pyre that had been an air craft seconds before, and the tundra was lit up for hundreds of yards.

“I think we just lost the deposit on our leased plane,” Zavala said.

Finished with its first line of business, the chopper swiveled so that its nose pointed toward the hangar. Austin and Zavala had been dumbfounded in the seconds since the helicopter arrived and began its deadly work. Now Austin realized how vulnerable they were. They dashed for the open door as the chopper leaped forward. White bursts of flame flowered from the guns on either side of the speeding aircraft, and the bullets threw up geysers of water and mud as they stitched their way to ward the two running figures.