The snow was falling heavily at Table Lake, Colorado, when the NUMA salvage divers, immune to the frigid water in their thermal suits, finished cutting away the wings and tail of Vixen 03. Then they manhandled two huge cradle slings under the mutilated fuselage.

Admiral Bass and Abe Steiger arrived, followed by an Air Force-blue truck carrying several shivering airmen of the Remains Identity and Recovery Team along with five coffins.

At ten a.m. everyone was assembled and Pitt waved his arms at the crane operators. Slowly the cables hanging from the floating derricks to beneath the wind-rippled surface of the lake tightened and quivered as

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the power-unit operators increased the tension. The derricks listed a few degrees with the strain and creaked at their bolted joints. Then, abruptly, as though a great weight had fallen from their unseen clutches, they straightened.

“She’s broken free of the mud,” Pitt announced.

In confirmation, Giordino, standing at his side, wearing radio earphones, nodded. “Divers report she is on her way up.”

“Tell whoever is operating the cradle sling around the nose section to keep it low. We don’t want the canisters spilling out of the hole in the tail.”

Giordino relayed Pitt’s orders through a tiny microphone attached to his headphones.

The freezing mountain air was heavy with tension; every man stood motionless, numb with anticipation, his eyes locked on the water between the derricks. The only sounds came from the exhaust of the lift engines. They were a hard-bitten salvage crew, and yet no matter how many wrecks they had reclaimed from the sea, the same old tentacles of excitement during a lift operation never failed to wring their emotions dry.

Admiral Bass found himself reliving that snowy night so many years ago. To him it seemed all but impossible to associate the image of Major Raymond Vylander in his memory with the fleshless bones he knew to be inside the wreck’s cockpit. He moved closer to the water’s edge until it lapped at his shoes, and he began to experience a burning sensation in his mid-chest and left shoulder.

Then the water under the cables swirled from blue to muddy brown, and the curved roof of Vixen 03 arched into the daylight for the first time in thirty-four years. The once-shiny aluminum skin had corroded to a whitish gray and was streaked by slimy bottom weed. As the cranes lifted her higher into the air, the silt-laden water cascaded from the open wound at the rear of the fuselage.

The blue and yellow insignia that ran across the top of the fuselage appeared surprisingly sharp, and the words military AIR transport service were still quite legible. Vixen 03 no longer resembled an airplane. It was easier to picture her as a huge dead whale whose fins and tail had been clipped. The severed and twisted control cables, electrical wiring, and hydraulic lines dangling from the gaping wounds could be imagined as entrails.