“Found them in the mountains, you say?”

“About thirty miles northwest of Leadville, in the Sawatch range,” Pitt answered. He had to speak loudly to be heard above the roar of the forklift that was carrying the nose gear and oxygen tank from the Jeep through the huge, yawning door of the FA A inspection hangar.

“Not much to go on,” said Dolan.

“But you can offer an educated guess.”

Dolan shrugged noncommittally. “You might compare it to a policeman who’s found a small lost child wandering the streets. The cop can see it’s a boy with two arms and two legs, approximately two years old. The kid’s clothes are J. C. Penney, and his shoes are Buster Browns. He says his first name is Joey, but he doesn’t know his surname, address, or phone number. We’re in the same boat, Mr. Pitt, as that cop.”

“Could you translate your analogue into factual detail?” Pitt asked, smiling.

“Please observe,” Dolan said with a professional flourish. He produced a ball-point pen from a breast pocket and probed it about like a pointer. “We have before us the frontal landing gear of an aircraft, an aircraft that weighed in the neighborhood of seventy or eighty thousand pounds. It was a propeller-driven craft, because the tires were not constructed for the stresses of a high-speed jet landing. Also, the strut design is of a type that has not been built since the nineteen fifties. Therefore, its age is somewhere between thirty and forty-five years. The tires came from Goodyear and the wheels from Rantoul Engineering, in Chicago. As to the make of the aircraft and its owner, however, I’m afraid there isn’t too much to go on.”

“So it ends here,” Pitt said.

“You throw in the towel too early,” said Dolan. “There is a perfectly legible serial number on the strut. If we can determine the type of ship this particular nose-gear model was designed for, then it becomes a simple matter of tracing the strut’s number through the manufacturer and establishing the parent aircraft.”

“You make it sound easy.” i

“Any other fragments?”

“Only what you see.”

“How did you come to bring them here?”

“I figured that if anybody could identify them, it would.be the Federal Aviation Administration.”

Vixen 03 I 27

“Putting us on the spot, huh?” Dolan said, grinning.

“No malice intended,” Pitt said, grinning back.

“Not much to go on,” Dolan said, “but you never can tell; we might get

lucky”

He made a thumbs-down motion toward a spot circled with red paint on the concrete floor. The forklift operator nodded and lowered the pallet holding the parts. Then he wheeled the forklift backward, cut a ninety-degree right turn, and clanked off toward another corner of the hangar.