“Any luck?” Pitt yelled.

Steiger turned around, waved, and began wading toward the bank. “I won’t be making any deposits at Fort Knox. I’ll be lucky if I can scrounge half a gram.” He gave Pitt a friendly but skeptical look. “How about you? Find what you were looking for?”

“A wasted trip,” Pitt replied. “But an invigorating hike.”

Steiger offered him a cigarette. Pitt declined.

“You know,” Steiger said, lighting up, “you’re a classic study of a stubborn man.”

“So I’ve been told,” Pitt said, and laughed.

Steiger sat down and inhaled deeply and let the smoke trickle between his lips as he spoke. “Now, take me: I’m a bona fide quitter, but only on the matters that don’t really count,” he said. “Crossword puzzles, dull books, household projects, hooked rugs-I never finish any of them. I figure, without all that mental stress, I’ll live ten years longer.”

“A pity you can’t quit smoking.”

“louche,” Steiger said.

Just then two teenagers, a boy and a girl, wearing down vests and standing on a makeshift raft, rounded a bend in the stream and drifted past. They were laughing with adolescent abandon, totally oblivious of the men on the bank. Pitt and Steiger watched them in silence until they disappeared downstream.

“Now, there is the life,” said Steiger. “I used to go rafting down the Sacramento River when I was a kid. Did you ever try it?”

Pitt did not hear the question. He stood gazing intently at the spot where the boy and the girl became lost to view. His facial expression transformed from deep thoughtfulness to sudden enlightenment.

“What’s with you?” Steiger asked. “You look as though you’ve seen God.”

“It was socking me in the face all this time and I ignored it,” Pitt murmured.

“Ignored what?”

“It just goes to prove the toughest problems fall by the simplest solutions.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“The oxygen tank and the nose gear,” Pitt said. “I know where they came from.”

Steiger only looked at Pitt, his eyes clouded with skepticism.

“What I’m getting at,” Pitt continued, “is that we’ve been overlooking the one quality they share.”

“I fail to see the connection,” said Steiger. “When installed in the aircraft, they work under two entirely different flow systems, one gas and the other hydraulic.”

“Yes, but take them off the aircraft and they both have one characteristic in common.”

“Which is?”

Pitt gazed at Steiger and smiled and smiled. Then he spoke the magic words.

“They float.”

8

Alongside most sleek executive jets, the Catlin M-200 came off like a flying toad. Also slower in flight, it had one redeeming quality that was unmatched by any other airplane its size: the Catlin was designed to land and take off in impossible places with cargo loads twice its own weight.