“I hear they’re good for cutting down weight,” Pitt answered. “The enzymes from the grapefruit juice cancel out the calories in the vodka.”

“Sounds like an old-wives’ tale. Besides, why bother? You don’t have an ounce of fat on you anywhere.”

“See,” Pitt laughed. “They really work.”

The humor was contagious. For the first time that day Steiger felt like laughing. But soon after the drinks arrived his expression clouded again, and he sat there silently, toying with his glass without touching its contents.

“Don’t tell me,” said Pitt, reading the colonel’s dour thoughts, “your friends at the Pentagon shot you down?”

Steiger nodded slowly. “They dissected every sentence of my report and flushed the pieces into the Washington sewer system.”

“Are you serious?”

“They wanted none of it.”

“What about the canisters and the fifth skeleton?”

“They claim the canisters are empty. As to your theory on Loren Smith’s father, I didn’t even bring it up. I saw little reason to stoke the fires of their already flaming skepticism.”

“Then you’re off the investigation.”

“I am if I wish to retire a general.”

“They leaned on you?”

“They didn’t have to. It was written in their eyes.”

“What happens now?”

Steiger looked at Pitt steadily. “I was hoping you might go it alone.”

Their eyes locked.

Salvage I 109

“You want me to raise the aircraft from Table Lake?”

“Why not? My God, you salvaged the Titanic from thirteen thousand feet in the middle of the Atlantic. A Stratocruiser in a landlocked lake should be child’s play for a man of your talents.”

“Very flattering. But you forget, I’m not my own boss. Raising Vixen 03 will take a crew of twenty men, several truckloads of equipment, a minimum of two weeks, and a budget of nearly four hundred thousand dollars. I can’t swing that on my own, and Admiral San decker would never give NUMA’s blessing to a project that size without solid assurance of additional government funding.”

“Then what about simply bringing up one of the canisters and Smith’s remains for positive identification?”

“And find ourselves holding the proverbial bag?”

“It’s worth a try,” Steiger said, excitement rising in his tone. “You can fly back to Colorado tomorrow. In the meantime I’ll authorize a contract to retrieve the crew’s bodies. That will get you off the hook with the Pentagon and NUMA.”

Pitt shook his head. “Sorry, but you’ll have to take a rain check. Sandecker assigned me to oversee the raising of a Union ironclad that sank off the Georgia coast during the Civil War.” He paused to check his watch. “I’m scheduled to board a flight for Savannah in six hours.”

Steiger sighed and his shoulders sagged. “Perhaps you can give it a go at a later date.”