The Pharaoh's Secret

22

The DC-3 raced down the dirt strip, past the pumping station, and clawed its way into the air. The plane struggled to gain altitude in the hot afternoon, even with its two Curtiss-Wright Cyclone engines straining at maximum rpm’s. New off the assembly line, they’d been rated at a thousand horsepower each, but no amount of maintenance work could ensure that that was the case seventy years later. Still, the aircraft picked up speed and began to climb, heading due south, until it reached ten thousand feet, where the air was cool and dry. After leveling off, it turned back toward the airfield.

Inside, Reza’s pilot handled the controls while Paul and Gamay stood in the center of the cabin, manning the two sides of a rolling cart.

The metal cart had four wheels, a flat, dented deck and a handle attached to one side. It was supporting a block of concrete that weighed nearly four hundred pounds. Paul and Gamay were doing their best to make sure neither the concrete nor the cart that held it would move around prematurely.

As she untied a strap, Gamay looked Paul’s way. “You got it on that end, right?”

Paul was crouched down, holding the cart firmly to prevent it from sliding toward the tail of the plane before they were ready.

“We’re two minutes from the drop zone,” the pilot shouted.

“Time to see if this works,” Paul said. “Slowly, now.”

With Gamay holding the handle and Paul pulling the cart from his side, they began to make their way to the back of the cabin. The seats had been removed, as had the cargo door. Air currents streamed through the yawning gap. A gap Paul and Gamay planned on pushing the cart through, hopefully without falling out themselves.

It all went well until they were five feet from the open door. Not surprisingly, as they neared the back of the plane, its nose began to rise. Balancing the concrete slab on the cart, Paul and Gamay now moved seven hundred and fifty pounds from the front of the plane to almost the very back. It changed the weight and balance, making the plane tail-heavy. As a result, the nose pitched upward.

“Push forward,” Gamay shouted.

“I think he knows that,” Paul replied, bracing himself to prevent the cart from rolling farther.

“Then why isn’t he doing it?” she replied.

Actually, the pilot was pushing forward, but the controls were responding very sluggishly. He pushed harder and used the trim tab to assist. In response, the nose came down appreciably — too much, in fact — as the plane pitched down. Suddenly, the cart wanted to roll toward the cockpit, trying to steamroll Gamay in the process.

“Paul,” she shouted.

There was little Paul could do except hold on and try to arrest the runaway cart. He managed to stop the progress just as Gamay found herself wedged against the remaining seats.

The weight shifting forward added to the nose-down effect the pilot was trying to achieve and the plane went into dive.

Gamay felt like she was being crushed. She pushed the cart back with all her strength. “This is the worst idea ever!” she shouted. “Right up there with all of Kurt’s bad ones.”

Paul was pulling the cart with all the leverage he could muster, trying to take the pressure off of Gamay. At this point, he couldn’t disagree with her.

“Pull back,” he shouted to the pilot, giving instructions now. “Pull back!”

Reza and his crew had been placing sensors in the ground awaiting the return of the aircraft and the concrete bomb it was carrying. They heard the plane coming, looked up and saw it bucking and diving, the engines roaring and then cutting back. From the ground, it looked like a roller-coaster ride.

“What are they doing?” one of the men asked Reza.

“The Americans are crazy,” another said.

Back up in the plane, Paul was thinking the same thing. As the nose came up, the cart became maneuverable again and they’d forced it back toward the tail. The pilot was ready this time and he controlled the pitch much better.

That left Paul near the open door, holding the cart and its concrete payload and trying to figure out how to shove it through without falling out.

He could push it hard, but how would he stop himself?

“We’re almost at the drop zone!” the pilot shouted.

Paul looked at Gamay. “This seemed much easier when I thought it up.”

“I have an idea,” she said. She shouted to the pilot: “Roll to the left.”

The pilot glanced back. “What?”

She made a rolling motion with her hand and shouted again. The pilot didn’t seem to comprehend. Paul did. “Great idea,” he said. “Can you show him?”

Gamay let go of the cart and ran up to the cockpit. She sat in the copilot’s seat once again and grabbed the wheel. “Like this.”

She turned the yoke to the left. The pilot followed suit and the DC-3 went over on its side.

In the rear, Paul had wrapped an arm around a cargo strap and put his back to the far side of the fuselage. When the plane rolled, he shoved the cart with his feet and watched it shoot out through the cargo door, carrying the heavy concrete block with it.

As the plane leveled off again, he moved cautiously to the door. Behind and below, the cart and the block were falling like two separate bombs — not tumbling or spinning, just dropping smoothly and silently through the air.

Gamay ran back and watched. “This is your best idea ever!” she shouted, giving him a kiss on the cheek. Paul smiled to himself, watching the culmination of his efforts approach.

Down below, Reza and the other technicians were also watching the block fall.

“Here it comes,” Reza said. “Everyone ready?”

Spread out across a few acres of land were four teams of men. Each team had drilled sensor probes into the ground. If all went well, the listening devices would pick up deep reverberated waves of sound after the concrete hit the ground. And, from that, they hoped to figure out what was beneath the sandstone.

“Green!” someone shouted.

“Green!” the rest of them confirmed.

Reza’s board was also green. His sensors were operating perfectly. He took one last look up, spotted the falling object and thought it appeared to be headed directly for him. Can’t be, he said to himself.

He waited exactly one second and then ran and dove across the sand.

The concrete block missed by fifty yards, but its impact boomed across the desert with a deep resonating thunder that Reza felt through his chest and limbs as much as he heard it with his ears. Exactly what they were hoping for.

He got up quickly, ran through a spreading cloud of dust and checked his computer. The green light continued to blink, the graph on the screen remained a blank.

“Come on, come on,” he pleaded. Finally, a bunch of squiggly lines began to run across the graph. More and more each second. Different frequencies from different depths.

“We have data,” he shouted. “Good, deep data.”

He took off his hat and threw it upward with exuberance as the DC-3 continued on by. Data was one thing. Now they would have to figure out what it meant.