McDonough unhooked the torch from his belt. Behind them, the white aperture of the tunnel’s mouth looked no bigger than a nickel, and the twin bright lines of the rails looked forty miles long. Ahead, the flashlight revealed nothing but the slimy walls of the tunnel, coated with soot.
And then there was a fugitive bluish gleam. McDonough set the motor back down as far as it would go. The truck crawled painfully through the stifling blackness. The thudding of the engine was painful, as though his own heart were trying to move the heavy platform.
The gleam came closer. Nothing moved around it. It was metal, reflecting the light from his torch. Martinson lit his own and brought it into play.
The truck stopped, and there was absolute silence except for the ticking of water on the floor of the tunnel.
“It’s a rocket,” Martinson whispered. His torch roved over the ridiculously inadequate tail empennage facing them. It was badly crumpled. “In fair shape, considering. At the clip he was going, be must have slammed back and forth like an alarm clapper.”
Cautiously they got off the truck and prowled around the gloaming, badly dented spindle. There were clean shears where the wings had been, but the stubs still remained, as though the metal itself had given to the impact before the joints could. That meant welded construction throughout, MeDonough remembered vaguely. The vessel rested now roughly in the center of the tunnel, and the railroad tracks had spraddled under its weight. The fuselage bore no iden-tifying marks, except for a red star at the nose; or rather, a red asterisk.