“Almost through,” J.B. answered, both hands busy with lock picks.
Stepping out of the forward hold, Dean glanced at the two men working on the door to the cockpit. “How’s it coming?” he asked.
Ryan allowed himself a brief smile. Like father, like son. “Almost through,” he said.
“Well, I checked the front blasters,” the boy said. “See if we could salvage anything. But they’re rusted solid, the barrels full with bird nests. Lots of 40 mm and 20 mm ammo shells in the ammo bunkers, but the brass is covered with corrosion.”
Mildred walked back in and tossed the briefcase back under the seats. “Krysty was right, just a cargo manifest.”
“Nothing useful, then?” Dean asked hopefully.
“No weapons or food.”
“Damn.”
“Got it,” J.B. said, the armored door to the cockpit swung aside on creaking hinges.
There was another rush of stale air, and after it passed, Ryan and J.B. stepped into the cockpit, their faces tense with anticipation. The sunlight streamed in through the leafy-edged windows, casting odd shadows. The remains of the command crew were in the same positions, but now their clothing was starting to visibly decompose at the invasion of clean air. Ryan gave the skeletons a fast glance, while J.B. took out his compass and went to the dashboard. He flipped several switches until the needle stopped jerking.
“It was their emergency beacon,” he said, tucking away the compass. “The nuke batteries were almost drained. Another couple of months and we never would have found this plane.”
Lying on the deck, Ryan was looking under the pilot’s chair. “Seals are unbroken,” he announced, running his fingertips along the undercarriage of the pilot’s seat.
“Same here,” J.B. said, doing the same to the copilot’s chair. “We might just be in luck here.”
Both men got busy with their knives, removing service panels, and then slicing through the nest of wiring inside the seats. They knew the sequence, blue, green, red, and each man did the job carefully. Ejector seats were tricky. Ryan remembered when Finn tried to take one apart too fast and it launched straight through the top of the plane, damn near taking his head along with it for a ride. And the fiery blast of the launch nearly aced the Trader.
Soon, they had the ejector rockets disassembled and toppled the seat to extract a sturdy plastic box shaped like a lopsided arch.
The boxes were sealed airtight, but J.B. made short work of the lock. Lining the inside was some form of clear plastic wrapping that knives wouldn’t cut. But Ryan found a ring tab on the side and gently pulled it along the seam, the plastic parting sluggishly to expose a layer of gray foam. Tossing away the plastic, Ryan removed the foam cushion to finally uncover an assortment of supplies, each neatly nestled in a shaped depression in the gray foam. It was the wealth of the predark world in perfect condition.
“Good stuff?” Dean asked curiously, craning his neck to see.
“The best,” his father replied.
“This is a pilot’s survival kit,” J.B. said, grinning in triumph. “An emergency pack for a crashed pilot to grab as he ran from a burning plane, just enough supplies to keep him alive for a few weeks until a rescue team could arrive.”
“Haven’t seen one in years,” Krysty said, watching the proceedings eagerly. “They are almost always taken after the crash.”
“Not this time,” Ryan said, and began laying out the contents in a neat row.
J.B. freed the copilot’s survival kit and then started defusing the navigator’s chair. Soon the five seats were in pieces and the precious kits splayed open wide.
There were five 9 mm Heckler amp; Koch blasters, vials of oil, fifteen empty clips, ten boxes of ammo. Survival knives with whetstones, fishing line and hooks, dye markers, Veri pistols with colored flares, signal mirrors, water-purification tabs, gold coins, MRE packs, spools of wire, bundles of rope and med kits.
J.B. called Mildred in from outside, and the physician eagerly went through the collection of pills and capsules, throwing away most of the drugs. Even sealed in an airtight container, a lot of the chemicals would lose their potency over the long decades, and a few would turn lethal. Everything else she placed in her battered shoulder bag bandages, bug-repellent sticks, elastic bandages, methamphetamines, barbiturates, sulfur powder, antiseptic creamas hard as a rock but reclaimablesunscreen, toothpaste, three hypodermic needles, sutures, surgical thread, iodine tablets and silver-based antibiotics.