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in the world. But this, it’s way beyond anything I thought possible.” I tore my eyes from the rounded edge I was fondling to glance at Floyd again. “Which of their aircraft designers did this? Do you have any idea how?”
    “No. Like I said, why do you care? Here it is.”
    “I don’t mean to sound goofy, but it makes things a lot easier if I know what it was for, who built it, why. Floyd, it doesn’t even look like an airplane. It’s obviously meant to fly — I’m guessing that when all the folds straighten out into their proper positions it’ll be a lot bigger than it is now. It’s basically just a great big wing. That’s damned hard to do.”
    Floyd shrugged. “It was a secret project. They wanted to use this thing to challenge our air superiority late in the war. I don’t know a whole lot more — most of the documentation was destroyed.”
    I didn’t want to ask why the Army hadn’t taken this thing to Wright Field. I knew perfectly well Floyd had somehow stolen an entire airplane and its ground support. I was a willing accessory after-the-fact to his crime just for the privilege of being around such a glorious machine. But I really wanted to know where it came from. I really wanted to be in the mind of whoever built it.
    I turned around to ask Floyd the question again, but he was gone. Fine. I would study my airplane, understand it, and be very careful of whatever scam Floyd was running on me. He might be my best friend, but I knew him too well to trust him completely — with my life, yes, but not with my honor.
    He wasn’t going to tell me everything he knew, I didn’t have to tell him everything I discovered.

Chapter Three

    A fter lunch, we were back in the barn . I wanted to make the most of my last few days before getting back to work. “You know what I really hate?” I said to Floyd.
    “What?” Floyd was measuring distances to rig a block-and-tackle to get the airplane off the flatbed.
    “I’m going to go in to work on Monday, sit around all day talking about fasteners — you know, clips and rivets and bolt shear and tensile strength. If I’m lucky. Sometimes I have to go count the damned things, when the guys down on the floor find extras they shouldn’t have after attaching a wing or something.”
    Floyd snorted back a laugh. “Yeah, I’d hate that, too.”
    “That’s not what I hate.” I set my hands on my hips and just stared up at the collapsed beauty of that aircraft. “It’s just my job. What I hate is that I’ll be there instead of here, and I won’t be able to talk about it. Not one little syllable.”
    “Oh, Vernon.” Floyd shook his head. “We can’t talk about this to nobody.”
    “Do you think I want a permanent vacation in Leavenworth?”
    He laughed at that, his smile pulling a reluctant chuckle from me in turn.

    I was up on the trailer with the aircraft again, while Floyd crawled around in the rafters making sure the rigging points for our eventual lift were secure.
    “How did it fly?” I called up to him.
    “That’s your problem.”
    “No, I want to know what you saw. Or were told by those ‘boffins’ you spoke with. It doesn’t have any propellers, or even engine cowlings. Heck, the darned thing doesn’t even have a cockpit windscreen.” Lindbergh had crossed the Atlantic without one, but I wouldn’t care to fly in combat that way. Did the pilot use periscopes?
    “Ever heard of a Schwalbe ?”
    Schwalbe . I vaguely remembered vocabulary lists from college. “German for ‘swallow,’ I think.”
    “Right. It was this Nazi secret weapon. The Jerries called it Turbo .”
    “Oh, the Messerschmitt 262.” I knew what jets were. We’d seen some of the classified research at the plant, mostly on the know-your-enemy line, because the Japs had been rumored to be building an Me-262 knockoff, the Nakajima Kikka, or “Orange Blossom.” Not that I’d ever seen a jet airplane, or even so much as a jet engine.
    And Floyd was right — this had