Atlantis Found

32

Limousines formed a long arc on the circular drive of the British Embassy in Buenos Aires. Ladies in ballgowns and men in tuxedos exited the long black cars and entered through high bronze doors into the foyer, where they were met by the British ambassador to Argentina, Charles Lexington, and his wife, Martha, a tall, serene woman with white hair cut in a pageboy. The social event of the year was a celebration in honor of Prince Charles's elevation to the throne, finally abdicated by his mother, Queen Elizabeth.

The elite of Argentina had been invited, and all attended. The President, the National Congress leaders, the mayor of the city, financiers and industrialists, and the nation's most admired celebrities. Those who entered the ballroom to the music of an orchestra in eighteenth-century costume were enthralled with the sumptuous buffet prepared by the finest chefs imported from England especially for the event.

When Karl Wolf and his usual entourage of sisters made their grand entrance into the vast room, they inevitably received the stares of everyone present. His personal bodyguard stayed close beside them at all times. In keeping with their family tradition, the gorgeous women were all wearing gowns of the same design but in different colors. After being greeted by the British ambassador, they swept into the ballroom, their radiance envied by almost all the women present.

Karl was accompanied by Geli, Maria, and Luci, who'd brought along their husbands, and Elsie, who had just returned from America. As his sisters and their spouses began dancing to a medley of Cole Porter tunes, Karl led Elsie to the buffet, stopping along the way to accept a glass of champagne from the liveried waiters. They selected a sampling of exotic dishes and moved into the library, where they found an empty table with two chairs next to a floor-to-ceiling bookcase.

Elsie was about to lift a fork with a delicate cheese to her mouth when her hand froze in midair and her face took on a look of disbelief. Karl studied her dazed expression but did not turn around, instead waiting quietly for an explanation. It came with the presence of a tall, rugged-looking man with a lovely woman at his side, flaming red hair cascading to her waist. The man wore a tuxedo with a maroon brocade vest, and a gold watch chain hung across the front. The woman was dressed in a black silk velvet jacket over a slim-fitting, black silk ankle-length gown, slit on the sides. A crystal-beaded choker adorned her slender neck.

They approached the Wolfs and stopped. "How nice to see you again, Elsie," said Pitt cordially. Before she could answer, he turned to Wolf. "You must be the infamous Karl Wolf I've heard so much about" He paused and turned to Pat. "May I introduce Dr. Patricia O'Connell?"

Wolf gazed at Pitt as a cutter might study a diamond before lifting his mallet to strike his wedge and cleave a stone. Though he didn't seem to recognize Pitt, Pat felt a chill ripple up her spine. The billionaire was extremely handsome, but he stared from eyes that were cold and threatening. There was a hardness about him that suggested an underlying savagery. If he knew who she was, he showed no sign of recognition at hearing her name, nor did he display gentlemanly grace by rising from his chair.

"Though we have never met," Pitt continued in a friendly fashion, "I feel as if I know you."

"I have no idea who you are," said Wolf in perfect English, with just a trace of a Teutonic accent.

"My name is Dirk Pitt."

For a brief moment, there was incomprehension in Wolf's eyes, then his face slowly took on a look of pure animosity. "You are Dirk Pitt?" he asked coldly.

"None other." He smiled at Elsie. "You look surprised to see me. You left Washington quite suddenly before we had a chance to chat again."

"Where did you come from?" she snarled.

"From the Ulrich Wolf," Pitt answered politely. "After taking a tour of the ship, Pat and I found ourselves in Buenos Aires and thought we'd drop by and say hello."

If her eyes were lasers, Pitt would have been fried and grilled. "We can have you killed."

"You've tried, and it didn't work out," Pitt replied casually. "I don't advise you to try again, certainly not inside the British Embassy in front of all these people."

"When you reach the street, Mr. Pitt, you will be in my country, not yours. You will be helpless to protect yourselves."

"Not a good idea, Karl. You'd only upset the United States Marines who escorted us here tonight under the protection of the American ambassador, John Horn."

One of Wolf's hefty bodyguards moved forward then as if to assault Pitt, but suddenly Giordino stepped from behind and stood toe-to-toe with the guard, blocking any movement. The guard, who outweighed Giordino by a good fifty pounds and stood ten inches taller, looked down contemptuously and said, "What makes you think you're so tough, little man?"

Giordino grinned condescendingly. "Would you be impressed if I told you that I'd just exterminated half a dozen of your fellow vermin?"

"He's not kidding," said Pitt.

The guard's reaction was amusing. He didn't know whether to be mad or wary. Wolf raised a hand and idly waved off his bodyguard. "I congratulate all of you on your escape from the Ulrich Wolf. My security forces proved most incompetent."

"Not at all," Pitt replied amicably. "They were really quite good. We were very lucky."

"From the report I received, luck had very little to do with it."

It was as close to a compliment as Karl Wolf could ever give. He came slowly out of his chair and stood facing Pitt. He was two inches taller and relished looking down at this thorn in Destiny Enterprises' side. His blue-gray eyes glinted, but their fixed stare was easily matched and returned by Pitt, who was more interested in studying his enemy than engaging in a childish game of stare-down.

"You are making a regrettable mistake in opposing me, Mr. Pitt. Surely you must be aware by now that I am dedicated to using every tool at my command to make the world as pure and as uncontaminated as it was nine thousand years ago."

"You have a strange way of going about it."

"Why did you come here tonight?"

Pitt did not back off. "I have suffered a great deal of inconvenience because of your family, and I was determined to meet the man who's been scheming to play master of the universe."

"And now that you've met me?"

"It seems to me you've bet the farm on a phenomenon that may not take place. How can you be so dead certain the twin of the comet that wiped out the Amenes will return next month and strike the earth? How do you know it won't miss, as it did then?"

Wolf looked at Pitt speculatively and smiled maliciously. It was obvious that a man of his wealth and power was not used to people who did not fear him, who did not grovel in his divine presence.

"The coming cataclysm is an established conclusion. The world, as it is known by every living creature, will no longer exist. With the exception of my family, everyone in this room, including yourself, will surely perish." He leaned forward with a wicked grin. "But I'm afraid, Mr. Pitt, that it will happen rather sooner than you think. The timetable's been advanced, you see. The end of the world… will begin precisely four days and ten hours from now."

Pitt tried to hide his shock. Less than five days! How was it possible?

Pat didn't bother to hide her dismay. "How could you do this? Why have you gone to so much trouble to keep it a secret?" she demanded impassionedly. "Why haven't you warned every living soul on Earth so they can prepare for whatever happens? Have you and your precious sisters no conscience? Have you no compassion? Don't the deaths of billions of children torment you, like any sane person? You're just as bad as your ancestors who slaughtered millions-"

Elsie shot to her feet. "How dare you insult my brother!" she hissed.

Pitt slid his arm around Pat's waist. "Don't waste your breath on these purveyors of slime," he said, his face taut with anger. The confrontation was getting too tense. But he couldn't resist getting in one more remark. He looked at Elsie and said pleasantly, with a chilling grin, "You know, Elsie, I'll bet that making love to you and your sisters is like making love to ice sculptures."

Elsie hauled back to slap Pitt, but Pat lunged forward and grabbed her arm. Elsie snatched it away, shocked that someone other than a family member would treat her roughly. For a moment, both Pitt and Wolf thought the two women were going to go at it, but Pat smiled brazenly and turned to Pitt and Giordino. "I'm bored. Why don't one of you gentlemen ask me to dance?"

Pitt decided it was wiser to hang around and attempt to milk the Wolfs for more information while he had their attention. He made a slight bow to Giordino. "You first."

"My pleasure." Giordino took Pat's hand and led her to the dance floor, where the orchestra was playing "Night and Day."

Pitt said to Karl Wolf, "Very clever of you, accelerating the schedule. How did you do it?"

"Ah, Mr. Pitt," Wolf said. "I must have some secrets to myself."

Pitt tried a different tack. "I compliment you on your ships. They are masterworks of marine architecture and engineering. Only the Freedom, the sea city built by Norman Nixon of Engineering Solutions, comes close to matching their magnificent scale."

"That is true." Wolf was intrigued, despite himself. "I freely admit that many of the qualities we built into the Ulrich Wolf came from those designs."

"Do you really think those immense vessels will float out to sea in the wash from the giant tidal wave?"

"My engineers have assured me their calculations are precise."

"What happens if they're wrong?"

The expression on Wolf's face suggested that he never considered the thought. "The cataclysm will come to pass, exactly when I said it would, and our ships will be safe."

"I'm not sure I'd want to be around after the earth was devastated and most of the humans and animals became extinct."

"That's the difference between you and me, Mr. Pitt. You see it as the end. I see it as a bold new beginning. Now, good night. We have much to do." And he gathered up his sister and walked away.

Pitt desperately wanted to believe that Wolf was simply another lunatic, but this man's passion and that of his entire family went far beyond mere fanaticism. Pitt stood there, uneasy. No man this intelligent would build an empire worth many billions of dollars to throw it away on a crackpot scheme. There had to be an underlying rationality, one that was too horrifying to envision. But what? According to Wolf's own timetable, Pitt now had only four days and ten hours to find the answer. And why was Wolf so forthcoming about the deadline? It was almost as if he didn't care that Pitt knew. Did he simply think that it didn't matter anymore, that there was nothing anyone could do about it? Or was there some other reason in that devious mind?

Pitt turned and walked away. He stepped up to the bar and ordered an anejo, 100 percent blue agave tequila on the rocks. Ambassador Horn came and stood beside him. Horn, a light-haired small man, had the look of a hawk gliding in a spiral over a forest, more interested in his sovereignty than scanning for a meal.

"How did you and Karl Wolf get along?" he inquired.

"Not too well," answered Pitt. "He has his mind set on playing God, and I never learned to genuflect."

"He's a strange man. No one I know has ever gotten close to him. Certainly, there's been no indication why he would believe in this fantastic story of the end of the world. I've told my colleagues here and in Washington, and they say there's no evidence at all of such an event coming- at least so far."

"Do you know much about him?"

"Not a great deal. Only what I've read in intelligence reports. His grandfather was a big Nazi who escaped Germany at the end of the war. He came here with his family and a group of Nazi cronies, along with their top scientists and engineers. Soon after arriving in Argentina, they established a huge financial conglomerate within less than two years, buying and operating the largest farms and ranches, banks and corporations in the country. Once their power base was solidified, they branched out internationally into everything from chemicals to electronics. One can only guess where the original capital came from. Rumors say it was gold from the German treasury and assets stolen from the Jews who died in the camps. Whatever the source, it must have been a tremendous hoard to have accomplished so much in so little time."

"What can you tell me about the family?"

Horn paused to order a martini from the bartender. "Mostly rumors. My Argentinian friends speak in hushed tones whenever the Wolfs come up in conversation. It's been reported that Dr. Josef Mengele, the `Angel of Death' at Auschwitz, was involved with the Wolfs until he drowned several years ago. The stories, I admit, sound pretty outlandish. But they claim that Mengele, continuing his genetic experiments, worked with the first generations of Wolfs in producing offspring with high intelligence and exceptional athletic ability. These children then produced an even more controlled strain, which you see in the extraordinary likenesses in all the third generation of Wolfs, such as Karl and his sisters, who, by the way, all look identical to their brothers and cousins. One outlandish bit of gossip is that Adolf Hitler's sperm was smuggled out of Berlin in the closing hours of the war and used by Mengele in impregnating the Wolf women."

"Do you believe all this?" Pitt asked.

"I certainly don't want to," said Horn, sipping at his martini. "British intelligence is mum on the subject. But my embassy intelligence officer, Major Steve Miller, using a computer, has compared photos of Hitler with those of the Wolfs. As abhorrent as it sounds, except for hair and eye color, there is a marked resemblance in facial structure."

Pitt straightened and extended his hand. "Ambassador, I can't tell you how grateful I am for your invitation and protection. Coming to Buenos Aires was a wild scheme, and you were very generous with your time in helping me to meet Karl Wolf."

Horn gripped Pitt's hand. "We were lucky the Wolfs showed up for the party. But I have to tell you that it was a real pleasure to see someone tell that arrogant devil where to get off. Because I'm a diplomat, I couldn't afford the luxury of doing it myself."

"He claims the timetable's moved up, that now there's only four days until Armageddon. I should think the family will soon be boarding their superships."

"Really? That's odd," said Horn. "I have it on good authority that Karl is scheduled to make an inspection tour of his mineral retraction facility in Antarctica the day after tomorrow."

Pitt's eyes narrowed. "He's cutting it pretty thin."

"That project has always been a bit of a mystery. As far as I know, the CIA has never been able to get an agent inside."

Pitt smiled at Horn. "You're certainly abreast of intelligence matters, Ambassador."

Horn shrugged. "It pays to keep one's fingers in the pie."

Pitt swirled the tequila in his glass and stared thoughtfully at the liquid curling around the ice cubes. What is so important in Antarctica that Wolf has to squeeze in a visit, Pitt wondered. It seemed to him that the new leader of the Fourth Empire would be flying toward his fleet in preparation for the big event instead of to the polar continent. Getting there and back would take two days. It didn't figure.

33

The following day, twenty-seven of the two-hundred-member Wolf dynasty, the dominant principals of Destiny Enterprises and the chief architects of the Fourth Empire, met at Destiny's corporate offices. They assembled in the spacious boardroom with its teak-paneled walls and handsomely carved forty-foot-long conference table, also carved from teak. A large oil painting of Ulrich Wolf hung above the mantel of a fireplace at one end of the room. The family patriarch stood ramrod-straight in a black SS uniform, jaw thrust out, black eyes staring at some distant horizon beyond the painting.

The twelve women and fifteen men waited patiently while being served fifty-year-old port from crystal glasses. At precisely ten o'clock, Karl Wolf stepped from the chairman's suite and took his seat at the end of the table. For a few moments, his gaze swept the faces of his brothers, sisters, and cousins seated expectantly around the table. His father, Max Wolf, sat at his left. Bruno Wolf was to his right. Karl Wolf's lips were parted in a slight smile, and he looked to be in a cheerful mood.

"Before we begin our final meeting in the office of Destiny Enterprises and our beloved city of Buenos Aires, I should like to express my admiration for the way you and your loved ones have accomplished so much in so little time. Every member of the Wolf family has performed far beyond expectations, and we should all be proud that none has proved a disappointment."

"Hear, hear," exclaimed Bruno. The chant was taken up around the table, accompanied by a round of applause.

"Without my son's leadership," announced Max Wolf, "the great crusade, conceived by your grandfathers, could never have achieved fulfillment. I am proud of your eminent contribution to the coming new world order and elated that our family, with the blood of the Fuhrer flowing through your veins, is now on the verge of making the Fourth Reich a reality."

More applause erupted around the table. To a stranger, everyone in the room, with the exception of Max Wolf, looked as if he or she had been cloned. The same facial features, body build, eyes and hair- it was as if the boardroom had become a hall of mirrors.

Karl shifted his eyes to Bruno. "Are those who are not present here today on board the Ulrich Wolf?"

Bruno nodded. "All family members are comfortably settled in their residence quarters."

"And the supplies and equipment?"

Wilhelm Wolf raised a hand and reported. "Food stocks have been loaded and stored aboard all four vessels. All ship's personnel are on board and accounted for. Every piece of equipment and all electronic systems have been tested and retested. They all function perfectly. Nothing has been left to chance or overlooked. Every contingency has been considered and alternatives prepared. The ships are in total readiness for the onslaught of even the strongest tidal waves anticipated by our computer projections. All that is left is for the rest of us to fly to the Ulrich Wolf and wait for the resurrection."

Karl smiled. "You will have to go without me. I will follow later. It is critical that I oversee the final preparations at our mining operation at Okuma Bay."

"Do not be late," said Elsie, smiling. "We might have to sail without you.

Karl laughed. "Never fear, dear sister. I have no intention of missing the boat."

Rosa raised her hand. "Did the American scientist decipher the Amenes inscriptions before she escaped the ship?"

Karl shook his head. "Unfortunately, whatever information she discovered, she took with her."

"Can't our agents retrieve it?" asked Bruno.

"I fear not. She is too well protected at the American Embassy. By the time we devised a plan and mounted an operation to seize her again, it would be too late. The deadline would be upon us."

Albert Wolf, the paleoecologist of the family, who was an expert in ancient environments and their effects on primeval plant and animal life, motioned to speak. "It would have been most beneficial to have studied a narrative by those who lived through the last cataclysm, but I believe our computer projections have given us a fairly accurate picture of what to expect."

"Once the ships are swept into open water," said Elsie, "our first priority is to ensure that they are rigidly sealed against all contamination from ash, volcanic gases, and smoke."

"You may rest easy on that problem, cousin," said Berndt Wolf, the family's engineering genius. "The ship's interiors are designed to become completely airtight in a matter of seconds. Then specially constructed filtering equipment takes over. All systems have been exactingly tested and have proven one hundred percent efficient. A pure, breathable atmosphere for an extended period of time is a confirmed reality."

"Have we decided on what part of the world we will come ashore after it's safe to do so?" asked Maria Wolf.

"We're still in the process of accumulating data and calculating projections," answered Albert. "We must determine exactly how the cataclysm and tidal waves will alter the world's coasts. It will be mostly a matter of analyzing the situation after the havoc has abated."

Karl glanced down the table at his kinsmen. "Much will depend on how the landmasses have changed. Europe may become inundated as far as the Urals in Russia. Water may fill the Sahara Desert. Ice will cover Canada and the United States. Our first priority is to survive the onslaught and wait patiently before deciding on where to establish a headquarters city for our new world order."

"We have several sites under consideration," said Wilhelm. "The prime considerations are a port, such as San Francisco, where we can moor the ships, preferably a location with nearby land suitable for growing crops and orchards, and a centralized area that facilitates transportation and the spread of our authority around the new world. Much will depend upon the extent of the cataclysm."

"Do we have any idea how long we must remain on board the ships before we can venture ashore?" asked Gerda Wolf, whose expertise was education and who had been chosen to supervise the fleet's school systems.

Albert looked at her and smiled. "Certainly no longer than we have to, my sister. Years will pass, but we have no way of predicting exactly how long it will take before we can safely begin our conquest of the land."

"The people who survive on high ground?" queried Maria. "How will we treat them?"

"There will be pitifully few," replied Bruno. "Those who we can find and round up will be placed in secure areas to cope as best they can."

"We're not going to assist them?"

Bruno shook his head. "We cannot weaken our own food supplies before our people have the opportunity to subsist off the land."

"In time, except for those of us of the Fourth Reich," said Max Wolf, "the rest of mankind will become extinct. Survival of the fittest. That is the way of evolution. It was ordained by the Fuhrer that a master race would someday govern the world. We are that master race."

"Let us be honest, Uncle," said Felix Wolf. "We are not fanatical Nazis. The Nazi party died with our grandparents. Our generation pays homage to Adolf Hitler only for his foresight. We do not worship the swastika or shout `Heil' in front of his picture. We are our own race, created to rid the present world of crime, corruption, and disease by establishing a higher level of mankind- one that will build a new society free from the sins of the old one. Through our genes, a new race will emerge, pure and untouched by the evils of the past."

"Well said." Otto Wolf spoke, after sitting quietly through the conference. "Felix has eloquently summed up our purpose and commitment. Now all that is left is for us to carry our great quest through to a triumphant conclusion."

There came a few moments of silence. Then Karl folded his hands and spoke slowly. "It will be most interesting to see the conditions around us this time next year. It will indeed be a world inconceivable to those who will have gone."

34

A small enclosed truck, painted white with no logo or advertising on its sides, rumbled past the terminal of the Jorge Newbery city airport, located within the federal district of Buenos Aires, and came to a stop under the shade of a maintenance hangar. The airport normally served Argentina's domestic airlines, including those that operated out of Paraguay, Chile, and Uruguay. None of the flight line workers seemed to take notice of a turquoise executive jet with "NUMA" boldly outlined on its fuselage, as it landed and taxied to the hangar where the truck was waiting.

Three men and a woman came through the passenger door and stepped down to the concrete, which was heated by the noonday sun. Just as they were about to reach the maintenance office door of the hangar, they veered around the corner and approached the truck. When they were thirty feet away, the rear door opened and four United States Marines in battle gear jumped to the ground and formed a perimeter around the vehicle. The sergeant in command then helped Congresswoman Smith, Admiral Sandecker, Hiram Yaeger, and a third man enter the truck before reclosing the door.

The interior of the truck was a comfortably furnished office and command post. One of fifty constructed specifically for American embassies around the world, it was designed to protect and aid embassy personnel to escape their compound in the event of attack, such as the abduction and hostage situation in Iran during November of 1979.

Pitt stepped forward and embraced Loren Smith, who was shown aboard first. "You gorgeous creature. I wasn't expecting you."

Pat O'Connell felt a stab of jealousy at seeing Pitt with his arms around Loren. The congresswoman from Colorado was far more attractive than she had imagined.

"The admiral asked me to come, and there were no pressing votes on the floor, so here I am, even if it is for only a few hours."

"A pity," he said sincerely. "We could have done Buenos Aires."

"I would have liked that," she replied in a husky tone. Then she saw Giordino. "Al, it's good to see you."

He gave her a peck on the cheek. "Always a pleasure to see my government at work."

Sandecker climbed in, followed by Yaeger and the stranger. He merely nodded at Pitt and Giordino. He walked directly to Pat O'Connell. "You don't know how happy I am to shake your hand again, Doctor."

"You don't know how happy I am to be here," she said, kissing him on the forehead, to his obvious embarrassment. "My daughter and I are in your debt for sending Dirk and Al to rescue us."

"I didn't have to send them," he said wryly. "They would have gone on their own."

Yaeger greeted his old friends and Pat, who was introduced to Loren for the first time. Then Sandecker introduced Dr. Timothy Friend. "Tim is an old school pal. He helped me pass algebra in high school. When I went to the Naval Academy, he went to the Colorado School of Mines for a degree in geophysics. Not content with that, he obtained his Ph.D. in astronomy at Stanford, and became one of the country's most respected astronomers and director of the government's Strategic Computing and Simulation Laboratory. Tim is a wizard of innovative visualization techniques."

Friend's bald head was encircled by wisps of gray hair, like a school of silverfish swimming around a coral dome. A short man, he had to tilt his head back slightly to gaze up at the two women, who were considerably taller. Giordino, who stood five feet four, was the only one he could look straight in the eye. A quiet man among friends, he became outgoing and lively when lecturing before students, directors of corporations, or high government officials. It was easy to tell that he was in his element.

"Would you all care to sit down?" said Pitt, motioning to comfortable leather chairs and sofas spaced in a square in the center of the truck's cargo area. Once they were seated, an embassy staff member served coffee and sandwiches from a small galley behind the cab.

"Loren asked to come along," said Sandecker, without preamble. "She and her congressional aides investigated Destiny Enterprises and came up with some intriguing information."

"What I found in the past two days is quite worrisome," Loren began. "Very quietly, under astounding secrecy, the Wolf family and Destiny Enterprises have sold every business, every one of their shares in national and international corporations, every financial holding, all bonds, all stocks, all real estate, including every stick of furniture in their homes. All bank accounts have been cleaned out. Every asset large and small has been liquidated. Billions of dollars were converted into gold bullion that was transported to a secret location-"

"Where it is now stored in the cargo compartments of their fleet of ships," Pitt finished.

"It's as though the entire family of two hundred members has never existed."

"These are not stupid people," Pitt said convincingly. "I find it inconceivable that they are capable of irrational judgment. So is there a comet coming, or isn't there?"

"The very reason I've asked Tim to come along," explained Sandecker.

Friend laid out several small piles of papers on a table between the chairs and sofas. He picked up the first one and leafed through it before consulting his notes. "Before I answer that, let me go back a bit, so you can understand what the Wolfs have been preparing for. I think it best to begin with the comet's impact on earth sometime around seven thousand B.C. Fortunately, this is not an event that occurs on a regular basis. Although Earth is struck daily, it's by small asteroid fragments no larger than a fist that burn up upon entry into the atmosphere. About every century, one approximately a hundred and fifty feet in diameter strikes Earth, such as the one that produced the crater in Window, Arizona, and the other that exploded before impact in Siberia in 1908 that plastered eight hundred square miles. Once every million years, an asteroid half a mile wide strikes with a force equal to detonating every nuclear device on Earth simultaneously. Over two thousand of these big celestial missiles cross our orbit on a regular schedule."

"Not a pretty picture," said Pat.

"Don't lose any sleep over it," Friend said, smiling. "Your odds of dying from an asteroid are twenty thousand to one during your lifetime. We can't, however, discount the logical possibility that it's only a question of time before our luck runs out."

Pitt poured a cup of coffee. "I assume you're talking about a really stupendous bang."

"Indeed," said Friend, nodding vigorously. "Once every one hundred million years, a mammoth asteroid or comet strikes Earth, like the one that smacked into the sea off Yucatan sixty-five million years ago and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. This impact came from an object six miles in diameter that left a crater one hundred and twenty miles wide."

Friend paused to scan his paperwork before continuing. "That was smaller than the one that struck nine thousand years ago. Our computer model indicates that it measured nearly ten miles in diameter and plunged into Hudson Bay, Canada. The resulting chain reaction annihilated nearly ninety-nine percent of all plant and animal life on the planet, which is twenty percent more than the asteroid that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years earlier."

Loren stared at Friend with rapt interest. "A chain reaction comprising what type of disasters?"

"You take an object ten miles in diameter, weighing several billion tons, and then hurl it through a vacuum into a big soft ball at a speed of one hundred and thirty thousand miles an hour, and you're going to have a blast that is gargantuan beyond comprehension. The earth probably rang like a bell, as the shock of impact was transmitted into every corner. Using computer simulation and visualization techniques, which were very complicated and would take me two hours to explain, we determined that the comet came on an angle, punching into the southeastern section of Hudson Bay and blasting out a crater two hundred and thirty miles in diameter, or more than twice the size of the island of Hawaii. The entire mass of water in the bay was vaporized, as the bulk of the now-disintegrating comet plowed into the Earth to a depth of two miles. Astronauts have taken photos that show a perfect sphere where the shoreline circles the remains of the crater."

"How do you know it was a comet and not an asteroid or meteor?" asked Yaeger.

"An asteroid is a small body or minor planet that wanders the inner solar system and revolves around the sun. Some are rich in carbon. Others contain minerals rich in iron, silicon, and other minerals. Meteorites for the most part, are smaller fragments from asteroids that have collided with one another and broken up. The largest ever found weighed seventy tons. A comet is quite different. It's often called a dirty snowball made up of ice, gas, and rocky dust particles. They usually travel in very long oval orbits on the outer edge of the solar system, and often beyond. Because of gravitational interaction from the sun and planets, a few are diverted and orbit around the sun. When they come close to the sun, the comet's surface ice vaporizes and forms a spectacular elongated cone or tail. It's generally thought that they are leftovers from the formation of the planets. By drilling and then analyzing the composition of the microscopic debris found in and around the Hudson Bay crater, geophysicists discovered tiny particles that they identified as part of the comet that slammed into the earth in seven thousand B.C. Tests revealed no traces of the usual minerals and metals associated with asteroids."

"So we have impact," said Sandecker. "Then what happened?"

"A measureless inverted cone of red-hot rock, steam, dust, and debris was hurled up and above the atmosphere, only to plunge in a fiery rain back down on Earth, igniting uncontrollable forest fires around the world. Huge amounts of sulfur, shock-heated nitrogen, and great doses of fluorides were injected into the atmosphere. The ozone layer would have been destroyed, skies blotted out, as winds of hurricane strength whipped across the land and seas. Our simulation suggests this cloud of debris and smoke lasted no less than fourteen months. This alone would have killed off most of Earth's life and collapsed the food chain."

"It sounds too horrible for me to imagine," said Loren quietly.

Friend made a taut smile. "Lamentably, that's only the opening act. Because Hudson Bay opened into the Atlantic Ocean, waves as high as seven or eight miles were formed that burst across the lowlands. Florida would have been totally inundated, along with most of the islands of the world. Much of Europe and Africa saw waves surging hundreds of miles inland from their shorelines. Because most of Australia's ancient inhabitants lived on or near the coasts, the continent would have suffered a ninety-nine-percent death rate within minutes. Southeast Asia would have been buried under water. Vast multitudes of sea life would have been carried far inland and left to die when the giant waves finally receded. The chemical balance of the oceans was altered. What the upheaval didn't kill in the oceans, the silt, mud, and debris would.

"Shuddering from the comet's impact, massive earthquakes far beyond the top end of the Richter scale forever changed the dimensions of the mountains, plains, and deserts. Then volcanoes around the globe, dormant or active, erupted- molten lava in great sheets as high as a mile stormed over whatever land wasn't submerged. If an astronaut had flown to Mars before the cataclysm and returned two years later, he would not have been able to recognize the world, nor would anyone he knew or loved still be alive. He could very well find himself the only man on Earth."

Pitt looked at the astronomer. "You don't paint a very pretty picture."

"The aftermath was ghastly to behold. Once the deluge waters retreated, boulders of every size and shape were dispersed throughout the landscape, where they still rest today and are a great puzzle to geologists, who otherwise can't explain how they came to be there. Vast deposits of mangled trees, along with the bodies of animals and sea life carried far inland, were heaped in huge deposits. These deposits can still be found in the frozen regions of the world, proving that they were hurled there by a giant cataclysm. Huge bodies of water were trapped, and formed lakes. In one known instance, the land strait that separated the Atlantic Ocean from the valley and rivers of the Mediterranean was swept away and the sea was formed. Old glaciers melted, new ones were formed. Tropical forests began to grow in mild climates that were once lashed by frigid winds and freezing temperatures. The Gobi, Sahara, and Mojave regions, then tropical forests, became dry and arid. The continental shelves that once stood above the water were now drowned. The magnetic poles reversed their polarity. Civilizations that existed were buried as deep as five hundred feet beneath the surface. It might have taken as long as twenty years before the world became completely stable again. The few humans who somehow survived were faced with a very grim existence, and it was a miracle any of them endured to become our ancestors."

Pat set down her cup. "The primitive people of the Earth were so badly decimated and fragmented, they kept no record of their activities for thousands of years. Except for the inscriptions by the Amenes, most of which were lost or buried, the only memories of the cataclysm that were passed down came by word of mouth. Only after the early Egyptians, the Sumerians, and the Indus civilization of India reinvented the written language did records and stories of the deluge begin to spread."

"Who knows what cities," said Pitt, "what palaces with their archaeological treasures lie scattered on the deep seafloor or buried under hundreds of feet of silt and rock? Except for the inscriptions left by the Amenes, we have no way of assessing the splendor of the distant past before civilizations began rebuilding themselves."

Friend had remained silent while each member of the group envisioned the nightmare. He let his eyes rove around the sitting area inside the command truck, curiously observing the expressions of abhorrence in their eyes. Only Pitt's eyes seemed to be composed. It was as if he was contemplating something much different, something far off in the distance.

"And thus ends the cataclysm," said Sandecker morosely.

Friend slowly shook his head. "I haven't yet come to the worst part," he said, his earlier smile gone. "Only in the past few years have scientists come to realize the major upheavals Earth has experienced in the past, with and without influence by objects from outer space. We know now that a significant impact by a large comet or asteroid has the capability to cause the earth's crust to shift. Charles Hapgood put forth the theory that because it literally floats on an inner molten core, the crust or shell, which is only twenty to forty miles thick, can and has rotated around the core's axis, causing great extremes in climate and the movement of the continents. It's called earth crust displacement, and its consequences can be catastrophic. At first, Hapgood's theory was laughed at by other Earth scientists. Then Albert Einstein focused his intellect on it and ended up agreeing with Hapgood."

"Sort of like the coating of Teflon around a soccer ball," suggested Yaeger.

"The same principle," Friend acknowledged. "Our computer simulation suggested that the impact exerted enough pressure to move the crust. The result was that some continents, islands, and other landmasses shifted closer to the equator, while others shifted farther away. The movement also caused the North and South Poles to shift from their former positions into warmer climates, unleashing trillions of tons of water that raised the surface of the oceans over almost four hundred feet. To give you an example, before the deluge, a man or woman could have walked from London across the English Channel to France without getting their feet wet.

"In the end, the whole world was rearranged. The North Pole that was in the center of Canada was now far to the north in what is now known as the Arctic Sea. Siberia also shifted north in an incredibly short time span, as evidenced by fruit trees with leaves and woolly mammoths that were found quick-frozen, with vegetation undigested in their stomachs that no longer grew within a thousand miles of that location. Because North America and most of Europe revolved south, the great ice age abruptly ended. Antarctica also shifted south, nearly two thousand miles from the region it had once occupied in the southern sea between the lower portions of South America and Africa."

"Was Earth's orbit affected?" Yaeger asked.

"No, the orbit remained on its present track around the sun. Nor was the Earth's axis altered. The equator remained where it had been since the beginning. The four seasons came and went as always. Only the face of the globe had changed."

"That explains a great deal," said Pitt, "such as how the Amenes could draw a map of Antarctica without its ice mass."

"And their city under the ice that the Germans discovered," said Pat. "Its climate was habitable before the shift."

"What about the Earth's axis of rotation?" queried Giordino. "Would that change?"

Friend shook his head. "Earth's tilt of twenty-three point four degrees would remain constant. The equator would also remain constant. Only the crust above the fluid core would move."

Sandecker said, "If we could get back to the comet for a moment, it's time for you to answer Dirk's question. Were the Amenes and the Wolf family right in predicting a cataclysmic collision with the twin of the comet that struck earth in seven thousand B.C.?"

"May I have another cup of coffee?" Friend asked.

"Certainly," said Loren, pouring from the pot on the center table.

Friend took a few sips and set the cup down. "Now, then, before I answer your question, Admiral, I'd like to describe briefly the new Asteroid and Comet Attack Alert System, which came online just last year. A number of telescope facilities and specially designed instruments have been set up in different areas of the world for the express purpose of discovering asteroids and comets whose orbits approach Earth. Already, astronomers manning the facilities have discovered over forty asteroids that will come unpleasantly close to Earth at some point within its orbit. But detailed calculations reveal that they will all miss by a comfortable margin in the years ahead."

"Have they known about the approach of the second comet," said Loren in dismay, "and suppressed any warning of the threat?"

"No," said Friend. "Though the astronomers agreed to keep news of such possible encounters secret for forty-eight hours, until computer projections could definitely say a collision was imminent. Only when they are certain a collision is imminent would news of the discovery be made public."

"So what you are saying-" said Yaeger.

"Is that there is no emergency."

Pitt looked at Friend. "Come again."

"The event in seven thousand B.C.," explained Friend, "was a million-to-one chance occurrence. The comet that struck Earth, and the comet that arrived a few days later and missed, were not twins. They were separate objects in different orbits that happened to cross paths with Earth at almost the same time. An incredible coincidence, nothing more."

"How soon is the second comet due to return?" Pitt inquired warily.

Friend thought a moment, then said, "Our best guess is that it will fly by no closer than eight hundred thousand miles from us- in another ten thousand years."

35

There came several moments of stunned silence, as perplexity flooded the minds of the people seated around Dr. Friend. Pitt swore softly under his breath. He stared steadily at Friend, as if attempting to read something in the astronomer's eyes, an uncertainty maybe, but there was none.

"The comet-" he began.

"Its name is Baldwin, after the amateur astronomer who rediscovered it," Friend interrupted.

"You say the Murphy comet and the second comet that the Amenes recorded are one and the same?"

Friend nodded vigorously. "No doubt about it. Calculations confirm that its orbit coincided with the comet that caused the cataclysm of seven thousand B.C."

Pitt glanced at Sandecker and Pat, then back to Friend. "There can be no mistake?"

Friend shrugged. "A margin of error of perhaps two hundred years, but certainly no more. The only other large object to enter Earth's atmosphere in recorded history was the one that flattened those eight hundred square miles in Siberia. Only now are astronomers beginning to believe that, instead of a colossal impact, it was actually a near miss."

"Surely the Wolfs must have had access to the same data," said Loren, looking bewildered. "It doesn't make sense for them to liquidate every asset of the family after having spent billions of dollars building a fleet of ships to survive a cataclysm they know is not about to happen."

"We all agree with you," said Sandecker. "It may simply be that the Wolf family is nothing more than a bunch of fruitcakes."

"Not only the family," said Giordino, "but two hundred and seventy-five thousand other people who work for them and look forward to the voyage to nowhere."

"That doesn't sound like an insignificant cult of crazies to me," said Loren.

"Very true," Pitt agreed. "When Al and I infiltrated the supership, we found a dedicated fanaticism with surviving the deluge."

"I reached the same conclusion," added Pat. "The conversations I overheard regarding the coming cataclysm were resolute. There was not the slightest doubt in their minds that disaster would overtake the world and that they had been given the gift of rebuilding a new civilization without the handicaps of the old."

Giordino looked at Pat. "An echo of Noah and his ark."

"But on a far grander scale," Pitt reminded him.

Sandecker shook his head slowly. "I have to admit that this whole dilemma is a mystery to me."

"The Wolf family must have a solid motive." Pitt paused, as everyone stared at him in silence. "There can be no other answer. If they are convinced the civilized world is going to be swept away and buried for all time, they must know something no one else on Earth knows."

"I can assure you, Admiral," said Friend, "that disaster is not soaring in from the solar system. Certainly not in the next few days. Our tracking network sees no large asteroids or comets coming anywhere close to Earth's orbit in the foreseeable future, certainly not before the end of the next century."

"So what else could produce such a disaster? Is there any way of predicting a crust displacement or a polar shift?" Yaeger asked Friend.

"Not without the opportunity to study such a phenomenon at first hand. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunami waves have been witnessed and recorded. But no crust movements or polar shifts have occurred since earth science emerged from the Greeks. So we have no solid data upon which to draw enough conclusions to even attempt predictions."

"Are there conditions on Earth that could cause the crust and poles to shift?" asked Pitt.

"Yes," Friend answered slowly. "There are natural forces that could upset Earth's balance."

"Such as?"

"The most likely scenario would be an ice shift at one of the poles."

"Is that possible?"

"Earth is like a giant child's top or gyroscope rotating on its axis, as it spins every year around the sun. And, like a top, it is not in perfect balance, because the landmasses and poles are not ideally placed for perfect stabilization. So Earth wobbles as it rotates. Now, if one of Earth's poles grows until it becomes oversize, it affects the wobble, like an unbalanced wheel on your car. Then it could cause a crust displacement or polar shift. I know respected scientists who believe this happens on a regular basis."

"How often?"

"Approximately every six to eight thousand years."

"When was the last shift?"

"By analyzing cores pulled from deep beneath the seas, oceanographers have dated the last shift at nine thousand years ago, the approximate age your comet struck Earth."

"So you might say we're due," said Pitt.

"Actually, overdue." Friend made a helpless gesture with his hands. "We can't say with any confidence. All we know is that when the day comes, the shift will be very sudden. There will be no warning."

Loren stared at Friend uneasily. "What will be the cause?"

"The ice formation that accumulates on top of Antarctica is not distributed equally. One side of the continent receives much more than the other. Every year, over fifty billion tons of ice are added to the Ross Ice Shelf alone, a growing mass which increases Earth's wobble. In time, as the weight shifts, so will the poles, causing, as Einstein himself predicted, trillions of tons of water and ice thousands of feet high to race from both poles toward the equator. The North Pole will sweep south and the South Pole will sweep north. All the forces that were unleashed by a comet strike will be repeated. The major difference is that instead of a world population of about a million people nine thousand years ago, now we're looking at a world populated by seven billion people who will be swept to their deaths. New York, Tokyo, Sydney, Los Angeles will be completely inundated, while cities far inland will be leveled to the ground and disappear. Hardly a slab of concrete would be left where millions walked only a few days earlier."

"And if the Ross Ice Shelf were suddenly to detach itself from the rest of the continent and drift out to sea?" Pitt put to Friend, leaving the question hang.

Friend's face turned grim. "It's an event we've already considered. A simulation shows that a drastic movement by the Shelf would cause an imbalance broad enough to trigger a sudden shift of Earth's crust."

"What do you mean by drastic movement?"

"Our simulation demonstrated that should the entire ice shelf break away and drift sixty miles to sea, its relocated mass would increase Earth's wobble enough to trigger a pole shift."

"How long do you estimate it would take to drift sixty miles?"

Friend thought a moment, then said, "Taking into account the sweep of the currents in that part of the Antarctic, I should say no more than thirty-six hours."

"Is there no way to stop the drift?" asked Loren.

"I don't see how" Friend shook his head. "No, I doubt if a thousand nuclear bombs could melt enough of the ice shelf to make a difference. But, look, this is all theoretical. What else could possibly cause the Shelf to go drifting out to sea?"

Pitt looked at Sandecker, who returned the stare. Both men were envisioning the same nightmare, and both read each other's mind. Pitt's stare moved to Loren.

"The Wolfs' nanotech facility that processes minerals from seawater, how far is it from the Ross Ice Shelf?" he asked her.

Loren's eyes widened. "Surely, you don't think-"

"How far?" Pitt gently pressured.

Finally, she drew a deep breath. "The plant sits right on the edge."

Pitt turned his attention to Friend. "Do you have an estimate of the Ross Ice Shelf's size, Doctor?"

"It's immense," said Friend, stretching out his hands for effect. "I can't give you exact dimensions. All I know is that it's the world's largest body of floating ice."

"Give me a few minutes," said Yaeger, as he opened his laptop computer and began typing on the keyboard. They all sat quietly and watched while Yaeger linked up with his computer network at NUMA headquarters. Within a few minutes, he was reading off the data on his monitor. "Estimates of its mass range as high as two hundred and ten thousand square miles, making it approximately the size of Texas. The circumference, not counting the perimeter facing the sea, is nearly fourteen hundred miles. Thickness runs from eleven hundred to twenty-three hundred feet. Ice scientists liken it to a gigantic floating raft" Yaeger looked up at the faces absorbed in his report. "There is, of course, a mountain of additional information on the ice shelf, but those are the essentials."

"How is it possible," asked Pat, "for man to force two hundred and ten thousand square miles of ice to crack and move apart?"

"I haven't the foggiest clue," said Pitt. "But I'll bet the farm the Wolf family has planned and worked for three generations to do just that."

"Good Lord!" muttered Friend. "It's unthinkable."

"The pieces," said Giordino darkly, "are coming together."

"By whatever means, they intend to break the ice shelf away from land and move it out to sea, upsetting Earth's rotation and causing an increase in its wobble. Once the imbalance is in the critical stage, a polar shift and a crust displacement will occur. Then the Wolfs' megaships, after surviving the resulting tidal waves, will be swept out to sea, where they'll drift before cruising around the altered Earth for several rears until the upheaval abates. When they are satisfied that Earth is livable again, they'll come ashore and establish a new order, the Fourth Empire, on the bodies of seven billion people, along with the mass destruction of animal and sea life."

Everyone seated in the truck looked stricken, faces locked in abhorrence and despair. No one could conceive of such a horror. No mind could grasp the total inhumanity of such an act.

"God help us all," Loren murmured softly.

Pitt looked at Sandecker. "You must inform the President."

"I've kept his science board and chief of staff, Joe Flynn, up to date on our investigation, but until now no one has taken the threat seriously."

"They'd better reconsider damned quick," said Giordino.

"We'd better rethink our options," said Pitt, "and come up with a plan of action. With only three days to go, we haven't got much time. Not if we want to stop the Wolfs from launching an apocalypse."

36

The pilot lined up the Destiny Enterprises company jet for Ids approach and settled down on the long ice runway without the slightest hint of a bump. The plane, the last one of the fleet that had been sold off, was a custom-built Japanese Dragonfire twin-engine jet with no markings or identification numbers on its fuselage, wings, or tail. It was painted white and blended in with the snowy landscape, as it taxied toward what looked like a steep cliff against a high mountain covered with ice.

When the aircraft was less than two hundred yards from smashing into the mountain, the ice cliff miraculously parted, revealing a vast grottolike interior. The pilot slowly pulled back on the throttles, bringing the jet to a stop in the middle of the hangar, which slave labor had carved out of the mountain nearly sixty years earlier. The jet engines whined briefly, before their turbines decreased their rotation and slowly came to a quiet rest. Behind, the ponderous ice doors closed on a series of solid rubber wheels.

There were two other aircraft parked in the hangar, both Airbus Industrie military versions of the A340-300. One was capable of carrying 295 passengers and twenty tons of freight. The other had been built purely as a cargo carrier. Both had maintenance men checking over the engines and filling the fuel tanks for the coming evacuation of Wolf personnel to the safety of the big superships waiting within the safety of the Chilean fjord.

The great hangar was a beehive of quiet activity. Workers in the various Wolf colored uniforms moved silently, conversing softly, as they packed the hundred or more wooden crates with the artifacts and wealth of Amenes, along with the looted art treasures from World War II and the sacred Nazi relics, all being readied for transportation to the Ulrich Wolf.

Fifty men in the standard Destiny Enterprises black security uniform stood at attention as Karl Wolf, along with his sister Elsie, exited the aircraft. He was wearing Alpine ski pants and a big suede jacket fined with alpaca wool. Elsie was dressed in a one-piece ski suit under a knee-length fur coat.

The man who directed the transportation project waited at the bottom of the boarding steps as they stepped to the ground.

"Cousin Karl, cousin Elsie, you do us an honor by coming."

"Cousin Horst," Karl greeted him. "I felt it my duty to observe the doomsday system in its final stages."

"An hour that is near at hand," Elsie added proudly.

"How goes the evacuation?" asked Karl.

"Cargo and passengers are scheduled to arrive on the Ulrich Wolf ten hours before the cataclysm," Horst assured him.

Then their brother, Hugo, and sister, Blondi, stepped forward to greet them. They took turns embracing.

"Welcome back to Valhalla," Blondi greeted Karl.

"Other business has kept me away too long," said Karl.

Hugo, who was the chief of the family security force, gestured toward a small electric automobile, one of a fleet of utility and heavy equipment vehicles that ran on batteries, to prevent a buildup of carbon monoxide inside the caverns. "We'll take you to the control center, where you can see for yourself how we begin the end of the old world."

"After I inspect your guards," said Karl. Trailed by Elsie, he walked down the line of security guards in their black uniforms, who stood ramrod straight, with their P-10 automatics strapped to their hips and Bushmaster M17S rifles slung over their shoulders. He stopped occasionally and asked a guard his nationality and military history. When he reached the end of the line, he nodded in satisfaction.

"An intrepid company of men. You've done well, Hugo. They look like they can handle any intrusion."

"Their orders are to shoot to kill any unidentified intruder that enters our perimeter."

"I hope they perform with greater efficiency than Erich's men at the shipyard."

"There will be no failure at this end," Hugo said firmly. "I promise you, brother."

"Any sign of encroachment?"

"None," answered Blondi. "Our detection-control unit has seen no activity within a hundred and fifty miles of the facility."

Elsie looked at her. "One hundred and fifty miles does not seem far."

"It's the distance to Little America Number Six, the Yankee Antarctic research station. Since the station was built, they've shown no interest in our operations. Our aerial surveillance has yet to detect any attempt to trespass onto our mining facility."

"All is quiet with the Americans," added Hugo. "They'll give us no problems."

"I'm not so sure," said Karl. "Keep a tight eye on any activity. I fear their intelligence may be on the verge of discovering our secret."

"Any attempt to stop us," Hugo said confidently, "will come too late. The Fourth Empire is inevitable."

"I sincerely pray that will be the case," said Karl, as he entered the auto ahead of the women. Usually gallant around the ladies, Karl came from the old German school where men never yielded to women.

The driver of the electric car left the aircraft hangar area and entered a tunnel. After a quarter of a mile, they entered a vast ice cavern that enclosed a small harbor with long floating docks that rose and fell with the tide from the Ross Sea. The high-roofed channel that ran from the inner harbor to the sea curved gently, allowing large ships to navigate the passage while the ice cliffs blocked all view from the outside. Light throughout the complex came from overhead fixtures containing dozens of halogen bulbs. Four submarines and a small cargo ship were moored beside the docks. The entire harbor complex was deserted. The cargo cranes stood abandoned, along with a small fleet of trucks and equipment. There wasn't a soul to be seen on the docks or the vessels. It was as if their crews had walked off and never returned.

"A pity the U-boats that served our venture so efficiently all these years will be lost," said Elsie wistfully.

"Perhaps they will survive," Blondi consoled her.

Hugo smiled. "When the time comes, I will personally return to Valhalla to see how they fared. They deserve to be enshrined for their service to the Fourth Empire."

The old tunnel that ran nine miles through the ice between the hidden dock terminal, the aircraft hangar, and then to the sea-mining extraction facility had also been excavated by slaves from the old Soviet Union, their preserved bodies now frozen in a mass grave on the ice shelf. Since 1985, the tunnel had been expanded and constantly realigned because of the shifting ice.

In the beginning, the efforts to extract valuable minerals from the sea had proved a dismal failure, but with the nanotechnology revolution pioneered by Eric Drexler in California, along with his wife Chris Peterson, Destiny Enterprises had thrown its immense wealth and resources into a project to control the structure of matter. By rearranging atoms and creating incredibly tiny engines, they had totally reinvented manufacturing processes. Molecular machines could even produce a tree from scratch. The Wolfs, however, threw their efforts into extracting valuable minerals such as gold from seawater, a process they'd achieved and gone on to refine until they were producing a thousand troy ounces of gold a day from the Ross Sea, along with platinum, silver, and many other rare elements. Unlike ore pulled from the ground and then expensively processed by crushers and chemicals, the minerals extracted from the sea came in a nearly pure form.

The engineering center of the Destiny Enterprises sea-mining facility was a great domed structure whose interior looked similar to the vast control room at the NASA space center. Electronic consoles were manned by thirty scientists and engineers who monitored the computerized electronics of the nanotech mining operation. But this day, all operations for the extraction of rare metals from the sea had come to a halt, and all Wolf personnel were concentrating their efforts on the coming split of the ice shelf.

Karl Wolf entered the expansive room and stopped in front of a spacious electronic board that hung from the center of the domed ceiling. In the center, a large map of the Ross Ice Shelf was displayed. Around the edges, a series of neonlike tubing distinguished the ice from the surrounding land. The tubing, which stretched from the mining company around the ice shelf and ended three hundred miles from the opposite end, was green. The section from where the green ended was continued in red to the edge of the sea.

"The area in red is yet to be programmed?" Karl asked the chief engineer, Jurgen Holtz, who walked up to the Wolf party and gave a sharp nod of his head in greeting.

"Yes, that is correct." Holtz raised a hand and gestured at the board. "We are in the process of setting the molecular triggering devices. We have about another four hundred miles to program to the end of the tunnel at the sea."

Karl studied the constantly changing red letters and numbers on the digital displays spaced around the map. "When is the critical moment?"

"The final process for splitting off the ice shelf is timed for six hours…" Holtz paused to stare up at a series of numbers showing the time left until doomsday. "Twenty-two minutes and forty seconds from now."

"Any problems that might cause a delay?"

"None we're aware of All computerized procedures and their backup systems have been inspected and scrutinized dozens of times. We have yet to find the slightest hint of a possible malfunction."

"An amazing feat of engineering," Karl said quietly, while gazing at the colored tubing surrounding the ice shelf. "A pity the world will never know of its existence."

"An amazing feat indeed," echoed Holtz, "boring a ten-foot-diameter tunnel fourteen hundred miles through the ice in two months."

"The credit goes to you and your engineers who designed and built the molecular tunneling machine," said Elsie, pointing at a large photo on one wall. The picture showed a hundred-foot-long circular boring machine with a thrust ram, a debris conveyor, and a strange-looking unit on the front that pulled apart selected molecular bonds within the ice, producing powder-snow-size chunks small enough to be transported to the rear of the conveyors to the open sea. A secondary unit rebonded the tiny chunks into near-perfect crystalline solid ice that was used to line the tunnel. When in full operation, the tunneler could bore through fifty miles of ice in twenty-four hours. Having accomplished its purpose, the great machine now sat under a growing sheet of ice outside the mining facility.

"Perhaps after the ice melts, we'll have an opportunity to use the tunneler again on subterranean rock," Karl said thoughtfully.

"You think the ice will melt away?" asked Elsie, puzzled.

"If our calculations are ninety-five percent correct, this section of the Antarctic will end up eighteen hundred miles north of here two months after the cataclysm."

"I've never quite understood how all this is going to break off the entire ice shelf and send it out to sea" said Elsie.

Karl smiled. "I'd forgotten that you were the family intelligence collector in Washington for the past three years and were not provided with details of the Valhalla Project."

Holtz held up one hand and pointed to the giant display board. "As simply as I can explain it, Miss Wolf, our nanocomputerized machine constructed a vast number of molecular replicating assemblers, which in turn constructed over many millions of tiny molecular ice-dissolving machines."

Elsie looked pensive. "In other words, the replicated assemblers, through molecular engineering, can create machines that can produce almost anything."

"That's the beauty of nanotechnology," replied Holtz. "The replicating assembler can copy itself in a few minutes. In less than twenty-four hours, tons of replicated machines, moving trillions of atoms around, drilled holes into the ice every six inches above and below the tunnel. Once the ice tubes were drilled to a predetermined depth, the nanocomputer closed down all further instructions to the machines. In sixteen hours, the moment our meteorologists have predicted a strong offshore wind in combination with a favorable current, a signal will be sent to reactivate the machines. They will then finish the job of dissolving the ice and separating the shelf from the continent, allowing it to drift out to sea."

"How long will that take?" asked Elsie.

"Less than two hours," answered Holtz.

"Then ten hours after the final break," Karl explained, "the displaced weight of the Ross Ice Shelf will have moved far enough away from the Antarctic continent to throw off Earth's delicately balanced rotation just enough to cause a polar shift in unison with a crust displacement, sending the world into a devastating upheaval."

"A world which we then can reshape into our image," said Elsie vaingloriously.

A man in the black uniform of a security guard came rushing out of an office and approached the group. "Sir," he said to Karl, handing him a sheet of paper.

Karl's face darkened for a brief instant, before turning reflective.

"What is it?" Elsie asked.

"A report from Hugo," Karl answered slowly. "It seems an unidentified aircraft is approaching from across the Amundsen Sea, and refuses to answer our signals."

"Probably the supply plane for the ice station at Little America," said Holtz. "Nothing to be concerned about. It flies in and out every ten days."

"Does it always pass over Valhalla?" asked Karl.

"Not directly, but it comes within a few miles as it makes its descent toward the ice station."

Karl turned to the security guard who had carried the message. "Please tell my brother to observe the approaching aircraft closely. If it deviates from its normal flight path to Little America, have him notify me immediately."

"Are you troubled, brother?" asked Elsie.

Karl looked at her, his face showing traces of concern. "Not troubled, my sister, merely cautious. I do not trust the Americans."

"The United States is a long way away," said Elsie. "It would take an American assault force more than twenty-four hours to assemble and fly over ten thousand miles to Okuma Bay."

"Still," Karl said patiently, "it pays to be vigilant" He looked at Holtz. "Should a distraction arise, can the signal to split the ice be sent early?"

"Not if we want absolute success," Holtz replied firmly. "Timing is critical. We must wait until just before the peak of the flood tide to activate the molecular ice-dissolving machines. Then the ebb tide will carry the great mass of the ice shelf out to sea."

"Then it appears we have nothing to fear," said Elsie optimistically.

Karl dropped his voice, speaking slowly, softly. "I hope you're right, dear sister."

At that moment, another security guard approached and passed Karl a message from Hugo. He read it, looked up, and smiled faintly. "Hugo says that the American supply plane is on its normal course ten miles beyond our perimeter and is flying at an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet."

"Hardly the height to drop an assault team," said Holtz.

"No nation on Earth would dare fire missiles into our facility without their intelligence agencies penetrating our operation. And none have. Hugo's security force has diverted and blocked all outside probes into Valhalla."

"Diverted and blocked," Karl repeated. But his mind was not so sure. He recalled one man who had already defied too many of the Wolf family's aims, and Karl could not but wonder where he might be.

37

Under a sky concealed by a thick layer of clouds, a NUMA executive jet landed on a frozen airstrip, taxied toward a domed building, and rolled to a stop. Little America V was the fifth in the line of United States ice stations to bear the name since Admiral Byrd had established the first in 1928. Once situated several miles from the edge of the Ross Shelf near Kainan Bay, the sea was now only a short walk away, due to the calving of the ice pack over the years. The base served as a terminus for the 630-mile-long well-traveled ice road to the Byrd Surface Camp on the Rockefeller Plateau.

A man bundled up in a lime-green parka and fur-trimmed hood removed his sunglasses and grinned as Pitt opened the passenger's door and stepped to the frozen ground.

"You Pitt or Giordino?" he asked in a rumbling voice.

"I'm Pitt. You must be Frank Cash, the ice station chief."

Cash merely nodded. "I didn't expect you for another two hours."

"We hurried."

Pitt turned as Giordino, who had closed the down the aircraft, joined them. Giordino introduced himself and said, "Thank you for working with us on such short notice, but it's a matter of extreme urgency."

"I have no reason to doubt you," said Cash astutely, "even though I received no instructions from a higher authority."

Unable to talk their way into joining the special force assault team that was being formed to raid the Wolf compound and halt the coming cataclysm, they had been told in no uncertain terms by Admiral Sandecker to remain in Buenos Aires out of harm's way. Pitt's reasoning had been that he and Giordino were essential to the raid, because it was they who had discovered the horrifying truth behind the man-induced cataclysm and knew more about the Wolfs and their security tactics than anyone else. And, since they were already in Buenos Aires and five thousand miles closer to the scene of conflict, they could get there before the assault team and scout the facility.

His plea had fallen on deaf ears. The argument by the high-ranking military had been that they were not professional fighting men who were trained and conditioned for such a strenuous and difficult operation. In Sandecker's case, he was not about to allow his best men to commit suicide in the frigid wastes of the southern polar continent. Pitt and Giordino, however, true to form, had taken a NUMA executive jet, and instead of flying it back to Washington as they had been ordered, they'd filled it to the brim with fuel and taken off for Antarctica, in hopes of entering the Wolf mining plant through the back door, without the slightest plan in their heads of how to cross sixty miles of frozen waste to the Wolf operation once they landed in Little America.

"We'll figure out something when we get there." Pitt was fond of saying this.

Followed by Giordino's "I'll tag along, since I don't have anything better to do."

"Come on inside," said Cash, "before we turn into ice sculptures."

"What's the temperature?" asked Giordino.

"Pretty nice today, with no wind. Last I looked, it was fifteen degrees below zero."

"At least I won't have to send for ice cubes for my tequila," said Pitt.

The domed building, which was 80 percent covered with ice, protruded only five feet above ground. The living and working quarters were a maze of rooms and corridors hacked under the ice. Cash led them into the dining area next to the kitchen and ordered them a hot lunch of lasagna from the station cook before producing a half-gallon bottle of Gallo burgundy. "Not fancy, but it hits the spot," he said, laughing.

"All the comforts of home," mused Giordino.

"Not really," Cash said, with a grim smile. "You have to be mentally deficient to want to live this life."

"Then why not take a job somewhere with a milder climate?" asked Pitt, noticing that all the men he'd seen at the station were bearded and the women had forsaken makeup and coiffures.

"Men and women volunteer to work in polar regions because of the excitement of pursuing a dangerous job exploring the unknown. A few come to escape problems at home, but the majority are scientists who pursue the studies of their chosen expertise regardless of where it takes them. After a year, they're more than ready to return home. By that time, they've either turned into zombies or they began to hallucinate."

Pitt looked at Cash. He didn't have a haunted look in his eyes, at least not yet. "It must take strength of character to subsist in such a bleak environment."

"It begins with age," Cash explained. "Men under twenty-five lack reliability, men over forty-five lack the stamina."

After waiting patiently for a few minutes, while Pitt and Giordino ate most of their lasagna, Cash finally asked, "When you contacted me from Argentina, did I hear right when you said you wanted to cross the ice shelf to Okuma Bay?"

Pitt nodded. "Our destination is the Destiny Enterprises mining operation."

Cash shook his head. "Those people are security fanatics. None of our scientific expeditions ever got within ten miles of the place before being chased off by their security goons."

"We're quite familiar with the goons," said Giordino, relaxing after filling his stomach.

"What did you have in mind for transportation? We have no helicopter here."

"All we'll need is a couple of snowmobiles," Pitt said, looking into Cash's face. The expression in the ice station chief's eyes was not encouraging.

Cash looked pained. "I fear you two have flown a long way for nothing. Two of our snowmobiles are in maintenance, waiting for parts to be flown in. And the other four were taken by scientists to study the ice around Roosevelt Island north of here."

"How soon before your scientists return?" asked Pitt.

"Not for another three days."

"You have no other transportation?" asked Giordino.

"A bulldozer and a ten-ton Sno-cat."

"What about the Sno-cat?"

Cash shrugged. "A section of one track shattered from the cold. We're waiting for a part to be flown in from Auckland."

Giordino looked across the table at his friend. "Then we have no choice but to fly in and hope we find a place to land."

Pitt shook his head. "We can't risk jeopardizing the special force mission by dropping in out of the blue. I had hoped that with snowmobiles we might have covered the distance, parked them a mile or two away from the mining compound, and then crept in unobserved."

"You fellas act like it's a matter of life or death," said Cash.

Pitt and Giordino exchanged glances and then both looked at the station chief, their faces set in grave expressions. "Yes," Pitt said severely, "it's life and death to more people than you can possibly conceive."

"Can you tell me what this is all about?"

"Can't," Giordino answered simply. "Besides, you wouldn't want to know. It might ruin your entire day."

Cash poured a cup of coffee and contemplated the dark liquid for a few moments. Then he said, "There is one other possibility, but it's highly improbable."

Pitt stared at him. "We're listening."

"Admiral Byrd's Snow Cruiser," Cash announced, as if he was launching a lecture, which indeed he was. "A jumbo four-wheel-drive, larger than any vehicle built in her day."

"When was that?" Giordino queried.

"Nineteen thirty-nine." There was a pause. "It was the inspiration of Thomas Poulter, a polar explorer, who designed and built a monstrous machine he hoped could carry five men and his pet dog to the South Pole and back. I guess you might call it the world's first really big recreational vehicle. The tires alone were over three feet wide and more than ten feet in diameter. From front to back, it measured fifty-six feet long by twenty feet wide and weighed thirty-seven tons fully loaded. Believe you me, she's some vehicle."

"She sounds overly elaborate," said Pitt, "for a vehicle designed to travel to the South Pole."

"She was that. Besides a grand control cabin raised on the front, it had its own machine shop, living quarters for the crew, and a galley that also performed double duty as a photographer's darkroom. The rear end housed storage space for a year's supply of food, spare tires, and enough fuel for five thousand miles of travel. Not only that, she was supposed to have carried a Beechcraft airplane with skis on her roof."

"What did such a monster use for power?"

"Two one-hundred-and-fifty-horsepower diesel engines linked to four seventy-five-horsepower electric traction motors, which could feed power to all or any one of the wheels individually. The wheels could all be turned for a crabbing movement and sharp turns, and even retract when crossing a crevasse. Each wheel alone weighed six thousand pounds. The tires were twelve-ply and made by Goodyear."

"Are you saying this gargantuan machine not only still exists, but is available?" asked Pitt incredulously.

"Oh, she exists, but I can't say she's available or that she could travel across sixty miles of the ice shelf. Sixty miles may not seem like much distance, but after the Snow Cruiser was completed, shipped to the Antarctic, and unloaded at Little America Three, not far from this station, her designer's best-laid plans went down the sewer. The engines had the power, but Poulter had miscalculated the gear ratios. The behemoth would do thirty miles an hour on a level road, but couldn't pull her mass through ice and snow, especially up a grade. Given up as a white elephant, she was abandoned. In later years, she was covered over by the ice, lost, and forgotten. It was always thought that as the ice shelf moved toward the sea, the Snow Cruiser would eventually be carried away and dropped in the deep when the ice floe melted."

"Where is she now, still buried under the ice?" Pitt inquired.

Cash shook his head and smiled. "The Snow Cruiser is about two miles from here, dangerously close to the edge of the ice shelf. A rich old mining engineer got it into his head to find and rescue the vehicle, then transport it back to the States for display in a museum. He and his crew discovered it thirty feet deep in the ice and spent three weeks digging it out. They built an ice tent around it, and the last I heard actually got it running."

"I wonder if they'd let us borrow it?"

"Never hurts to ask," said Cash. "But I think you'd do better selling a basset hound on eating broccoli."

"We've got to try," Pitt said firmly.

"You got Arctic clothing?"

"In the plane."

"Better get it on. We'll have to hike to where the Snow Cruiser sits." Then Cash looked as though he'd suddenly thought of something. "Before I forget, I'll have a couple of our maintenance men throw a cover over your plane and set up an auxiliary heater to keep your engines, fuel, and hydraulic systems warm and the ice off the fuselage and wings. Leave a plane set for a week and she'll start to disappear under a buildup of ice."

"Good idea," Giordino acknowledged. "We may have to use it in a hurry if all else fails."

"I'll meet you back here in half an hour and I'll lead you to the vehicle."

"Who is the old guy who's heading up the salvage operation?" asked Pitt.

Cash looked lost for a moment. "I don't really know. He's an eccentric cuss. His crew usually calls him 'Dad.' "

With Cash in the lead, they walked a trail marked with orange flags across the ice for nearly an hour. After a while, Pitt could see figures moving about a large blue tent surrounded by a series of smaller orange polar tents. A light snow was falling and forming a thin white blanket over the tents. Strange as it seems, the Antarctic rarely experiences a heavy snow. It is one of the driest continents on Earth, and a few inches below the surface, the snow is ancient.

There was almost no wind, but not having yet built an immunity against the icy temperatures, Pitt and Giordino felt cold beneath their heavy Arctic clothing. The sun blazed through the remnants of the ozone layer, and the glare would have dazzled their eyes but for the darkly coated lenses of their glasses.

"It looks nice and peaceful," said Pitt, taking in the majestic view of the landscape. "No traffic, no smog, no noise."

"Don't let it fool you," Cash came back. "The weather can change into cyclonic hell in less time than you can spit. I can't count all the fingers and toes that have been lost to frostbite. Frozen bodies are found on a regular basis. That's why anyone who works in the Antarctic is required to provide a full set of dental X rays and wear dog tags. You never know when your remains will have to be identified."

"Bad as that."

"The windchill is the big killer. People have taken a short hike only to be overtaken by high winds that block out all vision, and they freeze to death before finding their way back to the station."

They trudged the final quarter of a mile in silence, stepping over the crusted, wind-carved ice that thickened and compressed as it went deeper. Pitt was beginning to feel the tentacles of exhaustion, too little sleep, and the pressures of the past few days, but the thought of falling into a bed never occurred to him. The stakes were too high, fantastically so. Yet his step was not as energetic as it should have been. He noticed that Giordino was not walking lively, either.

They reached the camp and immediately entered the main tent. The initial sight of the Snow Cruiser stunned them almost as much as when they'd viewed the Wolfs' gigantic ships for the first time. The great wheels and tires dwarfed the men working around them. The control cab that sat flush with the smooth front end rose sixteen feet into the air and brushed the top of the tent. The top of the body behind the cab was flattened to hold the Beechcraft airplane that had not been sent to Antarctica with the big vehicle back in 1940. It was painted a bright fire-engine red, with a horizontal orange stripe running around the sides.

The loud sound they had heard when approaching across the ice came from a pair of chain saws held by two men who were cutting grooves in the massive tires. An old fellow with gray hair and a gray beard was supervising the crude method of cutting tread into rubber. Cash stepped up to him and patted one shoulder to get his attention. The old man turned, recognized Cash, and gestured for everyone to follow him. He led the way outside and then into a smaller tent next door that contained the galley, with a small cookstove. He offered them chairs around a long folding metal table.

"There, that's quieter," he said, with a warm smile, as he stared through blue-green eyes.

"This is Dirk Pitt and Al Giordino with the National Underwater and Marine Agency," said Cash. "They have an urgent mission for the government, and hope you can help them carry it out."

"My name is a bit strange, so my crew, who are all forty years younger than I am, just call me Dad," he said, shaking hands. "What can I do for you?"

"Haven't we met before?" asked Pitt, studying the old man.

"It's possible. I get around quite a bit."

"The Snow Cruiser," said Pitt, cutting to the heart of his request, "is it in any condition to drive to the South Pole?"

"That's what she was built to do, but if you'd have asked that question sixty years ago, or even a week ago, I'd have said no. On dry land it proved a remarkable machine, but on the ice it was a dismal failure. For one thing, the tires were smooth and spun ineffectively without friction. And the gearing in the reduction unit was all wrong. Driving her up a slight hill was like an eighteen-wheeler semi-truck and trailer attempting to pull a load up the Rocky Mountains in sixteenth gear. The engine would lug itself to death. By changing the gears and cutting treads in the tires, we think we can demonstrate that she might have lived up to expectations and actually reached the Pole."

"What if she came up against a crevasse too wide for her to drive over?" inquired Giordino.

"Thomas Poulter, the cruiser's designer and builder, came up with an ingenious innovation. The big wheels and tires were positioned close to the center of the body, which left an overhang front and rear of eighteen feet. The wheels were capable of retracting upward until they were level with the underside of the body. When the driver came to a crevasse, he lifted the front wheels. Then the rear-wheel traction pushed the forward section over the crevasse. Once the front wheels were safe on the opposite side, they were lowered. Finally, the rear wheels were retracted and the front then pulled the cruiser to the other side. A very ingenious system that actually works."

"Where did you find sixty-year-old gears that would fit the reduction unit?"

"The unit, or transmission, was not the only one built. We analyzed the problem and how to fix it before we came down here. The original manufacturer is still in business and had a bin of old parts buried deep in their warehouse. Fortunately, they had the gears we needed to make the necessary changes."

"Have you tested her yet?" asked Giordino.

"You've arrived at an opportune moment," replied Dad. "In the next hour, we hope to run her out onto the ice for the first time since she came to rest in 1940, and see what she can do. And just in time, too. Another couple of weeks and the ice floe would have broken and carried her out to sea, where she would have eventually sunk."

"How do you intend to transport her back to the States?" asked Giordino.

"I've chartered a small cargo ship that is moored off the ice shelf. We'll drive her across the ice, up a ramp, and onto the ship."

"If she performs according to expectations," said Pitt, "can we borrow her for a couple of days?"

Dad looked blank. Then he turned and stared at Cash. "He's joking."

Cash shook his head. "He's not joking. These men desperately need transportation to the Wolf mining facility."

Dad squinted at Pitt as he refilled his wineglass. "I should say not. By the time I'm finished, I will have spent over three hundred thousand dollars to pull her out of the ice, restore her to running condition, and transport her back to the Smithsonian in Washington. When I first discussed my dream of saving the vehicle, everyone laughed at me. My crew and I dug under the worst weather conditions imaginable. It was a major feat to lift her back to the surface again, and we're all damned proud. I'm not about to hand her over to a couple of strangers who want to go joyriding around the ice pack."

"Trust me," said Pitt earnestly. "We're not going for a joyride. As bizarre as it sounds, we are trying to avert a worldwide catastrophe."

"The answer is no!"

Pitt and Giordino exchanged cold looks. Then Pitt removed a small folder from the breast pocket of his arctic survival coat and pushed it across the table at Dad. "Inside, you will find several phone numbers. They list, in order, the Oval Office of the White House, the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, the chief director of NUMA, and the Congressional Security Committee. There are also names of other important people who will back up our story."

"And what, may I ask, is your story?" Dad asked skeptically.

So Pitt told him.

AN hour and thirty minutes later, Dad and his crew, along with Frank Cash, stood and watched silently as the big red vehicle, belching a black cloud of exhaust into the crystal blue sky, lumbered across the frozen landscape toward the horizon.

"I never got Dad's name," said Pitt, as he sat hunched over the steering wheel, gazing through the windshield and studying the ice field ahead for cracks and obstacles.

Giordino stood behind Pitt in the Snow Cruiser's confined chart and control room, studying a topographical map of the ice pack. "The name on an envelope that was sticking out of his pocket read 'Clive Cussler.' "

"That is an odd name. Yet it sounds vaguely familiar."

"Whoever," said Giordino indifferently.

"I hope I didn't step into a minefield when I promised to bring back his off-road vehicle in the same condition he loaned it to us."

"If we put a scratch on it, have him send the bill to Admiral Sandecker."

"Got a heading for me?" Pitt asked.

"Where's your GPS unit?"

"I forgot it in the rush. Besides, they didn't have a Global Positioning System in 1940."

"Just head that way," Giordino said, pointing vaguely into the distance.

Pitt's eyebrows rose. "That's the best you can do?"

"No directional instrument ever created can beat an eyeball."

"Your logic defies sanity."

"How long do you think it will take to get there?" Giordino asked.

"Sixty miles, at only twenty miles an hour," Pitt murmured. "Three hours, if we don't run into any barriers in the ice and have to detour around them. I only hope we can get there before the assault team. A full-scale attack might force Karl Wolf to slice off the ice shelf ahead of schedule."

"I have a sour feeling in my stomach that we won't be as lucky sneaking in here as we were at the shipyard."

"I hope you're wrong, my friend, because a lot of people are going to be very unhappy if we fail."

38

The sun blazed from an azure blue sky, its intensity tripled by the reflection off the crystallized surface as the big red Snow Cruiser crawled over the freeze-dried landscape like a bug over a wrinkled white sheet. Veiled by a gossamer of snow, she trailed a light haze of blue from her twin diesels' exhaust drifting in the air. The huge wheels crunched loudly as they rolled over the snow and ice, their crude crosscut tread gripping without slippage. She moved effortlessly, almost majestically, as she was meant to do, created by men who had not lived to see her fulfill their expectations.

Pitt sat comfortably straight in the driver's seat, and gripping the buslike steering wheel, drove the Cruiser in a straight line toward a range of mountains looming far off to the horizon. He peered through heavily polarized sunglasses. Snow blindness was an ominous threat in cold climates. It was caused by conjunctiva inflammation of the eye by the sun, whose glare reflected a low-spectrum ultraviolet ray. Anyone unlucky enough to suffer the malady felt like sand was being rubbed in their eyes, followed by blindness that lasted anywhere from two to four days.

Frostbite, though, wasn't a hazard. The heaters in the Snow Cruiser kept the cabins at a respectable sixty-five degrees. Pitt's only small but irritating problem was the constant buildup of frost on the three windshields. The window vents did not put out enough air to keep them clear. Though he drove wearing only an Irish-knit wool sweater, he kept his cold-weather clothing nearby, in case he had to leave the cruiser for whatever emergency might rear its unwelcome head. As beautiful as the weather looked, anyone familiar with either pole knew it could turn deadly in less time than it took to tell about it.

When added up, more than a hundred and fifty deaths had been recorded in Antarctica since exploration had begun, when a Norwegian sailor on a whaling ship, Carstens Borchgrevink, had become the first man to step ashore on the continent in 1895. Most were men who had succumbed to the cold, like Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his party, who'd frozen to death on their return trip after trekking to the South Pole. Others had become lost and wandered aimlessly before they died. Many were killed in aircraft crashes and other unfortunate accidents.

Pitt wasn't in the mood to expire, certainly not yet- not if he and Giordino were to stop the Wolfs from launching a frightful horror on mankind. Besides manhandling the Snow Cruiser over the ice shelf, his first order of business was to get to the mining facility as quickly as possible. His handheld GPS was of no use. The geographic display on Pitt's unit was incapable of showing his exact position within a thousand miles of the pole. Because the satellites that relayed the position belonged to the military, who had not planned on conducting a war in Antarctica, they were not in orbit over that part of the globe.

He called down to Giordino, who was standing below and behind him, hunched over a chart table studying a map of the Ross Ice Shelf "How about giving me a heading?"

"Just keep the front end of this geriatric antique aimed toward the highest peak of those mountains dead ahead. And, oh yes, be sure to keep the sea on your left."

"Keep the sea on my left," Pitt repeated in exasperation.

"Well, we certainly don't want to run off the edge and drown, do we?"

"What if the weather closes in and we can't see?"

"You want a heading," Giordino said cynically. "Pick any compass direction you want. You've got three hundred and sixty choices."

"I stand chastised," Pitt said wearily. "My mind was elsewhere. I'd forgotten that all compass readings down here point north."

"You'll never get on Jeopardy."

"Most of the category questions are beyond my meager mental capacity anyway." He turned to Giordino and made a shifty grin. "I'll bet you tell bloody horror bedtime stories to little children."

Giordino looked at Pitt, trying to decipher his meaning. "I what?"

"The cliffs at the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf reach two hundred feet above and nine hundred feet below the surface of the sea. From the top edge to the sea is a sheer drop. We drive off the ledge, there won't be enough left of us to sail anywhere."

"You have a point," Giordino grudgingly conceded.

"Besides falling into a bottomless crevasse or becoming lost and freezing to death in a blizzard, our only other dilemma is if the ice we're driving on breaks loose or calves and carries us out to sea. Then all we'll be able to do is sit and wait for a cataclysmic tidal wave launched by the polar shift to sweep us away."

"You should talk," Giordino said, his voice heavy with sarcasm. "Your bedtime stories make mine sound like Mother Goose science fiction tales."

"The skies are darkening," Pitt said, staring upward through the windshield.

"Do you still think we can make it in time?" asked Giordino.

Pitt glanced down at the odometer. "We've come twenty-one miles in the last hour. Barring unforeseen delays, we should be there in just less than two hours."

They had to make it in time. If the special assault team failed, then he and Giordino were the only hope, as inadequate for the job as any two men seemed. Pitt did not bask in an aura of optimism. He well knew the terrain ahead was fraught with obstacles. His biggest fears were rotting ice and crevasses seen too late. If he wasn't constantly alert, he could drive the Snow Cruiser into a deep crevasse and send it plunging hundreds of feet into the Antarctic Sea below. So far, the frozen wasteland lay fairly flat. Except for thousands of ripples and ruts like those found in a farmer's plowed field, the ride was reasonably smooth. Occasionally, he'd spot a crevasse hiding in the ice ahead. After a quick stop to appraise the situation, he'd find a way to detour around it.

The thought that he was driving a thirty-five-ton lethargic monster of steel across an icy plain with deep fissures looming unseen in every direction was not comforting. Few words in a dictionary could describe the feeling. Suddenly, a crack in the ice became visible, but only after he vas almost on top of it. With a hard twist of the wheel, he dewed the Snow Cruiser around sideways, stopping it within five feet of the edge. After driving parallel to the chasm for half a mile, he finally found a firm surface five hundred yards from where it vanished in the ice.

He glanced at the speedometer and noted that the speed had slowly crept up to twenty-four miles an hour. Giordino, down in the engine room, was fussing with the two big diesel engines, delicately adjusting the valves on the fuel intake pumps and increasing the flow. Because Earth's air is thinner at the poles due to a faster rate of spin, and because it is extremely dry and cold, the fuel ratio needed to be reset, a chore Dad and his crew had not yet performed. Fuel injection was constant on newer diesel engines, but on the sixty-year-old Cummins, the fuel flow to the injectors could be altered.

The frozen desert ahead was bleak, desolate and menacing, while at the same time a landscape of beauty and magnificence. It could be tranquil one moment and frightening the next. In Pitt's mind, it suddenly became frightening. His feet stomped the brake and clutch of the Snow Cruiser, and he watched stunned as a crevasse no more than a hundred feet away opened and spread apart, the crack stretching as far as he could see in both directions across the ice pack.

Dropping down the ladder from the control cabin, he threw open the entry door, stepped outside, and walked to the edge of the crevasse. It was a terrifying sight. The color of the ice on the sides that fell out of sight turned from white at the edge of a beautiful silver-green. Its gap spanned almost twenty feet. He turned as he heard the crunch of Giordino's feet behind him.

"What now?" questioned Giordino. "This thing must run forever."

"Frank Cash mentioned that the wheels could retract to cross crevasse. Let's check out the operation manual that Dad gave us."

As Dad had told them, the Snow Cruiser's designer, Thomas Poulter, had come up with an ingenious solution for the crevasse problem. The underside of the cruiser's belly was flat like a ski, with a front and rear overhang of eighteen feet on both ends from the wheels. Following the instructions in the manual, Pitt pressed the levers that retracted the front wheels vertically until they were level with the body. Then, using the rear wheels for traction, he drove the Cruiser slowly forward until the front section slid across the crevasse and rolled past the opposite edge a safe distance for stability. Next Pitt extended the front wheels and retracted the wheels in the rear. Now using the front-wheel drive, the rear half of the cruiser was pulled the rest of the way over the chasm. After, extending the rear wheels, they were on their way again.

"I do believe I'd call that a brilliant innovation," Giordino said admiringly.

Pitt shifted gears and turned the bow of the Snow Cruiser back toward the peak that had expanded into a range of mountains. "Amazing how he could be farsighted on one mechanism and yet badly underestimate the gearing and tire tread."

"No one is flawless. Except me, of course.'

Pitt accepted the bluster with practiced patience. "Of course."

Giordino took the manual with him into the engine compartment, but not before pointing to the twin temperature gauges on the instrument panel. "The engines are running hotter than normal. Better keep an eye on them."

"How can they run hot when it's twenty degrees below zero outside?" Pitt queried.

"Because their radiators are not exposed. They're mounted directly in front of the engines inside the compartment. It's almost as if they overheat themselves."

Pitt had hoped darkness would cloak their arrival at the mining compound, but at this time of year in the Antarctic, the sunset had barely occurred before it was dawn again. He didn't fool himself into thinking they could infiltrate the facility without being detected, certainly not in a gargantuan fire-engine-red snow vehicle. He knew he'd have to think of something in the next hour and a half. Soon, very soon, the buildings of the extraction plant would appear on the horizon along the base of the mountains.

He began to feel a tinge of hope, but then, as if an unseen force was working against him, the atmosphere grew heavy and congealed like a lace curtain. The wind suddenly swept in from the interior of the continent with the force of a tidal wave. One minute, Pitt could see for sixty miles. The next it was as though he was gazing through a film of water, fluid in motion, iridescent and ephemeral. The sky was gone in the blink of an eye and the sun totally blotted out, as the wind charged over the ice shelf like a raging monster. The world became a swirling pall of pure white.

He kept the accelerator pressed to the metal floor and clenched the steering wheel, not turning it, keeping the big vehicle moving in a straight line. They were in a hurry, and no tempestuous behavior from Mother Nature was going to slow them down.

A man wanders in circles during a whiteout, not because he's right-handed and tends to go in that direction, but because almost all humans unknowingly have one leg that is a millimeter shorter than the other. The same factor held true with the Snow Cruiser. None of the tires had come out of the mold symmetrically perfect with each other. If the steering wheel was locked in place while the vehicle was moving straight, it would gradually begin turning in an arc.

Nothing held substance. It was as if the world no longer existed. The gale-force windstorm seemed to drain the color out of everything. The ice storm swirled and gusted with such force that the driving hail of ice particles bombarded the windshield like tiny nails. Their impact against the glass came like a crescendo of clicking sounds. Pitt felt himself idly wondering if the onslaught would mar the old prewar safety glass. He lurched forward as the Snow Cruiser bounced over a frozen ice ridge unseen under the white maelstrom. He braced for a second bump, but it never came. The ice ran smooth.

The old line "It never rains but it pours," flashed through Pitt's mind when Giordino shouted through the hatch from the engine compartment, "Check your gauges. The engines are still running hot. With no air circulation down here, I have steam coming out of the radiator overflow tubes."

Pitt stared at the temperature gauges on the instrument panel. He'd spent so much effort concentrating on keeping the great vehicle moving on an undeviating course, he'd neglected to check the gauges. Oil pressure was slightly low, but the water temperatures were already crossing into the red zone. In less time than it takes to boil an egg, the radiators would boil over and blow a water hose from the engine. After that, there was no way of telling how long the engines would turn until their pistons burned and froze inside the cylinders. Already, he could hear the engines beginning to misfire as combustion occurred early from the acute heat.

"Throw on your cold-weather gear," Pitt shouted. "When you're ready, open the outside door. The flood of cold air should cool down the engines."

"And freeze us into Popsicles at the same time," Giordino came back.

"We'll have to suffer until they're running at normal temperatures again.

Both men donned their heavy-weather coveralls and hooded parkas again, Pitt struggling with the heavy clothing while he kept the Cruiser on a steady course through the storm. When they were fully dressed and fortified for the cold, Giordino opened the door. A howling chaos surged into the control cabin, the wind moaning and screaming as it whipped through the doorway. Pitt huddled over the steering wheel and stared through half-screwed-shut eyes as the blast of cold flung itself into the control cabin with a banshee shriek that drowned out all sounds from the diesel engines.

He could not have envisioned the profound shock that came from having the temperature inside the cabin drop eighty degrees within thirty seconds. When a human is appropriately clothed for extreme cold, he can endure temperatures of 120 degrees below freezing for twenty to thirty minutes at a time without suffering injury. But when the windchill factor adds another fifty degrees to the temperature, the drastic frigidness can kill within a few short minutes. Pitt's cold-weather clothing could protect him from mere cold, but the chill from the gale sucked the body heat right out of him.

Down in the engine compartment, Giordino sat between the two engines and savored what little heat he could soak up from the exhaust heaters and the radiator fans. He was deeply concerned about how Pitt could survive until the engine temperatures dropped. There was no more communication. The screaming wind made voice contact impossible.

The next few minutes were the longest Pitt had ever spent. He had never known such cold. It felt as if the wind went right through him, cutting his insides as it traveled. He stared at the needles on the engine temperature gauges and saw them drop with agonizing slowness. The ice crystals smashed into the windshields like a never-ending swarm. They hurtled through the door and into the control cabin, quickly covering Pitt and the instrument panel in a white glaze. The heater could no longer cope with the frozen air, and the inside of the windshield quickly frosted over, while the wipers on the outside were overwhelmed and soon became locked in a thickening blanket of ice. Unable to see past the steering wheel, Pitt sat like a rock as the torrent of white curled around him. He felt as though he were being swallowed by a ghost with thousands of tiny teeth.

He clenched his own teeth to keep them from chattering. Fighting forces far beyond his control, and realizing that he might be responsible for saving billions of lives, was not pleasant, but it drove him to stay the course against the screaming wind and stinging ice. What frightened him most was the prospect of driving into a crevasse that was impossible to see before it was too late. The sane thing to do was to slow the Snow Cruiser to a snail's crawl and send Giordino ahead to test the ice, but besides risking his friend's life, it would have cost them precious time, and time was an extravagance they did not have. His numbed right foot could no longer move up and down on the accelerator pedal, so he kept it fully pressed down, frozen in place to the floorboard.

Their drive across that deceptive and treacherous ice field had turned into a freezing nightmare.

There was no point of no return. It was finish the mission or die. The shrieking fury of the ice storm showed no signs of diminishing. Pitt wiped the thickening veneer of ice from the instrument panel at last. The temperature gauge needles were slowly dropping out of the red now. But if he and Giordino wanted to reach their destination without further interruption, the needles would have to fall another twenty degrees.

He was a blind man in a world of the blind. He was even denied a sense of touch. His hands and legs soon went numb, with all feeling lost. His body no longer felt a part of him and refused to respond to his commands. He found it next to impossible to breathe. The bitter cold seared his lungs. The thickening of the blood, the chill seeping through his skin, the stinging pain that was torturing his flesh, despite the insulation of his clothing, drained his strength. He never knew a man could freeze to death so fast. It required a concentrated effort of willpower not to give in and order Giordino to close the door. His bitterness against failing was as strong as the terrible wind.

Pitt had stared the grim reaper in the face before, and he had spat on him. As long as he was still breathing and able to think straight, he still had a chance. If only the wind would die. He knew that storms could vanish as quickly as they were born. Why can't this one die? he implored no one but himself. A horrible emptiness settled over him. His vision was darkening around the edges of his eyes, and still those vexing needles hadn't wavered into the normal temperature range.

He did not exist by any preposterous illusion of hope. He believed in himself and in Giordino and in luck. The Almighty could come along, too, if He was agreeable. Pitt had no wish to welcome the great beyond with open arms. He'd always believed he'd have to be dragged away by either angels or demons, fighting to the end. The jury was still out on whether his good virtues outweighed the bad. The only undeniable, uncontested reality was that he had little to say in the matter and was within minutes of freezing into a block of ice.

If there was a purpose for adversity, Pitt was damned if he knew what it was. Somewhere beyond it all, he stepped from being a mere mortal to a man outside himself. His mind was still clear, still capable of weighing the odds and the consequences. He pushed back the dark nightmare that was closing in on him. Suffering and foreboding no longer had meaning for him. He refused to accept an inevitable end. Any thought of dying became abhorrent and stillborn.

He almost gave way to an overpowering instinct to throw in the towel and surrender, but steeled himself to hold out another ten minutes. There was never a doubt in his mind that he and Giordino would see it through together, nor was there a moment of panic. Save the engines, save himself, and then save the world. That was the line of priority. He rubbed the frost from his glasses and saw that the needles on the gauge were falling faster and rapidly approaching their normal operating temperature.

Twenty more seconds, he told himself, then another twenty. What was the old ditty, "Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall"? Then came relief and exultation, as the temperature gauges registered nearly normal again.

There was no need to shout through the hatch down to Giordino in the engine compartment. The little Italian sensed when the time was ripe by placing a hand momentarily on the top of a radiator. He slammed shut the door, sealing off the frightful force of wind and ice, but not before throwing the interior heater switches as high as they could go. Then he rushed up to the control cabin and roughly pulled Pitt from behind the steering wheel.

"You've done enough for the cause," he said, troubled at seeing Pitt so close to death from hypothermia. "I'll help you down to the engine compartment where you can warm up."

"The Snow Cruiser…" Pitt barely murmured through frozen lips. "Don't let it wander."

"Don't burden yourself. I can drive this mechanical mastodon as well as you."

After setting Pitt on the floor between the big diesels where he could get warm again, Giordino climbed back into the icy control cabin, sat behind the steering wheel, and engaged first gear. Within sixty seconds, he had the grand vehicle boring through the storm once again at twenty-four miles an hour.

The consistent knock of the diesels, running smoothly once again, was more than music to Pitt's ears, it was a symbol of renewed hope. Never in his entire life had anything ever felt so good as the warmth that emanated from the engines and was absorbed by his half-frozen body. His blood soon thinned and circulated again, and he allowed himself he luxury of simply relaxing for half an hour while Giordino held the Wheel.

Almost morbidly, he began to wonder, had the special military force landed? Were they lost and dying in the same treacherous blizzard?

39

Painted in a charcoal gray with no markings but a small American flag on the vertical stabilizer, the McDonnell Douglas C-17 soared above an ocean of pearl-white clouds blanketing the glaring ice of Antarctica like a giant, featherless pterodactyl over a Mesozoic landscape.

Air Force Captain Lyle Stafford was quite at home in his cockpit office flying over the frozen continent. Normally, he flew back and forth between Christchurch, New Zealand, and the American ice stations scattered around Antarctica, transporting scientists, equipment, and supplies. This trip they had been abruptly pressed into service to fly the hurriedly assembled assault teams to the Ross Ice Shelf and drop them over the Destiny Enterprises mining facility.

Stafford looked more like a public relations director than a pilot. Graying hair neatly trimmed, always ready with a smile, he was always volunteering to help out Air Force service and charity organizations. On most flights, he read a book, while his copilot, Lieutenant Robert Brannon, a long-boned Californian whose knees came halfway to his chin when he was seated, tended the controls and instruments. Almost reluctantly, he glanced from his book, The Einstein Papery by Craig Dirgo, out his side window and then at the Global Positioning System display.

"Time to go back to work," he announced, putting aside the book. He turned and smiled at Major Tom Cleary, who sat perched on a stool behind the pilots. "It's almost time to begin prebreathing, Major, and acclimate yourselves to the oxygen."

Cleary stared through the windshield over the pilot's heads, but all he saw was cloud cover. He assumed that a corner of the Ross Ice Shelf was looming unseen ahead and below the aircraft. "How's my time?"

Stafford nodded at the instrument panel. "We'll be over your release point in one hour. Are your men ready and eager?"

"Ready, maybe, but I'd hardly describe them as eager. They've all jumped from a jet aircraft at thirty-five thousand feet at one time or another, but not while it was traveling at four hundred miles an hour. We're used to feeling the aircraft slow down before the ramp lowers."

"Sorry I can't bring you in closer, slower, and lower," said Stafford sympathetically. "The trick is for you and your men to land on the ice without your chutes being discovered in the air. My orders state in no uncertain terms for me to make my routine supply run to McMurdo Sound in my normal flight pattern. I've shaved it as close as I dare without raising suspicion. As it is, you'll have to glide nearly ten miles to your target zone just outside the security fences."

"The wind is blowing from the sea, so that's in your favor," offered Brannon.

"The cloud cover helps, too," Cleary said slowly. "And if they have a functioning radar system, the operator will have to have four eyes to detect us from the exact moment we exit until we deploy our canopies."

Stafford made a slight course change and then said, "I don't envy you, Major, jumping from a nice warm airplane into an icy blast one hundred degrees below zero."

Cleary smiled. "At least you didn't hand me the tired old pilot's line about `jumping from a perfectly good airplane.' I appreciate that."

They all laughed for a few moments at the inside joke among professionals. For decades, parachutists had been posed the question, "Why do you jump from a perfectly good airplane?" usually by pilots. The stock answer Cleary usually gave was "When a perfectly good airplane exists, then I'll quit jumping."

"As for the cold," Cleary continued, "our electrically heated thermal suits will keep us from turning into icicles while we descend to a warmer altitude."

"The clouds extend, too, within a thousand feet of the ground, so you'll be falling blind most of the way, since your compasses and GPS instruments are ineffective," said Brannon.

"The men are well trained for that. The key to a successful high-altitude, low-opening infiltration jump is to exit at the correct grid coordinate upwind, and have everyone under canopy at relatively the same altitude."

"We'll put you out on a silver quarter. But it won't be no picnic."

"No," said Cleary solemnly. "I'm sure that in the first minute after we drop from the plane, we'll wish we were falling into a fiery hell instead."

Stafford checked the instrument panel again. "After you and your men finish prebreathing, I'll decompress the cabin. Immediately afterward, I'll pass on the twenty and ten-minute warnings to you and my crew. Then I'll notify you over the intercom when we're six minutes from the release point. At two minutes out, I'll lower the ramp."

"Understood."

"At one minute out," Stafford went on, "I'm going to ring the alarm bell once. Then, when we're directly over the release point, I'll turn on the green light. At the airspeed we'll be flying, you'll have to get out quickly as a group."

"Our intentions exactly."

"Good luck to you," said Stafford, twisting in his pilot's seat and shaking hands with the major.

Cleary smiled faintly. "Thanks for the ride."

"Our pleasure," Stafford said genuinely. "But I hope we don't have to do it again anytime soon."

"Nor do I."

Cleary stood and straightened, left the cockpit, and walked aft into the aircraft's cavernous cargo bay. The sixty-five men seated inside were a serious-faced group, dogged and dead calm, considering the uncertain peril they were about to encounter. They were young. Their ages ranged from twenty to twenty-four. There was no laughter or unproductive conversation, no grousing or complaining. To a man they were absorbed in checking and rechecking their equipment. They were a composite of America's finest fighting men, hastily thrown together on the spur of the moment from special units nearest to Antarctica that were on counter-drug operations throughout South America. A team of Navy SEALs, members of the Army's elite Delta Force and a Marine Force Recon team… a combined band of secret warriors on a mission unlike any ever conceived.

Once the alert had been given the Pentagon by the White House, the one thing they had in short supply was time. A larger Special Forces unit was on the way from the United States but was not expected to reach Okuma Bay for another three hours, a time span that might prove too late and disastrous. Admiral Sandecker's warning was not received with enthusiasm by the President's top aides, nor the Armed Forces chief of staff. At first, none dared believe the incredible story. Only when Loren Smith and various scientists added their weight to the plea for action was the President persuaded to order the Pentagon to send a special force to stop the rapidly approaching cataclysm.

An air assault with missiles was quickly ruled out because of an utter lack of intelligence data. Nor could the White House and Pentagon be absolutely sure that they might not find themselves in hot water with the world for destroying an innocent plant and hundreds of employees. Nor could they be certain of the specific location for the command center for Earth's destruction. For all they knew, it could be hidden in an underground ice chamber miles from the facility. The Joint Chiefs decided that a manned assault offered the best chance of success, without an international outcry if they were wrong.

The men were seated on their heavy rucksacks, wearing parachutes, and were engaged in completing jumpmaster inspections. The rucksacks were full of survival gear and ammunition for the new Spartan Q99 Eradicator, a ten-pound deadly killer weapon that integrated an automatic twelve-gauge shotgun, a 5.56-millimeter automatic rifle with sniper scope, and a large-bore barrel in the center that fired small shrapnel-inflicting missiles that exploded with deadly results at the slightest impact. The spare magazines, shotgun shells, and shrapnel missiles weighed nearly twenty pounds and were carried in belly packs slung around their waists. The top flap of the belly pack held a navigation board, complete with a Silva marine compass and digital altimeter, both clearly visible to the jumper while gliding under his canopy.

Captain Dan Sharpsburg led the Army's Delta Force, while Lieutenant Warren Garnet was in command of the Marine Recon Team. Lieutenant Miles Jacobs and his SEAL team, which had aided NUMA on St. Paul Island, was also part of the assault force. The combined group was under the command of Cleary, a Special Forces veteran who had been on leave with his wife enjoying the Kruger Game Park in South Africa, when he was whisked away on a minute's notice to take command of the elite makeshift assault unit. It had to be the first time in American military history that separate special units were merged to fight as one.

For this mission, every man would be utilizing a new ram-air parachute system for the first time, called the MT-1Z or Zulu. With a four-to-one lift-to-drag ratio, the canopy could travel four meters horizontally for every meter descended, an advantage that did not go unappreciated among the three teams.

Cleary scanned the two rows of men. The nearest officer, Dan Sharpsburg, tilted his head and grinned. A red-haired wit with a gross sense of humor, and an old friend, he was one of the few who actually looked forward to the suicidal plunge. Dan had been "chasing airplanes" for years, achieving the status of Military Free Fall Instructor at the U.S. Army's prestigious Special Forces Military Free Fall School in Yuma, Arizona. When not off on a mission or training, Dan could be found skydiving with civilians for the fun of it.

Cleary had barely had time to glance at the service records of Jacobs and Garnet, but he knew they were the best of the best turned out by the Navy and Marines for special force missions. Though he was an old Army man, he well knew the SEALs and Marine Recon teams were among the finest fighting men in the world.

As he looked from face to face, he thought that if they survived the jump and glide to the target site, they then had the Wolfs' security force to contend with. A well-armed and trained small army of mercenaries, he was told, many of whom had served the very same forces as the men on the plane. No, Cleary concluded. This would be no picnic.

"How soon?" Sharpsburg asked tersely.

"Less than an hour," Cleary answered, moving down the line of men and alerting Jacobs and Garnet. Then he stood in the middle of the united fighting men and gave them final instructions. Satellite aerial photos were carried by everyone in a pocket of their thermal suits, to be studied once they had fallen into the clear and opened their canopies. Their target landing site was a large ice field just outside the mining facility, whose broken, uneven landscape offered them a small degree of protection when regrouping after the jump. The next part of the plan was the assault on the main engineering center of the facility, where it was hoped the doomsday controls were housed. Expert military minds judged that fewer casualties would occur if they landed and attacked from the outside rather than landing in the maze of buildings, antennas, machinery, and electrical equipment.

Coordination was to take place once each unit was on the ground and assembled for the assault. Any who were injured upon landing would have to suffer the cold and be dealt with later, after the facility had been secured and any systems or equipment that were designed to separate the ice shelf destroyed.

Satisfied that each man knew what was expected of him, Cleary moved to the rear of the cargo bay and donned his parachute and rucksack. Then he had one of Sharpsburg's men give him a complete jumpmaster inspection, with emphasis on his oxygen-breathing equipment for the long fall.

Finally, he silhouetted himself with his back to the closed cargo ramp in the floor and waved his hands to get the men's attention. From this point on, communication with the entire assault team would be conducted by hand and arm signals, which was standard operating procedure. The only voice communications until the jump would be between Cleary, Sharpsburg, Jacobs, Garnet, and Stafford in the cockpit. Once they exited the aircraft and were under canopy, each man could communicate with individual Motorola radios over secure frequencies.

"Pilot, this is the jumpmaster."

"I read you, Major," came back Stafford's voice. "Ready on the mark?"

"Jumpmaster checks complete. Oxygen prebreathing is under way."

Cleary took an empty seat and studied the men. So far, it was going well, almost too well, he thought. This is the time when Murphy's Law came sneaking around, and Cleary wasn't about to allow Mr. Murphy any opportunities. He was pleased to see the men were fully alert and primed.

They wore hoods under gray Gentex flight helmets to gain additional protection from the harsh subzero temperatures. Adidas Galeforce yellow-lens goggles for fog and overcast were attached to the helmets, resting up and leaving the men's eyes clearly visible to Cleary and the oxygen technician so they could check for any signs of hypoxia. The heating units in their thermal suits were activated, and each man checked his buddy to make certain that all equipment was properly organized and in place. Bungee cords and web straps were strategically laced around each man's clothing and equipment to prevent them from being torn away by the great burst of air expected upon their exit from the ramp.

After they checked their radios to confirm that each was transmitting and receiving, Cleary stood up and moved near the closed ramp. Facing his assault force again, he saw that all the men were giving him their undivided attention. Once again, he motioned to the man nearest his left with a thumbs-up signal.

In the cockpit, carefully studying his computerized course and the programmed target, Captain Stafford was concentrating his mind and soul on dropping the men waiting aft over the precise spot that would give them every chance of surviving. His primary concern was not to send them out ten seconds too early or five seconds too late and scatter them all over the frozen landscape. He disengaged the automatic pilot and turned the controls over to Brannon so his perspective and timing would not be diverted. Stafford switched to the cockpit intercom and spoke through his oxygen mask to Brannon. "Deviate one degree and it will cost them."

"I'll put them over the target," Brannon said self-assuredly. "But you have to put them on it."

"No confidence in your aircraft commander's navigational abilities? Shame on you."

"A thousand pardons, my captain."

"That's better," Stafford said expansively. He switched to the cargo bay intercom. "Major Cleary, are you ready?"

"Roger," Cleary answered briefly.

"Crew, are you ready?"

The crewmen, wearing harnesses attached to cargo tie-down rings and portable oxygen systems, were standing a few feet forward of the ramp on opposite sides.

"Sergeant Hendricks ready, Captain."

"Corporal Joquin ready, sir."

"Twenty-minute warning, Major," Stafford announced. "Depressurizing cabin at this time."

Hendricks and Joquin moved cautiously close to the ramp, carefully guiding their harness anchor lines, following checklists and preparing for what was about to become one of the most unusual duties of their military careers.

As the cabin decompressed, the men could feel the temperature drop, even within the protective confines of their electrically heated thermal jumpsuits. The air hissed from the cargo bay as it slowly equalized with the outside atmosphere.

Time passed quickly. And then Stafford's voice came over the intercom.

"Major, ten-minute warning."

"Roger." There was a pause, then Cleary asked sarcastically, "Can you give us any more heat back here?"

"Didn't I tell you?" Stafford replied. "We need ice for cocktails after you leave."

For the next two minutes, Cleary went over the infiltration plan of the mining facility in his mind. They were combining the elements of a high-altitude, low-canopy opening jump with a high-altitude, high-canopy opening jump to keep detection to a minimum. The plan was for the team to free-fall to 25,000 feet, open their canopies, assemble in the air, and fly to the target landing zone.

Sharpsburg's Delta Force would exit first, closely followed by Jacobs and his SEALS, and then by Garnet and his Marine Recon Team. Cleary would be the last man to jump, in order to have an overview of his men and be in the most advantageous position to give course corrections. Sharpsburg would be the Mother Hen, the term tagged to the lead j camper. All of the Ducks in Line would then follow. Where Sharpsburg went, so would they.

"Six minutes to jump," came Stafford's voice, interrupting Cleary's thoughts.

Stafford's eyes were on the computer monitor, linked to a newly installed photo system that revealed the ground in astonishing detail through the clouds. Brannon handled the big aircraft as tenderly as if it were a child, his course rock-steady on the line that traveled across the monitor, with a small circle depicting the jump target.

"Damn the orders!" Stafford suddenly snorted. "Brannon!"

"Sir?"

"At the one-minute warning, cut our airspeed to 135 knots indicated. I'm going to give those guys every chance at surviving I can. When Sergeant Hendricks reports that the last man has jumped, ease the throttles to two hundred knots."

"Won't the Wolfs' ground radar pick up our reduction in speed?"

"Radio McMurdo Station on an open frequency. Then say we're experiencing engine trouble, will have to reduce speed and arrive late."

"Not a bad cover," Brannon conceded. "If they're monitoring us on the ground, they'd have no reason not to buy the story."

Brannon went on his radio and announced the deception to anyone who was listening. Then he gestured at the numerals flashing on the computer monitor indicating the approaching jump mark. "Two minutes coming up."

Stafford nodded. "Begin reducing speed, very gradually. At one minute to drop, just after I ring the bell, cut the airspeed to 135."

Brannon flexed his fingers like a piano player and smiled. "I shall orchestrate the throttles like a concerto."

Stafford switched to the cargo bay intercom. "Two minutes, Major. Sergeant Hendricks, begin opening the ramp."

"Ramp opening," came back Hendricks's steady voice.

Stafford turned to Brannon. "I'll take the controls. You handle the throttles so I can concentrate on timing the drop."

After monitoring the transmission, Cleary stood up and moved to the port side of the ramp, keeping his back turned to one side of the fuselage so he had a clear view of his men, the jump/caution lights, and the ramp. He raised and extended his right arm in an arc, palm facing from his side to a perpendicular position. This was the command to stand up.

The men rose from their seats and stood, checking their rip cords and equipment again, adjusting the heavy rucksacks they wore to the rear below their main parachute container. The huge ramp began to creep open, allowing a great rush of frigid air to sweep through the cargo bay.

The next seconds passed with cruel sluggishness.

In grim determination, they gripped the steel anchor line cables with gloved hands for support against the immense whirlwind they expected when the ramp fully opened, and as guides as they moved to the edge of the ramp to execute their exit. Although they exchanged self-assured glances, it was as if they didn't see their buddies around them. No words were needed to describe what they would experience once the ramp opened, and they dove into air so cold it was unimaginable.

In the cockpit, Stafford turned to Brannon. "I'll take the controls now, so I can concentrate on timing. The throttles are yours."

Brannon raised both his hands. "She's all yours, Cap."

"Cap? Cap?" Stafford repeated as if in pain. "Can't you show me at least a smidgen of respect?" Then he switched the intercom aft. "One minute warning, Major."

Cleary did not acknowledge. He didn't have to. The alarm bell rang once. He gave the next signal, right arm straight out to his side at shoulder level, palm up, then bent it at the elbow until his hand touched his Gentex helmet, giving the command to move to the rear, the men in front coming to a stop three feet from the ramp hinges. He lowered his goggles into place and silently began counting off the seconds until exit. Suddenly, he sensed something out of place. The aircraft was noticeably slowing.

"Ramp opened and locked, Captain," Hendricks informed Stafford.

The sergeant's voice took Cleary by surprise. He immediately realized that he had forgotten to disconnect his communications cord from the intercom jack.

Cleary gave the men the hand and arm signal indicating fifteen seconds from exit. His eyes were fixed on the red caution light. The sixty-five-man team was massed into a tightly compressed group, with Sharpsburg now perched inches from the edge of the ramp.

Simultaneously, as the crimson caution light blinked off and the jump light flashed a vivid green, Cleary pointed to the open ramp.

As if jolted by a shock of electricity, Lieutenant Sharpsburg dove from the aircraft, soaring off into cloud-shrouded nothingness. With his arms and legs spread, he was swept out of sight as swiftly as if he'd been jerked by a giant spring. His team was no more than a few feet behind as they were also swallowed up in the clouds, followed swiftly by Jacobs and his SEAL team. Then came Garnet and his Marines. As the last Marine stepped off the ramp edge, Cleary leaped and was gone.

For a long moment, Hendricks and Joquin stood and stared into the white oblivion, unable to believe what they had just witnessed. Almost as if mesmerized, Hendricks spoke into the intercom on his oxygen mask. "Captain, they're gone."

Brannon lost no time in easing the throttles forward until the airspeed instruments read two hundred knots, half the C-17's cruising speed. The cargo door was closed and the oxygen system in the cargo bay replenished. Stafford's next act of business was to switch to a secure frequency and radio the U.S. South Atlantic Command Headquarters to report that the jump went as scheduled. Then he turned to Brannon.

"I hope they make it," he said quietly.

"If they do, it will be because you sent them out into a blast of air a good two hundred and fifty miles an hour less in strength than our normal cruising speed."

"I hope to God I didn't give them away," said Stafford, without remorse. "But it seemed certain death to subject them to such an explosive gust."

"You won't get an argument from me," Brannon said somberly.

Stafford sighed heavily as he reengaged the automatic pilot. "Not our responsibility any longer. We dropped them right on a dime." Then he paused, staring into the ominous white clouds that whipped past the windshield and obscured all view. "I pray they all get down safely."

Brannon looked at him askance. "I didn't know you were a praying man."

"Only during traumatic times."

"They'll make it down," said Brannon, with a sense of optimism. "It's after they hit the ground that hell could break loose."

Stafford shook his head. "I wouldn't want to go up against those guys that just jumped. I'll bet their attack will be a walk in the park."

Stafford had no idea how dead wrong he was.

The radar operator in the security building headquarters next to the control center picked up a phone as he studied the line sweep around his radar screen. "Mr. Wolf. Do you have a moment?"

A few minutes later, Hugo Wolf walked briskly into the small darkened room filled with electronic units. "Yes, what is it?"

"Sir, the American supply aircraft suddenly reduced its speed."

"Yes, I'm aware of that. Our radio intercepted a message from them saying they were having engine trouble."

"Do you think it might be a ruse?"

"Has it strayed from its normal flight path?" asked Hugo.

The radar operator shook his head. "No, sir. The plane is ten miles out."

"You see nothing else on the screen?"

"Only the usual interference during and immediately after an ice storm."

Hugo put a hand on the operator's shoulder. "Follow her course to make sure she doesn't double back, and keep a sharp eye for a hostile intrusion from the sea or air."

"And behind us, sir?"

"Now, who do you think would have the powers to cross the mountains or trek over the ice shelf in the middle of an ice storm?"

The operator shrugged. "No one. Certainly no one who is human."

Hugo grinned. "Exactly."

Air Force General Jeffry Coburn laid the phone back in its receiver and looked across the long table in the war room deep beneath the Pentagon. "Mr. President, Major Cleary and his unified command have exited the aircraft."

The Joint Chiefs and their aides were seated in a theaterlike section of a long room whose massive walls were covered with huge monitors and screens showing scenes of Army bases, Navy ships, and Air Force fields around the globe. The current status of ships at sea and military aircraft in the air were constantly monitored, especially the big transports carrying the hastily assembled Special Forces from the United States.

One huge screen that lay against the far wall held a montage of telephoto images taken of the Destiny Enterprises mining facility at Okuma Bay. The photos in the montage were not from an overhead view, but appeared to be pieced together and conceptualized after being shot from an aircraft several miles off to one side of the facility. There were no overhead images because the military had no spy reconnaissance satellites orbiting over the South Pole. The only direct radio contact with Cleary's assault force came from a civilian communications satellite used by United States ice research stations on the Ross Ice Shelf that was linked to the Pentagon.

Another screen revealed President Dean Cooper Wallace, six members of his cabinet, and a team of his close advisers, who were seated around a table in the secure room deep beneath the White House. The directors of the CIA and FBI, and Ron Little and Ken Helm, were also present on a direct link with the war room, along with Congresswoman Loren Smith, who had been invited because of her intimate knowledge of Destiny Enterprises. While they acted as advisers to the President on what had been given the code name Apocalypse Project, Admiral Sandecker sat with the joint Chiefs at the Pentagon and acted as consultant on their end.

"What is the countdown, General?" asked the President.

"One hour and forty-two minutes, sir," General Amos South, head of the joint Chiefs, answered. "That is the time our scientists tell us when tidal currents are at their height to separate the ice shelf and carry it out to sea."

"Just how accurate is this intelligence?"

"You might say it comes from the horse's mouth," Loren replied. "The timetable was revealed by Karl Wolf himself and was confirmed by the nation's top glaciologists and experts on nanotechnology."

"Since Admiral Sandecker's people penetrated Wolf's organization," explained Ron Little, "we have accumulated considerably more intelligence on what the Wolfs call the Valhalla Project. It all adds up to them doing exactly what they threaten, cutting off the Ross Ice Shelf and upsetting Earth's rotational balance in order to cause a polar shift."

"Triggering a cataclysm of unimaginable destruction," added Loren.

"We've come to the same conclusion at the FBI," said Helm, backing up Little. "We've asked experts in the field of nanotechnology to study the facts, and all agree. The Wolfs have the scientific and engineering capability to execute such an unthinkable act."

The President stared into the monitor at General South. "I still say, send in a missile and stop this insanity before it can get off the ground."

"Only as a last resort, Mr. President. The Joint Chiefs and I strongly agree that it is too risky."

Admiral Morton Eldridge, Chief of the Navy, entered the discussion. "One of our aircraft equipped with radar intercept systems has arrived on site. They've already reported that the Wolf mining facility has superior radar equipment that could detect an incoming missile from an aircraft or nearby submarine with a warning time of three minutes. That's more than enough time to alert and panic them into throwing the doomsday switch early, a situation that may or may not break off the ice shelf. Again, a risk that is a poor gamble at best."

"If, as you say," said Wallace, "their radar equipment is rated as superior, haven't they already been alerted by your aircraft and the signals it sends out?"

Admiral Eldridge and General Coburn exchanged bemused glances before Eldridge replied. "Because it is highly classified, it is known only by a select few that our new radar warning systems are virtually undetectable. Our radar interception aircraft is below the horizon. We can bend our signals to read theirs, but they cannot find or read ours."

"Should our ground force be unable to penetrate the Wolf security defenses," said South, "then, of course, as a last resort, we'll send in a missile from our nuclear attack sub Tucson."

"She's already on station in the Antarctic?" asked Wallace incredulously.

"Yes, sir," answered Eldridge. "A fortunate coincidence. She was on an ice data-gathering patrol when she successfully destroyed the Wolfs' U-boat that was firing on the NUMA research ship Polar Storm. Admiral Sandecker alerted me in time to send her to Okuma Bay before the final countdown."

"What about aircraft?"

"Two Stealth bombers are in the air and will begin a holding pattern ninety miles from the facility in another hour and ten minutes," answered Coburn.

"So we're covered from air and sea," said Wallace.

"That is correct," General South acknowledged.

"How soon before Major Cleary and his force begin their assault?"

South glanced up at a huge digital clock on one wall. "Depending on wind and overcast conditions, they should be gliding toward their target and landing in a few minutes."

"Will we receive a blow-by-blow account of the assault?"

"We have a direct link to Major Cleary's ground communications through the satellite that's servicing our ice stations at the Pole and McMurdo Sound. But since he and his men will be extremely busy for the next hour, and possibly coming under hostile fire, we do not think it wise to interfere or interrupt their field communications."

"Then we have nothing to do but wait and listen." Wallace spoke mechanically.

Silence greeted his words. No one in either war room offered him a reply.

After a long moment, he murmured, "God, how did we ever get in this mess?"

40

Hurtling more than 120 miles an hour through the thickly layered cloud mist from 35,000 feet, Cleary spread his arms apart and faced what he could only assume was the ground, since the cloud cover hid all evidence of a horizon. His mind boycotted the frigid blast of air that engulfed him, and he concentrated on maintaining a stable body position. He mentally reminded himself to personally thank Stafford someday for slowing the aircraft. It was a gesture that had provided the assault team with near-perfect conditions for exiting in a tightly knit group and enabled them to achieve a stable attitude without tumbling uncontrollably for several thousand feet. That situation would have scattered the teams over several miles, making the infiltration of a cohesive, intact fighting element nearly impossible.

He moved his left wrist within a few inches of his goggles, bringing the face of the MA2-30 altimeter within easy view. He was rapidly descending past 33,000 feet. Given the low air density at this altitude, he expected to speed up considerably.

Cleary concentrated on preserving his heading, 180 degrees from the C-17's course at exit time, and he scanned the air immediately around him for signs of the other men in free fall. He passed through a heavy layer of moisture and felt the stinging pellets of hail stab the front of his body, mask, and goggles. Off to his right, about forty feet, he could barely see the flashing of several high-intensity firefly lights in the gray emptiness.

The lights were attached to the top of each man's Gentex helmet with the beam facing backward. They were set in that direction as a preventive measure to warn a man falling directly on top of another at the moment of canopy pull.

He briefly wondered if they might have exited over the incorrect grid. It hardly made any difference now. They were committed. They were either upwind of the target landing zone or not. It was a fifty-fifty chance. Only his faith in Stafford's flying ability gave him a healthy measure of optimism.

In the seconds between the time that Captain Sharpsburg had dived from the ramp and Cleary followed, the point of no return had passed into oblivion. He looked down at the airspace directly beneath him and saw no one. Next he checked his altitude. He was approaching 28,000 feet.

The plans called for the men to free-fall to 25,000 feet, open their canopies, assemble in the air, and glide to the target landing zone. Slightly before reaching that altitude, each man would have to initiate his pull sequence. That meant clearing his airspace and arching his body as perfectly as possible, then locating and maintaining eye contact with his main rip cord on the right, outboard side of his parachute harness. The next step was to grasp and pull the rip cord and check over his right shoulder to be sure that his canopy was deploying properly. He would need a thousand feet of working altitude in order for his main canopy to open at 25,000 feet on the mark.

Off in the distance, he could now see more firefly lights, ten, perhaps twelve. The cloud layer was thinning and visibility was increasing as they penetrated the lower altitudes. Cleary's altimeter read 26,000 feet. Rational thoughts ceased and years of training took over. With no hesitation, Cleary reacted decisively, silently repeating the commands as he executed the action sequence. Arch, look, reach, pull, check, check, and check.

Cleary's MT-1Z main canopy deployed in a near-perfect attitude and heading, softly, smoothly, and without the slightest indication that it had slowed him from an airspeed of 150 miles an hour straight down to nearly zero. He was now suspended underneath the fully inflated wing, drifting with the wind like a lethargic marionette.

As if booming stereophonic loudspeakers had been switched off, the sound of wind howling past him had ceased. The earpiece speakers inside his Gentex helmet crackled with static, and for the first time since he'd stepped from the ramp, Cleary distinctly heard the sounds of his breathing through the oxygen mask. He looked up immediately and meticulously inspected every square inch of his canopy for any signs of damage, including the suspension lines from their attaching points to the risers.

"Wizard, this is Tin Man, requesting a common check, over," Lieutenant Garnet's voice came over the earpiece receivers. Every man was capable of communicating via throat microphones attached to Motorola radios in a secure mode.

Cleary answered, initiating a communications check that used the team sub-element call signs. "All teams, this is Wizard, report your status in sequence, over." Because of the lack of visibility, Cleary could not see the entire group. He had to rely on his sub-element leaders for details.

Captain Sharpsburg responded first. "Wizard, this is Lion. I have the point at twenty-three thousand feet. Also, visual contact with all but two of my men. Standing by to lead the stick to target." Stick was the term for a team of men descending in a line.

"Roger that, Lion," acknowledged Cleary.

"Wizard, Scarecrow here," announced Jacobs. "At twenty-four thousand feet and in visual contact with all my men. Over."

Garnet of the Marines was next. "Wizard, this is Tin Man. I have visual contact with all but one of my men."

"I copy, Tin Man," said Cleary.

Reaching up, Cleary grasped the control toggles of the left and right risers, giving them a simultaneous tug and unstowing the breaks, placing the canopy in full flight mode. He felt a surge of acceleration as the canopy picked up airspeed. Cleary's earpiece speakers were humming with the sounds of team members checking in with their respective leaders. He mentally reviewed the events that lay ahead. If the assault team had been released at the correct coordinates, they should land in the middle of a large open space on the ice near the security fence of the mining facility. The terrain afforded them safe cover and concealment from which they could assemble and conduct a final equipment check prior to moving into the assault position.

He could lightly feel the wind rushing by as his canopy gained airspeed, an indication that he was traveling with predominant winds and not against them. At 19,000 feet, the cloud layers opened up, revealing the stark white expanse of the frozen Antarctic landscape. Canopies were strung out in a jagged, stairstep line to his front, with the firefly beams looking like a string of Christmas lights hung above an empty horizon.

Suddenly, he was called by Garnet. "Wizard, this is Tin Man. I am one man short, repeat, one man short, over."

Damn! Cleary thought. It was going too smoothly, and now Murphy stepped in to remove any false sense of security.

Cleary didn't ask the name of the missing man. It wasn't necessary. If he had a malfunction and jettisoned his main canopy, he should be somewhere below the stick of canopies heading toward the assembly area, suspended beneath his reserve canopy. There was no thought of the man falling to his death. It rarely ever happened. Once on the ground, the missing man would have to rely on his skills to survive until a search team could be sent out after the facility was secured.

Cleary's only concern was the man's equipment. "Tin Man. This is Wizard. What arsenal was the man carrying?"

"Wizard, we are missing one complete demolition kit and two LAWS, over."

Not good. The LAW was a Light Antitank Weapon, a powerful, oneshot, throwaway unit that could take out an armored vehicle. Two men had cross-loaded a LAW each, so there were still two in reserve. The demolition kit was critical. It contained thirty pounds of C-4 plastic explosive, detonation cord, and time fuses. They badly needed the kit if they encountered barricades or fortifications. Of all the men to lose, (weary cursed, it had to be the one carrying the only demo kit and two LAWS.

So be it. "Wizard to all elements. Target is eight miles out. Extinguish all firefly lights and maintain maximum radio silence. Close up the stick as tight as possible. Wizard, out."

They were down to a fifteen-minute canopy flight to the target landing zone. Cleary checked his watch. They were still racing the clock, with little time in reserve. He hoped the missing man was not an omen. Myriad things could go wrong in the next half hour. They couldn't afford to lose another man and vital equipment. The tailwind was pushing them along nicely. Cleary looked ahead and down, satisfied that the stair-step formation was tight and the new-model canopies were exceeding all expectations for glide and stability. The plan was to be over the target landing site at 500 feet.

The mining facility was getting closer. Details of the buildings could be recognized through occasional breaks in the clouds. Now they were at 8,000 feet altitude and moving into a phase of the operation where they were most vulnerable before they were safely on the ground.

At 7,000 feet, Cleary felt something out of place. He was losing airspeed. His canopy began to buck and flutter from a crosswind that had swept in from nowhere. He intuitively reached up for the toggles nestled on the rear side of the front risers. These were canopy "trim tabs," which increased the canopy's angle of attack to counter the crosswind.

"Wizard, this is Lion. We've got one hell of a crosswind."

"Roger, Lion. I have it at my altitude as well. All elements, use trim tabs and maintain heading."

Cleary looked down and saw the icy landscape moving by, considerably slower than before. At 2,000 feet, the tailwind thankfully picked up again and the crosswind died off. He scanned the mining facility for movement or activity. Everything on the ground appeared normal. Puffs of white vapor revealed where warm air and exhaust escaped from within the facility's buildings. It looked deceivingly unthreatening.

At last, Cleary heard the message he was hoping for.

"Wizard, this is Lion. I have cleared the security fence and have visual of the target landing zone. We're almost home."

"Roger that, Lion," Cleary answered with relief.

He watched as the front element of the stick moved slightly to the right. They were preparing to fly a downwind and base leg of their flight in preparation for turning into the wind and landing. Sharpsburg, the lead man, turned perpendicular to the direction of flight. The stick of canopies immediately behind him followed suit, turning on the same imaginary point in the sky as Sharpsburg.

"Wizard," Lion reported, without bothering to identify himself, "five hundred feet and preparing to land."

Cleary did not reply. There was no need. He watched as the first canopy landed on target and deflated, followed by the second, then the third. As the men touched down, they jettisoned as much gear as possible and took up a hasty defensive perimeter.

Now at 500 feet, Cleary observed Jacobs's SEAL team mirror the landing of the Delta team. Next came Garnet and his Marines. Now directly over the imaginary turning point, he tugged at the left toggle and slid around ninety degrees for one hundred meters, repeating the maneuver until he was facing the wind. He felt it push into his body, slowing the canopy's forward movement. Then Cleary brought both toggles to the halfway point and studied the frozen ground and his altimeter collectively.

Two hundred feet came quickly. The ground was rushing up to meet him. Past the one-hundred-foot mark, he let up on his toggles, completely entering free flight. Then, relying on his expertise and experience, Cleary pulled the toggles all the way down until they reached full extension, and he touched the Antarctic's icebound surface as lightly as if he'd stepped off a curb.

He quickly unbuckled his harness and dropped the parachute system that had carried him safely to his destination. Then he knelt down and prepared his Spartan Q-99 Eradicator, locking and loading it for immediate use.

Garnet, Sharpsburg, and Jacobs were at his side within thirty seconds. They coordinated briefly, checking their position and making final preparations for their movement toward the control center of the facility. After issuing final instructions to Sharpsburg, who would be in charge of the assault team if Cleary was killed or badly wounded, he peered at the facility through his field glasses. Not seeing any signs of defensive activity, Cleary ordered the teams to move out tactically, with himself in the middle of the patrol.

41

Loath to die, the wind struggled to stay alive until there was no more strength left in it. Then it was gone, leaving the sun to transform the last of the windblown ice crystals into sparkling diamond dust. The dismal gray light gave way to a blue sky that returned as the Snow Cruiser forged relentlessly across the ice shelf. The mighty machine had proven herself a tough customer. Engines running faultlessly, wheels churning through the snow and ice, she never stalled or floundered during the malicious blizzard. But for the muffled tone of her exhaust, the stillness that settled over the desolate ice shelf made it seem like oblivion.

Warmed finally by the engines, Pitt felt ready to face reality again. He took over the wheel from Giordino, who found a broom in the bunk compartment and used it to brush the ice buildup off the windshields. Released from their frozen bondage, the windshield wipers finished sweeping the glass clean. The Rockefeller Mountains materialized in the distance and rose above the bow of the vehicle. They were that close.

Pitt pointed to a series of black smudges on the sun-splashed white horizon slightly off to his left. "There lies the Wolf mining works."

"We did good," said Giordino. "We couldn't have wandered more than a mile off our original track during the storm."

"Another three or four miles to go. We should be there in twenty minutes."

"Are you going to crash the party unannounced?"

"Not a wise move against an army of security guards," answered Pitt. "That low rock ridge protruding from the ice that angles toward the base of the mountains?"

"I see it."

"We can run along out of sight of the compound, using it for cover while we close the final two miles."

"We just might make it," said Giordino, "if they don't spot our exhaust."

"Keep your fingers crossed," Pitt said with a tight grin.

They left the great ice plain of the Ross Ice Shelf and crossed onto ice-mantled land and skirted the ridge that trailed down from the mountain like a giant tongue, keeping below the summit out of sight of the mining compound as they crept ever closer. Soon they were driving beneath towering gray rock cliffs, with streams of ice hanging from their crests like frozen waterfalls, gleaming blue-green under the radiant sun. The path they took along the base of the mountains was not flat or smooth but strewn with wavelike undulations.

Pitt downshifted the Snow Cruiser into second gear to climb the series of low mounds and valleys. The burly machine took the uneven terrain in stride, her wide wheels moving the great mass up and down the grades without effort. His eyes swept the instrument panel for the tenth time in as many minutes. The temperature gauges indicated that the slow speeds at high rpms were causing the diesels to overheat again, but this time they could keep the door open without suffering the agonies of a blizzard.

They were passing the mouth of a narrow box canyon when Pitt suddenly stopped the Snow Cruiser.

"What's up?" Giordino asked, staring at Pitt. "You see something?"

Pitt pointed downward through the windshield. "Tracks in the snow leading into the canyon. They could have only been made by the treads from a big Sno-cat."

Giordino's eyes followed Pitt's outstretched finger. "You've got good eyes. The tracks are barely visible."

"The blizzard should have covered them," said Pitt. "But they still show because the vehicle that made them must have passed through just as the storm was ending."

"Why would a Sno-cat travel up a dead-end ravine?"

"Another entrance to the mining compound?"

"Could very well be."

"Shall we find out?"

Giordino grinned. "I'm dying of curiosity."

Pitt cranked the steering wheel to its stop and sharply turned the Snow Cruiser into the canyon. The cliffs rose ominously above the ravine, their height escalating until the sun's light paled the deeper they drove into the mountain. Fortunately, the twists and turns were not severe, and the Snow Cruiser was able to deftly navigate her bulk around and through them. Pitt's only worry was that they'd find nothing but a rock wall, and then have to back the vehicle through the canyon, since there was no room to turn her around. A quarter of a mile from the canyon's mouth, Pitt braked the vehicle to a stop before a solid wall of ice.

It was a dead end. Disillusionment circled their minds.

They both stepped down from the Snow Cruiser and stared at the vertical sheet of ice. Pitt peered down at the tracks that traveled up the canyon and stopped at the wall. "The plot thickens. The Sno-cat could not have backed out of here."

"Certainly not without making a second set of tracks," observed Giordino.

Pitt moved until his face was inches from the ice, cupped his hands around his eyes to block out the light, and stared. He could make out vague shadows beyond the ice barrier. "Something is in there," he said.

Giordino gazed into the ice and nodded. "Is this where somebody says, `Open Sesame'?"

"No doubt the wrong code," Pitt said pensively.

"It has to be a good three feet thick."

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

Giordino nodded. "I'll stay on the ground outside and cover you with my Bushmaster."

Pitt climbed back into the Snow Cruiser, shifted the gear lever into reverse, and sent the vehicle back about fifty feet, keeping the tires in the packed depressions made by the Sno-cat for better traction. He paused, grasped the wheel tightly in both hands, and burrowed down in the seat, in case the ice should crash through the windshield. Then he shifted into first and jammed the accelerator pedal flat against the floorboards. With a roar from its exhaust, the big mechanical goliath leaped forward, gathered speed, and then smashed into the frozen wall, rumbling the ground beneath Giordino's feet.

The ice exploded and shattered into a great splash of glittering fragments that showered over the red Snow Cruiser like so many glass shards from a fallen crystal chandelier. The sound of the impact came like a giant gnashing his teeth. At first, Giordino thought the vehicle might have to ram the thick, solidified ice wall several times before breaking through, but he was almost left behind as it bulldozed its way through on the first try and disappeared on the other side. He chased after it, gun cradled in his arms, like an infantryman following a tank for cover.

Once through, Pitt brought the Snow Cruiser to a halt and brushed the glass from his face and chest. A large block of ice had burst through the center windshield, narrowly missing him before it fell to the floor and shattered. His face was cut on one cheek and across the forehead. Neither gash was deep enough to require stitches, but the blood that flowed made him look as though he were badly injured. He wiped the crimson from his eyes onto his sleeve and looked to see where the Snow Cruiser had come to rest.

They were sitting inside a large-diameter ice tunnel, with the vehicle's front end firmly embedded in a frozen wall opposite the shattered entry. In both directions the tunnel looked deserted. Seeing no sign of hostility, Giordino rushed into the Snow Cruiser and climbed the ladder to the control cabin. He found Pitt smiling hideously through a mask of blood.

"You look bad," he said, attempting to help Pitt from the driver's seat.

Pitt gently pushed him away. "It's not nearly as bad as it looks. We can't afford time for a clinical repair. You can patch me up with that old first-aid kit in the crew cabin. In the meantime, I vote we follow the tunnel toward the left. Unless I miss my guess, that will lead us to the mining compound."

Giordino knew it was senseless to contest the issue. He dropped down to the crew cabin and returned with a first-aid kit that hadn't been opened since 1940. He cleaned away the congealing blood on Pitt's face, then smeared the cuts with the antiseptic of the era, iodine, whose sharp sting had Pitt cursing in no quiet tones. Then he dressed the skin cuts. "Another life saved by the capable hands of Dr. Giordino, surgeon of the Antarctic."

Pitt looked into the face that was reflected in a side-view mirror. There was enough gauze and tape to cover a brain transplant. "What did you do?" he asked sourly. "I look like a mummy."

Giordino feigned a hurt look. "Aesthetics is not one of my strong points."

"Neither is medicine."

Pitt gunned the engines and maneuvered the hulking vehicle back and forth until he was able to straighten it around for a journey through the tunnel. For the first time, he wound down his window and studied the width of the tunnel. He figured the clearance between the ice and the vehicle's wheel hubs and its roof was no more than eighteen inches. He turned his attention to a large round pipe that ran along the outer arc of the tunnel, with small tubes running vertically from its core into the ice.

"What do you make of that?" he said, pointing to the pipe.

Giordino stepped from the Snow Cruiser, squeezed himself between the front tire and the pipe, and laid his hands on it. "Not an electrical conduit," he announced. "It must serve another purpose."

"If it's what I think it is…" Pitt's voice dropped portentously.

"Part of the mechanism to break loose the ice shelf," said Giordino, finishing his friend's train of thought.

Pitt stuck his head out his window and stared back into the long tunnel that stretched away to a vanishing point. "It must extend from the mining compound fourteen hundred miles to the opposite end of the ice shelf."

"An inconceivable feat of engineering to bore a tunnel that was equal to the distance between San Francisco and Phoenix."

"Inconceivable or not," said Pitt, "the Wolfs did it. You must remember, it's much easier to bore a tunnel through ice than hard rock."

"What if we cut a gap in the line and stop whatever activation system they've created to split off the ice shelf?" asked Giordino.

"A break might trigger it prematurely," answered Pitt. "We can't take the chance unless we find ourselves left with no other alternative. Only then can we risk dividing the line."

The tunnel looked like a great gaping black mouth. Except for the dim glow of the sun through the thick ice, there was no illumination. An electrical conduit with halogen bulbs spaced every twenty feet ran along the ceiling, but the power must have been shut down at the main junction box, because the lights were dark. Pitt turned on the two small headlights mounted on the lower front end of the Snow Cruiser, engaged gears, and drove off, increasing his speed through the tunnel until they were moving at twenty-five miles an hour. Though it was a pace easily sustained by a bicycle rider, it seemed a breakneck speed through the narrow confines of the tunnel.

While Pitt focused on keeping the Snow Cruiser from brushing against the unsympathetic ice, Giordino sat in the passenger seat, his rifle propped on one knee, eyes fastened as far as the headlights could throw their beams, watching for a sign of movement or any object other than the seemingly unending pipe with its intersecting tubes that ran down into the floor and through the roof of the tunnel.

The ominous fact that the tunnel was deserted suggested to Pitt that the Wolfs and their workers were abandoning the mining facility and preparing to escape to their giant ships. He pushed the Snow Cruiser as fast as it would go, occasionally spinning the wheel hubs into the ice walls and carving a trench before steering the vehicle straight again. Dread began clouding his mind. They had lost too much time crossing the ice shelf. The timetable that Karl Wolf had boasted of in Buenos Aires at the ambassador's party had been four days and ten hours.

The four days had passed, as had eight hours and forty minutes, leaving only an hour and twenty minutes until Karl Wolf threw the doomsday switch.

Pitt estimated that one mile, maybe one and half, separated them from the heart of the facility. He and Giordino were not given satellite maps of the layout, so finding the control center once they were inside would be pure guesswork. The questions nagging his mind were whether the Special Forces team had arrived and had been successful in eliminating the army of mercenaries. The latter would put up a bitter fight- the Wolfs had surely promised to save them and their families from the cataclysm. Any way he looked at it, the thought did not present a rosy picture.

AFTER another eighteen minutes of negotiating the tunnel in silence, Giordino hunched forward and gestured ahead. "We're coming to a crossroads."

Pitt slowed the Snow Cruiser, as they came to an intersection where five tunnels spread off into the ice. The dilemma was maddening. Time did not allow them to make the wrong choice. He leaned out the side window again and studied the frozen floor of the tunnel. Wheeled tracks branched into them all, but the deepest ruts appeared to travel into the one on the right. "The tube on the right looks like it's had the heaviest traffic."

Giordino jumped down out of the Snow Cruiser and disappeared up the tunnel. In a few minutes, he returned. "About two hundred yards farther on, it looks like the tunnel opens into a large chamber."

Pitt gave a brief nod and turned the vehicle and followed the tracks into the tunnel on his right. Strange structures began appearing locked in the ice, vague and indistinguishable but with the straight lines of objects that were man-made rather than a creation of nature. As Giordino had reported, the tunnel soon widened into a vast chamber whose curved roof was covered by ice crystals that hung down like stalactites. Light filtered down from several openings in the roof that illuminated the interior with an eerie glow. The effect seemed extraterrestrial, magical, timeless, and miraculous. Awed by the sight, Pitt slowly brought the Snow Cruiser to a halt.

The two men went silent in astonishment.

They found themselves parked in what was once the main square, surrounded by the icebound buildings of an ancient city.

42

No longer covered by the security blanket of the ice storm, the wind having dropped to only five miles an hour, Cleary felt naked, as his white-clad force fanned out and began advancing toward the mining facility. They took advantage of a series of hummocks that rose like camel humps for cover, until they reached the high fence that ran from the base of the mountain to the cliff above the sea and encircled the main compound.

Cleary had no prior intelligence on the force his men were up against. None had been gathered on the facility, simply because the CIA had never considered it a threat to the nation's security. Discovering the true horror of the menace at the last minute had left no time for covert penetration, nor had this simple hit-and-run strategy. It was a surgical operation, uncomplicated, requiring a quick conclusion. The orders were to neutralize the facility and deactivate the ice shelf breakaway systems before being relieved by a two-hundred-man Special Force team that was only an hour away.

All Cleary had been told was that the Wolf security guards were hardened professionals who came from elite fighting units around the world. This was information provided by the National Underwater & Marine Agency- hardly an organization practiced in intelligence gathering, Cleary mistakenly concluded. He was confident his elite force could handle any hostiles they encountered.

Little did he know that his small force was outnumbered three to one.

Moving in two columns, they reached what at first looked like a single fence but became two that were divided by a ditch. It looked to (weary as if it had been built decades before. There was an old sign whose paint was badly faded but could still be translated as `No Trespassing' in German. Made up of a common chain link, it was topped by several strings of wire whose barbs had become impotent long before from a thick coating of ice. Once many feet higher than now, ice drifts had built up against it until one could easily hoist one leg and step over it. The ditch had also filled in and was little more than a low, rounded furrow. The second fence was higher and still protruded seven feet above the snow, but posed no serious hazard. They lost precious minutes cutting through the strands until they could enter the grounds of the compound. Cleary took it as a good omen that they had penetrated the outer perimeter without discovery.

Once inside, their movements were shielded by a row of buildings with no windows. Cleary called a halt. He paused to examine a fifteen-by-eighteen-inch aerial photo of the compound. Though he had etched every street, every structure, in his mind during the flight from Cape Town, as had Sharpsburg, Garnet, and Jacobs, he wanted to compare a mark on the map to where they had passed through the outer fences. He was pleased to see they were only fifty feet from their intended infiltration point. For the first time since they had landed, regrouped, and advanced across the ice, he spoke into the Motorola radio.

"Tin Man?"

"I copy you, Wizard," replied the gravel voice of Lieutenant Warren Garnet.

"We split up here," said Cleary. "You know what is expected of you and your Marines. Good luck."

"On our way, Wizard," acknowledged Garnet, whose mission, as assigned to his Marine Recon Team, was to secure the generating plant and cut off all power to the facility.

"Scarecrow?"

Lieutenant Miles Jacobs of the Navy SEALs answered quickly. "I hear you, Wizard." Jacobs and his team were to circle around and assault the control center from the side facing the sea.

"You have the farthest to go, Scarecrow. You'd better get a move on."

"We're halfway there," Jacobs replied confidently, as he and his SEALs began moving out down a side road that led in the direction of the control center.

"Lion?"

"Ready to sweep," answered Captain Sharpsburg of the Army Delta Force cheerfully.

"I will accompany you."

"Happy to have an old hand along."

"Let's move out."

There was no synchronizing of watches, no further voice contact, as the teams divided and made their way to their assigned targets. There was no need. They all knew what they had to do, having been fully briefed on the horrendous consequences should they fail. Cleary had no doubts that his men would fight like demons or die without hesitation to stop the Wolfs from launching the apocalypse.

They moved lightly, almost fluidly, in offensive formation, two men ten yards ahead on either flank, and two men covering their rear. Every fifty yards, they stopped, dropped to the ground, or took whatever available cover presented itself, while Cleary studied the terrain and checked with the Marines and the SEAL teams.

"Tin Man, report."

"Sweep is clear. Approaching within three hundred yards of target."

"Scarecrow? Have you encountered anything?"

"If I wasn't sure, I'd say the place is abandoned," answered Jacobs.

Cleary did not reply. He rose from his crouched position as Sharpsburg moved his Lion team forward.

On the face of it, the facility seemed like a bleak and austere layout. Cleary saw nothing special about it, but then trepidation began to mount. The compound appeared totally deserted. No workers showed themselves. No vehicles moved. It was too quiet. The entire inner compound was cloaked in a cold, eerie silence.

Karl Wolf stared at an array of monitors in the headquarters of his security guards on a floor below the main control center. He watched with bemused interest as Cleary and his assault teams made their way through the roads of the complex.

"You'll have no problem preventing them from interrupting our launch time?" he asked Hugo, who was standing next to him.

"None," Hugo assured him. "We have contemplated and drilled for such an intrusion many times. Our fortifications are in place, the barricades raised, and our armored Sno-cats awaiting my orders to move into battle."

Karl nodded in satisfaction. "You have done well. Still, these are the elite of the American fighting forces."

"Not to worry, brother. My men are just as well trained as the Americans. We heavily outnumber them and have the advantage of fighting on our ground. The element of surprise is in our favor, not theirs. They do not suspect that they are walking into a trap. And we can travel through the facility's underground utility tunnels, emerge inside buildings, and attack their flanks and rear before they realize what is happening."

"Your overall strategy?" Karl asked.

"To gradually siphon them into a pocket in front of the control center, where we can destroy them at our leisure."

"Our ancestors who fought so many heroic battles against the Allies during the war would be proud of you."

Obviously pleased by his brother's compliment, Hugo clicked his heels and made a stiff bow. "I am honored to serve the Fourth Empire." Then he looked up and gazed at the monitors, studying the progress of the American fighting teams. "I must go now, brother, and direct our defenses."

"How long do you estimate it will take your men to crush the attackers?"

"Thirty minutes, certainly no more."

"That doesn't leave you and your men much time to reach and board the aircraft. Do not delay, Hugo. I have no wish to leave you and your brave men behind."

"And lose our dream of becoming the founding fathers of a brave new world?" Hugo said spiritedly. "I don't think so."

Karl motioned toward the digital clock mounted between the monitors. "Twenty-five minutes from now, we shall set the ice shelf detaching systems on automatic. Then everyone in the control center will leave through the underground tunnel that leads to the worker's main dormitory safely beyond the battlefield. From there, we'll take electric vehicles to the aircraft hangar."

"We shall not fail," said Hugo, with iron resolve.

"Then good luck to you," said Karl. He solemnly shook Hugo's hand, before turning and stepping into the elevator that would take him to the control room above.

Cleary and the Lion team were only a hundred and fifty yards from the entrance of the control center when Garnet's voice came over his intercom. "Wizard, this is Tin Man. There's something wrong here…"

In that instant, Cleary spotted the barricade blocking the road in front of the control center, saw the dark muzzles of guns propped on its crest. He opened his mouth to shout, but it was too late. A deafening volley laid down by the security guards exploded in front of the Delta Force from every direction. The blasts from two hundred guns swamped and reverberated off the walls of the buildings, cutting the icy air with a deafening roar.

Garnet and his Marines were caught in the open and exposed, but they laid down a covering fire and took whatever cover they could find along the buildings. Despite the ruthless fusillade, they continued advancing toward the power station, until Garnet recognized an ice barricade that was nearly impossible to distinguish against the white background until he was less than a hundred yards away. His men began a counterfire, firing their Eradicator rifles' fragmentation missiles at the security guards behind the barricades.

In front of the control center, at almost the same moment, Cleary found himself facing the same type of ice wall and blistering fire that Garnet was experiencing. Vulnerable to the heavy fire, the lead man on the left flank of the Delta Force caught bullets in a knee and thigh and he went down. Moving flat on his stomach, Sharpsburg grabbed the wounded man by his boots and pulled him around the corner of the building.

Cleary ducked below a stairway leading into a small storehouse. Shards of ice rained down on his shoulders as a stream of shells burst into the icicles hanging from the roof above him. Then a shot struck his body armor square-on above his heart, sending him staggering backward, alive but with a pain in his chest as if someone were pounding it with a sledgehammer. Sergeant Carlos Mendoza, who was the best shot of the team, lined up the crosshairs through the scope of his Eradicator on the Wolf security guard who'd shot Cleary and squeezed the trigger. A black figure jerked up from the crest of the barricade before falling back and disappearing. The sergeant then selected his next target and fired away.

More bullets slammed into the roof above Cleary, scattering ice slivers in a hundred different directions. He saw too late that Wolf's security force was prepared and waiting for them. The fortifications had been designed and constructed for just such an attack. He painfully discovered that the lack of proper intelligence was killing them. He also began to perceive that his attacking force was badly outnumbered by the defenders.

Cleary cursed himself for relying on untested information. He cursed the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, who'd estimated the Wolf security force at no more than twenty to twenty-five men. He cursed his lack of intuition, and in the heat of the moment he cursed himself for making the biggest mistake in his military life. He had badly underestimated his enemy.

"Tin Man!" he shouted into his microphone. "Report your situation!"

"I count sixty or more hostiles blocking the road in front of us," Garnet's voice replied in a monotone, as steady as if he were describing cows in a pasture. "We are under heavy fire."

"Can you force the issue and secure the power plant?"

"We are unable to advance due to extremely accurate fire. These are not your garden-variety security people we're facing. They know what they're doing. Can you send a team to relieve the pressure, Wizard? If we could band together in a flanking movement, I think we can take the barricade."

"Negative, Tin Man," replied Cleary. He well knew that the Recons were the elite of the Marine Corps. If they couldn't advance, nobody could. "We're also halted by heavy fire from at least eighty hostiles and cannot send support. I repeat, I cannot spare men to support you. Extricate as best you can and link up with Lion."

"Understood, Wizard. Withdrawing now."

With his Marines open and exposed, Garnet was frustrated to learn that he could expect no support, but had to retreat and find Cleary and Sharpsburg's Delta Force team through the maze of roads running through the facility. He wasted no time in considering going against orders and continuing the assault. Charging a barricade manned by three times his force across an open road was suicidal and would accomplish nothing but the massacre of his command. He was left with no choice but to begin an orderly withdrawal, carrying out their wounded as they withdrew from the murderous fire.

Having advanced halfway around the control center, Jacobs and his SEALS were jolted by the thunder of conflict and the shocking reports from Cleary and Garnet. He urged his men forward in hopes of securing the control center from the rear and removing the heat from teams Tin Man and Lion. The SEALs were only a hundred yards from the control center building when two armored Sno-cats turned the corner ahead and opened fire on them.

Jacobs watched helplessly as two of his men were cut down. Madder than hell, he held the trigger on his Eradicator rifle until the final round ejected from the clip, then his sergeant grabbed him by the collar of his parka and pushed him behind a trash bin before a barrage of counterfire could strike him. A volley of fragmentation missiles from the SEAL team temporarily halted the Sno-cats, but they began to come on again.

The SEALs fought tenaciously as they executed their withdrawal up the road, using whatever cover they could find. Then, unexpectedly, two more Sno-cats suddenly appeared at their rear and unleashed a torrent of fire. Jacobs felt a knot form in his stomach. He and his team had nowhere to go except into a narrow side alleyway. He prayed they were not being forced into an ambush, but the alley looked clear for at least seventy yards.

As he ran after his men, hoping they could reach cover before the Sno-cats turned the corner of the alley and achieved a field of unobstructed fire, he reported to Cleary. "Wizard, this is Scarecrow. We are under attack by four armored Sno-cats."

"Scarecrow, do they carry heavy weapons?"

"None that show. I make four hostiles with automatic weapons in each vehicle. Our fragmentation missiles have little effect on them."

Cleary crawled under a stairway, using it as a shield, and studied his map of the mining facility. "Give me your location, Scarecrow."

"We are moving down a narrow road toward the sea behind what looks like a row of maintenance shops about a hundred and fifty yards from the control center."

"Scarecrow, go another fifty yards, then bend a right turn and advance between a series of fuel storage tanks. That should bring you close to the front of the control center from a side road, where you can flank the hostiles pinning us down."

"Roger that, Wizard. On our way." Then, as an afterthought, Jacobs asked, "What have we got for defense against the armored Sno-cats?"

"Tin Man has two LAWs."

"We'll need four."

"The man carrying the other two went missing during the jump."

"Tin Man is at the power station," Jacobs said, frustrated. "He's not facing the armored cats, we are."

"I ordered him to withdraw from his objective because of overwhelming concentrated fire. He should be converging with Lion shortly."

"Tell him to load up, because four of those nasty vehicles will be right on our tail when we step into your front yard."

Jacobs and the SEALS soon circled the fuel storage tanks without encountering organized gunfire. Frequently glancing at his map of the facility, he led his men around a long wall that appeared to end near the front of the control center. It seemed like perfect cover, as they rushed to outflank the security guards behind the barrier who were blasting hell out of Sharpsburg and his Delta Force. Hardly had the SEALs come within fifty yards of the end of the wall when a blaze of concentrated fire struck them from the rear.

Unknown to them, a group of security guards had rushed through an underground tunnel and appeared from a building behind, a tactic that was happening with increasing frequency. Jacobs saw that it was virtually impossible to continue on his flanking maneuver, so he took his men along the path of least resistance and led them down a street strangely free of hostile gunfire.

Only eighty yards away, Cleary lay flat and peered through his binoculars, searching for a weak spot in the barricade blocking the entrance to the control center. He found none and realized that, like Garnet's, his position was rapidly becoming untenable, yet he was determined to make an assault on the control center as soon as he was reinforced by the Marine Recon Team, and the SEALs had begun their flanking attack on the barricade.

But down deep, doubts were starting to form as to whether he could still pull the coals of final victory out of the fire.

The security guards were waging war with a vengeance. In their minds, they were fighting not only for their own lives but for the lives of their families who were waiting on board the Ulrich Wolf. Hugo himself was in the thick of the fighting in front of the control center, directing his forces and tightening the noose on the American assault team. His arrogance while issuing orders reflected his supreme confidence and optimism. His battle strategy was going exactly as he'd planned it. Hugo was in the enviable position of a commander who could dictate the terms of the fight.

He was flushing his enemy into one concentrated area for annihilation, as he had promised his brother Karl.

He spoke into an intercom mike inside his battle helmet. "Brother Karl?"

There was a moment or two of slight static before Karl responded. "Yes, Hugo."

"The intruders are contained. You and Elsie and the others can leave for the hangar as soon as the engineers set the nanotech systems on automatic."

"Thank you, brother. I'll soon meet you at the aircraft."

Two minutes later, as Hugo was ordering his two remaining armored Sno-cats to charge the American team, a security guard rushed to him behind the barricade and shouted, "Sir, I have an urgent message from the aircraft hangar!"

"What is it?" Hugo yelled above the gunfire.

But in that instant, Sergeant Mendoza squinted at the head behind the crosshairs inside his sniper scope and gently pulled the trigger of his Eradicator. The guard dropped dead at Hugo's feet, neither hearing nor feeling the bullet enter his right temple and exit the left. The message he had urgently wished to report, on the destruction in the aircraft hangar by a strange vehicle, died with him.

Garnet's Marines linked up with Sharpsburg's Delta team and took cover, as the four Sno-cats withdrew from chasing Jacobs and attacked them in a double column from the rear. They came on oblivious to the two antitank weapons aimed at them by the Marines, who at less than a hundred yards couldn't miss. The lead Sno-cats went up in an explosion of fire and flying debris and bodies, forming an effective roadblock that prevented the remaining vehicles from striking the already beleaguered Americans.

Cleary realized quickly that the reprieve had only short-term benefits and was temporary. It would be only a question of time before the security guards wised up to the fact that no more antitank shells were being fired because the supply was exhausted. Then the armored Sno-cats would attack, and there would be no stopping them. When Jacobs and his team hit the barricade from the flank, hopefully the advantage would swing to their side.

In Washington, the battlefield reports from the men under fire made it evident that the assault force was in deep trouble. It was becoming more obvious by the minute that Cleary and his men were being shot to pieces. The President and the Joint Chiefs could not believe what they heard. What had been launched as a daring mission had turned into a slaughter and a disaster. They were shocked by the growing realization that the mission had failed, and that the entire inhabited world was in jeopardy of vanishing, a nightmare they found impossible to accept.

"The aircraft carrying the main force," the President said, his thinking becoming disoriented, "when…?"

"They won't be over the compound for another forty minutes," answered General South.

"And the countdown?"

"Twenty-two minutes until the currents are right for the ice shelf to break off."

"Then we've got to send in the missiles."

"We will be killing our own men as well," cautioned General South.

"Do we have another option?" the President put to him.

South looked down at his open hands and slowly shook his head. "No, Mr. President, we don't."

Admiral Eldridge asked, "Shall I alert the commander of the Tucson to launch missiles?"

"If I may suggest," said the Air Force chief of staff, General Coburn, "I think it best that we send in the Stealth bombers. Their aircrews are more accurate in guiding their missiles to a target than an unmanned Tomahawk launched from a submarine."

The President quickly made his decision. "All right, alert the bomber pilots, but tell them not to fire until ordered. We never know when a miracle might happen and Major Cleary can force his way into the control center and halt the countdown."

As General Coburn issued the order, General South muttered under his breath, "A miracle is exactly what it will take."

43

Streets ran off the square between buildings that protruded from the ice. They were not on the massive scale of much later civilizations, but their architectural characteristics were unlike any Pitt and Giordino had ever seen in their travels. There was no telling how many acres or square miles the city covered. What they saw was only a fraction of the magnificence that was the Amenes.

Rising up from one end of the square, an immense, richly ornate structure with triangular columns supported a pediment decorated with fleets of ancient ships in relief over a frieze carved with intricate sculptures of animals mingling with people wearing the same dress found on the mummies at St. Paul Island. The basic design of the colossal building was unlike any still standing from the ancient world. It would have been obvious to the eye of an architect that its basic structural form had been passed down through the millennia and copied by later builders of the great temples of Luxor, Athens, and Rome. The columns, however, were triangular, and looked foreign when compared to the much later round, fluted Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns.

A large entrance yawned beyond the columns. There were no stairs. The upper levels were reached by gradually sloping ramps. Spellbound, Pitt and Giordino exited the Snow Cruiser and walked past the columns. Inside the main chamber, a vast corbeled triangular roof soared above the ice-covered, rock-hewn floor. In huge niches along the walls were stone statues of what must have been Amenes kings, powerful-looking creations with round eyes and narrow faces carved out of granite rich in quartz that shimmered as they walked past them. Sculptured heads of men and a few women were set in the floor, staring upward through their thin coating of ice, with Amenes inscriptions engraved above and below them.

In the center of the great chamber, a life-size sculpture of an ancient ship, complete with banks of oars, full sails, and crews, stood on a pedestal. The sight was nothing less than spectacular. The sheer artistry, craft, and technical mastery of stone gave it an eerie mystique that mocked modern sculpture.

"What do you make of it?" asked Giordino reverently, as if he were standing in a cathedral. "A temple to their gods?"

"More likely a mausoleum or a shrine," said Pitt, gesturing at the heads rising from the floor. "These look like memorials, perhaps to revered men and women who explored the ancient world and those who were lost at sea."

"It's amazing the roof didn't collapse after the comfit's impact or the later accumulation of ice."

"Their builders must have worked under exceptionally high standards that were possible only under a structured culture."

They gazed in fascination down a network of windowless corridors whose interior walls were beautifully painted with scenes of spectacular seascapes that began with calm waters and progressed to waves whipped by hurricane furies beating against rocky shorelines. If modern men and women looked to the heavens for their God, the Amenes had looked to the seas. Their statuaries were of men and women, not stylized versions of gods.

"A long-lost race who discovered the world," Giordino said philosophically, "And yet there are no artifacts lying around, and no sign of the inhabitants' remains."

Pitt nodded at the network of narrow passages carved into the ice. "No doubt recovered by the Nazis who discovered it, and later taken by the Wolfs to their museums on board the Ulrich Wolf."

"Doesn't look like they excavated more than ten percent of the city."

"They had more mundane things on their mind," said Pitt sardonically, "like hiding Nazi treasures and secret relics, extracting gold from seawater, and planning to destroy the world so they could make it over into their image."

"Too bad we haven't the time to explore the place."

"There's nothing I'd like better than to take the grand tour," said Pitt, shaking off his captivation, "but we have twenty-five minutes or less to find the control center."

Wishing they could linger, Pitt and Giordino reluctantly turned their backs on the great edifice and hurried back to the square and climbed into the Snow Cruiser. Still following the tracks left by a Sno-cat, Pitt steered the big cruiser through the heart of the haunting ghost city and rolled it into a tunnel beyond the mausoleum of the Amenes. Pitt drove less cautiously the closer they came to the mining compound, while Giordino crouched below the instrument panel with his Bushmaster sticking through the shattered middle windshield.

Almost a mile deeper into the tunnel, they rounded a bend and found themselves confronted with an electric auto coming in the opposite direction. The three startled security guards in the other vehicle, easily recognizable in their black uniforms, stared incredulously at the monster bearing down on them. The driver panicked and slammed on his brakes, skidding across the ice floor of the tunnel without reducing his speed in the slightest. The other two guards had a higher regard for self-preservation and leaped from the auto in a futile attempt at prolonging their lives.

There was a series of shrill screeches from shredding and grinding metal as the Snow Cruiser smashed into the electric auto and rolled over it as though it were a tricycle mashed by a garbage truck. The driver disappeared, along with his crumpled vehicle, under the Cruiser, while the other two guards were crushed against the ice walls of the tunnel by the great tires. As Pitt stared back in his side-view mirror, he saw only a pile of twisted junk sitting flattened on the floor of the tunnel.

Giordino twisted around in his seat and stared back through the slanted rear window of the control cab. "I hope you paid your insurance premiums."

"Only liability and property damage. I never take out collision."

"You should reconsider."

Another two hundred yards through the tunnel, groups of workers in red coveralls were moving wooden crates onto a train of flatbed cars that were connected to a large Sno-cat. Forklifts were transporting the crates past a thick silver steel door whose mounting bolts led deep into the ice. The massive door looked like the types that were used in banks to safeguard the contents of their vaults. A short entryway through the ice led into a spacious cavern.

Two security guards stood stunned at the sight of the gargantuan Snow Cruiser, plunging from what should have been an abandoned tunnel. They stood transfixed in the glare of the headlights. Only when Giordino fired a short burst from his Bushmaster through the broken windshield into the forklift did workers and security guards come alive and scramble back into the cavern to save themselves from being mashed by the mechanical avalanche bearing down on them.

"The door!" Pitt shouted, slamming on the brakes.

Giordino did not acknowledge or question. Almost as if he'd read Pitt's mind, he leaped from the Snow Cruiser and ran to the steel door, as Pitt squeezed off several rounds from his Colt .45 through the doorway to the cavern to cover him. Giordino was surprised by the light touch it took to push the door closed. He'd expected to exert every ounce of strength in his body, but the heavy steel door swung as easily as if it hung in air. Once it clicked against its stops, he turned the locking wheel until the bars slid into their sockets, sealing it closed. Then he found a chain on the forklift and wrapped it around the wheel, securing the end to a wheel of a flatbed car loaded with crates, until it was impossible to turn from the inside. Now the Wolf security guards and workers were effectively imprisoned without any prospect of a quick escape.

"I wonder what's inside the crates?" Giordino said, as he climbed back into the control cab.

"Artifacts from the city of the Amenes, I'd guess." Pitt ran the Snow Cruiser through the gears until he had regained top speed again. An angel perched on the roof of the cab might have helped them this far on their wild passage, but they still had a long way to go. True, surprise was theirs, but it seemed remarkable that they had come this far without a shot being fired at them, a situation that could quickly change, Pitt well knew. The powers of their angel had her limits, assuming that it was a she. Events had been met and overtaken. Once the Snow Cruiser burst out into the open, it would be a different story. Every gun in the compound would train on it.

At a wide bend in the tunnel, they suddenly burst out into the almost measureless hangar housing the Destiny Enterprises jet aircraft. Without lifting his foot from the gas pedal, Pitt quickly surveyed the two Airbus A340-300 passenger and cargo planes parked in the center of the hangar. A Sno-cat with a train of flatbed cars was stretched beneath the cargo door of the first aircraft, the familiar wooden crates riding up inside the fuselage on a conveyor belt. Wolf Enterprise engineers and workers were climbing boarding steps at the other plane for the trip to the giant superships. Sitting off to one side was a sleek executive jet that was in the process of being refueled.

Pitt relaxed slightly at seeing no security guards. "What have we here?"

"Ah-ha!" Giordino tensed, seeing Pitt's leg stiffen as if he were trying to push the accelerator pedal through the floorboard. He raised a prudent eye over the instrument panel and groaned softly. "Are you going to do what I think you're going to do?"

"Once you drive in a demolition derby," said Pitt, with a diabolical gleam in his eyes, "you never get it out of your blood."

The reaction from everyone in the hangar at seeing the Snow Cruiser appear out of nowhere was the same as that of the others who had confronted it in the tunnel earlier. They all froze in pure astonishment, the expressions on their faces quickly turning to incomprehension and cold fear at seeing a red mechanical demon incarnate burst out of nowhere.

Pitt took less than three seconds to assess his route of destruction. It took the same amount of time for all to realize that his intentions were unmistakable. With a mind-set two notches beyond tenacious, he set a course across the ice floor of the hangar, as straight as the crow flies, toward the first Airbus. The aircraft sat high off the ground, but not high enough for the side fenders of the Snow Cruiser. The right front panel immediately below the side windows of the control cabin caught the aircraft eight feet inside the aft section of the port wing, crushing the ailerons and shredding the wingtip.

The cargo loaders and aircraft maintenance crew were galvanized into action and flung themselves clear as the leviathan struck the aircraft, pivoting it around at a ninety-degree angle as the tires on the landing gear skidded over the ice. They sprawled, desperately slipping and scrambling to get as far away as possible from the thundering titan gone mad. The only sounds they identified were the engines racing through the gear changes. Nothing else about the giant machine looked remotely familiar. But they briefly glimpsed the face of a heavily bandaged Pitt twisting the steering wheel back and forth, and Giordino pointing his Bushmaster menacingly out the side window. They'd seen more than enough to call for security guards, but their frantic appeal came much too late to stop the destruction.

The Snow Cruiser ripped into the outer wing of the second Airbus. This time Pitt cut too far inside the wing. In a horrible screeching sound, the devastated wing jackknifed around the front end of the Snow Cruiser tire and hung there. Pitt crammed the gearshift into reverse and jammed down the gas pedal. The Cruiser backed up, pulling the aircraft with it. Pitt wrenched the steering wheel as far as it could go, desperately attempting to shake free from the aircraft, but the tangled wreckage held, and the Cruiser's mammoth tires began to lose their grip on the ice and spin uselessly.

Pitt threw the Snow Cruiser into forward and then reverse, as if he were trying to rock a car mired in mud. Finally, after a series of vicious metallic shrieks, the wing released its grip and dropped awkwardly, its wingtip touching the ice and looking like a piece of torn and tangled aluminum with a reservation at the scrap yard. Then, without flinching or betraying the slightest expression of emotion, Pitt pitched the Snow Cruiser in the direction of the executive jet.

"You don't screw around, do you?" Giordino said in resigned amusement.

"Listen!" Pitt snarled. "If this scum fixed it for an apocalypse to strike the world, they can damn well stay here and suffer along with everyone else."

The words were hardly out of his mouth when the battered Snow Cruiser pulverized the tail assembly of the Wolfs' private jet that sat much lower to the ground than the much larger aircraft. No contest this time, the Snow Cruiser ripped off the vertical and horizontal stabilizers as if they were a balsawood tail on a model airplane. Its fuselage effectively sliced into two parts, the executive jet collapsed disjointedly, the wings and bow pointing upward as if in a takeoff mode.

Giordino shook his head in wonder and said admiringly, "You'll never get invited back if you leave a mess everywhere you go."

Pitt turned to Giordino, a smile as wide as the horizon on his face. "Time sure flies when you're having fun."

Pitt looked up and saw a Sno-cat suddenly appear in the cracked and broken remains of the rearview mirror. He wasn't overly concerned, at least not yet. The Snow Cruiser, he estimated, was probably five miles an hour or more faster.

He threw the big Cruiser through the tunnel, striking and skidding off the ice walls in a daring attempt to inch ahead of the security guards in the Sno-cat. He careened through the bends, temporarily out of the line of fire, gaining time and widening the gap until the Sno-cat no longer came into view.

"You've lost them," said Giordino, brushing the shattered glass from the rear window off his shoulders as calmly as if it were dandruff.

"Not for long," said Pitt patiently. "Once we break into the open, we'll be fair game."

Four minutes later, they cleared the final bend in the tunnel, running past equipment that had been abandoned and doors leading into empty storerooms, and two minutes after that, the Snow Cruiser roared free under a blue sky, exiting less than half a mile from the center of the main compound.

At long last they reached their destination and had their view of the mining facility for the first time. They had exited the tunnel at one end of the compound. Unlike most ice stations, which were mostly buried under snow and ice, the Wolfs had kept the buildings and roads running between them swept clean and clear. The smaller buildings stood in circular fashion around the two main structures comprising the extraction plant and the control center.

The thunder of gunfire abruptly tore the chilling air, as flames clawed upward from several buildings, with black smoke rolling high into the sky before flattening under an inversion layer. Explosions sent debris flying into the air, accented with bursts from automatic weapons. Bodies could be seen sprawled in the streets, bloodied red and grotesque in the snow, two black uniforms for every one in white camouflage fatigues.

"It would appear," Pitt said grimly, "the party has started without us."

44

Despite the long, hard training, and the bravery and dedication of Team Apocalypse in attempting to stop the cataclysm, the mission was about to collapse. They were taking hits and falling wounded and dead for nothing. They had not achieved one fragment of advantage. Disaster was piling on disaster, when Cleary's worst fears were realized. Jacobs's SEALS, unable to strike the flank of the barricade, were inexorably driven into the same perimeter along with the other teams. The trap was complete. Every hole was plugged. The entire assault force was boxed in with no way out.

Grenade shrapnel slashed Cleary's chin and a bullet struck him in the hand. Of his officers, Sharpsburg was down with wounds in an arm and shoulder. Garnet was coughing blood from a hit in the throat. Only Jacobs was still unscathed, as he shouted encouragement to the men and directed their fire.

Then, unexpectedly, the security guards ceased firing. The Special Forces maintained a ragged counterfire until Cleary ordered them to stop all action, wondering what card the Wolfs were about to play next.

A voice, distinct and refined, came over loudspeakers on the buildings around the facility, echoing up and down the roads- a voice whose message was relayed to Washington through the microphones worn by the special force.

"Please give me your attention. This is Karl Wolf. I send greetings to the American assault teams who are attempting to infiltrate the Destiny Enterprises mining facility. You must know by now that you are heavily outnumbered, surrounded, and entrapped with no means of escape. Further bloodshed is pointless. I advise you to disengage and retire back to the ice shelf, where you can be evacuated by your own people. You will be allowed to carry your dead and wounded with you. If you do not comply in the next sixty seconds, you will all die. The choice is yours."

The message came as a jolt.

Cleary refused to accept inevitable defeat. He stared helplessly at the huddled and bullet-torn corpses of the dead and the bleeding bodies of the wounded. The eyes of those ready and able to fight on still reflected fearlessness and tenacity. They had fought savagely, bled, and died. They had given all that was humanly possible. But they could do no more than go down fighting, a last stand, unknown and unmourned.

The redoubtable Cleary by now had only twenty-six men in fighting condition left out of the original sixty-five who had parachuted from the C-17. They were assailed from the front and scourged from the rear by the remaining armored Sno-cats. He fought off a venomous pessimism and a bitterness he'd never known before. It seemed hopeless to mount another assault, but he was determined to make one more try. To push forward would amount to nothing more than a suicide charge. And yet there was no thought of disengaging. Every man knew that if they didn't die here and now, they would certainly die when the Earth went mad. With deep misgivings, Cleary regrouped what was left of his command for a final assault on the control center.

Then, in the silence of the temporary ceasefire, he heard what sounded like a car horn blaring in the distance. Soon it became louder, and every head on the battlefield turned and stared, mystified.

And then the thing was upon them.

"What is happening?" Loren burst over the murmur of male voices at hearing the vocal burst of confusion over the speakers.

Everyone in the war rooms of the Pentagon and White House automatically glanced up at the monitors displaying static photos of the facility. For long, disbelieving moments, everyone sat in open amazement, listening spellbound to what they heard through the communications speakers.

"My God!" Admiral Eldridge uttered in a stunned croak.

"What in the devil is going on down there?" demanded the President.

"I have no idea, Mr. President," muttered General South, unable to comprehend the chaotic words of the Special Forces teams, who all seemed to be shouting at once. "I have no idea," he repeated vaguely.

Something totally macabre was happening on the battle site of the mining facility. The men of the Special Forces team, as well as the security guards, swung in shock. Cleary found himself staring through unblinking eyes with a stark, unfettered expression of bewilderment at a monstrous red juggernaut rolling on enormous donut tires that burst into view like a crazy man's nightmare. He watched in hypnotic fascination as the giant vehicle smashed into both armored Sno-cats, knocking them on their sides and squashing them, as the force of the impact hurled the startled guards into the air before they fell in broken heaps on the ice. Flames mushroomed in curling spires over a bursting canopy of screeching, tumbling doors, tractor treads, steel splinters, and armor plate. The monster never slowed, its driver never decelerating, as it relentlessly continued its spree of destruction.

Jacobs shouted for his men to leap aside, as Sharpsburg, in frantic disregard for his wounds, scrambled out of the way of the rapidly approaching monster. Garnet and his team gawked in blank disbelief, before they were abruptly galvanized into diving against the walls of the buildings to save themselves.

Then the thing was upon them, rushing past with an earsplitting roar from the exhaust headers whose mufflers had been torn off when crashing into the Sno-cats. It was a sound that none of the warriors, crouched dazed and stunned in the snow, could ever forget. And then it rampaged into the ice barricade as if it were made of cardboard.

The security guards froze in stunned astonishment along with every member of the Special Forces team, wounded or not, and watched in involuntary fascination as the colossus, not content with demolishing the barricade, rumbled on toward the high archway entrance of the control center like an out-of-control express train, callous of the devastation it was causing.

Bedlam! Security guards came alive and scattered frantically in every direction, trying to leap clear. For that one brief, fleeting moment, Cleary couldn't believe the rescuer of his command hadn't really been the work of aliens or demons from a hallucination. The curtain quickly parted in Cleary's mind and he realized that, thanks to the ponderous machine, victory had suddenly risen from the ashes.

Cleary always retained an image of that grand vehicle, its red paint transparent and glistening under the bright sun, its driver gripping the steering wheel with one hand, the other firing an old 1911-model Colt automatic out the window at the security guards as fast as he could pull the trigger, while another man sprayed any black uniform that moved with a Bushmaster rifle. It was a spectacle entirely unexpected, without precedent, a spectacle to make men doubt their sanity.

The thirty or fewer security guards who had not been laid dead and injured by the Special Force teams, and who'd survived the onslaught, soon recovered and began blasting at the murderous, freakish vehicle. Their gunfire slammed deafeningly in wave after wave. Bullets peppered the red body and great tires, tearing into metal and rubber, and still the monster refused to stop, horns atop the roof still trumpeting until they were shot away. Every shard of glass was shot out of the control cabin, and still the driver and his passenger blazed away at the security guards.

With brutal ferocity and with appalling savagery, the Snow Cruiser slammed into the control center, hurling her thirty-plus-ton mass, propelled at twenty miles an hour, through the metal walls and roof surrounding the entrance like a fist ramming into the front door of a dollhouse. The shattering impact tore off the roof of the Cruiser's control cabin as cleanly as if it had been chopped away by a giant ax. The front end of the raging monster crumpled as she bit deeply and plunged into the control room in a chaos of tearing, twisting metal and an explosion of electronic equipment, wiring, office furniture, and computer systems.

Her great body rent by a hurricane of small-arms fire, the control cabin nearly disintegrated, the massive tires torn to shreds and sitting flat under the wheels, the Snow Cruiser lost her momentum, rammed into the far wall, and finally came to a stop.

At such times, logic vanishes and men rise magnificently to the occasion. Stirred to action, shouting and cursing and without a spoken command, the surviving Marines, Delta Force, and SEALS leaped from their pitifully sheltered positions in the ice and rushed forward. Running through the breach left by the Snow Cruiser, they overran the barricade, concentrating their fire and eliminating most of the surprised security guards, who were caught unaware of the assault while they were still concentrating their attention and fire on the rampaging vehicle.

Hugo Wolf stood in pure horror. The gigantic red monstrosity from nowhere had, within the space of two short minutes, turned the tide of battle, wiping out two Sno-cats and their crews, and crushing nearly twenty of his men. Like a football quarterback who'd thrown a surefire touchdown pass in the closing minutes of the game, only to have the ball intercepted by the opposing team and run back for a touchdown, Hugo could not believe it was happening. Abruptly overtaken by panic, he leaped astride a nearby snowmobile, gunned the engine, and roared away from the turmoil toward the aircraft hangar.

Left abandoned and leaderless, the security guards saw faint hope of escape, and one by one, they surrendered their weapons and placed their hands on their heads. A few melted away and circled Cleary's assault teams in an attempt to reach the hangar before the aircraft took off. Suddenly, mercifully, the scene of carnage became strangely still and quiet. The bloody and nasty fight was over.

The control room was in unspeakable shambles. Consoles had been catapulted from their bases and hurled against the walls. The contents of desks, shelves, and cabinets were spilled across the floor, carpeting it in files and paper. Tables and chairs were twisted and smashed. Monitors hung from their mountings in crazy angles. The Snow Cruiser sat astride the insane havoc like some great wounded dinosaur, showered by a thousand bullets. Astoundingly, she did not die. In defiance of all the laws of mechanical engineering, her diesels still turned over at idle, with a low rapping sound coming from her shattered exhaust pipes.

Pitt pushed aside the bullet-riddled door of the Snow Cruiser and carelessly watched it drop off its fractured hinges and fall away. Remarkably, he and Giordino had not been killed. Bullets had cut through their clothes, Pitt had taken a shot that had cut a small gouge in his left forearm, and Giordino was bleeding from a scalp wound, but they had survived without serious injury, far beyond their wildest expectations.

Pitt searched the mangled control room for bodies, but the Wolfs, their engineers, and their scientists had evacuated the building for the hangar. Giordino stared through those smiling yet brooding dark eyes of his at the scene of havoc.

"Is the clock still ticking?" he asked gravely.

"I don't think so." Pitt nodded at the remains of the digital clock lying amid the debris and pointed at the numerals. They were frozen at ten minutes and twenty seconds. "By destroying the computers and all electronic systems, we stopped the countdown sequence."

"No ice shelf breaking and drifting out to sea?"

Pitt simply shook his head.

"No end of the earth?"

"No end of the earth," Pitt echoed.

"Then it's over," Giordino muttered, finding it hard to believe that what had begun in a mine in Colorado had finally reached a conclusion in a demolished room in the Antarctic.

"Almost." Pitt leaned weakly against the wrecked Snow Cruiser, feeling relief dulled with anger against Karl Wolf. "There are still a few loose ends we have to tie up."

Giordino stared as if he were on another planet. "Ten minutes and twenty seconds," he said slowly. "Could the world have really come that close to oblivion?"

"If the Valhalla Project had truly gone operational? Probably. Could it have truly altered Earth for thousands of years? Hopefully, we'll never know."

"Do not move a finger or twitch an eye!" The command came as hard as cold marble.

Pitt looked up and found himself face-to-face with a figure in white fatigues pointing a mutant-looking firearm at him. The stranger was bleeding from the chin and a wound in one hand.

Pitt stared at the apparition, trying unsuccessfully to gauge the eyes behind the polarized goggles.

"Can I wiggle my ears?" he asked, perfectly composed.

From his point of view, Cleary couldn't be sure whether the nondescript characters standing in front of him represented enemy or friend. The shorter one looked like a pit bull. The taller of the two was disheveled and had slipshod bandages covering half his face. They looked like men dead on their feet, their gaunt, barely focused, sunken eyes set over cheeks and jaws showing the early stages of scraggly beards. "Who are you and where did you two characters come from, wise mouth?"

"My name is Dirk Pitt. My friend is Al Giordino. We're with the National Underwater and Marine Agency."

"NUMA." Cleary repeated, finding the answer little short of lunacy. "Is that a fact?"

"It's a fact," Pitt answered, perfectly composed. "Who are you?"

"Major Tom Cleary, United States Army Special Forces. I'm in command of the team that assaulted the facility."

"I'm sorry we couldn't have arrived sooner and saved more of your men," Pitt said sincerely.

Cleary's shoulders sagged and he lowered his gun. "No better men have died today."

Pitt and Giordino said nothing. There was nothing fitting they could say.

Finally, Cleary straightened. "I can't believe a couple of oceanographic people from NUMA, untrained to fight hostiles, could do so much damage," said Cleary, still trying to figure the men standing in front of him.

"Saving you and your men was a spur-of-the-moment action. Stopping the Wolfs from launching a cataclysm was our primary goal."

"And did you accomplish it?" asked Cleary, looking around at the wreckage of what had once been a high-tech operational control center, "or is the clock still ticking?"

"As you can see," Pitt replied, "all electronic functions are disabled. The electronic commands to activate the ice-cutting machines have been terminated."

"Thank God," Cleary said, the stress and strain suddenly falling from his shoulders. He wearily removed his helmet, pulled his goggles over his forehead, stepped forward, and extended his unwounded hand. "Gentlemen. Those of us still standing are in your debt. Lord only knows how many lives were spared by your timely intervention with this…" As he shook their hands, he paused to gaze at the twisted shambles of the once-magnificent Snow Cruiser, her Cummins diesel engines still slowly clacking over like a pair of faintly beating hearts. "Just what exactly is it?"

"A souvenir from Admiral Byrd," said Giordino.

"Who?"

Pitt smiled faintly. "It's a long story."

Cleary's mind shifted gears. "I see no bodies."

"They must have all evacuated the center during the battle and headed for the hangar to board the aircraft and make their escape," Giordino speculated.

"My map of the facility shows an airstrip, but we didn't see any sign of aircraft during our descent."

"Their hangar can't be seen from the air. It was carved into the ice."

Cleary's expression turned to fury. "Are you telling me the fiends responsible for this shameful debacle have vanished?"

"Relax, Major," Giordino said with a canny smile. "They haven't left the facility."

Cleary saw the pleased look in Pitt's eyes. "Did you arrange that, too?"

"As a matter of fact, yes," Pitt answered candidly. "On our way here, we happened to run into their aircraft. I'm happy to announce that all flights from the facility have been canceled."

Shouts and cheers erupted unabashedly in the Pentagon and White House war rooms at hearing Cleary's voice announce the termination of the ice shelf detachment systems, followed by Lieutenant Jacobs's report that the survivors of Wolf's security force were laying down their arms and surrendering. Elation washed over the two rooms at learning the worst of the deadly crisis was over. They heard Cleary's voice carrying on a one-sided conversation with the saviors of the mission, who carried no radios and whose words could not be heard intelligibly over Cleary's throat microphone.

Unable to contain his exhilaration, the President snatched up a phone and spoke sharply. "Major Cleary, this is the President. Do you read me?"

There was a flicker of static, and then Cleary's voice answered. "Yes, Mr. President, I hear you loud and clear."

"Until now, I was told not to interfere with your communications, but I believe everybody here would like a coherent report."

"I understand, sir," Cleary said, finding it next to impossible to believe he was actually talking to his commander in chief. "I'll have to make it quick, Mr. President. We still have to round up the Wolfs, their engineers, and the last of their security guards."

"I understand, but please brief us on this macabre vehicle that came on the scene. Who does it belong to and who was operating it?"

Cleary told him, but failed miserably at attempting to describe the snow monster that had burst forth from the ice at the last minute and snatched victory virtually from the mouth of defeat.

Everyone sat and listened, bewildered, but nobody was more bewildered than Admiral Sandecker when informed that two men from his government agency who were under his direct authority had driven sixty miles across the barren ice in a monstrous 1940 snow vehicle and helped crush a small army of mercenary security guards. He was doubly stunned when he heard the names Dirk Pitt and Al Giordino, who he thought were due to land in Washington within the hour.

"Pitt and Giordino," he said, shaking his head in wonderment. "I should have known. If anyone can make a grand entrance where they're not expected, it's them."

"I'm not surprised," said Loren, with a smile across her lovely face. "There was no way Dirk and Al were going to stand by passively and wait for the world to stop."

"Who are these people?" demanded General South, angrily. "Where does NUMA get off interfering in a military operation? Who authorized their presence?"

"I would be proud to say I did," Sandecker said, staring directly at South without giving an inch, "but it simply would not be true. These men, make that my men, acted on their own initiative, and it looks to me that it was a damned good thing they did."

The argument died before it had begun. It never left the minds of those present in the war rooms of the Pentagon and White House that without the intervention of Pitt and Giordino, there would have been no estimating the frightful aftermath.

Pitt's and Giordino's ears should have been burning, but without a link to Cleary's headgear radio, they could not hear what was said half a world away. Pitt sat on the step of the Snow Cruiser and pulled the bandages off his face, revealing several cuts that would require stitches.

Cleary looked down at him. "You're certain the Wolfs are still here?"

Pitt nodded. "Karl, the head of the family, and one sister, Elsie, must be in tears at seeing the aircraft they'd planned to use to flee the facility has been rendered nonflyable."

"Can you and Mr. Giordino lead me to the hangar?"

Pitt cracked a smile. "I'd consider it an honor and a privilege."

General South's voice cut into the brief conversation. "Major Cleary, I am directing you to regroup, do what you can for your wounded, and secure the rest of the facility. Then wait for the main Special Forces unit, which should be landing inside half an hour."

"Yes, sir," answered Cleary. "But first there is a little unfinished business to settle." He pulled out the connector between his mike and receiving unit, turned to Pitt, and fixed him with an "Where is this hangar?"

"About half a mile," said Pitt. "Are you thinking of rounding up a hundred people with the few men you have left?"

Cleary's lips spread in a shifty grin. "Don't you think it and proper that the men who have gone through hell should the final kill?"

"You'll get no argument from me."

"Are you two up to acting as guides?"

"Did you get permission from Washington?"

"I neglected to ask."

Pitt's opaline green eyes took on a wicked look. Then he said, not? Al and I never could pass up a diabolical scheme."

45

It would be a classic understatement to say that Karl Wolf was horrified and enraged when he laid eyes on the broken wreckage of his aircraft. His grand scheme was in tatters, as he and his scientists and engineers milled around the hangar in fear and confusion. To his knowledge, the mechanism to break away the ice shelf was still set to come online in less than four minutes.

Misguided by Hugo, who told them his guards at the control center were still locked in a life-or-death struggle with the Special Forces teams, Karl had no perception that the Fourth Empire had died before it was born, or that Project Valhalla was aborted.

The Wolfs stood in a solemn group, unable to accept the full impact of the disaster, unable to believe the incredible story of a huge vehicle that had run amok and smashed their aircraft, before heading off toward the battle raging in front of the control center. They stood stunned with disbelief at the sudden reversal of their long-cherished plans. Hugo was the only one missing from his family members. Committed to the end, he had disregarded their predicament and was feverishly organizing the remaining members of his security force for the final resistance against the Americans he knew for certain were short minutes away from assaulting the hangar.

Then Karl said, "Well, that's it, then." He turned to Blondi. "Send a message to our brother Bruno on board the Ulrich Wolf. Explain the situation and tell him to send backup aircraft here immediately with all speed. We haven't another moment to lose."

Blondi didn't waste time with questions. She took off at a run toward the radio inside the control room at the edge of the airstrip.

"Will it be possible to land on the Ulrich Wolf during the early stages of the cataclysm?" Elsie Wolf asked her brother. Her face was pale with anguish.

Karl looked at his chief engineer, Jurgen Holtz. "Do you have an answer for my sister, Jurgen?"

A frightened Holtz looked down at the icy floor of the hangar and replied woodenly. "I have no way of calculating the exact arrival time of the expected hurricane winds and tidal waves. Nor can I predict their initial strength. But if they reach the Ulrich Wolf before our flight can land, I fear the result can only lead to tragedy."

"Are you saying we're all going to die?" demanded Elsie.

"I'm saying we won't know until the time comes," Holtz said soberly.

"We'll never have time to transfer the Amenes artifacts from the damaged planes after Bruno arrives," said Karl, staring distraught at the family's personal executive jet, sitting broken like a child's toy "We'll take only relics of the Third Reich."

"I'm going to need every able-bodied male and female who can shoot a weapon." The voice came from behind Karl. It was Hugo, whose black uniform was splattered with blood from the dead guard who'd failed to tell him of the havoc in the hangar. "I realize we have many frightened and disoriented people on our hands, but if we are to survive until rescued by our brothers and sisters at the shipyard, we must hold out against the American fighting force."

"How many of your fighting men have survived?" asked Karl.

"I'm down to twelve. That's why I require all the reserves I can find."

"Do you have enough weapons for us all?"

Hugo nodded. "Guns and ammo can be found in the arsenal room at the entrance of the hangar."

"Then you have my permission to recruit any and everyone who wants to see their loved ones again."

Hugo looked his brother in the eyes. "It is not my place, brother, to ask them to fight and die. You are the leader of our new destiny. You are whom they respect and venerate. You ask, and they will follow."

Karl stared into the faces of his brother and two sisters, seeing his own expression of foreboding in their eyes. With a mind as cold as an iceberg and a heart of stone, he had no misgivings about ordering his people to lay down their lives so that he and his siblings might survive.

"Assemble them," he said to Elsie, "and I will tell them what they must do."

Leaving four of his men who were not hurt seriously to tend the wounded and stand guard over the surviving security guards, Cleary and twenty-two able-bodied men of his remaining team, led by Pitt and Giordino, who knew the way to the hangar, entered the main tunnel in tactical formation, with two of Garnet's Delta Force acting as forward flanking scouts.

Lieutenant Jacobs was more than surprised to meet up with Pitt and Giordino again, and even more amazed to find that they were the madmen who'd driven the Snow Cruiser into the battle zone only minutes before Cleary and his men would have ended up like Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Little Bighorn.

Moving cautiously, the column rounded the first bend in the tunnel and moved past the deserted construction equipment and the doorways leading into the empty storerooms. Walking through the ice tunnel seemed far different to Pitt and Giordino than when they had careened through it in the Snow Cruiser. Pitt smiled to himself at seeing the long gouges in the ice caused by his reckless driving when escaping the armored Sno-cat.

When they reached an abandoned tow vehicle, attached to a small train of four flatbed cars that had been used to haul supplies and cargo throughout the tunnel labyrinth, they halted their advance and used the equipment for cover, as Cleary questioned Pitt and Giordino.

"How far to the hangar from here?" he asked.

"About another five hundred yards before the tunnel opens into it," Pitt answered.

"Is there any place between here and there they could set up a barricade?"

"Every ten feet, if they had the time and blocks of ice. But I doubt they could have built anything substantial in the few short minutes since they lost their battle for the facility." He pointed down on the ice. Besides the rotund indentations from the tires of the Snow Cruiser, the only other tracks came from a single snowmobile and the footprints of several men that suggested that they had been running from the battle.

"Can't be more than a dozen security guards left. If they intend to mount a defense, it will have to be within a hundred yards of the hangar."

"Don't forget the Sno-cat," said Giordino quietly, "the one you didn't mash into scrap."

"There's another one of those devilish vehicles still lurking around?" growled Cleary.

Pitt nodded. "Very well could be. What's in your traveling arsenal that can disable it?"

"Nothing that will penetrate its armor," Cleary admitted.

"Hold up your men, Major. I think I see something that might be of use."

Pitt rummaged around in the toolbox of the tow vehicle until he came up with an empty fuel can. He found a steel pry bar and used it to perforate the top of the can. Then he took the bar and punched the bar through the bottom of the tow vehicle's fuel tank. When the can was full, he held it up. "Now all we need is an igniting device."

Lieutenant Jacobs, who was observing Pitt's actions, reached into his pack and retrieved a small flare gun used for signaling purposes at night or in foul weather. "Will this do?"

"Like a beautiful woman and a glass of fine Cabernet," said Pitt.

Cleary raised his arm and swung it forward. "Let's move out."

There were no haunting fears of the unknown now, no urgencies or trepidations. Flankers moving like cats, followed by men unshakable and committed, bent on avenging friends who'd died back at the control center, they advanced into the tunnel like wraiths under the obscure light refracting through the ice. Pitt felt a swell of pride, knowing that he and Giordino were accepted by such men as equals.

Suddenly, the flankers motioned a halt. Everyone froze, listening. An engine's exhaust faintly heard in the distance signaled the approach of a vehicle. Soon the sound grew louder and echoed through the tunnel. Then twin lights appeared, their beams dancing on the ice before rounding the bend.

"The Sno-cat," Pitt announced calmly. "Here it comes." He pointed at one of the nearby empty storerooms. "I suggest you and your men get inside quickly before we're all exposed by the headlights."

A terse, quiet command, and twenty seconds later, every man was inside the storeroom, with the door cracked open an inch. The lights grew brighter as the Sno-cat trod its way through the tunnel. Just behind the storeroom door, Pitt crouched with the fuel can clutched in both hands. Behind him, Jacobs stood poised and ready to fire the flare pistol, and behind him, the entire team primed and ready to pour from the storeroom and lay down a hail of lethal fire on the occupants of the Sno-cat or any guards who might be following on foot.

Timing was critical. If Pitt threw the can too soon or too late and the guards inside survived, the entire Special Force team was trapped inside the storeroom like ducks in a closet, and would be wiped out in less time than it would take to tell about it. Jacobs had to be on target, too. A miss and it was all over.

The Sno-cat came closer. Pitt judged its speed at about ten miles an hour. The driver was moving cautiously. Through the narrow slit between the door and frame, he saw no sign of guards following the vehicle on foot. "She's coming too fast for support to follow behind," Pitt reported softly to Cleary. "My guess is they're on a scouting mission."

"They carry four men," Cleary murmured. "I know that much."

Pitt shied his head and closed his eyes to keep from being temporarily blinded by the bright lights of the Sno-cat. It was so close now he could hear its treads crunch against the icy floor of the tunnel. With infinite caution, without using any sudden movement that might catch the eye of the vehicle's occupants, he inched the door open. The front end of the Sno-cat was now close enough to the storeroom that he could hear the muted beat of its engine. Nimbly, focused, and precise, he threw the door open, raised himself to his full height and hurled the gas can into the open compartment of the Sno-cat. Then, without the slightest suggestion of a pause, he ducked to his side and dropped to the ice.

Jacobs was not one to let the grass grow under his feet. He was aiming the flare pistol before Pitt cast aside the door. A millimeter's adjustment and he fired, the shell missing Pitt's head by the width of two fingers a heartbeat after the fuel can sailed into the open Sno-cat and splashed its contents inside.

The interior erupted in a holocaust of flame. The horrified guards, their uniforms ablaze, leaped from the Sno-cat and rolled frantically on the ice to smother the fire. Even if they had been successful, their lives would not have been spared. The men of Cleary's command who had suffered so appallingly from the guards earlier were not in a benevolent mood. They burst from the storeroom and put the guards out of their agony in a flurry of gunfire. The Sno-cat, now hardly identifiable as a mechanical transport, lurched driverless through the tunnel, grazing the slick walls of ice that did little to slow it down.

No time was spent inspecting the death scene. Cleary regrouped his men and got them moving again. Not one man turned and looked back or showed a sign of remorse. They pushed on through the tunnel, anxious to end the nightmare and punish those responsible. With a conscious effort of will, Pitt rose to his feet and leaned on Giordino's rock-strong shoulder for a few steps until his legs worked efficiently again, then set off after Cleary.

When his radio calls to the Sno-cat went unanswered and the sounds of gunfire reverberated from the tunnel, Hugo Wolf assumed the worst. With no more armored vehicles, he had one more hand to play before the Americans reached the hangar and engaged in another free-for-all battle with his eight remaining security guards. He had little confidence in the small army of engineers, who hardly knew how to handle weapons or had the fortitude to shoot down another human, especially a trained professional who was shooting back. What he was about to attempt, Hugo thought morosely, was the last throw of the dice.

He walked over to where Karl, Elsie, and Blondi were conversing with Jurgen Holtz. Karl turned and looked at Hugo, seeing the dark expression. "Problems, brother?"

"I believe I have lost my last armored Sno-cat and four men who were not expendable."

"We've got to hold out," said Elsie. "Bruno is on his way with two aircraft and is scheduled to arrive five hours from now."

"Three and a half hours after the ice shelf breaks free," Holtz remarked. "The activation sequence for the ice machines has begun and there can be no stopping it."

Karl swore softly. "Can we hold out until then?"

Hugo stared at the tunnel leading to the mining facility as if he were expecting an army of phantoms. "They can't have but a handful of men left. If my guards can eliminate them in the tunnel or at least whittle them down to a pitiful few, then between the rest of us, we easily have enough firepower to stop them for good."

Karl faced Hugo and laid a hand on his shoulder. "Regardless of the outcome, brother, I know you will have conducted yourself bravely and with honor."

Hugo embraced Karl, then moved off to join the last of his guards and lead them into the tunnel. They were followed by a tow vehicle pulling a flatcar loaded with a fifty-five-gallon drum and a large six-foot-diameter fan.

The Special Forces team stopped short of the last bend in the tunnel before it straightened and ran another fifty yards into the hangar. A light mist appeared ahead that seemed to grow thicker as it rolled through the tunnel and began to envelop the men.

"What do you make of it?" Cleary asked Pitt.

"Nothing good. We encountered nothing like it when we passed through here with the Snow Cruiser." Pitt raised a finger as if testing for wind. "It's not a natural phenomenon. Not only does it have a strange smell, but it's being sent by some sort of mechanism, probably a large fan."

"Not poisonous," said Cleary, sniffing the mist. "Part of our training is in recognizing toxic gas. My guess is they're laying a harmless chemical on us to screen their movements."

"Could be they're short on manpower and making a desperation play," suggested Jacobs, who came up alongside the major.

"Close up," Cleary ordered his men through his helmet radio. "We'll keep going. Be ready to take whatever cover you can find, should they advance and fire out of the mist."

"I don't recommend that course of action," Pitt warned him.

Cleary simply asked, "Why?"

Pitt grinned at Giordino. "I think we've been here before."

"And done that," Giordino added.

Pitt stared appraisingly at the mist, then put his hand on Giordino's arm. "Al, take one of the Major's men, run back to the tow vehicle, and bring back its spare tire."

Cleary eyes reflected curiosity. "What good is a tire?"

"A little subterfuge of our own."

Minutes later, a tremendous detonation tore through the heart of the tunnel. No flame or swirling smoke, but a blinding flash followed by an enormous shock wave that crushed the confined air before it shot away like a missile through a pneumatic tube. The explosive sound came like a giant clap of thunder before it rumbled away and its echoes slowly faded.

Very slowly, stunned by the sheer density of the shock, his ears ringing like cathedral bells, Hugo Wolf and his eight remaining security guards staggered with numbed senses to their feet and began to advance through mounds of fallen ice, expecting to find nothing but the disintegrated bodies of the Americans. The sheer concussion was far beyond what they'd expected, but their hopes were buoyed into thoughts that their enemy had been eliminated.

Rounding the bend and using flashlights to penetrate the remnant of the mist and vapors from the explosion, they slowly moved forward until they could distinguish bodies lying gruesomely in and under the ice dislodged from the tunnel's roof. Hugo's eyes wandered from figure to figure, satisfaction and elation rising inside him at the sight of the dead Americans. Not one had survived. He looked down at two men who were dressed as civilians and wondered who they were and where they had come from. They were lying facedown, and he failed to recognize them as the two men who'd driven the abominable vehicle that had caused so much death and destruction at the control center.

"Congratulations on a great triumph, Mr. Wolf," one of his guards complimented him.

Hugo slowly nodded. "Yes, but it was a triumph that came with too high a cost." Then, mechanically, he and his men turned their backs on the seeming carnage and began walking back to the hangar.

"Freeze!" Cleary shouted.

Hugo and his men whirled around, aghast at seeing dead men suddenly leap to their feet with their guns leveled and trained. He might have surrendered then and there. Any sane man would have seen that resistance could only end in certain death. But Hugo, more on reflex than with a stable mind, threw up his gun to fire, the guards following his action.

The Special Forces weapons roared as one. The security guards managed to fire only a few frenzied rounds before they were cut down. Hugo stumbled backward, stood motionless in his tracks, his face contorted as he dropped his gun and stared through shocked and glazed eyes at the neatly spaced bullet holes that crossed the stomach of his black uniform from chest to waist. Finally, with sick certainty that he had failed, and knowing he had only a few seconds to live, he crumpled to the ground.

The gunfire had died away, and Jacobs, followed cautiously by his men, began inspecting the bodies and removing all weapons clutched in dead hands. Pitt, with his Colt hanging loosely in his right hand, came over and knelt at Hugo's side. The leader of the Wolf family's annihilated security force became aware of a presence and stared up expressionlessly.

"How did you know?" he murmured.

"Your people used the same booby-trap trick on me in the mine in Colorado."

"But the explosion…?"

Pitt knew the man was going, and he had to get it in fast. "We rolled the spare tire and wheel from a tow vehicle down the tunnel, tripping the wire to your explosive charge. We then took cover in a storeroom. Immediately after the blast, we ran out and scattered ourselves in the ice debris caused by the concussion and played dead." "Who are you?" he whispered. "My name is Dirk Pitt." The eyes widened briefly. "Not you," he whispered. Then the eyes froze open and his head slumped to the side.

46

The explosion, followed by a storm of gunfire, resounded through the tunnel and into the hangar like thunder rumbling from the other end of a drainage pipe. Then the racket abruptly stopped and the sounds ebbed, until an ominous silence spread and hung heavy inside the hangar. Minutes passed, with everyone standing frozen, staring into the yawning darkness, waiting with uneasy trepidation. Then the eerie stillness was broken by the approaching sound of footsteps echoing along the ice floor of the tunnel.

A figure slowly took form and walked into the refracted light falling through the roof of the hangar. A tall man, holding a stick with a white rag flowing from the top, advanced toward the semicircle of a hundred men and women holding guns, every muzzle pointed at the stranger. A scarf was wrapped around the lower half of his face. He walked directly up to Karl Wolf and his sisters, stopped, and pulled away the scarf, revealing a craggy face darkened with bearded stubble and haggard with fatigue.

"Hugo sends his regrets, but he is unable to join your little bon voyage party."

There was a moment of incredulous confusion throughout the hangar. Blondi stared in amazed fascination. Elsie's face took on an expression of shock and baffled rage. Predictably, Karl was the first to recover and come back on keel. "So it's you, Mr. Pitt," he said, observing Pitt through suspicious eyes. "You're like a curse."

"Forgive the casual dress," said Pitt cordially, "but my tux is at the cleaners."

Glaring at Pitt, her blue eyes furious, Elsie stepped forward and thrust an automatic pistol into Pitt's stomach. He grunted in pain, stepped back, and clutched his midriff, but the smile never left his face.

"You will notice," Pitt spoke tautly, "that I am unarmed and carrying a flag of truce."

Karl pushed Elsie's gun hand away. "Let me kill him," she hissed venomously.

"All in good time," he said conversationally. He looked Pitt in the eves. "Hugo is dead?"

"As we say back home, Hugo bought the farm."

"And his men?"

"In the same category."

"Were you responsible for the destruction of my aircraft?"

Pitt looked around at the smashed aircraft and shrugged. "I drove rather recklessly, I must admit."

"Where did you come from?" Wolf asked sharply.

Pitt smiled, ignored him completely, and said, "I suggest you order your people to lay down their weapons before they get hurt very badly. More than enough blood has been spilled here today. It would be the height of stupidity to add to the carnage."

"Your men, Mr. Pitt, how many of the American force are left?"

"See for yourself." Pitt turned and made a motion with his arm. Giordino, Cleary, and his remaining twenty men stepped from the tunnel into the hangar and spread out in an even line nearly ten paces apart, guns held at the ready.

"Twenty against a hundred." Karl Wolf smiled for the first time.

"We're expecting reinforcements momentarily."

"Too late," Karl said, firmly believing that Pitt was desperately attempting to save himself through deception. "The nanotech systems created to break away the ice shelf have been activated by now The world is headed for a cataclysm as we talk. Nothing can stop it."

"I beg to differ," Pitt said, his tone purposefully neutral. "All systems were shut down ten minutes before they were to be set in motion. I'm sorry to disrupt your plans, Karl, but there will be no cataclysm. There will be no New Destiny, no Fourth Empire. The world will go on spinning around the sun as before, far from perfect, with all its man-made weaknesses and frailties. Summer and winter, blue skies and clouds, rain and snow, will continue uninterrupted until long after the human race has ceased to exist. If we become extinct, it will be from natural causes, not from some outlandish scheme by a megalomaniac bent on world domination."

"What are you saying?" Elsie snapped in growing alarm.

"No need to panic, dear sister," said Karl, his tone a shade less than congenial. "The man is lying."

Pitt shook his head wearily. "It's all over for the Wolf family. If anyone deserves to be indicted by a world tribunal for attempted crimes against humanity, it's you. When seven billion souls find out how you and your family of ghouls tried to exterminate every man, woman, and child on the planet, you're not going to be very popular. Your giant ships, wealth, and treasures will be seized. And if any of your family members do escape a lifetime in jail, their every move will be closely watched by international intelligence and police agencies to ensure that they won't have any ambitions for a Fifth Empire."

"If what you say is true," Karl said with a sneer, only slightly diminished by uncertainty, "what do you plan to do with my sisters and me?"

"Not my call." Pitt sighed. "Sometime, someplace, you'll be hanged for your crimes, for all the murders you've ordered of those who stood in your way. My satisfaction will be sitting in the front row and watching you drop."

"A most provocative illusion, Mr. Pitt, and most intriguing. A pity it's pure fantasy."

"You're a hard man to convince."

"Give the order to fire, brother," Elsie demanded. "Shoot the vermin. If you don't, I will."

Karl Wolf stared at the weary and battle-exhausted veterans of Cleary's command. "My sister is right. Unless your men surrender within the next ten seconds, my people will cut them down."

"Never happen," said Pitt, his voice hard and abrupt.

"One hundred guns against twenty? The battle will not last long, and there can only be one conclusion. You see, Mr. Pitt, too much is at stake. My sisters and I will gladly sacrifice our lives in the name of the Fourth Empire."

"It's stupid to waste lives for a dream that's already dead and buried," Pitt said casually.

"The hollow statement of a desperate man. At least I will have the gratification of knowing you'll be the first to die."

Pitt stared at Wolf for a long moment, then glanced down at the automatic rifle in the madman's hands. Then he shrugged. "Have it your way. But before you get carried away with blood lust, I suggest you look behind you."

Wolf shook his head. "I'm not taking my eyes off you."

Pitt turned slightly to Elsie and Blondi. "Why don't you girls explain the facts of life to your brother?"

The Wolf sisters turned and looked.

Every neck in the hangar turned and every pair of eyes looked toward the rear wall and the entrance of the far tunnel. If there was one thing the hangar was lacking, it wasn't an arsenal of automatic weapons. Another two hundred had joined the drama being enacted around the wrecked aircraft. Two hundred nasty-looking Eradicator rifles all aimed at the backs of Destiny Enterprises engineers and scientists and held in the hands of men whose faces were hidden by helmets and goggles. They were ranged in an orderly semicircle, the front row kneeling, the back row standing, dressed in Arctic battle gear similar to that worn by Cleary and his team.

One of the figures stepped forward and spoke loudly with authority. "Lay down your weapons very slowly and back away! At the first sign of hostility, I will order my men to open fire! Please cooperate and no one will be hurt!"

There was no sign of hesitation or resistance. Far from it. The men and women who made up the scientific team for Destiny Enterprises were only too happy to rid themselves of weapons few of them knew how to operate properly. There was an almost universal sigh of relief as they backed away from the Bushmaster rifles and raised their hands in the air.

Elsie looked as if she had taken a knife in the heart. She stood with a stunned, uncomprehending look on her face. Blondi, her eyes stricken and bewildered, looked as if she was going to be sick. Karl Wolf's face went tense and hard as stone, more angry than fearful at the certainty of seeing his grand plan to launch a new world order suddenly evaporate.

"Which one of you is Dirk Pitt?" inquired the leader of the newly arrived Special Forces.

Pitt slowly raised his hand. "Here."

The officer strode up to Pitt and gave a slight nod of his head. "Colonel Robert Wittenberg, in charge of the Special Forces operation. What is the status of the Ross Ice Shelf operation?"

"Terminated," Pitt answered steadily. "The Valhalla Project was shut down ten minutes short of the ice-cutting system's activation."

Wittenberg relaxed visibly. "Thank God," he sighed.

"Your timing could not have been more perfect, Colonel."

"After making radio contact with Major Cleary, we followed your directions through the opening in the ice you smashed with your vehicle." He paused and asked as if in awe, "Did you see the ancient city?"

Pitt smiled. "Yes, we saw it."

"From there it was a routine run with full battle gear," Wittenberg continued, "until we arrived at the hangar and assembled before anyone turned and noticed us."

"It was touch and go, but Major Cleary and I managed to keep everyone's attention focused away from your end of the tunnel until you took up your battle position."

"Is this all of them?" asked Wittenberg.

Pitt nodded. "Except for several of their wounded back at the control center."

Cleary approached, and the two warriors saluted before shaking hands warmly. Cleary's smile was tired, but the teeth showed. "Bob, you don't know how happy I am to see your ugly old face."

"How many times does this make that I saved your tail?" Wittenberg said, humor in his eyes.

"Twice, and I'm not ashamed to admit it."

"You didn't leave much for me to do."

"True, but if you and your men hadn't shown up when you did, you'd have found half an acre of dead bodies."

Wittenberg stared at Cleary's men, who stood gaunt and weary but still vigilant, watching every move made by the Wolf personnel as they dropped their rifles on the ice floor and gathered in hushed groups near the wrecked aircraft. "It looks like they whittled you down some."

"I lost too many good men," Cleary admitted grimly.

Pitt gestured to the Wolfs. "Colonel Wittenberg, may I introduce Karl Wolf and his sisters Elsie and…" Not knowing Blondi, he paused.

"My sister Blondi," Karl intervened. He was a man in the middle of a nightmare. "What do you intend to do with us, Colonel?"

"If it was up to me," growled Cleary, "I'd shoot the whole lot of you.

"Were you given orders concerning the Wolfs after you captured them?" Pitt asked Wittenberg.

The colonel shook his head. "There was no time to discuss political policy regarding prisoners."

"In that case, may I ask a favor?"

"After all you and your friend have done," replied Cleary, "you have but to name it."

"I'd like temporary custody of the Wolfs."

Wittenberg gazed into Pitt's eyes, as if trying to read the mind behind. "I don't quite understand."

But Cleary did. "Since you were given no orders concerning the disposition of prisoners," he said to the colonel, "I think it only fitting and proper that the man who saved us from unimaginable horror have his request honored."

Wittenberg thought a moment before nodding. "I quite agree. The spoils of war. You have custody of the Wolfs until such time as they can be transported under guard to Washington."

"No one government has legal jurisdiction over any individual in Antarctica," said Karl arrogantly. "It is unlawful for you to hold us as hostages."

"I'm only a simple soldier," said Wittenberg, with an indifferent shrug. "I'll leave it for the lawyers and politicians to decide your fate after you're in their hands."

While the newly combined Special Force teams secured the mining facility and rounded up the captives, eventually placing them in confinement in a workers' dormitory, Pitt and Giordino unobtrusively herded Karl, Elsie, and Blondi Wolf along the huge doors that covered one wall of the hangar. Seemingly unnoticed, they suddenly forced the three Wolfs through a small maintenance door that opened onto the aircraft runway outside. The sudden surge of cold air came as a shock after the sixty-degree temperature inside the hangar.

Karl Wolf turned and smiled bleakly at Pitt and Giordino. "Is this where you execute us?"

Blondi seemed as if she were in a trance, but Elsie stared at Pitt scathingly. "Shoot us, if you dare!" she spat savagely.

Pitt's face was masked by disgust. "By all that is holy in this world, you all deserve to die. Your whole despicable family deserves to die. But it won't be me or my friend here who will do the honors. I'll leave that to natural causes."

The revelation suddenly struck Wolf. "You're allowing us to escape?"

Pitt nodded. "Yes."

"Then you don't see my sisters and me standing trial and going to jail."

"A family of your wealth and power will never step into a courtroom. You will use every means at your command to cheat the gallows or a life behind bars and go free in the end."

"What you say is true," said Karl contemptuously. "No head of government would dare risk the consequences of indicting the Wolf family."

"Nor incur our wrath," added Elsie. "There isn't a high official or national leader who doesn't owe our family. Our exposure will be their exposure."

"We cannot be imprisoned like common rabble," said Blondi, her voice having regained a measure of insolence. "The family is too spirited, too strong-willed. We will rise again, and next time we will not fail."

"I, for one," said Giordino, his black eyes filled with scorn, "think that is a bad idea."

"We'll all rest easier knowing you won't be around to have a hand in it," said Pitt coldly.

Karl Wolf's eyes narrowed, and then he stared out over the icy landscape. "I believe I see your motive," he murmured in subdued tones. "You are turning us loose to die out on the ice floe."

"Yes." Pitt nodded his head slightly.

"Not dressed for frigid temperatures, we won't last an hour."

"My guess is twenty minutes."

"It seems I underestimated you as an opponent, Mr. Pitt."

"I have this theory that the world can get along just fine without the chief director of Destiny Enterprises and the family empire."

"Why don't you simply shoot us and get it over with?"

Pitt gazed at Wolf with the briefest of pleasure in his green eyes. "That would be too quick. This way you'll have time to reflect on the horror you attempted to inflict on billions of innocent people."

There was a slight flush on Wolf's temples. In a supportive gesture, he put his arms around his sister's shoulders. "Your lecture bores me, Mr. Pitt. I'd rather meet death by freezing than listen to more of your philosophic drivel."

Pitt looked thoughtfully at Karl Wolf and his sisters. He wondered if it was possible to make a dent in this incorrigible family. The loss of their empire shook them, but the threat of death didn't unnerve them in the least. If anything, it maddened them. He looked from one face to the other. "A word of warning. Don't bother attempting to double back into the tunnels or the mining facility. All entrances and exits will be guarded." Then he made a gesture with his old Colt. "Start walking."

Blondi looked resigned to her fate, as did Karl. Already she was shivering violently from the biting cold. Not Elsie. She lunged at Pitt, only to receive a backhand from Giordino that knocked her to her knees. As she struggled to her feet, helped by Karl, Pitt had rarely seen such a look of pure malevolence on a woman's face. "I swear, I'll kill you," she snarled through bloody lips. Pitt smiled ruthlessly. "Goodbye, Elsie, have a nice day." "If you walk fast," said Giordino cynically, "you'll stay warmer." Then he slammed and locked the door.

47

Forty-eight hours later, the mining facility was crawling with scientists and engineers, who began studying the Wolfs' nanotechnology systems while making dead certain the network to break off the ice shelf could not be reactivated. They were followed by an army of anthropologists and archaeologists, who descended on the ancient city of the Amenes. Almost all were former skeptics who denied the existence of an Atlantis-type culture before 4000 B.C. Now they stood and walked amid the ancient ruins in reverent awe, gazing at the grotesque shape of the pillars under ice, unable to believe what they were truly encountering. Soon they were cataloging the artifacts found in the damaged aircraft and the storage rooms in the tunnels spreading from the hangar. After being carefully crated, the artifacts were flown to the United States for conservation and in-depth study before being placed on public display.

Every university in every country with a dedicated archaeology department sent teams to study the city and begin removing the ice that had shrouded it for nine millennia. It would be a massive project that would continue for nearly fifty years and would lead to other undiscovered Amenes sites. The incredible magnitude of artifacts would eventually fill museums in every major city of the world.

His face repaired by a medical team flown in to tend and evacuate the wounded, Pitt, along with Giordino, greeted Dad Cussler when he and his crew arrived to disassemble the remains of the Snow Cruiser for shipment back to a restoration shop in the States. They accompanied him to the control center and then stood back with heavy misgivings as he examined the vehicle for the first time since it had left Little America VI.

The old man stared solemnly and sadly at the great red vehicle that was battered to a pulp, riddled with bullet holes, tires shredded and flat, the windows in the control cabin shot to shards. Nearly three full minutes passed as he walked around the wreckage, examining the damage. Finally, he looked up and made a crooked grin.

"Nothing that can't be fixed," he said, pulling at his gray beard.

Pitt stared at him bleakly. "You really believe it can be rebuilt?"

"I know so. Might take a couple of years, but I think we can put her back together as good as new."

"It doesn't seem possible," said Giordino, shaking his head.

"You and I aren't seeing the same thing," said Cussler. "You see a pile of junk. I see a magnificent machine that will one day be admired by millions of people at the Smithsonian." His blue-green eyes gleamed as he spoke. "What you don't realize is that you took a mechanical failure and turned it into an astonishing success. Before, the Snow Cruiser's only distinction was that it was a fiasco and didn't come close to achieving what it was designed to do. And that was to carry a crew in comfort five thousand miles over the ice of the Antarctic. It floundered almost immediately after coming off the boat in 1930 and lay buried for seventy years. You two not only proved her a triumph of early-twentieth-century engineering by driving her sixty miles across the ice shelf in the middle of a blizzard, but you used her brute size and power to prevent a worldwide cataclysm. Now, thanks to you, she's a priceless and treasured piece of history."

Pitt gazed at the huge mutilated vehicle as if it were a wounded animal. "But for her, none of us would be standing here."

"Someday, I hope you'll tell me the entire story."

Giordino looked at the old man oddly. "Somehow, I think you already know it."

"When she's put on display," said Dad, slapping Pitt on the back, "I'll send you both invitations to the ceremony."

"Al and I will look forward to it."

"That reminds me. Could you point out whoever is in charge here. During our crossing from the ice station, my crew and I ran across three frozen bodies about a half a mile from the runway. It looked like they were trying to cross over the security fence before the cold caught up with them. I'd better report it so the remains can be recovered."

"A man and two women?" Pitt asked innocently.

Dad nodded. "Funny thing. They were dressed more like they were going to a football game in Philadelphia than to survive the Antarctic."

"Some people just don't respect the hazards of frigid climates."

Dad lifted an eyebrow, then reached in his pocket and pulled out a red bandanna half the size of a pup tent and blew his nose. "Yeah, ain't it the truth."

Aircraft were landing with frequency, unloading scientists and military personnel, then loading Cleary's wounded along with the injured Wolf security guards and airlifting them to hospitals in the United States. Not to be left out, the nuclear submarine Tucson navigated her way through the cavern into the ice-enclosed harbor and moored next to the old Nazi U-boats.

Captain Evan Cunningham was a bantam cock of a man, short and wiry, who moved his arms and legs as if jerked on strings. He had a smooth face with a sharp chin and Prussian blue eyes that seemed constantly in motion. He met with Colonel Wittenberg and General Bill Guerro, who had been sent to Okuma Bay from Washington to take command from Wittenberg and oversee the growing complexity of the discovery. Cunningham offered the services of his ship and crew as authorized by the naval chief of staff.

Wittenberg had described Pitt to Cunningham, and the commander had sought out the man from NUMA. He approached and introduced himself. "Mr. Pitt, we've talked over the radio, but haven't actually met. I'm Evan Cunningham, captain of the Tucson."

"A privilege to meet you, Captain. Now I can properly express my thanks for your timely rescue of the Polar Storm and everyone on board."

`A lucky case of being in the right place at the right time." He grinned broadly. "Not every sub commander in today's navy can say he sank a U-boat."

"Certainly not unless they've retired to a nursing home."

"Speaking of U-boats, did you know there are four more docked in the ice harbor?"

Pitt nodded. "I took a quick look at them this morning. They're as pristine as the day they came out of the factory."

"My engine-room crew went on board to study them. They were mighty impressed with the high quality of engineering created when their grandparents were still in junior high school."

"To anyone born after 1980, World War Two must seem as distant as the Civil War was to our parents."

Pitt excused himself as he glanced at the passengers stepping down the boarding ladder of a Boeing 737 that had taxied up to the hangar. A woman wearing a knit cap with red hair flowing from under it like a fiery waterfall stopped for a moment and looked around the hangar, marveling at the busy activity. Then she looked in his direction and her face lit up.

Pitt began to walk toward her, but was overtaken by Giordino, who ran past him, took Pat O'Connell in his muscular arms, lifted her off the ground as easily as if she were a down pillow, and swung her around in a circle. Then they kissed passionately.

Pitt watched them, mystified. When Giordino set Pat on her feet again, she looked over and waved. Pitt kissed her lightly on one cheek, stood back, and said, "Have I been missing something or do you two have a thing for each other?"

Pat laughed gaily. "Al and I looked into each other's eyes when we were in Buenos Aires and something beautiful happened between us."

He looked at Giordino dryly. "Like what?"

"Like we fell in love."

Pitt was no longer mystified. He was dumbfounded. "You fell in love?"

Giordino shrugged and smiled. "I can't explain it. I've never felt this way before."

"Does this mean you're breaking up the act?"

"My friend, you and I have been through a lot together, more wild ventures than I care to remember. It's a miracle we're still alive, and we have more than our share of scars to prove it. We have to face reality. We're not getting any younger. My joints are beginning to creak when I get up in the morning. We've got to think about slowing down." He paused and grinned. "And then, of course, there's Mama Giordino to consider."

"You have a mother?" asked Pat, teasing.

"You and Mama will get along famously," Giordino said approvingly. "Mama said I can't remain a bachelor forever if I want to give her little Giordinos to fatten with her celebrated lasagna."

"We'd better hurry." Pat laughed. "At thirty-five, I don't have much time left to produce a new brood."

"You have Megan," Pitt said.

"Yes, and she adores Al."

Pitt shook his head in wonder. "Megan approves of this alien character?"

"Why shouldn't she?" Pat said. "He saved her life."

Pitt didn't mention that he had a hand in saving mother and daughter, too. Nor did he let on that he had a fondness for Pat that went beyond mere friendship. "Well, I guess there's nothing left for me to do but give my blessing and insist on being the best man at your wedding."

Giordino put his arm around Pitt's shoulder and said wistfully, "I can't think of another mortal I'd rather have stand up for me."

"Have you set a date?"

"Not before six months," answered Pat. "Admiral Sandecker arranged for me to direct the project to decipher and translate the Amenes inscriptions found in the lost city. It will actually take years, but I don't think he'll hold it against me if I go home early for a wedding with Al."

"No," Pitt said, trying to absorb the unexpected promise of Al becoming married. "I don't guess he will."

Lieutenant Miles Jacobs came up and threw a casual salute. "Mr. Pitt? Major Wittenberg would like a word with you."

"Where can I find him?"

"He and General Guerro have set up a command post in one of the aircraft maintenance offices on the far end of the hangar."

"I'm on my way, thank you." Pitt turned and looked at Giordino. "You'd better get Pat situated in one of the empty storerooms- she can use it for living quarters and a base for her inscription project." Then he turned and strode through the turmoil of activity to the military command post.

Wittenberg sat at his desk and gestured to a chair, as Pitt entered one of the offices the Russians slaves had carved out of the ice nearly six decades previously. A communications center had been set up, manned by two operators. The place was a madhouse, with civilians and military personnel rushing in and out. General Guerro sat behind a large metal desk in one corner, surrounded by scientists who were requesting the military rush in special excavation equipment so they could begin removing the ice shroud from the ancient city. He did not look happy as he made excuses for the delay.

"Have you found the relics yet?"

"We've been too busy to search," answered Wittenberg. "I thought I'd pass the buck to you. If you're successful, let me know and I'll schedule a military transport to fly you back to the States."

"I'll get back to you shortly," said Pitt, rising to his feet. "I think I know where the Wolfs put them."

"One more thing, Mr. Pitt," said Wittenberg seriously. "Do not say anything to anyone. It's best the relics are removed quietly, before a lot of crazies get wind of their existence and move heaven and earth to lay their hands on them."

"Why not destroy them and be done with it?"

"Not our call. The President personally ordered them brought to the White House."

"I think I understand," Pitt assured him.

As he walked across the hangar floor, the weight of his responsibility fell over him like a black cloud. Uneasily, he approached the Wolfs' deserted executive jet and studied the mutilated tail section that he had crushed with the Snow Cruiser, before stepping around to the entrance door and entering the darkened interior. In what little light filtered in through the smashed opening and the windows, he could discern an interior luxuriously appointed with leather chairs and sofas. He pulled his flashlight from a pocket and swept its beam around the cabin. There was a bar and credenza with a large TV. The rear compartment of the cabin held a king-size bed in anticipation of its owner's getting a few hours' sleep while the plane was in flight. The bathroom had goldplated fixtures and a small shower. Forward, just behind the cockpit, he could see a small galley, complete with oven, microwave, sink, and cabinets that held crystal glasses and china.

His eyes fell on a long box that was tied to the floor beside the bed. Pitt knelt and ran his hands over the surface. He tried to lift one end, but found it was made out of bronze and extremely heavy. There was a brass plaque embedded in the lid. He shined the light on the lettering and leaned closer. The inscription was in German, but relying on the few words he'd learned, he loosely translated the message as "Here lie the treasures of the ages awaiting resurrection."

He twisted the pins from their hasps and removed them. Then, taking a deep breath, he took both hands and lifted the lid.

There were four objects inside the bronze box, all contained in leather cases and neatly wrapped in heavy linen. He carefully opened the first case and unwrapped the smallest object. It held a small bronze plaque with a crack running through it. The sculptured front side displayed a holy knight killing a dragonlike monster. Pitt would learn later that it was considered a sacred Nazi relic because Hitler had had it in a breast pocket of his uniform during the assassination attempt, when German army dissenters had set off a bomb in his forest headquarters.

The next case held the sacred Nazi flag earlier described by Admiral Sandecker as having been smeared with the blood of a fallen supporter of Hitler who'd been killed when the Bavarian police fired on the fledgling Nazi party members during the Munich Putsch in November of 1923. The bloodstain could easily be seen under the beam of the flashlight. He placed it back inside the linen and the leather case.

Then he opened a long mahogany chest and stared in rapt fascination at the Holy Lance, the lance allegedly used by a Roman centurion to pierce the body of Jesus Christ, the lance Hitler believed would give him control over the destiny of the world. The image of the lance being used to kill Christ on the cross was too overwhelming for Pitt to envision. He gently laid the most sacred relic in Christendom back in the mahogany chest and turned to the largest of the leather cases.

After unwrapping the linen, he discovered that he was holding a heavy urn of solid silver a few inches less than two feet high. The top of the lid was decorated with a black eagle that stood on a gold wreath surrounding an onyx swastika. Just below the lid were inscribed the words Der Fuhrer. Directly beneath were the dates 1889 and 1945 over the runic symbols for the SS. On the base above a ring of swastikas were the names Adolf Hitler and Eva Hitler.

The horror struck Pitt like a blow to the face. The sheer immensity of what he was staring at sent shivers up his spine and a knot twisting inside his stomach, as his face drained of all color. It didn't seem possible that in his hands he was holding the ashes of Adolf Hitler and his mistress/wife, Eva Braun.