Raise the Titanic

Raise The Titanic

By

Clive Cussler

Foreword

When Dirk Pitt salvaged the Titanic from the pages of a typewriter set in a damp corner of an unfinished basement, the legendary ocean liner was still ten years away from actual discovery. The year was 1975 and Raise the Titanic became the fourth book in Pitt's underwater adventures. Then, no one was inspired to spend the immense effort in time and money for a search operation. But after the book was published and the movie produced, a renewed tidal wave of interest swept America and Europe. At least five expeditions were launched to look for the wreck.

My original inspiration was based on fantasy and a desire to see the world's most famous ship brought up from the seabed and towed into New York Harbor, completing her maiden voyage begun three quarters of a century before. Fortunately, it was a fantasy shared by millions of her devoted fans.

Now, 73 years after she slipped into the silence of the black abyss, cameras have finally revealed her open grave.

Fiction has become fact.

Pitt's description of her in the story pretty well matches what the robot cameras recorded shortly after she was found through the miracle of sidescan sonar. Aside from her structural damage, sustained during her 13,000-foot plunge to the bottom, she suffers little from sea growth and corrosion. Even the wine bottles and silver service that spilled out on the silt appear pristine.

Will the Titanic ever be raised?

It is unlikely. A total salvage operation would nearly equal the cost of the Apollo man-on-the-moon project. Soon, however, we can expect to see manned submersibles circling her hulk in search of her treasure in artifacts, while teams of American and British attorneys roll up their sleeves for long courtroom battles over her possession.

Pitt has always looked in the future and found it full of excitement and adventure. In the nineteen seventies he was a man of the eighties. Now he is a man of the nineties. Like a scout out for a wagon train. Pitt looks over the next hill and tells us what's there. He sees what we'd all like to see in our imaginations.

That's why no one could have been more delighted than I when it was announced that the Titanic had been found.

I knew that Pitt had seen her first.

April 1912

PRELUDE

The man on Deck A, Stateroom 33, tossed and turned in his narrow berth, the mind behind his sweating face lost in the depths of a nightmare. He was small, no more than two inches over five feet, with thinning white hair and a bland face, whose only imposing feature was a pair of dark, bushy eyebrows. His hands lay entwined on his chest, his fingers twitching in a nervous rhythm. He looked to be in his fifties. His skin had the color and texture of a concrete sidewalk, and the lines under his eyes were deeply etched. Yet he was only ten days shy of his thirty-fourth birthday.

The physical grind and the mental torment of the last five months had exhausted him to the ragged edge of madness. During his waking hours, he found his mind wandering down vacant channels, losing all track of time and reality. He had to remind himself continually where he was and what day it was. He was going mad, slowly but irrevocably mad, and the worst part of it was that he knew he was going mad.

His eyes fluttered open and he focused them on the silent fan that hung from the ceiling of his stateroom. His hands traveled over his face and felt the two-week growth of beard. He didn't have to look at his clothes; he knew they were soiled and rumpled and stained with nervous sweat. He should have bathed and changed after he'd boarded the ship, but, instead, he'd taken to his berth and slept a fearful, obsessed sleep off and on for nearly three days.

It was late into Sunday evening, and the ship wasn't due to dock in New York until early Wednesday morning, slightly more than fifty hours hence.

He tried to tell himself he was safe now, but his mind refused to accept it, in spite of the fact that the prize that had cost so many lives was absolutely secure. For the hundredth time he felt the lump in his vest pocket. Satisfied that the key was still there, he rubbed a hand over his glistening forehead and closed his eyes once more.

He wasn't sure how long he'd dozed. Something had jolted him awake. Not a loud sound or a violent movement, it was more like a trembling motion from his mattress and a strange grinding noise somewhere far below his starboard stateroom. He rose stiffly to a sitting position and swung his feet to the floor. A few minutes passed and he sensed an unusual, vibrationless quiet. Then his befogged mind grasped the reason. The engines had stopped. He sat there listening, but the only sounds came from the soft joking of the stewards in the passageway, and the muffled talk from the adjoining cabins.

An icy tentacle of uneasiness wrapped around him. Another passenger might have simply ignored the interruption and quickly gone back to sleep, but he was within an inch of a mental breakdown, and his five senses were working overtime at magnifying every impression. Three days locked in his cabin, neither eating nor drinking, reliving the horrors of the past five months, served only to stoke the fires of insanity behind his rapidly degenerating mind.

He unlocked the door and walked unsteadily down the passageway to the grand staircase. People were laughing and chattering on their way from the lounge to their staterooms. He looked at the ornate bronze clock which was flanked by two figures in bas-relief above the middle landing of the stairs. The gilded hands read 1151.

A steward, standing alongside an opulent lamp standard at the bottom of the staircase, stared disdainfully up at him, obviously annoyed at seeing so shabby a passenger wandering the first-class accommodations, while all the others strolled the rich Oriental carpets in elegant evening dress.

"The engines . . . they've stopped," he said thickly.

"Probably for a minor adjustment, sir," the steward replied. "A new ship on her maiden voyage and all. There's bound to be a few bugs to iron out. Nothing to worry about. She's unsinkable, you know."

"If she's made out of steel, she can sink." He massaged his bloodshot eyes. "I think I'll take a look outside."

The steward shook his head. "I don't recommend it, sir. It's frightfully cold out there."

The passenger in the wrinkled suit shrugged. He was used to the cold. He turned, climbed one flight of stairs and stepped through a door that led to the starboard side of the boat deck. He gasped as though he'd been stabbed by a thousand needles. After lying for three days in the warm womb of his stateroom, he was rudely shocked by the thirty-one-degree temperature. There was not the slightest hint of a breeze, only a biting, motionless cold that hung from the cloudless sky like a shroud.

He walked to the rail and turned up the collar of his coat. He leaned over but saw only the black sea, calm as a garden pond. Then he looked fore and aft. The Boat Deck from the raised roof over the first-class smoking room to the wheelhouse forward of the officers' quarters was totally deserted. Only the smoke drifting lazily from the forward three of the four huge yellow and black funnels, and the lights shining through the windows of the lounge and reading room revealed any involvement with human life.

The white froth along the hull diminished and turned black as the massive vessel slowly lost her headway and drifted silently beneath the endless blanket of stars. The ship's purser came out of the officers' mess and peered over the side.

"Why did we stop?"

"We've struck something," the purser replied without turning.

"Is it serious?"

"Not likely, sir. If there's any leakage, the pumps should handle it."

Abruptly, an ear-shattering roar that sounded like a hundred Denver and Rio Grande locomotives thundering through a tunnel at the same time erupted from the eight exterior exhaust ducts. Even as he put his hands to his ears, the passenger recognized the cause. He had been around machinery long enough to know that the excess steam from the ship's idle reciprocating engines was blowing off through the bypass valves. The terrific blare made further speech with the purser impossible. He turned away and watched as other crew members appeared on the Boat Deck. A terrible dread spread through his stomach as he saw them begin stripping off the lifeboat covers and clearing away the lines to the davits.

He stood there for nearly an hour while the din from the exhaust ducts died slowly in the night. Clutching the handrail, oblivious to the cold, he barely noticed the small groups of passengers who had begun to wander the Boat Deck in a strange, quiet kind of confusion.

One of the ship's junior officers came past. He was young, in his early twenties, and his face had the typically British milky-white complexion and the typically British bored-with-it-all expression. He approached the man at the railing and tapped him on the shoulder.

"Beg your pardon, sir. But you must get your life jacket on."

The man slowly turned and stared. "We're going to sink, aren't we?" he asked hoarsely.

The officer hesitated a moment, then nodded. "She's taking sea faster than the pumps can keep up."

"How long do we have?"

"Hard to say. Maybe another hour if the water stays clear of the boilers."

"What happened? There was no other ship nearby. What did we collide with?"

"Iceberg. Slashed our hull. Damnable bit of bloody luck."

He grasped the officer's arm so hard the young man winced. "I must get into the cargo hold."

"Little chance of that, sir. The mail room on F Deck is flooding and the luggage is already floating down in the hold."

"You must guide me there."

The officer tried to shake his arm loose, but it was held like a vise. "Impossible! My orders are to see to the starboard lifeboats."

"Some other officer can man the boats," the passenger said tonelessly. "You're going to show me the way to the cargo hold."

It was then that the officer noticed two discomforting things. First, the twisted, insane look on the passenger's face, and, second, the muzzle of the gun that was pressing against his genitals.

"Do as I ask," the man snarled, "if you wish to see grandchildren."

The officer stared dumbly at the gun and then looked up. Something inside him was suddenly sick. There was no thought of argument or resistance. The reddened eyes that burned into his, burned from within the depths of insanity.

"I can only try."

"Then try!" the passenger snarled. "And no tricks. I'll be at your back all the way. One stupid mistake and I'll shoot your spine in two at the base."

Discreetly, he shoved the gun into a coat pocket, keeping the barrel nudged against the officer's back. They made their way without difficulty through the milling throng of people who now cluttered the Boat Deck. It was a different ship now. No laughter or gaiety, no class distinction; the wealthy and the poor were joined by the common bond of fear. The stewards were the only ones smiling and making small talk as they handed out ghost-white life preservers.

The distress rockets soared into the air, looking small and vain under the smothering blackness, their burst of white sparkles seen by no one except those aboard the doomed ship. It provided an unearthly backdrop for the heartrending good-byes, the forced expressions of hope in the men's eyes as they tenderly lifted their women and children into the lifeboats. The terrible unreality of the scene was heightened as the ship's eight-piece band assembled on the Boat Deck, incongruous with their instruments and pale life jackets. They began to play Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band."

The ship's officer, prodded by the gun, struggled down the main stairway against the wave of passengers who were surging up toward the lifeboats. The low angle of the bow was becoming more pronounced. Going down the steps, their stride was off-balance. At B Deck they commandeered an elevator and rode it down to D Deck.

The young officer turned and studied the man whose strange whim had inexorably bound him tighter in the grip of certain death. The lips were drawn back tightly over the teeth, the eyes glassy with a faraway look. The passenger glanced up and saw the officer staring at him. For a long moment their eyes locked.

"Don't worry."

"Bigalow, sir."

"Don't worry, Bigalow. You'll make it before she goes."

"What section of the cargo hold do you want?"

"The ship's vault in number one cargo hold, G Deck."

"G Deck must surely be under water by now."

"We'll only know when we get there, won't we?" The passenger motioned with the gun in his coat pocket as the elevator doors opened. They moved out and pushed their way through the crowd.

Bigalow tore off his life belt and ran around the staircase leading to E Deck. There he stopped and looked down and saw the water crawling upward, inching its relentless path up the steps. Some of the lights still burned under the cold green water, giving off a haunting, distorted glow.

"It's no use. You can see for yourself."

"Is there another way?"

"The watertight doors were closed right after the collision. We might make it down one of the escape ladders."

"Then keep going."

The journey along the circuitous alleyways went rapidly through the unending steel labyrinth of passages and ladder tunnels. Bigalow halted and lifted a round hatch cover and peered into the narrow opening. Surprisingly, the water on the cargo deck beneath was only two feet deep.

"No hope," he lied. "It's flooded."

The passenger roughly shoved the officer to one side and looked for himself.

"It's dry enough for my purpose," he said slowly. He waved the gun at the hatch. "Keep going."

The overhead electric lights were still burning in the hold as the two men sloshed their way toward the ship's strong room. The dim rays glinted off the brass of a giant Renault town car blocked to the deck.

Both of them stumbled and fell in the icy water several times, numbing their bodies with the cold. Staggering like drunken men, they reached the vault at last. It was a cube in the middle of the cargo compartment. It measured eight feet by eight feet; its sturdy walls were constructed of twelve inch-thick Belfast steel.

The passenger produced a key from his vest pocket and inserted it in the slot. The lock was new and stiff, but finally the tumblers gave with an audible click. He pushed the heavy door open and stepped into the vault. Then he turned and smiled for the first time. "Thanks for your help, Bigalow. You'd better head topside. There's still time for you."

Bigalow looked puzzled. "You're staying?"

"Yes, I'm staying. I've murdered eight good and true men. I can't live with that." It was said flatly. The tone final. "It's over and done with. Everything."

Bigalow tried to speak, but the words would not come.

The passenger nodded in understanding and began pulling the door closed behind him.

"Thank God for Southby," he said.

And then he was gone, swallowed up in the black interior of the vault.

Bigalow survived.

He won his race with the rising water and managed to reach the Boat Deck and throw himself over the side only seconds before the ship took her plunge.

As the bulk of the great ocean liner sank from sight, her red pennant with the white star that had been hanging limply, high on the aft mast peak under the dead calm of the night, suddenly unfurled when it touched the sea, as though in final salute to the fifteen hundred men, women, and children who were either dying of exposure or drowning in the frigid waters over the grave.

Blind instinct clutched at Bigalow and he reached out and seized the pennant as it slipped past. Before his mind could focus, before he knew the full danger of his foolhardy act, he found himself being pulled beneath the water. Yet he stubbornly held on, refusing to release his grip. He was nearly twenty feet below the surface when at last the pennant's grommets tore from the halyard and the prize was his. Only then did he struggle upward through the liquid blackness. After what seemed to him an eternity, he broke into the night air again, thankful that the expected suction from the sinking ship had not gotten him.

The twenty-eight-degree water nearly killed him. Given another ten minutes in its freezing grip, he would have simply been one more statistic of that terrible tragedy.

A rope saved him; his hand brushed against and grabbed a trailing rope attached to a capsized boat. With the last ounce of his ebbing strength, he pulled his nearly frozen body on board and shared with thirty other men the numbing ache of the cold until they were rescued by another ship four hours later.

The pitiful cries of the hundreds who died would forever linger in the minds of those who survived. But as he clung to the overturned, partly submerged lifeboat, Bigalow's thoughts were on another memory the strange man sealed forever in the ship's vault.

Who was he?

Who were the eight men he claimed to have murdered?

What was the secret of the vault?

They were questions that were to haunt Bigalow for the next seventy-six years, right up to the last few hours of his life.

THE SICILIAN PROJECT

July 1987

1

The President swiveled in his chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and stared unseeing out of the window of the Oval Office and cursed his lot. He hated his job with a passion he hadn't thought possible. He had known the exact moment the excitement had gone out of it. He had known it the morning be had found it hard to rise from bed. That was always the first sign. A dread of beginning the day.

He wondered for the thousandth time since taking office why he had struggled so hard and so long for the damned thankless job anyway. The price had been painfully his. His political trail was littered with the bones of lost friends and a broken marriage. And, he'd no sooner taken the oath of office when he had found his infant administration staggered by a Treasury Department scandal, a war in South America, a nationwide airlines strike, and a hostile Congress that had come to mistrust whoever resided in the White House. He threw in an extra curse for Congress. Its members had overridden his last two vetoes and the news didn't sit well with him.

Thank God, be would escape the bullshit of another election. How he'd managed to win two terms still mystified him. He had broken all the political taboos ever laid down for a successful candidate. Not only was he a divorced man but he was not a churchgoer, smoked cigars in public, and sported a large mustache besides. He had campaigned by ignoring his opponents and by hitting the voters solidly between the eyes with tough talk. And they had loved it. Opportunely, he had come along at a time when the average American was fed up with goody-goody candidates who smiled big and made love to the TV cameras, and who spoke trite, nothing sentences that the press couldn't twist or find hidden meanings to invent between the nouns.

Eighteen more months and his second term in office would be over. It was the one thought that kept him going. His predecessor had accepted the post of head regent at the University of California. Eisenhower had withdrawn to his farm in Gettysburg, and Johnson to his ranch in Texas. The President smiled to himself. None of that elder-statesman on-the-sidelines crap for him. His plans called for self-exile to the South Pacific on a forty-foot ketch. There he would ignore every damned crisis that stirred the world while sipping rum and eyeing any pug-nosed, balloon-chested native girls who wandered within view. He closed his eyes and almost had the vision in focus when his aide eased open the door and cleared his throat.

"Excuse me, Mr. President, but Mr. Seagram and Mr. Donner are waiting."

The President swiveled back to his desk and ran his hands through a patch of thick silver-tinted hair. "Okay, send them in."

He brightened visibly. Gene Seagram and Mel Donner enjoyed immediate access to the President at any time, day or night. They were the chief evaluators for the Meta Section, a group of scientists who worked in total secrecy, researching projects that were as yet unheard of-projects that attempted to leapfrog current technology by twenty to thirty years.

Meta Section was the President's own brainchild. He had conceived it during his first year in office, connived and manipulated the unlimited secret funding, and personally recruited the small group of brilliant and dedicated men who comprised its core. He took great unadvertised pride in it. Even the CIA and the National Security Agency knew nothing of its existence. It had always been his dream to back a team of men who could devote their skills and talents to impossible schemes, fantasy schemes with one chance in a million for success. The fact that Meta Section was still batting zero five years after its inception bothered his conscience not at all.

There was no hand shaking, only cordial hello's. Then Seagram unlatched a battered leather briefcase and withdrew a folder stuffed with aerial photographs. He laid the pictures on the President's desk and pointed at several circled areas that were marked on transparent overlays.

"The mountain region on the upper island of Novaya Zemlya, north of the Russian mainland. All indications from our satellite sensors pinpoint this area as a slim possibility."

"Damn?" the President muttered softly. "Every time we discover something like this, it has to sit in the Soviet Union or in some other untouchable location." He scanned the photographs and then turned his eyes to Donner. "The earth is a big place. Surely there must be other promising areas?"

Donner shook his head. "I'm sorry, Mr. President, but geologists have been searching for byzanium ever since Alexander Beesley discovered its existence in 1902. To our knowledge, none has ever been found in quantity."

"It's radioactivity is so extreme," Seagram said, "it has long vanished from the continents in anything more than very minute trace amounts. The few bits and pieces we've gathered on this element have been gleaned from small, artificially prepared particles."

"Can't you build a supply through artificial means?" the President asked.

"No, sir," Seagram replied. "The longest-lived particle we managed to produce with a high-energy accelerator decayed in less thaw two minutes."

The President sat back and stared at Seagram. "How much of it do you need to complete your program?"

Seagram looked to Donner, then at the President. "Of course you realize, Mr. President, we're still in a speculative stage . . ."

"How much do you need?" the President repeated.

"I should judge about eight ounces."

"I see."

"That's only the amount required to test the concept fully," Donner added. "It would take an additional two hundred ounces to set up the equipment on a fully operational scale at strategic locations around the nation's borders."

The President slumped in his chair. "Then I guess we scrap this one and go on to something else."

Seagram was a tall lanky man, with a quiet voice and a courteous manner, and, except for a large, flattened nose, he could almost have passed as an unbearded Abe Lincoln.

Donner was just the opposite of Seagram. He was short and seemed almost as broad as he was tall. He had wheat colored hair, melancholy eyes, and his face always seemed to be sweating. He began talking at a machine-gun pace. "Project Sicilian is too close to reality to bury and forget. I strongly urge that we push on. We'd be playing for the inside straight to end inside straights, but if we succeed . . . my God, sir, the consequences are enormous."

"I'm open to suggestions," the President said quietly.

Seagram took a deep breath and plunged in. "First, we'd need your permission to build the necessary installations. Second, the required funds. And third, the assistance of the National Underwater and Marine Agency."

The President looked questioningly at Seagram. "I can understand the first two requests, but I don't grasp the significance of NUMA. Where does it fit in?"

"We're going to have to sneak expert mineralogists into Novaya Zemlya. Since it's surrounded by water, a NUMA oceanographic expedition nearby would make the perfect cover for our mission."

"How long will it take you to test, construct, and install the system?"

Donner didn't hesitate. "Sixteen months, one week."

"How far can you proceed without byzanium?"

"Right up to the final stage," Donner answered.

The President tilted back in his chair and gazed at a ship's clock that sat on his massive desk. He said nothing for nearly a full minute. Finally he said, "As I see it, gentlemen, you want me to bankroll you into building a multimillion dollar, unproven, untested, complex system that won't operate because we lack the primary ingredient which we may have to steal from an unfriendly nation."

Seagram fidgeted with his briefcase while Donner merely nodded.

"Suppose you tell me," the President continued, "how I explain a maze of these installations stretching around the country's perimeters to some tight-fisted liberal in Congress who gets it in his head to investigate?"

"That's the beauty of the system," said Seagram. "It's small and it's compact. The computers tell us that a building constructed along the lines of a small power station will do the job nicely. Neither the Russian spy satellites nor a farmer living next door will detect anything out of the ordinary."

The President rubbed his chin. "Why do you want to jump the gun on the Sicilian Project before you're one hundred-per-cent ready?"

"We're gambling, sir," said Donner. "We're gambling that in the next sixteen months we can either make a breakthrough and produce byzanium in the laboratory or find a deposit we can extract somewhere on earth."

"Even if it takes us ten years," Seagram blurted, "the installations would be in and waiting. Our only loss would be time."

The President stood up. "Gentlemen, I'll go along with your science-fiction scheme, but on one condition. You have exactly eighteen months and ten days. That's when the new man, whoever he may be, takes over my job. So if you want to keep your sugar daddy happy until then, get me some results."

The two men across the desk went limp.

At last Seagram managed to speak. "Thank you, Mr. President. Somehow, some way, the team will bring in the mother lode. You can count on it."

"Good. Now if you'll excuse me. I have to pose in the Rose Garden with a bunch of fat old Daughters of the American Revolution." He held out his hand. "Good luck, and remember, don't screw up your undercover operations. I don't want another Eisenhower U-2 spy mission to blow up in my face. Understood?"

Before Seagram and Donner could answer, he had turned and walked out a side door.

Donner's Chevrolet was passed through the White House gates. He eased into the mainstream of traffic and headed across the Potomac into Virginia. He was almost afraid to look in the rear view mirror for fear that the President might change his mind and send a messenger to chase them down with a rejection. He rolled down the window and breathed in the humid summer air.

"We came off lucky," Seagram said. "I guess you know that."

"You're telling me. If he'd known we'd sent a man into Russian territory over two weeks ago, the fertilizer would have hit the windmill."

"It still might," Seagram mumbled to himself. "It still might if NUMA can't get our man out."

2

Sid Koplin was sure he was dying.

His eyes were closed and the blood from his side was staining the white snow. A burst of light whirled around in Koplin's mind as consciousness gradually returned, and a spasm of nausea rushed over him and he retched uncontrollably. Had he been shot once, or was it twice? He wasn't sure.

He opened his eyes and rolled up onto his hands and knees. His head pounded like a jackhammer. He put his hand to it and touched a congealed gash that split his scalp above the left temple. Except for the headache, there was no exterior sensation; the pain had been dulled by the cold. But there was no dulling of the agonizing burn on his left side, just below his rib cage, where the second bullet had struck, and he could feel the syrup like stickiness of the blood as it trickled under his clothing, over his thighs and down his legs.

A volley of automatic weapons fire echoed down the mountain. Koplin looked around, but all he could see was the swirling white snow that was whipped by the vicious arctic wind. Another burst tore the frigid air. He guessed that it came from only a hundred yards away. A Soviet patrol guard must be firing blindly through the blizzard in the random hope of hitting him again.

All thought of escape had vanished now. It was finished. He knew he could never make it to the cove where he'd moored the sloop. Nor was he in any condition to sail the little twenty-eight-foot craft across fifty miles of open sea to a rendezvous with the waiting American oceanographic vessel.

He sank back in the snow. The bleeding had weakened him beyond further physical effort. The Russians must not find him. That was part of the bargain with Meta Section. If he must die, his body must not be discovered. Painfully, he began scraping snow over himself. Soon he would be only a small white mound on a desolate slope of Bednaya Mountain, buried forever under the constantly building ice sheet.

He stopped a moment and listened. The only sounds he heard were his own gasps and the wind. He listened harder, cupping his hands to his ears. Just audible through the howling wind he heard a dog bark.

"Oh God," he cried silently. As long as his body was still warm, the sensitive nostrils of the dog were sure to pick up his scent. He sagged in defeat. There was nothing left for him but to lie back and let his life ooze away.

But a spark deep inside him refused to dim and be extinguished. Merciful God, he thought deliriously, he couldn't just lie there waiting for the Russians to take him. He was only a professor of mineralogy, not a trained secret agent. His mind and forty-year-old body weren't geared to stand up under intensive interrogation. If he lived, they could tear the whole story from him in a matter of hours. He closed his eyes as the sickness of failure overcame all physical agony.

When he opened them again, his field of vision was filled with the head of an immense dog. Koplin recognized him as a komondor, a mighty beast standing thirty inches at the shoulder, covered by a heavy coat of matted white hair. The great dog snarled savagely and would have ripped Koplin's throat open if it hadn't been kept in check by the gloved hand of a Soviet soldier. There was an indifferent look about the man. He stood there and stared down at his helpless quarry, gripping the leash in his left hand while he steadied a machine pistol with his right. He looked fearsome in his huge greatcoat that came down to booted ankles, and the pale, expressionless eyes showed no compassion for Koplin's wounds. The soldier shouldered his weapon and reached down and pulled Koplin to his feet. Then without a word, the Russian began drawing the wounded American toward the island's security post.

Koplin nearly passed out from the pain. He felt as though he'd been dragged through the snow for miles when actually it was only a distance of fifty yards. That was as far as they'd got when a vague figure appeared through the storm. It was blurred by the wall of swirling white. Through the dim haze of near unconsciousness, Koplin felt the soldier stiffen.

A soft "plop" sounded over the wind, and the massive komondor fell noiselessly on its side in the snow. The Russian dropped his hold on Koplin and frantically tried to raise his gun, but the strange sound was repeated and a small hole that gushed red suddenly appeared in the middle of the soldier's forehead. Then the eyes went glassy and he crumpled beside the dog.

Something was terribly wrong; this shouldn't be happening, Koplin told himself, but his exhausted mind was too far gone to draw any valid conclusions. He sank to his knees and could only watch as a tall man in a gray parka materialized from the white mist and gazed down at the dog.

"A damned shame," he said tersely.

The man presented an imposing appearance. The oak tanned face looked out of place for the Arctic. And the features were firm, almost cruel. Yet it was the eyes that struck Koplin. He had never seen eyes quite like them. They were a deep sea-green and radiated a penetrating kind of warmth, a marked contrast from the hard lines etched in the face.

The man turned to Koplin and smiled. "Dr. Koplin, I presume?" The tone was soft and effortless.

The stranger pushed a handgun with silencer into a pocket, knelt down to eye level, and nodded at the blood spreading through the material of Koplin's parka. "I'd better get you to where I can take a look at that." Then he picked Koplin up as one might a child and began trudging down the mountain toward the sea.

"Who are you?" Koplin muttered.

"My name is Pitt. Dirk Pitt."

"I don't understand . . . where did you come from?"

Koplin never heard the answer. At that moment, the black cover of unconsciousness abruptly lifted up, and he fell gratefully under it.

3

Seagram finished off a margarita as he waited in a little garden restaurant just off Capitol Street to have lunch with his wife. She was late. Never in the eight years they had been married had he known her to arrive anywhere on time. He caught the waiter's attention and gestured for another drink.

Dana Seagram finally entered and stood in the foyer a moment searching for her husband. She spotted him and began meandering between the tables in his direction. She wore an orange sweater and a brown tweed skirt so youthfully it made her seem like a coed in graduate school. Her hair was blond and tied with a scarf, and her coffee-brown eyes were funny and gay and quick.

"Been waiting long?" she said, smiling.

"Eighteen minutes to be precise," he said. "About two minutes, ten seconds longer than your usual arrivals."

"I'm sorry," she replied. "Admiral Sandecker called a staff meeting, and it dragged on later than I'd figured."

"What's his latest brainstorm?"

"A new wing for the Maritime Museum. He's got the budget and now he's making plans to obtain the artifacts."

"Artifacts?" Seagram asked.

"Bits and pieces salvaged from famous ships." The waiter came with Seagram's drink and Dana ordered a daiquiri.. "It's amazing how little is left. A life belt or two from the Lusitania, a ventilator from the Maine here, an anchor from the Bounty there; none of it housed decently under one roof."

"I should think there are better ways of blowing the taxpayer's money."

Her face flushed. "What do you mean?"

"Collecting old junk," he said diffidently, "enshrining rusted and corroded bits of non-identifiable trash under a glass case to be dusted and gawked at. It's a waste."

The battle flags were raised.

"The preservation of ships and boats provides an important link with man's historical past." Dana's brown eyes blazed. "Contributing to knowledge is an endeavor an asshole like you cares nothing about."

"Spoken like a true marine archaeologist," he said.

She smiled crookedly. "It still frosts your balls that your wife made something of herself, doesn't it?"

"The only thing that frosts my balls, sweetheart, is your locker-room language. Why is it every liberated female thinks it's chic to cuss?"

"You're hardly one to provide a lesson in savoir-faire," she said. "Five years in the big city and you still dress like an Omaha anvil salesman. Why can't you style your hair like other men? That Ivy League haircut went out years ago. I'm embarrassed to be seen with you."

"My position with the administration is such that I can't afford to look like a hippie of the sixties."

"Lord, lord." She shook her head wearily. "Why couldn't I have married a plumber or a tree surgeon? Why did I have to fall in love with a physicist from the farm belt?"

"It's comforting to know you loved me once."

"I still love you, Gene," she said, her eyes turning soft. "This chasm between us has only opened in the last two years. We can't even have lunch together without trying to hurt each other. Why don't we say to hell with it and spend the rest of the afternoon making love in a motel. I'm in the mood to feel deliciously sexy."

"Would it make any difference in the long run?"

"It's a start."

"I can't."

"Your damned dedication to duty again," she said, turning away. "Don't you see? Our jobs have torn us apart. We can save ourselves, Gene. We can both resign and go back to teaching. With your Ph.D. in physics and my Ph.D. in archaeology, along with our experience and credentials, we could write our own ticket with any university in the country. We were on the same faculty when we met, remember? Those were our happiest years together."

"Please, Dana, I can't quit. Not now."

"Why?"

"I'm on an important project-"

"Every project for the last five years has been important. Please, Gene, I'm begging you to save our marriage. Only you can make the first move. I'll go along with whatever you decide if we can get out of Washington. This town will kill any hope of salvaging our life together if we wait much longer."

"I need another year."

"Even another month will be too late."

"I am committed to a course that makes no conditions for abandonment."

"When will these ridiculous secret projects ever end? You're nothing but a tool of the White House."

"I don't need that bleeding-heart, liberal crap from you."

"Gene, for God's sake, give it up!"

"It's not for God's sake, Dana, it's for my country's sake. I'm sorry if I can't make you understand."

"Give it up," she repeated, tears forming in her eyes. "No one is indispensable. Let Mel Donner take your place."

He shook his head. "No," he said firmly. "I created this project from nothing. My gray matter was its sperm. I must see it through to completion."

The waiter reappeared and asked if they were ready to order.

Dana shook her head. "I'm not hungry." She rose from the table and looked down at him. "Will you be home for dinner?"

"I'll be working late at the office."

There was no stopping her tears now.

"I hope whatever it is you're doing is worth it," she murmured. "Because it's going to cost you a terrible price."

4

Unlike the Russian intelligence officer so often stereotyped in American motion pictures, Captain Andre Prevlov had neither bull-shoulders nor shaven head. He was a well proportioned handsome man who sported a layered hairstyle and a modishly trimmed mustache. His image, built around an orange Italian sports car and a plushly furnished apartment overlooking the Moscow River, didn't sit too well with his superiors in the Soviet Navy's Department of Foreign Intelligence. Yet, despite Prevlov's irritating leanings, there was little possibility of his being purged from his high position in the department. The reputation he had carefully constructed as the Navy's most brilliant intelligence specialist, and the fact that his father was number twelve man in the Party, combined to make Captain Prevlov untouchable.

With a practiced, casual movement, he lit a Winston and poured himself a shot glass of Bombay gin. Then he sat back and read through the stack of files that his aide, Lieutenant Pavel Marganin had laid on his desk.

"It's a mystery to me, sir," Marganin said softly, "how you can take so easily to Western trash."

Prevlov looked up from a file and gave Marganin a cool, disdainful stare. "Like so many of our comrades, you are ignorant of the world at large. I think like an American, I drink like an Englishman, I drive like an Italian, and I live like a Frenchman. And do you know why, Lieutenant?"

Marganin flushed and mumbled nervously. "No, sir."

"To know the enemy, Marganin. The key is to know your enemy better than he knows you, better than he knows himself. Then do unto him before he has a chance to do unto you."

"Is that a quote from Comrade New Tshetsky?"

Prevlov shrugged in despair. "No, you idiot; I'm bastardizing the Christian Bible." He inhaled and blew a stream of smoke through his nostrils and sipped the gin. "Study the Western ways, my friend. If we do not learn from them, then our cause is lost." He turned back to the files. "Now then, why are these matters sent to our department?"

"No reason other than that the incident took place on or near a seacoast."

"What do we know about this one?" Prevlov snapped open the next file.

"Very little. A soldier on guard patrol at the north island of Novaya Zemlya is missing, along with his dog."

"Hardly grounds for a security panic. Novaya Zemlya is practically barren. An outdated missile station, a guard post, a few fishermen-we have no classified installations within hundreds of miles of it. Damned waste of time to even bother sending a man and a dog out to patrol it."

"The West would no doubt feel the same way about sending an agent there."

Prevlov's fingers drummed the table as he squinted at the ceiling.

Finally, he said, "An agent? Nothing there . . . nothing of military interest . . .yet-" He broke off and flicked a switch on his intercom. "Bring me the National Underwater and Marine Agency's ship placements of the last two days."

Marganin's brows lifted. "They wouldn't dare send an oceanographic expedition near Novaya Zemlya. That's deep within Soviet waters."

"We do not own the Barents Sea," Prevlov said patiently. "It is international waters."

An attractive blond secretary, wearing a trim brown suit, came into the room, handed a folder to Preview, and then left, closing the door softy behind her.

Prevlov shuffled through the papers in the folder until he found what he was looking for. "Here we are. The NUMA vessel First Attempt, last sighted by one of our trawlers three hundred and twenty-five nautical miles southwest of Franz Josef Land."

"That would put her close to Novaya Zemlya," Marganin said.

"Odd," Prevlov muttered. "According to the United States Oceanographic Ship Operating Schedule, the First Attempt should have been conducting plankton studies off North Carolina at the time of this sighting." He downed the remainder of the gin, mashed out the butt of his cigarette, and lit another. "A very interesting concurrence."

"What does it prove?" Marganin asked.

"It proves nothing, but it suggests that the Novaya Zemlya patrol guard was murdered and the agent responsible escaped, most likely rendezvoused with the First Attempt. It suggests that the United States is up to something when a NUMA research ship deviates from her planned schedule without explanation."

"What could they possibly be after?"

"I haven't the foggiest notion." Prevlov leaned back in his chair and smoothed his mustache. "Have the satellite photos enlarged of the immediate area at the time of the event in question."

The evening shadows were darkening the streets outside the office windows when Lieutenant Marganin spread the photo blowups on Prevlov's desk and handed him a high powered magnifying glass.

"Your perceptiveness paid off, sir. We have something interesting here."

Prevlov intently studied the pictures. "I see nothing unusual about the ship; typical research equipment, no military-detection hardware in evidence."

Marganin pointed at a wide-angle photo that barely revealed a ship as a small white mark on the emulsion. "Please note the small shape about two thousand meters from the First Attempt in the upper-right corner."

Prevlov peered through the glass for almost a full half minute. "A helicopter!"

"Yes, sir, that's why I was late with the enlargements. I took the liberty of having the photos analyzed by Section R."

"One of our Army security patrols, I imagine."

"No, sir."

Prevlov's brows raised. "Are you suggesting that it belong to the American vessel?"

"That's their guess, sir." Marganin placed two more pictures in front of Prevlov. "They examined earlier photos from another reconnaissance satellite. As you can see by comparing them, the helicopter is flying on a course away from Novaya Zemlya toward the First Attempt. They judged its altitude at ten feet and its speed at less than fifteen knots."

"Obviously avoiding our radar security," Prevlov said.

"Do we alert our agents in America?" said Marganin.

"No, not yet. I don't want to risk their cover until we are certain what it is the Americans are after."

He straightened the photographs and slipped them neatly into a folder, then looked at his Omega wristwatch. "I've just time for a light supper before the ballet. Do you have anything else, Lieutenant?"

"Only the file on the Lorelei Current Drift Expedition. The American deep-sea submersible was last reported in fifteen thousand feet of water off the coast of Dakar."

Prevlov stood up, took the file and shoved it under his arm. "I'll study it when I get a chance. Probably nothing in it that concerns naval security. Still, it should make good reading. Leave it to the Americans to come up with strange and wonderful projects."

5

"Damn, damn, double damn!" Dana hissed. "Look at the crow's-feet coming in around my eyes." She sat at her dressing table and stared dejectedly at her reflection in the mirror. "Who was it who said old age is a form of leprosy?"

Seagram came up behind her, pulled back her hair, and kissed the soft, exposed neck. "Thirty-one on your last birthday and already you're running for senior citizen of the month."

She stared at him in the mirror, bemused at his rare display of affection. "You're lucky; men don't have this problem."

"Men also suffer from the maladies of age and crow's-feet. "What makes women think we don't crack at the seams, too?"

"The difference is, you don't care."

"We're more prone to accept the inevitable," he said, smiling. "Speaking of the inevitable, when are you going to have a baby?"

"You bastard! You never give up, do you?" She threw a hairbrush on the dressing table, knocking a regiment of evenly spaced bottles of artificial beauty about the glass top. "We've been through all this a thousand times. I won't subject myself to the indignities of pregnancy. I won't swish crap-laden diapers around in a toilet bowl ten times a day. Let someone else populate the earth. I'm not about to split off my soul, like some damned amoeba."

"Those reasons are phony. You don't honestly believe them yourself."

She turned back to the mirror and made no reply.

"A baby could save us, Dana," he said gently.

She dropped her head in her hands. "I won't give up my career any more than you'll give up your precious project."

He stroked her soft golden hair and gazed at her image in the mirror. "Your father was an alcoholic who deserted his family when you were only ten. Your mother worked behind a bar and brought men home to earn extra drinking money. You and your brother were treated like animals until you were both old enough to run away from the garbage bin you called home. He turned crook and started holding up liquor stores and gas stations; a nifty little occupation that netted him a murder conviction and life imprisonment at San Quentin. God knows, I'm proud of how you lifted yourself from the sewer and worked eighteen hours a day to put yourself through college and grad school. Yes, you had a rotten childhood, Dana, and you're afraid of having a baby because of your memories. You've got to understand your nightmare doesn't belong to the future; you can't deny a son or daughter their chance at life."

The stone wall remained unbreached. She shook off his hands and furiously began plucking her brows. The discussion was closed; she had shut him out as conclusively as if she had caused him to vanish from the room.

When Seagram emerged from the shower, Dana was standing in front of a full-length closet mirror. She studied herself as critically as a designer who was seeing a finished creation for the first time. She wore a simple white dress that clung tightly to her torso before falling away to the ankles. The décolletage was loose and offered a more than ample view of her breasts.

"You'd better hurry," she said casually. It was as though the argument had never happened. "We don't want to keep the President waiting."

"There will be over two hundred people there. No one will stick a black star on our attendance chart for being tardy."

"I don't care." She pouted. "We don't receive an invitation to a White House party every night of the week. I'd at least like to create a good impression by arriving on time."

Seagram sighed and went through the ticklish ritual of tying a bow tie and then attaching his cuff links clumsily with one hand. Dressing for formal parties was a chore he detested. Why couldn't Washington's social functions be conducted with comfort in mind? It might be an exciting event to Dana, but to him it was a pain in the rectum.

He finished buffing his shoes and combing his hair and went into the living room. Dana was sitting on the couch, going over reports, her briefcase open on the coffee table. She was so engrossed she didn't look up when he entered the room.

"I'm ready."

"Be with you in a moment," she murmured. "Could you please get my stole?"

"It's the middle of summer. What in hell do you want to sweat in a fur for?"

She removed her horned-rimmed reading glasses and said, "I think one of us should show a little class, don't you?"

He went into the hall, picked up the telephone, and dialed. Mel Donner answered in the middle of the first ring.

"Donner."

"Any word yet?" Seagram asked.

"The First Attempt-"

"Is that the NUMA ship that was supposed to pick up Koplin?"

"Yeah. She bypassed Oslo five days ago."

"My God! Why? Koplin was to jump ship and take a commercial flight stateside from there."

"No way of knowing. The ship is on radio silence, per your instructions."

"It doesn't look good."

"It wasn't in the script, that's for sure."

"I'll be at the President's party till around eleven. If you hear anything, call me."

"You can count on it. Have fun."

Seagram was just hanging up when Dana came out of the living room. She read the thoughtful expression on his face. "Bad news?"

"I'm not sure yet."

She kissed him on the cheek. "A shame we can't live like normal people so you could confide your problems to me."

He squeezed her hand. "If only I could."

"Government secrets. What a colossal bore." She smiled slyly. "Well?"

"Well, what?"

"Aren't you going to be a gentleman?"

"I'm sorry, I forgot." He pulled her stole from the closet and slipped it over her shoulders. "A bad habit of mine, ignoring my wife."

Her lips spread in a playful grin. "For that, you will be shot at dawn."

Christ, he thought miserably, a firing squad might not be too farfetched at that, if Koplin screwed up at Novaya Zemlya.

6

The Seagrams settled behind the crowd gathered at the entrance to the East Room and waited their turn in the receiving line. Dana had been in the White House before, but she was still impressed by it.

The President was standing smartly and devilishly handsome. He was in his early fifties and was definitely a very sexy man. The latter was supported by the fact that standing next to him, greeting every guest with the fervor of discovering a rich relative, was Ashley Fleming, Washington's most elegant and sophisticated divorcee.

"Oh shit!" Dana gasped.

Seagram frowned at her irritably. "Now what's your problem?"

"The broad standing beside the President."

"That happens to be Ashley Fleming."

"I know that," Dana whispered, trying to hide behind Seagram's reassuring bulk. "Look at her gown."

Seagram didn't get it at first, and then it hit him, and it was all he could do to suppress a boisterous laugh. "By God, you're both wearing the same dress!"

"It's not funny," she said grimly.

"Where did you get yours?"

"I borrowed it from Annette Johns."

"That lesbian model across the street?"

"It was given to her by Claude d'Orsini, the fashion designer."

Seagram took her by the hand. "If nothing else, it only goes to prove what good taste my wife has."

Before she could reply, the line joggled forward and they suddenly found themselves standing awkwardly in front of the President.

"Gene, how nice to see you." The President smiled politely.

"Thank you for inviting us, Mr. President. You know my wife, Dana."

The President studied her, his eyes lingering on her cleavage. "Of course. Charming, absolutely charming." Then he leaned over and whispered in her ear.

Dana's eyes went wide and she flushed scarlet.

The President straightened and said, "May I introduce my lovely hostess, Miss Ashley Fleming. Ashley, Mr. and Mrs. Gene Seagram."

"It's a great pleasure to meet you at last, Miss Fleming," Seagram murmured.

He might as well have been talking to a tree. Ashley Fleming's eyes were cutting apart Dana's dress.

"It seems apparent, Mrs. Seagram," Ashley said sweetly, "one of us will be searching for a new dress designer first thing in the morning."

"Oh, I couldn't switch," Dana replied innocently. "I've been going to Jacques Pinneigh since I was a little girl."

Ashley Fleming's penciled brows raised questioningly. "Jacques Pinneigh? I've never heard of him."

"He's more widely known as J. C. Penney," Dana smiled sweetly. "His downtown store is having a clearance sale next month. Wouldn't it be fun if we shopped together. That way we wouldn't wind up as look-a-likes."

Ashley Fleming's face froze in a mask of indignation as the President went into a coughing spasm. Seagram nodded weakly, grabbed Dana's arm, and quickly hustled her away into the mainstream of the crowd.

"Did you have to do that?" he growled.

"I couldn't resist it. That woman is nothing but a glorified hooker." Then Dana's eyes looked up at him in bewilderment. "He propositioned me," she said, unbelieving. "The President of the United States propositioned me."

"Warren G. Harding and John F. Kennedy were rumored to be swingers. This one is no different. He's only human."

"A lecher for a President. It's disgusting."

"Are you going to take him up on it?" Seagram grinned.

"Don't be ridiculous!" she snapped back.

"May I join the battle?" The request came from a little man with flaming red hair, nattily dressed in a blue dinner jacket. He had a precisely trimmed beard that matched the hair and complemented his piercing hazel eyes. To Seagram the voice seemed vaguely familiar, but he drew a blank on the face.

"Depends whose side you're on," Seagram said.

"Knowing your wife's fetish for Women's Lib," the stranger said, "I'd be only too happy to join forces with her husband."

"You know Dana?"

"I should. I'm her boss."

Seagram stared at him in amazement. "Then you must be-"

"Admiral James Sandecker," Dana cut in, laughing, "Director of the National Underwater and Marine Agency. Admiral, may I introduce my easily flustered husband, Gene."

"An honor, Admiral." Seagram extended his hand. "I've often looked forward to the opportunity of thanking you in person for that little favor."

Dana looked puzzled. "You two know each other?"

Sandecker nodded. "We've talked over the telephone. We've never met face-to-face."

Dana slipped her hands through the men's arms. "My two favorite people consorting behind my back. What gives?"

Seagram met Sandecker's eyes. "I once called the Admiral and requested a bit of information. That's all there was to it."

Sandecker patted Dana's hand and said, "Why don't you make an old man eternally grateful and find him a scotch and water."

She hesitated a moment, then kissed Sandecker lightly on the cheek and obediently began worming her way through the scattered groups of guests milling around the bar.

Seagram shook his head in wonder. "You have a way with women. If I had asked her to get me a drink, she'd have spit in my eye."

"I pay her a salary," Sandecker said. "You don't."

They made their way out on the balcony and Seagram lit a cigarette while Sandecker puffed to life an immense Churchill cigar. They walked in silence until they were alone beneath a tall column in a secluded corner.

"Any word on the First Attempt from your end?" Seagram asked quietly.

"She docked at our Navy's submarine base in the Firth of Clyde at thirteen hundred hours, our time, this afternoon."

"That's nearly eight hours ago. Why wasn't I notified?"

"Your instructions were quite clear," Sandecker said coldly. "No communications from my ship until your agent was safely back on U.S. soil."

"Then how?..."

"My information came from an old friend in the Navy. He phoned me only a half an hour ago, madder than hell, demanding to know where my skipper got off using naval facilities without permission."

"There's been a screw-up somewhere," Seagram said flatly. "Your ship was supposed to dock at Oslo and let my man come ashore. Just what in hell is she doing in Scotland?"

Sandecker gave Seagram a hard stare. "Let's get one thing straight, Mr. Seagram, NUMA is not an arm of the CIA, FBI, or of any other intelligence bureau, and I don't take kindly to risking my people's lives just so you can poke around Communist territory playing espionage games. Our business is oceanographic research. Next time you want to play James Bond, get the Navy or the Coast Guard to do your dirty work. Don't con the President into ordering out one of my ships. Do you read me, Mr. Seagram?"

"I apologize for your agency's inconvenience, Admiral. I meant nothing derogatory. You must understand my uneasiness."

"I'd like to understand." There was a slight softening in the admiral's face. "But you'd make things a damned sight simpler if you would take me into your confidence and tell me what it is you're after."

Seagram turned away. "I'm sorry."

"I see," Sandecker said.

"Why do you suppose the First Attempt bypassed Oslo?" Seagram said.

"My guess is that your agent felt it was too dangerous to catch a civilian plane out of Oslo and decided on a military flight instead. Our nuclear sub base on the Firth of Clyde has the nearest airfield, so he probably ordered the captain of my research vessel to skip Norway and head there."

"I hope you're right. Whatever the reason, I'm afraid that the deviation from our set plan can only spell trouble."

Sandecker spied Dana standing in the balcony doorway with a drink in one hand. She was searching for them. He waved and caught her eye, and she started to move toward them.

"You're a lucky man, Seagram. Your wife is a bright and lovely gal."

Suddenly, Mel Donner appeared, rushed past Dana, and reached them first. He excused himself to Admiral Sandecker.

"A naval transport landed twenty minutes ago with Sid Koplin on board," Donner said softly. "He's been taken to Walter Reed."

"Why Walter Reed?"

"He's been shot up pretty badly."

"Good God." Seagram groaned.

"I've got a car waiting. We can be there in fifteen minutes."

"Okay, give me a moment."

He spoke quietly to Sandecker and asked the admiral to see that Dana got home and to make his regrets to the President. Then he followed Donner to the car.

7

"I'm sorry, but he is under sedation and I cannot allow any visitors at this time." The aristocratic Virginia voice was quiet and courteous, but there was no hiding the anger that clouded the doctor's gray eyes.

"Is he able to talk?" Donner asked.

"For a man who regained consciousness only minutes ago, his mental faculties are remarkably alert." The cloud remained behind the eyes. "But don't let that fool you. He won't be playing any tennis for a while."

"Just how serious is his condition?" Seagram asked.

"His condition is just that serious. The doctor who operated on him aboard the NUMA vessel did a beautiful job. The bullet wound in his left side will heal nicely. The other wound, however, left a neat little hairline crack in the skull. Your Mr. Koplin will be having headaches for some time to come."

"We must see him now," Seagram said firmly.

"As I've told you, I'm sorry, but no visitors."

Seagram took a step forward so that he was eye to eye with the doctor. "Get this into your head, Doctor. My friend and I are going into that room whether you like it or not. If you personally try to stop us, we'll put you on one of your own operating tables. If you yell for attendants, we'll shoot them. If you call the police, they will respect our credentials and do what we tell them." Seagram paused and his lips curled in a smug grin. "Now then, Doctor, the choice is yours."

Koplin lay flat on the bed, his face as white as the pillowcase behind his head, but his eyes were surprisingly bright.

"Before you ask," he said in a low rasp, "I feel awful. And that's true. But don't tell me I look good. Because that's a gross lie."

Seagram pulled a chair up to the bed and smiled. "We don't have much time, Sid, so if you feel up to it, we'll jump right in."

Koplin nodded to the tubes connected to his arm. "These drugs are fogging my mind, but I'll stay with you as long as I can."

Donner nodded. "We came for the answer to the billion dollar question."

"I found traces of byzanium, if that's what you mean?"

"You actually found it! Are you certain?"

"My field tests were by no stroke of the imagination as accurate as lab analysis might have been, but I'm ninety nine-per-cent positive it was byzanium."

"Thank God." Seagram sighed. "Did you come up with an assay figure?" he asked.

"I did."

"How much . . . how many pounds of byzanium do you reckon can be extracted from Bednaya Mountain?"

"With luck, maybe a teaspoonful."

At first Seagram didn't get it, then it sunk in. Donner sat frozen and expressionless, his hands clenched over the armrests of the chair.

"A teaspoonful," Seagram mumbled gloomily. "Are you certain?"

"You keep asking me if I'm certain." Koplin's drawn face reddened with indignation. "If you don't buy my word for it, send somebody else to that asshole of creation."

"Just a minute." Donner's hand was on Koplin's shoulder. "Novaya Zemlya was our only hope. You took more punishment than we had any right to expect. We're grateful, Sid, truly grateful."

"All hope isn't lost yet," Koplin murmured. His eyelids drooped.

Seagram didn't hear. He leaned over the bed. `What was that, Sid?"

"You've not lost yet. The byzanium was there."

Donner moved closer. "What do you mean, the byzanium was there?"

"Gone . . . mined...."

"You're not making sense."

"I stumbled over the tailings on the side of the mountain." Koplin hesitated a moment. "Dug into them. . ."

"Are you saying someone has already mined the byzanium from Bednaya Mountain?" Seagram asked incredulously.

"Yes.

"Dear God." Donner moaned. "The Russians are on the same track."

"No . . . no . . ." Koplin whispered.

Seagram placed his ear next to Koplin's lips.

"Not the Russians-"

Seagram and Donner exchanged confused stares.

Koplin feebly clutched Seagram's hand. "The . . . the Coloradans. . ."

Then his eyes closed and he drifted into unconsciousness.

They walked through the parking lot as a siren whined in the distance. "What do you suppose he meant?" Donner asked.

"It doesn't figure," Seagram answered vaguely. "It doesn't figure at all."

8

"What's so important that you have to wake me on my day off!" Prevlov grunted. Without waiting for an answer, he shoved open the door and motioned Marganin into the apartment. Prevlov was wearing a silk Japanese robe. His face was drawn and tired.

As he followed Prevlov through the living room into the kitchen, Marganin's eyes traveled professionally over the furnishings and touched each piece. To someone who lived in a tiny six-by-eight-foot barracks room, the decor, the vastness of the apartment seemed like the interior east wing of Peter the Great's summer palace. It was all there, the crystal chandeliers, the floor to ceiling tapestries, the French furniture. His eyes also noted two glasses and a half-empty bottle of Chartreuse on the fireplace mantel; and on the floor, beneath the sofa, rested a pair of women's shoes. Expensive, Western, by the look of them. He palmed a strand of hair and found himself staring at the closed bedroom door. She would have to be extremely attractive. Captain Prevlov had high standards.

Prevlov leaned into the refrigerator and lifted out a pitcher of tomato juice. "Care for some?"

Marganin shook his head.

"Mix it with the right ingredients," Prevlov muttered, "as the Americans do, and you have an excellent cure for a hangover." He took a sip of the tomato juice and made a face. "Now then, what do you want?"

"KGB received a communication from one of their agents in Washington last night. They had no clues as to its meaning and hoped that perhaps we might throw some light on it."

Marganin's face reddened. The sash on Prevlov's robe had loosened and he could see that the captain wore nothing beneath it.

"Very well." Prevlov sighed. "Continue."

"It said, `Americans suddenly interested in rock collecting. Most secret operation under code name Sicilian Project."'

Prevlov stared at him over his Bloody Mary. "What sort of drivel is that?" He finished the glass in one gulp and slammed it down on the sink counter. "Has our illustrious brother intelligence service, the KGB, become a house of fools?" The voice was the dispassionate, efficient voice of the official Prevlov-cold, and devoid of all inflection except bored irritation. "And you, Lieutenant? Why do you bother me with this childish riddle now? Why couldn't this have waited until tomorrow morning when I'm back in the office?'

"I . . . I thought perhaps it was important," Marganin stammered.

"Naturally." Prevlov smiled coldly. "Every time the KGB whistles, people jump. But veiled threats don't interest me. Facts, my dear Lieutenant, facts are what count. What do you feel is so important about this Sicilian Project?"

"It seemed to me the reference to rock collecting might tie in with the Novaya Zemlya files."

Perhaps twenty seconds elapsed before Prevlov Spoke. "Possible, just possible. Still, we can't be certain of a connection'

"I . . . I only thought-"

"Please leave the thinking to me, Lieutenant." He tightened the sash on his robe. "Now, if you have run out of here-brained witch hunts, I would like to filet back to bed."

"But if the Americans are looking for something-"

"Yes, but what?" Prevlov asked dryly. "What mineral is so precious to them that they must look for it in the earth of an unfriendly country?"

Marganin shrugged.

"You answer that and you have the key." Prevlov's tone hardened almost imperceptibly. "Until then, I want solutions. Any peasant bastard can ask stupid questions."

Marganin's face reddened again. "Sometimes the Americans have hidden meanings to their code names."

"Yes," Prevlov said with mock solemnity. "They do have a penchant for advertising."

Marganin plunged forward. "I researched the American idioms that refer to Sicily, and the most prevalent seems to be their obsession with a brotherhood of hooligans and-"

"If you. had done your homework" Prevlov yawned, " you'd have discovered it's called the Mafia."

"There is also a musical ensemble that refer to themselves as the Sicilian Stilettos."

Prevlov offered Marganin a glacial stare.

"Then there is a large food processor in Wisconsin who manufactures a Sicilian salad oil."

"Enough!" Prevlov held up a protesting hand. "Salad oil, indeed. I am not up to such stupidity so early in the morning." He gestured at the front door. "I trust you have other projects at our office that are more stimulating than rock collecting."

In the living room he paused before a table on which was a carved ivory chess set and toyed with one of the pieces. "Tell me, Lieutenant, do you play chess?"

Marganin shook his head. "Not in a long time. I used to play a little when I was a cadet at the Naval Academy."

"Does the name Isaak Boleslavski mean anything to you?"

"No, sir."

"Isaak Boleslavski was one of our greatest chess masters," Prevlov said, as if lecturing a schoolboy. "He conceived many great variations of the game. One of them was the Sicilian Defense." He casually tossed the black king at Marganin who deftly caught it. "Fascinating game, chess. You should take it up again."

Prevlov walked to the bedroom door and cracked it. Then he turned and smiled indifferently to Marganin. "Now, if you will excuse me. You may let yourself out. Good day, Lieutenant."

Once outside, Marganin made his way around the rear of Prevlov's apartment building. The door to the garage was locked, so he glanced furtively up and down the alley and then tapped a side window with his fist until it splintered. Carefully, he picked out the pieces until his hand could grope inside and unlatch the lock. One more look down the alley and he pushed up the window, climbed the sill, and entered the garage.

A black American Ford sedan was parked next to Prevlov's orange Lancia. Quickly, Marganin searched both cars and memorized the numbers on the Ford's embassy license plate. To make it look like the work of a burglar, he removed the windshield wipers-the theft of which was a national pastime in the Soviet Union-and then unlocked the garage door from the inside and walked out.

He hurried back to the front of the building and he had only to wait three minutes for the next electric bus. He paid the driver and eased into a seat and stared out the window. Then he began to smile. It had been a most profitable morning.

The Sicilian Project was the furthest thing from his mind.

THE COLORADANS

August 1987

9

Mel Donner routinely checked the room for electronic eavesdropping equipment and set up the tape recorder. "This is a test for voice level." He spoke into the microphone without inflection. "One, two, three." He adjusted the controls for tone and volume, then nodded to Seagram.

"We're ready, Sid," Seagram said gently. "If it becomes tiring, just say so and we'll break off until tomorrow."

The hospital bed had been adjusted so that Sid Koplin sat nearly upright. The mineralogist appeared much improved since their last meeting. His color had returned and his eyes seemed bright. Only the bandage around his balding head showed any sign of injury. "I'll go until midnight," he said. "Anything to relieve the boredom. I hate hospitals. The nurses all have icy hands and the color on the goddamned TV is always changing."

Seagram grinned and laid the microphone in Koplin's lap. "Why don't you begin with your departure from Norway."

"Very uneventful," Koplin said. "The Norwegian fishing trawler Godhawn towed my sloop to within two hundred miles of Novaya Zemlya as planned. Then the captain fed the condemned man a hearty meal of roast reindeer with goat-cheese sauce, generously provided six quarts of aquavit, cast off the tow-hawser, and sent yours truly merrily on his way across the Barents Sea."

"Any weather problems?"

"None-your meteorological forecast held perfect. It was colder than a polar bear's left testicle, but I had fine sailing weather all the way." Koplin paused to scratch his nose. "That was a sweet little sloop your Norwegian friends fixed me up with. Was she saved?"

Seagram shook his head. "I'd have to check, but I'm certain it had to be destroyed. There was no way to take it on board the NUMA research vessel, and it couldn't be left to drift into the path of a Soviet ship. You understand."

Koplin nodded sadly. "Too bad. I became rather attached to her."

"Please continue," Seagram said.

"I raised the north island of Novaya Zemlya late in the afternoon of the second day. I had been at the helm for over forty hours, dozing off and on, and I began to find it impossible to keep my eyes open. Thank God for the aquavit. After a few swigs, my stomach was burning like an out-of-control forest fire and suddenly I was wide awake."

"You sighted no other boats?"

"None ever showed on the horizon," Koplin answered. Then he went on, "The coast proved to be a seemingly unending stretch of rocky cliffs. I saw no point in attempting a landing-it was beginning to get dark. So I turned out to sea, hove to, and sneaked a few hours sleep. In the morning I skirted the cliffs until I picked out a small sheltered cover and then went in on the auxiliary diesel."

"Did you use your boat for a base camp?"

"For the next twelve days. I made two, sometimes three field trips a day on cross-country skis, prospecting before returning for a hot meal and a good night's rest in a warm-"

"Up to now, you had seen no one?"

"I kept well clear of the Kelva missile station and the Kama security post. I saw no sign of the Russians until the final day of the mission."

"How were you discovered?"

"A Russian soldier on patrol his dog must have crossed my trail and picked up my scent. Small wonder. I hadn't bathed in almost three weeks."

Seagram dropped a smile. Donner picked up the questioning more coldly, aggressively "Let's get back to your field trips. What did you find?"

"I couldn't cover the whole island on cross-country skis, so I concentrated on the promising areas that had been pinpointed by the satellite computer printouts." He stared at the ceiling. "The north island; the outer continuation of the Ural and Yugorski mountain chains, a few rolling plains, plateaus, and mountains-most of which are under a permanent ice sheet. Violent winds much of the time. The chill factor is murderous. I found no vegetation other than some rock lichen. If there were any warm-blooded animals, they kept to themselves."

"Let's stick to the prospecting," Donner said, "and save the travel lecture for another time."

"Just laying the groundwork." Koplin shot Donner a disapproving stare, his tone icy. "If I may continue without interruption-"

"Of course," Seagram said. He pulled his chair strategically between the bed and Donner. "It's your game, Sid. We'll play by your rules."

"Thank you." Koplin shifted his body. "Geographically, the island is quite interesting. A description of the faulting and uplifting of rocks that were once sediments formed under an ancient sea could fill several textbooks. Mineralogically, the magmatic paragenesis is barren."

"Would you mind translating that?"

Koplin grinned. "The origin and geological occurrence of a mineral is called its paragenesis. Magma, on the other hand, is the source of all matter; a liquid rock heated under pressure which turns solid to form igneous rock, perhaps better known as basalt or granite."

"Fascinating," Donner said dryly. "Then what you're stating is that Novaya Zemlya is void of minerals."

"You are singularly perceptive, Mr. Donner," Koplin said.

"But how did you find traces of byzanium?" Seagram asked.

"On the thirteenth day, I was poking around the north slope of Bednaya Mountain and ran onto a waste dump."'

"Waste dump?"

"A pile of rocks that had been removed during the excavation of a mine shaft. This particular dump happened to have minute traces of byzanium ore."

The expressions on his interrogators' faces suddenly went sober.

"The shaft entrance was cunningly obscured," Koplin continued. "It took me the better part of the afternoon to figure which slope it was on."

"One minute, Sid." Seagram touched Koplin's arm. "Are you saying the entrance to this mine was purposely concealed?"

"An old Spanish trick. The opening was filled until it was even with the natural slope of the hill."

"Wouldn't the waste dump have been on a direct line from the entrance?" Donner asked.

"Under normal circumstances, yes. But in this case they were spaced over a hundred yards apart, separated by a gradual arc that ran around the mountain's slope to the west."

"But you did discover the entrance?" Donner went on.

"The rails and ties for the ore cars had been removed and the track bed covered over, but I managed to trace its outline by moving off about fifteen hundred yards and studying the mountain's slope through binoculars. What you couldn't see when you were standing on top of it became quite clear from that distance. The exact location of the mine was then easy to determine."

"Who would go to all that trouble to hide an abandoned mine in the Arctic?" Seagram asked no one in particular. "There's no method or logic to it."

"You're only half right, Gene," Koplin said. "The logic, I fear, remains an enigma; but the method was brilliantly executed by professionals-Coloradans." The word came slowly, almost reverently. "They were the men who excavated the Bednaya Mountain mine. The muckers, the blasters, the jiggers, the drillers, the Cornishmen, the Irishmen, Germans, and Swedes. Not Russians, but men who emigrated to the United States and became the legendary hard-rock miners of the Colorado Rockies. How they came to be on the icy slopes of Bednaya Mountain is anybody's guess, but these were the men who came and mined the byzanium and then vanished into the obscurity of the Arctic."

The sterile blankness of total incomprehension flooded Seagram's face. He turned to Donner and was met by the same expression. "It sounds crazy, absolutely crazy."

" `Crazy'?" Koplin echoed. "Maybe, but no less true."

"You seem pretty confident," Donner muttered.

"Granted. I lost the tangible proof during my pursuit by the security guard; you have only my word on it, but why doubt it? As a scientist, I only report facts, and I have no devious motive behind a lie. So, if I were you, gentlemen, I would simply accept my word as genuine."

"As I said, it's your game." Seagram smiled faintly.

"You mentioned tangible evidence." Donner was calm and coldly efficient.

"After I penetrated the mine shaft-the loose rock came away in my hands, and I had only to scoop out a three-foot tunnel-the first thing my head collided with in the darkness was a string of ore cars. The strike of my fourth match illuminated an old pair of oil lamps. They both had fuel and lit on the third try." The faded blue eyes seemed to stare at something beyond the hospital room wall. "It was an unnerving scene that danced under the lamp's glow, mining tools neatly stacked in their racks, empty ore cars standing on rusting eight-gauge rails, drilling equipment ready to attack the rock-it was as though the mine was waiting for the incoming shift to sort the ore and run the waste to the dump."

"Could you say whether it looked as if someone left in a hurry?"

"Not at all. Everything was in its place. The bunks in a side chamber were made, the kitchen was cleared up, all the utensils were still on the shelves. Even the mules used to haul the ore cars had been taken to the working chamber and efficiently shot; their skulls each had a neat round hole in its center. No, I'd say the departure was very methodical.

"You have not yet explained your conclusion as to the Coloradans' identity," Donner said flatly.

"I'm coming to it now." Koplin fluffed a pillow and turned gingerly on his side. "The indications were all there, of course. The heavier equipment still bore the manufacturers' trademarks. The ore cars had been built by the Guthrie and Sons Foundry of Pueblo, Colorado; the drilling equipment came from the Thor Forge and Ironworks of Denver; and the small tools showed the names of the various blacksmiths who had forged them. Most had come from Central City and Idaho Springs, both mining towns in Colorado."

Seagram leaned back in his chair. "The Russians could have purchased the equipment in Colorado and then shipped it to the island."

"Possibly," Koplin said. "However, there were a few other bits and pieces that also led to Colorado."

"Such as?"

"The body in one of the bunks for one."

Seagram's eyes narrowed. "A body?"

"With red hair and a red beard," Koplin said casually. "Nicely preserved by the sub-zero temperature. It was the inscription on the wood above the bunk supports that proved most intriguing. It said, in English, I might add, `Here rests Jake Hobart. Born 1874. A damn good man who froze in a storm, February 10, 1912."'

Seagram rose from his chair and paced around the bed "A name, that at least is a start." He stopped and looked at Koplin. "Were there any personal effects left lying around?"

"All clothing was gone. Oddly, the labels on the food cans were French. But then there were about fifty empty wrappers, Mile-Hi Chewing Tobacco, scattered on the ground. The last piece of the puzzle though, the piece that definitely ties it to the Coloradans, was a faded yellow copy of the Rocky Mountain News, dated November 17, 1911. It was this part of the evidence that I lost."

Seagram pulled out a pack of cigarettes and shook one loose. Donner held a lighter for him and Seagram nodded.

"Then there is a chance the Russians may not have possession of the byzanium," he said.

"There is one more thing," Koplin said quietly. "The top-right section of page three of the newspaper had been neatly snipped out. It may mean nothing, but, on the other hand, a check of the publisher's old files might tell you something."

"It might at that." Seagram regarded Koplin thoughtfully. "Thanks to you, we have our work laid out for us."

Donner nodded. "I'll reserve a seat on the next flight to Denver. With luck, I should come up with a few answers."

"Make the newspaper your first stop, then try and trace Jake Hobart. I'll make a check on old military records from this end. Also, contact a local expert on Western mining history, and run down the names of the manufacturers Sid gave us. However unlikely, one of them might still be in business."

Seagram stood up and looked down at Koplin. "We owe you more than we can ever repay," he said softly.

"I figure those old miners dug nearly half a ton of high-grade byzanium from the guts of that bitch mountain," Koplin said, rubbing his hand through a month's growth of beard. "That ore has got to be stashed away in the world somewhere. Then again, if it hasn't emerged since 1912, it may be lost forever. But, if you find it, make that when you find it, you can say thanks by sending me a small sample for my collection."

"Consider it done."

"And while you're at it, get me the address of the fellow who saved my life so I can send him a case of vintage wine. His name is Dirk Pitt."

"You must mean the doctor on board the research vessel who operated on you."

"l mean the man who killed the Soviet patrol guard and his dog, and carried me off the island."

Donner and Seagram looked at each other thunderstruck.

Donner was the first to recover. "Killed a Soviet patrol guard!" It was more statement than question. "My God, that tears it!"

"But that's impossible!" Seagram finally managed to blurt. "When you rendezvoused with the NUMA ship, you were alone."

"Who told you that?"

"Well . . . no one. We naturally assumed--"

"I'm not Superman," Koplin said sarcastically. "The patrol guard picked up my trail, closed to within two hundred yards, and shot me twice. I was hardly in any condition to outrun a dog and then sail a sloop over fifty miles of open sea."

"Where did this Dirk Pitt come from?"

"I haven't the vaguest idea. The guard was literally dragging me off to his security post commander when Pitt appeared through the blizzard, like some vengeful Norse god, and calmly, as if he did it every day before breakfast, shot the dog and then the guard without so much as a how-do-you-do."

"The Russians will make propaganda hay with this." Donner groaned.

"How?" Koplin demanded. "There were no witnesses. The guard and his dog are probably buried under five feet of snow by now, they may never be found. And if they are, so what? Who's to prove anything? You two are pushing the panic button over nothing."

"It was a hell of a risk on that character's part," Seagram said.

"Good thing he took it," Koplin muttered. "Or instead of me lying here safe and snug in my sterile hospital bed, I'd be lying in a sterile Russian prison spilling my guts about Meta Section and byzanium."

"You have a valid point," Donner admitted.

"Describe him," Seagram ordered. "Face, build, clothing"

Koplin did so. His description was sketchy in some areas, but in others his recollection of detail was remarkably accurate.

"Did you talk with him during the trip to the NUMA

"Couldn't. I blacked out right after he picked me up and didn't come to until I found myself here in Washington in the hospital."

Donner gestured to Seagram. "We'd better get a make on this guy, quick."

Seagram nodded. "I'll start with Admiral Sandecker. Pitt must have been connected with the research vessel. Perhaps someone in NUMA can identify him."

"I can't help wondering how much he knows," Donner said staring at the floor.

Seagram didn't answer. His mind had strayed to a shadowy figure on a snow-covered island in the Arctic. Dirk Pitt. He repeated the name in his mind. Somehow it seemed strangely familiar.

10

The telephone rang at 1210 A.M. Sandecker popped open one eye and stared at it murderously for several moments. Finally, he gave in and answered it on the eighth ring.

"Yes, what is it?" he demanded.

"Gene Seagram here. Admiral. Did I catch you in bed?"

"Oh, hell no." Sandecker yawned. "I never retire before I write five chapters on my autobiography, rob at least two liquor stores, and rape a cabinet member's wife. Okay, what are you after, Seagram?"

"Something has come up."

"Forget it. I'm not endangering any more of my men and ships to bail your agents out of enemy territory." He used the word enemy as though the country were at war.

"It's not that at all."

"Then what?"

"I need a line on someone."

"Why come to me in the dead of night?"

"I think you might know him."

"What's the name?"

"Pitt. Dirk. The last name is Pitt, probably spelled P-i-t-t."

"Just to humor an old man's curiosity, what makes you think I know him?"

"I have no proof, but I'm certain he has a connection with NUMA."

"I have over two thousand people under me. I can't memorize all their names."

"Could you check him out? It's imperative that I talk to him."

"Seagram," Sandecker grunted irritably, "you're a monumental pain in the ass. Did it ever occur to you to call my personnel director during normal working hours?"

"My apologies," Seagram said. "I happened to be working late and-"

"Okay, if I dig up this character, I'll have him get in touch with you."

"I'd appreciate it." Seagram's tone remained impersonal. "By the way, the man your people rescued up in the Barents Sea is getting along nicely. The surgeon on the First Attempt did a magnificent job of bullet removal."

"Koplin, wasn't it?"

"Yes, he should be up and around in a few days."

"That was a near thing, Seagram. If the Russians had cottoned onto us, we'd have a nasty incident on our hands about now."

"What can I say?" Seagram said helplessly.

"You can say good night and let me get back to sleep," Sandecker snarled. "But first, tell me how this Pitt figures into the picture."

"Koplin was about to be captured by a Russian security guard when this guy appears out of a blizzard and kills the guard, carries Koplin across fifty miles of stormy water, not to mention stemming the blood flow from his wounds, and somehow deposits him on board your research vessel, ready for surgery."

"What do you intend to do when you find him?"

"That's between Pitt and myself."

"I see," Sandecker said. "'Well, good night, Mr. Seagram."

"Thank you, Admiral. Good-by."

Sandecker hung up and then sat there a few moments, a bemused expression on his face. "Killed a Russian security guard and rescued an American agent. Dirk Pitt . . . you sly son of a bitch."

11

United's early flight touched down at Denver's Stapleton Airfield at eight in the morning. Mel Donner passed quickly through the baggage claim and settled behind the wheel of an Avis Plymouth for the fifteen-minute drive to 400 West Colfax Avenue and the Rocky Mountain News. As he followed the west-bound traffic, his gaze alternated between the windshield and a street map stretched open beside him on the front seat.

He had never been in Denver before, and he was mildly surprised to see a pall of smog hanging over the city. He expected to be confronted with the dirty brown and gray cloud over places like Los Angeles and New York, but Denver had always conjured up visions in his mind of a city cleansed by crystal clean air, nestled under the protective shadow of Purple Mountain Majesties. Even these were a disappointment; Denver sat naked on the edge of the great plains, at least twenty-five miles from the nearest foothills.

He parked the car and found his way to the newspaper's library. The girl behind the counter peered back at him through tear-shaped glasses and smiled an uneven-toothed, friendly smile.

"Can I help you?"

"Do you have an issue of your paper dated November 17, 1911?"

"Oh my, that does go back." She twisted her lips. "I can give you a photocopy, but the original issues are at the State Historical Society."

"I only need to see page three."

"If you care to wait, it'll take about fifteen minutes to track down the film of November 17, 1911, and run the page you want through the copy machine."

"Thank you. By the way, would you happen to have a business directory for Colorado?"

"We certainly do." She reached under the counter and laid a booklet on the smudged plastic top.

Donner sat down to study the directory as the girl disappeared to search out his request. There was no listing of a Guthrie and Sons Foundry in Pueblo. He thumbed to the T's. Nothing there either for the Thor Forge and Ironworks of Denver. It was almost too much to expect, he reasoned, for two firms still to be in business after nearly eight decades.

The fifteen minutes came and went, and the girl hadn't returned, so he idly leafed through the directory to pass the time. With the exception of Kodak, Martin Marietta, and Gates Rubber, there were very few companies he'd heard of. Then suddenly he stiffened. Under the J listings his eyes picked out a Jensen and Thor Metal Fabricators in Denver. He tore out the page, stuffed it in his pocket, and tossed the booklet back on the counter.

"Here you are, sir," the girl said. "That'll be fifty cents."

Donner paid and quickly scanned the headline in the upper-right-hand corner of the old newsprint's reproduction. The article covered a mine disaster.

"Is it what you were looking for?" the girl asked.

"It will have to do," he said as he walked away.

Jensen and Thor Metal Fabricators was situated between the Burlington-Northern rail yards and the South Platte River; a massive corrugated monstrosity that would have blotted any landscape except the one that surrounded it. Inside the work shed, overhead cranes shuffled enormous lengths of rusty pipe from pile to pile, while stamping machines pounded away with an intolerable clangor that made Donner's eardrums cringe from the attack. The main office sat off to one side behind sound-proofed aggregate concrete walls and tall arched windows.

An attractive, large-breasted receptionist escorted him down a shag-carpeted hall to a spacious paneled office. Carl Jensen, Jr., came around the desk and shook hands with Donner. He was young; no more than twenty-eight and wore his hair long. He had a neatly trimmed mustache and wore an expensive plaid suit. He looked for all the world like a UCLA graduate; Donner couldn't see him as anything else.

"Thank you for taking the time to see me, Mr. Jensen."

Jensen smiled guardedly. "It sounded important. A big man on the Washington campus and all. How could I refuse?"

"As I mentioned over the telephone, I'm checking on some old records."

Jensen's smile thinned. "You're not from the Internal Revenue, I hope."

Donner shook his head. "Nothing like that. The government's interest is purely historical. If you still keep them, I'd like to check over your sales records for July through November of 1911."

"You're putting me on." Jensen laughed.

"I assure you, it's a straight request."

Jensen stared at him blankly. "Are you sure you've got the right company?"

"I am," Donner said brusquely, "if this is a descendant of the Thor Forge and Ironworks."

"My great-grandfather's old outfit," Jensen admitted.

"My father bought up the outstanding stock and changed the name in 1942 "

"Would you still have any of the old records?"

Jensen shrugged. "We threw out the ancient history some time ago. If we'd saved every receipt of sale since great granddaddy opened his doors back in 1897, we'd need a warehouse the size of Bronco Stadium just to store them."

Donner pulled out a handkerchief and wiped the beads of sweat from his face. He sagged in his chair.

"However," Jensen continued, "and you can thank the foresight of Carl Jensen, Sr,, we have all our past records down on microfilm."

"Microfilm?"

"The only way to fly. After five years, we film everything. Efficiency personified, that's us."

Donner couldn't believe his luck. "Then you can provide me with sales for the last six months of 1911?"

Jensen didn't answer. He leaned over the desk, spoke into his intercom, and then tilted back in his executive chair. "While we wait, can I get you a cup of coffee, Mr. Donner?"

"I'd prefer something with a little more snap."

"Spoken like a man from the big city." Jensen stood up and walked over to a mirrored bar from which he produced a bottle of Chivas Regal. "You'll find Denver quite gauche. A bar in an office is generally frowned upon here. The locals' idea of entertaining visiting firemen is to treat them to a large Coca-Cola and a lavish lunch at the Wienerschnitzel. Fortunately for our esteemed out-of-town customers, I spent my business apprenticeship on Madison Avenue."

Donner took the offered glass and downed it.

Jensen looked at him appraisingly and then refilled the glass. "Tell me, Mr. Donner, just what is it you expect to find?"

"Nothing of importance," Donner said.

"Come now. The government wouldn't send a man across half the country to itemize seventy-six-year-old sales records strictly for laughs."

"The government often handles its secrets in a funny way."

"A classified secret that goes back to 1911?" Jensen shook his head in wonder. "Truly amazing."

"Let's just say we're trying to solve an ancient crime whose perpetrator purchased your great-grandfather's services."

Jensen smiled and courteously accepted the lie.

A black-haired girl in long skirt and boots swiveled into the room, threw Jensen a seductive look, laid a Xerox paper on his desk, and retreated.

Jensen picked up the paper and examined it. "June to November must have been a recession year for my ancestor. Sales for those months were slim. Any particular entry you're interested in, Mr. Donner?"

"Mining equipment."

"Yes, this must be it . . . drilling tools. Ordered August tenth and picked up by the buyer on November first." Jensen's lips broke into a wide grin. "It would seem, sir, the laugh is on you."

"I don't follow."

"The buyer, or as you've informed me, the criminal . . ." Jensen paused for effect ". . . was the U.S. government."

12

The Meta Section headquarters was buried in a nondescript old cinder block building beside the Washington Navy Yard. A large sign, its painted letters peeling under the double onslaught of the summer's heat and humidity, humbly advertised the premises as the Smith Van & Storage Company.

The loading docks appeared normal enough. Packing crates and boxes were piled in strategic locations, and to passing traffic on the Suitland Parkway, the trucks parked around the yard behind a fifteen-foot-high chain-link fence looked exactly as moving vans should look. Only a closer inspection would have revealed old derelicts with missing engines and dusty, unused interiors. It was a scene that would have warmed the soul of a motion-picture set designer.

Gene Seagram read over the reports on the real-estate purchases for the Sicilian Project's installations. There were forty-six in all. The northern Canadian border numbered the most, followed closely by the Atlantic seaboard. The Pacific Coast had eight designated areas, while only four were plotted for the border above Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico. The transactions had gone off smoothly; the buyer in each case had gone under the guise of the Department of Energy Studies. There would be no cause for suspicion. The installations were designed, to all outward appearances, to resemble small relay power stations. To even the most wary of minds, there was nothing to suspect on the surface.

He was going over the construction estimates when his private phone rang. Out of habit, he carefully put the reports back in their folder and slipped it in a desk drawer, then picked up the phone. "This is Seagram."

"Hello, Mr. Seagram."

"Who's this?"

"Major McPatrick, Army Records Bureau. You asked me to call you at this number if I came up with anything on a miner by the name of Jake Hobart."

"Yes, of course. I'm sorry, my mind was elsewhere." Seagram could almost envision the man on the other end of the line. A West Pointer, under thirty-that much was betrayed by the clipped verbs and the youngish voice. Probably make general by the time he was forty-five, providing he made the right contacts while commanding a desk at the Pentagon.

"What do you have, Major?"

"I've got your man. His full name was Jason Cleveland Hobert. Born January 23, 1874, in Vinton, Iowa."

"At least the year checks."

"Occupation, too he was a miner."

"What else?"

"He enlisted in the Army in May of 1898 and served with the First Colorado Volunteer Regiment in the Philippines."

"You did say Colorado?"

"Correct, sir." McPatrick paused and Seagram could hear the riffling of papers over the line. "Hobart had an excellent war record. Got promoted to sergeant. He suffered serious wounds fighting the Philippine insurrectionists and was decorated twice for meritorious conduct under fire."

"When was he discharged?"

"They called it 'mustering out' in those days," McPatrick said knowledgeably. "Hobart left the Army in October of 1901."

"Is that your last record of him?"

"No, his widow is still drawing a pension-"

"Hold on," Seagram interrupted. "Hobart's widow is still living?"

"She cashes her fifty dollars and forty cents' pension check every month, like clockwork."

"She must be over ninety years old. Isn't that a little unusual, paying a pension to the widow of a Spanish American War veteran? You'd think most of them would be pushing up tombstones by now."

"Oh hell no, we still carry nearly a hundred Civil War widows on the pension rolls. None were even born when Grant took Richmond. May and December marriages between sweet young things and old toothless Grand Army of the Republic vets were quite ordinary in those days."

"I thought a widow was eligible for pension only if she was living at the time her husband was killed in battle."

"Not necessarily," McPatrick said. "The government pays widows' pensions under two categories. One is for service-oriented death. That, of course, includes death in battle, or fatal sickness or injury inflicted while serving between certain required dates as set by Congress. The second is non-service death. Take yourself, for example. You served with the Navy during the Vietnam war between the required dates set for that particular conflict. That makes your wife, or any future wife, eligible for a small pension should you be run over by a truck forty years from now."

"I'll make a note of that in my will," Seagram said, uneasy in the knowledge that his service record was where any desk jockey in the Pentagon could lay his hands on it. "Getting back to Hobart."

"Now we come to an odd oversight on the part of Army records."

"Oversight?"

"Hobart's service forms fail to mention re-enlistment, yet he is recorded as `died in the service of his country'. No mention of the cause, only the date . . . November 17, 1911."

Seagram suddenly straightened in his chair. "I have it on good authority that Jake Hobart died a civilian on February 10, 1912."

"Like I said, there's no mention of cause of death. But I assure you, Hobart died a soldier, not a civilian, on November 17. I have a letter in his file dated July 25, 1912, from Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War under President Taft, ordering the Army to award Sergeant Jason Hobart's wife full widow's pension for the rest of her natural life. How Hobart rated the personal interest of the Secretary of War is a mystery, but it leaves little doubt of our man's status. Only a soldier in high standing would have received that kind of preferential treatment, certainly not a coal miner."

"He wasn't a coal miner," Seagram snapped.

"Well, whatever."

"Do you have an address for Mrs. Hobart?"

"I have it here somewhere." McPatrick hesitated a moment. "Mrs. Adeline Hobart, 261-B Calle Aragon, Laguna Hills, California. She's in that big senior citizens development down the coast from L.A."

"That about covers it," Seagram said. "I appreciate your help in this matter, Major."

"I hate to say this, Mr. Seagram, but I think we've got two different men here."

"I think perhaps you're right," Seagram replied. "It looks as though I might be on the wrong track."

"If I can be of any further help, please don't hesitate to call me."

"I'll do that," Seagram grunted. "Thanks again."

After he hung up, he dropped his head in his hands and slouched in the chair. He sat that way not moving for perhaps two full minutes. Then he laid his hands on the desk and smiled a wide, smug grin.

Two different men very well could have existed with the same surname and birth year who worked in the same state at the same occupation. That part of the puzzle might have been a coincidence. But not the connection, the glorious 365-to-l longshot connection that mysteriously tied the two men together and made them one. Hobart's recorded death and the old newspaper found by Sid Koplin in the Bednaya Mountain mine bore the same date November 17, 1911.

He pushed the intercom switch for his secretary. "Barbara, put through a call to Mel Donner at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver."

"Any message if he isn't in?"

"Just leave word for him to call me on my private line when he returns."

"Shall do."

"And one more thing, book me on United's early morning flight tomorrow to Los Angeles."

"Yes, sir."

He clicked the switch to off and leaned back in the chair thoughtfully. Adeline Hobart, over ninety years old. He hoped to God she wasn't senile.

13

Donner didn't normally stay in a downtown hotel. He preferred the more inconspicuous setting of a garden variety motel closer to the suburbs, but Seagram had insisted on the grounds that local cooperation comes more easily to an investigator when he lets it be known that he has a room in the city's oldest and most prestigious building. Investigator, the word nauseated him. If one of his fellow professors on the University of Southern California campus had told him five years ago that his doctorate in physics would lead him to play such a clandestine role, he'd have choked laughing. Donner wasn't laughing now. The Sicilian Project was far too vital to the country's interests to risk a leak through outside help. He and Seagram had designed and created the project on their own, and it was agreed that they'd take it as far as they could alone.

He left his rented Plymouth with the parking attendant and walked across Tremont Place, through the hotel's old-fashioned revolving doors, and into the pleasantly ornate lobby, where the young mustachioed assistant manager gave him a message without so much as a smile. Donner took it without so much as a thank you, then made his way to the elevators and his room.

He slammed the door and threw the room key and Seagram's message on the desk and turned on the television. It had been a long and tiresome day, and his bodily systems were still operating on Washington, D.C. time. He dialed room service and ordered dinner, then kicked off his shoes, loosened his tie, and sagged onto the bed.

For perhaps the tenth time he began going over the photocopy of the old newspaper page. It made very interesting reading; if, that is, Donner's interest lay in advertisements for piano tuners, electric belts for rupture, and strange malady remedies, along with editorials on the Denver City Council's determination to clear such-and-such street of sinful houses of entertainment, or intriguing little inserts guaranteed to make feminine readers of the early 1900s gasp in innocent horror.

CORONER'S REPORT

Last week, the habitués of the Paris Morgue were greatly puzzled by a curious India-rubber leg that lay exposed for recognition on one of the slabs. It appears that the body of an elegantly dressed woman, apparently aged about 50, had been found in the Seine, but the body was so decomposed that it could not be kept. It was remarked, however, that the left leg, amputated at the thigh, had been replaced by an ingeniously constructed India-rubber leg, which was exhibited in the hope that it might lead to the identification of the owner.

Donner smiled at the quaint piece of history and turned his attention to the upper-right-hand section of the page, the part that Koplin had said was missing from the paper he'd discovered on Novaya Zemlya.

DISASTER AT THE MINES

Tragedy struck like a vengeful wraith early this morning when a dynamite blast set off a cave-in at the Little Angel Mine near Central City, trapping nine men of the first shift, including the well-known and respected mining engineer, Joshua Hays Brewster.

The weary and haggard rescue crews report that hope of finding the men alive is black indeed. Bull Mahoney, the intrepid foreman of the Satan Mine, made a herculean effort to reach the trapped miners, but was turned back by a wall of tidal water that inundated the main shaft.

"Them poor fellows is goners sure," Mahoney stated to reporters at the disaster scene. "The water has gushed up near two levels above where they was working. They surely was drowned like rats before they knew what hit them."

The silent and sorrowful throng milling around the mine entrance woefully bemoaned the chilling likelihood that this is one time when the bodies of the lost men will not be recovered and brought to the "grass" for decent burial.

It is reliably known that it was Mr. Brewster's intent to re-open the Little Angel Mine which had been closed since 1881. Friends and business associates say that Brewster often boasted that the original digging had missed the high-grade lode, and with luck and fortitude, he was going to be the discoverer.

When reached for comment, Mr. Ernest Bloeser, now retired and former owner of the Little Angel Mine, said on the front porch of his home in Golden, "That mine was dogged by bad luck from the day I opened it. All it ever turned out to be was a low-grade ore shoot which never did turn a profit." Mr. Bloeser further stated, "I think Brewster was dead wrong. There was never any indication of the mother lode. I am astounded that a man of his reputation could think so."

In Central City, the last message proclaimed that if the situation is in the eternal graces of the almighty, the opening will be sealed as a tomb and the missing men will rest in blackness through the ages, never again to see the "grass" or sunlight.

The grim reaper's list of the men caught up in this most terrible of disasters is as follows:

Joshua Hays Brewster, Denver

Alvin Coulter, Fairplay

Thomas Price, Leadville

Charles P. Widney, Cripple Creek

Vernon S. Hall, Denver

John Caldwell, Central City

Walter Schmidt, Aspen

Warner E. O'Deming, Denver

Jason C. Hobart, Boulder

May God watch over these brave toilers of the mountains.

No matter how many times Donner's eyes traveled over the old news type, they always came back to the last name among the missing miners. Slowly, like a man in a trance, he laid the paper in his lap, picked up the phone and dialed long distance.

14

"The Monte Cristo!" Harry Young exclaimed delightedly. "I heartily endorse the Monte Cristo. The Roquefort dressing is also excellent. But first, I'd like a martini, very dry, with a twist."

"Monte Cristo sandwich and Roquefort on your salad. Yes, sir," the young waitress repeated, bending over the table so that her short skirt rode up to reveal a pair of white panties. "And you, sir?"

"I'll take the same." Donner nodded. "Only I'll start with a Manhattan on the rocks."

Young peered over the top of his glasses as the waitress hurried to the kitchen. "If only someone would give me that for Christmas," he said, smiling.

Young was a skinny little man. In decades past he would have been called an overdressed, silly old fool. Now he was an alert, eager-faced seventy-eight-year-old bon vivant with a practiced eye for beauty. He sat across the booth table from Donner in a blue turtleneck and patterned, doubleknit sportscoat.

"Mr. Donner!" he said happily. "This is indeed a pleasure. The Broker is my favorite restaurant." He waved his hand at the walnut-paneled walls and booths. "This was once a bank vault, you know."

"So I noticed when I had to duck through the five-ton door."

"You should come here for dinner. They give you an enormous tray of shrimp for an appetizer." He fairly beamed at the thought.

"I'll bear that in mind on my next visit."

"Well, sir." Young looked at him steadily. "What's on your mind?"

"I have a few questions."

Young's eyebrows raised above his glasses. "Oh my, now you have tickled my curiosity. You're not with the FBI are you? Over the phone you simply said you were with the federal government."

"No, I'm not with the FBI. And I'm not on the payroll of Internal Revenue, either. My department is welfare. It's my job to track down the authenticity of pension claims."

"Then how can I help you?"

"My particular project at the moment is the investigation of a seventy-six-year-old mining accident that took the lives of nine men. One of the victim's descendants has filed for a pension. I'm here to check the validity of the claim. Your name, Mr. Young, was recommended to me by the State Historical Society, which glowingly described you as a walking encyclopedia on Western mining history."

"A bit of an exaggeration," Young said, "but I'm flattered, nonetheless."

The drinks arrived and they sipped them for a minute. Donner took the time to study the pictures of turn-of-the-century Colorado silver kings that hung on the walls. Their faces all projected the same intense stare, as if they were trying to melt the camera lens with their wealth-fortified arrogance.

"Tell me, Mr. Donner, how can anyone file a pension claim on a seventy-six-year-old accident?"

"It seems the widow didn't receive all she was entitled to," Donner said, skating onto unsure ice. "Her daughter is demanding the back pay, so to speak."

"I see," Young said. He stared across the table speculatively and then began idly tapping his spoon against a plate. "Which of the men who were lost in the Little Angel disaster are you interested in?"

"My compliments," Donner said, avoiding the stare and unfolding his napkin self-consciously. "You don't miss a trick."

"It's nothing, really. A seventy-six-year-old mining accident. Nine men missing. It could only be the Little Angel disaster."

"The man's name was Brewster."

Young stared at him an extra moment, then stopped the plate-tapping and banged his spoon against the table top. "Joshua Hays Brewster," he murmured the name. "Born to William Buck Brewster and Hettie Masters in Sidney, Nebraska, on April 4 . . . or was it April 5, 1878."

Donner's eyes opened wide. "How could you possibly know all that?"

"Oh, I know that and much more." Young smiled. "Mining engineers, or the Lace-Boot Brigade, as they were once known, are a rather cliquish group. It's one of the few professions where sons follow fathers and also marry sisters or daughters of other mining engineers."

"Are you about to say that you were related to Joshua Hays Brewster?"

"My uncle." Young grinned.

The ice parted and Donner fell through.

"You look like you could stand another drink, Mr. Donner." Young signaled to the waitress for another round. "Needless to say, there is no daughter who is seeking a claim to a pension; my mother's brother died a childless bachelor."

"Liars never prosper," Donner said with a thin smile. "I'm sorry if I've embarrassed you by foolishly painting myself into a corner."

"Can you enlighten me?"

"I would prefer not to."

"You are from the government?" Young asked.

Donner showed him his credentials.

"Then, may I ask why you're investigating my long-dead uncle?"

"I would prefer not to," Donner repeated. "Not at this time, at any rate."

"What do you wish to know?"

"Whatever you can tell me about Joshua Hays Brewster and the Little Angel accident."

The drinks came along with the salad. Donner agreed that the dressing was excellent. They ate in silence. When Young had finished and wiped his tiny white mustache, he took a deep breath and relaxed against the backrest of the booth.

"My uncle was typical of the men who developed the mines in the early nineteen hundreds; white, eager, and middle class, and except for his small size-he stood only five feet two-he could easily have passed for what the novelists of the day vividly depicted as a gentlemanly, two-fisted, devil-may-care, adventurous mining engineer, complete with shining boots, jodhpurs, and a Smokey-the-Bear ranger hat."

"You make him sound like a hero from an old Saturday matinee serial."

"A fictional hero could never have measured up," Young said. "The field is highly specialized today, of course, but an engineer of the old school had to be as tough as the rock he mined, and he had to be versatile-mechanic, electrician, surveyor, metallurgist, geologist, lawyer, arbitrator between penny-pinching management and muscle-brained workers. This was the kind of man it took to run a mine. This was Joshua Hays Brewster."

Donner kept silent, slowly swirling the liquor around in his glass.

"After my uncle graduated from the School of Mines," Young continued, "he followed his profession in the Klondike, Australia, and Russia before returning to the Rockies in 1908 to manage the Sour Rock and Buffalo, a pair of mines at Leadville owned by a group of French financiers in Paris who never laid eyes on Colorado."

"The French owned mining claims in the States?"

"Yes. Their capital flowed heavily throughout the West. Gold and silver, cattle, sheep, real estate; you name it, they had a finger in it."

"What possessed Brewster to reopen the Little Angel?"

"That's a strange story in itself," Young said. "The mine was worthless. The Alabama Burrow, three hundred yards away, coughed up two million dollars in silver before the water in the lower levels began running ahead of the pumps. That was the shaft that hit the high-grade lode. The Little Angel never came close." Young paused to sip at his drink and then stared at it as though he were seeing a vague image in the ice cubes. "When my uncle advertised his intentions to reopen the mine to anyone who would listen, people who knew him well were shocked. Yes, Mr. Donner, shocked. Joshua Hays Brewster was a cautious man, a man of painstaking detail. His every move was carefully calculated in terms of success. He never played the odds unless they were steeply in his favor. For him to publicly announce such a hare-brained scheme was unthinkable. The mere act was considered by all to be that of a madman."

"Maybe he found some clue the others had missed."

Young shook his head. "I've been a geologist for over sixty years, Mr. Donner, and a damned good one. I've re-entered and examined the Little Angel down to the flooded levels, and analyzed every accessible inch of the Alabama Burrow, and I'm telling you positively and unequivocally there is no untapped vein of silver down there now, nor was there one in 1911."

The Monte Cristo sandwiches came and the salad plates were whisked away.

"Are you suggesting your uncle went insane?"

"The possibility has occurred to me. Brain tumors were generally undiagnosed in those days."

"So were nervous breakdowns."

Young wolfed the first quarter of his sandwich and drained his second martini. "How is your Monte Cristo, Mr. Donner?"

Donner forced a few bites. "Excellent, and yours?"

"Grandly delicious. Would you like my private theory? Don't bother to be polite; you can laugh without embarrassment. Everyone else does when they hear it."

"I promise you I won't laugh," Donner said, his tone dead serious.

"Be sure to dip your Monte Cristo in the grape jam, Mr. Donner. It heightens the pleasure. Now then, as I've mentioned, my uncle was a man of great detail, a keen observer of his work, his surroundings and accomplishments. I've collected most of his diaries and notebooks; they fill a goodly portion of my study's bookshelves. His remarks concerning the Sour Rock and the Buffalo mines, for example, take up five hundred and twenty-seven pages of exacting sketches and neatly legible handwriting. The pages in the notebook that come under the heading of the 'Little Angel Mine', however, are totally blank."

"He left nothing behind regarding the Little Angel, not even a letter, perhaps?"

Young shrugged and shook his head. "It was as though there was nothing to record. It was as though Joshua Hays Brewster and his eight-man crew went down into the bowels of the earth never intending to return."

"What are you suggesting?"

"Ridiculous as it seems," Young admitted, "the thought of mass suicide once darted through my mind. Extensive research showed me that all nine men were either bachelors or widowers. Most were itinerant loners who drifted from digging to digging, looking for any excuse to move on when they became bored or disenchanted with the foreman or mine management. They had little to live for once they became too old to work the mines."

"But Jason Hobart had a wife," Donner said.

"What? What's that?" Young's eyes widened. "I found no record of a wife for any of them."

"Take my word for it."

"God in heaven! If my uncle had known that, he'd never have recruited Hobart."

"Why is that?"

"Don't you see he needed men he could trust implicitly, men who had no close friends or relatives to ask questions should they vanish."

"You're not making sense," Donner said flatly.

"Simply put, the reopening of the Little Angel Mine and the subsequent tragedy was a sham, a pretext, a hoax. I'm convinced my uncle was going mad. How or what caused his mental illness will never be known. His character altered drastically, even to the point of producing a different man."

"A split personality?"

"Exactly. His moral values changed; his warmth and love for friends disappeared. When I was younger, I talked to people who remembered him. They all agreed on one thing, the Joshua Hays Brewster they all knew and loved died months before the Little Angel disaster."

"How does this lead to a hoax?"

"Insanity aside, my uncle was still a mining engineer. Sometimes he could tell within minutes whether a mine would pay or not. The Little Angel was a bust, he knew that. He never had any intention of finding a high-grade lode. I don't have the vaguest idea of what his game was, Mr. Donner, but one thing I'm certain of, whoever pumps the water from the lower levels of that old shaft will find no bones."

Donner finished off his Manhattan and looked quizzically at Young. "So you think the nine men who went into the mine escaped?"

Young smiled. "Nobody actually saw them enter, Mr. Donner. It was assumed, and reasonably so, that they died down there in the black waters because they were never heard from again."

"Not enough evidence," Donner said.

"Oh, I have more, lots more," Young replied enthusiastically.

"I'm listening."

"Item One. The Little Angel's lowest working chamber was a good hundred feet above the mean water level. At worst, the walls leaked only moderately from surface accumulations. The lower shaft levels were already flooded because the water had gradually built up during the years the mine was originally shut down. Therefore, there was no way a dynamite blast could have unleashed a tidal wave of water over my uncle and his crew.

"Item Two. The equipment supposedly found in the mine after the accident was old, used junk. Those men were professionals, Mr. Donner. They'd never have gone below the surface with second-rate machinery.

"Item Three. Though he made it known to everyone that he was reopening the mine, my uncle never once consulted or discussed the project with Ernest Bloeser, the man who owned the Little Angel. In short, my uncle was claim jumping. An unthinkable act to a man of his moral reputation.

"Item Four. The first warning of possible disaster didn't come until the next afternoon, when the foreman of the Satan Mine, one Bill Mahoney, found a note under his cabin door that said, 'Help! Little Angel Mine. Come Quick!' A most strange method to sound an alarm, don't you think? Naturally, the note was unsigned.

"Item Five. The sheriff in Central City stated that my uncle had given him a list of the crew's names with the request that he give it to the newspapers in case of a fatal accident. An odd premonition, to say the least. It was as if Uncle Joshua wanted to be certain there was no mistaking the victims' identities."

Donner pushed back his plate and drank a glass of water. "I find your theory intriguing, but not fully convincing."

"Ah, but finally, perhaps above all, Mr. Donner, I have saved the piece de resistance until last.

"Item Six. Several months after the tragedy, my mother and father, who were on a tour through Europe, saw my uncle standing on the boat-train platform in Southampton, England. My mother often related how she went up to him and said, 'God in heaven, Joshua, is it really you?' The face that stared back at her was bearded and deathly white, the eyes glassy. 'Forget me,' he whispered and then turned and ran. My father chased him down the platform but soon lost him in the crowd."

"The logical answer is a simple case of mistaken identity."

"A sister who doesn't know her own brother?" Young said sarcastically. "Come now, Mr. Donner, surely you could pick your brother out of a crowd?"

"'Fraid not. I was an only child."

"A shame. You missed one of life's great joys."

"At least I didn't have to share my toys." The check arrived and Donner threw a credit card on the tray. "So what you're saying is that the Little Angel disaster was a cover-up."

"That's my theory." Young patted his mouth with his napkin. "No way of proving it, of course, but I've always had a haunting feeling that the Societe des Mines de Lorraine was in back of it."

"Who were they?"

"They were and still are to France what Krupp is to Germany, what Mitsubichi is to Japan, what Anaconda is to the United States."

"Where does the Societe-whatever you call it-fit in?"

"They were the French financiers who hired Joshua Hays Brewster as their engineer-manager of exploration. They were the only ones with enough capital to pay nine men to vanish off the face of the earth."

"But why? Where is the motive?"

Young gestured helplessly. "I don't know." He leaned forward and his eyes seemed to burn. "But I do know that whatever the price, whatever the influence, it took my uncle and his eight-man crew to some unnamed hell outside the country."

"Until the bodies are recovered, who's to say you're wrong."

Young stared at him. "You are a courteous man, Mr. Donner. I thank you."

"For what? A free lunch at the government's expense?"

"For not laughing," Young said softly.

Donner nodded and said nothing. The man across the table had just spliced one tiny strand of the frayed puzzle to the red-bearded bones in the Bednaya Mountain mine. There was nothing to laugh about, nothing to laugh about in the least.

15

Seagram returned the farewell smile from the stewardess, stepped off the United jet, and prepared himself for the quarter-mile trip to the street entrance of the Los Angeles International Airport. He finally reached the front lobby, and unlike Donner, who had rented his car from No. 2, Seagram preferred dealing with No. 1 and signed out a Lincoln from Hertz. He turned onto Century Boulevard, and within a few blocks entered the on-ramp south to the San Diego Freeway. It was a cloudless day and the smog was surprisingly light, allowing a hazy view of the Sierra Madre mountains. He drove leisurely in the right-hand lane of the freeway at sixty miles an hour, while the mainstream of local traffic sped by the Lincoln doing seventy-five and eighty with routine indifference to the posted fifty-five miles an hour limit. He soon left the chemical refineries of Torrance and the oil derricks around Long Beach behind and entered the vastness of Orange County where the terrain suddenly flattened out and gave way to a great, unending sea of tract homes.

It took him a little over an hour to reach the turn-off for Leisure World. It was an idyllic setting golf courses, swimming pools, stables, neatly manicured lawns and park areas, golden-tanned senior citizens on bicycles.

He stopped at the main gate and an elderly guard in uniform checked him through and gave him directions to 261-B Calle Aragon. It was a picturesque little duplex tucked neatly on the slope of a hill overlooking an immaculate park. Seagram parked the Lincoln against the curb, walked through a small courtyard patio filled with rose bushes, and poked the doorbell. The door opened and his fears vanished; Adeline Hobart was definitely not the senile type.

"Mr. Seagram?" The voice was light and cheerful.

"Yes. Mrs. Hobart?"

"Please come in." She extended her hand. The grip was as firm as a man's. "Goodness, nobody's called me that in over seventy years. When I received your long-distance call regarding Jake, I was so surprised I almost forgot to take my Geritol."

Adeline was stout, but she carried her extra pounds easily. Her blue eyes seemed to laugh with every sentence and her face carried a warm, gentle look. She was everyone's idea of a sweet little old snow-haired lady.

"You don't strike me as the Geritol type," he said.

She patted his arm. "If that is meant as flattery, I'll buy it." She motioned him to a chair in a tastefully furnished living room. "Come and sit down. You will stay for lunch, won't you?"

"I'd be honored, if it's no trouble."

"Of course not. Bert is off chasing around the golf course, and I appreciate the company."

Seagram looked up. "Bert?"

"My husband."

"But I was under the impression-"

"I was still Jake Hobart's widow," she finished his sentence, smiling innocently. "The truth of the matter is, I became Mrs. Bertram Austin sixty-two years ago."

"Does the Army know?"

"Oh heavens, yes. 1 wrote letters to the War Department notifying them of my marital status a long time ago, but they simply sent polite, noncommittal replies and kept mailing the checks."

"Even though you'd remarried?"

Adeline shrugged. "I'm only human, Mr. Seagram. Why argue with the government. If they insist on sending money, who's to tell them they're crazy?"

"A lucrative little arrangement."

She nodded. "I won't deny it, particularly when you include the ten thousand dollars I received at Jake's death."

Seagram leaned forward, his eyes narrowed. "The Army paid you a ten-thousand-dollar indemnity? Wasn't that a bit steep for 1912?"

"You couldn't be half as surprised as I was then," she said. "Yes, that amount of money was a small fortune in those days."

"Was there any explanation?"

"None," she replied. "I can still see the check after all these years. All it said was `Widow's Payment' and it was made out to me. That's all there was to it."

"Perhaps we can start at the beginning."

"When I met Jake?"

Seagram nodded.

Her eyes looked beyond him for a few moments. "I met Jake during the terrible winter of 1910. It was in Leadville, Colorado, and I had just turned sixteen. My father was on a business trip to the mining fields to investigate possible investment in several claims, and since it was close to Christmas, and I had a few days vacation from school, he relented and took Mother and me along. The train barely made it into Leadville station when the worst blizzard in forty years struck the high country of Colorado. It lasted for two weeks, and believe me, it was no picnic, especially when you consider that the altitude of Leadville is over ten thousand feet."

"It must have been quite an adventure for a sixteen-year-old girl."

"It was. Dad paced the hotel lobby like a trapped bull while Mother just sat and worried, but I thought it was marvelous."

"And Jake?"

"One day, Mother and I were struggling across the street to the general store-an ordeal when you are lashed by fifty-mile-an-hour winds at twenty degrees below zero when out of nowhere this giant brute of a man picks each of us up under one arm and carries us through the snowdrifts and deposits us on the doorstep of the store, just as sassy as you please."

"It was Jake?"

"Yes," she said distantly, "it was Jake."

"What did he look like?"

"He was a large man, over six feet, barrel-chested. He'd worked in the mines in Wales when he was a boy. Anytime you saw a crowd of men a mile away, you could easily pick Jake out. He was the one with the bright red hair and heard who was always laughing."

"Red hair and beard?"

"Yes, he was quite proud of the fact that he stood out from the rest."

"All the world loves a man who laughs."

She smiled broadly. "It certainly wasn't love at first sight on my part, I can tell you. To me, Jake looked like a big uncouth bear. He was hardly the type to tickle a young girl's fancy."

"But you married him."

She nodded. "He courted me all during the blizzard, and when the sun finally broke through the clouds on the fourteenth day, I accepted his proposal. Mother and Dad were distraught, of course, but Jake won them over, too."

"You couldn't have been married long?"

"I saw him for the last time a year later."

"The day he and the others were lost in the Little Angel." It was more statement than question.

"Yes," she said wistfully. She avoided his stare and looked nervously toward the kitchen. "My goodness, I'd better fix us some lunch. You must be starving, Mr. Seagram."

But Seagram's businesslike expression faded and his eyes came alight with sudden excitement. "You heard from Jake after the Little Angel accident, didn't you, Mrs. Austin?"

She seemed to retreat into the cushions of her chair. Apprehension spread across her gentle face. "I don't know what you mean."

"I think you do," he said softly.

"No . . . no, you're mistaken."

"Why are you afraid?"

Her hands were trembling now. "I've told you all I can."

"There's more, much more, Mrs. Austin." He reached over and took her hands. "Why are you afraid?" he repeated.

"I'm sworn to secrecy," she murmured.

"Can you explain?"

She said, hesitantly, "You're with the government, Mr. Seagram. You know what it is to keep a secret."

"Who was it? Jake? Did he ask you to remain silent?"

She shook her head.

"Then who?"

"Please believe me," she pleaded. "I can't tell you . . . I can't tell you anything."

Seagram stood up and looked down on her. She seemed to have aged, the wrinkles etched more deeply in her ancient skin. She had withdrawn into a shell. It would take a mild form of shock treatment to get her to open up.

"May I use your telephone, Mrs. Austin?"

"Yes, of course. You'll find the nearest extension in the kitchen''

It was seven minutes before the familiar voice came through the earpiece. Quickly, Seagram explained the situation and made his request. Then he turned back to the living room. "Mrs. Austin. Can you come here a moment?"

Timidly, she approached him.

He handed her the receiver. "Here is someone who wishes to speak to you."

Cautiously, she took it from his hands. "Hello," she muttered, "this is Adeline Austin."

For a brief instant, an expression of confusion was mirrored in her eyes, then it was slowly transformed and froze into genuine astonishment. She kept nodding, saying nothing, as though the detached voice over the line was standing before her.

Finally, at the end of the one-sided conversation, she managed to utter a few words "Yes, sir . . . I will. Goodby."

Slowly, she replaced the receiver and stood in a trancelike bewilderment. "Was . . . was that really the President of the United States?"

"It was. You can verify it if you wish. Call long distance and ask for the White House. When they answer, talk to Gregg Collins. He's the President's chief aide. It was he who passed along my call."

"Just imagine, the President asked me to help him." She shook her head dazedly. "I can't believe it really happened."

"It happened, Mrs. Austin. Believe me, any information you can give us concerning your first husband and the strange circumstances surrounding his death would be of great benefit to the nation. I know that sounds like a trite way of stating it, but . . ."

"Who can turn down a President?" The sweet smile was back. The tremor was gone from Adeline's hands. She was back on balance, outwardly, at least.

Seagram took her arm and gently guided her back to her chair in the living room. "Now then, tell me about Jake Hobart's relationship with Joshua Hays Brewster."

"Jake was an explosives specialist, a blaster, one of the best in the fields. He knew dynamite like a blacksmith knew his forge, and since Mr. Brewster insisted on only the top men to make up his mining crews, he often hired Jake to handle the blasting."

"Did Brewster know Jake was married?"

"Odd you should ask that. We had a little house in Boulder, away from the mining camps, because Jake didn't want it known he had a wife. He claimed that mine foremen wouldn't hire a blaster who was married."

"So naturally, Brewster, unaware of Jake's marital status, paid him to blast in the Little Angel mine."

"I know what was printed in the newspapers, Mr. Seagram, but Jake never set foot in the Little Angel mine, nor did the rest of the crew."

Seagram pulled his chair closer so that they were almost touching knees. "Then the disaster was a hoax," he said hoarsely.

She looked up. "You know . . . you know that?"

"We suspected, but have no proof."

"If it's proof you want, Mr. Austin, I'll get it for you." She rose to her feet, shrugging off Seagram's attempts to help her, and disappeared into another room. She returned carrying an old shoebox, which she proceeded to open reverently.

"The day before he was to enter the Little Angel, Jake took me down to Denver and we went on a shopping spree. He bought me fancy clothes, jewelry, and treated me to champagne at the finest restaurant in town. We spent our last night together in the honeymoon suite of the Brown Palace Hotel. Do you know of it?"

"I have a friend staying there right now."

"In the morning, he told me not to believe what I heard or read in the newspapers about his death in a mining accident, and that he would be gone for several months on a job somewhere in Russia. When he returned, he said we would be rich beyond our wildest dreams. Then he mentioned something I've never understood."

"What was that?"

"He said the Frenchies were taking care of everything and that when it was all over, we would live in Paris." Her face took on a dreamlike quality. "In the morning he was gone. on his pillow was a note that simply said, 'I love you, Ad' and an envelope containing five thousand dollars."

"Do you have any idea where the money came from?"

"None. We only had about three hundred dollars in the bank at the time."

"And that was the last you heard from him?"

"No." She handed Seagram a faded postcard with a tinted photograph of the Eiffel Tower on the front. "This came in the mail about a month later."

Dear Ad, The weather is rainy here and the beer awful. Am fine and so is the other boys. Don't fret. As you can tell I ain't dead by a long shot. You know who.

The handwriting was obviously from a heavy hand. The postmark on the card was dated Paris, December 1, 1911.

"It was followed in a week by a second card," Adeline said as she handed it to Seagram. It depicted Sacra Coeur but was postmarked Le Havre.

DearAd, We're headin for the arctic. This will be my last message for some time. Be brave. The Frenchies are treating us right. Good food, good ship. You know who.

"You're certain it's Jake's handwriting?" Seagram asked. "Absolutely. I have other papers and old letters of Jake's. You can compare them if you wish."

"That won't be necessary, Ad." She smiled when she heard her nickname. "Was there any further communication?"

She nodded. "The third and last. Jake must have stocked up on picture postcards of Paris. This one shows the Sainte-Chapelle, but it was mailed from Aberdeen, Scotland, on April 4, 1912."

DearAd, This is a frightful place. The cold is fearsome. We don't know if we will survive. If I can somehow get this to you, you will be taken care of. God Bless. Jake.

Along the side, another hand had written in:

Dear Mrs. Hobart. We lost Jake in a storm. We gave him a Christian readin. We're sorry. V.H.

Seagram took out the list of the crew's names that Donner had read him over the phone.

"V.H. must have been Vernon Hall," he said.

"Yes, Vern and Jake were good friends."

"What happened after that? Who swore you to secrecy?"

"About two months later, I think it was early in June, a Colonel Patman or Patmore-I can't remember which came to the house in Boulder and told me it was imperative that I never reveal any contact from Jake after the Little Angel mine affair."

"Did he give any reason?"

She shook her head. "No, he simply said it was in the interest of the government to remain silent, and then he handed me the check for ten thousand dollars and departed."

Seagram sagged in his chair as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. It didn't seem possible that this little ninety-three-year-old woman should have the key to a lost billion-dollar ore cache, but she did.

Seagram looked at her and smiled. "That offer of lunch is beginning to sound awfully good about now."

She grinned back and he could see the mischief in her eyes. "As Jake would have said, to hell with lunch. Let's have a beer first."

16

The crimson rays of the sunset were still lingering on the western horizon when the first rumble of distant thunder signaled the approach of a lightning storm. The air was warm and the gentle offshore breeze felt good on Seagram's face as he sat on the terrace of the Balboa Bay Club and sipped his after-dinner cognac.

It was eight o'clock, the hour when the fashionable residents of Newport Beach began their evening socializing. Seagram had taken a dip in the club pool and then eaten early. He sat there listening to the grumbling of the nearing storm. The air became thick and charged with electricity, but there was no sign of rain or wind. In the photographic flash of the lightning he could see pleasure boats cruising up the bay, showing red and green navigation lights, their white paint giving them the appearance of silent gliding ghosts. Lightning stabbed the night air again, a jagged fork splitting the clouded sky. He watched it strike somewhere behind the Balboa Island rooftops, and in almost the same instant, the roar of the thunder thrust against his eardrums like a cannon barrage.

Everyone else had nervously moved inside the dining room, and Seagram soon found the terrace deserted. He stayed, enjoying mother nature's display of fireworks. He finished off the cognac and leaned back in his chair, watching for the next flash of lightning. It soon came and illuminated a figure standing beside his table. In that instant of light, he made out a tall man with black hair and rugged features staring down at him through cool, piercing eyes. Then the stranger blended into the darkness again.

As the thunder rumbled away, a seemingly disembodied voice asked, "Are you Gene Seagram?"

Seagram hesitated, waiting for his eyes to readjust themselves to the dark that followed the flash. "I am."

"I believe you've been looking for me."

"At the moment, you have the advantage."

"My apologies. I'm Dirk Pitt."

The skies lit up again and Seagram was relieved to see a smiling face. "It would seem, Mr. Pitt, that dramatic entrances are a habit with you. Did you also conjure up this electrical storm?"

Pitt's answering laugh came to the accompaniment of a clap of thunder.

"I haven't mastered that feat yet, but I am making progress at parting the Red Sea."

Seagram gestured to an empty chair. "Won't you sit down?"

"Thank you."

"I'd offer you a drink, but my waiter apparently has a fear of lightning."

"The worst of it is passing," Pitt said, looking skyward. The voice was quiet and controlled.

"How did you find me?" Seagram asked.

"A step-by-step process," Pitt replied. "I called your wife in Washington, and she said you were on a business trip to Leisure World. Since it's only a few miles from here, I checked with the guard at the gate. He told me he had admitted a Gene Seagram who was okayed for entry by a Mrs Bertram Austin.. She in turn mentioned she had recommended the Balboa Bay Club when you stated a desire to postpone your flight back to Washington and lay over until tomorrow. The rest was easy."

"I should feel flattered by your persistent style."

Pitt nodded. "All very elementary."

"A fortunate circumstance that we happened to be in the same neck of the woods," Seagram said.

"I always like to take a few days off and go surfing about this time of year. My parents have a house just across the hay. I could have contacted you sooner, but Admiral Sandecker said there was no hurry."

"You know the Admiral?"

"I work for him."

"Then you're with NUMA?"

"Yes, I'm the agency's special projects director."

"I thought your name sounded vaguely familiar. My wife has mentioned you."

"Dana?".

"Yes, have you worked with her?"

"Only once. I flew in supplies to Pitcairn Island last summer when she and her NUMA archaeological team were diving for artifacts from the Bounty. "

Seagram looked at him. "So Admiral Sandecker told you there was no hurry to contact me."

Pitt smiled. "From what I gather, you rubbed him wrong with a middle-of-the-night phone call."

The black clouds had rolled seaward and the lightning was stabbing at Catalina across the channel.

"Now that you have me in your sights," Pitt said, "what can I do for you?"

"You can begin by telling me about Novaya Zemlya."

"Not much to tell," Pitt said casually. "I was in charge of the expedition to pick up your man. When he didn't show on schedule, I borrowed the ship's helicopter and made a reconnaissance flight toward the Russian island."

"You took a chance. Soviet radar might have picked you up on their scopes."

"I took that possibility into consideration. I stayed within ten feet of the water and kept my air speed down to fifteen knots. Even if I had been spotted, my radar blip would have read as a small fishing boat."

"What happened after you reached the island?"

"I cruised the shoreline until I found Koplin's sloop moored in a cove. I set the copter down on the beach nearby and began searching for him. It was then I heard shots through a wall of swirling snow that had been kicked up by a gust of wind."

"How was it possible to run onto Koplin and the Russian patrol guard? Finding them in the middle of a snowstorm is akin to stumbling on a needle in a frozen haystack."

"Needles don't bark," Pitt answered. "I followed the sound of a dog on the hunt. It led me to Koplin and the guard."

"The latter, of course, you murdered," Seagram said.

"I suppose a prosecuting attorney might suggest that." Pitt gestured airily. "On the other hand, it seemed the thing to do at the time."

"What if the guard had been one of my agents also?"

"Comrades-in-arms don't sadistically drag each other through the snow by the scruff of the neck, especially when one of them is seriously wounded."

"And the dog, did you have to kill the dog?"

"The thought occurred to me that left to his own devices, he might have led a search patrol back to his master's body. As it is, chances are neither will be discovered, ever."

"Do you always carry a gun with a silencer?"