Shock Wave

DEATH FROM NOWHERE

January 14, 2000

Seymour Island, Antarctic Peninsula

There was a curse of death about the island. A curse proven by the graves of men who set foot on the forbidding shore, never to leave. There was no beauty here, certainly nothing like the majestic ice-shrouded peaks, the glaciers that towered almost as high as the White Cliffs of Dover, or the icebergs that floated serenely like crystal castles that one might expect to see on and around the great landmass of the Antarctic and its offshore islands.

Seymour Island comprised the largest ice-free surface on or near the whole continent. Volcanic dust, laid down through the millennia, hastened the melting of ice, leaving dry valleys and mountains without a vestige of color and nearly devoid of all snow. It was a singularly ugly place, inhabited only by few varieties of lichen and a rookery of Adelie penguins who found Seymour Island an ample source for the small stones they use to build their nests.

The majority of the dead, buried in shallow pits pried from the rocks, came from a Norwegian Antarctic expedition after their ship was crushed in the ice in 1859. They survived two winters before their food supply ran out, finally dying off one by one from starvation. Lost for over a decade, their well-preserved bodies were not found until 1870, by the British while they were setting up a whaling station.

Others died and were laid beneath the rocks of Seymour Island. Some succumbed to disease, others to accidents that occurred during the whaling season. A few lost their lives when they wandered from the station, were caught by an unexpected storm and frozen by windchill. Surprisingly, their graves are well marked. Crews of whalers caught in the ice passed the winter until the spring melt by chiseling inscriptions on large stones, which they mounted over the burial sites. By the time the British closed the station in 1933, sixty bodies lay beneath the loathsome landscape.

The restless ghosts of the explorers and sailors that roamed the forsaken ground could never have imagined that one day their resting place would be crawling with accountants, attorneys, plumbers, housewives and retired senior citizens who showed up on luxurious pleasure ships to gawk at the inscribed stones and ogle the comical penguins that inhabited a piece of the shoreline. Perhaps, just perhaps, the island would lay its curse on these intruders too.

The impatient passengers aboard the cruise ship saw nothing ominous about Seymour Island. Safe in the comfort of their floating palace, they saw only a remote, unspoiled and mysterious land rising from a sea as blue as an iridescent peacock feather. They felt only excitement at a new experience, especially since they were among the first wave of tourists ever to walk the shores of Seymour Island. This was the third of five scheduled stops as the ship hopscotched among the islands along the peninsula, certainly not the most attractive, but one of the more interesting according to the cruise-line literature.

Many had traveled Europe and the Pacific, seen the usual exotic places travelers flock to around the world. Now they wanted something more, something different; a visit to a destination few had seen before, a remote place they could set foot on and brag about to friends and neighbors afterward.

As they clustered on the deck near the boarding ladder in happy anticipation of going ashore, aiming their telephoto lenses at the penguins, Maeve Fletcher walked among them, checking the bright orange insulated jackets passed out by the ship’s cruise staff, along with life jackets for the short trip between the ship and shore.

Energetic and in constant motion, she moved about with a concentrated briskness in a lithe body that had seen more than its fair share of vigorous exercise. She towered above the women and stood taller than most of the men. Her hair, braided in two long pigtails, was as yellow as a summery iris. She stared through eyes as blue as the deep sea, from a strong face with high cheekbones. Her lips always seemed parted in a warm smile, revealing a tiny gap in the center of her upper teeth. Tawny skin gave her a robust outdoorsy look.

Maeve was three years shy of thirty, with a master’s degree in zoology. After graduation she took a three year sabbatical to gain field experience studying bird and animal life in the polar regions. After she returned to her home in Australia, she was halfway through her dissertation for a doctorate at the University of Melbourne when she was offered a temporary job as naturalist and expedition leader for passengers of Ruppert & Saunders, a cruise line based in Adelaide and specializing in adventure tours. It was an opportunity to earn enough money to finish her dissertation, so she dropped everything and set sail to the great white continent on board the company’s ship Polar Queen.

This trip there were ninety-one paying passengers on board, and Maeve was one of four naturalists who were to conduct the excursions on shore. Because of the penguin rookery, the historic buildings still standing from the whaling operations, the cemetery and the site of the camp where the Norwegian explorers perished, Seymour Island was considered a historical site and a fragile environment. To reduce visitor impact, the passengers were guided ashore at staggered times and in separate groups for two-hour expeditions. They were also lectured on a code of behavior. They were not to step on lichens or moss, nor step within five meters of any bird or animal life. Nor could they sneak souvenirs, not so much as a small rock. Most of them were Australians, with a few New Zealanders mixed in.

Maeve was scheduled to accompany the first party of twenty-two visitors to the island. She checked off the list of names as the excited travelers stepped down the boarding ladder to a waiting Zodiac, the versatile rubber float craft designed by Jacques Cousteau. As she was about to follow the last passenger, the ship’s first officer, Trevor Haynes, stopped her on the boarding ladder. Quiet and quite handsome in the lady’s eyes, he was uncomfortable mingling with the passengers and rarely made an appearance away from the bridge.

“Tell your people not to be alarmed if they see the ship sailing off,” he told her.

She turned and looked up the steps at him. “Where will you be going?”

“There is a storm brewing a hundred miles out. The captain doesn’t want to risk exposing the passengers to any more rough water than necessary. Nor does he want to disappoint them by cutting short the shore excursions. He intends to steam twenty kilometers up the’ coast and drop off another group at the seal colony, then return in time to pick you up and repeat the process.”

“Putting twice the number ashore in half the time.”

“That’s the idea. That way, we can pack up and leave and be in the relatively calm waters of the Bransfield Strait before the storm strikes here.”

“I wondered why you didn’t drop the anchor.” Maeve liked Haynes. He was the only ship’s officer who wasn’t continually trying to sweet-talk her into his quarters after late-night drinks. “I’ll expect you in two hours,” she said with a wave.

“You have your portable communicator should you encounter a problem.”

She held up the small unit that was attached to her belt. “You’ll be the first to know.”

“Say hello to the penguins for me.”

“I shall.”

As the Zodiac skimmed over water that was as flat and reflective as a mirror, Maeve lectured her little band of intrepid tourists on the history behind their destination. “Seymour Island was first sighted by James Clark Ross in 1842. Forty Norwegian explorers, castaway when their ship was crushed in the ice, perished here in 1859. We’ll visit the site where they lived until the end and then take a short walk to the hallowed ground where they are buried.”

“Are those the buildings they lived in?” asked a lady who must have been pushing eighty, pointing to several structures in a small bay.

“No,” answered Maeve. “What you see are what remains of an abandoned British whaling station. We’ll visit it just before we take a short hike around that rocky point you see to the south, to the penguin rookery.”

“Does anyone live on the island?” asked the same lady.

“The Argentineans have a research station on the northern tip of the island.”

“How far away?”

Maeve smiled condescendingly. “About thirty kilometers.” There’s always one in every group who has the curiosity of a four-year-old, she mused.

They could see the bottom clearly now, naked rock with no growth to be seen anywhere. Their shadow followed them about two fathoms down as they cruised through the bay. No rollers broke on the shoreline, the sea ran smooth right up to the edge, lapping the exposed rock with the slight wash usually found around a small lake. The crewman shut off the outboard motor as the bow of the Zodiac skimmed onto the shore. The only sign of a living thing was a pure white snow petrel that glided through the sky above them like a large snowflake.

Only after she had helped everyone to disembark from the Zodiac and wade ashore onto the pebbled beach in the knee-high rubber boots supplied by the ship did Maeve turn and look at the ship as it gathered way and steamed northward.

The Polar Queen was quite small by cruise ship standards. Her length was only seventy-two meters, with a twenty-five hundred gross rated tonnage. She was built in Bergen, Norway, especially to cruise polar waters. She was as ruggedly constructed as an icebreaker, a function she could perform if the occasion arose. Her superstructure and the broad horizontal stripe below her lower deck were painted glacier white. The rest of her hull was a bright yellow. She could skirt the ice floes and icebergs with the agility of a rabbit due to her bow and stern thrusters. Her comfortable cabins were furnished in the style of a ski chalet, with picture windows facing the sea. Other amenities included a luxurious lounge and dining salon, hosted by a chef who turned out three-star culinary creations, a fitness center and a library filled with books and information on the polar regions. The crew was well trained and numbered twenty more than the passengers.

Maeve felt a tinge of regret she couldn’t quite understand as the yellow-and-white Polar Queen grew smaller in the distance. For a brief moment she experienced the apprehension the lost Norwegian explorers must have felt at seeing their only means of survival disappear. She quickly shook off any feelings of uneasiness and began leading her party of babbling travelers across the gray moonscape to the cemetery.

She allotted them twenty minutes to pick their way among the tombstones, shooting rolls of film of the inscriptions. Then she herded them around a vast pile of giant bleached whale bones near the old station while describing the methods the whalers used to process the whales.

“After the danger and exhilaration of the chase and kill,” she explained, “came the rotten job butchering the huge carcass and rendering the blubber into oil. ‘Cutting in’ and ‘trying out,’ as the old-timers called it.”

Next came the antiquated huts and rendering building. The whaling station was still maintained and monitored on an annual basis by the British and was considered a museum of the past. Furnishings, cooking utensils in the kitchen, along with old books and worn magazines, were still there just as the whalers left them when they finally departed for home.

“Please do not disturb any of the artifacts,” Maeve told the group. “Under international law nothing may be removed.” She took a moment to count heads. Then she said, “Now I’ll lead you into the caves dug by the whalers, where they stored the oil in huge casks before shipping it to England.”

From a box left at the entrance to the caves by expedition leaders from previous cruises, she passed out flashlights. “Is there anyone who suffers from claustrophobia?”

One woman who looked to be in her late seventies raised her hand. “I’m afraid I don’t want to go in there.”

“Anyone else?”

The woman who asked all the questions nodded. “I can’t stand cold, dark places.”

“All right,” said Maeve. “The two of you wait here. I’ll conduct the rest a short distance to the whale-oil storage area. We won’t be more than fifteen minutes.”

She led the chattering group through a long, curving tunnel carved by the whalers to a large storage cavern stacked with huge casks that had been assembled deep inside the rock and later left behind. After they entered she stopped and gestured at a massive rock at the entrance.

“The rock you see here was cut from inside the cavern and acts as a barrier against the cold and to keep competing whalers from pilfering surplus oil that remained after the station closed down for the winter. This rock weighs as much as an armored tank, but a child can move it, providing he or she knows its secret.” She paused to step aside, placed her hand on a particular place on the upper side of the rock and easily pushed it to close the entrance. “An ingenious bit of engineering. The rock is delicately balanced on a shaft through its middle. Push in the wrong spot and it won’t budge.”

Everyone made jokes about the total darkness broken only by the flashlights as Maeve moved over to one of the great wooden casks. One had remained half full, and she held a small glass vial under a spigot and filled it with a small amount of oil. She passed the vial around, allowing the tourists to rub a few drops between their fingers.

“Amazingly, the cold has prevented the oil from spoiling, even after nearly a hundred and thirty years. It’s still as fresh as the day it came from the cauldron and was poured into the cask.”

“It feels as though it has extraordinary lubricating qualities,” said a gray-haired man with a large red nose, common in a heavy drinker.

“Don’t tell the oil companies,” Maeve said with a thin smile. “Or the whales will become extinct before next Christmas.”

One woman asked for the vial and sniffed it. “Can it be used as cooking oil?”

“Yes indeed,” Maeve answered. “The Japanese are particularly fond of whale oil for cooking and margarine. In fact the old whalers used to dip their biscuits in saltwater and then fry them in the bubbling blubber. I tried it once and found it to have an interesting if slightly bland taste—”

Maeve was abruptly cut off by the scream of an elderly woman who frantically clutched the sides of her head. Six other people followed suit, the women crying out, the men groaning.

Maeve ran from one to the other, stunned at the look of intense pain in their eyes. “What is it?” she shouted. “What’s wrong? Can I help you?”

Then suddenly it was her turn. A daggerlike thrust of pain plunged into her brain, and her heart began to pound erratically. Instinctively her hands pressed her temples. She stared dazedly at the excursion members. Through the hypnotic spell of agony and terror, all their eyes seemed to be bulging from their sockets. Then she was struck by a tidal wave of dizziness rapidly followed by great nausea. She fought an overwhelming urge to vomit, before losing all balance and falling down.

No one could understand what was happening. The air became heavy and hard to breathe. The beams of the flashlights took on an unearthly bluish glow. There was no vibration, no shaking of the earth, and yet dust began to swirl inside the cavern. The only sounds were the screams of the tormented.

They began to sag and fall to the ground around Maeve. With horrified disbelief she found herself immersed in disorientation, caught in the grip of a crazy nightmare where her body was turning itself inside out.

One moment people stared at death from an unknown source. Then inexplicably, an instant later, the excruciating agony and vertigo began to ease. As quickly as it had come on, it faded and disappeared.

Maeve felt exhausted to her bones. She leaned weakly against the cask of whale oil, eyes closed, vastly relieved at being free of pain.

No one found the voice to speak for nearly two minutes. Finally, a man, who was cradling his stunned wife in his arms, looked up at Maeve. “What in God’s name was that?”

Maeve slowly shook her head. “I don’t know,” she answered dully.

With great effort she made the rounds, greatly cheered at finding everyone still alive. They all appeared to be recovering with no lingering effects. Maeve was thankful that none of the more elderly had suffered permanent damage, especially heart attacks.

“Please wait here and rest while I check the two ladies at the entrance of the tunnel and contact the ship.”

They were a good group, she thought. None questioned or blamed her for the unexplained event. They immediately began comforting each other, the younger ones helping the more elderly to restful positions. They watched as she swung open the massive door and walked through the portal until the beam of her flashlight vanished around a curve in the tunnel.

As soon as Maeve reached daylight again, she couldn’t help wondering if it had all been a hallucination. The sea was still calm and blue. The sun had risen a little higher in a cloudless sky. And the two ladies who had preferred to remain in the open air were lying sprawled on their stomachs, each clutching at nearby rocks as if trying to keep from being torn away by some unseen force.

She bent down and tried to shake them awake but stiffened in horror when she saw the sightless eyes and the gaping mouths. Each had lost the contents of her stomach. They were dead, their skin already turning a dark purplish-blue.

Maeve ran down to the Zodiac, which was still sitting with its bow pulled onto the shoreline. The crewman who had brought them ashore was also lifeless, the same appalling expression on his face, with the same skin color. In numbed shock, Maeve lifted her portable communicator and began transmitting. “Polar Queen, this is land expedition one. We have an emergency. Please answer immediately. Over.”

There was no reply.

She tried again and again to raise the ship. Her only response was silence. It was as if Polar Queen and her crew, and passengers had never existed.

January is midsummer in Antarctica, and days are long with only an hour or two of twilight. Temperatures on the peninsula can reach as high as fifteen degrees Celsius (fifty-nine degrees Fahrenheit), but since the tour group had come ashore it had dropped to freezing. At the scheduled time for the Polar Queen to return there was neither word nor sign of her.

Maeve continued her futile attempts to make contact every half hour until eleven o’clock in the evening. As the polar sun dipped toward the horizon, she stopped hailing on the ship’s channel to conserve the transmitter’s batteries. The portable radio’s range was limited to ten kilometers, and no other ship or passing aircraft was within five hundred kilometers of picking up her calls for help. The nearest source of relief was the Argentinean research station on the other end of the island, but unless freak atmospheric conditions stretched her signals, they would not have received them either. In frustration, she gave up and planned to try again later.

Where was the ship and crew? she wondered constantly. Was it possible they had encountered the same murderous phenomenon and suffered harm? She did not wish to dwell on pessimistic thoughts. For the time being she and her party were secure. But without food or bedding for warmth, she did not see how they could hold out very long. A few days at most. The ages of her excursion group were on the high side. The youngest couple were in their late sixties, while the rest ranged through the seventies to the oldest, a woman of eighty-three who wanted a taste of adventure before she went into a nursing home. A sense of hopelessness welled inside Maeve.

She noted with no small apprehension that dark clouds were beginning to drift in across the sea from the west, the vanguard of the storm that First Officer Trevor Haynes had warned Maeve to expect. She had enough experience with south polar weather conditions to know that coastal storms would be accompanied by fierce winds and blinding sleet. Little or no snow would fall. Debilitating windchill would be the primary danger, Maeve finally gave up hope of seeing the ship anytime soon and began to plan for the worst by making preparations for the excursion members to bed down for the next ten hours.

The still-standing huts and rendering shed were pretty well open to the elements. The roofs had caved in long ago, and high winds had broken the few windows as well as carrying off the doors. She decided her group would stand a better chance of surviving the bitter cold and life threatening wind by remaining in the cavern. A fire using a stack of weathered lumber at the whaling station was a possibility, but it would have to be placed near the entrance. Farther back in the cave, and the smoke could cause asphyxiation.

Four of the younger men helped her place the bodies of the two women and crewman in the rendering shed. They also pulled the Zodiac farther ashore and tied it down to prevent it from being blown inland by the increasing winds. Next they sealed all but a small opening of the tunnel entrance with rocks to minimize any frigid gusts that might sweep through into the cavern. She did not want to seal them off completely from the outside by closing the rock door. Then she gathered everyone around and ordered them to huddle together for mutual warmth.

There was nothing left to do, and the hours of waiting for rescue seemed like an eternity. They tried to sleep but found it all but impossible. The numbing cold slowly began to penetrate their clothing, and the wind outside turned into a gale that shrieked like a banshee through the air hole in the stone barrier they’d erected at the tunnel entrance.

Only one or two complained. Most bore the ordeal stoically. Some were actually excited at experiencing a real adventure. Two of the Aussie husbands, big men who had made their fortune as partners in a construction firm, teased their wives and cracked sarcastic jokes to keep everyone’s spirits up. They seemed as unconcerned as if they were waiting to board a plane. They were all good people in their twilight years, Maeve thought. It would be a shame, no, a crime, if they were to all die in that icy hellhole.

Her mind wandered, and she vaguely envisioned them all interred under the rocks with the Norwegian explorers and the British whalers. A delusion, she reminded herself firmly. Despite the fact that her father and sisters were violently hostile toward her, she could not bring herself to believe they would deny her proper burial in the family plot where her ancestors rested. And yet she knew it was a distinct possibility that her family would no longer admit that Maeve was of their own flesh and blood, not after the birth of her twin boys.

She lay there, staring at the fog that formed in the cavern from the heavy concentrated breathing, and tried to picture her sons, now only six years old, watched over by friends, while she earned badly needed money with the cruise line. What would become of them if she died? She prayed that her father would never get his hands on them. Compassion never entered into his reckonings. People’s lives mattered little to him. Nor was money a driving force. He considered it merely a tool. Power to manipulate, that was his passion. Maeve’s two sisters shared their father’s callousness toward others. Fortunately, she took after her mother, a gentle lady who was driven to suicide by her cold and abusive husband when Maeve was twelve.

After the tragedy, Maeve never considered herself part of the family. None of them had forgiven her for leaving the fold and striking out on her own under a new name with nothing but the clothes on her back. It was a decision she had never regretted.

She awakened, listening for a sound, or rather the lack of it. The wind was no longer whistling into the tunnel from outside. The storm was still brewing, but there was a temporary break in the frigid wind. She returned and roused the two Australian contractors.

“I need you to accompany me to the penguin rookery,” she told them. “They’re not hard to capture. I’m breaking the law, but if we are to stay healthy until the ship returns, we must put nourishment in our stomachs.”

“What do you think, mate?” boomed one of the men.

“I could use a taste of bird,” replied the other.

“Penguins aren’t candidates for gourmet dining,” Maeve said, smiling. “Their meat is oily, but at least it’s filling.”

Before they left for the rookery, she prodded the others to their feet and sent them to steal wood from the whaling station to build a fire. “In for a penny, in for a pound. If I’m going to jail for killing protected creatures and destroying historic property, I might as well do a thorough job of it.”

They made for the rookery, which was about two kilometers around the point encircling the north part of the bay. Though the wind had died, the sleet made their way miserable. They could hardly see more than three meters in front of them. It was as though they were looking at everything through a sheet of water. Sight was even more difficult without goggle. They were wearing only sunglasses, and the drifting sleet blew in around the rims of the lenses and caked their eyelashes. Only by keeping close to the edge of the water did they maintain a sense of direction. They added twenty minutes to the hike by not walking across the point as the crow flies, but at least the detour prevented them from becoming lost.

The wind howled in again, biting into their exposed faces. The thought of them all trekking to the Argentinean research station crossed Maeve’s mind. But she quickly dismissed it. Few would survive the thirty-kilometer journey through the storm. Better than half the aged tourists would quickly perish along the way. Maeve had to consider all prospects, the feasible and the impractical. She might make it. She was young and strong. But she could not bring herself to desert the people who were depending on her. Sending the big Aussie men who trudged beside her was a possibility. The nagging problem as she saw it was what would they find when they arrived?

What if the Argentinean scientists had died under the same mysterious circumstances as the members of her own party? If the worst had occurred, then the only hard incentive for reaching the station was to use their powerful communications equipment. The decision was agonizing. Should she risk the two Australians’ lives in a hazardous trek, or keep them at hand to help her care for the old and the weak? She decided against going for the research station. Her job did not involve putting the passengers of Ruppert & Saunders in life-threatening situations. It seemed inconceivable that they had been abandoned. They had no choice but wait it out until rescue came, from whatever source, and exist the best way they could until then.

The sleet had slackened, and their vision increased to nearly fifty meters. Overhead, the sun appeared as a dim orange ball with a halo of varied colors like a round prism. They rounded the spur of rock encompassing the bay and curved back to the shoreline containing the penguin rookery. Maeve did not relish the thought of killing penguins even as a means to stay alive. They were such tame and friendly creatures.

The Pygoscelis adeliae or Adelie penguins are one of seventeen true species. They sport a black-feathered back and hooded head and a white breast and stare through beady little eyes. As suggested by fossils found on Seymour Island, their ancestors evolved more than forty million years ago and were as tall as a man. Attracted to their almost human social behavior patterns, Maeve had spent one whole summer observing and studying a rookery and had begun a love affair with this most delightful of birds. In contrast with the larger emperor penguin, the Adelies can move as fast as five kilometers an hour and often faster when tobogganing over the ice on their chests. Give them a funny little derby and a cane to swing, she often mused, and they could have waddled along in a perfect imitation of Charlie Chaplin.

“I believe the bloody sleet is slackening,” said one of the men. He was wearing a leather cap and puffing on a cigarette.

“About damned time,” muttered the other, who had used a scarf to wrap his head, turban-style. “I feel like a damp rag.”

They could clearly see out to sea for nearly half a kilometer. The once glasslike sea was now a turmoil of whitecaps agitated by the wind. Maeve turned her attention to the rookery. As far as she could see was a carpet of penguins, over fifty thousand of them. As she and the Hussies walked closer, it struck her as odd that none of the birds stood on their little feet, tail feathers extended as props to keep from falling over backward. They were, scattered all about, most lying on their backs as if they had toppled over.

“Something’s not right,” she said. “None are standing.”

“No fools those birds.” said the man in the turban. “They know better than to stand against blowing sleet.”

Maeve ran to the edge of the rookery and looked down at the penguins lying on the outer edge. She was struck by the absence of sound. None moved nor showed interest in her approach. She knelt and studied one. It lay limp on the ground, eyes staring sightless at her. Her face was stricken as she looked at the thousands of birds that showed no sign of life. She stared at two leopard seals, the natural predator of penguins, whose bodies washed back and forth in the small surge along the rock-strewn beach.

“They’re all dead,” she muttered in shock.

“Bloody hell,” gasped the man in the leather cap. “She’s right. Not one of the little buggers is breathin’.”

This can’t be real. Maeve thought wildly. She stood absolutely still She could not see what caused the mass death, but she could feel it. The crazy idea that every living thing in the rest of the world had died from the mysterious malady suddenly struck her mind. Is it possible we’re the only ones left alive on a dead planet? she wondered in near panic.

The man with the scarf-turban wrapped around his head bent over and picked up a penguin. “Saves us the trouble of having to slaughter them.”

“Leave them be!” Maeve shouted at him.

“Why?” the man replied indignantly. “We’ve all got to eat.”

“We don’t know what killed them. They might have died from some sort of plague.”

The man in the leather cap nodded. “The little lady knows what she’s talking about. Whatever disease killed these birds could do us in too. I don’t know about you, but I don’t aim to be responsible for my wife’s death.”

“But it wasn’t a disease,” the other man argued. “Not what killed those little old ladies and that sailor lad. It was more like some fluke of nature.”

Maeve stood her ground. “I refuse to gamble with lives. Polar Queen will be back. We haven’t been forgotten.”

“If the captain is trying to give us a good scare, he’s doing a damned fine job of it.”

“He must have a good reason for not returning.”

“Good reason or not, your company better be heavily insured because they’re going to get their ears sued off when we get back to civilization.”

Maeve was in no mood to argue. She turned her back on the killing ground and set off toward the storage cavern. The two men followed, their eyes searching over a menacing sea for something that wasn’t there.

To wake up after three days in a caw on a barren island in the middle of a polar storm and know you are responsible for three deaths and the lives of nine men and eleven women is not an enjoyable experience. Without any sign of the hoped-for arrival of the Polar Queen, the once cheerful excursion that came ashore to experience the wondrous isolation of the Antarctic had become a nightmare of abandonment and despair for the vacation travelers. And to add to Maeve’s desperation, the batteries of her portable communicator had finally gone dead.

Anytime now, Maeve knew she could expect the older members of the party to succumb to the harsh conditions inside the cave. They had lived their lives in warm and tropical zones and were not acclimated to the freezing harshness of the Antarctic. Young and hardy bodies might have lasted until help finally arrived, but these people lacked the strength of twenty- and thirty-year-olds. Their health was generally frail and vulnerable with age.

At first they joked and told stories, treating their ordeal as merely a bonus adventure. They sang songs, mostly “Waltzing Matilda,” and attempted word games. But soon lethargy set in, and they went quiet and unresponsive. Bravely, they accepted their suffering without protest.

Now, hunger overcame any fear of diseased meat, and Maeve stopped a mutiny by finally relenting and sending the men out to bring in several dead penguins. There was no problem of decomposition setting in since the birds had frozen soon after they were killed. One of the men was an avid hunter. He produced a Swiss army knife and expertly skinned and butchered the meat. By filling their bellies with protein and fat they would add fuel to maintain their body heat.

Maeve found some seventy-year-old tea in one of the whaler’s huts. She also appropriated an old pot and a pan. Next she tapped the casks for a liter of the remaining whale oil, poured it in the pan and lit it. A blue flame rose, and everybody applauded her ingenuity at producing a workable stove. Then she cleaned out the old pot, filled it with snow and brewed the tea. Spirits were buoyed, but only for a short time. Depression soon recast its heavy net over the cavern. Their determination not to die was being sapped by the frigid temperature. They morbidly began to believe the end was inevitable. The ship was never returning, and any hope of rescue from another origin bordered on fantasy.

It no longer mattered if they expired from whatever unknown disease, if any, killed the penguins. None were dressed properly to resist for long sustained temperatures below freezing. The danger of asphyxiation was too great to use the whale oil to build a bigger fire. The small amount in the pan merely produced a feeble bit of warmth, hardly sufficient to prolong life. Eventually the fatal tentacles of the cold would encircle them all.

Outside, the storm went from bad to worse and it began to snow, a rare occurrence on the peninsula during summer. Hope of a chance discovery was destroyed as the storm mounted in intensity. Four of the elderly were near death from exposure, and Maeve suffered bleak discouragement as all control began to slip through her frozen fingers. She blamed herself for the three that were already dead, and it affected her badly.

The living looked upon her as their only hope. Even the men respected her authority and carried out her orders without question. “God help them,” she whispered to herself. “I can’t let them know I’ve come to the end of my rope.”

She shuddered from an oppressive feeling of helplessness. A strange lethargy stole through her. Maeve knew she must see the terrible trial through to its final outcome, but she didn’t think she had the strength to continue carrying twenty lives on her shoulders. She felt exhausted and didn’t want to struggle anymore. Dimly, through her listlessness, she heard a strange sound unlike the cry of the wind. It came to her ears as though something were pounding the air. Then it faded. Only her imagination, she told herself. It was probably nothing but the wind changing direction and making a different howl through the air vent at the tunnel entrance.

Then she heard it again briefly before it died. She struggled to her feet and stumbled through the tunnel. A snowdrift had built up against the wind barrier and nearly filled the small opening. She removed several rocks to widen a passage and crawled outside into an icy world of wind and snow. The wind held steady at about twenty knots, swirling billows of snow like a tornado. Suddenly, she tensed and squinted her eyes into the white turbulence.

Something seemed to be moving out there, a vague shape with no substance and yet darker than the opaque veil that fell from the sky.

She took a step and pitched forward. For a long moment she thought of just lying there and going to sleep. The urge to give it all up was overwhelming. But the spark of life refused to diminish and blink out. She lifted herself to her knees and stared through the wavering light. She caught something moving toward her, and then a gust obliterated it. A few moments later it reappeared, but closer this time. Then her heart surged.

It was the figure of a man covered in ice and snow. She waved excitedly and called to him. He paused as if listening, then turned and began walking away.

This time she screamed, a high-pitched scream such as only a female could project. The figure turned and stared through the drifting snow in her direction. She waved both arms frantically. He waved back and began jogging toward her.

“Please don’t let him be a mirage or a delusion,” she begged the heavens.

And then he was kneeling in the snow beside her, cradling her shoulders in arms that felt like the biggest and strongest she had ever known. “Oh, thank God. I never gave up hoping you’d come.”

He was a tall man, wearing a turquoise parka with the letters NUMA stitched over the left breast, and a ski mask with goggles. He removed the goggles and stared at her through a pair of incredible opaline green eyes that betrayed a mixture of surprise and puzzlement. His deeply tanned face seemed oddly out of place in the Antarctic.

“What in the world are you doing here?” he asked in a husky voice tinged with concern.

“I have twenty people back there in a cavern. We were on a shore excursion. Our cruise ship sailed off and never returned.”

He looked at her in disbelief. “You were abandoned?”

She nodded and stared fearfully into the storm. “Did a worldwide catastrophe occur?”

His eyes narrowed at the question. “Not that I’m aware of. Why do you ask?”

“Three people in my party died under mysterious circumstances. And an entire rookery of penguins just north of the bay has been exterminated down to the last bird.”

If the stranger was surprised at the tragic news, he hid it well. He helped Maeve to her feet. “I’d better get you out of this blowing snow.”

“You’re American,” she said, shivering from the cold.

“And you’re Australian.”

“It’s that obvious?”

“You pronounce a like i.”

She held out a gloved hand. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you, Mr...?”

“My name is Dirk Pitt.”

“Maeve Fletcher.”

He ignored her objections, picked her up and began carrying her, following her footprints in the snow toward the tunnel. “I suggest we carry on our conversation out of the cold. You say there are twenty others?”

“That are still alive.”

Pitt gave her a solemn look. “It would appear the sales brochures oversold the voyage.”

Once inside the tunnel he set her on her feet and pulled off his ski mask. His head was covered by a thick mass of unruly black hair. His green eyes peered from beneath heavy dark eyebrows, and his face was craggy and weathered from long hours in the open but handsome in a rugged sort of way. His mouth seemed set in a casual grin. This was a man a woman could feel secure with, Maeve thought.

A minute later, Pitt was greeted by the tourists like a hometown football hero who had led the team to a big victory. Seeing a stranger suddenly appear in their midst had the same impact as winning a lottery. He marveled that they were all in reasonably fit shape, considering their terrible ordeal. The old women all embraced and kissed him like a son while the men slapped his back until it was sore. Everybody was talking and shouting questions at once. Maeve introduced him and related how they met up in the storm.

“Where did you drop from, mate?” they all wanted to know.

“A research vessel from the National’ Underwater & Marine Agency. We’re on an expedition trying to discover why seals and dolphins have been disappearing in these waters at an astonishing rate. We were flying over Seymour Island in a helicopter when the snow closed in on us, so we thought it best to land until it blew over.”

“There’re more of you?”

“A pilot and a biologist who remained on board. I spotted what looked like a piece of a Zodiac protruding from the snow. I wondered why such a craft would be resting on an uninhabited part of the island and walked over to investigate. That’s when I heard Miss Fletcher shouting at me.”

“Good thing you decided to take a walk when you did,” said the eighty-three-year-old great-grandmother to Maeve.

“I thought I heard a strange noise outside in the storm. I know now that it was the sound of his helicopter coming in to land.”

“An incredible piece of luck we stumbled into each other in the middle of a blizzard,” said Pitt. “I didn’t believe I was hearing a woman’s scream. I was sure it was a quirk of the wind until I saw you waving through a blanket of snow.”

“Where is your research ship?” Maeve asked.

“About forty kilometers northeast of here.”

“Did you by chance pass our ship, Polar Queen?”

Pitt shook his head. “We haven’t seen another ship for over a week.”

“Any radio contact?” asked Maeve. “A distress call, perhaps?”

“We talked to a ship supplying the British station at Halley Bay, but have heard nothing from a cruise ship.”

“She couldn’t have vanished into thin air,” said one of the men in bewilderment. “Not along with the entire crew and our fellow passengers.”

“We’ll solve the mystery as soon as we can transport all you people to our research vessel. It’s not as plush as Polar Queen, but we have comfortable quarters, a fine doctor and a cook who stands guard over a supply of very good wines.”

“I’d rather go to hell than spend another minute in this freeze box,” said a wiry New Zealand owner of a sheep station, laughing.

“I can only squeeze five or six of you at a time into the helicopter, so we’ll have to make several trips,” explained Pitt. “Because we set down a good three hundred meters away, I’ll return to the craft and fly it closer to the entrance to your cave so you won’t have to suffer the discomfort of trekking through the snow.”

“Nothing like curbside service,” Maeve said, feeling as if she had been reborn. “May I go with you?”

“Feel up to it?”

She nodded. “I think everyone will be glad to not have me ordering them about for a little while.”

Al Giordino sat in the pilot’s seat of the turquoise NUMA helicopter and worked a crossword puzzle. No taller than a floor lamp, he had a body as solid as a bee keg poised on two legs, with a pair of construction derricks for arms. His ebony eyes occasionally glanced into the snow glare through the cockpit windshield, then seeing nothing of Pitt, they refocused on the puzzle, Curly black hair framed the top of a round face, which was fixed with a perpetual sarcastic expression about the lips that suggested he was skeptical of the world and everyone in it, while the nose hinted strongly at his Roman ancestry.

A close friend of Pitt’s since childhood, they had been inseparable during their years together in the Air Force before volunteering for an assignment to help launch the National Underwater & Marine Agency, a temporary assignment that had lasted the better part of fourteen years.

“What’s a six-letter word for fuzzballed goondorpher that eats stinkweed?” he asked the man sitting behind him in the cargo bay of the aircraft, which was packed with laboratory testing equipment. The marine biologic from NUMA looked up from a specimen he’d collected earlier and raised his brows quizzically.

“There is no such beast as a fuzzballed goondorpher.”

“You sure? It says so right here.”

Roy Van Fleet knew when Giordino was sowing a cornfield with turnips. After three months at sea together Van Fleet had become too savvy to fall for the stubborn Italian’s con jobs. “On second thought, it’s a flying sloth from Mongolia. See if `slobbo’ fits.”

Realizing he had lost his easy mark, Giordino looks up from the puzzle again and stared into the falling snow “Dirk should have been back by now.”

“How long has he been gone?” asked Van Fleet.

“About forty-five minutes.”

Giordino screwed up his eyes as a pair of vague shapes took form in the distance. “I think he’s coming in now,” Then he added, “There must have been funny dust in that cheese sandwich I just ate. I’d swear he’s got soma one with him.”

“Not a chance. There isn’t another soul within thirty kilometers.”

“Come see for yourself.”

By the time Van Fleet had capped his specimen jar and placed it in a wooden crate, Pitt had thrown open the entry hatch and helped Maeve Fletcher climb inside.

She pushed back the hood on her orange jacket, fluffed out her long golden hair and smiled brightly. “Greetings, gentlemen. You don’t know how happy I am to see you.”

Van Fleet looked as if he had seen the Resurrection. His face registered total incomprehension.

Giordino, on the other hand, simply sighed in resignation. “Who else.” he asked no one in particular, “but Dirk Pitt could tramp off into a blizzard on an uninhabited backwater island in the Antarctic and discover a beautiful girl?”

Less than an hour after Pitt alerted the NUMA research vessel Ice Hunter, Captain Paul Dempsey braved an icy breeze and watched as Giordino hovered the helicopter above the ship’s landing pad. Except for the ship’s cook busily preparing hot meals in the galley, and the chief engineer, who remained below, the entire crew, including lab technicians and scientists, had turned out to greet the first group of cold and hungry tourists to be airlifted from Seymour Island.

Captain Dempsey had grown up on a ranch in the Beartooth Mountains astride the Wyoming-Montana border. He ran away to sea after graduating from high school and worked the fishing boats out of Kodiak, Alaska. He fell in love with the icy seas above the Arctic Circle and eventually passed the examination to become captain of an ice-breaking salvage tug. No matter how high the seas or how strong the wind, Dempsey never hesitated to take on the worst storms the Gulf of Alaska could throw al him after he’d received a call from a ship in distress, During the next fifteen years, his daring rescues of innumerable fishing boats, six coastal freighters, two oil tankers and a Navy destroyer created a legend that resulted in a bronze statue beside the dock at Seward, a source of great embarrassment to him. Forced into retirement when the oceangoing salvage company became debt ridden, he accepted an offer from the chief director of NUMA, Admiral James Sandecker, to captain the agency’s polar research ship, Ice Hunger.

Dempsey’s trademark, a chipped briar pipe, jutted from one corner of his tight but good-humored mouth. He was a typical tugman, broad shouldered and thick waisted, habitually standing with legs wide set, yet he presented a distinguished appearance. Gray haired, clean shaven, a man given to telling good sea stories, Dempsey might have been taken for a jovial captain of a cruise ship.

He stepped forward as the wheels of the chopper settled onto the deck. Beside him stood the ship’s physician, Dr. Mose Greenberg. Tall and slender, he wore his dark brown hair in a ponytail. His blue-green eyes twinkled, and he had about him that certain indefinable air of trustworthiness common to all conscientious, dedicated doctors around the world.

Dr. Greenberg, along with four crewmen bearing stretchers for any of the elderly passengers who found it difficult to walk on their own, ducked under the revolving rotor blades and opened the rear cargo door. Dempsey moved toward the cockpit and motioned to Giordino to open the side window. The stocky Italian obliged and leaned out.

“Is Pitt with you?” asked Dempsey loudly above the swoosh of the blades.

Giordino shook his head. “He and Van Fleet stayed behind to examine a pack of dead penguins.”

“How many of the cruise ship’s passengers were you able to carry?”

“We squeezed in six of the oldest ladies who had suffered the most. Four more trips ought to do it. Three to transport the remaining tourists and one to bring out Pitt, Van Fleet, the guide and the three dead bodies they stashed in an old whalers’ rendering shed.”

Dempsey motioned into the miserable mixture of snow and sleet. “Can you find your way back in this soup?”

“I plan to beam in on Pitt’s portable communicator.”

“How bad off are these people?”

“Better than you might expect for senior citizens who’ve suffered three days and nights in a frigid cave, Pitt said to tell Dr. Greenberg that pneumonia will be his main worry. The bitter cold has sapped the older folk’s energy, and in their weakened condition, their resistance is real low.”

“Do they have any idea what happened to their cruise ship?” asked Dempsey.

“Before they went ashore, their excursion guide was told by the first officer that the ship was heading twenty kilometers up the coast to put off another group of excursionists. That’s all she knows. The ship never contacted her again after it sailed off.”

Dempsey reached up and lightly slapped Giordino on the arm. “Hurry back and mind you don’t get your feet wet.” Then he moved around to the cargo door and introduced himself to the tired and cold passengers from the Polar Queen as they exited the aircraft.

He tucked a blanket around the eighty-three-year-old woman, who was being lifted to the deck on a stretcher, “Welcome aboard,” he said with a warm smile. “We have hot soup and coffee and a soft bed waiting for you in our officers’ quarters.”

“If it’s all the same to you,” she said sweetly, “I’d prefer tea.”

“Your wish is my command, dear lady,” Dempsey said gallantly. “Tea it is.”

“Bless you, Captain,” she replied, squeezing his hand.

As soon as the last passenger had been helped across the helicopter pad, Dempsey waved off Giordino, who immediately lifted the craft into the air. Dempsey watched until the turquoise craft dissolved and vanished into the white blanket of sleet.

He relit the ever-present pipe and tarried alone on the helicopter pad after the others had hurried back into the comfort of the ship’s superstructure to get out of the cold. He had not counted on a mission of mercy, certainly not one of this kind. Ships in distress on ferocious seas he could understand. But ship’s captains who abandoned their passengers on a deserted island under incredibly harsh conditions he could not fathom.

The Polar Queen had sailed far more than 25 kilometers from the site of the old whaling station. He knew that for certain. The radar on Ice Hunter’s bridge could see beyond 120 kilometers, and there was no contact that remotely resembled a cruise ship.

The gale had slackened considerably by the time Pitt, along with Maeve Fletcher and Van Fleet, reached the penguin rookery. The Australian zoologist and the American biologist had become friendly almost immediately. Pitt walked behind them in silence as they compared universities and colleagues in the field. Maeve plagued Van Fleet with questions pertaining to her dissertation, while he queried her for details concerning her brief observation of the mass decimation of the world’s most beloved bird.

The storm had carried the carcasses of those nearest the shoreline out to sea. But by Pitt’s best calculation a good forty thousand of the dead birds still lay scattered amid the small stones and rocks, like black-and-white gunnysacks filled with wet grain. With the easing of the wind and sleet, visibility increased to nearly a kilometer.

Giant petrels, the vultures of the sea, began arriving to feast upon the dead penguins. Majestic as they soared’ gracefully through the air, they were merciless scavengers of meat from any source. As Pitt and the others watched in disgust, the huge birds quickly disemboweled their lifeless prey, forcing their beaks inside the penguin carcasses until their necks and heads were red with viscera and gore.

“Not exactly a sight I care to remember,” said Pitt.

Van Fleet was stunned. He turned to Maeve, his eyes unbelieving. “Now that I see the tragedy with my own eyes I find it hard to accept so many of the poor creatures dying within such a concentrated space in the same time period.”

“Whatever the phenomenon,” said Maeve, “I’m certain it also caused the death of my two passengers and the ship’s crewman who brought us ashore.”

Van Fleet knelt and studied one of the penguins. “No indication of injury, no obvious signs of disease or poison. The body appears fat and healthy.”

Maeve leaned over his shoulder. “The only nonconformity that I found was the slight protrusion of the eyes.”

“Yes, I see what you mean. The eyeballs seem half again as large.”

Pitt looked at Maeve thoughtfully. “When I was carrying you to the cave, you said the three who died did so under mysterious circumstances.”

She nodded. “Some strange force assaulted our senses, unseen and nonphysical. I have no idea what it was. But I can tell you that for at least a full five minutes it felt like our brains were going to explode. The pain was excruciating.”

“From the blue coloring on the bodies you showed me in the rendering shed.” said Van Fleet, “the cause of death appears to be cardiac arrest.”

Pitt stared over the scene of so much annihilation. “Not possible that three humans, countless thousands of penguins and fifty or more leopard seals all expired together from a heart condition.”

“There must be an interrelating cause,” said Maeve.

“Any connection with the huge school of dolphins we found out in the Weddell Sea or the pod of seals washed up just across the channel on Vega Island, all deader than petrified wood?” Pitt asked Van Fleet.

The marine biologist shrugged. “Too early to tell without further study. There does, however, appear to be a definite link.”

“Have you examined them in your ship’s laboratory?” asked Maeve.

“I’ve dissected two seals and three dolphins and found no hook 1 can hang a respectable theory on. The primary consistency seems to be internal hemorrhaging.”

“Dolphins, seals, birds and humans,” Pitt said softly. “They’re all vulnerable to this scourge.”

Van Fleet nodded solemnly. “Not to mention the vast numbers of squid and sea turtles that have washed ashore throughout the Pacific and the millions of dead fish found floating off Peru and Ecuador in the past two months.”

“If it continues unstopped there is no predicting how many species of life above and under the sea will become extinct.” Pitt turned his gaze toward the sky at the distant sound of the helicopter. “So what do we know except that our mystery plague kills every living thing in air and liquid without discrimination?”

“All within a matter of minutes,” added Maeve.

Van Fleet came to his feet. He appeared badly shaken. “If we don’t determine whether the cause is from natural disturbances or human intervention of some kind, and do it damned quick, we may be looking at oceans devoid of all life.”

“Not just oceans. You’re forgetting this thing also kills on land,” Maeve reminded him.

“I don’t even want to dwell on that horror.”

For a long minute no one said a word, each trying to comprehend the potential catastrophe that lay somewhere in and beyond the sea. Finally, Pitt broke the silence.

“It would appear,” he said, a pensive look on his craggy face, “that we have our work cut out for us.”

Pitt studied the screen of a large monitor that displayed a computer-enhanced satellite image of the Antarctic Peninsula and the surrounding islands. He leaned back, rested his eyes a moment and then stared through the tinted glass on the navigation bridge of Ice Hunter as the sun broke through the dissipating clouds. The time was eleven o’clock on a summer’s evening in the Southern Hemisphere, and daylight remained almost constant.

The passengers from Polar Queen had been fed and bedded down in comfortable quarters charitably provided by the crew and scientists, who doubled up. Doc Greenberg examined each and every one and found no permanent damage or trauma. He was also relieved to find only a few cases of mild colds but no evidence of pneumonia. In the ship’s biolaboratory, two decks above the ship’s hospital, Van Fleet, assisted by Maeve Fletcher, was performing postmortem examinations on the penguins and seals they had airlifted from Seymour Island in the helicopter. The bodies of the three dead were packed in ice until they could be turned over to a professional pathologist.

Pitt ran his eyes over the huge twin bows of the Ice Hunter. She was not your garden-variety research ship but one of a kind, the first scientific vessel entirely computer designed by marine engineers working with input from oceanographers. She rode high on parallel hulls that contained her big engines and auxiliary machinery. Her space-age rounded superstructure abounded with technical sophistication and futuristic innovations. The quarters for the crew and ocean scientists rivaled the staterooms of a luxury cruise ship. She was sleek and almost fragile looking, but that was a deception. She was a workhorse, born to ride smooth in choppy waves and weather the roughest sea. Her radically designed triangular hulls could cut through and crush an ice floe four meters thick.

Admiral James Sandecker, the feisty director of the National Underwater & Marine Agency, followed her construction from the first computerized design drawing to her maiden voyage around Greenland. He took great pride in every centimeter of her gleaming white superstructure and turquoise hulls. Sandecker was a master of obtaining funds from the new tightfisted Congress, and nothing had been spared in Ice Hunter’s construction nor her state-of-the-art equipment. She was without argument the finest polar research ship ever built.

Pitt turned and refocused his attention on the image beamed down from the satellite.

He felt almost no exhaustion. It had been a long and tiring day, but one filled with every emotion, happiness and satisfaction at having saved the lives of over twenty people and sorrow at seeing so many of nature’s creatures lying dead almost as far as the eye could see. This was a catastrophe beyond comprehension. Something sinister and menacing was out there. A hideous presence that defied logic.

His thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of Giordino and Captain Dempsey as they stepped out of the elevator that ran from the observation wing above the navigation bridge down through fifteen decks to the bowels of the engine room.

“Any glimpse of Polar Queen from the satellite cameras?” asked Dempsey.

“Nothing I can positively identify,” Pitt replied. “The snow is blurring all imaging.”

“What about radio contact?”

Pitt shook his head. “It’s as though the ship were carried away by aliens from space. The communications room can’t raise a response. And while we’re on the subject, the radio at the Argentinean research station has also gone dead.”

“Whatever disaster struck the ship and the station,” said Dempsey, “must have come on so fast none of the poor devils could get off a distress call.”

“Have Van Fleet and Fletcher uncovered any clues leading to the cause of the deaths?” asked Pitt.

“Their preliminary examination shows that the arteries ruptured at the base of the creatures’ skulls, causing hemorrhaging. Beyond that, I can tell you nothing.”

“Looks like we have a thread leading from a mystery to an enigma to a dilemma to a puzzle with no solution in sight,” Pitt said philosophically.

“If Polar Queen isn’t floating nearby or sitting on the bottom of the Weddell Sea,” Giordino said thoughtfully, “we might be looking at a hijacking.”

Pitt smiled as he and Giordino exchanged knowing looks. “Like the Lady Flamborough?”

“Her image crossed my mind.”

Dempsey stared at the deck, recalling the incident. “The cruise ship that was captured by terrorists in the port of Punta del Este several years ago.”

Giordino nodded. “She was carrying heads of state for an economic conference. The terrorists sailed her through the Strait of Magellan into a Chilean fjord, where they moored her under a glacier. It was Dirk who tracked her down.”

“Allowing for a cruising speed of roughly eighteen knots,” Dempsey estimated, “terrorists could have sailed Polar Queen halfway to Buenos Aires by now.”

“Not a likely scenario,” Pitt said evenly. “I can’t think of one solid reason why terrorists would hijack a cruise ship in the Antarctic.”

“So what’s your guess?”

“I believe she’s either drifting or steaming in circles within two hundred kilometers of us.” Pitt said it so absolutely he left little margin for doubt.

Dempsey looked at him. “You have a prognostication we don’t know about?”

“I’m betting my money that the same phenomenon that struck down the tourists and crewman outside the cave also killed everybody on board the cruise ship.”

“Not a pretty thought,” said Giordino, “but that would explain why she never returned to pick up the excursionists.”

“And let us not forget the second group that was scheduled to be put ashore twenty kilometers farther up the coast,” Dempsey reminded them.

“This mess gets worse by the minute,” Giordino muttered.

“Al and I will conduct a search for the second group from the air,” Pitt said, contemplating the image on the monitor. “If we can’t find any sign of their presence, we’ll push on and check on the people manning the Argentinean research station. For all we know they could be dead too.”

“What in God’s name caused this calamity?” Dempsey asked no one in particular.

Pitt made a vague gesture with his hands “The familiar causes for extermination of life in and around the sea do not fit this puzzle. Natural problems generally responsible for huge fish kills around the world, like fluctuations in temperatures of surface water or algal blooms such as red tides, do not apply here. Neither is present.”

“That leaves man-made pollution.”

“A possibility that also fails to measure up,” Pitt argued. “There are no known industrial sources for toxic pollution within thousands of kilometers. And no radioactive and chemical wastes could have killed every penguin in such a short time span, certainly not those that were safely nesting on land clear of the water. I fear we have a threat no one has faced before.”

Giordino pulled a massive cigar from the inside pocket of his jacket. The cigar was one of Admiral Sandecker’s private stock, made expressly for his private enjoyment. And Giordino’s too, since it was never discovered how he had helped himself to the admiral’s private stock for over a decade without ever getting caught. He held a flame to the thick dark brown shaft of tobacco and puffed out a cloud of fragrant smoke.

“Okay,” he said, enjoying the taste. “What’s the drill?”

Dempsey wrinkled his nose at the cigar’s aroma. “I’ve contacted officials of Ruppert & Saunders, the line that owns Polar Queen, and apprised them of the situation. They lost no time in initiating a massive air search. They’ve requested that we transport the survivors of the shore excursion to King George Island, where a British scientific station has an airfield. From there arrangements will be made to airlift them back to Australia.”

“Before or after we look for Polar Queen?” Giordino put to him.

“The living come first,” Dempsey replied seriously. As captain of the ship, the decisions belonged to him. “You two probe the coastline in your helicopter while I steer the Hunter on a course toward King George Island. After our passengers are safely ashore, we’ll make a sweep for the cruise ship.”

Giordino grinned. “By then, the Weddell Sea will be swarming with every salvage tug from here to Capetown, South Africa.”

“Not our problem,” said Dempsey. “NUMA isn’t in the ship salvage business.”

Pitt had tuned out of the conversation and walked over to a table where a large chart of the Weddell Sea was laid flat. He ignored any inclination to work by instinct and drove himself to think rationally, with his brain and not his gut. He tried to put himself onboard the Polar Queen when she was struck by the murdering scourge. Giordino and Dempsey went quiet as they stared at him expectantly.

After nearly a minute, he looked up from the chart and smiled. “Once we program the relevant data into the teleplotting analyzer, it should give us a ballpark location with a fighting chance for success.”

“So what do we feed into the brain box?” Dempsey’s term for any piece of electronics relating to the ship’s computer systems.

“Every scrap of data on wind and currents from the last three and a half days, and their effects against a mass the size of Polar Queen. Once we calculate a drift pattern, we can tackle the problem of whether she continued making way with a dead crew at the helm, and in what direction.”

“Suppose that instead of steaming around in circles, as you suggested, her rudder was set on a straight course?”

“Then she might be fifteen hundred kilometers away, somewhere in the middle of the South Atlantic and out of range of the satellite imaging system.”

Giordino put it to Pitt. “But you don’t think so.”

“No,” Pitt said quietly. “If the ice and snow covering this ship after the storm is any indication, Polar Queen has enough of the stuff coating her superstructure to make her nearly invisible to the satellite imaging system.”

“Enough to camouflage her as an iceberg?” asked Dempsey.

“More like a snow-blanketed projection of land.”

Dempsey looked confused. “You’ve lost me.”

“I’ll bet my government pension,” said Pitt with cast-iron conviction, “we’ll find the Polar Queen hard aground somewhere along the shore of the peninsula or beached on one of the outlying islands.”

Pitt and Giordino took off at four o’clock in the morning, when most of the crew of lee Hunter were still sleeping. The weather had returned to milder temperatures, calm seas and crystal-clear blue skies, with a light five-knot wind out of the southwest. With Pitt at the controls, they headed toward the old whaling station before swinging north in search of the second group of excursionists from Polar Queen.

Pitt could not help feeling a deep sense of sadness as they flew over the rookery’s killing ground. The shore as far as the horizon seemed carpeted with the bodies of the comical little birds. The Addlie penguins were very territorial, and birds from other rookeries around the Antarctic Peninsula were not likely to immigrate to this particular breeding ground. The few survivors who might have escaped the terrible scourge would require twenty years or more to replenish the once numerous population of Seymour Island. Fortunately, the massive loss was not enough to critically endanger the species.

As the last of the dead birds flashed under the helicopter, Pitt leveled out at fifty meters and flew above the waterline, staring out the windscreen for any sign of the excursionists’ landing site. Giordino gazed out his side window, scanning the open-water pack ice for any glimpse of Polar Queen, occasionally making a mark on a folded chart that lay across his lap.

“If I had a dime,” Giordino muttered, “for every iceberg on the Weddell Sea, I could buy General Motors.”

Pitt glanced past Giordino out the starboard side of the aircraft at a great labyrinth of frozen masses calved from the Larsen Ice Shelf and driven northwest by the wind and current into warmer water, where they split and broke up into thousands of smaller bergs. Three of them were as big as small countries. Some measured three hundred meters thick and rose as high as three-story buildings from just the water surface. All were dazzling white with hues of blue and green. The ice of these drifting mountains had formed from compacted snow in the ancient past, before breaking loose and plowing relentlessly over the centuries toward the sea and their slow but eventual meltdown.

“I do believe you could pick up Ford and Chrysler too.”

“If Polar Queen struck any one of these thousands of bergs, she could have gone to the bottom in less time than it takes to tell about it.”

“A thought I don’t care to dwell on.”

“Anything on your side?” asked Giordino.

“Nothing but gray, undistinguished rock poking through a blanket of white snow. I can only describe it as sterile monotony.”

Giordino made another notation on his chart and checked the airspeed against his watch. “Twenty kilometers from the whaling station, and no sign of passengers from the cruise ship.”

Pitt nodded in agreement. “Certainly nothing I can see that resembles a human.”

“Maeve Fletcher said they were supposed to put the second party ashore at a seal colony.”

“The seals are there all right,” Pitt said, gesturing below. “Must be over eight hundred of them, all dead.”

Giordino raised in his seat and peered out the port window as Pitt banked the helicopter in a gentle descending turn to give him a better view. The yellow-brown bodies of big elephant seals packed the shoreline for nearly a kilometer. From fifty meters in the air, they looked to be sleeping, but a sharp look soon revealed that not one moved.

“It doesn’t look like the second excursion group left the ship,” said Giordino.

There was nothing more to see, so Pitt swung the aircraft back on a course over the surf line. “Next stop, the Argentinean research station.”

“It should be coming into view at any time.”

“I’m not looking forward to what we might find,” said Pitt uneasily.

“Look on the bright side.” Giordino smiled tightly. “Maybe everybody said to hell with it, packed up and went home.”

“Wishful thinking on your part,” Pitt replied. “The station is highly important for its work in atmospheric sciences. It’s one of five permanently occupied survey stations that measure the behavior and fluctuations of the Antarctic ozone hole.”

“What’s the latest news on the ozone layer?”

“Weakening badly in both Northern and Southern Hemispheres,” Pitt answered seriously. “Since the large cavity over the Arctic pole has opened, the amoeba shaped hole in the south, rotating in clockwise direction from polar winds, has traveled over Chile and Argentina as high as the forty-fifth parallel. It also passed across New Zealand’s South Island as far as Christchurch. The plant and animal life in those regions received the most harmful dose of ultraviolet radiation ever recorded.”

“Which means we’ll have to pile on the suntan lotion;” Giordino said sardonically.

“The least of the problem,” said Pitt. “Small overdoses of ultraviolet radiation badly damage every agricultural product from potatoes to peaches. If the ozone values drop a few more percentage points, there will be a disastrous loss of food crops around the world.”

“You paint a grim picture.”

“That’s only the background,” Pitt continued. “Couple that with global warming and increasing volcanic activity, and the human race could see a rise in sea level of thirty to ninety meters in the next two hundred years. The bottom line is that we’ve altered the earth in a terrifying way we don’t yet understand—”

“There!” Giordino abruptly cut in and pointed. They were coming over a shoulder of rock that sloped toward the sea. “Looks more like a frontier town than a scientific base.”

The Argentinean research and survey station was a complex of ten buildings, constructed with solid steel portal frames that supported dome roofs. The hollow walls had been thickly filled with insulation against the wind and frigid cold. The antenna array for gathering scientific data on the atmosphere festooned the domed roofs like the leafless branches of trees in winter. Giordino tried one last time to raise somebody on the radio while Pitt circled the buildings.

“Still quiet as a hermit’s doorbell,” Giordino said uneasily as he removed the earphones.

“No outstretched hand from a welcome committee,” Pitt observed.

Without a further word he settled the helicopter neatly beside the largest of the six buildings, the rotor blades whipping the snow into a shower of ice crystals. A pair of snowmobiles and an all-terrain tractor sat deserted, half buried in snow. There were no footprints to be seen, no smoke curled from the vents. No smoke or at least white vapor meant no, inhabitants, none that were alive at any rate. The place looked eerily deserted. The blanket of white gave it a ghostly look indeed, thought Pitt.

“We’d better take along the shovels stored in the cargo bay,” he said. “It looks like we’re going to have to dig our way in.”

It required no imagination at all to fear the worst. They exited the aircraft and trudged through snow up to their thighs until they reached the entrance to the central building. About two meters of snow had drifted against the door. Twenty minutes later they had removed enough to pull the door half ajar.

Giordino gave a slight bow and smiled grimly. “After you.”

Pitt never doubted Giordino’s fortitude for a minute. The little Italian was utterly fearless. It was an old routine they had practiced many times. Pitt led the way while Giordino covered any unexpected movement from the flanks and rear. One behind the other they stepped into a short tunnel ending at an interior door that acted as an additional cold barrier. Once through the inside door, they continued on down a long corridor that opened into a combination recreation and dining room. Giordino walked over to a thermometer attached to the wall.

“It’s below freezing in here,” he muttered.

“Somebody hasn’t been tending the heat,” Pitt acknowledged.

They did not have to go far to discover their first resident.

The odd thing about him was that he didn’t look like he was dead. He knelt on the floor, clutching the top of a table, staring open-eyed and unwinkingly at Pitt and Giordino as if he had been expecting them. There was something unnaturally wrong and foreboding about his stillness. He was a big man, bald but for a strip of black hair running around the sides of his head and meeting in the back. Like most scientists who spent months and sometimes years in isolated outposts, he had ignored the daily male ritual of shaving, as evidenced by the elegantly brushed beard that fell down his chest. Sadly, the magnificent beard had been soiled when he retched.

The frightening part about him, the part that made the nape of Pitt’s neck tingle, was the expression of abject fear and agony on the face that was frozen by the cold into a mask of white marble. He looked hideous beyond description.

The eyes bulged, and the mouth was oddly twisted open as if in a final scream. That this individual had died in extreme pain and terror was obvious. The fingernails of the white hands that dug into the tabletop were broken and split. Three of them had left tiny droppings of icecrystalled blood. Pitt was no doctor and had never entertained the thought of becoming one, but he could tell this man was not stiffened by rigor mortis; he was frozen solid.

Giordino stepped around a serving counter and entered the kitchen. He returned within thirty seconds. “There are two more in there.”

“Worst fears confirmed,” said Pitt heavily. “Had just one of the station’s people survived, he’d have maintained the auxiliary motors to run the generators for electrical heat and power.”

Giordino looked down the corridors leading to the other buildings. “I’m not in the mood to hang around. I say we vacate this ice palace of the dead and contact Ice Hunter from the chopper.”

Pitt looked at him shrewdly. “What you’re really saying is that we pass the buck to Captain Dempsey and give him the thankless job of notifying the Argentinean authorities that the elite group of scientists manning their chief polar research station have all mysteriously departed for the great beyond.”

Giordino shrugged innocently. “It seems the sensible thing to do.”

“You could never live with yourself if you slunk off without making a thorough search for a possible survivor.”

“Can I help it if I have an inordinate fondness for people who live and breathe?”

“Find the generating room, fuel the auxiliary motors, restart them and turn on the electrical power. Then head for the communications center and report to Dempsey while I check out the rest of the station.”

Pitt found the rest of the Argentinean scientists where they had died, the same look of extreme torment etched on their faces. Several had fallen in the lab and instrument center, three grouped around a spectrophotometer that was used to measure the ozone. Pitt counted sixteen corpses in all, four of them women, sprawled in various compartments about the station. Everyone had protruding, staring eyes and gaping mouths, and all had vomited. They died frightened and they died in great pain, frozen in their agony. Pitt was reminded of the plaster casts of the dead from Pompeii.

Their bodies were fixed in odd, unnatural positions. None lay on the floor as if they had simply fallen. Most looked as if they had suddenly lost their balance and were desperately clinging to something to keep upright. A few were actually clutching carpeted flooring; one or two had hands tightly clasped against the sides of their head. Pitt was intrigued by the odd positions and tried to pry the hands away to see if they might have been covering any indications of injury or disease, but they were as rigid as if they had been grafted to the skin of the ears and temples.

The vomiting seemed an indication that death was brought about by virulent disease or contaminated food. And yet the obvious causes did not set right to Pitt’s way of thinking. No plague or food poisoning is known to kill in a few short minutes. As he walked in deep contemplation toward the communications room, a theory began unfolding in his mind. His thoughts were rudely interrupted when he entered and was greeted by a cadaver perched on a desk like a grotesque ceramic statue.

“How did he get there?” Pitt asked calmly.

“I put him there,” Giordino said matter-of-factly without looking up from the radio console. “He was sitting on the only chair in the room and I figured I needed it worse than he did.”

“He makes a total of seventeen.”

“The toll keeps adding up.”

“You get through to Dempsey?”

“He’s standing by. Do you want to talk to him?”

Pitt leaned over Giordino and spoke into the satellite telephone that linked him with almost any point of the globe. “This is Pitt. You there, skipper?”

“Go ahead Dirk, I’m listening.”

“Has Al filled you in on what we’ve found here?”

“A brief account. As soon as you can tell me there are no survivors, I will alert Argentinean authorities.”

“Consider it done. Unless I missed one or two in closets or under beds, I have a body count of seventeen.”

“Seventeen,” Dempsey repeated. “I read you. Can you determine the cause of death?”

“Negative,” Pitt answered. “The apparent symptoms aren’t like anything you’d find in your home medical guide. We’ll have to wait for a pathologist’s report.”

“You might be interested to know that Miss Fletcher and Van Fleet have pretty well eliminated viral infections and chemical contamination as the cause of death for the penguins and seals.”

“Everyone at the station vomited before they died. Ask them to explain that.”

“I’ll make a note of it. Any sign of the second shore party?”

“Nothing. They must still be on board the ship.”

“Very strange.”

“So what are we left with?”

Dempsey sighed defeatedly. “A big fat puzzle with too many missing pieces.”

“On the flight here we passed over a seal colony that was wiped out. Have you determined how far the scourge extends?”

“The British station two hundred kilometers to the south of you on the Jason Peninsula and a U.S. cruise ship that’s anchored off Hope Bay have reported no unusual events nor any evidence of mass creature destruction. By taking into account the area in the Weddell Sea where we discovered the school of dead dolphins, I put the death circle within a diameter of ninety kilometers, using the whaling station on Seymour Island as a center point.”

“We’re going to move on now,” Pitt notified him, “and make a sweep for Polar Queen.”

“Mind that you keep enough fuel in reserve to return to the ship.”

“In the bank,” Pitt assured Dempsey. “An invigorating swim in ice water I can do without.”

Giordino closed down the research station’s communications console, and then they stepped lively toward the entrance; jogged quickly was closer to the truth. Neither Pitt nor Giordino wished to spend another moment in that icy tomb. As they rose from the station, Giordino studied his chart of the Antarctic Peninsula.

“Where to?”

“The right thing to do is search in the area selected by Ice Hunter’s computer,” Pitt replied.

Giordino gave Pitt a dubious look. “You realize, of course, that our ship’s data analyzer did not agree with your idea of the cruise ship running aground on the peninsula or a nearby island.”

“Yes, I’m well aware that Dempsey’s brain box put Polar Queen steaming around in circles far out in the Weddell Sea.”

“Do I detect a tone of conflict?”

“Let’s just say a computer can only analyze the data that is programmed into it before offering an electronic opinion.”

“So where to?” Giordino repeated.

“We’ll check out the islands north of here as far as Moody Point at the tip of the peninsula. Then we’ll curve east and work out to sea until we converge with the Ice Hunter.”

Giordino well knew he was being baited and hooked by the biggest flimflam man in the polar seas, but he took the bait anyway. “You’re not strictly following the computer’s advice.”

“Not one hundred percent, no.”

Giordino could feel the jerk on the line. “I’d like a faint clue as to what’s going on in your devious mind.”

“We found no human bodies at the seal colony. So we now know the ship did not heave to for a shore excursion. Follow me?”

“Thus far.”

“Picture the ship steering north from the whaling station. The scourge, plague or whatever you want to call it, strikes before the crew has a chance to send the passengers ashore. In these waters, with ice floes and bergs floating all around like ice cubes in a punch bowl, there is no way the captain would have set the ship on automated control. The risk of collision is too great. He would have taken the helm himself, probably steering the ship from one of the electronic steering consoles on the port and starboard bridge wings.”

“Good as far as it goes,” Giordino said mechanically. “Then what?”

“The ship was cruising along the coast of Seymour Island when the crew was stricken,” Pitt explained.

“Now take your chart and draw a line slightly north of east for two hundred kilometers and cross it with a thirty kilometer arc. Then tell me where you are and what islands intersect the course.”

Before Giordino complied, he stared at Pitt. “Why didn’t the computer come to the same conclusion?”

“Because as a ship’s captain, Dempsey was more concerned with winds and currents. He also assumed, and rightly so for a master mariner, that the last act of a dying captain would be to save his ship. That meant turning Polar Queen away from the danger of grounding on a rocky shore and steering her toward the relative safety of the sea and taking his chances with the icebergs.”

“You don’t think that was the way it was.”

“Not after seeing the bodies at the research station. Those poor souls hardly had time to react much less carry out a sound decision. The captain of the cruise ship died in his own vomit while the ship was on a course parallel to the shore. With the rest of the ship’s officers and the engine room crew stricken, Polar Queen sailed on until she either beached on an island, struck a berg and sank, or steamed out into the South Atlantic until her engines ran out of fuel and she became a drifting derelict far off the known sea lanes.”

The absence of reaction to Pitt’s divination was almost total. It was as if Giordino expected it. “Have you ever thought seriously of becoming a professional palm reader?”

“Not until five minutes ago,” Pitt came back.

Giordino sighed and drew the course Pitt requested on the chart. After a few minutes he propped it against the instrument panel so Pitt could view his markings. “If your mystical intuition is on target, the only chance Polar Queen has for striking hard ground between here and the South Atlantic is on one of three small islands that are little more than pinnacles of exposed rock.”

“What are they called?”

“Danger Islands.”

“They sound like the setting of an adolescent pirate novel.”

Giordino thumbed through a coastal reference manual.

“Ships are advised to give them a wide berth,” he said. “High basalt palisades rising sharply from rough waters. Then it lists the ships that have piled up on them.” He looked up from the chart and reference manual and gave Pitt a very narrow look. “Not exactly a place where kids would play.”

From Seymour Island to the mainland the sea was as smooth as a mirror and just as reflective. The rockbound mountains soared above the water and their snowy mantles were reproduced by the water in exacting detail. West of the islands the sea was calmed by a vast army of drifting icebergs that rose from marine-blue water like frosted sailing ships from centuries past. Not one genuine vessel was in sight, nothing of human manufacture marred the incredibly beautiful seascape.

They skirted Dundee Island, not far below the extreme tip of the peninsula. Directly ahead of them Moody Point curled toward the Danger Islands like the bony finger of the old guy with the scythe signifying his next victim. The calm waters ended off the point. As if they had walked from a warm comfortable room through a door into a storm outside, they found the sea suddenly transformed into an unbroken mass of white-capped swells marching in from the Drake Passage. A buffeting wind also sprang up and caused the helicopter to sway like a toy locomotive hurtling around a model train layout.

The peaks of the three Danger Islands came into view, their rock escarpments rising out of a sea that writhed and thrashed around their base. They rose so steeply that even seabirds couldn’t get a foothold on their sheer walls. They thrust angrily from the sea in contempt of the waves that broke against the unyielding rock in rapid explosions of foam and spray. The basalt formation was so hard that a million years of onslaught by a maddened sea produced little weathering. Their polished walls ran up to vertical peaks that possessed no flat spaces wider than a good-sized coffee table.

“No ship could live long in that bedlam,” said Pitt.

“No shallow water around those pinnacles,” Giordino observed. “The water looks to drop off a hundred fathoms within a stone’s throw of the cliffs.”

“According to the charts, it drops over a thousand meters in less than three kilometers.”

They circled the first island in the chain, a wicked, brooding mass of ugly stone sitting amid the churning violence. There was no sign of floating debris on the tormented sea. They flew across the channel separating this island from the next, looking down on the rushing white capped surge that reminded Pitt of the spring floodwaters gushing down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. No ship’s captain would be crazy enough to take his vessel within a cannon shot of this place.

“See anything?” Pitt asked Giordino as he struggled to keep the helicopter stable against the unpredictable winds that tried to slam them against the towering cliffs.

“A seething mass of liquid only a white-water kayaker could love. Nothing more.”

Pitt completed the circumference and dipped the craft toward the third and outermost island. This one looked dark and evil, and it took surprisingly little imagination to see that the peak was shaped in the likeness of an upturned face, much like that of the devil, with slitty eyes, small rock protrusions for horns and a sharp beard below smirking lips.

“Now that’s what I call repugnant,” said Pitt. “I wonder what name it goes by.”

“No individual names are given on the chart,” Giordino replied.

A moment later, Pitt swung the helicopter on a parallel course with the wave-swept palisades and began circling the barren island. Suddenly, Giordino stiffened and peered intently through the front windscreen. “Do you see that?”

Pitt turned briefly from the spectacular collision between water and rock and gazed forward and down. “I see no flotsam.”

“Forget the water. Look over the top of that high ridge dead ahead.”

Pitt studied the strange rock formation that trailed from the main mass and led into the sea like a man-made breakwater. “That blob of white snow beyond the ridge?”

“That ain’t no blob of snow,” Giordino said firmly.

Pitt suddenly realized what it was. “I’ve got it now!” he said with mounting excitement. It was smooth and white and shaped like a triangle with the top cut off. The upper rim was black, and there was some sort of painted emblem on the side. “A ship’s funnel! And there’s her radar mast sticking up forty meters forward. You made a good call, pal.”

“If it’s Polar Queen, she must have struck the cliffs on the other side of that spur.”

But that was an illusion. When they flew over the natural seawall jutting into the sea it became apparent that the cruise ship was floating undamaged a good five hundred meters from the island. It was incredible, but there she was without a scratch.

“She’s still clear!” Giordino shouted.

“Not for long,” Pitt said. In an instant he took in the dire situation. The Polar Queen was steaming in large circles, her helm somehow jammed hard to starboard. They had arrived less than thirty minutes before her arc would bring her in collision with the sheer rocks, crushing her hull and sending everyone on board into deep, icy water.

“There are bodies on her deck,” said Giordino soberly.

A few lay scattered about the bridge deck. Several had fallen on the sundeck near the stern. A Zodiac, still attached to the gangway, was dragged along through the swells, two bodies lying on its bottom. That no one was alive was obvious by the fact they were all covered with a thin coating of snow and ice.

“Two more revolutions and she’ll kiss the rock,” said Giordino.

“We’ve got to get down there and somehow turn her about.”

“Not in this wind,” said Giordino. “The only open space is the roof over the bridge-deck quarters. That’s a tricky landing I wouldn’t want to try. Once we dump airspeed and hover prior to setting down, we’ll have as much control as a dry leaf. A sudden downdraft and we’ll end up in the mess down there.”

Pitt unsnapped his safety harness. “Then you drive the bus while I go down on the winch.”

“There are people under restraint in rubber rooms who aren’t that crazy. You’d be whipped around like a yo-yo on a string.”

“You know any other way to get on board?”

“Only one. But it’s not approved by the Ladies Home Journal.”

“The battleship drop in the Vixen affair,” said Pitt, recalling.

“One more occasion where you were damned lucky,” said Giordino.

There was no doubt in Pitt’s mind-the ship was going to pile up on the rocks. Once the bottom was torn out of her, she would sink like a brick. There was always the possibility that someone had survived the unknown plague as Maeve and her excursionists had in the cave. The cold, hard reality dictated that the bodies be examined in hopes of tracking down the cause of death. If there was the slightest chance of saving the Polar Queen, he had to take it.

Pitt looked at Giordino and smiled faintly. “It’s time to cue the daring young man on the flying trapeze.”

Pitt already wore thermal underwear made from heavy nylon pile to retain his body heat and shield him from frigid temperatures. Over this he pulled on a diver’s drysuit, specially insulated for polar waters. The purpose of the dry suit was twofold. The first was to protect him from the windchill while he was dangling beneath the moving helicopter. The second, to keep him alive in cold water long enough for rescue, should he drop too soon or too late and miss the ship entirely.

He strapped on a quick-release harness and tightened the chin strap to the heavy crash-type helmet that contained his radio headset. He looked through the compartment that held Van Fleet’s lab equipment and into the cockpit. “Do you read me okay?” he asked Giordino through the tiny microphone in front of his lips.

“A little fuzzy around the edges. But that should clear once you’re free of the engine’s interference. How about me?”

“Your every syllable is like a chime,” Pitt jested.

“Because the upper superstructure is crowded with the funnel, forward mast and a batch of electronic navigation equipment, I can’t risk dropping you amidships. It will have to be either the open bow or the stern.”

“Make it the sundeck over the stern. The bow contains too much machinery.”

“I’ll start the run from starboard to port as soon as the ship turns and the wind comes from abeam,” Giordino informed him. “I’ll come in from the sea and attempt to take advantage of the calmer conditions on the lee side of the cliffs.”

“Understood.”

“You ready?”

Pitt adjusted his helmet’s face mask and pulled on his gloves. He took the remote control unit to the winch motor in one hand, turned and pulled open the side entry hatch. If he hadn’t been dressed for the abrupt blast of polar frigidity he would have been frozen into a Popsicle within a few seconds. He leaned out the door and gazed at Polar Queen.

She was circling in closer and closer to her death. Only fifty meters separated her from destruction on this pass. The uncompromising rock walls of the outermost Danger Island seemed to beckon to her. She looked like an uncaring moth serenely gliding toward a black spider, Pitt thought. There wasn’t much time left. She was beginning her final circuit, which would bring her into collision with an immovable object. She would have died before but for the waves that crashed against the sheer rock and echoed back, delaying her trip to the bottom.

“Throttling back,” Giordino said, announcing the start of his run over the ship.

“Exiting now,” Pitt informed him. Pitt pressed the release button to reel out the cable. As soon as he had enough slack to clear the doorway he stepped into space.

The rush of wind took him in its grasp and strung his body out behind the underside of the helicopter. The rotor blades thumped above him, and the sound of the turbine exhaust came through his helmet and earphones. Whirling through the chilly air, Pitt felt the same sensation as that felt by a bungee jumper after the initial recoil. He focused his concentration onto the ship, which looked like a toy boat floating on a blanket of blue in the near distance. The superstructure of the ship rapidly grew until it filled most of his vision.

“Coming up on her,” Giordino’s voice came over the earphones. “Mind you don’t slam into the railing and slice yourself into little pieces.”

He may have spoken as calmly as though he was parking a car in a garage, but there was a noticeable strain in Giordino’s voice as he struggled to keep the slow-moving helicopter stable while heading through frenzied crosswinds.

“And don’t you bloody your nose on those rocks,” Pitt shot back.

Those were the last words between them. From now on it was all by sight and gut instinct. Pitt had let himself down until he was almost fifteen meters below and behind the chopper. He fought against the pull and momentum that worked to twist him in circles, using his outstretched arms like the wings and ailerons of an aircraft. He felt himself drop a few meters as Giordino reduced speed.

To Giordino it seemed Polar Queen churned the water with her screws as though it was business as usual and she was on a tropical pleasure cruise. He eased back on the throttle as far as he dared. One more notch and all control would belong to the winds. He was flying with every shred of experience he’d gained during many thousands of hours in the air, if being tossed about by fickle air currents could be called flying. Despite the wind buffeting, if he maintained his present course, he could drop Pitt dead center onto the sundeck. He later swore that he was pitched and yawed by winds coming at him from six different directions. From his position at the end of the winch cable, Pitt marveled that Giordino kept the craft on a straight line.

The black cliffs loomed up beyond the ship, ominous and menacing. If it was a sight to daunt the bravest of sea captains, it certainly daunted Giordino. It wouldn’t do for him to make a spectacular head-on smash into the exposed rock, any more than it would do for Pitt to miscalculate and strike the side of the ship, breaking every bone in his body.

They were flying toward the lee side of the island, and the winds abated slightly. Not much, but enough for Giordino to feel he had firm control of the chopper and his destiny once more. One instant the cruise ship stretched in front of Giordino and the next the white superstructure and yellow hull swept out of sight beneath him. Then all he saw was ice-frozen rock that rose out of sight above his forward view. He could only hope Pitt was away as he abruptly threw the helicopter into a vertical ascent. The cliffs, wet from the billowing spray from the pounding waves, looked as if they were drawing him toward them like a magnet.

Then he was over the icy crest and was struck by the full force of the wind, which threw the aircraft on its tail, the rotor blades in a perpendicular position. Without any attempt at finesse, Giordino threw the helicopter around to a level position on a reverse course and beat back over the ship, his eyes darting as he looked out the window for a glimpse of Pitt.

Giordino did not know, could not have known, that Pitt had released his harness and made a perfect drop from a height of only three meters directly into the center of the sundeck’s open swimming pool. Even from that short height it looked no larger than a postage stamp, but to Pitt it seemed as enticing as the cushiness of a haystack. He flexed his knees and stretched out his arms to lessen his momentum. The depth was only two meters in the deep end, and he made a tremendous splash, hurling a huge amount of water onto the deck. His feet, encased in dive boots, impacted solidly on the bottom, and he stopped dead, immersed in a stooped position.

With growing apprehension, Giordino circled the superstructure of the ship, searching for a glimpse of Pitt. He didn’t spot him at first. He shouted into his microphone. “Did you make it down okay? Make yourself known, buddy.”

Pitt waved his arms and replied. “I’m here in the swimming pool.”

Giordino was dazed. “You fell in the pool?”

“I’ve a good notion to stay here,” Pitt replied happily. “The heater is still on and the water is warm.”

“I strongly suggest you get your butt to the bridge,” Giordino said with deadly seriousness. “She’s coming out of the backstretch and into the far turn. I give her no more than eight minutes before you hear a big scraping noise.”

Pitt needed no further encouragement. He hoisted himself out of the pool and took off at a dead run along the deck to the forward companionway. The bridge was only one deck above. He took the companionway four steps at a time, threw open the door of the wheelhouse and rushed inside. A ship’s officer was lying on the deck, dead, his arms clutching the base of the chart table. Pitt hurriedly scanned the ship’s automated navigation systems console. He lost a precious few seconds searching for the digital course monitor. The yellow light indicated that the electronic control was on manual override. Feverishly he dashed outside onto the starboard bridge wing. It was empty. He turned and rushed back across the wheelhouse onto the port bridge wing. Two more ship’s officers were lying in contorted positions on the deck, white and cold. Another ice-encrusted body hunched over the ship’s exterior control panel on his knees, arms frozen underneath and around its pedestal. He wore a foul-weather jacket with no markings but a cap with enough gold braid to show that he was surely the captain.

“Can you drop the anchors?” asked Giordino.

“Easier said than done,” Pitt replied irritably. “Besides, there is no flat bottom. The sides of the island probably drop at a near ninety-degree angle for a thousand fathoms. The rock is too smooth for the anchor flukes to dig in and grip.”

Pitt saw in a glance why the ship maintained a direct track for nearly two hundred kilometers before initiating a circular course to port. A gold medal on a chain had fallen outside the captain’s heavy jacket collar and hung suspended above the face of the control panel. Each gust of wind pushed it from side to side, and at the end of each pendulum swing, it struck against one of the toggle-type levers that controlled the movement of the ship, part of an electronics system almost all commanders of modern vessels use when docking in port. Eventually, the medal had knocked the directional lever into the half-port position, sending Polar Queen steaming around in corkscrewlike circles, ever closer to the Danger Islands.

Pitt lifted the medal and studied the inscription and image of a man engraved on one side. It was Saint Francis of Paola, the patron saint of mariners and navigators. Francis was revered for his miracles in saving sailors from resting in the deep. A pity Saint Francis had not rescued the captain, Pitt thought, but there was still a chance to save his ship.

If not for Pitt’s timely appearance, the simplest of events, the freak circumstance of a tiny bit of metal tapping against a small lever, a twenty-five hundred gross ton ship and all its passengers and crew, alive or dead, would have crashed into unyielding rock and fallen into a cold and dispassionate sea.

“You’d better be quick.” Giordino’s anxious voice came over the earphones.

Pitt cursed himself for lingering and sneaked a fast glance in awe at the sinister walls that seemed to stretch above his head into the upper atmosphere. They were so flat and smooth from eons of wave action that it was as though some giant hand had polished their surface. The breakers rising out of the sea were roaring into the exposed cliff less than two hundred meters away. As Polar Queen narrowed the gap, the incoming swells slammed into her beam, shoving her hull ever closer to disaster. Pitt estimated that she would strike on her starboard bow in another four minutes.

Unimpeded, the relentless waves swept in from the deep reaches of the ocean and dashed into the cliff with the explosive concussion of a large bomb. The white sea burst and boiled in a huge witch’s cauldron of blue water and white spray. It soared toward the top of the jagged rock island, hung there for a moment and then fell back, creating a return wave. It was this backwash that temporarily kept Polar Queen from being quickly swept against the palisades when she passed by.

Pitt tried to pull the captain away from the control panel, but he wouldn’t budge. The hands clasped around the base refused to give. Pitt gripped the body under the armpits and heaved with all his strength. There was a sickening tearing sound that Pitt knew was the patting of frozen skin that had adhered to metal, then suddenly the captain was free. Pitt threw him off to the side, found the chrome lever that controlled the helm and pushed it hard against the slot marked PORT to increase the angle of turn away from calamity.

For nearly thirty seconds it seemed nothing was happening, then with agonizing slowness the bow began to swing away from the boiling surf. It was not nearly quick enough. A ship can’t turn in the same radius as a big semitrailer. It takes almost a kilometer to come to a complete stop, much less cut a sharp inside turn.

He briefly considered throwing the port screw into reverse and swinging the ship on her axis, but he needed every knot of the ship’s momentum to maintain headway through the quartering swell, and then there was the danger of the stern swinging too far to starboard and crashing into the cliff.

“She’s not going to make it,” Giordino warned him. “She’s caught by the rollers. You’d better jump while you still have a chance.”

Pitt didn’t answer. He scanned the unfamiliar control panel and spotted the levers that controlled the bow and stern thrusters. There was also a throttle command unit that linked the panel to the engines. Holding his breath, Pitt set the thruster levers in the port position and pushed the throttles to full ahead. The response was almost instantaneous. Deep belowdecks, as if guided by an unseen hand, the engine revolutions increased. Momentary relief swelled within Pitt as he felt the throbbing vibration of engines at work under his feet. Now he could do little but stand and hope for the best.

Above the ship, Giordino looked down with a sinking sensation. From his vantage point it didn’t seem the ship was turning. He saw no chance for Pitt to escape once the ship rammed into the island. Leaping into the boiling water meant only a futile struggle against the incredible power of a surging sea, an impossible situation at best.

“I’m coming in for you,” he apprised Pitt.

“Stay clear,” Pitt ordered. “You can’t feel it up there, but the air turbulence this close to the precipice is murderous.”

“It’s suicidal to wait any longer. If you jump now I can pick you up.”

“Like hell—” Pitt broke off in horror as the Polar Queen was caught broadside by a giant comber that rolled over her like an avalanche. For long moments she seemed to slide toward the cliff, nearer the frantic turmoil swirling around the rock. Then she was driving forward again, her icebreaker bow burying itself under the wave, the foaming crest curling as high as the bridge, spray streaming from it like a horse’s mane in the breeze. The ship descended ever deeper as if she were continuing a voyage to the bottom far below.

The torrent came with a roar louder than thunder and flung Pitt to the deck. He instinctively held his breath as the icy water surged over and around him. He clung desperately to the pedestal of the control console to keep from being swept over the side into the maelstrom. He felt as if he had dropped over a towering cascade. All he could see through his face mask was a billow of bubbles and foam. Even in his arctic dry suit the cold felt like a million sharp needles stabbing his skin. He thought his arms were being pulled from their sockets as he clung for his life.

Then Polar Queen struggled up and burst through the back of the wave, her bow forging another ten meters to port. She was refusing to die, game to fight the sea to the bitter end. The water drained from the bridge in rivers until Pitt’s head surfaced into the air again. He took a deep breath and tried to stare through the downpour of water that splashed back from the black rock of the cliffs. God, they seemed so close he could spit on them. So close that foam thrown upward by the horrendous collision of water against rock rebounded and fell over the ship like a cloudburst. The ship was abeam of the chaos, and he eased back on the stern thruster in an attempt to quarter the surge.

The bow thruster dug in and shouldered the forward part of the ship into the flood as the stern screws thrashed the water into foam, pushing her on an angle away from the vertical rock face. Imperceptibly, but by the grace of God, her bow was edging out to sea.

“She’s coming about!” Giordino yelled from above. “She’s coming about!”

“We’re not out of the woods yet.” For the first time since the inundation, Pitt had the luxury of replying. He warily eyed the next sequence of waves that came rolling in.

The sea wasn’t through with the Polar Queen yet. Pitt ducked as a huge sheet of spray crashed over the bridge wing. The next comber struck like an express train before colliding with the backwash from the last one. Bludgeoned by the impact from two sides, the ship was tossed upward until her hull was visible almost to the keel. Her twin screws rose into the air, throwing white water that reflected the sun like sparks of a fireworks pinwheel. She hung suspended for a terrible moment, finally dropping into a deep trough before she was struck by the next breaker in line. The bow was jerked to starboard, but the thruster battled her back on course.

Again and again the cruise ship heeled over as the waves rolled against the sides of her hull. There was no stopping her now. She was through the worst of it and shook off the endless swells as though she were a dog shaking water off its coat. The hungry sea might take her another time, but more likely she would end up at the scrappers thirty or more years from now. But this day she still sailed the brutal waters.

“You pulled it of! You really pulled it off!” shouted Giordino as though he didn’t believe his eyes.

Pitt sagged against the bridge-wing railing and felt suddenly tired. It was then he became conscious of a pain in his right hip. He recalled striking against a stanchion that supported a night light when he was immersed by the giant wave. He couldn’t see under the dry suit but he knew that his skin was forming a beautiful bruise.

Only after he set the navigation controls for a straight course south into the Weddell Sea did he turn and gaze at the pile of rock that towered above the sea like a jagged black column. There was an angry look about the cold face of the precipice, almost as if it were enraged at being cheated out of a victim. The barren island soon became little more than a pile of sea-ravaged rock as it receded in Polar Queen’s wake.

Pitt looked up as the turquoise helicopter hovered over the wheelhouse. “How’s your fuel?” he asked Giordino.

“Enough to make Ice Hunter with a few liters to spare,” Giordino answered.

“You’d better be on your way, then.”

“Did you ever stop to think that if you board and sail an abandoned ship into the nearest port you’d make a few million bucks from the insurance underwriters on a salvage contract?”

Pitt laughed. “Do you really think Admiral Sandecker and the United States government would allow a poor but honest bureaucrat to keep the pay without screaming?”

“Probably not. Can I do anything for you?”

“Just give Dempsey my position and tell him I’ll rendezvous at whatever position he chooses.”

“See you soon,” Giordino signed off. He was tempted to make a joke about Pitt’s having an entire cruise ship to himself, but the reality of the situation quickly set in. There could be no joy at knowing you were the only one alive on a ship of the dead. He did not envy Pitt for even one second as he swung the helicopter into a turn and set a course for the Ice Hunter.

Pitt removed his helmet and watched as the turquoise helicopter flew low across the blue ice-cold sea. He watched until it became a speck on the golden-blue horizon. A fleeting sense of loneliness shrouded him as he gazed around the empty ship. How long he stood gazing across the decks devoid of life, he never recalled. He stood there as if stalling, his mind blank.

He was waiting for some sort of sound besides the slap of the waves against the bow and the steady beat of the engines. Maybe he waited for a sound that indicated the presence of people, voices or laughter. Maybe he waited for some sign of movement from something other than the ship’s pennants flapping in the breeze. More likely he was seized by foreboding about what he would most certainly find. Already the scene at the Argentinean research station was being played out again. The dead passengers and crew, soaked through and sprawled on the upper decks, were only a sample of what he expected to find in the quarters and staterooms below.

At last he pulled his mind back on track and entered the wheelhouse. He set the engines on half speed and plotted an approximate course toward an interception point with Ice Hunter. Then he programmed the coordinates into the navigation computer and engaged the automated ship’s control system, linking it with the radar to self-steer the ship around any passing icebergs. Assured the ship was in no further danger, he stepped from the wheelhouse.

Several of the bodies on the outer decks were crewmen who died in the act of maintaining the ship. Two were painting bulkheads, others had-been working on the lifeboats. The bodies of eight passengers suggested that they had been admiring the unspoiled shoreline when they were struck down. Pitt walked down a passageway and looked in the ship’s hospital. It was empty, as was the health club. He took the carpeted stairs down to the boat deck, which held the ship’s six suites. They were all empty except one. An elderly woman lay as if sleeping. He touched her peck with his fingers. She was as cold as ice. He moved down to the salon deck.

Pitt began to feel like the Ancient Mariner on a ship of ghosts. The only thing missing was an albatross around his neck. The generators were still supplying electricity and heat, everything was orderly and everything in place. The interior warmth of the ship felt good after the inundation of icy water on the bridge wing. He was mildly surprised to find he had become immune to the dead bodies. He no longer bothered to closely examine them to see if there was a spark of life. He knew the tragic truth.

Though mentally prepared, he still found it hard to believe there was no life on board. That death had swept through the ship like a gust of wind was foreign to everything he’d ever experienced. It became most uncomfortable for him to intrude into the life of a ship that had known happier memories. He idly wondered what future passengers and crew would think, cruising on a jinxed ship. Would no one sail on her ever again, or would the tragedy attract sell-out crowds in search of adventure mixed with morbidness?

Suddenly he paused, cocked an ear and listened. Piano music was drifting from somewhere within the ship. He recognized the piece as an old jazz tune called “Sweet Lorraine.” Then, as suddenly as the music began, it stopped.

Pitt began to sweat under the dry suit. He paused for a couple of minutes and stripped it off. The dead won’t mind me walking around in my thermal underwear, he thought in grim humor. He pushed on.

He wandered into the kitchen. The area around the ovens and preparation tables was littered with the corpses of the chefs, ordinary kitchen help and waiters, lying two and three deep. There was a cold horror about the place. It looked like a charnel house but without the blood. Nothing but shapeless, lifeless forms frozen in their final act of clutching something tangible as if an unseen force were trying to drag them away. Pitt turned away, sickened, and rode the kitchen elevator up to the dining salon.

The tables were set for a meal unserved. Silverware, scattered by the ship’s violent motion, still lay on immaculately clean tablecloths. Death must have arrived just prior to the seating for the lunchtime meal. He picked up a menu and studied the entrees. Sea bass, Antarctic ice fish, toothfish (a giant cod) and veal steak for those without a taste for fish. He laid the menu on the table and was about to leave when he spotted something that was out of place. He stepped over the body of a waiter and walked to a table by one of the picture windows.

Someone had eaten here. Pitt stared at the dishes that still had scraps of food on them. There was a nearly empty bowl of what looked like clam chowder, broken rolls smeared with butter and a half-consumed glass of ice tea. It was as though someone had just finished lunch and left for a stroll around the deck. Had they opened the dining salon early for someone? he wondered. He rejected any thought that suggested a passenger had eaten here after the death plague struck.

Pitt tried to write off the intriguing discovery with a dozen different logical solutions. But subconsciously, a fear began to grow. Unthinkingly, he began to look over his shoulder every so often. He left the dining salon and moved past the gift shop and worked forward into the ship’s lounge. A Steinway grand piano was situated beside a small wooden dance floor. Chairs and tables were spaced around the lounge in a horseshoe arrangement. Besides the cocktail waitress who had fallen while carrying a tray of drinks, there was a party of eight men and women, mostly in their early seventies, who had been seated around a large table but now lay in grotesque positions on the carpet. As he studied the husbands and wives, some locked in a final embrace, Pitt experienced sadness and anguish at the same time. Overwhelmed with a sense of helplessness, he cursed the unknown cause of such a terrible tragedy.

Then he noticed another corpse. It was a woman, sitting on the carpet in one corner of the lounge. Her chin was on her knees, head cradled in her arms. Dressed in a fashionable short-sleeved leather jacket and wool slacks, she was not in a contorted position, nor did she appear to have vomited like all the others.

Pitt’s nerves reacted by sending a cold shiver up his spine. His heart sprinted from a slow steady beat to a rapid pace. Gathering control over his initial shock, he moved slowly across the room until he stood looking down on her.

He reached out and touched her cheek with a light exploring fingertip, experiencing an incredible wave of relief as he felt warmth. He gently shook her by the shoulders and saw her eyelids quiver open.

At first she looked at him dazed and uncomprehending, and then her eyes flew wide, she threw her arms around him and gasped. “You’re alive!”

“You don’t know how happy I am to see you are too.” Pitt said softly, his lips parted in a smile.

Abruptly, she pulled back from him. “No, no, you can’t be real. You’re all dead.”

“You needn’t be afraid of me,” he said in a soothing tone.

She stared at him through wide brown eyes rimmed red from weeping, a sad enigmatic gaze. Her facial complexion was flawless, but there was an unmistakable pallor and just a hint of gauntness. Her hair was the color of red copper. She had the high cheekbones and full, sculptured lips of a fashion model. Their eyes locked for a moment, and then he dropped his stare slightly. From what he could tell about her in her curled position, she had a fashion model’s figure Her bared arms looked muscular for a woman. Only when she lowered her eyes and peered at his body did he suddenly feel embarrassed to be standing in front of a lady in his long johns.

“Why aren’t you properly dressed?” she finally murmured.

It was an inconsequential question bred from a state of fear and trauma, not curiosity. Pitt didn’t bother to explain. “Better yet, you tell me who you are and how you survived when the others died.”

She looked as if she were about to fall over on her side, so he quickly bent down, circled his arm around her waist and lifted her into a leather chair next to a table. He walked over to the bar. He went behind the bar expecting to find the body of the bartender and was not disappointed. He took a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 Tennessee sour mash whiskey from a mirrored shelf and poured a shot glass.

“Drink this,” he said, holding the glass to her lips.

“I don’t drink,” she protested vaguely.

“Consider it medicinal. Just take a few sips.”

She managed to consume the contents of the glass without coughing, but her face twisted into a sour expression as the whiskey, smooth as summer’s kiss to a connoisseur, inflamed her tonsils. After she’d gasped a few breaths of air, she looked into his sensitive green eyes and sensed his compassion.

“My name is Deirdre Dorsett,” she whispered nervously.

“Go on,” he prompted. “That’s a start. Are you one of the passengers?”

She shook her head. “An entertainer. I sing and play the piano in the lounge.”

“That was you playing ‘Sweet Lorraine.’”

“Call it a reaction from shock. Shock at seeing everyone dead, shock at thinking it would be my turn next. I can’t believe I’m still alive.”

“Where were you when the tragedy occurred?”

She peered at the four couples lying nearby in morbid fascination. “The lady in the red dress and the silverhaired man were celebrating their fiftieth anniversary with friends who accompanied them on the cruise. The night before their private party, the kitchen staff had carved a heart and cupid out of ice to sit in the middle of a bowl of champagne punch. While Fred, he’s ...” She corrected herself, “He was the bartender, opened the champagne, and Marta, the waitress, brought in a crystal bowl from the kitchen, I volunteered to bring the ice carving from the storage freezer.”

“You were in the freezer?”

She nodded silently.

“Do you recall if you latched the door behind your?”

“It swings closed automatically.”

“You could lift and carry the ice carving by yourself?”

“It wasn’t very large. About the size of a small garden pot.”

“Then what did you do?”

She closed her eyes very tightly, then pressed her hands against them and whispered. “I was only in there for a few minutes. When I came out I found everyone on the ship dead.”

“Exactly how many minutes would you say?” Pitt asked softly.

She moved her head back and forth and spoke through her hands. “Why are you asking me all these questions?”

“I don’t mean to sound like a prosecuting attorney. But please, it’s important.”

Slowly she lowered her hands and stared vacantly at the surface of the table. “I don’t know, I have no way of knowing exactly how long I was in there. All I remember is it took me a little while to wrap the ice carving in a couple of towels so I could get a good grip on it and carry it without freezing my fingers.”

“You were very lucky,” he said. “Yours is a classic example of being in the right place at the right time. If you had stepped from the freezer two minutes before you did, you’d be as dead as all the others. You were doubly lucky I came on board the ship when I did.”

“Are you one of the crew? You don’t look familiar.”

It was obvious to him she was not fully aware of the Polar Queen’s near brush with the Danger Islands. “I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself. My name is Dirk Pitt. I’m with a research expedition. We found your excursion party where they had been abandoned on Seymour Island and came looking for your ship after all radio calls went unanswered.”

“That would have been Maeve Fletcher’s party,” she said quietly. “I suppose they’re all dead too.”

“Two passengers and the crewman who took them ashore,” he answered. “Miss Fletcher and the rest are alive and well.”

For a brief instant her face took on a series of expressions that would have done a Broadway actress proud. Shock was followed by anger culminating in a slow change to happiness. Her eyes brightened and she visibly relaxed. “Thank God Maeve is all right.”

The sunlight came through the windows of the lounge and shone on her hair, which was loose and flowing about her shoulders, and he caught the scent of her perfume. Pitt sensed a strange mood change in her. She was not young but a confident woman in the prime of her early thirties, with strong inner qualities. He also felt a disconcerting desire for her that angered him. Not now, he thought, not under these circumstances. He turned away so she wouldn’t see the rapt expression on his face.

“Why...?” she asked numbly, gesturing around her. “Why did they all have to die?”

He stared at the eight friends who were enjoying a special moment before their lives were so cruelly stolen from them. “I can’t be totally certain,” he said in a voice solemn with rage and pity, “but I think I have a good idea.”

Pitt was fighting fatigue when Ice Hunter sailed off the radar screen and loomed over the starboard bow. After searching the rest of the Polar Queen for other survivors, a lost cause as it turned out, he only allowed himself a short catnap while Deirdre Dorsett stood watch, ready to wake him lest the ship run down some poor trawler fishing for ice-water cod. There are those who feel refreshed after a brief rest. Not Pitt. Twenty minutes in dreamland was not enough to reconstitute his mind and body after twenty-four hours’ of stress and fatigue. He felt worse than when he lay down. He was getting too old to jump out of helicopters and battle raging seas, he mused. When he was twenty, he felt strong enough to leap over tall buildings with a single bound. At thirty, maybe a couple of one-story houses. How far back was that? Considering his sore muscles and aching joints, he was sure it must be eighty or ninety years ago.

He’d been working too long for the National Underwater & Marine Agency and Admiral Sandecker. It was time for a career move, something not as rigorous, with shorter hours. Maybe weaving hats out of palm fronds on a Tahiti beach, or something that stimulated the mind, like being a door-to-door contraceptive salesman. He shook off the silly thoughts brought on by weariness and set the automated control system to ALL STOP.

A quick radio transmission to Dempsey on board Ice Hunter, informing him that Pitt was closing down the engines and requesting a crew to come aboard and take over the cruise ship’s operation, and then he picked up the phone and called Admiral Sandecker over a satellite link to give him an update on the situation.

The receptionist at NUMA headquarters put him straight through on Sandecker’s private line. Though they were a third of the globe apart, Pitt’s time zone in the Antarctic was only one hour ahead of Sandecker’s in Washington, D.C.

“Good evening, Admiral.”

“About time I heard from you.”

“Things have been hectic.”

“I had to get the story secondhand from Dempsey on how you and Giordino found and saved the cruise ship.”

“I’ll be happy to fill you in with the details.”

“Have you rendezvoused with Ice Hunter?” Sandecker was short on greetings.

“Yes, Sir. Captain Dempsey is only a few hundred meters off my starboard beam. He’s sending a boat across to put a salvage crew on board and take off the only survivor.”

“How many casualties?” asked Sandecker.

“After a preliminary search of the ship,” answered Pitt, “I’ve accounted for all but five of the crew. Using a passenger list from the purser’s office and a roster of the crew in the first officer’s quarters, we’re left with 20 passengers and two of the crew still among the living, out of a total of 202.”

“That tallies to 180 dead.”

“As near as I can figure.”

“Since it is their ship, the Australian government is launching a massive investigation into the tragedy. A British research station with an airfield is situated not far to the southwest of your position, at Duse Bay. I’ve ordered Captain Dempsey to proceed there and transport the survivors ashore. The cruise line owners, Ruppert & Saunders, have chartered a Qantis jetliner to fly them to Sydney.”

“What about the bodies of the dead passengers and crew?”

“They’ll be packed in ice at the research station and flown to Australia on a military transport. Soon as they arrive, official investigators will launch a formal inquiry into the tragedy while pathologists conduct postmortem examinations on the bodies.”

“Speaking of Polar Queen,” said Pitt. He gave the admiral the particulars of its discovery by him and Giordino and the near brush with calamity in the ferocious breakers around the base of the Danger Islands. At the end he asked, “What do we do with her?”

“Ruppert & Saunders are also sending a crew to sail her back to Adelaide, accompanied by a team of Australian government investigators, who will examine her from funnel to keel before she reaches port.”

“You should demand an open contract form for salvage. NUMA could be awarded as much as $20 million for saving the ship from certain disaster.”

“Entitled to or not, we’ll not charge one thin dime for saving their ship.” Pitt detected the silky tone of satisfaction in Sandecker’s voice. “I’ll get twice that sum in favors and cooperation from the Aussie government for future research projects in and around their waters.”

No one could ever accuse the admiral of being senile. “Niccolo Machiavelli could have taken lessons from you,” Pitt sighed.

“You might be interested in learning that dead marine life in your area has tapered off. Fishermen and research station support vessels have reported finding no unusual fish or mammal kills in the past forty-eight hours. Whatever the killer is, it has moved on. Now we’re beginning to hear of massive amounts of fish and unusually high numbers of sea turtles being washed up on beaches around the Fiji Islands.”

“Sounds suspiciously like the plague has a life of its own.”

“It doesn’t stay in one place,” said Sandecker grimly. “The stakes are high. Unless our scientists can systematically eliminate the possible causes and home in on the one responsible damned quick, we’re going to see a loss of sea life that can’t be replenished not in our lifetime.”

“At least we can take comfort in knowing it’s not a repeat of the explosive reproduction by the red tide from chemical pollution out of the Niger River.”

“Certainly not since we shut down that hazardous waste plant in Mali that was the cause,” added Sandecker. “Our monitors up and down the river have shown no further indications of the altered synthetic amino acid and cobalt that created the problem.”

“Do our lab geniuses have any suspects on this one?” inquired Pitt.

“Not on this end,” replied Sandecker. “We were hoping the biologists on board Ice Hunter might have come up with something.”

“If they have, they’re keeping it a secret from me.”

“Do you have any notions on the subject?” asked Sandecker. There was a careful, almost cautious probing in his voice. “Something juicy that I can give the hounds from the news media who are parked in our lobby nearly two hundred strong.”

A shadow of a smile touched Pitt’s eyes. There was a private understanding between them that nothing of importance was ever discussed over a satellite phone. Calls that went through the atmosphere were as vulnerable to eavesdropping as an old farm-belt party line. The mere mention of the news media meant that Pitt was to dodge the issue. “They’re drooling for a good story, are they?”

“The tabloids are already touting a ship of the dead from the Antarctic triangle.”

“Are you serious?”

“I’ll be happy to fax you the stories.”

“I’m afraid they’ll be disappointed by my hypothesis.”

“Care to share it with me?”

There was a pause. “I think it might be an unknown virus that is carried by air currents.”

“A virus,” Sandecker repeated mechanically. “Not very original, I must say.”

“I realize it has a queer sound to it,” said Pitt, “about as logical as counting the holes in an acoustical ceiling when you’re in the dentist’s chair.”

If Sandecker was puzzled by Pitt’s nonsensical ramblings, he didn’t act it. He merely sighed in resignation as if he was used to chatter. “I think we’d better leave the investigation to the scientists. They appear to have a better grip on the situation than you do.”

“Forgive me, Admiral, I’m not thinking straight.”

“You sound like a man wandering in a fog. As soon as Dempsey sends a crew on board, you head for Ice Hunter and get some sleep.”

“Thank you for being so understanding.”

“Simply a matter of appreciating the situation. We’ll speak later.” A click, and Admiral Sandecker was gone.

Deirdre Dorsett went out onto the bridge wing and waved wildly as she recognized Maeve Fletcher standing at the railing of Ice Hunter. Suddenly free of the torment of being the only person alive on a ship filled with cadavers, she laughed in sheer unaffected exhilaration, her voice ringing across the narrowing breach between the two ships.

“Maeve!” she cried.

Maeve stared across the water, searching the decks of the cruise ship for the female calling her name. Then her eyes locked on the figure standing on the bridge wing, waving. For half a minute she stared, bewildered. Then as she recognized Deirdre, her face took on the expression of someone walking in a graveyard at night who was suddenly tapped on, the shoulder.

“Deirdre?” she shouted the name questioningly.

“Is that any way to greet someone close who’s returned from the dead?”

“You ... here ... alive?”

“Oh, Maeve, you can’t know how happy I am to see you alive.”

“I’m shocked to see you too,” said Maeve, slowly taking rein of her senses.

“Were you injured while ashore?” Deirdre asked as if concerned.

“A mild case of frostbite, nothing more.” Maeve gestured to the Ice Hunter crewmen who were lowering a launch. “I’ll hitch a ride and meet you at the foot of the gangway.”

“I’ll be waiting.” Deirdre smiled to herself and stepped back into the wheelhouse, where Pitt was talking over the radio to Dempsey. He nodded and smiled at her before signing off.

“Dempsey tells me Maeve is on her way over.”

Deirdre nodded. “She was surprised to see me.”

“A fortunate coincidence,” said Pitt, noting for the first time that Deirdre was nearly as tall as he, “that two friends are the only members of the crew still alive.”

Deirdre shrugged. “We’re hardly what you’d call friends.”

He stared curiously into brown eyes that glinted from the sun’s rays that shone through the forward window. “You dislike each other?”

“A matter of bad blood, Mr. Pitt,” she said matter-of-factly. “You see, despite our different surnames, Maeve Fletcher and I are sisters.”

The sea was thankfully calm when Ice Hunter, trailed by Polar Queen, slipped under the sheltering arm of Duse Bay and dropped anchor just offshore from the British research station. From his bridge, Dempsey, instructed the skeleton crew on board the cruise ship to moor her a proper distance away so the two ships could swing on their anchors with the tides without endangering each other.

Still awake and barely steady on his feet, Pitt had not obeyed Sandecker’s order that he have a peaceful sleep. There were still a hundred and one details to be attended to after he turned over operation of Polar Queen to Dempsey’s crew. First he put Deirdre Dorsett in the boat with Maeve and sent them over to Ice Hunter. Then he spent the better part of the sunlit night making a thorough search of the ship, finding the dead he had missed on his brief walk-through earlier. He closed down the ship’s heating system to help preserve the bodies for later examination, and only when Polar Queen was safely anchored under the protecting arm of the bay did he hand over command and return to the NUMA research ship. Giordino and Dempsey waited in the wheelhouse to greet and congratulate him. Giordino took one look at Pitt’s exhausted condition and quickly poured him a cup of coffee from a nearby pot that was kept brewing at all times in the wheelhouse. Pitt gratefully accepted, sipped the steaming brew and stared over the rim of the cup toward a small craft with an outboard motor that was chugging toward the ship.

Almost before the anchor flukes of Ice Hunter had taken bite of the bottom, representatives from Ruppert & Saunders had departed their aircraft and boarded a Zodiac for the trip from shore. Within minutes they climbed aboard the lowered gangway and quickly climbed to the bridge, where Pitt, Dempsey and Giordino awaited them. One man cleared the steps three at a time and pulled up short, surveying the three men standing before him. He was big and ruddy and wore a smile a yard wide.

“Captain Dempsey?” he asked.

Dempsey stepped forward and extended his hand. “I’m he.”

“Captain Ian Ryan, Chief of Operations for Ruppert & Saunders.”

“Happy to have you aboard, Captain.”

Ryan looked apprehensive. “My officers and I are here to take command of Polar Queen.”

“She’s all yours, Captain,” Dempsey said easily. “If you don’t mind, you can send back my crew in your boat once you’re aboard.”

Relief spread across Ryan’s weathered face. It could have been a delicate situation. Legally, Dempsey was salvage master of the cruise ship. Command had passed to him from the dead captain and the owners. “Am I to understand, sir, that you are relinquishing command in favor of Ruppert & Saunders?”

“NUMA is not in the salvage business, Captain. We make no claim on Polar Queen.”

“The directors of the company have asked me to express our deepest thanks and congratulations for your efforts in saving our passengers and ship.”

Dempsey turned to Pitt and Giordino and introduced them. “These are the gentlemen who found the survivors on Seymour Island and kept your company’s ship from running onto the Danger Island rocks.”

Ryan pumped their hands vigorously, his grasp strong and beefy. “A remarkable achievement, absolutely remarkable. I assure you that Ruppert & Saunders will prove most generous in their gratitude.”

Pitt shook his head. “We have been instructed by our boss at NUMA headquarters, Admiral James Sandecker, that we cannot accept any reward or salvage monies.”

Ryan looked blank. “Nothing, nothing at all?”

“Not one cent,” Pitt answered, fighting to keep his bleary eyes open.

“How bloody decent of you,” Ryan gasped. “That’s unheard of in the annals of marine salvage. I’ve no doubt our insurance carriers will drink to your health every year on the anniversary of the tragedy.”

Dempsey gestured toward the passageway leading to his quarters. “While we’re on the subject of drinks, Captain Ryan, may I offer you one in my cabin?”

Ryan nodded toward his officers, who were grouped behind him. “Does that include my crew?”

“It most certainly does,” Dempsey said with a friendly smile.

“You save our ship, rescue our passengers and then stand us a drink. If you don’t mind my saying so,” said Ryan in a voice that seemed to come from his boots, “you Yanks are damned odd people.”

“Not really,” Pitt said, his green eyes twinkling through the weariness. “We’re just lousy opportunists.”

Pitt’s movements were purely out of habit as he took a shower and shaved for the first time since before he and Giordino took off to find Polar Queen. He came within an eye blink of sagging to his knees and drifting asleep under the soothing splash of the warm water. Too tired even to dry his hair, he tucked a bath towel around his waist and stumbled to his queen-sized bed-no tight bunk or narrow berth on this ship-pulled back the covers, stretched out, laid his head on the pillow and was gone.

His unconscious mind didn’t register the knock on his cabin door. Normally alert to the tiniest peculiar sound, he did not awaken or respond when the knock came a second time. He was so dead to the world there wasn’t the slightest change in his breathing. Nor was there a flutter of his eyelids when Maeve slowly opened the door, peered hesitantly into the small anteroom and softly called his name.

“Mr. Pitt, are you about?”

Part of her wanted to leave, but curiosity drew her on. She moved in cautiously, carrying two short-stemmed snifter glasses and a bottle of Remy Martin XO cognac loaned to her by Giordino from his private traveling stock. The excuse for her barging in like this was to properly thank Pitt for saving her life.

Startled, she caught her reflection in a mirror above a desk that folded from the wall. Her cheeks were flushed like those of a young girl waiting for her date to the high school prom to show up. It was a condition she’d seldom experienced before. Maeve turned away, angry at herself. She couldn’t believe she was entering a man’s quarters without being invited. She hardly knew Pitt. He was little more than a stranger. But Maeve was a lady used to striking out on her own.

Her father, the wealthy head of an international mining operation, had raised Maeve and her sisters as if they were boys, not girls. There were no dolls or fancy dresses or debutante balls. His departed wife had given him three daughters instead of sons to continue the family’s financial empire, so he simply ignored fate and trained them to be tough. By the time she was eighteen, Maeve could kick a soccer ball farther than most men in her college class, and she once trekked across the outback of Australia from Canberra to Perth with only a dog, a domesticated dingo, for company, an accomplishment her father rewarded her for by pulling her out of school and putting her to work in the family mines alongside of hard-bodied male diggers and blasters. She rebelled. This was no life for a woman with other desires. She ran away to Melbourne and worked her way through university toward a career in zoology. Her father made no attempt to bring her back into the family fold. He merely abolished her claim to any family investments and pretended she never existed after her twins were born out of wedlock six months after a wonderful year she spent with a boy she met in class. He was the son of a sheep rancher, beautifully dark from the harsh outback sun, with a solid body and sensitive gray eyes. They had laughed, loved and fought constantly. When they inevitably parted, she never told him she was pregnant.

Maeve set the bottle and glasses on the desk and stared down at the personal things casually thrown among a stack of papers and a nautical chart. She peeked furtively into a cowhide wallet fat with assorted credit cards, business and membership cards, two blank personal checks and $123 in cash. How strange, she thought, there were no pictures. She laid the wallet back on the desk and studied the other items strewn about. There was a wellworn, orange-faced Doxa dive watch with a heavy stainless-steel band, and a mixed set of house and car keys. That was all.

Hardly enough to give her an insight into the man who owned them, she thought. There had been other men who had entered her life and departed, some at her request, a few on their own. But they all left something of themselves. This seemed to be a man who walked a lonely path, leaving nothing behind.

She stepped through the doorway into his sleeping quarters. The mirror above the sink in the bathroom behind was still fogged with steam, a sign that the occupant had recently bathed. She smelled a small whiff of men’s aftershave, and it produced a strange tingle in her stomach.

“Mr. Pitt,” she called out again, but not loudly. “Are you here?”

Then she saw the body laid out full length on the bed, arms loosely crossed over the chest as though he were lying in a coffin. She breathed a sigh of relief at seeing that his loins were covered by a bath towel. “I’m sorry,” she said very softly. “Forgive me for disturbing you.”

Pitt slept on without responding.

Her eyes traveled from his head to his feet. The black mass of curly hair was still damp and tousled. His eyebrows were thick, almost bushy, and came close to meeting above a straight nose. She guessed he was somewhere in the neighborhood of forty, though the craggy features, the tanned and weathered skin and chiseled, unyielding jawline made him seem older. Small wrinkles around the eyes and lips turned up, giving him the look of a man who was perpetually smiling. It was a strong face, the kind of face women are drawn to. He looked like a man of strength and determination, the kind of man who had seen the best of times and worst of times but never sidestepped whatever life threw at him.

The rest of his body was firm and smooth except for a dark patch of hair on his chest. The shoulders were broad, the stomach flat, the hips narrow. The muscles of his arms and legs were pronounced but not thick or bulging. The body was not powerful but tended on the wiry side, even rangy. There was a tenseness that suggested a spring that was waiting to uncoil. And then there were the scars. She couldn’t begin to imagine where they came from.

He did not seem cut from the same mold as the other men she had known. She hadn’t really loved any of them, sleeping with them out of curiosity and rebellion against her father more than passionate desire. Even when she became pregnant by a fellow student, she refused an abortion to spite her father and carried her twin sons to birth.

Now, staring down at the sleeping man in the bed, she felt a strange pleasure and power at standing over his nakedness. She lifted the lower edge of the towel, smiled devilishly to herself, and let it fall back in place. Maeve found Pitt immensely attractive and wanted him, yes, feverishly and shamelessly wanted him.

“See something you like, little sister,” came a quiet, husky voice from behind her.

Chagrined, Maeve spun and stared at Deirdre, who leaned casually against the doorway, smoking a cigarette.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded in a whisper.

“Keeping you from biting off more than you can chew.”

“Very funny.” In a motherly gesture, Maeve pulled the covers over Pitt’s body and tucked them under the mattress. Then she turned and physically pushed Deirdre into the anteroom before softly closing the bedroom door. “Why are you following me? Why didn’t you return to Australia with the other passengers?”

“I might ask the same of you, dear sister.”

“The ship’s scientists asked me to remain on board and make out a report of my experience with the death plague.”

“And I remained because I thought we might kiss and make up,” Deirdre said, drawing on her cigarette.

“There was a time I might have believed you. But not now.”

“I admit there were other considerations.”

“How did you manage to stay out of my sight during the weeks we were at sea?”

“Would you believe I remained in my cabin with an upset stomach?”

“That’s so much rot,” snapped Maeve. “You have the constitution of a horse. I’ve never known you to be sick.”

Deirdre looked around for an ashtray, and finding none, opened the cabin door and flipped her cigarette over the railing into the sea. “Aren’t you the least bit amazed at my miraculous survival?”

Maeve stared into her eyes, confused and uncertain. “You told everyone you were in the freezer.”

“Rather good timing, don’t you think?”

“You were incredibly lucky.”

“Luck had nothing to do with it,” Deirdre contradicted. “What about yourself? Didn’t it ever occur to you how you came to be in the whaling station caves at exactly the right moment?”

“What are you implying?”

“You don’t understand, do you?” Deirdre said as if scolding a naughty child. “Did you think Daddy was going to forgive and forget after you stormed out of his office, swearing never to see any one of us again? He especially went mad when he heard that you had legally changed your name to that of our great-great-great-grandmother. Fletcher, indeed. Since you left, he’s had your every movement observed from the time you entered Melbourne University until you were employed by Ruppert & Saunders.”

Maeve stared at her with anger and disbelief that faded as something began to dawn slowly in her mind. “He was that afraid that I would talk to the wrong people about his filthy business operations?”

“Whatever unorthodox means Daddy has used to further the family empire was for your benefit as well as Boudicca and myself.”

“Boudicca!” Maeve spat. “Our sister, the devil incarnate.”

“Think what you may,” Deirdre said impassively, “Boudicca has always had your best interests at heart.”

“If you believe that, you’re a bigger fool than I gave you credit for.”

“It was Boudicca who talked Daddy into sparing your life by insisting I go along on the voyage.”

“Sparing my life?” Maeve looked lost. “You’re not making sense.”

“Who do you think arranged for the ship’s captain to send you ashore with the first excursion?”

“You?”

“Me.”

“It was my turn to go ashore. The other lecturers and I worked in sequence.”

Deirdre shook her head. “If they had stuck to the proper schedule, you’d have been placed in charge of the second shore party that never got off the ship.”

“So what was your reasoning?”

“An act of timing,” said Deirdre, suddenly turning cold. “Daddy’s people calculated that the phenomenon would appear when the first shore party was safe inside the whaling station storage caves.”

Maeve felt the deck reeling beneath her feet, and the color drained out of her cheeks. “No way he could have predicted the terrible event,” she gasped.

“A smart man, our father,” Deirdre said calmly as if she were gossiping with a friend over the telephone. “If not for his advance planning, how do you think I knew when to lock myself in the ship’s freezer?”

“How could he possibly know when and where the plague would strike?” she asked skeptically.

“Our father,” Deirdre said, baring her teeth in a savage smile, “is not a stupid man.”

Maeve’s fury seethed throughout her body. “If he had any suspicions, he should have given a warning and averted the slaughter,” she snapped.

“Daddy has more important business than to fuss over a boatload of dismal tourists.”

“I swear before God I’ll see that you all pay for your callousness.”

“You’d betray the family?” Deirdre shrugged sarcastically, then answered her own question. “Yes, I believe you would.”

“Bet on it.”

“Never happen, not if you want to see your precious sons again.”

“Sean and Michael are where Father will never find them.”

“Call in the dogs if you have a mind to, but hiding the twins with that teacher in Perth was not really all that clever.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“Your flesh-and-blood sister, Boudicca, merely persuaded the teacher and his wife, the Hollenders as I recall their name, to allow her to take the twins on a picnic.”

Maeve trembled and felt she was going to be sick as the full enormity of the revelation engulfed her. “You have them?”

“The boys? Of course.”

“The Hollenders, if she so much as hurt them—”

“Nothing of the sort.”

“Sean and Michael, what have you done with them?”

“Daddy is taking very good care of them on our private island. He’s even teaching them the diamond trade. Cheer up. The worst that can happen is that they suffer some type of accident. You know better than anybody the risks children run, playing around mining tunnels. The bright side is that if you stand with the family, your boys will someday become incredibly wealthy and powerful men.”

“Like Daddy?” Maeve cried in outrage and fear. “I’d rather they die.” She subdued the urge to kill her sister and sat heavily in a chair, broken and defeated.

“They could do worse,” said Deirdre, gloating over Maeve’s helplessness. “String along your friends from NUMA for a few days, and keep your mouth shut about what I’ve told you. Then we’ll catch a flight for home.” She walked to the door and turned. “I think you’ll find Daddy most forgiving, providing you ask forgiveness and demonstrate your loyalty to the family.” Then she stepped onto the outside deck and out of sight.