Shock Wave

CATASTROPHE IN PARADISE

Honolulu, Hawaii

A sandy-haired marine sergeant sat in a pair of sunbleached shorts and a red-flowered aloha shirt and drank a can of beer while a movie cassette tape in the VCR played on a television set. He slouched sumptuously on a couch that he had scrounged from one of the two luxury hotels on the Hawaiian island of Lanai that was being remodeled. The movie was an early John Wayne epic, Stagecoach. A virtual-reality headset that he had purchased from a Honolulu electronics store encompassed his head. After connecting the headset into the VCR, he could “enter” the television screen and mingle with the actors during scenes from the movie. He was lying beside John Wayne on the top of the stagecoach during the climactic chase scene, shooting at the pursuing Indians, when a loud buzzer cut into the action. Reluctantly, he removed the set from his head and scanned four security monitors that viewed strategic areas of the classified facility he guarded. Monitor three showed a car approaching over a dirt road leading through a pineapple field to the entry gate. The late morning sun glinted off its front bumper while the rear bumper pulled a trail of dust.

After several months of bleak duty, the sergeant had his routine down to a fine science. In the three minutes it took for the car to travel up the road, he changed into a neatly pressed uniform and was standing at attention beside the gate that barred access through a tunnel into the open core of the long-extinct volcano.

On closer scrutiny he saw that it was a Navy staff car. He stooped and peered in the side window. “This is a restricted area. Do you have permission to enter?”

The driver, in the whites of a Navy enlisted man, motioned a thumb over his shoulder. “Commander Gunn in the back has the necessary entry papers.”

Proficient, businesslike, Rudi Gunn had wasted no precious time in seeking permission to dismantle the huge dish antenna in the middle of the Palawai volcano on Lanai. Unraveling the convoluted thread through the bureaucracy to track down the agency that held jurisdiction over the antenna and then confronting the department that operated the space communications facility would be a month-long expedition in itself. The next chore, an impossible one, would be to find a bureaucrat willing to take responsibility for allowing the dish to be taken down and temporarily loaned to NUMA.

Gunn eliminated the useless red tape by merely having NUMA’s printing department dummy up an official-looking requisition form in triplicate, authorizing NUMA to relocate the antenna to another site on the Hawaiian island of Oahu for a secret project. The document was then signed by several workers in the printing department, on lines under lofty fictitious titles. What normally would have taken the better part of a year, before being officially denied, took less than an hour and a half, time mostly spent in setting the type.

When Gunn, wearing his uniform as a commander in the Navy, was driven up to the gate outside the tunnel entrance and produced his authorization to dismantle and remove the antenna, the sergeant in command of the deserted facility was dutifully cooperative. He was even more cooperative after assessing the exquisite form of Molly Faraday sitting next to Gunn in the backseat. If he had any thought of calling a superior officer for official confirmation it quickly melted as he stared at a convoy of large flatbed trucks and a portable crane that followed in the tracks of the staff car. Authority for an operation of this magnitude must have come from the top of the ladder.

“Good to have some company,” the sergeant said with a wide smile. “It gets pretty boring up here with nary a soul to talk to while I’m on duty.”

“How many are you?” asked Molly sweetly through the rear window.

“Only three of us, ma’am, one for each eight-hour shift.”

“What do you do when you’re not on guard duty?”

“Lay on the beach mostly, or try and pick up single girls at the hotels.”

She laughed. “How often are you able to leave the island?”

“Every thirty days. Then five days leave in Honolulu, before returning to Lanai.”

“When was the last time an outsider visited the facility?”

If the sergeant realized he was being interrogated, he didn’t show it. “Some guy with National Security Agency credentials came and poked around about four months ago. Hung around less than twenty minutes. You’re the first to visit since him.”

“We should have the antenna down and out of here sometime late tonight,” said Gunn.

“May I inquire, sir, where it’s going to be reassembled?”

“What if I told you it was going to be scrapped?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me in the least,” said the sergeant. “With no repair or maintenance in the last few years, the old dish is beginning to look like it’s been worked over by the elements.”

Gunn was amused at seeing the marine stalling while enjoying the opportunity to talk to a stranger. “May we pass through and get to work, Sergeant?”

The sergeant snapped a salute and quickly pressed a button that electronically swung open the gate. After the staff car passed out of sight into the tunnel, he watched and waved to the drivers of the trucks and crane. When the last vehicle disappeared inside the volcano, he closed the gate, entered the guard compound and changed back into his shorts and aloha shirt before releasing the pause button on his VCR. He adjusted his virtual-reality headset and reversed the cassette tape until he rejoined John Wayne in blasting away at the Indians.

“So far so good,” Gunn said to Molly.

“Shame on you for telling that nice young boy you were junking the antenna,” she chided him.

“I merely said, ‘what if?’”

“We get caught forging official documents, painting a used car to look like an official Navy vehicle and stealing government property ...” Molly paused and shook her head in wonder. “They’ll hang us from the Washington Monument.”

“I’ll gladly pay the price if we save nearly two million people from a horrible death,” said Gunn without regret.

“What happens after we deflect the acoustic wave?” she asked. “Do we return the antenna and reassemble it?”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.” He stared at her, as if surprised she asked the question, before smiling devilishly. “Unless, of course, there’s an accident and we drop it on the bottom of the sea.”

Sandecker’s end of the project was not going one-tenth as well. Despite relying heavily on the Navy’s old admiral buddy system, he could not convince anyone with command authority to temporarily loan him the aircraft carrier Roosevelt and her crew. Somewhere along the chain of command between the President and the Admiral in Command of Pacific Fleet Operations someone had spiked his request.

The admiral was pacing the office of Admiral John Overmeyer at Pearl Harbor with the ferocity of a bear who’d lost its cub to a zoo. “Damn it, John!” snapped Sandecker. “When I left Admiral Baxter of the Joint Chiefs, he assured me that approval to use the Roosevelt for the deployment of an acoustic reflector was a done deal. Now you sit there and tell me I can’t have her.”

Overmeyer, looking as sturdy and vigorous as an Indiana farmer, threw up his hands in exasperation. “Don’t blame me, Jim. I can show you the orders.”

“Who signed them?”

“Admiral George Cassidy, Commanding Officer of the San Francisco Naval District.”

“What in hell does some desk jockey who operates ferryboats have to do with anything?”

“Cassidy does not operate ferryboats,” Overmeyer said wearily. “He’s in command of the entire Pacific Logistics Command.”

“He’s not over you,” stated Sandecker sharply.

“Not directly, but if he decided to get nasty, every transport carrying supplies for all my ships between here and Singapore might be inexplicably delayed.”

“Don’t stroke me, John. Cassidy wouldn’t dare drag his feet, and you damn well know it. His career would go down the drain if he allowed petulance to stand in the way of supplying your fleet.”

“Have it your way,” said Overmeyer. “But it doesn’t alter the situation. I cannot let you have the Roosevelt.”

“Not even for a lousy seventy-two hours?”

“Not even for seventy-two seconds.”

Sandecker suddenly halted his pacing, sat down in a chair and stared Overmeyer in the eye. “Level with me, John. Who put the handcuffs on me?”

Obviously flustered, Overmeyer could not hold the stare and looked away. “That’s not for me to say.”

“The fog begins to clear,” said Sandecker. “Does George Cassidy know he’s being cast as a villain?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Overmeyer answered honestly.

“Then who in the Pentagon is stonewalling my operation?”

“You didn’t hear this from me.”

“We served together on the Iowa. You’ve never known me to expose a friend’s secrets.”

“I’d be the last man to doubt your word,” Overmeyer said without hesitation. This time he returned Sandecker’s stare. “I don’t have absolute evidence, mind you, but a friend at the Naval Weapons Testing Center hinted that it was the President himself who dropped the curtain on you, after some unnamed snitch at the Pentagon let your request for an aircraft carrier slip to the White House. My friend also suggested that scientists close to the President thought your acoustic plague theory was off the wall.”

“Can’t they get it through their collective academic heads that people and untold numbers of sea life have already died from it?”

“Apparently not.”

Sandecker sagged in his chair and expelled a long breath. “Stabbed in the back by Wilbur Hutton and the President’s National Science Board.”

“I’m sorry, Jim, but word has gone out in Washington circles that you’re some kind of fanatical kook. It may well be that the President wants to force you to resign from NUMA so he can put a political crony in your place.”

Sandecker felt as if the executioner’s axe was rising. “So what? My career is unimportant. Can’t I get through to anyone? Can’t I get it across to you, Admiral, that you and every man under your command on the island of Oahu will be dead in three days?”

Overmeyer looked at Sandecker with great sadness in his eyes. It is a difficult thing for a man to believe another is breaking down, especially if that man is his friend. “Jim, to be honest, you terrify me. I want to trust your judgment, but there are too many intelligent people who think your acoustic plague has as much chance of actually occurring as the end of the world.”

“Unless you give me the Roosevelt,” said Sandecker evenly, “your world will cease to exist on Saturday at eight o’clock in the morning.”

Overmeyer shook his head grimly. “I’m sorry, Jim, my hands are tied. Whether I believe your prediction of doom or not, you know damned well I can’t disobey orders that come down from my Commander-in-Chief.”

“If I can’t convince you, then I guess I’d better be on my way.” Sandecker came to his feet, started for the door and turned. “Do you have family here at Pearl?”

“My wife and two visiting granddaughters.”

“I hope to God I’m wrong, but if I were you, my friend, I’d get them off the island while you still can.”

The giant dish was only half dismantled by midnight. The interior of the volcano was illuminated by incandescent brilliance and echoed with the sounds of generators, the clank of metal against metal and the curses of the dismantling crew. The pace remained frantic from start to finish. The NUMA men and women sweated and fought bolted connections that were rusted together from lack of upkeep and repair. Sleep was never considered, nor were meals. Only coffee as black as the surrounding sea was passed around.

As soon as a small section of the steel-reinforced fiberglass dish was removed from the main frame, the crane picked it up and set it on the flatbed of a waiting truck. After five sections were stacked one on top of the other and tied down, the truck exited the interior of the volcano and drove toward the port of Kaumalapau on the west coast, where the antenna parts were loaded on board a small ship for transport to Pearl Harbor.

Rudi Gunn was standing shirtless, sweating from the humidity of a steamy night, directing a team of men laboring strenuously to disconnect the main hub of the antenna from its base. He was constantly consulting a set of plans for the same type of antenna used in other space tracking facilities. The plans came from Hiram Yaeger, who had obtained them by breaking into the corporate computer system of the company that had originally designed and constructed the huge dishes.

Molly, who had changed into a more comfortable khaki blouse and shorts, sat nearby in a small tent, manning the communications and fielding any problems that arose during the dismantling operation and transportation of parts to the loading dock. She stepped out of the tent and handed Gunn a cold bottle of beer.

“You look like you could use a little something to wet your tonsils,” she said.

Gunn nodded thankfully and rolled the bottle across his forehead. “I must have consumed twenty liters of liquid since we got here.”

“I wish Pitt and Giordino were here,” she said sadly. “I miss them.”

Gunn stared absently at the ground. “We all miss them. I know the admiral’s heart is torn out.”

Molly changed the subject. “How’s it look?”

He tilted his head toward the half-dismantled antenna. “She’s fighting us every step of the way. Things are going a little faster now that we know how to attack her.”

“A shame,” she decided after a thoughtful survey of the thirty men and four women who struggled so long and hard to tear apart and move the antenna, their dedication and tireless efforts now seemingly wasted in a magnificent attempt to save so many lives, “that all this may very well come to nothing.”

“Don’t give up on Jim Sandecker,” said Gunn. “He may have been blocked by the White House in securing the Roosevelt, but I’ll bet you a dinner with soft lights and music that he’ll come up with a replacement.”

“You’re on,” she said, smiling thinly. “That’s a bed I’ll gladly lose.”

He looked up curiously. “I beg your pardon?”

“A Freudian slip.” She laughed tiredly. “I meant ‘bet.’”

At four in the morning, Molly received a call from Sandecker. His voice showed no trace of fatigue.

“When do you expect to wrap up?”

“Rudi thinks we’ll have the final section loaded on board the Lanikai—”

“The what?” Sandecker interrupted.

“The Lanikai, a small interisland freighter I chartered to haul the antenna to Pearl Harbor.”

“Forget Pearl Harbor. How soon before you’ll be out of there?”

“Another five hours.” replied Molly.

“We’re running tight. Remind Rudi we have less than sixty hours left.”

“If not Pearl Harbor, where do we go?”

“Set a course for Halawa Bay, on the island of Molokai.” answered Sandecker. “I found another platform for deploying the reflector.”

“Another aircraft carrier?”

“Something even better.”

“Halawa Bay is less than a hundred kilometers across the channel. How did you manage that?”

“They who await no gifts from chance, conquer fate.”

“You’re being cryptic, Admiral,” Molly said, intrigued.

“Just tell Rudi to pack up and get to Molokai no later than ten o’clock this morning.”

She had just switched off the portable phone when Gunn entered the tent. “We’re breaking down the final section,” he said wearily. “And then we’re out of here.”

“The admiral called,” she informed Gunn. “He’s ordered us to take the antenna to Halawa Bay.”

“On Molokai?” Gunn asked, his eyes narrowed questioningly.

“That was the message,” she said flatly.

“What kind of ship do you suppose he’s pulled out of his hat?”

“A fair question. I have no idea.”

“It’d better be a winner,” Gunn muttered, “or we’ll have to close the show.”

There was no moon, but the sea flamed with spectral blue-green phosphorescence under the glint of the stars that filled the sky from horizon to horizon like unending city lights. The wind had veered and swept in from the south, driving the Marvelous Maeve hard to the northwest. The green-and-yellow beech-leaf sail filled out like a woman’s tattooed breast, while the boat leaped over the waves like a mule running with thoroughbreds. Pitt had never imagined that the ungainly looking craft could sail so well. She would never win a trophy, but he could have closed his eyes and envisioned himself on a first class yacht, skimming over the sea without a care in the world.

The swells no longer had the same hostile look nor did the clouds look as threatening. The nightly chill also diminished as they traveled north into warmer waters. The sea had tested them with cruelty and harshness, and they had passed with flying colors. Now the weather was cooperating by remaining constant and charitable.

Some people tire of looking at the sea from a tropical beach or the deck of a cruise ship, but Pitt was not among them. His restless soul and the capricious water were one, inseparable in their shifting moods.

Maeve and Giordino no longer felt as though they were struggling to stay alive. Their few moments of warmth and pleasure, nearly drowned by adversity, were becoming more frequent. Pitt’s unshakable optimism, his contagious laughter, his unrelenting grasp of hope, his strength of character sustained and helped them face the worst that nature could throw at them. Never did they perceive a bare hint of depression in his perspective, whatever the situation. No matter how strained he appeared as he sighted his sextant on the stars or warily watched for a sudden change of the wind, he was always smiling.

When she realized she was falling deeply in love with him, Maeve’s independent spirit fought against it. But when she finally accepted the inevitable, she gave in to her feelings completely. She continually found herself studying his every move, his every expression as he jotted down their position on Rodney York’s chart of the southern sea.

She touched him on the arm. “Where are we?” she asked softly.

“At first light I’ll mark our course and figure the distance separating us from Gladiator Island.”

“Why don’t you give it a rest? You haven’t slept more than two hours since we left the Miseries.”

“I promise I’ll take a nice long siesta when we’re on the last leg of the voyage,” he said, peering through gloom at the compass.

“Al never sleeps ‘either,” she said, pointing at Giordino, who never ceased examining the condition of the outriggers and the rigging holding the boat together.

“If the following wind holds and my navigating is anywhere near the mark, we should sight your island sometime early morning on the day after tomorrow.”

She looked up at the great field of stars. “The heavens are lovely tonight.”

“Like a woman I know,” he said, eyes going from compass to the sails to Maeve. “A radiant creature with guileless blue eyes and hair like a shower of golden coins. She’s innocent and intelligent and was made for love and life.”

“She sounds quite appealing.”

“That’s only for starters. Her father happens to be one of the richest men in the solar system.”

She arched her back and snuggled against his body, feeling its hardness. She brushed her lips against the mirth lines around his eyes and his strong chin. “You must be very smitten with her.”

“Smitten, and why not?” he said slowly. “She is the only girl in this part of the Pacific Ocean who makes me mad with passionate desire.”

“But. I’m the only girl in this part of the Pacific Ocean.”

He kissed her lightly on the forehead. “Then it’s your solemn duty to fulfill my most intimate fantasies.”

“I’d take you up on that if we were alone,” she said in a sultry voice. “But for now, you’ll just have to suffer.”

“I could tell Al to take a hike,” he said with a grin.

She pulled back and laughed. “He wouldn’t get far.” Maeve secretly sensed a flow of happiness at knowing no flesh-and-blood woman stood between them. “You’re a special kind of man,” she whispered. “The kind every woman longs to meet.”

He laughed easily. “Not so. I’ve seldom swept the fair sex off their feet.”

“Maybe it’s because they see that you’re unreachable.”

“I can be had if they play their cards right,” he said jokingly.

“Not what I mean,” she said seriously. “The sea is your mistress. I could read it in your face through the storm. It was not as if you were fighting the sea as much as you were seducing it. No woman can compete with a love so vast.”

“You have a deep affection for the sea too,” he said tenderly, “and the life that lives in it.”

Maeve breathed in the night. “Yes, I can’t deny devoting my life to it.”

Giordino broke the moment by emerging from the deckhouse and announcing that one of the buoyancy tubes was losing air. “Pass the pump,” he ordered. “If I can find the leak, I’ll try and patch it.”

“How is Marvelous Maeve holding up?” Pitt asked.

“Like a lady in a dance contest,” Giordino replied. “Limber and lithe, with all her body joints working in rhythm.”

“She hangs together until we reach the island and I’ll donate her to the Smithsonian to be displayed as the boat most unlikely to succeed.”

“We strike another storm,” said Giordino warily, “and all bets are off.” He paused and casually glanced around the black horizon where the stars melted into the sea. Suddenly, he stiffened. “I see a light off to port.”

Pitt and Maeve stood and stared in the direction Giordino indicated with his hand. They could see a green light, indicating a ship’s starboard side, and white range masthead lights. It looked to be passing far in their wake toward the northeast.

“A ship,” Pitt confirmed. “About five kilometers away.”

“She’ll never see us,” said Maeve anxiously. “We have no lights of our own.”

Giordino disappeared in the deckhouse and quickly reappeared. “Rodney York’s last flare,” he said, holding it up.

Pitt gazed at Maeve. “Do you want to be rescued?”

She looked down at the black sea rolling under the boat and slowly shook her head. “It’s not my decision to make.”

“Al, how say you? A hearty meal and a clean bed strike you as tempting?”

Giordino grinned. “Not half as inviting as a second go-around with the Dorsett clan.”

Pitt circled an arm around Maeve’s shoulder. “I’m with him.”

“Two days,” Maeve murmured thankfully. “I can’t believe I’ll actually see my boys again.”

Pitt said nothing for a moment, thinking of the unknown that lay ahead of them. Then he said gently, “You’ll see them, and you’ll hold them in your arms. I promise you.”

There was never any real inclination to turn from their established goal. Pitt and Giordino’s minds ran as one. They had entered a zone where they were indifferent and uncaring of their own lives. They were so wrapped up in their determination to reach Gladiator Island that neither man bothered to watch as the lights of the passing ship grew smaller and gradually disappeared in the distance.

When the interisland cargo ship carrying the dismantled antenna steamed into Halawa Bay on Molokai, all hands lined the railings and stared in rapt fascination at the peculiar vessel moored in the harbor. The 228-meter-long ship, with its forest of cranes and twenty-three-story derrick rising in the middle of its hull, looked like it had been designed and constructed by an army of drunken engineers, spastic welders and Oklahoma oil riggers.

An expansive helicopter pad hung over the stern by girders as if it was an add-on accessory. The high bridge superstructure rose on the aft end of the hull, giving the ship the general look of an oil tanker, but that’s where any similarity ended. The center section of hull was taken up by an enormous conglomeration of machinery with the appearance of a huge pile of scrap. A veritable maze of steel stairways, scaffolding, ladders and pipes clustered around the derrick, which reached up and touched the sky like a gantry used to launch heavy rockets into space. The raised house on the forecastle showed no sign of ports, only a row of skylight-like windows across the front. The paint was faded and chipped with streaks of rust showing through. The hull was a marine blue, while the superstructure was white. The machinery had once been painted myriad colors of gray, yellow and orange.

“Now I can die happy after having seen it all,” Gunn exclaimed at the sight.

Molly stood beside him on the bridge wing and stared in awe. “How on earth did the admiral ever conjure up the Glomar Explorer?”

“I won’t even venture to guess,” Gunn muttered, gazing with the wonder of a child seeing his first airplane.

The captain of the Lanikai leaned from the door of the wheelhouse. “Admiral Sandecker is on the ship-to-ship phone, Commander Gunn.”

Gunn raised a hand in acknowledgment, stepped from the bridge wing and picked up the phone.

“You’re an hour late,” were the first words Gunn heard.

“Sorry, Admiral. The antenna was not in pristine shape. I ordered the crew to perform routine repair and maintenance during disassembly so that it will go back together with less hassle.”

“A smart move,” Sandecker agreed. “Ask your captain to moor his ship alongside. We’ll begin transferring the antenna sections as soon as his anchors are out.”

“Is that the famous Hughes Glomar Explorer I’m seeing?” asked Gunn.

“One and the same with a few alterations,” answered Sandecker. “Lower a launch and come aboard. I’ll be waiting in the captain’s office. Bring Ms. Faraday.”

“We’ll be aboard shortly.”

Originally proposed by Deputy Director of Defense David Packard, formerly of Hewlett-Packard, a major electronics corporation, and based on an earlier deep ocean research ship designed by Willard Bascom and called the Alcoa Seaprobe, the Glomar Explorer became a joint venture of the CIA, Global Marine Inc. and Howard Hughes, through his tool company that eventually became the Summa Corporation.

Construction was commenced by the Sun Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Company at their shipyard facilities in Chester, Pennsylvania, and the huge vessel was immediately wrapped in secrecy, with the aid of misleading information. She was launched forty-one months later in the late fall of 1972, a remarkable achievement in technology for a vessel completely innovative in concept.

She then became famous for her raising of a Russian Golf-class submarine from a depth of five kilometers in the middle of the Pacific. Despite news stories to the contrary, the entire sub was raised in pieces and examined, a colossal feat of intelligence that paid great dividends in knowledge about Soviet submarine technology and operation.

After her brief moment of fame, no one quite knew what to do with the Explorer, so she eventually wound up in the hands of the United States government and was included in the Navy’s mothball program. Until recently, she had languished for over two decades in the backwash of Suisun Bay, northeast of San Francisco.

When Gunn and Molly stepped onto the deck of the immense vessel, they felt as though they were standing in the center of an electric generating plant. Seen close up, the scope of the machinery was staggering. None of the tight security that surrounded the vessel during her first voyage was visible. They were met at the top of the boarding ramp by the ship’s second officer and no one else.

“No security guards?” asked Molly.

The officer smiled as he showed them up a stairway leading to a deck below the wheelhouse. “Since this is a commercial operation and we’re not on a secret mission to steal foreign naval vessels from the seafloor, no security measures are necessary.”

“I thought the Explorer was in mothballs,” said Gunn.

“Until five months ago,” replied the officer. “Then she was leased to Deep Abyss Engineering to mine copper and manganese from the deep ocean two hundred kilometers south of the Hawaiian Islands.”

“Have you begun operations?” asked Molly.

“Not yet. Much of the ship’s equipment is ancient by today’s standards and we’ve had to make some major changes, especially to the electronics. At the moment, the main engines are acting up. Soon as they’re repaired, we’ll be on our way.”

Gunn and Molly exchanged questioning looks without voicing their concern. As if tuned to the same wavelength, they wondered how a ship that was dead in the water could get them where they had to be in time to deflect the acoustic plague.

The ship’s officer opened the door to a spacious, elegant stateroom. “These quarters were reserved for Howard Hughes in the event he ever visited the ship, an event that is not known to have taken place.”

Sandecker stepped forward and greeted them. “An extraordinary piece of work. I compliment you both. I take it the dismantling turned out to be a tougher job than we estimated.”

“Corrosion was the enemy,” Gunn admitted. “The grid connections fought us every step of the way.”

“I never heard so much cursing,” said Molly with a smile. “The engineers turned the air blue, believe you me.”

“Will the antenna serve our purpose?” asked Sandecker.

“If the sea doesn’t get too nasty and tear it apart at the seams,” replied Gunn, “it should get the job done.”

Sandecker turned and introduced a short plump man a few years over forty. “Captain James Quick, my aides Molly Faraday and Commander Rudi Gunn.”

“Welcome aboard,” said Quick, shaking hands. “How many of your people are coming with you?”

“Counting Ms. Faraday and me, I have a team of thirty-one men and five women,” Gunn answered. “I hope our numbers don’t cause a problem.”

Quick leisurely waved a hand. “No bother. We have more empty quarters than we know what do with and enough food to last two months.”

“Your second officer said you had engine problems.”

“A stacked deck,” said Sandecker. “The captain tells me a sailing time is indefinite.”

“So it was a case of hurry up and wait,” muttered Gunn.

“A totally unforeseen obstacle, Rudi, I’m sorry.”

Quick set his cap on his head and started for the door. “I’ll gather up my crane operators and order them to begin transferring the antenna from your ship.”

Gunn followed him. “I’ll come along and manage the operation from the Lanikai.”

As soon as they were alone, Molly gazed at Sandecker with canny regard. “How on earth did you ever convince the government to loan you the Glomar Explorer?”

“I bypassed official Washington and made Deep Abyss Engineering an offer they couldn’t refuse.”

Molly stared at him. “You purchased the Glomar Explorer?”

“I chartered her,” he corrected her. “Cost me an arm and half a leg.”

“Is there room in NUMA’s budget?”

“Circumstances demanded a quick deal. I wasn’t about to haggle with so many lives in the balance. If we’re proven right about the deadly acoustic convergence, I’ll shame Congress out of the funds. And to be on the safe side, I hammered out a performance clause.”

“Finding the Explorer nearby after the Navy refused the Roosevelt was like stumbling on a gold mine.”

“What luck giveth, luck taketh away.” Sandecker shook his head slowly. “The Explorer is in Molokai because of propeller shaft bearing failure during the voyage from California. Whether she can get under way and put us on site before it’s too late is open to question.”

The big starboard cranes used to lift machinery were soon extended outward over the open cargo deck of Lanikai. Hooks attached to the boom cables were lowered and coupled to the antenna sections before hoisting and swinging them on board the Glomar Explorer, where they were stacked on an open area of the deck in numbered sequence for reassembly.

Within two hours, the transfer was completed and the antenna sections tied down on board the Explorer. The little cargo ship pulled up her anchors, gave a farewell blast of her air horn and began moving out of the harbor, her part of the project finished. Gunn and Molly waved as the Lanikai slowly pushed aside the green waters of the bay and headed out into the open sea.

The NUMA team members were assigned quarters and enjoyed a well-deserved meal from the Explorer’s expansive galley before bedding down in staterooms that had gone unused since the ship wrestled the Soviet sub from the deep waters of the Pacific. Molly had taken over the role of housemother and circulated among the team to make sure none had come down sick or had injured themselves during the antenna breakdown.

Gunn returned to the former VIP quarters once reserved for the eccentric Howard Hughes. Sandecker, Captain Quick and another man, who was introduced as Jason Toft, the ship’s chief engineer, were seated around a small game table.

“Care for a brandy?” asked Quick.

“Yes, thank you.”

Sandecker sat wreathed in cigar smoke and idly sipped the golden liquid in his glass. He did not look like a happy camper. “Mr. Toft has just informed me that he can’t get the ship under way until critical parts are delivered from the mainland.”

Gunn knew the admiral was churning inside, but he looked as cool as a bucket of ice on the exterior. He looked at Toft. “When do you expect the parts, Chief?”

“They’re in flight from Los Angeles now,” answered Toft, a man with a huge stomach and short legs. “Due to land in four hours. Our ship’s helicopter is waiting on the ground at the Hilo airport on the big island of Hawaii to terry the parts directly to the Explorer.”

“What exactly is the problem?” asked Gunn.

“The propeller shaft bearings,” Toft explained. “For some strange reason, because the CIA rushed construction, I guess, the propeller shafts were not balanced properly. During the voyage from San Francisco the vibration cracked the lubricating tubes, cutting off the flow of oil to the shaft bearings. Friction, metal fatigue, overstress, whatever you want to call it, the port shaft froze solid about a hundred miles off Molokai. The starboard shaft was barely able to carry us here before her bearings burned out.”

“As I told you earlier, we’re working under a critical deadline.”

“I fully understand the scope of your dilemma, Admiral. My engine-room crew will work like madmen to get the ship under way again, but they’re only human. I must warn you, the shaft bearings are only part of the problem. The engines may not have many hours on them, having only taken the ship from the East Coast to the middle of the Pacific and then back to California, back in the 1970s, but without proper attention for the last twenty years, they are in a terrible state of neglect. Even if we should get one shaft to turn, there is no guarantee we’ll get past the mouth of the harbor before breaking down again.”

“Do you have the necessary tools to do the job?” Sandecker pressed Toft.

“The caps on the port shaft have been torn down and the bearings removed. Replacement should go fairly smoothly. The port shaft, however, can only be repaired at a shipyard.”

Gunn addressed himself to Captain Quick. “I don’t understand why your company didn’t have the Explorer refitted at a local shipyard after she came out of mothballs in San Francisco.”

“Blame it on the bean-counters.” Quick shrugged. “Chief Toft and I strongly recommended a refit before departing for Hawaii, but management wouldn’t hear of it. The only time spent at the shipyard was for removal of much of the early lifting equipment and the installation of the dredging system. As for standard maintenance, they insisted it was a waste of money and that any mechanical failures could be repaired at sea or after we reached Honolulu, which obviously we failed to do. And on top of that, we’re way undermanned. The original crew was 172 men, I have 60 men and women on board, mostly maritime crewmen, crane and equipment operators and mechanics to maintain the machinery. Twelve of that number are geologists, marine engineers and electronics experts. Unlike your NUMA projects, Commander Gunn, ours is a bare-bones operation.”

“My apologies, Captain,” said Gunn. “I sympathize with your predicament.”

“How soon can you get us under way?” Sandecker asked Toft, trying to keep the fatigue of the past few weeks from showing.

“Thirty-six hours, maybe more.”

The room went silent as every eye was trained on Sandecker. He fixed the chief engineer with a pair of eyes that went as cold as a serial killer’s. “I’ll explain it to you one more time,” he offered sharply, “as candidly as I can put it. If we are not on station at the convergence site with our antenna positioned in the water thirty-five hours from now, more people will die than inhabit most small countries. This is not a harebrained fantasy or the script for a Hollywood science-fiction movie. It’s real life, and I for one do not want to stand there looking at a sea of dead bodies and say `If only I’d made the extra effort, I might have prevented it.’ Whatever magic it takes, Chief, we must have the antenna in the water and positioned before 800 A.M. the day after tomorrow.”

“I’ll not promise the impossible,” Toft came back sternly. “But if we can’t make your schedule, it won’t be for the lack of my engine-room people working themselves to death.” He drained his glass and walked from she room, closing the door heavily behind him.

“I’m afraid you upset my chief engineer,” Quick said to Sandecker. “A bit harsh, weren’t you, laying the blame on him if we fail?”

Sandecker stared at the closed door thoughtfully. “The stakes are too high, Captain. I didn’t plan it this way, certainly not for the burden to sit on Chief Toft’s shoulders. But like it or not, that man holds the fate of every human being on the island of Oahu in his hands.”

At 3:30 P.M. the following afternoon, a haggard and grimy Toft stepped into the wheelhouse and announced to Sandecker, Gunn and Captain Quick, “The bearings in the port shaft have been replaced. I can get us under way, but the best speed I can give you is five knots with a little edge to spare.”

Sandecker pumped Toft’s hand. “Bless you, Chief, bless you.”

“What is the distance to the convergence site?” asked Quick.

“Eighty nautical miles,” Gunn answered without hesitation, having worked the course out in his mind over a dozen times.

“A razor-edge margin,” Quick said uneasily. “Moving at five knots, eighty nautical miles will take sixteen hours, which will put us on your site a few minutes before oh-eight hundred hours.”

“Oh-eight hundred hours,” Gunn repeated in a tone slightly above a whisper. “The precise time Yaeger predicted the convergence.”

“A razor-thin margin,” Sandecker echoed, “but Chief Toft has given us a fighting chance.”

Gunn’s face became drawn. “You realize, I hope, Admiral, that if we reach the area and are hit by the convergence, we all stand a good chance of dying.”

Sandecker looked at the other three men without a change of expression. “Yes,” he said quietly. “A very good chance.”

Shortly after midnight, Pitt took his final sighting of the stars and marked his chart under the light of a half-moon. If his calculations were in the ballpark, they should be sighting Gladiator Island within the next few hours. He instructed Maeve and Giordino to keep a lookout ahead while he allowed himself the luxury of an hour’s sleep. It seemed to him that he had barely drifted off when Maeve gently shook him awake.

“Your navigation was right on the button,” she said, excitement in her tone. “The island is in sight.”

“A beautiful job .of navigating, old buddy,” Giordino congratulated him. “You beat your estimated time of arrival.”

“Just under the wire too,” Maeve said, laughing. “Dead leaves are beginning to fall off the sails.”

Pitt stared into the night but only saw the splash of stars and moon on the sea. He opened his mouth to say he couldn’t see anything when a shaft of light swung across the western horizon, followed by a bright red glow. “Your island has a beacon?” he asked Maeve.

“A small lighthouse on the rim of the southern volcano.”

“At least your family did something to aid marine navigation.”

Maeve laughed. “Thoughts of lost sailors never entered my great-grandfather’s mind when he built it. The purpose has always been to warn ships to steer clear of the island and not to come ashore.”

“Have many vessels come to grief on the island’s coast?”

She looked down at her hands and clasped them. “When I was little, Daddy often talked about ships that were cast on the rocks.”

“Did he describe survivors?”

She shook her head. “There was never talk of rescue attempts. He always said that any man who stepped foot on Gladiator Island without an invitation had a date with Satan.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, the badly injured were murdered and any able-bodied survivor was put to work in the mines until he died. No one has ever escaped from Gladiator to tell of the atrocities.”

“You escaped.”

“A lot of good it did the poor miners,” she said sadly. “No one ever took my word over my family’s. When I tried to explain the situation to authorities, Daddy merely bought them off.”

“And the Chinese laborers working the mines today? How many of them leave the island in one piece?”

Maeve’s face was grim. “Almost all eventually die from the extreme heat in the bottom of the lower mine pits.”

“Heat?” There was curiosity in Pitt’s face. “From what source?”

“Steam vents through cracks in the rock.”

Giordino gave Pitt a pensive look. “A perfect place to organize a union.”

“I make landfall in about three hours,” said Pitt. “Not too late to change our minds, skip the island and try for Australia.”

“It’s a violent, unrelenting world,” Giordino sighed. “Absolutely worthless without a good challenge now and then.”

“There speaks the backbone of America,” Pitt said with a smile. He stared up at the moon as if appraising it. “I figure we have just enough light to do the job.”

“You still haven’t explained how we’re going to come ashore unobserved by Daddy’s security guards,” said Maeve.

“First, tell me about the cliffs surrounding Gladiator Island.”

She looked at him queerly for a moment, then shrugged. “Not much to tell. The cliffs encircle the whole landmass except for the lagoon. The western shore is pounded by huge waves. The eastern side is calmer but gill dangerous.”

“Are there any small inlets on the eastern shore with a sandy beach and natural rock chimneys cut into the cliffs?”

“There are two that I remember. One has a good entrance but a tiny beach. The other is more narrow but with a broader stretch of sand. If you’re thinking of landing at either one, you can forget it. Their bluffs rise steeply for a good hundred meters. A first-rate professional rock climber using all the latest techniques and equipment wouldn’t think of attempting that climb in the dead of night.”

“Can you guide us into the narrow channel with the roomy beach?” asked Pitt.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Maeve said flatly. “You might as well climb Mount Everest with an ice pick. And then there are the security guards. They patrol the bluffs every hour.”

“At night too?”

“Daddy leaves no door open for diamond smugglers,” she said as if explaining to a schoolchild.

“How large is the patrol?”

“Two men, who make one complete circuit of the island during their shift. They’re followed by another patrol on the hour.”

“Is it possible for them to see the beach from the edge of the bluff?” Pitt grilled her.

“No. The cliff is too steep to see straight down.” She looked at Pitt, her eyes in the moonlight wide and questioning. “Why all the interrogation about the backside of the island? The lagoon is the only way in.”

He exchanged scheming looks with Giordino. “She has the luscious body of a woman but the mind of a skeptic.”

“Don’t feel bad,” Giordino said, yawning. “Women never believe me either.”

Pitt gazed on the rocks that had had a long roll of fatalities, rocks where the shipwrecked men who survived wished they had drowned rather than suffer untold miseries as slaves in the Dorsett diamond mines. For a long time, as the cliffs of Gladiator Island loomed up out of the darkness, no one on the Marvelous Maeve moved or spoke. Pitt saw Maeve’s back as she lay in the bow, acting as lookout for any offshore rocks. He glanced at Giordino and caught the white blur of his friend’s face and the slow nod as he stood poised to start the outboard motor.

The light from the half-moon was more than he dared hope for. It was enough to illuminate the steeply angled palisades, but sufficiently meager to prevent the Marvelous Maeve from being observed by probing eyes on the bluffs. As if the partial moon wasn’t blessing enough, the sea cooperated with a fairly smooth surface of low, passive swells, and there was a following wind. Without an easterly breeze, Pitt’s best laid plans for infiltrating the island would go down the drain. He turned the trimaran on a course parallel to the island’s shoreline. At seventy meters a white horizontal blur, trimmed with phosphorescence, grew out of the darkness, accompanied by the low drumming of seas rolling against the cliffs.

Until they sailed around the tip of the island, and the back of the volcano shielded the little boat from the sweeping beam of the Gladiator lighthouse, Pitt felt like a convict in an old prison movie, trying to escape over a wall with searchlights playing all around. Strangely, all conversation dropped to hushed tones as if they could be heard over the soft boom of the surf.

“How far to the inlet?” he called to Maeve softly.

“I think it’s about a kilometer up the shore from the lighthouse,” she answered without turning.

The boat had lost considerable way after swinging east to north along the shoreline, and Pitt was finding it difficult to maintain a steady course. He raised a hand as a signal to Giordino to start the outboard motor. Three heartbeats slowed and then suddenly increased as Giordino pulled on the starter rope, ten, twenty, thirty times without success.

Giordino paused, massaged his tiring arm, stared menacingly at the ancient motor and began talking to it. “You don’t start on the next pull, I will attack and unnecessarily mutilate every bolt in your crankcase.” Then he took a firm grip on the pull handle and gave a mighty heave. The motor snorted and its exhaust puffed a few moments before settling down to a steady snarl. Giordino wiped the sweat from his face and looked pleased. “One more manifestation of Giordino’s law,” he said, catching his breath. “Deep down, every mechanical contrivance has a fear of being junked.”

Now that Giordino steered the craft with the outboard, Pitt lowered the sails and removed his kite from the deckhouse. He deftly looped a coil of thin line on the deck of the boat. Then he tied a small grappling hook, found at York’s campsite, to the line slightly below where it attached to the kite. Then he sat and waited, knowing in his heart of hearts that what he had in mind had only one chance of succeeding out of too many to count.

“Steer port,” warned Maeve, gesturing to her left. “There is a pinnacle of rocks about fifty meters dead ahead.”

“Turning to port,” Giordino acknowledged as he pulled the steering handle of the outboard toward him, swinging the bows around on a twenty-degree angle toward shore. He kept a cautious eye on the white water swirling around several black rocks that rose above the surface until they were safely astern.

“Maeve, see anything yet?” asked Pitt.

“I can’t be certain. I never had to find the bloody inlet in the dark before,” she replied testily.

Pitt studied the swells. They were growing steeper and closer together. “The bottom is coming up. Another thirty meters and we’ll have to turn for open water.”

“No, no,” Maeve said in an excited voice. “I think I see a break in the cliffs. I’m sure of it. That’s the inlet that leads to the largest beach.”

“How far?” Pitt demanded.

“Sixty or seventy meters,” she answered, rising to her knees and pointing toward the cliffs.

Then Pitt had it too. A vertical opening in the face of the palisades that ran dark in the shadows out of the moonlight. Pitt wetted his finger and tested the wind. It held steady out of the east. “Ten minutes,” he begged under his breath. “All I need is ten minutes.” He turned to Giordino. “Al, can you hold us in a steady position about twenty meters from the entrance?”

“It won’t be easy in the surge.”

“Do your best.” He turned to Maeve. “Take the tiller and aim the bow head-on into the swells. Combine your efforts with Al’s on the outboard to keep the boat from swinging broadside.”

Pitt unfolded the struts on his homemade kite. When extended, the Dacron surface measured nearly two and a half meters high. He held it up over the side of the boat, pleased to see it leap up out of his hands as the breeze struck its bowed surface. He payed out the line as the kite rose and dipped in the predawn sky.

Maeve suddenly saw the genius behind Pitt’s mad plan. “The grappling hook,” she blurted. “You’re trying to snag it on the top of the bluffs and use the line to climb the cliffs.”

“That’s the idea,” he replied as he focused his gaze on the obscure shape of the kite, just slightly visible under the half-light from the moon.

Adroitly jockeying the throttle of the outboard and the Forward/Reverse lever, Giordino performed a masterful job of keeping the boat in one spot. He neither spoke nor took his eyes off the sea to observe Pitt’s actions.

Pitt had prayed for a steady wind, but he got more than he bargained for. The onshore breeze, meeting resistance from the rising palisades, curved and rushed up their steep face before sweeping over the summit. The big kite was nearly pulled from his grip. He used a sleeve of his battered leather jacket as a protective glove, holding it around the line to keep the friction from burning his hands. The immense drag was nearly pulling his arms out of their sockets. He clamped his teeth together and hung on, mentally plagued by any number of things that could go wrong, any one of which would end their undertaking a sudden shift in the wind smashing the kite against the rocks, Giordino losing the boat to the incoming surge, the grappling hook unable to find a grip on the rocks, a patrol appearing at the wrong time and discovering them.

He brushed off all thoughts of failure as he taxed his depth perception to the limit. In the black of night, even with the moon’s help, he could not begin to accurately judge when the grappling hook had risen beyond the top of the bluffs. He felt the knot he’d tied to indicate when the fine had payed out a hundred meters slip under the leather jacket. He roughly figured another twenty meters before loosening his grip on the line. Released from its resistance to the wind, the kite began to seesaw and fall.

Pitt felt as if a great pressure was released from his mind and body as he gave a series of tugs on the line and felt it go taut. The grappling hook had dug its points into the rock on the first attempt and was holding firm. “Take her in, Al. We’ve got our way to the top.”

Giordino had been waiting for the word. His struggle to keep the trimaran in a fixed position under the steady onslaught of the waves was a study in skill and finesse. Gladly, he eased the motor into Forward, opened the throttle and threaded the Marvelous Maeve between the rocks into the eye of the cove under the cliffs.

Maeve returned to the bow and acted as lookout, guiding Giordino through the black water that seemed to grow calmer the deeper they penetrated the inlet. “I see the beach,” she informed them. “You can just make out a light strip of sand fifteen meters ahead and to starboard.”

In another minute the bow and outriggers touched the strip of beach and ran up onto the soft sand. Pitt looked at Maeve. The cliffs shadowed the light from the moon, and he saw her features only vaguely. “You’re home,” he said briefly.

She tilted her head and gazed up between the cliffs at the narrow slot of sky and stars that looked light-years away. “Not yet, I’m not.”

Pitt had never let the line to the grappling hook out of his hands. Now, he slipped the leather jacket over Maeve’s shoulders and gave the line a hard tug. “We’d better get moving before a patrol comes along.”

“I should go first,” said Giordino. “I’m the strongest.”

“That goes without saying,” Pitt said, smiling in the dark. “I believe it’s your turn anyway.”

“Ah, yes,” Giordino said, remembering. “Payback time for watching like an impotent snail when that terrorist cut your safety line while you were swimming around that sinkhole in the Andes.”

“I had to climb out using nothing but a pair of screwdrivers.”

“Tell me the story again,” said Giordino sarcastically. “I never tire of hearing it.”

“On your way, critic, and keep an eye peeled for a passing patrol.”

With only a nod, Giordino grabbed at the thin line and gave it a sharp pull to test its immovability. “This thing strong enough to take my weight?”

Pitt shrugged. “We’ll have to hope so, won’t we?”

Giordino gave him a sour look and started up the side of the cliff. He quickly vanished in the blackness while Pitt grasped the end of the line and held it taut to take up the slack.

“Find a couple of protruding rocks and tie off the boat fore and aft,” Pitt ordered Maeve. “If worse comes to worst, we may have to rely on Marvelous Maeve to carry us away from here.”

Maeve looked at him curiously. “How else did you expect to escape?”

“I’m a lazy sort. I had it in the back of my mind that we could steal one of your father’s yachts, or maybe an aircraft.”

“Do you have an army I’m not aware of?”

“You’re looking at half of it.”

Further conversation died as they gazed unseeing in the darkness, speculating on Giordino’s progress Pitt’s only awareness of his friend’s movements was the quivering on the line.

After thirty minutes, Giordino stopped to catch his breath. His arms ached like a thousand devils were stabbing them. His ascent had been fairly rapid considering the unevenness of the rocks. Climbing without the fine would have been impossible. Even with the proper gear, having to make his way in the dark a meter at a time, groping for toeholds, driving in pitons and securing ropes, the climb would have taken the better part of six hours.

One minute of rest, no more, then it was hand over hand again. Wearily but still powerfully he pulled himself upward, kicking around the overhangs, taking advantage of the ledges. The palms of his hands were rubbed raw from the never-ending clutching and heaving on the thin nylon line salvaged from Rodney York’s boat. As it was, the old line was hardly strong enough to take his bulk, but it had had to be light in weight for the kite to carry the grappling hook over the top. Any heavier and it would have been a lost cause.

He paused to look upward at the shadowy lip of the summit, lined against the stars. Five meters, he estimated, five meters to go. His breath was heaving in aching gasps, his chest and arms bruised from scraping against unseen rock in the darkness. His immense strength was down to the bottom of its reserves. He was climbing the last few meters on guts alone. Indestructible, as hard and gritty as the rock on which he climbed, Giordino kept going, refusing to stop again until he could climb no more. Then suddenly the ground at the top of the cliff opened before his eyes and spread out on a horizontal level. One final heave over the edge and he lay flat, listening to his heart pound, his lungs pumping like bellows, sucking air in and out.

For the next three minutes Giordino lay without moving, elated that the agonizing exertion was over. He surveyed his immediate surroundings and found himself stretched across a path that traveled along the edge of the cliffs. A few paces beyond, a wall of trees and underbrush loomed dark and uninviting. Seeing no sign of lights or movement, he traced the line to the grappling hook and saw that it was firmly imbedded in a rock outcropping.

Pitt’s zany idea had worked incredibly well.

Satisfied the hook wasn’t going anywhere, he rose to his feet. He untied the kite and hid it in the vegetation opposite the path before returning to the edge of the bluff and giving two sharp tugs on the rope that vanished into the darkness.

Far below, Pitt turned to Maeve. “Your turn.”

“I don’t know if I’m up to this,” she said nervously. “Heights scare me.”

He made a loop, dropped it over her shoulders and cinched it tight around her waist. “Hold tight to the line, lean back from the cliff and walk up the side. Al will haul you up from above.”

He answered Giordino’s signal by jerking three times on the line. Maeve felt the slack taken up, followed by the pressure around her waist. Clamping her eyes tightly shut, she began walking like a fly up the vertical face of the cliff.

Far above, his arms too numb to elevate Maeve by hand, Giordino had discovered a smooth slot in the rock that would not damage or cut into the nylon fibers. He inserted the line and laid it over his shoulders. Then he bent forward and staggered across the path, dragging Maeve’s weight up the cliff behind him.

In twelve minutes, Maeve appeared over the edge, eyes tightly closed. “Welcome to the top of the Matterhorn,” Giordino greeted her warmly.

“Thank God that’s behind me,” she moaned gratefully, opening her eyes for the first time since leaving the beach. “I don’t think I could ever do it again.”

Giordino untied Maeve. “Keep watch while I hoist Dirk. You can see a fair distance along the cliffs to the north, but the path south is hidden by a big group of rocks about fifty meters away.”

“I remember them,” said Maeve. “They have a hollow interior with natural ramparts. My sister Deirdre and I used to play there and pretend we were royalty. It’s called the Castle. There’s a small rest station and a telephone inside for the guards.”

“We’ve got to bring Dirk up before the next patrol comes along,” said Giordino, carefully dropping the line again.

To Pitt, it felt as if he were being hauled topside in the time it took to fry an egg. But less than ten meters from the rim, his ascent abruptly stopped. No word of washing, no word of encouragement, only silence. It could only mean one thing. His timing was unlucky. A patrol must be approaching. Unable to see what was occurring on the ledge above, he pressed his body into a small crevice, lying rigid and still, listening for sounds in the night.

Maeve had spotted the beam of light as it swung around one wall of the Castle and immediately alerted Giordino, Quickly, he secured the line around a tree to maintain tension so Pitt wouldn’t be dropped back onto the beach, He brushed dirt and dead leaves over the section of rope that showed but had no time to conceal the grappling hook.

“What about Dirk?” Maeve whispered frantically, “He might wonder what happened and call up to us.”

“He’ll guess the plot and be as quiet as a mouse.” Giordino answered with certainty. He shoved her roughly into the underbrush beside the path. “Get in there and stay low till the guards pass by.”

Inexorably, the unswerving single beam of light grew larger as it approached. After having walked their circuit a hundred times in the past four months without seeing so much as a strange footprint, the two-man patrol should have been lax and careless. Routine inaction leads to boredom and indifference. They should have walked right on past, seeing only the same rocks, the same bends in the path, hearing the same faint beat of the surf pounding the rocks far below. But these men were highly trained and highly paid. Bored, yes, lethargic, no.

Giordino’s pulse jumped at seeing that the guards were studying every inch of the path as they walked. He could not have known that Dorsett paid a twenty-five thousand’ dollar bonus for the severed hand of every diamond smuggler that was caught. What became of the rest of the body was never known, much less discussed. These men took their work seriously. They spied something and stopped directly in front of Maeve and Giordino.

“Hello, here’s something the last patrol missed, or wasn’t here an hour ago.”

“What do you see?” asked his partner.

“Looks like a grappling hook off a boat.” The first guard dropped to one knee and brushed away the hurried camouflage. “Well, well, it’s attached to a line that drops down the cliff.”

“The first attempt to enter the island from the bluffs since that party of Canadian smugglers we caught three years ago.” Afraid to stand too close to the edge, the guard beamed his light down the cliff face, but saw nothing.

The other guard pulled out a knife and made ready to cut the line. “If any are waiting to come up from below, they’re about to be awfully disappointed.”

Maeve sucked in her breath as Giordino stepped out of the bushes onto the path. “Don’t you characters have anything better to do than wander around at night?”

The first guard froze, his knife hand raised in the air. The second guard spun around and leveled his Bushmaster M-16 assault rifle at Giordino. “Freeze in your position or I’ll fire.”

Giordino did as he was told, but tensed his legs in preparation to spring. Fear and temporary shock gripped him at realizing it was only a matter of seconds before Pitt would be hurtling toward the sea and rocks below. But the guard’s face went blank and he lowered his weapon.

His partner looked at him. “What’s wrong with you?”

He broke off, peered behind Giordino and saw a woman step into the beam of light. There was no fear in her expression, rather it was one of anger. “Put away your silly guns and behave as you were trained!” she snapped.

The guard with the flashlight beamed it at Maeve. He stood in silent surprise, peering intently into her face before finally mumbling, “Miss Dorsett?”

“Fletcher,” she corrected him. “Maeve Fletcher.”

“I ... we were told you drowned.”

“Do I look like I’ve been floating in the sea?” Maeve, in her ragged blouse and shorts, wasn’t sure how she appeared to the guards. But she knew without doubt that she didn’t look like the daughter of a billionaire diamond tycoon.

“May I ask what you’re doing here this time of the morning?” the guard asked politely but firmly.

“My friend and I decided to take a walk.”

The guard with the knife wasn’t buying it. “You’ll excuse me,” he said, grabbing the line in his free hand in readiness to slice it with his left, “but there is something very wrong here.”

Maeve stepped over and abruptly slapped the man with the leveled rifle across the cheek. The startling display of supremacy surprised both guards, and they hesitated. Swift as a coiled rattler, Giordino sprang at the nearer guard, brushing away the assault rifle and smashing his head into the man’s stomach. The guard grunted in a violent convulsion before crashing to the ground on his back. Giordino, losing his footing, toppled across the fallen guard.

In the same instant, Maeve threw herself at the guard poised to cut Pitt’s lifeline, but he swung a vicious backhand that caught her on the side of the head and stopped her in her tracks. Then he dropped the knife and threw up his assault rifle, the index finger of his right hand sliding against the trigger as he aimed the barrel at Giordino’s chest.

Giordino knew he was dead. Entangled with the offset guard, he had no time for any defensive move. He knew it was impossible to reach the guard before he saw the flash from the muzzle. He could do nothing but stiffen his body in expectation of the bullet’s impact.

But no shot rang out and no bullet struck Giordino’s flesh.

Unnoticed, a hand with an arm attached snaked over the edge of the cliff, reached up and snatched the ripe, jerking it out of the guard’s hands. Before the guard drew another breath, he was yanked into space. His final scream of terror echoed throughout the black void until it became muffled and died as if covered by a funeral shroud.

Then Pitt’s head, lit by the flashlight on the ground, raised above the cliff’s edge. The eyes blinked in the glare of the light and then the lips turned up in a slight grin.

“I believe that’s what you call flying in the face of adverse opinion.”

Maeve hugged Pitt. “You couldn’t have arrived at a more opportune moment.”

“How come you didn’t blast away with your little pop gun?” asked Giordino.

Pitt pulled the tiny automatic out of his back pocket and held it in the palm of his hand. “After the guard with the flashlight failed to find me hiding in a crevasse, I waited a minute and then pulled myself up to the edge of the cliff to see what was happening. When, I saw you were within an instant of being shot, there was no time to draw and aim. So I did the next best thing.”

“Lucky he did,” Maeve said to Giordino, “or you wouldn’t be here.”

Giordino was not one to display maudlin sentiment “Next chance I get, I’ll carry out his trash.” He glanced down at the guard who was writhing on the ground in the fetal position, clutching his abdomen. He picked up the M-16 and checked the ammo clip. “A nice addition to our arsenal.”

“What do we do with him?” asked Maeve. “Chuck him over the cliff?”

“Nothing so drastic,” answered Pitt. Instinctively, he glanced in both directions along the path leading along the ledge. “He can’t hurt us now. Better to gag and tie him up and leave him for his buddies to find. When he and his partner don’t show up to check in at the next guard station, they’re certain to come searching for them.”

“The next patrol won’t show up for another fifty minutes,” said Giordino, rapidly pulling the nylon line over the cliff’s edge onto the path. “Time enough for a good head start.”

Minutes later the guard, his eyes wide with fright and clothed only in his underwear, hung in space from the grappling hook, ten meters below the rim of the cliff top. The nylon line was wrapped around his body tightly, like a cocoon.

With Maeve as a guide, they set off along the cliff path. Giordino packed the diminutive automatic pistol, while Pitt, now clad in the guard’s uniform, carried the Bushmaster M-16. They no longer felt exposed and helpless. Irrational, Pitt knew, for there must have been no less than a hundred other security guards standing watch over the mines and the island’s shoreline. That wasn’t the worst of their problems. Now that there was no returning to the Marvelous Maeve, they would have to seek other means of transport, a plan Pitt had always held in the back of his mind without the foggiest notion of how to carry it out. That wasn’t a primary concern just yet. What mattered now was finding Maeve’s boys and stealing them out of the hands of their crazy grandfather.

After traveling about five hundred meters, Maeve held up a hand and gestured into the thick underbrush. “We’ll cross the island here,” she informed them. “A road curves to within thirty meters of where we stand. If we’re careful and remain out of sight of any traffic, we can follow the road into the central housing area for Dorsett employees.”

“Where are we in relation to the volcanoes that anchor each end of the island?” asked Pitt.

“We’re about half way between and opposite the lagoon.”

“Where do you think your boys might be held?” Giordino put to her.

“I wish I knew,” she said distantly. “My first guess is the manor house, but I wouldn’t put it past my father to keep them under guard, in the security compound, or worse, they’re kept by Jack Ferguson.”

“Not a good idea to wander around like tourists looking for a restaurant,” said Pitt.

“I’m with you,” Giordino agreed. “The proper thing to do is find someone in authority with the answers and twist his arm.”

Pitt fastidiously straightened the jacket of his stolen uniform and brushed off the shoulders. “If he’s on the island, I know just the man.”

Twenty minutes later, after traveling over a road that wound in a series of hairpin turns over the spine of the island, they approached the compound that housed the mining engineers and the security guards. Keeping in the sheltered gloom of the underbrush, they skirted the detention camp for the Chinese laborers. Bright lights illuminated the barracks and open grounds, surrounded by a high electrified fence that was topped by rows of circular razor wire. The area was so heavily secured by electronic surveillance systems that no guards were walking around the perimeter.

In another hundred meters, Maeve stopped and gestured for Pitt and Giordino to drop behind a low hedge that bordered a concrete thoroughfare. One end of the road ended at a driveway that passed through a large arched gate to the Dorsett family manor house. A short distance in the opposite direction, the road split. One broad avenue trailed down a slope to the port in the center of the lagoon, where the docks and warehouses reflected a weird appearance under the eerie yellow glow of sodium-vapor lamps. Pitt took an extra minute to study the big boat tied beside the dock. Even at this distance, there was no mistaking the Dorsett yacht. Pitt was especially pleased to see a helicopter sitting on the upper deck.

“Does the island have an airstrip?” he asked Maeve.

She shook her head. “Daddy refused to construct one, preferring all his transportation by sea. He uses a helicopter to carry him back and forth from the Australian mainland. Why do you want to know?”

“A process of elimination. Our getaway bird sits yonder on the yacht,” Pitt said.

“You clever man, you had that in mind all along.”

“I was merely swept up in a orgy of inspiration,” Pitt said artfully, then asked, “How many men guard the yacht?”

“Only one, who monitors the dock security systems.”

“And the crewmen?”

“Whenever the boat is docked at the island, Daddy requires the crew to stay in quarters ashore.”

Pitt took note that the other fork in the road curved toward the main compound. The mines inside the volcanoes were alive with activity, but the central area of the Dorsett Consolidated Mining community was deserted. The dock beside the yacht appeared totally deserted under the floodlights mounted on a nearby warehouse. Everyone else, it seemed, was asleep in bed, a not uncommon circumstance at four o’clock in the morning.

“Point out the chief of security’s house,” Pitt said to Maeve.

“The mining engineers and my father’s servants live in the cluster of buildings closest to the lagoon,” answered Maeve. “The house you want sits on the southeast corner of the security guards’ compound. Its walls are painted gray.”

“I see it.” Pitt drew a sleeve across his forehead to wipe away the sweat. “Is there a way to reach it other than the road?”

“A walkway runs along the rear.”

“Let’s get moving. We don’t have a whole lot of time before daylight.”

They stayed in the shadows behind the hedge and the neatly trimmed trees that stretched alongside the paved shoulders of the road. Tall streetlights were spaced every fifty meters, the same as most city streets. Except for the soft rustle of wild grass and scattered leaves beneath their feet, the three of them moved quietly toward the gray house at the corner of the compound.

When they reached a clump of bushes outside the rear door, Pitt put his mouth to Maeve’s ear. “Have you ever been inside the house before?”

“Only once or twice when I was a little girl and Daddy asked me to deliver a message to the man who headed his security a long time ago,” she replied in a soft murmur.

“Can you say whether the house has an alarm system to detect intruders?”

Maeve shook her head. “I can’t imagine who would want to break into the security chief’s diggings.”

“Any live-in help?”

“They’re housed in a different compound.”

“The back door it is,” Pitt whispered.

“I hope we find a well-stocked kitchen,” muttered Giordino. “I’m not comfortable sneaking around in the dark on an empty stomach, a very empty stomach, I might add.”

“You can have first crack at the refrigerator,” Pitt promised.

Pitt stepped out of the shadows and slipped up to one side of the back door and peered through a window. The interior was lit only by a dim light over a hallway that ended at a stairwell leading to the second floor. Cautiously, he reached over and gently twisted the latch. There was a barely audible click as the shaft slipped from its catch. He took a deep breath and cracked the door ever so slightly. It swung on its hinges noiselessly, so he pushed it wide open and stepped into a rear entryway that opened into a small kitchen. He stepped across the kitchen and quietly closed a sliding door leading to a hallway. Then he turned on the light. At the signal, Maeve and Giordino followed him in.

“Oh, thank you, God,” muttered Giordino in ecstasy at seeing a beautifully decorated kitchen over whose counters and oven hung expensive cooking utensils fit for a gourmet chef.

“Warm air,” Maeve whispered happily. “I haven’t felt warm air in weeks.”

“I can taste the ham and eggs already,” said Giordino.

“First things first,” Pitt said quietly.

Turning the light out again, he slipped the hallway door open, leveled the assault rifle and stepped into the hallway. He cocked his head and listened, hearing only the soft noise of a heater fan. Flattening himself against the wall, he moved along the hallway under the muted light before starting up the carpeted stairway, testing each step for a squeak before setting his weight on it.

At the landing at the top of the stairs, he found two closed doors, one on either side. He tried the one to his right. The room was furnished as a private office with computer, telephones and file cabinets. The desk was incredibly orderly and free of clutter, the same as the kitchen. Pitt smiled to himself. He expected no less from the inhabitant. Sure of himself now, he stepped over to the left door, kicked it open and switched on the light.

A beautiful Asian girl, no more than eighteen, with long black silken hair falling over the side of the bed to the floor, stared in bulging-eyed fright at the figure standing in the doorway with an assault rifle. She opened her mouth as if to scream but emitted a muted gurgling sound.

The man next to her was a cool customer. He lay on his side, eyes closed, and made no attempt to turn and look at Pitt. Pitt would have missed the fractional movement but for the apparent indifference of the man. He lightly pulled the trigger, sending two quick shots into the pillow. The muzzle blast was muffled by the gun’s suppressor and came like a pair of handclaps. Only then did the man in bed bolt upright and stare at a hand that was bleeding from a bullet through the palm.

Now the girl shrieked, but neither man seemed to care. They both waited patiently until she froze into silence.

“Good morning, Chief,” said Pitt cheerfully. “Sorry to inconvenience you.”

John Merchant blinked in the light and focused his eyes on his intruder. “My guards will have heard the screams and come on the run,” he said calmly.

“I doubt that. Knowing you, I should judge that feminine screams coming from your living quarters are considered a nightly occurrence by your neighbors.”

“Who are you? What do you want?”

“How quickly they forget.”

Merchant squinted and then his mouth dropped open in recognition. His face registered abject disbelief. “You can’t―be ... you can’t be ... Dirk Pitt!”

As if prompted, Maeve and Giordino came into the room. They stood there behind Pitt, saying nothing, looking at the two people in bed as if watching a staged drama.

“This has to be a nightmare,” Merchant gasped.

“Do you bleed in your dreams?” asked Pitt, slipping his hand under Merchant’s pillow, retrieving the nine-millimeter automatic the security chief was reaching for and throwing it to Giordino. He thought the slimy little man would come around to accepting the situation, but Merchant was too stunned at seeing the ghosts of three people he thought were dead.

“I saw you cast adrift with my own eyes, before the storm struck,” Merchant said in a dull monotone. “How is it possible you all survived?”

“We were swallowed by a whale,” said Giordino, pulling the window curtains closed. “We upset his tummy, and you can guess what happened next.”

“You people are crazy. Give up your weapons. You’ll never get off the island alive.”

Pitt placed the muzzle of his assault rifle against Merchant’s forehead. “The only words I want to hear from you concern the location of Miss Fletcher’s sons. Where are they?”

A spark of defiance gleamed in Merchant’s eyes. “I won’t tell you anything.”

“Then you will surely die,” said Pitt coldly.

“Strange words from a marine engineer and an oceanographer, a man who sets women and children on a pedestal, and who is respected for his word and integrity.”

“I applaud your homework.”

“You won’t kill me,” said Merchant, regaining control of his emotions. “You are not a professional assassin, nor a man who has the stomach for murder.”

Pitt gave a casual shrug. “I’d venture to say that one of your guards, the one I threw over the cliffs about half an hour ago, would disagree.”

Merchant stared at Pitt impassively, not certain whether to believe him. “I do not know what Mr. Dorsett has done with his grandsons.”

Pitt moved the rifle barrel from Merchant’s head to one knee. “Maeve, count to three.”

“One,” she began, as composed as if she were counting lumps of sugar in a cup of tea. “Two ... three.”

Pitt pulled the trigger and a bullet smashed through Merchant’s kneecap. Merchant’s mistress went into another fit of screaming until Giordino clamped his hand over her mouth.

“Can we please have some quiet? You’re cracking the plaster.”

A complete transformation came over Merchant. The evil malignity of the repellant little man was suddenly replaced with a demeanor marked by pain and terror. His mouth twisted as he spoke. “My knee, you’ve shattered my knee!” he rasped in horror.

Pitt placed the muzzle against one of Merchant’s elbows. “I’m in a hurry. Unless you wish to be doubly maimed, I suggest you speak, and speak the truth or you’ll have a tough time brushing your teeth from now on.”

“Miss Fletcher’s sons work in the mines with the other laborers. They’re kept with the others in the guarded camp.”

Pitt turned to Maeve. “It’s your call.”

Maeve looked into Merchant’s eyes, her face taut with emotion. “He’s lying. Jack Ferguson, my father’s overseer, is in charge of the boys. They would never be out of his sight.”

“Where does he hang out?” asked Giordino.

“Ferguson lives in a guest house beside the mansion so he can be at my father’s beck and call,” said Maeve.

Pitt smiled coldly at Merchant. “Sorry, John, wrong answer. That will cost you an elbow.”

“No, please, no!” Merchant muttered through teeth clenched from the pain. “You win. The twins are kept in Ferguson’s quarters when they’re not working in the mines.”

Maeve stepped forward until she was standing over Merchant, distraught and grieved at envisioning the suffering her sons were enduring. Her self-control crumbled as she slapped him sharply, several times across the face. “Six-year-old boys forced to work in the mines! What kind of sadistic monsters are you?”

Giordino wrapped his arms gently around Maeve’s waist and pulled her back into the center of the room, as she broke into anguished sobbing.

Pitt’s face reflected sorrow and anger. He moved the muzzle to within a millimeter of Merchant’s left eye. “One more question, friend John. Where sleeps the helicopter’s pilot?”

“He’s in the mining company’s medical clinic with a broken arm,” Merchant answered sullenly. “You can forget about forcing him to fly you from the island.”

Pitt nodded and smiled knowingly at Giordino. “Who needs him?” He looked about the room and nodded toward the closet. “We’ll leave them in there.”

“Do you intend to murder us?” asked Merchant slowly.

“I’d sooner shoot skunks,” Pitt pointed out. “But since you brought it up, you and your little friend will be tied up, gagged and locked in the closet.”

Merchant’s fear was obvious from the tic at one corner of his mouth. “We’ll suffocate in there.”

“I can shoot you both now. Take your pick.”

Merchant said no more and offered no resistance as he and the girl were bound with the bed sheets, torn into strips, and unceremoniously dumped into the closet. Giordino moved half the furniture in the bedroom against the door to keep it from being forced open from the inside.

“We’ve got what we came for,” said Pitt. “Let’s be on our way to the old homestead.”

“You said I could raid the refrigerator,” protested Giordino. “My stomach is going through rejection pains.”

“No time for that now,” said Pitt. “You can gorge later.”

Giordino shook his head sorrowfully as he stuffed Merchant’s nine-millimeter automatic inside his belt. “Why do I feel as though there’s a conspiracy afoot to deplete my body sugar?”

Seven o’clock in the morning. A blue sky, unlimited visibility and a sea with low swells rolling like silent demons toward unseen shores where they would crash and die. It was a normal day like most days in the tropical waters off the Hawaiian Islands, warm with more than a trace of humidity and a light breeze, generally referred to as the trade winds. It was a Saturday, a day when the beaches at Waikiki and the windward side of the island were slowly coming alive with early birds awake for an early morning dip. Soon they would be followed by thousands of local residents and vacationers looking forward to leisurely hours of swimming in surf subdued by offshore reefs, and sunbathing on heated sand later in the day. Lulled by the relaxing atmosphere, none were remotely aware that this might be their last day on earth.

The Glomar Explorer, only one of her big twin screws driving under full power, pushed steadily toward the site of the deadly acoustic convergence, the sound waves already hurtling through the sea from the four sources. She should have been running a good half hour late, but Chief Engineer Toft had pushed his crew to and beyond the edge of exhaustion. He cursed and pleaded with the engine that strained against its mounts, bound to the only operating shaft, and coaxed another half knot out of it. He swore to get the ship to its meeting with destiny with time to spare, and by God he was doing it.

Up on the starboard wing of the bridge, Sandecker peered through binoculars at a commercial version of the Navy’s SH-60B Sea Hawk helicopter, with NUMA markings, as it approached the ship from bow-on, circled once and dropped on the big ship’s stern landing pad, Two men hurried from the aircraft and entered the aft superstructure. A minute later, they joined Sandecker on the bridge.

“Did the drop go well?” Sandecker asked anxiously.

Dr. Sanford Adgate Ames nodded with a slight smile. “Four arrays of remote acoustical sensing instruments have been deployed under the surface at the required locations thirty kilometers distant from the convergence zone.”

“We laid them directly in the four estimated paths of the sound channels,” added Gunn, who had made the flight with Ames.

“They’re set to measure the final approach and intensity of the sound?” Sandecker asked.

Ames nodded. “The telemetry data from the underwater modems will be relayed by their surface flotation satellite link to the onboard processor and analyst terminal here on board the Explorer. The system works similarly to submarine acoustic locating programs.”

“Fortunately, we have a weather and current window working in our favor,” said Gunn. “All things considered, the sound waves should come together as predicted.”

“Warning time?”

“Sound travels underwater at an average of fifteen hundred meters per second,” replied Ames. “I figure twenty seconds from when the sound waves pass the modems until they strike the reflector dish under the ship.”

“Twenty seconds,” Sandecker repeated. “Damned little time to mentally prepare for the unknown.”

“Since no one without some kind of protection has survived to describe the full intensity of the convergence, my best estimate of its duration before it is totally deflected toward Gladiator Island is approximately four and a half minutes. Anyone on board the ship who does not reach the dampened shelter will surely die horribly.”

Sandecker turned and gestured at the vivid green mountains of Oahu, only fifteen kilometers distant. “Will any effects reach the people on shore?”

“They might feel a brief but sharp pain inside their heads, but no permanent harm should come to them.”

Sandecker stared out the bridge windows at the huge mass of machinery soaring skyward in the middle of the ship. Infinite miles of cable and hydraulic lines ranged over the deck from the derrick and cranes. Teams of men and women, sitting and standing on platforms suspended in the air like those used by skyscraper window cleaners, worked at reconnecting the seemingly unending number of links on the enormous reflector shield. The giant derrick held the main frame of the shield, while the surrounding cranes lifted the smaller numbered pieces into their slots where they were then joined. Thanks to Rudi Gunn’s foresight in cleaning and oiling the connectors, all parts fit quickly and smoothly. The operation was going like clockwork. Only two more parts were left to install.

The admiral turned his gaze toward the jewel of the Pacific, easily distinguishing details of Diamond Head, the hotels strung along Waikiki Beach, the Aloha Tower in Honolulu, the homes fading into the clouds that always seemed to hover over Mount Tantalus, the jetliners landing at the international airport, the facilities at Pearl Harbor. There could be no room for error. Unless the operation went according to plan, the beautiful island would become a vast killing field.

At last he looked at the man studying the digital numbers on the ship’s computerized navigation system. “Captain Quick.”

The master of the Glomar Explorer looked up. “Admiral Sandecker.”

“How far to the site?”

Quick smiled. It was only the twentieth time the admiral had asked the same question since departing Halawa Bay. “Less than five hundred meters and another twenty minutes until we begin pinpointing the ship over the numbers your people computed for the Global Positioning System.”

“Which leaves us only forty minutes to deploy the reflector shield.”

“Thanks to Chief Toft and his engine-room crew, otherwise we never could have made it on schedule.”

“Yes,” Sandecker agreed. “We owe him big.”

The long minutes passed with everyone in the wheelhouse keeping one eye on the clock and the other on the red digital numbers of the Global Positioning System as they diminished finally to a row of zeros, indicating the ship was over the precise site where the sound rays were calculated to converge and explode with unparalleled intensity. The next project was to hold the ship in the exact spot. Captain Quick focused on programming the coordinates into the automated ship’s control system, which analyzed sea and weather conditions and controlled the thruster jets on the bow and stern. In an incredibly short time span, the Glomar Explorer had achieved station and was able to hover motionless in the water, resisting wind and current within a deviation factor of less than a meter.

Several other systems, each critical to the operation, also came into play. The pitch was feverish. Teams of engineers and technicians, electronics systems experts and scientists worked simultaneously to put the reflector shield in the precise path of the sound waves. The NUMA team, working on platforms far above the deck, made the final connections and attached the shield to the drop hook of the derrick.

Far below, one of the most unique sections of the ship stirred to life. Taking up the middle third of the ship, the 1,367 square meter Moon Pool, as it was called, filled with water as two sections of the center hull, one fore, the other aft, retracted into specially designed sleeves, The true heart of the seafloor dredging system and what had been the recovery operation of the Russian submarine, the Moon Pool was where it all came together, where the dredging hose would be extended thousands of meters deep to the minerals carpeting the ocean’s bottom and where the vast reflector shield would be lowered into the sea.

The engineering systems on board the Glomar Explorer were originally constructed to raise heavy objects from the seafloor, not to lower lighter but more expansive objects downward. Procedures were hurriedly modified for the complex operation. Minor glitches were quickly overcome. Every move was coordinated and performed with precision.

The tension on the lowering cable was increased by the derrick operator until the reflector hung free in the air. The appropriate signal by the NUMA team was given, indicating that the reflector assembly was “all completed.” The entire unit was then lowered diagonally through the rectangular Moon Pool into the sea with centimeters to spare. It was that close. The immersion time ran ten meters a minute. Full deployment by the cables securing the dish at the precise angle and depth to ricochet the sound waves to Gladiator Island took fourteen minutes.

“Six minutes and ten seconds to convergence,” Captain Quick’s voice droned over the ship’s loudspeakers. “All ship’s personnel will go to the engine-room storage compartment at the aft end of the ship and enter as you have been instructed. Do this immediately. I say immediately. Run, do not walk.”

Suddenly, everyone was dropping down ladders and scaffolding, hurrying in unison like a pack of marathon runners toward the propulsion and pump room deep in the bowels of the ship. Here, twenty ship’s crewmembers had been busily sound-isolating the supply compartment with every piece of dampening material they could lay their hands on. The ship’s towels, blankets, bedding and mattresses, along with all cushions from lounge chairs and any scraps of lumber they could scrounge were placed against ceiling, deck and bulkheads to deaden all intruding sound.

As they rushed down the passageways belowdecks, Sandecker said to Ames, “This is the agonizing part of the operation.”

“I know what you’re thinking,” Ames replied, agilely descending two steps at a time. “The anxiety of wondering if we made a tiny miscalculation that put us in the wrong place at the wrong time. The frustration of not knowing whether we succeeded if we don’t live through the convergence. The unknown factors are mind boggling.”

They reached the engine room storage compartment, which had been selected to ride out the convergence because of its watertight door and its total lack of air ducts. They were checked in by two ship’s officers who were counting heads and handing out sound-deadening headgear that fit over the ears. “Admiral Sandecker, Dr. Ames, please place these over your ears and try not to move around.”

Sandecker and Ames found the NUMA team members settled in one corner of the compartment and joined them, moving beside Rudi Gunn and Molly Faraday, who had preceded them. They immediately gathered around monitoring systems that were integrated with the warning modems and other underwater sensors. Only the admiral, Ames and Gunn held off using the sound deadeners so they could confer right up to the final few seconds.

The compartment quickly filled amid a strange silence. Unable to hear, no one spoke. Captain Quick stood on a small box so he could be observed by all in the room. He held up two fingers as a two-minute warning. The derrick operator, who had the farthest to travel, was the last man to enter. Satisfied that every person on the ship had been accounted for, the captain ordered that the door be sealed. Several mattresses were also pressed against the exit to muffle any sound that seeped into the confined compartment. Quick held up one finger, and the tension began to build until it lay like a mantle over the people packed closely together. All stood. There wasn’t enough room to sit or recline.

Gunn had calculated that the ninety-six men and women had less than fifteen minutes in the tight quarters before their breathable air stagnated and they were overwhelmed by the effects of asphyxiation. Already the atmosphere was beginning to grow stale. The only other immediate danger was claustrophobia rearing its ugly head. The last thing they needed was unbridled hysteria. He gave Molly an encouraging wink and began monitoring the time while almost everyone else watched the ship’s captain as if he were a symphony orchestra conductor with poised baton.

Quick raised both hands and curled them into fists. The moment of truth had arrived. Everything now hinged on the data analyzed by Hiram Yaeger’s computer network. The ship was on station exactly as directed, the shield was in the precise position calculated by Yaeger and crosschecked by Dr. Ames and his staff. The entire operation down to the slightest detail was acted upon. Nothing less than a sudden and unusual change in sea temperature or an unforeseen seismic occurrence that significantly altered the ocean’s current could spell disaster. The enormous consequences of failure were blanked from the minds of the NUMA team.

Five seconds passed, then ten. Sandecker began to feel the prickle of disaster in the nape of his neck. Then suddenly, ominously, the acoustic sensors, thirty kilometers distant, began registering the incoming sound waves along their predicted paths.

“Good Lord!” muttered Ames. “The sensors have gone off the scale. The intensity is greater than I estimated.”

“Twenty seconds and counting!” snapped Sandecker. “Get your ear mufflers on.”

The first indication of the convergence was a small resonance that rapidly grew in magnitude. The dampened bulkheads vibrated in conjunction with a hum that penetrated the sound-deadening ear protectors. The crowded people in the confined room sensed a mild form of disorientation and vertigo. But no one was struck by nausea and none panicked. The discomfort was borne stoically. Sandecker and Ames stared at each other, fulfillment swamping them in great trembling waves.

Five long minutes later it was all over. The resonance had faded away, leaving an almost supernatural silence behind it.

Gunn was the first to react. He tore off his sound deadeners, waved his arms and shouted at Captain Quick, “The door. Open the door and let some air in here.”

Quick got the message. The mattresses were cast aside and the door undogged and thrown open. The air that filtered into the room reeked with oil from the ship’s engine room but was welcomed by all as they slowly removed the sound deadeners from their heads. Vastly relieved the threat was over, they shouted and laughed like fans celebrating a win of their favorite football team. Then slowly, in an orderly manner, they filed from the storage room, up the companionways and into the fresh air.

Sandecker’s reaction time was almost inhuman. He ran up the companionways to the wheelhouse in a time that would have broken any existing record, if there had been one. He snatched up a pair of binoculars and rushed out onto the bridge wing. Anxiously, he focused the lenses on the island, only fifteen kilometers distant.

Cars were traveling routinely on the streets, and busy crowds of sunseekers moved freely about the beaches. Only then did he expel a long sigh and sag in relief over the railing, totally drained of emotion.

“An utter triumph, Admiral,” Ames said, pumping Sandecker’s hand. “You proved the best scientific minds in the country wrong.”

“I was blessed with your expertise and support, Doc,” Sandecker said as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. “I’d have accomplished nothing but for you and your staff of bright young scientists.”

Overcome with exhilaration, Gunn and Molly both hugged Sandecker, an act considered unthinkable on any other occasion. “You did it!” said Gunn. “Nearly two million lives saved, thanks to your stubbornness.”

“We did it,” Sandecker corrected him. “From beginning to end it was a team effort.”

Gunn’s expression suddenly turned sober. “A great pity Dirk wasn’t here to see it.”

Sandecker nodded solemnly. “His concept was the spark that ignited the project.”

Ames studied the array of instruments he had set up during the voyage from Molokai.

“The reflector positioning was perfect,” he said happily. “The acoustic energy was reversed exactly as intended.”

“Where is it now?” asked Molly.

“Combined with the energy from the other three island mining operations, the sound waves are traveling back to Gladiator Island faster than any jet plane. Their combined force should strike the submerged base in roughly ninety-seven minutes.”

“I’d love to see his face.”

“Whose face?” asked Ames innocently.

“Arthur Dorsett’s,” answered Molly, “when his private island starts to rock and roll.”

The two men and the woman crouched in a clump of bushes off to one side of the great archway that broke the middle of a high, lava-rock wall enclosing the entire Dorsett estate. Beyond the archway, a brick driveway circled around a large, well-trimmed lawn through a grand port cochere, a tall structure extending from the front of the house to shelter people getting in and out of cars. The entire driveway and house were illuminated by bright lamps strategically spaced about the landscaped grounds. Entry was barred by a thick iron gate that looked like it came from a castle out of the Middle Ages. Nearly five meters thick, the archway itself housed a small office for the security guards.

“Is there another way in?” Pitt asked Maeve softly.

“The arched gate is the only way in or out,” she whispered back.

“No drainage pipe or small ravine conveniently running beneath the wall?”

“Believe me, when I think of all the times I wanted to run away from my father when I was a young girl, I’d have found a passage leading from the grounds.”

“Security detectors?”

“Laser beams along the top of the wall with infrared body-heat sensors installed at different intervals about the grounds. Anything larger than a cat will cause an alarm to sound in the security office. Television cameras automatically come on and aim their lenses at the intruder.”

“How many guards?”

“Two at night, four during the day.”

“No dogs?”

She shook her head in the darkness. “Father hates animals. I never forgave him for stomping on a small bird with a broken wing I was trying to nurse back to health.”

“Old Art certainly creates an image of barbarity and viciousness,” said Giordino. “Does he do cannibalism, too?”

“He’s capable of anything, as you very well found out,” said Maeve.

Pitt stared at the gate thoughtfully, carefully gauging visible activity by the guards. They seemed content to stay inside and monitor the security systems. Finally, he rose to his feet, rumpled his uniform and turned to Giordino.

“I’m going to bluff my way inside. Hang loose until I open the gate.”

He slung the assault rifle over his shoulder and pulled his Swiss army knife from a pocket. Extending a small blade he made a small cut in one thumb, squeezed out the blood and smeared it over his face. When he reached the gate, Pitt dropped to his knees and gripped the bars in both hands. Then he began to shout in a low moaning tone, as if in pain.

“Help me. I need help!”

A face appeared around the door, then disappeared. Seconds later, both guards ran out of the security office and opened the gate. Pitt fell forward into their waiting arms.

“What happened?” demanded a guard. “Who did this to you?”

“A gang of Chinese tunneled out of the camp. I was coming up the road from the dock when they jumped me from behind. I think I killed two of them before I got away.”

“We’d better alert the main security compound,” blurted one of the guards.

“Help me inside first,” Pitt groaned. “I think they fractured my skull.”

The guards lifted Pitt to his feet and slung his arms over their shoulders. They half carried, half dragged him into the security office. Slowly, Pitt moved his arms inward until the guards’ necks were in the crooks of his elbows. As they pressed together to pass through the doorway, he took a convulsive step backwards, hooked the guards’ necks in a tight grip and exerted every bit of strength in his biceps and shoulder muscles. The sound of their bared heads colliding was an audible thud. They both crashed to the floor, unconscious for at least the next two hours.

Safe from detection, Giordino and Maeve hurried through the opened gate and joined Pitt inside the office. Giordino picked up the guards as if they were straw scarecrows and sat them in chairs around a table facing a row of video monitors. “To anyone walking by,” he said, “it’ll look like they fell asleep during the movie.”

A quick scan of the security system, and Pitt closed down the alarms, while Giordino bound the guards with their own ties and belts. Then Pitt looked at Maeve. “Where’s Ferguson’s quarters?”

“There are two guest houses in a grove of trees behind the manor. He lives in one of them.”

“I don’t suppose you know which one?”

She shrugged. “This is the first time I’ve returned to the island since I ran away to Melbourne and the university. If I remember correctly, he lives in the one nearest the manor.”

“Time to repeat our break-in act,” said Pitt. “Let’s hope we haven’t lost our touch.”

They moved up the driveway at a steady, unhurried pace. They were too weakened from an inadequate diet and the hardships of the past weeks to run. They reached what Maeve believed was the living quarters of Jack Ferguson, superintendent of Dorsett’s mines on Gladiator Island.

The sky was beginning to lighten in the east as they approached the front door. The search was taking too long. With the coming of dawn, their presence would most certainly be discovered. They had to move fast if they wanted to find the boys, reach the yacht and escape in Arthur Dorsett’s private helicopter before the remaining darkness was lost.

There was no stealth this time, no slinking quietly into the house. Pitt walked up to the front door, kicked it in with a splintering crunch and walked inside. A quick look around with the flashlight taken from the guards at the cliff told him all he needed to know. Ferguson lived there all right. There was a stack of mail on a desk that was addressed to him and a calendar with notations. Inside a closet, Pitt found neatly pressed men’s pants and coats.

“Nobody home,” he said. “Jack Ferguson has gone. No sign of suitcases, and half the hangers in the closet are empty.”

“He’s got to be here,” said Maeve in confusion.

“According to dates he’s marked on his calendar, Ferguson is on a tour of your father’s other mining properties”

She stared at the vacant room in futility and growing despair. “My boys are gone. We’re too late. Oh God, we’re too late. They’re dead.”

Pitt put his arm around her. “They’re as alive as you and I”

“But John Merchant—”

Giordino stood in the doorway. “Never trust a man with beady eyes.”

“No sense in wasting time here,” said Pitt, pushing past Giordino. “The boys are in the manor house, always have been, as a matter of fact.”

“You couldn’t have known Merchant was lying,” Maeve challenged Pitt.

He smiled. “Ah, but Merchant didn’t lie. You were the one who said the boys lived with Jack Ferguson in a guesthouse. Merchant merely went along with you. He guessed we were suckers enough to buy it. Well, maybe we did, but only for a second.”

“You knew?”

“It goes without saying that your father wouldn’t harm your sons. He may threaten, but a dime will get you a quarter they’re sequestered in your old room, where they’ve been all along, playing with a room full of toys, courtesy of their old granddad.”

Maeve looked at him in confusion. “He didn’t force them to work in the mines?”

“Probably not. He turned the screws on your maternal instincts to make you think your babies were suffering so he could make you suffer. The dirty bastard wanted you to go to your death believing he would enslave the twins, place them in the care of a sadistic foreman and work them until they died. Face facts. With Boudicca and Deirdre childless, your boys are the only heirs he’s got. With you out of the way, he figured he could raise and mold them into his own image. In your eyes a fate worse than death.”

Maeve looked at Pitt for a long moment, her expression turning from disbelief to understanding, then she shivered. “What kind of fool am I?”

“A great song title,” said Giordino. “I hate to dampen good news, but this time the people of the house are stirring about.” He gestured at lights shining in the windows of the manor house.

“My father always rises before dawn,” said Maeve. “He never allowed my sisters and me to sleep after sunrise.”

“What I wouldn’t give to join them for breakfast,” moaned Giordino.

“Not to sound like an echo chamber,” said Pitt, “but we need a way in without provoking the inhabitants.”

“All rooms of the manor open onto interior verandas except one. Daddy’s study has a side door that leads onto a squash court.”

“What’s a squash court?” inquired Giordino.

“A court where they play squash,” answered Pitt. Then to Maeve “In what direction is your old bedroom?”

“Across the garden and past the swimming pool to the east wing, second door on the right.”

“That’s it then. You two go after the boys.”

“What will you do?”

“Me, I’m going to borrow Daddy’s phone and stick him with a long-distance call.”

The atmosphere on board the Glomar Explorer was relaxed and partylike. The NUMA team and the ship’s personnel that were gathered in the spacious lounge next to the galley celebrated their success in repelling the acoustic plague. Admiral Sandecker and Dr. Ames were sitting opposite each other, sipping champagne poured from a bottle produced by Captain Quick from his private stock for special occasions.

After further consideration, it was decided to reclaim the antenna/reflector from the water and dismantle it again in case Dorsett Consolidated’s disastrous mining operations could not be terminated and it became essential to stop another acoustic convergence in order to save lives. The reflector shield was raised, and the hull below the Moon Pool was sealed off and the sea pumped from its cavernous interior. Within an hour, the historic ship was on its return course to Molokai.

Sandecker heaved himself out of his chair after being informed by the ship’s communications officer that he had an important call from his chief geologist, Charlie Bakewell. He walked to a quiet part of the lounge and pulled a compact satellite phone from his pocket. “Yes, Charlie.”

“I understand congratulations are in order.” Bakewell’s voice came clearly.

“It was a close thing. We barely positioned the ship and dropped the reflector shield before the convergence occurred. Where are you now?”

“I’m here at the Joseph Marmon Volcanic Observatory in Auckland, New Zealand. I have an update for you from their staff of geophysicists. Their most recent analysis of the sound ray energy’s impact cars Gladiator Island isn’t very encouraging.”

“Can they compute the repercussions?”

“I’m sorry to say the predicted magnitude is worse than I originally thought,” answered Bakewell. “The two volcanoes on the island, I’ve since learned, are called Mount Scaggs and Mount Winkleman, after two survivors from the raft of the Gladiator. They’re part of a chain of potentially explosive volcanoes that encircles the Pacific Ocean known as the `Ring of Fire’ and lie not far from a tectonic plate similar to the ones separating the San Andreas Fault in California. Most volcanic activity and earthquakes are caused by a movement of these plates. Studies indicate the volcanoes’ last major activity occurred sometime between 1225 and 1275 A.D., when they erupted simultaneously.”

“As I recall, you said the chances of them erupting from the convergence impact was one in five.”

“After consulting with the experts here at the Marmon Observatory, I’ve lowered the odds to less than even.”

“I can’t believe the sound ray traveling toward the island has the strength to cause a volcanic eruption,” said Sandecker incredulously.

“Not by itself,” replied Bakewell. “But what we neglected to consider was Dorsett’s mining operations making the volcanoes most susceptible to outside tremors. Even a minor seismic disturbance could trigger volcanic activity from Mounts Scaggs and Winkleman, because years of excavating diamonds has removed much of the ancestral deposits containing the gaseous pressure from below. In short, if Dorsett doesn’t stop digging, it’s only a matter of time before his miners uncork the central conduit, releasing an explosion of molten lava.”

“An explosion of molten lava,” Sandecker repeated mechanically. “Dear God, what have we done? Hundreds of lives will be lost.”

“Don’t be in a rush to confess your sins,” said Bakewell seriously. “There are no women and children known to be on Gladiator Island. You’ve already saved the lives of countless families on Oahu from certain extinction. Your action is bound to wake up the White House and State Department to the threat. Sanctions and legal actions against Dorsett Consolidated Mining will occur, I guarantee it. Without your intervention the acoustic plague would have continued, and there is no telling what harbor city the next convergence zone might have intersected.”

“Still ... I might have ordered the reflector shield to divert the sound waves toward an uninhabited landmass,” said Sandecker slowly.

“And watch it surge through another unsuspecting fishing fleet or cruise ship. We all agreed this was the safest path. Give it a rest, Jim, you have no reason to condemn yourself.”

“You mean I have no choice but to live with it.”

“What is Dr. Ames’ estimate of the sound wave’s arrival at Gladiator?” inquired Bakewell, steering Sandecker away from a guilt trip.

Sandecker glanced at his watch. “Twenty-one minutes to impact.”

“There’s still time to warn the inhabitants to evacuate the island.”

“My people in Washington have already tried to alert Dorsett Consolidated Mining management of the potential danger,” said Sandecker. “But under orders from Arthur Dorsett, all communications between his mining operations and the outside have been cut off.”

“It sounds almost as if Dorsett wanted something to happen.”

“He’s taking no chances of interference before his deadline.”

“There is still a possibility no eruption will happen. The sound ray’s energy might dissipate before impact.”

“According to Dr. Ames’ calculations, there’s little chance of that,” said Sandecker. “What is your worst case scenario?”

“Mount Scaggs and Mount Winkleman are described as shield volcanoes, having built gently sloping mounds during their former activity. This class is seldom highly explosive like cinder cones, but Scaggs and Winkleman are not ordinary shield volcanoes. Their last eruption was quite violent. The experts here at the observatory expect explosions around the base or flanks of the mounds that will produce rivers of lava.”

“Can anyone on the island survive such a cataclysm?” asked Sandecker.

“Depends on which side the violence takes place. Al, most no chance if the volcanoes blow out toward the inhabited part of the island on the west.”

“And if they blow to the east?”

“Then the odds of survival should rise slightly, even with repercussions from enough seismic activity to bring down most if not all of the island’s buildings.”

“Is there a danger of the eruption causing tidal waves?”

“Our analysis does not indicate a seismic disturbance with the strength to produce monstrous tidal activity,” explained Bakewell. “Certainly nothing on the magnitude of the Krakatoa holocaust near Java in 1883. The shores of Tasmania, Australia and New Zealand shouldn’t be touched by waves higher thaw one and a half meters.”

“That’s a plus,” Sandecker sighed.

“I’ll get back to you when I know more,” said Bakewell. “Hopefully, I’ve given you the worst, and all news from now on will be good.”

“Thank you, Charlie. I hope so too.”

Sandecker switched off the phone and stood there thoughtfully. Anxiety and foreboding did not show on his face, not a twitch of an eyelid, not even a tightening of the lips, but there was a dread running deep beneath the surface. He did not notice Rudi Gunn approaching him until he felt his shoulder tapped.

“Admiral, there is another call for you. It’s from your office in Washington.”

Sandecker switched on the phone and spoke into it again. “This is Sandecker.”

“Admiral?” came the familiar voice of his longtime secretary, Martha Sherman. Her normally formal tone was nervous with excitement. “Please stand by. I’m going to relay a call to you.”

“Is it important?” he asked irritably. “I’m not in the mood for official business.”

“Believe me, you’ll want to take this call,” she informed him happily. “One moment while I switch you over.”

A pause, then, “Hello,” said Sandecker. “Who’s this?”

“Good morning from Down Under, Admiral. What’s this about you dawdling around blue Hawaii?”

Sandecker was not the kind of man to tremble, but he trembled now and felt as if the deck had fallen from under his feet. “Dirk, good Lord, is it you?”

“What’s left of me,” Pitt replied. “I’m with AI and Maeve Fletcher.”

“I can’t believe you’re all alive,” Sandecker said as if an electrical surge was coursing through his veins.

“AI said to save him a cigar.”

“How is the little devil?”

“Testy because I won’t let him eat.”

“When we learned that you were cast adrift by Arthur Dorsett in the path of a typhoon, I moved heaven and earth to launch a massive search, but the long arm of Dorsett frustrated my rescue efforts. After almost three weeks with no word, we thought you were all dead. Tell me how you survived all this time.”

“A long story,” said Pitt. “I’d rather you brought me up-to-date on the acoustic plague.”

“A story far more involved than yours. I’ll give you the particulars when we meet. Where are the three of you now?”

“We managed to reach Gladiator Island. I’m sitting in Arthur Dorsett’s study as we speak, borrowing his telephone.”

Sandecker went numb with disbelief. “You can’t be serious.”

“The gospel truth. We’re going to snatch Maeve’s twin boys and make our getaway across the Tasman Sea to Australia.” He said it in such a way as to sound like he was walking down the street to buy a loaf of bread.

Cold fear replaced Sandecker’s earlier anxiety, but it was the shocking fear of helplessness. The news struck with such unexpectedness, such suddenness, that he was incapable of words for several seconds until Pitt’s inquiring voice finally penetrated his shock.

“Are you still there, Admiral?”

“Pitt, listen to me!” demanded Sandecker urgently. “Your lives are in extreme danger! Get off the island!’ Get off now!”

There was a slight pause. “Sorry, sir, I don’t read you—”

“I’ve no time to explain,” Sandecker interrupted. “All I can tell you is a sound ray of incredible intensity will strike Gladiator Island in less than twenty minutes. The impact will set up seismic resonance that is predicted to blow off the volcanoes on opposite ends of the island. If the eruption takes place on the western side, there will be no survivors. You and the others must escape to sea while you still can. Talk no further. I am cutting off all communications.”

Sandecker switched off his phone, capable of nothing but the realization that he had unknowingly and innocently sealed a death warrant on his best friend.

The shocking knowledge struck Pitt like the thrust of a dagger. He stared through a large picture window at the helicopter sitting on the yacht moored to the pier in the lagoon. He estimated the distance at just under a kilometer. Burdened by two young children, he figured they would need a good fifteen minutes to reach the dock. Without means of transportation, a car or a truck, it would be an extremely close timetable. The time for caution had flown as if there had never been such a time. Giordino and Maeve should have found her sons by now. They had to have found them. If not, something must have gone terribly wrong.

He turned his gaze first toward Mount Winkleman, and then swept the saddle of the island, his eyes stopping on Mount Scaggs. They looked deceptively peaceful. Seeing the lush growth of trees in the ravines scoring the slopes, he found it hard to imagine the two mounts as menacing volcanoes, sleeping giants on the verge of spewing death and disaster in a burst of gaseous steam and molten rock.

Briskly, but not in a hurried panic, he rose out of Dorsett’s leather executive chair and came around the desk. At that instant, he halted abruptly, frozen in the exact center of the room as the double doors to the main interior of the house swung open, and Arthur Dorsett walked in.

He was carrying a cup of coffee in one hand and a file of papers under an arm. He wore wrinkled slacks and what had once been white but was now a yellowed dress shirt with a bow tie. His mind seemed elsewhere. Perceiving another body in his study, he looked up, more curious than surprised. Seeing the intruder was in uniform, his first thought was that Pitt was a security guard. He opened his mouth to demand the reason for Pitt’s presence, then stiffened in petrified astonishment. His face became a pale mask molded by shock and bewilderment. The file fell to the floor, its papers sliding out like a fanned deck of cards. His hand dropped to his side, spilling the coffee on his slacks and the carpet.

“You’re dead!” he gasped.

“You don’t know how happy I am to prove you wrong,” Pitt commented, pleased to see that Dorsett wore a patch over one eye. “Come to think of it, you do look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“The storm ... there is no way you could have survived a raging sea.” A flicker of emotional repossession showed in the one black eye and slowly but surely grew. “How was it possible?”

“A lot of positive thinking and my Swiss army knife.” My God, this guy is big, Pitt thought, very glad he was the one pointing a gun.

“And Maeve ... is she dead?” He spoke haltingly as he studied the assault rifle in Pitt’s hands, the muzzle aimed at his heart.

“Just knowing that it causes you great annoyance and displeasure makes me happy to report she is alive and well and at this very moment about to make off with your grandsons.” Pitt stared back, green eyes locked with black. “Tell me, Dorsett. How do you justify murdering—your own daughter? Did one single woman who was simply trying to find herself as a person pose a threat to your assets? Or was it her sons you wanted, all to yourself?”

“It was essential the empire be carried on after my death by my direct descendants. Maeve refused to see it that way.”

“I have news for you. Your empire is about to come crashing down around your head.”

Dorsett failed to grasp Pitt’s meaning. “You intend to kill me?”

Pitt shook his head. “I’m not your executioner. The island volcanoes are going to erupt. A fitting end for you, Arthur, consumed by fiery lava.”

Dorsett smiled faintly as he regained control. “What sort of nonsense is that?”

“Too complicated to explain. I don’t know all the technicalities myself, but I have it on the best authority. You’ll just have to take my word for it.”

“You’re bloody insane.”

“0 ye of little faith.”

“If you’re going to shoot,” said Dorsett, cold anger glaring from his coal-black eye, “do it now, clean and quick.”

Pitt grinned impassively. Maeve and Giordino had yet to make an appearance. For the moment he needed Arthur Dorsett alive in case they had been captured by security guards. “Sorry, I haven’t the time. Now please turn around and go up the stairs to the bedrooms.”

“My grandchildren, you can’t have my grandchildren,” he muttered as if it was a divine statement.

“Correction, Maeve’s children.”

“You’ll never get past my security guards.”

“The two at the front gate are— what’s the word?— incapacitated.”

“Then you’ll have to murder me in cold blood, and I’ll wager everything I’ve got that you don’t have the guts for it.”

“Why is it people keep thinking I can’t stand the sight of blood?” Pitt touched his finger against the trigger of the assault rifle. “Get moving, Arthur, or I’ll shoot off your ears.”

“Go ahead, you yellow bastard,” Dorsett lashed out, pronouncing it as bahstud. “You already took one of my eyes.”

“You don’t get the picture, do you?” White-hot anger consumed Pitt at seeing Dorsett’s arrogant belligerence. He raised the rifle slightly and gently squeezed the trigger. The gun spat with a loud pop through the suppressor and a slice of Dorsett’s left ear sprayed the carpet. “Now, head for the stairs. Make a move I don’t like and you’ll get a bullet in the spine.”

There was no hint of pain in the bestial black eye. Dorsett smiled a menacing smile that sent an involuntary shiver through Pitt. Then slowly, he put a hand to his shattered ear and turned toward the door.

At that instant Boudicca walked into the study, majestically straight and handsomely proportioned in a form, fitting silk robe that stopped several centimeters above her knees, not recognizing Pitt in the guard’s uniform, and not realizing her father was in immediate danger. “What is it, Daddy? I thought I heard a gunshot—” Then she noticed the blood seeping through fingers pressed against his head. “You’re hurt!”

“We have unwelcome visitors, Daughter,” said Dorsett. Almost as if he had eyes in the back of his head, he knew that Pitt’s attention was focused briefly on Boudicca. Unwittingly, she didn’t fail him. As she rushed toward him to assess the damage, she caught sight of Pitt’s face out of the corner of one eye. For an instant her face reflected confusion, then abruptly her eyes widened in recognition.

“No ... no, it’s not possible.”

It was the distraction Dorsett had prepared for. In a violent twisting motion, he whirled around, one arm striking the gun barrel and knocking it aside.

Pitt instinctively pulled the trigger. A spray of bullets blasted into a painting of Charles Dorsett over a fireplace mantel. Physically weakened and dead on his feet from lack of sleep, Pitt’s reaction time was a fraction longer than it should have been. The strain and exhaustion of the past three weeks had taken their toll. He watched in what seemed slow motion as the assault rifle was torn from his hands and sent flying across the room before smashing through a window.

Dorsett was on Pitt like a maddened rhino. Pitt clutched him, struggling to stay on his feet. But the heavier man was swinging his huge fists like pile drivers, his thumbs gouging at Pitt’s eyes. Pitt twisted his head and kept his eyes in their sockets, but a fist caught him on the side of the head above one ear. Fireworks burst inside his brain, and he was swept by a wave of dizziness. Desperately, Pitt crouched and rolled to his side to escape the rain of blows.

He jumped in the opposite direction as Dorsett lunged at him. The old diamond miner had sent many a man to the hospital with only his bare hands, backed by arms and shoulders thick with muscle. During his rough-and tumble youth in the mines, he had prided himself on never having to resort to knives and guns. His bulk and power were all he required to put away anyone with the nerve to stand up to him. Even at an age when most men turned to flab, Dorsett retained a body as hard as granite.

Pitt shook his head to clear his sight. He felt like a battered prizefighter, desperately holding on to the ropes until the bell for the end of the round, struggling to bring his mind back on track. Few were the martial-arts experts who could put down Dorsett’s irresistible mass of sheer muscle. Pitt was beginning to think the only thing that would slow the diamond merchant was an elephant gun. If only Giordino would charge over the hill. At least he had a nine-millimeter automatic. Pitt’s mind raced on, adding up viable moves, dismissing the ones certain to end with broken bones. He dodged around the desk, stalling for time, facing Dorsett and forcing a smile that made his face ache.

Pitt had learned long ago after numerous barroom fights and riots that hands and feet were no match against chairs, beer mugs and whatever else was handy to crack skulls. He glanced around for the nearest weapon.

“What now, old man? Are you going to bite me with your rotting teeth?”

The insult had the desired effect. Dorsett roared insanely and lashed out with a foot at Pitt’s groin. His timing was off by a fractional instant, and his heel only grazed Pitt’s hip. Then he leaped across the desk. Pitt calmly took one step back, snatched up a metal desklamp and swung it with strength renewed by wrath and hatred.

Dorsett tried to lift an arm to ward off the blow, but he was a fraction slow. The lamp caught him on the wrist, snapping it before hurtling on against the shoulder and breaking the collarbone with a sharp crack. He bellowed like a stricken animal and came after Pitt again with a look of black malevolence heightened by pain and pure savagery. He threw a vicious punch at Pitt’s head.

Pitt ducked and jammed the base of the lamp downward. It connected somewhere below Dorsett’s knee on the shin, but the momentum of the flying leg knocked the lamp from Pitt’s hand. There was a clunk on the carpet. Now Dorsett was coming back at him almost as if he were completely uninjured. The veins were throbbing on the sides of his neck, the eye blazed and there were dribbles of saliva at the ends of his cracked, gasping mouth. He actually seemed to be laughing. He had to be mad. He mumbled something incoherent and leaped toward Pitt.

Dorsett never reached his victim. His right leg collapsed, and he crashed to the floor on his back. Pitt’s swing of the lamp base had broken his shinbone. This time Pitt reacted like a cat. With a lightning move, he sprang onto the desk, tensed and jumped.

Together, Pitt’s feet hurtled downward, ramming soles and heels into Dorsett’s exposed neck. The malignant face, single eye gleaming black, yellowed teeth bared, seemed to stretch in shock. A huge hand groped the empty air. Arms and legs lashed out blindly. An agonized animal sound burst from his throat, a horrible gurgling sound that came through his crushed windpipe. Then Dorsett’s body collapsed as all life faded away and the sadistic light in his eye blinked out.

Pitt somehow managed to remain standing, panting through clenched teeth. He stared at Boudicca, who strangely had made no move to help her father. She looked down at the dead body on the carpet with the uncaring but fascinated expression of a witness at a fatal traffic accident.

“You killed him,” she said finally in a normal tone of voice.

“Few men deserved to die more,” Pitt said, catching his breath while massaging a growing knot on his head.

Boudicca turned her attention away from her dead father as though he didn’t exist. “I should thank you, Mr. Pitt, for handing me Dorsett Consolidated Mining Limited on a silver platter.”

“I’m touched by your sorrow.”

She smiled boredly. “You did me a favor.”

“To the adoring daughter go the spoils. What about Maeve and Deirdre? They’re each entitled to a third of the business.”

“Deirdre will receive her share,” Boudicca said matter-of-factly. “Maeve, if she is still alive, will get nothing. Daddy had already cut her out of the business.”

“And the twins?”

She shrugged. “Little boys have accidents every day.”

“I guess it isn’t in you to be a loving aunt.”

Pitt went taut from the bleak prospects. In a few minutes the eruption would occur. He wondered whether he had the strength left to fight another Dorsett. He remembered his surprise when Boudicca had lifted and crushed his body against the wall on her yacht at Kunghit Island. His biceps still ached from the memory of her grip. According to Sandecker, the acoustic wave would strike the island in minutes, followed by the eruption of the volcanoes. If he had to die, he might as well go out fighting. Somehow being beaten to pulp by a woman didn’t seem as frightening as being cremated by molten lava. What of Maeve and her boys? He could not bring himself to believe harm had come to them, not with Giordino present. They had to be warned of the coming cataclysm if there was still any chance they could escape the island alive.

Deep inside him he knew he was no match for Boudicca, but he had to act while he had the slight advantage of surprise. The thought was still in his mind when he sprinted forward, head down, across the room, crashing shoulder first into Boudicca’s stomach. Boudicca was caught off guard, but it made little difference, almost no difference at all. She took the full force of the blow, grunted from the sudden shock, and although she reeled back a few steps, she remained standing. Before Pitt could recover his own balance, she clutched him with both arms under his chest, swung around in a half circle and threw him against a bookcase, his back shattering the glass doors. Incredibly, he managed somehow to remain erect on wobbly legs instead of crashing to the floor.

Pitt gasped in agony. His whole body felt like every’ bone was broken. He fought off the pain and charged again, catching Boudicca with a bruising uppercut with his fist that drew blood. It was a blow that should have knocked any woman unconscious for a week, but Boudicca simply wiped away the blood streaming from her mouth with the back of one hand and smiled horribly. She doubled her fists and moved toward Pitt, crouched in a boxer’s stance. Hardly correct posture for a lady, Pitt thought.

He stepped in, ducked under a savage right-hand slash and hit her again with the last of his remaining strength, He felt his fist drive home against flesh and bone, and then he was pounded by a tremendous blow that caught him in the chest. Pitt thought his heart had been mashed to pulp. He couldn’t believe any woman could hit so hard. He had hammered her with a punch that had more than enough momentum to break her jaw, yet she still smiled through a bleeding mouth and repaid him with a driving backhand that drove him into the stone fireplace, forcing all the breath out of his lungs. He fell and lay there grotesquely for several moments, engulfed in pain, As though in a fog, he pushed himself to his knees, then came to his feet and stood swaying, gathering himself for one final move.

Boudicca stepped in and brutally caught Pitt in the rib cage with her elbow. He could hear the sharp snap of one, maybe two ribs cracking, and felt the stabbing pain in his chest as he crumpled to his hands and knees. He stared dumbly at the design in the carpet and wanted to hold onto the floor forever. Perhaps he was dead and this was all there was to it, a floral design in a carpet.

Despairingly, he realized he could go no further. He groped for the fireplace poker, but his vision was too blurred and his movements too uncoordinated for him to find and grasp it in his hands. Vaguely, he saw Boudicca lean down, take him by one leg and hurl him crazily across the floor, where he collided with the open door. Then she walked over and picked him up by the collar with one hand and smashed him a hard blow in the head just above the eye. Pitt lay there, teetering on the edge of unconsciousness, swimming in pain, sensing but not really feeling the blood flowing from a gash above his left eye.

Like a cat toying with a mouse, Boudicca would soon tire of the game and kill him. Dazedly, almost miraculously, drawing on a strength he didn’t know he possessed, Pitt somehow struggled slowly to his feet for what he was certain would be the last time.

Boudicca stood there beside the body of her father, smirking with anticipation. Complete mastery was etched in her face. “Time for you to join my father,” she said. Her tone was deep, icy and compelling.

“There’s a nauseating thought for you.” Pitt’s voice came thick and slurred.

Then Pitt saw the malice slowly fade in Boudicca’s face and felt a hand gently ease him aside as Giordino entered the Dorsett family study.

He stared at Boudicca contemptuously and said, “This fancy maggot is mine.”

At that moment Maeve appeared in the doorway, clutching a pair of blond-haired little boys by the hands, one on either side of her. She looked from Pitt’s bleeding face to Boudicca to her father’s body on the floor. “What happened to Daddy?”

“He caught a sore throat,” muttered Pitt.

“Sorry I’m late,” said Giordino calmly. “A couple of servants proved overly protective. They locked themselves in a room with the boys. It took me a while to kick in the door.” He didn’t explain what he did with the servants. He handed Pitt the nine-millimeter automatic taken from John Merchant. “If she wins, shoot her.”

“With pleasure,” Pitt said, his eyes devoid of sympathy.

Gone was any display of confidence in Boudicca’s eyes. Gone too was any anticipation of merely hurting her opponent. This time she was fighting for her life, and she was going to use every dirty street-fighting trick she’d been taught by her father. This was to be no civilized boxing or karate match. She moved wolflike to position herself to deliver a killing blow, mindful of the gun in Pitt’s hand.

“So you came back from the dead too,” she hissed.

“You never left my dreams,” Giordino said, puckering his lips and sending her a kiss.

“A pity you survived only to die in my house—”

A mistake. Boudicca wasted the half-second with unnecessary talk. Giordino was on her like a cattle stampede, legs bent, feet extending as they came in contact with Boudicca’s chest. The impact doubled her over with a gasp of agony, but incredibly, she somehow retained her stance and clamped her hands around Giordino’s wrists. She hurled herself backward over the desk, pulling him with her until she was lying, back against the floor, with Giordino face-down on the desktop above her, seemingly defenseless with his arms stretched out and locked in front of him.

Boudicca looked up into Giordino’s face. The evil grin came back on her lips as she held her victim helpless in a steel grip. She increased the pressure and bent his wrists with the intention of breaking them with her Amazon strength. It was a shrewd move. She could render Giordino disabled while shielding herself with his body until she could retrieve a revolver Arthur Dorsett kept loaded inside a bottom desk drawer.

Pitt, waiting for a signal from his friend to shoot, could not line up the automatic on Boudicca under the desk. Barely conscious, it was all he could do to keep from collapsing, his vision still unfocused from the blow to the forehead. Maeve was huddling against him now, her arms clasped around her sons, shielding their eyes from the brutal scene.

Giordino seemed to lie there immobile, as if accepting defeat without fighting back, while Boudicca kept bending his wrists slowly backward. Her silk robe had fallen away from her shoulders, and Maeve, who stared in awe at those massive shoulders and bulging muscles, having never seen her older sister unclothed, was stunned at the sight. Then her gaze drifted to the body of her father sprawled on the carpet. There was no sadness in her eyes, only shock at his unexpected death.

Then slowly, as if he’d been conserving his strength, Giordino pulled his wrists and hands upward as if curling a set of weights. Incomprehension followed on the heels of shock in Boudicca’s face. Then came disbelief, and her body quivered as she exerted every trace of strength to stop the relentless force. Suddenly, she could grip his wrists no more, and her hold was broken. She immediately went for Giordino’s eyes, but he had expected the move and brushed her hands aside. Before Boudicca could recover, Giordino was across the desk and falling on her chest, his legs straddling her body, pressing her arms to the floor. Held immobile by strength she had never expected, Boudicca thrashed in frantic madness to escape. Desperately, she tried to reach the desk drawer containing the revolver, but Giordino’s knees kept her arms effectively pinned against her sides.

Giordino flexed his arm muscles, and then his hands were around her throat. “Like father, like daughter,” he snarled. “Join him in hell.”

Boudicca realized with sickening certainty that there would be no release, no mercy. She was effectively imprisoned. Her body convulsed in terror as Giordino’s massive hands squeezed the life from her. She tried to scream but only uttered a squawking cry. The crushing grip never relaxed as her face contorted, the eyes bulged and the skin began turning blue. Normally warm with a humorous smile, Giordino’s face remained expressionless as he squeezed ever more tightly.

The agonized drama lasted until Boudicca’s body jerked and stiffened, the strength drained out of her and she went limp. Without slackening his hold around her throat, Giordino pulled the giant woman off the floor and draped her body across the top of the desk.

Maeve watched in morbid fascination and shock as Giordino tore the silk robe from Boudicca’s body. Then she screamed and turned away, sickened at the sight.

“You called it, partner,” said Pitt, his thoughts struggling to adjust fully to what he beheld.

Giordino made a slight tilt of his head, his eyes cold and remote. “I knew the minute she socked me in the jaw on the yacht.”

“We’ve got to leave. The whole island is about to go up in smoke and cinders.”

“Come again?” Giordino asked dumbly.

“I’ll draw you a picture later.” Pitt looked at Maeve. “What have you got for transportation around the house?”

“A garage on the side of the house holds a pair of minicars Daddy uses-used for driving between the mines.”

Pitt swept one of the boys up in his arms. “Which one are you?”

Frightened of the blood streaming down Pitt’s face, the youngster mumbled, “Michael.” He pointed to his brother, who was now held by Giordino. “He’s Sean.”

“Ever flown in a helicopter, Michael?”

“No, but I always wanted to.”

“Wishing will make it so,” Pitt laughed.

As Maeve hurried from the study, she turned and took one last look at her father and Boudicca, whom she always thought of as her sister, an older sibling who remained distant and seldom displayed anything but animosity, but a sister nonetheless. Her father had kept the secret well, enduring the shame and hiding it from the world. It sickened her to discover after all these years that Boudicca was a man.

They found Dorsett’s island vehicles, compact models of a car built in Australia called a Holden, in a garage adjoining the manor. The cars had been customized by having all the doors removed for easy entry and exit and were painted a bright shade of yellow. Pitt was eternally thankful to the late Arthur Dorsett for leaving the key in the ignition of the first car in line. Quickly, they all piled in, Pitt and Giordino in the front, Maeve and her boys in the back.

The engine turned over, and Pitt shoved the floor shift into first gear. He pressed the accelerator pedal as he released the clutch, and the car leaped forward.

Giordino leaped out at the archway and opened the gate. They had hardly shot onto the road when they passed a four-wheel-drive open van filled with security men traveling in the other direction.

Pitt thought, this would have to happen now. Somebody must have given the alarm. Then reality entered his mind when he realized it was the changing of the guard. The men bound and posed inside the archway office were about to be relieved in more ways than one.

“Everybody wave and smile,” directed Pitt. “Make it look like we’re all one big happy family.”

The uniformed driver of the van slowed and stared curiously at the occupants of the Holden, then nodded and saluted, not sure he recognized anyone but assuming they were probably guests of the Dorsett family. The van was stopping at the archway as Pitt poured on the power’ and raced the Holden toward the dock stretching out into the lagoon.

“They bought it,” said Giordino.

Pitt smiled. “Only for the sixty seconds it takes them to figure out that the night-shift guards aren’t dozing out of boredom.”

He swerved off the main road serving the two mines’ and headed toward the lagoon. They had a straight shot at the dock area now. No cars or trucks stood between them and the yacht. Pitt didn’t take the time to look at his watch, but he knew they had less than four or five minutes before Sandecker’s predicted cataclysm.

“They’re coming after us,” Maeve called out grimly.

Pitt didn’t have to look in the rearview mirror to confirm, nor be told their run for freedom was in jeopardy because of the guards’ quick reaction in taking up the chase. The only question running through his mind was whether he and Giordino could get the helicopter airborne before the guards came within range and shot them out of the sky.

Giordino pointed through the windshield at their only obstacle, the guard standing outside the security office, watching their rapid approach. “What about him?”

Pitt returned Merchant’s automatic pistol to Giordino. “Take this and shoot him if I don’t scare him to death.”

“If you don’t what—?”

Giordino got no further. Pitt hit the stoutly built wooden dock at better than 120 kilometers per hour, then jammed his foot on the brake pedal, sending the car into a long skid aimed directly toward the security office. The startled guard, unsure which way to jump, froze for an instant and then leaped off the side of the dock into the water to escape being crushed against the front grill of the car.

“Neatly done,” Giordino said admiringly, as Pitt straightened out and braked sharply beside the yacht’s gangway.

“Quickly!” Pitt shouted. “Al, run to the helicopter, remove the tie-down ropes and start the engine. Maeve, you take your boys and wait out of sight in the salon. It will be safer there if the guards arrive before we can lift off. Wait until you see the rotor blades begin to turn on the aircraft. Then make a run for it.”

“Where will you be?” asked Giordino, helping Maeve lift the boys out of the car and sending them dashing up the gangway.

“Casting off the mooring lines to keep boarders off the boat.”

Pitt was sweating by the time he pulled the yacht’s heavy mooring ropes from their bollards and heaved them over the side. He took one final look at the road leading to the Dorsett manor house. The driver of the van had misjudged his turn off the main road and skidded the vehicle crosswise into a muddy field. Precious seconds were lost by the security men before they regained the road toward the lagoon. Then, in almost the exact same instant, the helicopter’s engine coughed into life followed by the crack of a gunshot from inside the yacht.

He sprinted up the gangway, fear exploding inside him, hating himself with the taste of venom for sending Maeve and her boys on board the boat without investigating. He reached for the nine millimeter, but then remembered he had given it to Giordino. He ran across the deck, muttered, “Please, God!” tore open the door to the salon and ran inside.

His mind reeled at the shock of hearing Maeve plead, “No, Deirdre, no, please, not them too!”

Pin’s eyes took in the terrible scene. Maeve on the floor, her back against a bookcase, her boys clutched in her arms, both sobbing in fright. A blood-red stain was spreading across her blouse from a small hole in her stomach at the navel.

Deirdre stood in the center of the salon, holding a small automatic pistol aimed at the twin boys, her face and bare arms like polished ivory. Dressed in an Emanuel Ungaro that enhanced her beauty, her eyes were cold and her lips pressed tightly together in a thin line. She stared at Pitt with an expression that would have frozen alcohol. When she spoke, Deirdre’s voice took on a peculiarly deranged quality.

“I knew you didn’t die,” she said slowly.

“You’re madder than your malignant father and degenerate brother,” Pitt said coldly.

“I knew you’d come back to destroy my family.”

Pitt moved slowly until his body shielded Maeve and the boys. “Call it a crusade to eradicate disease. The Dorsetts make the Borgias look like apprentice amateurs,” he said, stalling for time as he inched closer. “I killed your father. Did you know that?”

She nodded slowly, her gun hand white and as firm as marble. “The servants Maeve and your friend locked in’ a closet knew I was sleeping on the boat and called me. Now you will die as my father died, but not before I’ve finished with Maeve.”

Pitt turned slowly. “Maeve is already dead,” he lied.

Deirdre leaned sideways and tried to examine her sister around Pitt’s body. “Then you can watch as I shoot her precious twins.”

“No!” Maeve cried out from behind Pitt... “Not my babies!”

Deirdre was beyond all reason as she lifted the gun and stepped around Pitt for a clear shot at Maeve and her sons.

White rage overcame any shred of common sense as Pitt leaped, hurling himself toward Deirdre. He came out fast, saw the muzzle of the automatic pointing at his chest. He did not fool himself into thinking he could make it. The distance separating them was too far to bridge in time. At two meters, Deirdre couldn’t miss.

Pitt hardly felt the impact from the two bullets as they struck and penetrated into his flesh. There was enough loathing and malice inside him to deaden any pain, forestall any abrupt shock. He pounded Deirdre off her feet with a crushing impact that distorted her delicate features into an expression of abhorrent agony. It was like running into a sapling tree. Her back bowed as she toppled backward over a coffee table, pressed downward by Pitt’s crushing weight. There was a horrible sound like a dried branch snapping as her spine fractured in three places.

Her strange, wild cry brought no compassion from Pitt. Her head was thrown back, and she stared up at Pitt through dazed brown eyes that still retained a look of deep hatred.

“You’ll pay...” she moaned wrathfully, staring up at the growing circles of blood on Pitt’s side and upper chest. “You’re going to die.” The gun was still locked in her grip, and she tried to aim it at Pitt again, but her body refused to react to her mind’s commands. All feeling had suddenly gone out of her.

“Maybe,” he said slowly, looking down and smiling a smile as hard as the handle on a coffin, certain her spine was irreparably fractured. “But it’s better than being paralyzed for the rest of my life.”

He dragged himself off Deirdre and stumbled over to Maeve. Bravely, she ignored her wound and was consoling the little boys, who were still crying and trembling in terror.

“Its all right, my darlings,” she said softly. “Everything will be all right now.”

Pitt knelt in front of her and examined her wound. There was little blood, just a neat hole that looked like nothing more than a slight stab wound from a small object. He could not see where the plunging bullet had expanded inside her body and torn through her intestines and a labyrinth of blood vessels before penetrating the duodenum and lodging in a disc between two vertebrae. She was bleeding internally, and unless she received immediate medical treatment, death was only minutes away.

Pitt’s heart felt as if it had fallen into a chasm filled with ice. He instinctively wanted to cry in bitter grief, but no sound came from his throat, only a moan of sorrow that rose from deep inside him.

Giordino couldn’t stand the delay any longer. Dawn had arrived, and the eastern sky above the island was already glowing orange from the sun. He jumped from the helicopter to the deck, ducking under the rotating blades as the van carrying the security guards raced onto the dock. What the devil had happened to Pitt and Maeve? he wondered anxiously. Pitt wouldn’t have wasted an unnecessary second. The mooring lines were hanging slack in the water, and the yacht had already caught the outgoing tide and had drifted nearly thirty meters away from the dock.

Haste was vital. The only reason the guards had not fired on the helicopter or yacht was because they were afraid to damage Dorsett property. Now the guards were only a hundred meters away and closing in.

Giordino was so engrossed in keeping his eyes on their pursuers and his mind on what was delaying his friends that he failed to notice the sound of dogs barking from all parts of the island or the sudden flight of birds ascending and flying in confused circles in the sky. Nor did he sense an odd humming sound or feel the quivering on land and see the sudden agitation of the lagoon’s waters as the sound waves of staggering intensity, driven by an immense velocity, slammed into the subterranean rock of Gladiator Island.

Only when he was within a few steps of the door to the main salon did he glance over his shoulder at the guards. They were standing transfixed on the dock whose planking was curling like waves across a sea. They had forgotten their quarry and were pointing to a small cloud of gray smoke that had begun to rise and spread above Mount Scaggs. Giordino could see men pouring like ants from the tunnel entrance in the volcano’s slope. There seemed to be some activity inside Mount Winkleman as well. Pitt’s warning about the island going up in smoke and cinders came back to him.

He burst through the doorway of the salon, stopped dead and expelled a low moan of emotional agony at seeing the blood oozing from the wounds in Pitt’s chest and waist, the puncture in Maeve’s midriff and the body of Deirdre Dorsett bent back almost double over the coffee table.

“God, what happened?”

Pitt looked up at him without answering. “The eruption, has it started?”

“There’s smoke coming from the mountains, and the ground is moving.”

“Then we’re too late.”

Giordino immediately knelt beside Pitt and stared at Maeve’s wound. “This looks bad.”

She looked up at him, her eyes imploring. “Please take my boys and leave me.”

Giordino shook his head heavily. “I can’t do that. We’ll all go together or not at all.”

Pitt reached over and clutched Giordino’s arm. “No time. The whole island will blow any second. I can’t make it either. Take the boys and get out of here, get out now.”

As if he had been struck by a bombshell, Giordino went numb with disbelief. The lethargic nonchalance, the wisecracking sarcasm, fled from him. His thick shoulders seemed to shrink. Nothing in his entire life had primed him to desert his best friend of thirty years to a certain death. His expression was one of agonized indecision. “I can’t leave either of you.” Giordino leaned over and slipped his arms under Maeve as if to carry her. He nodded at Pitt. “I’ll come back for you.”

Maeve brushed his hands away. “Don’t you see Dirk is right?” she murmured weakly.

Pitt handed Giordino Rodney York’s logbook and letters. “See that York’s story reaches his family,” he said, his voice hard with glacial calmness. “Now for God’s sake, take the kids and go!”

Giordino shook his head in torment. “You never quit, do you?”

Outside, the sky had suddenly vanished, replaced by a cloud of ash that burst from the center of Mount Winkleman with a great rumbling sound that was truly terrifying. Everything went dark as the evil black mass spread like a giant umbrella. Then came a more thunderous explosion that hurled thousands of tons of molten lava into the air.

Giordino felt as if his soul was being torn away. Finally, he nodded and turned his head, a curious understanding in his grieved eyes. “All right.” And then one last jest. “Since nobody around here wants me, I’ll go.”

Pitt gripped him by the hand. “Good-bye, old friend. Thank you for all you’ve done for me.”

“Be seeing you,” Giordino muttered brokenly, tears forming in his eyes. He looked like a very old man who was shrouded in solemn and heart-wrenching shock. He started to say something, choked on the words and then he snatched up Maeve’s children, one boy under each arm, and was gone.

Charles Bakewell and the experts at the volcanic observatory in Auckland could not look into the interior of the earth as they could the atmosphere and to a lesser degree, the sea. It was impossible for them to predict the exact events in sequence and magnitude once the acoustic wave traveling from Hawaii struck Gladiator Island. Unlike most eruptions and earthquakes, these gave no time to study precursory phenomena such as foreshocks, groundwater fluctuations and changes in the behavior of domestic and wild animals. The dynamics were chaotic. All the scientists were certain of was that a major disturbance was in the making, and the smoldering furnaces deep within the island were about to burst into life.

In the event, the resonance created by the energy from the sound wave would shake the already weakened volcanic cores, triggering the eruptions. Catastrophic events followed in quick succession. Reaching up from many miles beneath the island’s surface, the superheated rock expanded and liquified, immediately ascending through fissures opened by the tremors. Hesitating only to displace the cooler, enclosing rocks, the flow formed an underground reservoir of molten material known as a magma chamber, where it built up immense pressures.

The stimulus for volcanic gas is water vapor transformed into red-hot steam, which provides the surge that thrusts the magma to the surface. When water enters a gaseous state, its volume instantly mushrooms nearly a thousand times, creating the astronomical power needed to produce a volcanic eruption.

The expulsion of rock— fragments and ash by the rising column of gas provides the plume of smoke common to violent eruptions. Though no combustion actually takes place during eruption, it is the glow of an electrical discharge reflected from incandescent rock onto the water vapor that gives the impression of fire.

Inside the diamond mines, the workers and supervisors fled through the exit tunnels at the first ground shudder. The temperature inside the pits climbed with incredible rapidity. None of the guards made any attempt to turn back the stampede. In their panic they led the horde in a mad rush toward what they wrongly assumed was the safety of the sea. Those who ran toward the top of the saddle between the two volcanoes unwittingly gamed the best chance for survival.

Like sleeping giants, the island’s twin volcanoes reawakened from centuries of inactivity. Neither matched the other in their violent display. Mount Winkleman burst to life first with a series of fissures that opened along its base, unleashing long lines of magma fountains that welled up from the ruptures and spurted high in the air. The curtain of fire spread as vents formed along the fissures. Enormous quantities of molten lava poured down the slopes in a relentless river and spread like a fan as it devastated any vegetation that stood in its way.

The ferocity of the sudden storm of air pressure lashed the trees against each other before they were crushed flat and incinerated, their charred remains swept toward the shoreline. Any trees and undergrowth that escaped the rolling inferno were left standing blackened and dead. Already, the ground was littered with birds that dropped out of the sky, choked to death by the gases and fumes that Winkleman had discharged into the atmosphere.

As if guided by a heavenly hand, the ungodly ooze swept over the security compound but bypassed the Chinese laborers’ detention camp by a good half a kilometer, thereby saving the lives of three hundred miners. Horrendous in scope, its only redeeming quality was that it traveled no faster than the average human could run. The gushing magma from Mount Winkleman wreaked terrible damage, but caused little loss of life.

But then came Mount Scaggs’ turn.

From deep within its bowels, the volcano named after the captain of the Gladiator gave out a deep-throated roar like a hundred freight trains rolling through a tunnel. The crater hurled out a tremendous ash cloud, far greater than the one belched by Winkleman. It twisted and swirled into the sky, a black, evil mass. As ominous and frightening as it looked, the ash cloud was only an opening act for the drama yet to come.

Scaggs’ western slope could not resist the deep-rooted stress ascending from thousands of meters below. The liquified rocks, now a white-hot mass, hurtled toward the surface. With immeasurable pressure it ripped a jagged crack on the upper slope, releasing an inferno of boiling mud and steam that was accompanied by a single, thunderous explosion that scattered the magma into millions of fragments.

A gigantic frenzy of molten lava shot from the slope of the volcano like a cannon barrage. An enormous quantity of glowing magma was purged in a pyroclastic flow, a tumultuous compound of incandescent rock fragments and heated gas that travels over the ground like liquid molasses but at velocities exceeding 160 kilometers per hour. Gaining speed, it avalanched down the flank of the volcano with a continuous roar, disintegrating the slope and throwing a fearsome windstorm in front of it that reeked of sulphur.

The effect of the superheated steam of the pyroclastic flow as it relentlessly swept forward was devastating, enveloping everything in a torrent of raining fire and scalding mud. Glass was melted, stone buildings were flattened, any organic object was instantly reduced to ashes. The seething horror left nothing recognizable in its wake.

The horrifying flow outran the canopy of ash that still cast an eerie pall across the island. And then the fiery magma plunged into the heart of the lagoon, boiling the water and creating a mad turbulence of steam that sent white plumes billowing into the sky. The once beautiful lagoon quickly lay under an ugly layer of gray ash, dirty mud and shredded debris swept ahead of the catastrophic flow of death.

The island used by men and women for greed, an island that some believed deserved to die, had been annihilated. The curtain was coming down on its agony.

Giordino had lifted the sleek British-built Agusta Mark II helicopter from the deck of the yacht and reached a safe distance from Gladiator Island before the spray of blazing rock fell over the dock and the yacht. He could not see the full scope of the devastation. It was hidden by the immense ash cloud that had reached a height of three thousand meters above the island.

The incredible twin eruptions were not only a scene of hideous malevolence but of awesome beauty also. There was a sense of unreality about it. Giordino felt as if he were looking down from the brink of hell.

Hope flared when he observed the yacht suddenly come to life and charge across the waters of the lagoon toward the channel cut in the encircling reef. Badly wounded or not, Pitt had somehow managed to get the boat under way. However fast the yacht could fly over the sea, it was not fast enough to outrun the gaseous cloud of flaming ash that scorched everything in its path before plunging across the lagoon.

But then any hope vanished as Giordino watched the uneven race in growing horror. The inferno swept over the yacht’s churning wake, closing the gap until it smothered the craft and blotted it from all view of the Agusta Mark II. From a thousand feet in the air it appeared that no one could have lived for more than a few seconds in that hellish fire.

Giordino was overcome with anguish for being alive when the mother of the children strapped together in the copilot’s seat and a friend who was like a brother were dying in the holocaust of fire below. Cursing the eruption, cursing his helplessness, he turned from the horrendous sight. His face was drained white as he flew more on instinct than experience. His inner pain, he knew, would never fade. His old surefire cockiness had died with Gladiator Island. He and Pitt had traveled a long road, with one always there to save the other in times of peril. Pitt was not the type to die, Giordino had told himself on numerous occasions when it looked like his friend was in the grave. Pitt was indestructible.

A spark of faith began to build inside Giordino. He glanced at the fuel gauges. They registered full. After studying a chart clipped to a board hanging below the instrument panel, he decided on a westerly course toward Hobart, Tasmania, the closest and best place to land with the kids. Once the Fletcher twins were in the safe hands of the authorities, he would refuel and return to Gladiator Island, if for nothing else than to try to retrieve Pitt’s body for his mother and father in Washington.

He was not about to let Pitt down. He had not done so in life and he wasn’t about to do so in death. Strangely, he began to feel more at ease. After figuring his flight time to Hobart and back to the island, he began talking to the little boys, who had lost their fear and peered excitedly out the cockpit window at the sea below.

Behind the helicopter, the island became an indistinct silhouette, similar in outline to the one it had offered the emaciated survivors aboard the raft of the Gladiator on another day one hundred and forty-four years before.

Seconds after he was, sure Giordino had lifted the helicopter off the yacht and was safely in the air, Pitt pushed himself to his feet, wetted a towel from the sink in the bar and wrapped it around Maeve’s head. Then he began piling cushions, chairs, every piece of furniture he could lift over Maeve until she was buried. Unable to do more to protect her from the approaching sea of fire, he stumbled into the wheelhouse, clutching his side where one bullet had plunged into the abdominal muscle, made a small perforation in his colon and lodged in the pelvic girdle. The other bullet had glanced off a rib, bruised and deflated one lung and passed out through his back muscles. Fighting to keep from falling into the black, nightmarish pool clouding his eyes, he studied the instruments and controls of the boat’s console.

Unlike the helicopter’s, the yacht’s fuel gauges read empty. Dorsett’s crew did not bother to refuel until they were alerted that one or more of the Dorsett family was preparing for a voyage. Pitt found the proper switches and kicked over the big Blitzen Seastorm turbodiesel engines. They had no sooner rumbled to idling rpms when he engaged their Casale V-drives and pushed the throttles forward. The deck beneath his feet shuddered as the bow lifted and the water behind the stern whipped into foam. He took manual control of the helm to steer a course toward the open sea.

Hot ashes fell in a thick blanket. He could hear the crackling and the growling of the approaching tempest of fire. Flaming rocks fell like hail, hissing in clouds of steam as they hit the water and sank beneath the surface. They dropped endlessly out of the sky after having been thrown a great distance by the tremendous pressures coming out of Mount Scaggs. The column of doom engulfed the docks and seemed to take off in pursuit of the yacht, rolling across the lagoon like an enraged monster from the fiery depths of hell. And then it was on top of him in full fury, descending over the yacht in a whirling convoluted mass two hundred meters high before Pitt was able to clear the lagoon. The boat was pitched for ward as it was struck a staggering blow from astern. The radar and radio masts were swept clean away, along with the lifeboats, railings and deck furniture. The boat struggled through the blazing turbulence like a wounded whale. Flaming rocks crashed on the superstructure roof and decks, smashing the once beautiful yacht into a shattered hulk.

The heat in the wheelhouse was searing. Pitt felt as if someone had rubbed his skin with a red-hot salve. Breathing became agonizingly difficult, especially so because of the collapsed lung. He fervently prayed that Maeve was still alive back in the salon. Gasping for air, clothing beginning to smolder, hair already singed, he stood there desperately gripping the helm. The superheated air forced its way down his throat and into his lungs till each intake of breath was an agony. The roar of the firestorm in his ears combined with the pounding of his heart and the surge of his blood. His only resources to resist the blazing assault were the steady throb of the engines and the sturdy construction of the boat.

When the windows around him began to crack and then shatter, he thought he would surely die. His whole mind, his every nerve was focused on driving the boat forward as though he could by sheer willpower force her ahead faster. But then abruptly the heavy blanket of fire thinned and dropped away as the yacht raced into the clear. The dirty gray water went emerald green and the sky sapphire blue. The wave of fire and scalding mud had finally lost its momentum. He sucked in the clean salt air like a swimmer hyperventilating before making a free dive into the depths. He did not know how badly he was injured, and he did not care. Excruciating pain was stoically endured.

At that moment, Pitt’s gaze was drawn by the upper head and body of an immense sea creature that rose out of the water off the starboard bow. It appeared to be a giant eel with a round head a good two meters thick. The mouth was partially open and he could see razor-sharp teeth in the shape of rounded fangs. If its undulating body were straightened out, Pitt estimated its length at between thirty and forty meters. It traveled through the water at a speed only slightly slower than the yacht.

“So Basil exists,” Pitt muttered to himself in the empty wheelhouse, the words aggravating his burning throat. Basil was no stupid sea serpent, he surmised. The enormous eel was fleeing his scalding habitat in the lagoon and heading for the safety of the open sea.

Once through the channel, Basil rolled forward into the depths, and with a wave of his huge tail, disappeared.

Pitt nodded a good-bye and turned his attention back to the console. The navigational instruments were no longer functioning. He tried sending a Mayday over both the radio and satellite phone, but they were dead. Nothing seemed to function except the big engines that still drove the yacht through the waves. Unable to set the boat on an automatic course, he tied the helm with the bow pointed west toward the southeastern coast of Australia and set the throttle a notch above idle to conserve what little fuel remained. A rescue ship responding to the catastrophe on Gladiator Island was bound to spot the crippled yacht, stop and investigate.

He forced his unsteady legs to carry him back to Maeve, deeply afraid of finding her body in a burned out room. With great trepidation, he stepped over the threshold separating the salon from the wheelhouse. The main salon looked like it had been swept by a blowtorch, The thick, durable fiberglass skin had kept much of the heat from penetrating the bulkheads but the terrible heat had broken through the glass windows. Remarkably, the flammable material on the sofas and chairs, though badly scorched, had not ignited.

He shot a glance at Deirdre. Her once beautiful hair was singed into a blackened mass, her eyes milky and staring, her skin the color of a broiled lobster. Light wisps of smoke rose from her expensive clothes like a low mist. She had the appearance of a doll that had been cast into a furnace for a few seconds before being pulled out. Death had saved her from life within an immovable body.

Uncaring of his pain and injuries, he furiously threw aside the furniture he had heaped over Maeve. She had to be still alive, he thought desperately. She had to be waiting for him in all her pain and despair at once again losing her children. He pulled off the last cushion and stared down with mounting fear. Relief washed over him like a cascade as she lifted her head and smiled.

“Maeve,” he rasped, falling forward and taking her in his arms. Only then did he see the large pool of blood that had seeped down between her legs and spread on the deck carpeting. He held her close, her head nestled against his shoulder, his lips brushing her cheeks.

“Your eyebrows,” she whispered through a funny little smile.

“What about them?”

“They’re all singed off, most of your hair too.”

“I can’t look dashing and handsome all the time.”

“You always do to me.” Then her eyes went moist with sadness and concern. “Are my boys safe?”

He nodded. “Al lifted off minutes before the firestorm struck. I should think they’re well on their way to a safe shore.”

Her face was as pale as moonlight. She looked like a fragile porcelain doll. “I never told you that I loved you.”

“I knew,” he murmured, fighting to keep from choking up.

“Do you love me too, if only a little bit?”

“I love you with all my soul.”

She raised a hand and lightly touched his scorched face. “My huckleberry friend, always waitin’ round the bend. Hold me tight. I want to die in your arms.”

“You’re not going to die,” he said, unable to control the fabric of his heart as it tore in pieces. “We’re going to live a long life together, cruising the sea while we raise a boatload of kids who swim like fish.”

“Two drifters off to see the world,” she said in a low whisper.

“There’s such a lot of world to see,” Pitt said, repeating the words to the song.

“Take me across Moon River, Dirk, carry me across ...” Her expression almost seemed joyful.

Her eyes fluttered and closed. Her body seemed to wilt like a lovely flower under a frigid blast of cold. Her face became serene like a peacefully sleeping child’s. She was across and waiting on the other shore.

“No!” he cried, his voice like a wounded animal baying in the night.

All life seemed to flow out of Pitt too. He no longer clung to consciousness. He no longer fought the black mist closing in around him. He released his hold on reality and embraced the darkness.

Giordino’s plan for a quick, turnaround flight to Gladiator Island was dashed almost from the beginning.

After using the Agusta’s state-of-the-art satellite communications system to brief Sandecker on board the Glomar Explorer in Hawaii, he contacted air-and-sea rescue units in both Australia and New Zealand and became the first person to announce the disaster to the outside world. During the remainder of the flight to Hobart, he was continually besieged with requests from high-level government officials and reporters from the news media for accounts of the eruption and assessment of the damage.

Upon approaching the capital city of Tasmania, Giordino flew along the steep foothills bordering Hoban, whose commercial district was located on the west bank of the Derwent River. Locating the airport, he called the tower. The flight controllers directed him to set down in a military staging area half a kilometer from the main terminal. He was stunned to see a huge crowd of people milling about the area as he hovered over the landing site.

Once he shut down the engine and opened the passenger door, everything was accomplished in an orderly manner. Immigration officials came on board and arranged for his entry into Australia without a passport. Social services authorities took custody of Maeve’s young sons, assuring Giordino that as soon as their father was located, they would be placed in his care.

Then as Giordino finally set foot on the ground, half starved and exhausted almost beyond redemption, he was attacked by an army of reporters shoving microphones under his nose, aiming TV cameras at his face and shouting questions about the eruption.

The only question he answered with a smile on his face was to confirm that Arthur Dorsett was one of the first casualties of the holocaust.

Finally, breaking free of the reporters and reaching the office of the airport’s security police, Giordino called the head of the U.S. consulate, who reluctantly agreed to pay for the refueling of the helicopter, but only for humanitarian purposes. His return flight to Gladiator Island was again delayed when Australia’s Director of Disaster Relief asked if Giordino would help out by airlifting food and medical supplies back to the island in the Agusta. Giordino graciously gave his consent and then impatiently paced the asphalt around the helicopter while it was refueled and passenger seats were removed to make more room before the needed provisions were loaded on board. He was thankful when one of the relief workers sent him a bag full of cheese sandwiches and several bottles of beer.

To Giordino’s surprise, a car drove up and the driver notified him of Sandecker’s imminent arrival. He stared at the driver as if the man were crazy. Only four hours had passed since he’d reported to Sandecker in Hawaii.

The confusion cleared away as a U.S. Navy F-22A supersonic two-place fighter lined up on the runway and touched down. Giordino watched as the sleek craft, capable of Mach 3 + speeds, taxied over to where he had parked the helicopter. The canopy slid back, and Sandecker, wearing a flight suit, climbed out onto a wing. Without waiting for a ladder, he jumped onto the asphalt.

He strode straightway over to the startled Giordino and locked him in a bear hug. “Albert, you don’t know how glad I am to see you.”

“I wish there were more of us here to greet you,” Giordino said sadly.

“Useless to stand here consoling ourselves.” Sandecker’s face was tired and lined. “Let’s find Dirk.”

“Don’t you want to change first?”

“I’ll shed this Star Wars suit while we’re in flight. The Navy can have it back when I get around to returning it.”

Less than five minutes later, with two metric tons of badly needed supplies tied down in the passenger/cargo compartment, they were airborne and heading over the Tasman Sea toward the smoldering remains of Gladiator Island.

Relief ships of the Australian and New Zealand navies were immediately ordered to the island with relief sup plies and medical personnel. Any commercial ship within two hundred nautical miles was diverted to offer any assistance possible at the disaster scene. Astoundingly, the loss of life was not nearly as high as first suspected from the immense destruction. Most of the Chinese laborers had escaped from the path of the firestorm and, lava flows. Half the mine supervisors survived, but of Arthur Dorsett’s eighty-man security force, only seven badly burned men were found alive. Later autopsies showed that most of the dead suffocated from inhaling the ash.

By late afternoon, the eruption had substantially diminished in force. Bursts of magma still flowed from the volcanoes’ fissures, but had dwindled to small streams. Both volcanoes were mere shadows of their former bulk. Scaggs had nearly disappeared, leaving only a wide, ugly crater. Winkleman remained as a massive mound less than a third of its former height.

The canopy of ash still hovered over the volcanoes as Giordino and Sandecker dropped toward the devastated island. Most of the western side of the landmass looked as if a giant wire scraper had scoured it down to bedrock. The lagoon was a swamp choked with debris and floating pumice. Little remained of Dorsett Consolidated’s mining operations. What wasn’t buried under ash protruded like ruins from a civilization dead for a thousand years. The destruction of vegetation was practically total.

Giordino’s heart went cold when he saw no sign of the yacht carrying Pitt and Maeve in the lagoon. The dock was scorched and had sunk in the ash-blanketed water beside the demolished warehouses.

Sandecker was horrified. He had had no idea of the scope of the catastrophe. “All those people dead,” he muttered. “My fault, all my fault.”

Giordino looked at him through understanding eyes. “For every dead inhabitant, there are ten thousand people who owe you their lives.”

“Still ...” Sandecker said solemnly, his voice trailing off.

Giordino flew over a rescue ship that had already anchored in the lagoon. He began decreasing his airspeed in preparation for setting down in a space cleared by Australian army engineers who had parachuted onto the disaster scene first. The rotor’s downwash raised huge billows of ash, obscuring Giordino’s view. He hovered and slowly worked the collective pitch and cyclic control in coordination with the throttle. Flying blind, he settled the Agusta and touched down with a hard bump. Drawing a deep breath, he sighed as the rotors wound down.

The ash cloud had hardly dissipated when a major in the Australian army, dusted from head to toe and followed by an aide, ran up and opened the entry door. He leaned in the cargo compartment as Sandecker made his way aft. “Major O’Toole,” he introduced himself with a broad smile. “Glad to see you. You’re the first relief craft to land.”

“Our mission is twofold, Major,” said Sandecker. “Besides carrying supplies, we’re looking for a friend who was last seen on Arthur Dorsett’s yacht.”

O’Toole shrugged negatively. “Probably sunk. It’ll be weeks before the tides clean out the lagoon enough for an underwater search.”

“We were hoping the boat might have reached open water.”

“You’ve had no communication from your friend?”

Sandecker shook his head.

“I’m sorry, but chances seem remote that he escaped the eruption.”

“I’m sorry too.” Sandecker stared at something about a million kilometers away and seemed unaware of the officer standing by the door. Then he pulled himself together. “Can we give you a hand unloading the aircraft?”

“Any help will be greatly appreciated. Most of my men are out rounding up survivors.”

With the assistance of one of O’Toole’s officers, the boxes containing food, water and medical supplies were removed from the cargo compartment and piled some distance from the helicopter. Failure and sadness stilled any words between Giordino and Sandecker as they returned to the cockpit in preparation for the return flight to Hobart.

Just as the rotors began to rotate, O’Toole came running up, waving both hands excitedly. Giordino opened his side window and leaned out.

“I thought you should know,” O’Toole shouted above the engine exhaust. “My communications officer just received a report from a relief ship. They sighted a derelict boat drifting approximately twenty-four kilometers northwest of the island.”

The distress in Giordino’s face vanished. “Did they stop to investigate for survivors?”

“No. The derelict was badly damaged and looked deserted. The captain rightly assumed his first priority was to reach the island with a team of doctors.”

“Thank you, Major.” Giordino turned to Sandecker, “You heard?”

“I heard,” Sandecker snapped impatiently. “Get this thing in the air.”

Giordino required no urging. Within ten minutes of lifting off, they spotted the yacht almost exactly where the captain of the relief ship reported it, wallowing dead amid the marching swells. She rode low in the water with a ten-degree list to port. Her topsides looked as if they had been swept away by a giant broom. Her once proud sapphire-blue hull was scorched black, and her decks wore a heavy coating of gray ash. She had been through hell and she looked it.

“The helicopter pad looks clear,” commented Sandecker.

Giordino lined up on the stern of the yacht and made a slow, slightly angled descent. The sea showed no sign of white, indicating a mild wind factor, but the yacht’s roll and its list made his landing tricky.

He reduced power and hovered at an angle matching that of the yacht, timing his drop for when the yacht rose on the crest of a wave. At the exact moment, the Agusta flared out, hung for a few seconds and sank to the sloping deck. Giordino immediately applied the brakes to keep the aircraft from rolling into the sea and shut down the engine. They were safely down and their thoughts now turned to fear of what they might find.

Giordino jumped out first and quickly fastened tiedown ropes from the helicopter to the deck. Hesitating for a moment to draw their breath, they stepped across the charred deck and entered the main salon.

One look at the two inert figures huddled in one corner of the room and Sandecker shook his head despairingly.

He briefly closed his eyes tight, fighting a wave of mental anguish. So awesome was the cruel scene, he couldn’t move. There was no sign of life. Grief tore at his heart He stared motionless in sad bewilderment. They both had to be dead, he thought.

Pitt was holding Maeve in his arms. The side of his face was a mask of dried blood from the injury inflicted by Boudicca. The whole of his chest and side were also stained dark crimson. The charred clothes, the eyebrows and hair that had been singed away, the burns on his face and arms, all gave him the image of someone horribly maimed in an explosion. He looked like he’d died hard.

Maeve seemed as though she had died not knowing her sleep would be eternal. A waxen sheen on her lovely features, she reminded Sandecker of a white, unburned candle, a sleeping beauty no kiss would ever awake.

Giordino knelt down beside Pitt, refusing to believe his old friend was dead. He gently shook Pitt’s shoulder. “Dirk! Speak to me, buddy.”

Sandecker tried to pull Giordino away. “He’s gone,” he said in a saddened whisper.

Then with such unexpectedness that both men were frozen in shock and disbelief, Pitt’s eyes slowly opened, He stared up at Sandecker and Giordino, not understanding, not recognizing.

His lips quivered, and then he murmured, “God forgive me, I lost her.”