Treasure

PART I

October 12, 1991

Heathrow Airport, London

No one paid the slightest attention to the pilot as he slipped around the crowd of media correspondents who overflowed from the interior of the VIP lounge. Nor did any of the passengers sitting in the waiting area of gate 14 notice that he carried a large duffel bag instead of a briefcase. He kept his head down, eyes straight ahead, carefully avoiding the battery of TV cameras aimed at a attractive woman with a smooth brown face and compelling coal-black eyes, who was the hub of the noisy activity.

The pilot quickly walked through the enclosed boarding ramp and halted in front of a pair of airport security agents. They wore plain clothes and blocked the aircraft door. He threw a casual wave and tried to shoulder his way past them, but a hand firmly grasped his arm.

"One moment, Captain."

The pilot stopped, a questioning but friendly expression on his dark-skinned face. He seemed idly amused at the inconvenience.

His olive-brown eyes had a gypsylike piercing quality about them. The nose had been broken more than once, and a long scar ran down the base of his face.

He stood nearly six feet four inches, thickset, with a slightly rounded paunch. Seasoned, confident, and standing straight in a tailored uniform, he looked like any one of ten thousand airline pilots who captained international passenger jets.

He removed his identification from a breast pocket and handed it to the security agent.

"Carrying VIPs this trip?" he asked innocently.

The British guard, correct, immaculately dressed, nodded. "A body of United Nations people returning to New York including the new SecretaryGeneral."

"Hala Kamil?"

"Yes."

"Hardly the job for a woman."

"Sex didn't prove a hindrance for Prime Minister Thatcher."

"She wasn't in water over her head."

"Kamil is an astute lady. She'll do all right."

"Providing Moslem fanatics from her own country don't blow her away,"

replied the pilot in a decided American accent.

The Britisher gave him a strange look indeed but made no further comment as he compared the photo on the I.D. card with the face before him and read the name aloud. "Captain Dale Lemk."

"any problem?"

"No, simply preventing any," the guard replied flatly.

Lemk extended his arms. "Do you want to frisk me too?"

"Not necessary. A pilot would hardly hijack his own airplane. But we must check your credentials, to be certain you're a genuine crew member."

"I'm not wearing this uniform for a costume party."

"May we see your carry bag?"

"Be my guest." He set the blue nylon bag on the floor and opened it. The second agent lifted out and riffled the pages of the standard pilot's aircraft and flight operations manuals and then held up a mechanical device with a small hydraulic cylinder.

"Mind telling us what this is?"

"An actuator arm for an oil-cooling door. It stuck in the open position, and our maintenance people at Kennedy asked me to hand-carry it home for inspection."

The agent poked at a bulky object tightly packed on the bottom of the bag. "Hello, what do we have here?" Then he looked up, a curious expression in his eyes. "Since when do airline pilots carry parachutes?"

Lemk laughed. "My hobby is skydiving. Whenever I have an extended layover, I jump with friends at Croydon."

"I don't suppose you would consider jumping from a jetliner?"

"Not from one flying five hundred knots at thirty-five thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean."

The agents exchanged satisfied glances. The duffel bag was closed and the I.D. card was passed back.

"Sorry to have delayed you, Captain Lemk."

"I enjoyed the chat."

"Have a good flight to New York."

"Thank you."

Lemk ducked into the plane and entered the cockpit. He locked the door and switched off the cabin lights so any casual observer could not view his movements through the windows from the concourse above. In well-rehearsed sequence, he knelt behind the seats, pulled a small flashlight from his coat pocket and raised a trapdoor leading to the electronics bay below the cockpit, a compartment that was named by some long-forgotten joker as the "hell hole." He dropped down the ladder into pure darkness, underscored by the murmur of the flight attendants'

voices as they prepared the main cabin for boarding and the thump of the luggage being loaded in the rear by the baggage handlers.

Lemk reached up and tugged the duffel bag down after him and switched on the penlight. A glance at his watch told him he had about five minutes before his flight crew arrived. In an exercise he had practiced nearly fifty times, he retrieved the actuator arm from the bag and connected it to a miniature device he had concealed in his flight cap.

He attached the assembled unit to the hinges of a small access door to the outside used by ground/maintenance mechanics. Then he laid out the parachute.

When his first and second officers arrived, Lemk was sitting in the pilot's seat, his face buried in an information manual. They exchanged casual greetings and began running through their preflight check routine. Neither the copilot nor the engineer perceived that Lemk seemed unusually quiet and withdrawn.

Their senses might have been sharper if they had known this was to be their last night on earth.

Inside the crowded lounge, Hala Kamil faced a forest of microphones and glaring camera lights. With seemingly inexhaustible patience, she fielded the barrage of questions thrown at her by the mob of inquisitive reporters.

Few asked about her sweep through Europe and the nonstop meetings with heads of state. Most probed for insights on the imminent overthrow of her Egyptian government by Moslem fundamentalists.

The extent of the turmoil was unclear to her. Fanatical mullahs, led by Akhmad Yazid, an Islac law scholar, had ignited religious passions that ran through the millions of destitute villagers of the Nile and the impoverished masses in the slums of Cairo. High-ranking officers in the army and air force were openly conspiring with the Islamic radicals to remove the recently installed president, Nadav Hasan. The situation was extremely volatile, but Hala had received no up-to-the-minute intelligence from her government, and she was forced to keep her answers vague and ambiguous.

On the surface Hala appeared infinitely poised and sphinxlike as she replied calmly, without emotion. Inwardly she floated between confusion and spiritual shock. She felt distant and alone, as though uncontrollable events were swirling around someone else, someone beyond help for whom she could only feel sorrow.

She could have posed for the painted portrait bust of Queen Nefertiti in the Berlin museum. They both possessed the same long-stemmed neck, delicate features and haunting look. Forty-two years old, slim, black eyes, flawless tawny complexion and long jet-black silken hair brushed straight and falling down to her shoulders. She stood five feet eleven inches in heels, and her lithe, shapely body was enhanced by a designer suit with pleated skirt.

Hala had enjoyed the attentions of four lovers over the years but had never married. A husband and children seemed foreign to her. She refused to spare the time for long-term attachments, and making love held little more ecstasy for her than buying a ticket and attending the ballet.

As a child in Cairo, where her mother was a teacher and her father a shoemaker, she had spent every minute of her free time sketching and digging in the ancient ruins within bicycle distance of her home. A gourmet cook and an artist with a Ph.D. in Egyptian antiquities, she had landed one of the few jobs open to Moslem women, as researcher for the Ministry of Culture.

With great individual effort and prodigious energy, she then successfully fought Islamic discrimination and worked up to Director of Antiquities and later head of the Department of information-She caught the eye of then President Mubarak, who asked her to serve on the Egyptian delegation to the United Nations General Assembly. Five years later, Hala was named Vice Chairman when Javier P6rez de Cudllar stepped down in the middle of his second tour during an upheaval when five Moslem-run nations withdrew from the charter during a controversy over demands for religious reform. Because the men in line ahead of her refused the job, she was appointed to serve as SecretaryGeneral in a tenuous hope she might mend the widening cracks in the organization's foundation.

Now, with her own government teetering on the brink of disintegration, there was a good chance she might become the first chief representative of the United Nations without a good try.

An aide came up and whispered in her ear. She nodded and held up one hand.

"I'm told the plane is ready to take off," she said. "I'll take one more question."

Hands flew up and a dozen queries filled the air at once. Hala pointed to a man standing at the doorway holding a tape recorder.

"Leigh Hunt of BBC, Madame Kamil. if Akhmad Yazid replaces President Hasan's democratic government with an Islamic republic, will you return to Egypt?"

"I am a Moslem and an Egyptian. if my country's leaders, regardless of the government in power, wish me to come home, I will comply."

"Even though Akhmad Yazid has called you a heretic and a traitor?"

"Yes," Hala replied evenly.

"If he's half as fanatical as the Ayatollah Khomeini, you might be running into an execution. Would you care to comment?" Hala shook her head, smiled gracefully and said, "I must leave now. Thank you."

A circle of security guards escorted her from the throng of reporters and onto the boarding ramp. Her aides and a large delegation from UNESCO were already seated. Four members of the World Bank were sharing a bottle of champagne and conversing in low tones in the pantry. The main cabin smelled of jet fuel and Beef Wellington.

Wearily Hala fastened the catch of her seat belt and glanced out the window. There was a light mist and the blue lights along the taxi strips blurred into a dull glow before disappearing completely. She removed her shoes, closed her eyes and gratefully dozed off before the stewardess could offer her a cocktail.

After waiting its Turn behind the warm exhaust of a TWA 747, United Nations charter Flight 106 finally moved onto the end of the runway.

When takeoff clearance came down from the control tower, Lemk eased the thrust levers forward and the Boeing 720-B rolled over the damp concrete and rose into the soggy air.

As soon as he reached his cruising altitude of 10,500 meters and engaged the autopilot, Lemk unbuckled his belt and rose from his seat.

"A call of nature," he said, heading for the cabin door. His second officer and engineer, a freckle-faced man with sandy hair, smiled without turning from the instrument panel. "I'll wait right here."

Lemk forced a short laugh and stepped into the passenger cabin. The flight attendants were preparing the meal service. The aroma of Beef Wellington came stronger than ever. He made a gesture and drew the chief steward aside.

"Can I get you anything, Captain?"

"Just a cup of coffee," replied Lemk. "But don't bother, I can manage."

"No bother." The steward stepped into the pantry and poured a cup.

"There is one other thing.

"sir?"

"The company has asked us to take part in a government sponsored meteorology study. When we're twenty-eight hundred kilometers out from London, I'm going to drop down to fifteen-hundred meters for about ten minutes while we record wind and temperature readings. Then return to our normal altitude."

"Hard to believe the company went along. I wish my bank account totaled what it will cost in lost fuel."

"You can bet those cheap bastards in top management will send a bill to Washington."

"I'll inform the passengers when the time comes so they won't be alarmed."

"You might also announce that if anyone spots any lights through the windows, they'll be coming from a fishing fleet."

"I'll see to it."

Lemk's eyes swept the main cabin, pausing for an instant on the sleeping form of Hala Kamil before moving on. "Did it strike you that security was unusually heavy?" Lemk asked conversationally.

"Of those reporting told me Scotland Yard caught wind of a plot to assassinate the SecretaryGeneral."

"They act as though there's a terrorist plot under every rock. I had to show my identification while they searched my flight bag."

The steward shrugged. "What the hell, it's for our protection as well as the passengers'."

Lemk motioned down the aisle. "At least none of them looks like a hijacker."

"Not unless they've taken to wearing three-piece suits."

"Just to be on the safe side, I'll keep the cockpit door locked. Call me on the intercom only if it's important."

"Will do."

Lemk took a sip of his coffee, set it aside and returned to the cockpit.

The first officer, his copilot, was gazing out the side window at the lights of Wales to the north, while behind him the engineer was occupied with computing fuel consumption.

Lemk turned his back to the others and slipped a small case from the breast pocket of his coat. He opened it and readied a syringe containing a highly lethal nerve agent called sarin. Then he faced his crew again and made a fumbling step as if losing his balance and grabbed the arm of the second officer for support.

"Sorry, Frank, I tripped on the carpet."

Frank Hartley wore a bushy mustache, had thin gray hair and a long, handsome face. He never felt the needle enter his shoulder. He looked up from the gauges and lights of his engineer's panel and laughed easily. "You're going to have to lay off the sauce, Dale."

"I can fly straight," Lemk replied good-naturedly. "It's walking that gives me a hard time."

Hartley opened his mouth as if to say something, but suddenly a blank expression crossed his face. He shook his head as if to clear his vision. Then his eyes rolled upward, and he went limp.

Leaning his body against Hartley so the engineer would not fall to one side, Lemk withdrew the syringe and quickly replaced it with another.

"I think something is wrong with Frank."

Jerry Oswald swung around in the copilot's seat. A big man with the pinched features of a desert prospector, he stared questioningly. "What ails him?"

"Better come take a look."

Oswald twisted his bulk past the seat and bent over Hartley. Lemk jabbed the needle and pushed the plunger, but Oswald felt the prick.

"What the hell was that?" he blurted, whirling around and gazing dumbly at the hypodermic needle in Lemk's hand. He was far heavier and more muscular than Hartley, and the toxin did not take effect immediately.

His eyes widened in sudden comprehension, and then he lurched forward, gripping Lemk by the neck.

"You're not Dale Lemk," he snarled. "Why are you made up to look like him?"

The man who called himself Lemk could not have answered if he wanted.

The great hands were choking the breath out of him. Crammed against a bulkhead by the immense weight of Oswald, he tried to gasp out the words of a lie, but no words could come. He rammed his knee into the engineer's groin. The only reaction was a short grunt. Blackness began to creep into the corners of his vision.

Then, slowly, the pressure was released and Oswald reeled backward. His eyes became terror-stricken as he realized he was dying. He looked at Lemk in confused hatred. With the few final beats left in his heart he swung his fist, landing a solid blow into Lemk's stomach.

Lemk drifted to his knees, dazed, the breath punched out of him. He watched as if looking through fog as Oswald fell against the pilot's seat and crashed to the cockpit floor. Lemk slid to a sitting position and rested for a minute, gasping for air, massaging the pain in his gut.

He rose awkwardly to his feet and listened for any curious voices coming from the other side of the door. The main cabin seemed quiet. None of the passengers or flight crew had heard anything unusual above the monotonous whine of the engines.

He was drenched in sweat by the time he manhandled Oswald into the copilot's seat and strapped him in. Hartley's safety belt was already fastened so Lemk ignored him. At last he settled behind the control column on the pilot's side of the cockpit and plotted the aircraft's position.

Forty-five minutes later, Lemk banked the plane from its scheduled flight path to New York onto a new heading, toward the frozen Arctic.

It is one of the most barren spots on the earth and one never seen or experienced by tourists. In the last hundred years, only a handful of explorers and scientists have trod its forbidding landscape. The sea along the rugged shore is frozen for all but a few weeks each year, and in the early fall temperatures hover around - 73 degrees the cold sides for the long winter months, and even in summer, dazzling sunshine can be replaced by an impenetrable gale in less than an hour.

Yet, shadowed by scarred mountains and swept by a constant wind, the magnificent desolation in the upper reaches of Ardencaple Fjord on the northeast coast of Greenland was inhabited nearly two thousand years ago by a band of hunters. Radiocarbon dating on excavated relics indicated the site was occupied from A.D. 200 to A.D. 400, a Short time span for the archaeological clock. But they left behind twenty dwellings which had been preserved by the frigid ice.

A prefabricated aluminum structure had been airlifted by helicopter and assembled over the ancient village by scientists from the University of Colorado. A balky heating arrangement and foam-glass insulation fought a lopsided battle against the cold, but at least denied entry to the never-ending wind moaning eerily around the outside walls. The shelter also enabled an archaeological team to work the site into the beginning stages of winter.

Lily Sharp, a professor of anthropology at Colorado, was oblivious to the cold that seeped into the covered village. She rested on her knees on the floor of a single-family dwelling, carefully scraping away the frozen earth with a small hand trowel. She was alone and lost in deep concentration as she probed the distant past belonging to the prehistoric people.

They were sea-mammal hunters who spent the harsh Arctic winters in dwellings dug partially into the ground, with low walls of rock and turf roofs often supported by whale bones. They entertained themselves with oil lamps, passing the long dark months carving miniature sculptures out of driftwood, ivory and antlers.

They had settled this part of Greenland during the first centuries after Christ. Then, inexplicably, at the height of their culture, they pulled up stakes and vanished, leaving behind a revealing cache of relics.

Lily's perseverance paid off. While the three men on the archaeology team relaxed after dinner in the hut that was their living quarters, she had returned to the protected settlement and continued to excavate, unearthing a length of caribou antler with twenty bearlike figures sculpted on its surface, a delicately carved woman's comb and a stone cooking pot.

Suddenly Lily's trowel clinked on something. She repeated the movement and listened carefully. Fascinated, she tapped again. It was not the familiar sound from the edge of the trowel striking a rock. Though a bit flat, it had a definite metallic ring to it.

She straightened and stretched her back. Strands of her dark red hair, long and thick, shining under the glare from the Coleman lantern, fell from under her heavy woolen cap. Her blue-green eyes mirrored skeptical curiosity as she gazed at the tiny speck protruding from the charcoal-black earth.

A prehistoric people lived here, she pondered. They never knew iron or bronze.

Lily tried to stay calm, but a feeling of astonishment crept over her.

Then excitement, followed by urgency. She missed the archaeologist's fussbudget passion for prudence. She scraped and dug furiously at the hard-crusted soil. Every few minutes she stopped and painstakingly brushed away the loose dirt with a small painter's brush.

At last the artifact lay fully exposed. She leaned over for a closer look, staring in awe as it glimmered yellow under the bright white from the Coleman lantern.

Lily had excavated a gold coin.

A very old one, by the look of the worn edges. There was a tiny hole and a piece of rotted leather thong on one side, suggesting that it had once been worn as a pendant or personal amulet She sat back and took a deep breath, almost wanting to reach down and touch it.

Five minutes later, Lily was still crouched there on her knees, her mind trying to create a solution, when abruptly the shelter's door opened and a large-bellied man with a blackwhiskered, kindly-looking face stepped in from the cold, accompanied by a swirl of snow. He exhaled clouds of steam as he breathed. His eyebrows and beard were matted with ice, which made him look like some frozen monster from a science-fiction movie until he broke into a great toothy smile.

it was Dr. Hiram Gronquist, the chief archaeologist of the four-person dig.

"Sorry to interrupt, Lily," he said in his soft, deep voice, "but you've been pushing too hard. Take a break. Come back to the hut, warm up and let me pour you a good stiff brandy."

"Hiram," said Lily, doing her best to stifle the excitement in her voice, "I want you to see something."

Gronquist moved closer and knelt down beside her. "What have you found?"

"See for yourself."

Gronquist fumbled for his reading glasses inside his parka and slid them over his red nose. He bent over the coin until his face was only inches away and studied it from every angle. After several moments, he looked up at Lily, an amused twinkle in his eyes.

"You putting me on, lady?"

Lily looked at him sternly, then relaxed and laughed. "Oh, my God, you think I salted it?"

"You've got to admit, it's like finding a virgin in a bor dello."

"Cute."

He gave her a friendly pat on one knee. "Congratulations, this is a rare discovery."

"How do you suppose it got here?"

"There isn't a workable gold deposit within a thousand miles, and it certainly wasn't minted by the early inhabitants. Their level of development was only a notch above Stone Age. The coin obviously came from another source at a later date. "

"How do you explain the fact it was buried with artifacts we've dated within a century either side Of A.D. 300?"

Gronquist shrugged. "I can't."

"What's your best guess?" asked Lily.

"Off the top of my head, I'd say the coin was probably traded or lost by a Viking."

"There is no record of Vikings sailing this far north along the East Coast," said Lily.

"Okay, maybe Eskimos from a more recent time frame traded goods with the Norse settlements to the south and used this site to camp during hunting expeditions."

"You know better, Hiram. We've found no evidence of habitation after A.D. four hundred."

Gronquist gave Lily a scolding look. "You never give in, do you? We don't even have a date on the coin."

"Mike Graham is an expert on ancient coins. One of his specialties is dating sites around the Mediterranean. He might identify it."

"Won't cost us a nickel for an appraisal," said Gronquist agreeably.

"Come along. Mike can examine it while we have that brandy."

Lily donned her heavy fur-lined gloves, adjusted the hood of her parka and turned down the Coleman. Gronquist switched on a flashlight and held the door open for her. She stepped into the agony of the numbing cold and wind that groaned like a ghost in a churchyard. The freezing air struck her exposed cheeks and made her shudder, a reaction that always seemed to sneak up on her even though she should have been quite used to it by now.

She grasped the rope that led to the living quarters and groped along behind the protecting bulk of Gronquist. She stole a glance upward. The sky was unclouded and the stars seemed to melt into one vast carpet of shimmering diamonds illustrating the barren mountains to the west and the sheet of ice that ran down the fjord to sea in the east. The strange beauty of the Arctic was a compelling mistress, Lily decided.

She could understand why men lost their souls to its spell.

After a thirty-yard hike through the dark, they entered the storm corridor of their hut, walked another ten feet and opened a second door to the living quarters inside. To Lily, after the abominable cold outside, it was like stepping inside a furnace. The aroma of coffee caressed her nostrils like perfume and she immediately pulled off her parka and gloves and poured herself a cup.

Sam Hoskins, neck-length blond hair matching an enormous blond handlebar mustache, was hunched over a drafting board. A New York architect with a love for archaeology, Hoskins allowed two months a year out of his busy schedule to rough it on digs around the world. He provided invaluable assistance by rendering detailed drawings of how the prehistoric village might have looked seventeen hundred years ago.

The other team member, a light-skinned man with thinning sandy hair, reclined on a cot, reading a dog-eared paperback novel. Lily couldn't remember seeing Mike Graham without an adventure book in one hand or stuffed in a coat pocket. One of the leading field archaeologists in the country, Graham was as laid back as a mortician.

"Hey, Mike!" Gronquist boomed. "Take a look at what Lily dug up."

He flipped the coin across the room. Lily gasped in shock, but Graham expertly snatched it out of the air and peered at the face.

After a moment he looked up, his eyes narrowed doubtfully. "You're putting me on."

Gronquist laughed heartily. "My exact words when I laid eyes on it. No gag. She excavated it at site eight."

Graham pulled a briefcase from under his cot and retrieved a magnifying glass. He held the coin under the lens, examining it from every angle.

"Well, what's the verdict?" Lily asked impatiently.

"Incredible," murmured Graham, captivated. "A Gold Miliarensia. About thirteen and a half grams. I've never seen one before. They're quite rare. A collector would -probably pay between six and eight thousand dollars for it."

"Who is the likeness on the face?"

"A standing figure of Theodosius the Great, Emperor of the Roman and Byzantine Empires. His position is a common motif found on the face of coins from that era. if you look closely, you can make out captives at his feet while his hands hold a globe and a labarum."

"A labarum?"

"Yes, a banner bearing the Greek letters XP and forming a kind of monogram meaning the the name of Christ." The Emperor Constantine adopted it after his conversion to Christianity and it was handed down through his successors."

"What do you make of the lettering on the reverse?" asked Gronquist.

Graham's eyeball enlarged out of proportion through the glass as he studied the coin. "Three words. First one looks like TRIVMFATOR. Can't make out the other two. They're nearly worn smooth. A collector's catalogue should give a description and Latin translation. I'll have to wait until we return to civilization before I can look them up."

"Can you date it?"

Graham stared at the ceiling thoughtfully. "Coined during the reign of Theodosius, which, if I remember correctly, was from A.D. 379 to 395."

Lily stared at Gronquist- "Right in the ballpark."

He shook his head. "Sheer fantasy, to suggest fourth-century Eskimos had contact with the Roman Empire."

"We can't rule out the infinity of chance," Lily persisted.

"Once this gets out, there will be a flood of speculation and hype by the news media," said Hoskins, inspecting the coin for the first time.

Gronquist took a swallow of his brandy. "Ancient coinage has turned up in odd places before. But the date and source of its deposit could rarely be proven to the full satisfaction of the archaeologists'

community."

"Perhaps," said Graham slowly. "But I'd give my Mercedes convertible to know how it turned up here."

They all gazed at the coin for a few moments without speaking, each lost in their own thoughts.

Finally Gronquist broke the silence. "It seems the only thing we know for certain is that we have a real mystery on our hands.

Shortly before midnight, the imposter began his practiced drill to abandon the jetliner. The air was sparkling clear and the dim smudge that was Iceland rose above the flat, black horizon line of the sea. The small island country was outlined by a faint but eerie display of greenish rays from the Aurora Borealis.

He was oblivious to the dead men around him. He had grown used to the smell of blood and it no longer sickened him. Death and gore simply went with the job. He was as indifferent to mutilated bodies as a pathologist or the neighborhood butcher.

The imposter was quite clinical about killing. Numbers of dead were merely mathematical sums. He was paid well; he was a mercenary, as well as a religious fanatic who murdered for a cause. Oddly, the only part of his work that offended him was being called an assassin or a terrorist. He detested the words. They had a political ring about them, and he nurtured a passionate dislike for politicians.

He was a man of a thousand identities, a perfectionist who rejected random gunfire in crowds or sloppy car bombs, considering them tools for juvenile idiots. His methods were far more subtle. He never left anything to chance. International investigators found it difficult to separate many of his hits from what appeared to be accidents.

The death of Hala Kamil was more than an assigned task. He considered it a duty. His elaborate plan had taken five months to perfect, followed by the patient wait for the opportune moment.

Almost a waste, he mused. Kamil was a beautiful woman. But she was a threat that had to be nullified.

He gently eased back on the throttles and nudged the control column forward, beginning a shallow rate of descent. To anyone but another pilot the slight drop in speed and altitude was imperceptible.

The main cabin crew had not troubled him. By now the passengers were dozing, attempting but failing to fall into the deep sleep so elusive on long aircraft flights.

for the twentieth time he re-checked his heading and studied the computer he had reprogrammed to indicate the time and distance to his drop zone.

Fifteen minutes later the jetliner crossed over an uninhabited section of Iceland's southern coastline and headed inland. The landscape below became a montage of gray rock and white snow. He lowered the flaps and reduced speed until the Boeing 720-B was flying at 352 kilometers an hour.

He reengaged the auto pilot on a new radio frequency transmitted from a beacon placed on the Hofsjokull, a glacier rising 1,737 meters from the center of the island. Then he set the altitude so the aircraft would impact 150 meters below the peak.

Methodically he smashed and disabled the communication and direction indicators. He also began dumping fuel as a backup in case a flaw somehow marred his carefully conceived plan.

Eight minutes to go.

He dropped through the trapdoor into the hell hole. He already wore a pair of French paraboots with thick, elastic soles. He hurriedly removed a jumpsuit from the duffel bag and slipped into it. There had been no room for a helmet so he pulled on a ski mask and stocking cap.

Next came a pair of gloves, goggles and an altimeter, which he strapped to one wrist.

He clipped the harness snaps and checked the straps for snugness. He wore a piggyback rig where the reserve sat on his shoulder blades and the main chute fit into the small of his back. He relied on a ram air canopy, a square air foil that is more flown than jumped.

He glanced at the dial of his watch. One minute, twenty seconds. He opened the escape door and a rush of air swept through the hell hole. He studied the sweep second hand on the watch and began counting down.

When he reached zero he launched his body through the narrow opening feet first, facing in the direction of flight. The velocity of the airstream struck him with the icy force of an avalanche, crushing the breath from his lungs. The plane soared past with a deafening roar. for a brief instant he felt the heat from the turbine's exhaust, and then he was away and falling.

Face down in a stable arched and spread position, knees slightly flexed, hands spread in front, Lemk looked down and saw only blackness. No lights burned on the ground.

He assumed the worst; his crew had failed to reach the correct rendezvous point. Without a defined target zone he could not gauge his wind drift or direction. He might land kilometers away, or worse, impact in the middle of jagged ice with serious injury and never be found in time.

In ten seconds he had already dropped nearly 360 meters. The needle on the luminous dial of his altimeter was crossing into the red. He could not wait any longer. He pulled the pilot chute from a pouch and threw it into the wind. It anchored to the sky and strung out the main canopy.

He heard the chute open with a satisfying thump, and he was jerked into an upright position. He took his penlight and aimed the narrow beam over his head. The canopy blossomed above him.

Suddenly a small circle of lights blinked on about one Mile away to his right. Then a flare went up and hung for several seconds, just long enough for him to judge wind direction and speed. He pulled on the right steering toggle and began gliding toward the lights.

Another flare went up. The wind held steady with no fluctuation as he neared the ground. He could clearly see his crew now. They had laid out another line of lights leading to the previously lit circle. He jockeyed the steering toggles and made a 180-degree bank into the wind.

Lemk prepared to strike the ground. His crew had chosen the terrain well. The balls of his feet made contact with soft tundra, and he made a perfect stand-up landing in the center of the circle.

Without a word, he unsnapped the harness and walked outside the glare of the lights. He looked up at the sky.

The aircraft with its unsuspecting crew and passengers flew straight toward the glacier that gradually rose, closing the gap between ice and metal.

He stood there watching as the faint sound of the jet engines died and the blinking navigation lights melted into the black 4 night.

Back in the galley, one of the flight attendants tilted her head, listening.

"What's that tinny noise coming from the cockpit?" she asked.

Gary Rubin, the chief steward, stepped into the aisle and faced toward the bow of the plane. He could hear what sounded like a continuous, muffled roar, almost like rushing water in the distance.

Ten seconds after the imposter's exodus, the timer on the actuator set the hydraulic arm in motion, closing the hatch in the hell hole and cutting off the strange sound.

"It stopped," he said. "I don't hear it any more."

"What do you suppose it was?"

"Can't say. I've never heard anything quite like it. for a moment I thought we might have suffered a pressure leak."

A passenger call light came on and the flight attendant brushed back her blond hair and stepped into the main cabin.

"Maybe you better check it out with the captain," she said over her shoulder.

Rubin hesitated, remembering Lemk's order not to bother the flight crew except for a matter of importance. Better safe than sorry. The welfare of the passengers came first. He lifted the intercom phone to his ear and pressed the cockpit call button.

"Captain, Chief Steward here. We've just experienced a weird noise forward of the main cabin. Is there a problem?"

He received no reply.

He tried three times, but the receiver remained dead. He stood there at a loss for several moments, wondering why the flight cabin did not respond. In twelve years of flying, this was a new experience for him.

He was still trying to fathom the mystery when the flight attendant rushed up and said something. At first he ignored her, but the urgency in her voice got through to him.

"What . . . what did you say?"

"We're over land!"

"Land?"

"Directly beneath us," she said, eyes blank with confusion. "A passenger pointed it out to me."

Rubin shook his head doubtfully. "Impossible. We have to be over the middle of the ocean. He probably saw lights from fishing boats. The captain said we might spot them during our descent for the meteorology study."

"See for yourself," she pleaded. "The ground is coming up fast. I think we're landing."

He stepped over to the galley window and looked down. Instead of the dark waters of the Atlantic there was a glimmer of white. A vast sheet of ice was slipping under the aircraft no more than 240 meters below. It was near enough for the ice crystals to reflect the strobe flashes from the navigation lights. He froze, uncomprehending, trying to make some sense out of what his eyes told him was true.

If this was an emergency landing, why hadn't the captain alerted the main cabin crew? The "Fasten Seat Belts" and "No Smoking" signs had not been turned on.

Almost all of the U.N. passengers were awake, reading or engaged in conversation. Only Hala Kamil was sound asleep. Several representatives from Mexico, returning from an economic mission to the World Bank headquarters, were huddled around a table in the tail section. Director of Foreign Financing Minister Salazar talked in grim undertones. The atmosphere around the table was dampened by defeat. Mexico had suffered a disastrous economic collapse and was going through technical bankruptcy with no monetary aid in sight.

Dread flared within Rubin, and the words rustled from his mouth: "What in hell is going on?"

The flight attendant muttered as Her face paled and her eyes widened.

"Shouldn't we begin emergency procedures?"

"Don't alarm the passengers. Not yet anyway. Let me check with the captain first."

"Is there time?"

"I don't know."

Controlling his fear, Rubin walked quickly, almost at a jog, toward the cockpit, faking a bored yawn to divert any curiosity at his rapid step.

He whipped the curtain closed that shielded the boarding entryway from the main cabin.

When he tried the door. It was locked.

He frantically rapped his knuckles against the door. No one answered from inside. He stared dumbly at the thin barrier that blocked the cockpit, his mind an incredulous blank; and then, in a flash of desperation, he lashed out his foot and kicked in the door.

The panel was built to open outward, but the blow smashed it against the inner wall. . Rubin stared into the cramped space of the cockpit.

Disbelief, bewilderment, fear, they swirled through his mind like a flood hurtling down a shattered dam.

One swift glance took in the slumped form of the men, Oswald's head on the floor, face up, ever, staring sightlessly at the cabin roof. Lemk had seemingly vanished.

Rubin stumbled over Oswald's body, leaned across the panel-staring through the wind The massive summit of the Hofsjokull loomed beyond the bow of the plane no more than ten miles away The flickering n lights silhouetted against the rising ice, the uneven surface with ghostly shades of gray and green.

Driven by panic, the steward climbed into the pilot's seat and firmly clutched the control column.

He pulled the wheel toward his chest.

Nothing happened.

The column refused to give.

Glancing at the panel, he observed that it showed a slow but steady increase in altitude. He yanked at the wheel again, but harder this time. It gave slightly. He was stunned by the unyielding pressure.

There was no time to think straight. He was too inexperienced to realize he was trying to override the automatic pilot with brute strength when only twenty-five pounds of pressure was required to overpower it.

The sharp, cold air made the glacier appear near enough to reach out and touch. He pushed the throttles forward and hauled back on the control column again. It gave sluggishly, like the wheel of a speeding car that lost its power steering, and inched back.

With agonizing slowness the Boeing lifted its nose and swept past the icy peak with less than a hundred feet to spare.

Down on the glacier, the man who had murdered the bona fide Flight 106

pilot, Date Lemk, in London and taken his place, peered into the distance through a pair of night glasses. The northern lights had faded to a dim glow, but the uneven rim of the Hofsjokull still showed against the sky.

The air was hushed with expectancy. The only sounds came from the two-man crew who were loading the flights transmitter beacon into the hull of a helicopter.

Suleiman Aziz Arnmar's eyes became accustomed to the darkness, and he could make out the broken ridges scarring the wall of the ice floe.

Ammar stood like a statue, counting the seconds, waiting for the small speck of flame that would mark the crash of Flight 106. But the distant fireball did not materialize.

Finally Ammar lowered the glasses and sighed. The stillness of the glacier spread around him, cold and remote. He pulled off the gray-haired wig and threw it into the darkness. Next he removed a pair of specially handcrafted boots and took out the four-inch risers in the heels. He became aware of his servant and friend, Ibn Telmuk, standing beside him.

"Good makeup job, Suleiman, I wouldn't recognize you," said Ibn, a swarthy type with a curly mass of ebony hair. "The equipment loaded?"

Ammar asked.

"All secured. Was the mission a success?"

"A minor miscalculation. The plane somehow cleared the crest. Allah has given Miss Kamil a few more minutes of life."

"Akhmad Yazid will not be pleased."

"Kamil will die as planned," Annnar said confidently. "Nothing was left to chance."

"The plane still flies."

"Even Allah can't keep it in the air indefinitely."

"You have failed," said a new voice.

Ammar swung and stared into the frozen scowl of Muhammad Ismail. The Egyptian's round face was a curious blend of malevolence and childish innocence. The beady black eyes gazed with evil intensity over a heavy mustache, but they lacked the power of penetration. Bravado without substance, a facade of toughness, pulling a trigger was his only skill.

Ammar had had little choice in working with lsmail. The obscure village mullah had been forced on him by Akhmad Yazid. The Islamic idol hoarded his trust Re a miser, rationing it out only to those he believed possessed a fighting spirit and a traditionalist's devotion to the original laws of Islam. Firm religious traits meant more to Yazid than competency and professionalism.

Ammar professed to being a true believer of the faith, but Yazid was wary of him. The assassin's habit of talking to Moslem leaders as though they were mortal equals did not sit well with Yazid. He insisted that Ammar carry out his death missions under the guarded eye of Ismail.

Ammar had accepted his watchdog without protest. He was a master at the game of deceit. He quickly reversed Ismail's role into that of a dupe for his own intelligence purposes.

But the stupidity of Arabs was a constant irritation to Ammar. Cold, analytical reasoning was beyond them. He shook his head wearily and then patiently explained the situation to Ismail.

"Events can happen beyond our control. An updraft, a malfunction in the automatic pilot or altimeters, a sudden change in the wind. A hundred different variables could have caused the plane to miss the peak. But all probabilities were considered. The automatic pilot is locked on a course toward the pole. No more than ninety minutes of air time is left."

"And if someone discovers the bodies in the cockpit and one of the passengers knows how to fly?" Ismail persisted.

"The dossiers of all on the plane were carefully examined. None indicated any pilot experience. Besides, I smashed the radio and navigation instruments. Anyone attempting to take control will be lost.

No compass, no landmarks to give them a direction. Hala Kamil and her U.N. bedfellows will vanish in the cold waters of the Arctic sea."

"Is there no hope for survival?" asked Ismad. "None," said Ammar firmly.

"Absolutely none."

Dirk Pitt relaxed and slouched in a swivel chair, stretching out his legs until his six-foot-three-inch body was on a near horizontal plane.

Then he yawned and ran his hands through a thick mat of wavy black hair.

Pitt was a lean, firm-muscled man in prime physical shape for someone who didn't run ten miles every day or look upon the exertion and sweat of bodybuilding as a celestial tonic against old age. His face wore the tanned, weathered skin of an outdoorsman who preferred the sun to the fluorescent lighting of an office. His deep green, opaque eyes radiated a strange combination of warmth and cruelty while his lips seemed eternally locked in a friendly grin.

He was a smooth article who moved easily among the rich and powerful, but preferred the company of men and women who drank their liquor straight up and liked to get their hands dirty.

A product of the Air Force Academy, he was listed on active status with the rank of Major, although he had been on loan to the National Underwater & Marine Agency (NUMA) for nearly six years as their Special Projects Director, Along with Al Giordino, his closest friend since childhood, he had lived and adventured in every sea, on the surface and in the depths, encountering in half a decade more wild experiences than most men would see in ten lifetimes. He had found the vanished Manhattan Limited express train after swimming through an underground cavern in New York, salvaged a few passengers before being sent to the bottom of the Saint Lawrence River with a thousand souls. He had hunted down the lost nuclear submarine Starbuck in the middle of the Pacific and tracked the ghost ship Cyclops to her grave under the Caribbean. And he raised the Titanic.

He was, Giordino often mused, a man driven to rediscover the past, born eighty years too late.

"You might want to see this," Giordino said suddenly from the other side of the room.

Pitt turned from a color video monitor that displayed a view of the seascape one hundred meters beneath the hull of the icebreaker survey ship Polar Explorer. She was a sturdy new vessel especially built for sailing through ice-covered waters. The massive boxlike superstructure towering above the hull resembled a five-story office building, and her great bow, pushed by 80,000-horsepower engines, could pound a path through ice up to one-and-a-half meters thick.

Pitt placed one foot against a counter, flexed his knee and pushed. The motion was honed through weeks of practice and with the gentle roll of the ship for momentum. He twisted 180 degrees in his swivel chair as its castors carried him some meters across the slanting deck of the electronics compartment.

"Looks like a crater coming up."

Al Giordino sat at a console studying an image on the Klein sidescan sonar recorder. Short, standing a little over 162 centimeters in stockinged size-eleven feet, broadened with beefy shoulders in the shape of a wedge, he looked as if he were assembled out of spare bulldozer parts. His hair was dark and curly, an inheritance from Italian ancestry, and if he had worn a bandanna and an earring he could have moonlighted as an organ-grinder. Dry-humored, steadfast and reliable as the tides, Giordino was Pitts insurance policy against Murphy's Law.

His concentration never flickered while Pitt, feet extended as bumpers, came to an abrupt stop against the console beside him.

Pitt watched the computer-enhanced sonograph as the ridge of a crater slowly rose to a crest and then made a steep descent into the interior void.

"She's dropping fast," said Giordino.

Pitt glanced at the echo sounder. "Down from 140 to 180 meters. "

"Hardly any slope to the outer rim."

"Two hundred and still falling."

"Weird formation for a volcano," said Giordino. "No sign of lava rock."

A tall, florid-faced man with thick graying brown hair that struggled to escape from a baseball cap tilted toward the back of his head, opened the door and leaned in the compartment.

"You night owls in the mood for food or drink?"

"Peanut-butter sandwich and a cup of black coffee sounds good," Pitt replied without turning. "Leveling out at 220 meters. "

"A couple of doughnuts with milk," Giordino answered.

Navy Commander Byron Knight, skipper of the survey vessel, nodded.

Besides Pitt and Giordino, he was the only man with access to the electronics compartment. It was off limits to the rest of the officers and crew.

"I'll have your orders rustled up from the galley."

"You're a wonderful human being, Byron," Pitt said with a sarcastic smile. "I don't care what the rest of the navy says about you."

"You ever try Peanut butter with arsenic?" Knight threw at him over his shoulder.

Giordino watched intently as the arc of the formation spread and widened. "Diameter almost two kilometers."

"Interior is smooth sediment," said Pitt. "No breakup of the floor."

"Must have been one gigantic volcano."

"Not a volcano."

Giordino faced Pitt, a curious look in his eyes. "You have another name for a submerged pockmark?"

"How about meteor impact?"

Giordino looked skeptical. "A meteor crater this deep on the sea bottom?"

"Probably struck thousands, maybe millions of years ago, at a time when the sea level was lower."

"What led you up that street?"

"Three clues," Pitt explained. "First, we have a well defined rim without a prominent outer upsiope. Second, the subbottom profiler indicates a bowl-shaped cross section. And third" he paused, pointing at a stylus that was making furious sweeps across a roll of graph paper.

"The magnetometer is having a spasm. There's enough iron down there to build a fleet of battleships."

Suddenly Giordino stiffened. "We have a target!"

"Where?"

"Two hundred meters to starboard, lying perpendicular on the crater's slope. Pretty vague reading. The object is partly obscured by the geology."

Pitt snatched the phone and rang the bridge. "We've had a malfunction in the equipment. Continue our heading to the end of the run. If we can make the repair in time, come around and repeat the track."

"Will do, sir," replied the watch officer.

"You should have sold snake oil," said Giordino, smiling.

"No telling the size of Soviet ears."

"Anything from the video cameras?"

Pitt glanced at the monitors. "Just out of range. They should pick it up on the next pass."

The initial sonar image that appeared on the recording paper looked like a brown smudge against the lighter geology of the crater's wall. Then it slipped past the sidescan's viewing window and disappeared into a computer that enhanced the detail. The finished picture came out on a special large high-resolution color video monitor. The smudge had become a well defined shape.

Using a joystick, Pitt moved a pair of crosshairs to the center of the image and clicked the button to expand the image.

The computer churned away for a few seconds, and then a new, larger, even more detailed image appeared on the screen. A rectangle automatically appeared around the target and showed the dimensions. At the same time another machine reproduced the color image on a sheet of glossy paper.

commander Knight came rushing back into the compartment. After days of tedium, cruising back and forth as though mowing a vast lawn, staring for hours on end at the video display and sidescan readings, he was galvanized, anticipation written in every line of his face.

"I was given your message about a malfunction. You have a target?"

Neither Pitt nor Giordino answered. They smiled like prospectors who have hit the mother lode. Knight, staring at them, suddenly knew.

"Good God above!" he blurted. "We've found her, really found her?"

"Hiding in the seascape," said Pitt, pointing to the monitor while handing Knight the photo. "The perfect image of one Alfa-class Soviet submarine."

Knight stared, fascinated, at both sonar images. "The Russians probed all around this section of the sea. Incredible they didn't find her."

"She's easy to miss," said Pitt. "The ice pack was heavier when they conducted their search. They couldn't maintain a straight track.

Probably skirted the opposite side of the upslope, and their sonar beams only showed a shadow where the sub was lying. Also, the unusually heavy concentration of iron under the crater would have thrown off their magnetic profile."

"Our intelligence people will dance on the ceiling when they see this."

"Not if the Reds get wise," said Giordino. "They'll hardly stand idle and watch us repeat our 'Seventy-five snatch of their 'Golf' class sub with the Glomar Explorer."

"You suggesting they haven't swallowed our story about conducting a geological survey of the seafloor?" Pitt asked with deep sarcasm.

Giordino gave Pitt a sour look indeed. "Intelligence is a weird business," he said. "The crew on the other side of these bulkheads has no idea of what we're up to, yet Soviet agents in Washington smelled out our mission weeks ago. The only reason they haven't interfered is because our undersea technology is better and they want us to lead the way to their sub."

"Won't be easy to deceive them," agreed Knight. "Two of their trawlers have been shadowing our every move since we left port."

"So have their surveillance satellites," added Giordino.

Pitt said, "All reasons why I asked the bridge to run out our last track before coming about for a closer look."

"Good try, but the Russians will pick up our track rerun."

"No doubt, except once we pass over the sub we go on and Turn onto the next lane, continuing as before. Then I'll radio our engineers in Washington to complain of equipment problems and ask for maintenance instructions. Every couple of miles we'll rerun a lane to reinforce the ruse."

Giordino looked at Knight. "They might buy it. It's believable enough."

Knight considered that. "Okay, we won't hang around. This will be our last look at the target. Then we continue on, acting as if we've found nothing."

"And after we've finished this grid," Pitt said, "we can start a new one thirty miles away and fake a discovery."

"A nice added touch," Giordino said approvingly. "Drop a red herring across our trail."

Knight smiled wryly. "Sounds like a good script. Let's go for it."

The ship rolled and the deck canted slightly to starboard as the helmsman brought her around on a reverse course. Far behind the stern, like an obstinate dog on a long leash, a robot submersible called Sherlock automatically refocused its two movie cameras and one still camera while continuing to send out probing sonar waves. Presumedly named by its designer after the fictional detective, Sherlock revealed detailed features of the seafloor previously unseen by man.

Minutes ticked by with the slowness of hours until at last the crest of the crater began slipping across the sidescan. The Polar Explorer's course towed Sherlock along the plunging slope of the crater's interior.

Three pairs of eyes locked on the sidescan recorder.

"Here she comes," Giordino said with the barest tremor of excitement.

The Soviet submarine nearly filled the port side of the sonograph. She was lying on a steep angle with her stern toward the center of the crater, her bow pointing at the rim. The hull was upright and she was in one piece, unlike the U.S. submarines Thresher and Scorpion, which had imploded into hundreds of pieces when they sank in the 1960s. The slight list to her starboard side was no more than two or three degrees.

Ten months had passed since she went missing, but her outer works were free of growth and rust in the frigid Arctic waters.

"No doubt of her being an 'Alfa' class," said Knight. "Nuclear-powered, titanium hull, nonmagnetic and noncorrosive in salt water, latest silent-propellor technology, the deepestdiving and fastest submarines in both the Soviet and U.S.

navies."

The lag between the sonar recording and the video view was around thirty seconds. As if watching a tennis match, their heads turned in unison from the sonar as they stared intently at the TV monitors.

The sub's smooth lines slid into view under the camera's lights and were revealed in a ghostly bluish-gray hue. The Americans found it hard to believe the Russian vessel was a graveyard with over a hundred and fifty men resting inside. It looked like a child's toy sitting on the bottom of a wading pool.

"any indication of unusual radioactivity?" asked Knight.

"Very slight rise," answered Giordino. "Probably from the sub's reactor."

"She didn't suffer a meltdown," Pitt surmised.

"Not according to the readings."

Knight stared at the monitors and made a cursory damage report. "Some damage to the bow. Port diving plane torn away. A long gouge in her port bottom, running for about twenty meters."

"A deep one by the looks of it," observed Pitt. "Penetrated her ballast tanks into the inner pressure hull. She must have struck the opposite rim of the crater, tearing the guts out of her. Easy to imagine the crew struggling to raise her to the surface as she kept running across the center of the crater. But she took in more water than she could blow off and lost depth, finally impacting about halfway up the slope on this side."

The compartment fell into a momentary silence as the submarine dropped astern of the Sherlock and slowly faded from view of the cameras. They continued to gaze at the monitors as the broken contour of the sea bottom glided past, their minds visualizing the horrible death that stalked men who sailed the hostile depths beneath the sea.

for nearly half a minute no one spoke, they hardly breathed. Then slowly each shook off the nightmare and turned away from the monitors.

The ice was broken. They began to relax and laugh with all the spontaneous enthusiasm of saloon patrons celebrating a winning touchdown by the home team.

Pitt and Giordino could sit back and take it easy for the rest of the voyage. Their part in the search project was over. They had found a needle in a haystack. Then slowly Pitts expression turned serious and he stared off into space.

Giordino knew the symptoms from long experience. Once a project was successfully completed, Pitt suffered a letdown. The challenge was gone, and his restless mind quickly turned to the next one.

"Damn fine job, Dirk, and you too, Al," Knight said warmly. "You NUMA people know your search techniques. This has to be the most remarkable intelligence coup in twenty years. "

"Don't get carried away," said Pitt. "The tough part is yet to come.

Recovering the sub under Russian noses will be a delicate operation. No Glomar Explorer this time. No salvage from highly visible surface ships. The entire operation will have to be carried out underwater-"

"What the hell is that?" Giordino's eyes had returned to the monitor.

"Looks like a fat jug."

"More like an urn," Knight confirmed.

Pitt stared into the monitor for a long moment, his face thoughtful, his eyes tired, red and suddenly intense. The object was standing straight up. Two handles protruded from opposite sides of a narrow neck, flaring sharply into a broad, oval body that in Turn tapered toward the base buried in the silt.

"A terra-cotta amphora," Pitt announced finally.

"I believe you're right," said Knight. "The Greeks and Romans used them to transport wine and olive oil. They've been recovered all over the bottom of the Mediterranean."

"What's one doing in the Greenland Sea?" Giordino asked no one in particular. "There, to the left of the picture, we've picked up a second."

Then a cluster of three drifted under the cameras, followed by five more running in a ragged line from southeast to northwest.

Knight turned to Pitt, "You're the shipwreck expert. How do you'read it?"

A good ten seconds passed before Pitt replied. Then at last he did, his voice was distant, as though it came from someone in the next compartment.

"My guess is they lead toward an ancient shipwreck the history books say isn't supposed to be here."

Rubin would have traded his soul to abandon the impossible task, remove hands slick with sweat from the control rolumn, close tired eyes and accept death, but his sense of responsibility to the flight crew and passengers drove him on.

Never in his wildest nightmares did he see himself in such a crazy predicament. One wrong physical movement, a slight error in judgment and fifty people would find a deep, unknown grave in the sea. Not fair, he cried in his mind over and over. Not fair.

None of the navigation instruments was fullctioning. All communications equipment was dead. Not one of the passengers had ever flown an aircraft, even a light plane. He was totally disoriented and hopelessly lost. Inexplicably the needles on the fuel gauges wavered on "Empty."

His mind strained at the confusion of it all.

Where was the pilot? What caused the flight officers' deaths? Who was behind this insane madness?

The questions swarmed in his mind, but the answers remained wrapped in frustration.

Rubin's only consolation was that he was not alone. Another man shared the cockpit.

Eduardo Ybarra, a member of the Mexican delegation, had once served as a mechanic in his country's air force. Thirty years had passed since he wielded a wrench on propellerdriven aircraft, but bits and pieces of the old knowledge had returned to him as he sat in the copilot's seat-reading the instruments for Rubin and taking command of the throttles.

Ybarra's face was round and brown, the hair thick and black with traces of gray, the brown eyes widely spaced and expressionless. In his three-piece suit, he seemed out of place in the cockpit. Oddly there was no beaded perspiration on his forehead, and he had not loosened his tie or removed his coat.

He motioned upward at the sky through the windshield. "Judging from the stars, I'd say we're on a heading toward the North Pole."

"Probably flying east over Russia for all I know," Rubin said grimly. "I haven't a vague idea of our direction."

"That was an island we left behind us."

"Think it was Greenland?"

Ybarra shook his head. "We've had water under us for the last few hours. We'd still be over the icecap if it was Greenland. My guess is we crossed Iceland."

"My God, how long have we been heading north?"

"No telling when the pilot turned off his London-to-New York course."

Another fear added to Rubin's aching confusion. Calamity was piling on calamity. The one-in-a-thousand chance of coming through alive had rapidly risen to one in a million. He had to make a desperate decision, the only decision.

"I'm going to bring her around ninety degrees to port."

"We have no other choice," Ybarra agreed solemnly.

"A few might survive if we crash on land. Near impossible to pull off a water landing on high waves in the dark, even by an experienced pilot.

And if by some miracle we set her down intact, no human dressed in street clothes could last more than a few minutes in a freezing sea."

"We may already be too late." The U.N. delegate from Mexico nodded at the instrument panel. The red fuel warning lights were flashing across the board. "I fear our time in the air has run out."

Rubin stared in astonishment at the telltale instruments. He did not realize that the Boeing flying 200 knots at 1,500 meters ate up the same amount of fuel as it did when flying 500 knots at 10,500 meters. "Okay we head west until she drops from under us."

Rubin rubbed his palms on his pants legs and gripped the control column.

He had not taken command of the aircraft again since climbing over the glacier's peak. He took a deep breath and pressed the "Autopilot Release" button on the control column. He was too unsure of himself to slip the Boeing into a bank with the ailerons so he used only the rudder controls to gently crab around in a flat Turn. As soon as the nose came onto a straight course he felt something was wrong.

"Rpms dropping on number four engine," said Ybarra with a noticeable tremor in his voice. "It's starving for fuel."

"Shouldn't we shut it down or something?"

"I don't know the procedure," Ybarra replied dumbly.

Oh, dear Lord, Rubin thought to himself, the blind leading the blind.

The altimeter began to register a steady drop. The airspeed indicated a decrease too. His mind strained beyond reason, Rubin tried to will the plane in the air rather than fly it.

He also tried to fight time as the distance between the plane and the sea slowly, relentlessly narrowed. Then, without warning, the control column began to grow sluggish and vibrate in his hands.

"She's stalling," shouted Ybarra, his stoic face showing fear at last.

"Push the nose down."

Rubin eased the control column forward, fully aware he was hastening the inevitable. "Lower the flaps to increase our lift!" he ordered Ybarra.

"Flaps coming down," Ybarra replied through pursed lips.

"This is it," Rubin muttered. "We're going in."

A stewardess stood in the open cockpit door listening to the exchange, eyes wide with fright, face pale as a sheet of paper.

"Are we going to crash?" she asked, barely above a whisper.

Rubin tensed in his seat, too busy to Turn. "Yes, dammit!" he swore.

"Strap yourself in."

She spun and nearly fell down as she raced back to the main cabin to alert the other flight attendants and passengers for the worst. Everyone realized there was no putting off the inevitable, and thankfully there was no panic or hysterical outcry. Even the prayers came softly.

Ybarra twisted in his seat and stared down the aisle. Kamil was comforting an older man who was shaking uncontrollably.

Her face was completely calm and seemed to bear a smiling expression of contentment. She was truly a lovely woman, Ybarra thought. A pity her beauty would soon be erased. He sighed and turned back to the instrument panel.

The altimeter was falling past two hundred meters. Ybarra took a great risk and increased the throttle settings on the three remaining engines.

It was a useless gesture born of desperation. The engines would burn their last few gallons of fuel at a faster rate and die sooner. But Ybarra wasn't thinking logically. He could not sit and do nothing. He felt he had to perform one final, defiant act, anything, even if it meant hastening his own death.

Five tormenting minutes passed as one. The black sea reached up to clutch the aircraft.

"I see lights!" Rubin blurted suddenly. "Dead ahead!"

His eyes instantly flicked up and focused through the windshield. "A ship!" he cried. "It's a ship!"

Almost as he shouted, the plane roared over the polar Explorer, missing the radar mast by less than ten meters.

The crew of the icebreaker had been alerted by radar to the approaching aircraft. The men standing inside the bridge involuntarily ducked as the airliner, exhaust from its two straining engines screaming like an army of banshees, swept overhead toward the Greenland coast to the west.

The roar filled the electronics compartment, and it emptied like a lake through a split dam. Knight took off for the bridge at a dead run with Pitt and Giordino right behind him. None of the men manning the bridge as much as turned as the captain burst past the door. Everyone was peering in the direction of the receding aircraft.

"What in hell was that?" Knight demanded from the officer on watch.

"An unidentified aircraft nearly ranmied the ship, Captain."

"Military?"

"No, sir. I caught a quick glimpse of the lower wings as she flashed overhead. She bore no markings."

"A spy plane maybe?"

"I doubt it. All her windows were lit UP."

"A commercial airliner," Giordino suggested.

Knight's expression became vague and a trifle irritated.

"Where does the pilot get off, endangering my ship? What's he doing around here anyway? We're hundreds of miles off commercial flight paths."

"She's losing altitude," said Pitt, staring at the blinking lights as they grew smaller in the east. "I'd say she's going in."

"God help them if they set down on this sea in the dark."

"Strange he hasn't turned on the landing lights."

The watch officer nodded his head in agreement. "Strange is the word. A pilot in trouble would surely send out a distress signal. The communications room hasn't heard a peep."

"You tried to raise him?" asked Knight.

"As soon as they came at us on radar. No reply"

Knight stepped to the window and gazed out. He dnimmed his fingertips thoughtfully for no more than four seconds. Then he turned and faced the watch officer.

"Maintain course, continue the grid pattern."

Pitt looked at him. "I understand your decision, but I can't say I applaud it."

"You're on a Navy ship, Mr. Pitt," said Knight sternly. "We're not the Coast Guard. Our mission takes first priority."

"There could be women and children on board that plane."

"The facts don't spell tragedy. She's still in the air. If the Polar Explorer is the only hope of rescue in this part of the sea, why no distress call, no attempt to signal us with his landing lights, no sign of preparations to ditch? You're a flyer, you tell me why the pilot hasn't circled the ship if he's in trouble."

"Could be he's trying for land."

"Begging the Captain's pardon," interrupted the watch officer, "I forgot to mention the landing flaps were down."

"Still no proof of an immanent crash," Knight said stubbornly.

"Damn the compassion, full steam ahead," Pitt said coldly. "This isn't war, Captain. We're talking about a mission of mercy. I wouldn't want it on my conscience if a hundred people died because I failed to act.

The Navy can well afford the time it takes to investigate."

Knight tilted his head toward the empty chart room, closing the door after Pitt and Giordino entered. "We have our own mission to consider,"

he persisted calmly. "We Turn off course now and the Russians will suspect we found their sub and home in on this area."

"Solid point," Pitt acknowledged. "But you can still send Giordino and me into the game."

"I'm listening."

"We use our NUMA helicopter on the aft deck and you supply your medical people and a couple of strong bodies. We'll chase the aircraft while the Polar Explorer keeps running search lanes."

"And Russian surveillance? What will their intelligence analysts make of it?"

"At first they won't see it as a coincidence. They're already probably trying to paint a connection. But if, God forbid, the plane crashes, and proves out to be a commercial airliner, then at least you'll have a legitimate reason for turning off course to launch a rescue mission.

Afterward we resume our search pattern, fake out the Russians and gamble on turning a disaster into a windfall."

"And your helicopter flight, they'll monitor your every move."

"Al and I will use open communications and keep a running dialogue of our search for the downed mystery plane. That should pacify their suspicions."

Knight's eyes turned downward, staring at something beyond the deck.

Then he sighed and raised his head to look at Pitt.

"We're wasting time. Get your bird untied and warmed up. I'll see to the medical personnel and a team of volunteers."

Rubin made no attempt to circle the Polar Explorer because of the almost nonexistent altitude and his sad lack of flying talent. There was every chance he would stall the plane and send it cartwheeling into the rising swells.

The mere sight of the ship had ignited a small glimmer of hope in the cockpit. Now they had been sighted and rescuers would know where to look for survivors. A small comfort, but better than none at all.

The black sea abruptly turned to solid pack ice and, magmfied by starlight, whirled crazily beneath the windshield. Rubin almost felt as if he were sledding through it. With the final impact only minutes away, it finally occurred to him to order Ybarra to Turn on the landing lights.

The Mexican feverishly scanned the instrument panel, found the marked switches and flicked them to "ON." A startled polar bear was caught in the sudden glare before he vanished beneath and behind the aircraft.

They were hurtling over a dead, frozen plain,

"Mother of Jesus," murmured Ybarra. "I see hills on our right. We've crossed overland."

Luck's pendulum had finally swung in Rubin's favor. Ybarra's hills were a desolate range of mountains that swept above the jagged Greenland coast for a hundred miles in both directions. But Rubin had somehow missed them and miraculously manhandled the descending Boeing into the middle of Ardencaple Fjord, He was flying up the narrow inlet to the sea below and between the summits of steep sloping cliffs. Luck also conjured up a headwilld, which gave the aircraft added lift.

The ice seemed close enough for him to reach out and drag his hand over it. The lights reflected a kaleidoscope of shivering colors. A dark mass loomed ahead. He gently pushed the right rudder pedal and the mass slid away to his port side.

"Lower the landing gear!" Rubin shouted.

Ybarra wordlessly complied. Under normal emergency landing procedures it was the worst possible action to take, but in their ignorance they unwittingly made the correct decision for the terrain. The landing gear dropped from their wheel wells and the plane quickly lost speed due to the added wind resistance.

Rubin gripped the control wheel until his knuckles turned ivory, and he glanced down directly at the ice flashing past. The blazing crystals seemed to be rising up to meet him, spreading as they came.

Rubin closed his eyes, praying they would come down in soft snow instead of striking unyielding ice. There was nothing more he and Ybarra could do. The end was approaching with horrifying speed.

Mercifully, he did not know, could not know, the ice was only one meter thick, far too thin to support the weight of a Boeing 720-B.

The maze of instrument lights had gone crazy, and the lights were flashing red. The ice rushed out of the darkness. Rubin had the sensation of bursting through a black curtain into a white void. He pulled back on the control column and the speed of the Boeing fell away as the nose rose up for the last time in a feeble attempt to cling to the sky.

Ybarra sat terrified. Oblivious to the 320-kilometer-an-hour airspeed, frozen in shock, he made no attempt to yank back the throttles. Nor did his dazed mind think to cut the electrical switches.

Then the impact.

On reflex, Rubin and Ybarra flung up their hands and closed their eyes.

The tires touched, slid, and gouged twill trails through the ice. The port inboard engine buckled and was torn from its mounts, madly gyrating into the darkness. Both starboard engines dug in at the same time, caught and twisted the wing away in a shrieking, mangled mass. Then all power was lost and the lights went dark.

The Boeing careened across the fjord's ice sheet, shedding pieces of protesting metal like particles behind a comet. It smashed into a pressure ridge that had been thrust up when the pack ice collided. The nose gear was crushed back against the forward belly, tearing into the hell hole. The bow dropped and plowed through the ice, crushing the thin aluminum plates inward against the cockpit. At last the momentum fell off, and the crumpled plane, distorted and dismembered, came to the end of its shattering journey. It came to a stop just thirty meters short of a jumbled group of large rocks near the icebound shore.

for a brief few seconds there was a deathly silence. Then the ice made a loud series of cracking sounds, metal groaned as it twisted against metal, and the battered aircraft slowly settled through the ice into the frigid water.

The archaeologists heard the Boeing fly up the valley too.

They rushed out of their hut in time to catch a brief look at the plane's outline reflected in the ice glare by the landing lights. They could clearly make out the illuminated cabin windows and the extended landing gear. Almost immediately came the sound of shrieking metal, and a scant instant later the vibration of the impact carried through the frozen surface. The lights went dead, but the protest of tortured metal continued for several seconds. Then, suddenly, a dead silence swept out of the darkness, a silence that overpowered the dreary moan of the wind.

The archaeologists stood in disbelieving shock. Stunned, frozen immobile, immune to the cold, they stared into the black night like haunted statues.

"Good lord," Gronquist finally muttered in awe, "it crashed in the fjord."

Lily could not conceal the shock in her voice. "Horrible! No one could have survived uninjured."

"More than likely dead if they went in the water."

"Probably why there's no fire," added Graham.

"Did anyone see what kind of plane it was?" asked Hoskins.

Graham shook his head. "Happened too fast. Good size, though. Looked to be multi-engine. Might be an ice recon patrol."

"How far do you make it?" asked Gronquist.

"Probably a kilometer, a kilometer and a quarter."

Lily's expression was pale and strained. "We've got to do something to help them."

Gronquist took a visual bearing and rubbed his unprotected cheeks.

"Let's get back inside before we freeze, and form a plan before we charge off half-cocked."

Lily began to come back on track. "Gather up blankets, any extra warm clothing," she said brusquely. "I'll see to the medical supplies."

"Mike, get on the radio," Gronquist ordered. "Notify the weather station at Daneborg. They'll spread the word to Air Force rescue units at Thule."

Graham made an affirmative motion with his hand and was the first one inside the hut.

"We'd better bring along tools for prying any survivors from the wreckage," said Hoskins.

Gronquist nodded as he yanked on his parka and gloves. "Good thinking.

Figure out whatever else we'll require. I'll hook up the sled to one of the snowmobiles. We can pile all the stuff in that."

Five minutes ago they had all been asleep. Now they were throwing on cold-weather gear and hurriedly rushing about their respective chores.

Forgotten was the enigmatic Byzantine coin, forgotten was the warm comfort of sleep; all that mattered was the urgency of getting to the downed plane as quickly as possible.

Returning outside, head against a sudden shift of wind, Gronquist dashed around the hut to a small snow-covered shed that protected the project's two snowmobiles. He kicked away the ice that had formed around the bottom of the door and pulled it open. Inside, a small oil heater struggled with all the efficiency of a candle inside a freezer to keep the interior air twenty degrees above the temperature outside. He tried the starter buttons, but the batteries were badly drained after months of hard use, and both engines balked at turning over. Cursing in vapored breaths, he removed his heavy gloves with his teeth and began yanking on the manual pull ropes. The engine on the first snowmobile caught on the fifth attempt, but the second played stubborn. Finally, after -two pulls (Gronquist counted them), the engine obstinately coughed to life.

He hitched the tongue of a large sled to the rear catch on the snowmobile whose engine had had extra time to warm up. He finished none too soon, as his fingers were beginning to Turn numb.

The others had already stacked the supplies and equipment outside the entryway to the hut when he rode up. Except for Gronquist, they were all bundled up in down-filled jumpsuits. The sled was loaded to the top of its sideboards in less than two minutes. Graham passed everyone a heavy-duty flashlight, and they were ready to set off.

"If they crashed through the ice," shouted Hoskins above the wind, "we might as well forget it."

"He's right," Graham shouted back. "They'd be dead from hypothemiia by now."

Lily's eyes turned hard behind her ski mask. "Pessimism never saved anybody. I suggest you big jocks get a move on."

Gronquist grabbed her by the waist and lifted her onto the snowmobile.

"Do what the lady says, boys. There're people dying out there."

He swung a leg over the seat in front of Lily and cracked the throttle as Hoskins and Graham raced for the idling snowmobile in the shed. The engine's exhaust purred and the rear tread gripped the snow. He cut a sharp U-Turn and took off toward the shore, the sled bouncing along behind.

They swept over the uneven ice-covered stones of the beach onto the frozen fjord. It was dangerous going. The beam from the single light mounted in front of the handgrips wavered over the ice pack in a crazy jumble of white flashes against black shadows, making it nearly impossible for Gronquist to see any pressure ridges until they were plowing up and over them like a lifeguard boat through heavy surf. And no amount of driving skill could prevent the heavily laden sled from veenng and seesawing in their wake.

Lily clasped her hands around Gronquist's great stomach in a death grip, her eyes closed, head buried against his shoulder. She yelled for him to slow down, but he ignored her. She turned and spied the bobbing light of the other snowmobile rapidly closing on their tail.

Without the drag of the sled, the overtaking vehicle, with Hoskins steering and Graham behind, quickly caught up and passed. Soon all Lily could see of the other two men was an indistinct blur of hunched figures through a trailing cloud of fine surface snow.

She felt Gronquist tense as a large metal object rose up out of the darkness at the far edge of the light's ray. Gronquist abruptly jammed the handgrips around to his left. The edges of the front skis dug into the ice and the snowmobile swerved away just one meter from striking a piece of the plane's shattered wing. He made a frantic attempt to straighten out, but the sudden twist of centrifugal force whipped the sled around like the tail of a maddened rattlesnake. The top-heavy sled went into a wild skid, jackknifed against the snowmobile and snapped the hitch. The tips of the runners dug in and it flipped upside down, scattering its load in the air like debris from an explosion.

Gronquist shouted something, but the words were cut off as the flat side of a runner unerringly caught him on the shoulder, knocking him off the snowmobile. He was thrown in a wide arc like a demolition ball about to smash a wall. The hood of his coat was jerked back and the ice rose up and struck his unprotected head.

Lily's arms were torn from around Gronquist's waist as he vanished into the darkness. She thought she might be thrown clear. The sled missed her, crashing to a stop a few meters away, but the snowmobile had other ideas. Without Gronquist's hands on the clutch lever and throttle, it came to a stop, teetering precariously at a forty-five-degree angle, engine popping at idle.

It hung there for a brief moment, and then slowly heeled over to one side, falling on Lily's legs from her hips down and pinning her helplessly against the ice sheet.

Hoskins and Graham were not immediately aware of the accident behind them, but they were about to run into a disaster of their own. After covering another two hundred meters, Graham turned, more out of curiosity than intuition, to check how far they had outdistanced Lily and Gronquist. He was surprised to see their light hewn far to the rear, stationary and pointing downward.

He pounded Hoskins's shoulder and shouted in his ear, "I think something's happened to the others."

It had been Hoskins's original intention to find the depression in the ice carved by the plane after it touched down and then follow it to the final crash site. His eyes were straining to penetrate the gloom beyond when Graham interrupted his concentration.

The words came indistinct over the growl of the snowmobile's exhaust. He twisted his head and shouted back at Graham.

"I can't hear you."

"Something's wrong."

Hoskins nodded in understanding and refocused his attention on the terrain ahead. The distraction was to cost them. Too late, he glimpsed one of the troughs gouged by the landing gear almost as he was on it.

The snowmobile flew over the two-meter opening in the ice and became airborne. The weight of the two riders forced the nose to dip down and it collided against the opposite wall with a sharp crack like the blast of a pistol. Fortunately for Hoskins and Graham, they were pitched over the edge and onto the ice surface, their bodies tumbling crazily as if they were cottonstuffed dolls thrown across a waxed floor.

Thirty seconds later a stunned Graham, moving like a ninety-year-old man, stiffly lifted himself to his hands and knees. He sat there dazed, not fully aware of how he got there. He heard a strange hissing sound and looked around.

Hoskins was sitting in an upright position, doubled up in agony with both hands tightly pressed against his groin. He was sucking and exhaling air through clenched teeth while rocking back and forth.

Graham removed his outer mitten and lightly touched his nose, It didn't feel broken, but blood was flowing from the nostrils, forcing him to breathe through his mouth. A series of stretches indicated all joints were still mobile, all limbs in place. Not too surprising, considering the heavy padding of his clothing. He crawled over to Hoskins, whose tortured hissing had become a string of mournful groans.

"What happened?" Graham asked, regreuing such a stupid question the instant he uttered it.

"We hit a gash furrowed in the ice by the aircraft," Hoskins managed between groans. "Jesus, I think I've been castrated."

"Let me have a look." Graham pried away the hands and unzipped the front of Hoskins's jumpsuit. He took a flashlight from a pocket and pushed the switch. He could not suppress a smile. "Your wife will need another excuse to dump you. There's no sign of blood. Your sex life is secure."

"Where's Lily . . . and Gronquist?" Hoskins asked haltingly.

"About two hundred meters back. We've got to make our way around the ice opening and check out their situation."

Hoskins rose painfully to his feet and hobbled to the edge of the ice break. Amazingly, the snowmobile's headlamp was still burning, its dim glow playing on the bottom of the flord while backlighting the bubbles that traveled up six meters to the surface. Graham walked over and peered down. Then they looked at each other.

"As lifesavers," said Hoskins dejectedly, "we'd better stick with archaeology-"

"Quiet!" Graham snapped suddenly. He cupped his mittens to his ears and turned from side to side like a radar dish. Then he stopped and pointed excitedly at flashing lights in the distance. "Hot damn!" he shouted.

"There's a helicopter coming up the fjord."

Lily floated in and out of reality.

She could not understand why it became increasingly difficult for her to think straight. She lifted her head and looked around for Gronquist. He lay unmoving several meters away. She shouted, desperately trying to get a response, but he lay as though dead. She gave up and gradually entered a halfdream world as her legs lost all sensation of feeling.

Only when she began to shiver did Lily realize she was in a mild state of shock.

She was certain Graham and Hoskins would return any moment, but the moments soon grew into painful minutes, and they did not show. She felt very tired and was about to gratefully slip away into sleep when she heard a strange thumping sound approaching from overhead. Then a dazzling light cut the dark sky and blinded her eyes. Loose snow was kicked up by a sudden windstorm and swept around her. The thumping sound died in intensity and a vague figure, encircled by the light, came toward her.

The figure became a man in a heavy fur parka who immediately summed up the situation, took a strong - grip on the snowmobile and heaved it off her legs to an upright position.

He walked around her until the light illuminated his face. Lily's eyes weren't focusing as they should but they stared into a pair of sparkling green eyes that took her breath away. They seemed to reflect hardness, gentleness and sincere concern in one glinting montage. They narrowed a fraction when he saw that she was a woman. She wondered dizzily where he came from.

Lily couldn't think of anything to say except, "Oh, am I ever glad to see you."

"Name's Dirk Pitt," answered a warm voice. "If you're not busy, why don't you have dinner with me tomorrow night?"

Lily looked up at Pitt, trying to read him, not sure she had heard him correctly. "I may not be up to it."

He pushed back the hood of his parka and ran his hands up and down her legs. He gently squeezed her ankles. "No apparent breaks or swelling,"

he said in a friendly voice. "Are you in pain?"

"I'm too cold to hurt."

Pitt retrieved a pair of blankets that had been pitched from the sled d you get here?"

he asked her.

"I'm one of a team of archaeologists doing an excavation on an ancient Eskimo village. We heard the plane come up the fjord and ran out of our hut in time to see it land on the ice. We were heading for the crash site with blankets and medical supplies when we . . ." Lily's words became vague and she weakly gestured toward the overturned sled.

"We?"

In the light from the helicopter Pitt quickly read the accident in the snow coating the ice: the straight trail of the snowmobile, the abrupt swerve around the severed aircraft wing, the sharp cuts made by the runners of the out-of-control sledonly then did he glimpse another human form lying nearly ten meters beyond the wing.

"Hold on."

Pitt walked over and knelt down beside Gronquist. The big archaeologist was breathing evenly. Pitt gave him a cursory examination.

Lily watched for a few moments, and then asked anxiously, "Is he dead?"

"Hardly. A nasty contusion on his forehead. Concussion, most likely.

Possible fracture, but I doubt it. He has a head like a bank vault."

Graham came trudging up, Hoskins limping along behind, both looking like snowmen, their Arctic jumpsuits dusted white, their face masks plastered with ice from their breathing. Graham lifted his mask, exposing his bloodied face and studied Pitt blankly for a moment, then he smiled bleakly.

"Welcome, stranger. Your timing was perfect."

No one on the helicopter had seen the other two members of the archaeology expedition from the air, and Pitt began to wonder how many other ambulance cases were wandering around the fjord.

"We have an injured man and lady here," Pitt said without formalities.

"Are they part of your group?"

The smile fell from Graham's face. "What happened?"

"They took a bad spill."

"We took one too."

"You see the aircraft?"

"Saw it go down, but we didn't reach it."

Hoskins moved around Graham and stared down at Lily and then glanced around until he spied Gronquist. "How badly are they hurt?"

"Know better after they've had X-rays."

"We've got to help them."

"I have a team of medics on board the helicopter."

"Then what in hell are you waiting for?" Hoskins cut him off - "Call them out here - " He made as if to brush past Pitt, but he was stopped dead by an iron grip on his arm. He stared uncomprehending into a pair of unblinking eyes.

"Your friends will have to wait," Pitt said firmly. "any survivors on the downed aircraft must come first. How far to your camp?"

"A kilometer to the south," Hoskins answered compliantly.

"The snowmobile is still operable. You and your partner rehitch the sled and carry them back to your camp. Go easy in case they have any internal injuries. You have a radio?"

"Yes. "

"Keep it set on frequency thirty-two and stand by," said Pitt. "If the plane was a commercial jetliner loaded with passengers, we'll have a real mess on our hands."

"We'll stand by," Graham assured him.

Pitt leaned over Lily and squeezed her hand. "Don't forget our date,"

he said.

Then he yanked the parka hood over his head, turned and jogged back to the helicopter.

Rubin felt a great weight smothering him from all sides as if some relentless force was driving him backward. The seat belt and harness pressed cruelly into his gut and shoulders. He opened his eyes and saw only vague and shadowy images. As he waited for his vision to clear he tried to move his hands and arms, but they seemed locked in place.

Then his eyes gradually focused and he saw why.

An avalanche of snow and ice had forged through the shattered windshield, entrapping his body up to the chest. He made a desperate attempt to free himself. After a few minutes of struggling, he gave up.

The unyielding pressure held him like a straitjacket. There was no way he could escape the cockpit without help.

The shock slowly began to fade and he gritted his teeth from the pain that erupted from his broken legs. Rubin thought it strange that his feet felt as though they were immersed in water. He rationalized that it was his own blood.

Rubin was wrong. The plane had settled through the ice in water nearly three meters deep and it had flooded the cabin floor up to the seats.

Only then did he remember Ybarra. He turned his head to his right and squinted through the darkness. The starboard side of the aircraft's bow had been crushed inward almost to the engineer's panel. All he could see of the Mexican delegate was a rigid, upraised arm protruding from the snow and telescoped wreckage.

Rubin turned away, sick in the sudden realization that the little man who had sat at his side throughout the terrible ordeal was dead, every bone crushed. Rubin also realized he had only a short time to live before he froze to death.

He began to cry.

"She should be coming up!" Giordino shouted over the engine and rotor noise.

Pitt nodded and stared down at the gouge that cut across the merciless ice, its sides littered with bits and pieces of jagged debris. He saw it now. A tangible object with mamnade straight lines imperceptibly appeared in the gloom ahead. Then they were on top of it.

There was a sad and ominous appearance about the crumPlead aircraft. One wing had completely ripped off and the other was twisted back against the fuselage. The tail section was buckled at a pathetic angle. The remains had the look of a mashed bug on a white carpet.

... The fuselage sank through the ice and two-thirds of it is immersed in water," Pitt observed.

"She didn't burn," said Giordino. "That's a piece of luck."

He held up his hand to shade his eyes from the dazzling reflection as the helicopter's lights swept the airliner's length. "Talk about highly polished skin. Her maintenance people took good care of her. I'd guess she was a Boeing 720-B. any sign of life?"

"None," replied Pitt. "it doesn't look good."

"How about identification markings?"

"Three stripes running down the hull, light blue and purple separated by a band of gold."

"Not the colors of any airline i'm familiar with."

"Drop down and circle her," said Pitt. "While you spot a landing site, I'll try and read her lettering."

Giordino banked and spiraled toward the wreckage. The landing lights, mounted on bow and tail of the helicopter, exposed the half-sunken aircraft in a sea of brilliance. The name above the decorative stripes was in a slanted-style instead of the usual easier to read block-type letters.

"NEBULA," Pitt read aloud. "NEBULA AIR."

"Never heard of it," said Giordino, his eyes fixed on the ice.

"A plush airline that caters to vips.

"What in hell is it doing so far from the beaten track?"

"We'll soon know if anybody's alive to tell us."

Pitt turned to the eight men sitting comfortably in the warm belly of the chopper. They were all appropriately clothed in blue Navy Arctic weather gear. One was the ship's surgeon, three were medics, and four were damage-control experts. They chatted back and forth as casually as if they were on a bus trip to Denver. Between them, tied down by straps in the center of the floor, boxes of medical supplies, bundles of blankets and a rack of stretchers sat stacked beside asbestos suits and a crate of firefighting equipment.

An auxiliary-powered heating unit was secured opposite the main door, its hoisting cables attached to an overhead winch. Next to it stood a compact snowmobile with an enclosed cabin and side tracks.

The gray-haired man seated just aft of the cockpit, with gray mustache and beard to match, looked back at Pitt and grinned. "About time for us to earn our pay?" he asked cheerfully.

Nothing, it seemed, could dim Dr. Jack Gale's merry disposition.

"We're setting down now," answered Pitt. "Nothing stirring around the plane. No indication of fire. The cockpit is buried and the fuselage looks distorted but intact."

"Nothing ever comes easy." Gale shrugged. "Still, it beats hell out of treating burn cases."

"That's the full news. The tough news is the main cabin is filled with nearly a meter of water, and we didn't bring our galoshes."

Gale's face turned serious. "God help any injured who didn't stay dry.

They wouldn't have lasted eight minutes in freezing water."

"If none of the survivors can open an emergency exit, we may have to cut our way inside."

"Sparks from cutting equipment have a nasty habit of igniting sloshing jet fuel," said Lieutenant Cork Simon, the stocky leader of the Polar Explorer's damage-control team. He bore the confident look of a man who knew his job inside out and then some. "Better we go in through the main cabin door. Doc Gale, here, will need all the space he can get to remove any stretcher cases."

"I agree," said Pitt. "But a pressurized door that's been jammed against its stops by the distortion of the crash will take time to force open. people may be freezing to death in there. Our first job is to make an opening to insert the vent pipe from the heater."

He broke off as Giordino cut a steep Turn and dropped down toward a flat area only a stone's throw from the wreck. Everyone tensed in readiness.

Outside, the beat of the rotor blades whiPPed up a small blizzard of snow and ice particles, turning the landing site into an alabaster-colored stew that wiped out all vision.

Giordino had barely touched the wheels to the ice and set the throttles on idle when Pitt shoved open the loading door, jumped into the cold and headed toward the wreckage. Behind him Doc Gale began directing the unloading of supplies while Cork Simon and his team willched the auxiliary heater and the snowmobile onto the ice.

Half-running, half-slipping, pi made a visual inspection of the interior of the fuse lage, carefully avoiding open breaks in the ice.

The air reeked with the unwelcome smell of jet fuel. He climbed up the ice MOUnd that was piled a meter thick over the cockpit windows.

Climbing the slick surface was like crawling up a greased ramp. He tried to scoop an opening into the cockpit, but quickly gave it up: it would have taken an hour or more to dig through the packed ice and then tunnel inside.

He slid down and ran around to the remaining wing. The right section was twisted and broken from its supporting mounts, the tip pointing toward the tail. it lay on the ice, crushed against the sunken fuselage only an arm's length below the row of windows. Using the wing as a platform over the open water, Pitt dropped to his hands and knees and tried to peer inside. The lights from the helicopter reflected off the Plexiglas, and he had to cup his hands around his eyes to close out the glare, At first he could not detect any movement, only darkness and a deathly stillness.

Then, quite suddenly, a grotesque face materialized on the other side of the window, scant centimeters from Pitts eyes.

He unconsciously stepped back. The sudden appearance of a woman with a cut over one eye and blood flowing over half the features, all distorted by the hairline cracks running through the window, startled Pitt momentarily.

He quickly shook off the shock and studied the unblemished side of the face. The high cheekbones, the long dark hair, and one olive-brown eye was enough to suggest a very beautiful woman, Pitt thought charitably.

He leaned close to the window and yelled, "Can you open an emergency exit hatch?"

The plucked eyebrow raised a fraction, but the eye looked blank.

"Do you hear me?"

At that instant, Simon's men fired up the auxiliary power unit, and a stand of floodlights flashed on, illuminating the aircraft in a glare as bright as daylight. They quickly connected the heater unit and Simon began dragging the flexible hose across the ice.

"Over here, on the wing," Pitt waved. "And bring something to cut through a window."

The damage-control team had been trained for emergency ship repair, and they went about their trade, competent and without wasted movement, as if rescuing trapped passengers from a downed airplane was an everyday exercise.

When Pitt turned back, the woman's face was gone.

Simon and one of his team scrambled up on the twisted wing, struggling to keep their footing while tugging the widemouthed heater hose behind.

Pitt felt a blast of hot air and was amazed that the heating unit required so little time to warm UP

"We'll need a fire ax to break through," said Pitt.

Simon feigned a haughty look. "Give the U.S. Navy credit for a touch of finesse. We've advanced far beyond crude chopping methods." He removed a compact battery-powered tool from his coat pocket. He pushed the switch and a small abrasive wheel on one end began to spin. "Goes through aluminum and Plexiglas like butter."

"Do your stuff," Pitt said dryly, moving back out of the way.

Simon was as good as his word; the little cutting device sliced through the thick exterior window in less than two minutes. The sheet inside took only seconds.

Pitt hunched down and extended his arm inside and beamed a flashlight. There was no sign of the woman. The cold water of the fjord glittered under the light's ray. The water lapped at the edge of empty, nearby seats.

Simon and Pitt inserted the end of the heater hose through the window and then hurried around to the forward section of the aircraft. The navy men had reached under the water and released the latch to the main exit door, but, as expected, it was jammed. They rapidly drilled holes and screwed in stainless-steel hooks which were attached to cables leading to the snowmobile.

The driver engaged the clutch and the snowmobile slowly inched ahead until the slack was taken up. Then he revved the engine, the metal spikes of the treads dug in, and the little snowmobile strained forward.

for a few seconds nothing seemed to happen. There was only the growl of the exhaust and the crunching noise of the treads as they chiseled their way into the ice.

After an anxious wait, a new sound broke the cold-an unearthly screeching of protesting metal, and then the lower edge of the cabin door raised out of the water. The cables were unhooked and the entire rescue crew crouched down, set their shoulders against the door and heaved upward until it creaked almost to a full open position.

The inside of the plane was dark and ominous.

Pitt leaned across the narrow stretch of open water and stared into the unknown, his stomach churning with morbid curiosity. His figure threw a shadow over the water in the aisle of the main cabin, and at first he saw nothing but the gleam from the walls of the galley.

It was strangely quiet and there was no sign of human remains.

Pitt hesitated and looked back. Doc Gale and his medical team were standing behind him, staring in grim anticipation, while Simon's men were unreeling cable from the power unit to light the plane's interior.

"Going in," Pitt said.

He jumped across the opening into the plane. He landed on the deck in water that splashed over his knees. His legs felt like they had been suddenly stabbed by a thousand needles. He waded around the bulkhead and into the aisle separating the seats of the passenger cabin. The eerie silence was unnerving; the only sound came from the sloshing of his movement.

Then he froze in shock, his worst fears unfolding like the petals of a poisonous flower.

Pitt found himself exchanging blank looks with a sea of ghostly white faces. None moved, none blinked, none spoke. They just sat strapped in their seats and stared at him with the sightless expression of the dead.

A chill colder than the freezing air spread over the back of Pitts neck.

The light from outside filtered through the windows, casting eerie shadows on the walls. He looked from seat to seat as if expecting one of the passengers to wave a greeting or say something, but they sat as still as mummies in a tomb.

He leaned over a man with slicked-back red-blond hair precisely parted down the middle of the skull, who sat in an aisle seat. There was no expression of agony on the face. The eyes were half open as if they were about to close in sleep, the lips met natumfly, the jaw slightly loose.

Pitt lifted a limp hand and placed his fingertips just below the base of the thumb and pressed against the artery running beneath the skin on the inner side of the wrist. His touch felt no pulsations-the heart had stopped.

"Anything?" asked Doc Gale, wading past him and examining another passenger.

"He's gone," replied Pin.

"So's this one."

"from what cause?"

"Can't tell yet. No apparent injuries. Dead only a short time. No indication of intense pain or struggle. Skin coloring doesn't suggest asphyxiation."

"if he last fits," said Pitt. "The oxygen masks are still in the overhead panels."

Gale quickly moved from body to body. "I'll know better after a more thorough examination."

He paused as Simon finished mounting a light unit above the doorway and safely above the water. The naval officer motioned outside, and suddenly the interior of the passenger cabin was flooded with light.

Pitt surveyed the cabin. The only noticeable damage was a slight distortion in the ceiling. All seats were in an upright position and the seat belts buckled.

"Impossible to believe they just sat here half immersed in ice water and died from hypothermia without making any movement," he said while checking an elderly brown-haired woman for life signs. There was no hint of suffering in her face. She looked as if she had simply fallen asleep. A small rosary hung loosely from her fingers.

"Obviously all were dead before the plane struck the ice," offered Gale.

"A valid answer," Pitt murmured, rapidly scanning the seat rows as if searching for someone.

"Death probably came from toxic fumes."

"Smell anything?"

"No

"Neither do I."

"What does that leave us?"

"Digested poison."

Gale stared at Pitt a long, hard moment. "You're talking mass murder."

"We appear to be headed in that direction."

"Might help if we had a witness."

"We do."

Gale stiffened and hurriedly looked over the white faces. "You spot someone still breathing? Point him out."

"Before we broke inside," Pitt explained, "a woman stared at me through a window. She was alive. I don't see her now."

Before Gale could reply, Simon sloshed down the aisle and stopped, his eyes bulging with shock and incomprehension. "What in hell?" He stiffened and stared wildly around the cabin. "They look like figures in a wax museum."

"try cadavers in a morgue," said Pitt dryly.

"They're dead? Everyone? You're absolutely sure?"

"Someone is alive," answered Pitt, "either in the cockpit or hiding out in the bathrooms to the rear."

"Then they're in need of my attention," said Gale.

Pitt nodded. "I think it best if you continue your examination in the slim chance there's a spark of life in any of these people. Simon can check the cockpit area. I'll head aft and search the bathrooms."

"What about all these stiffs?" asked Simon irreverently. "Shouldn't we alert Commander Knight and begin evacuating them?"

"Leave them be," Pitt said quietly, "and stay off the radio. We'll make our report to Commander Knight in person. Keep your men outside. Seal the door and place the interior of the aircraft off limits. Same goes for your medical team, Doc. Touch nothing unless it's absolutely necessary. Something's happened here beyond our depth. Word of the crash has already gone out. Within hours air-crash investigators and the news media will be swarming around like locusts. Best to keep what we've found under wraps until we hear from the proper authorities."

Simon weighed Pitts words for a moment. "I get the picture.

"Then let's get a move on and find a survivor,"

What was normally a twenty-second walk took Pitt nearly two minutes of struggle through the thigh-high water before he reached the bathrooms.

His feet had already turned numb and he didn't require the services of Doc Gale to tell him he'd have to dry and warm them in the next half hour or risk frostbite.

The death toll would have been much higher if the plane had carried a full load of passengers. But even with many of the seats vacant, he still counted fifty-three bodies.

He paused to examine a female flight attendant seated against the rear bulkhead. Her head was tilted forward and blond hair spilled across her face. He felt no pulse.

He reached the compartment containing the bathrooms. Three had the VACANT sign showing and he peered inside, They were empty. The fourth read OCCUPIED and was locked. Someone had to be inside to have slipped the latch.

He knocked loudly on the door and said, "Can you understand me? Help is here. Please try to unlock the door."

Pitt put his ear to the panel and thought he heard a soft sobbing from the other side, followed by low murmurs as if two people were conversing in hushed tones.

He raised his voice. "Stand back. I'm going to force the door. "

Pitt raised his dripping leg and gave a sharp but controlled kick, just enough to break the latch without smashing the door against whoever was inside. His heel impacted just above the knob and the catch ripped from the jam. The door gave about an inch. A gentle nudge with his shoulder and it swung inward.

Two women were huddled in the cramped rear of the bathroom, standing on top of the toilet platform out of the water, shivering and clutching each other for support. Actually, the one doing the clutching was a uniformed flight attendant, her eyes wide with alarm and the fear of a trapped doe. She was standing on her right leg, the left was stiffly extended to the side. A wrenched knee, Pitt guessed.

The other woman straightened and stared back at Pitt defiantly. Pitt immediately recognized her as the apparition at the window. Part of her face was still masked with coagulated blood, but both eyes were open now and had the cold look of hatred. Pitt was surprised at her hostility.

"Who are you and what do you want?" she demanded in a husky voice with a slight trace of an accent.

A dumb question was the first thought that crossed Pitts mind, but he quickly wrote off the woman's testy challenge to shock. He smiled his best Boy Scout trustworthy smile.

"My name is Dirk Pitt. I'm part of a rescue team from the United States ship Polar Explorer."

"Can you prove it?"

"Sorry, I left my driver's license at home." 'This was bordering on the ridiculous. He tried another tack and leaned against the door frame and casually crossed his arms. "Please rest easy," he said soothingly. "I want to help, not harm you."

The flight attendant seemed to relax for an instant, her eyes softened and the edges of her lips lifted in a timid smile. Then abruptly the fear returned and she sobbed hysterically.

"They're all dead, murdered!"

"Yes, I know," said Pitt gently. He held out his hand. "Let me take you where it's warm and the ship's doctor can tend your injuries."

Pitts face was shadowed by the floodlights irt the forward part of the cabin, and the stronger woman of the two could not read his eyes. "You might be one of the terrorists who caused all this," she said in a controlled tone. "Why should we trust you?"

"Because you'll freeze to death if you don't,"

Pitt tired of the word games. He stepped forward, carefully lifted the flight attendant in his arms and eased her out into the aisle. She offered him no resistance, but her body was stiff with apprehension.

"Just relax," he said. "Pretend you're Scarlett O'Hara and I'm Rhett Butler come to sweep you off your feet."

"I don't feel much like Scarlett. I must look a mess."

"Not to me," Pitt grinned. "How about dinner some night?"

"Can my husband come along?"

"Only if he picks up the check."

She gave in then and he felt her body sag in exhausted relief. Slowly her arms circled his neck and she buried her head in his shoulder. He paused and turned to the other woman. The warmth of his smile was revealed and his eyes glinted in the light. "Hang tight. I'll be right back for you."

for the first time Hala knew she was safe. Only then did the dam holding back the nightmare of fright, the stunning disbelief that any of this was happening to her, flood over the gates.

The suppressed emotions ran free, and she wept, Rubin knew he was slipping away. The cold and the pain had ceased to exist. The strange voices, the sudden display of light, formed no meaning for him. He felt detached, To his confused mind they were like obscure recollections from a distant place, a former time.

Suddenly a white brilliance filled the shattered cockpit. He wondered if this was the light at the end of the tunnel people who had died and returned claimed to have experienced.

A disembodied voice nearby said, "Take it easy, take it easy."

Rubin tried to focus his eyes on a vague figure hovering over him. "Are you God?"

Simon's face went blank for a brief moment. Then he smiled compassionately. "Only a mere mortal who happened to be in the neighborhood."

"I'm not dead?"

"Sorry, but if I'm any judge of age, you'll have to wait at least another fifty years."

"I can't move. My legs feel like they're pinned. I think they might be broken. Please . . . please get me out."

"That's why I'm here," said Simon cheerfully. He used his hands to scoop a good foot of ice and snow away from Rubin's upper torso until the trapped arms came free. "There, now you can scratch your nose until I return with a shovel and cutting tools."

Simon reentered the main cabin as Pitt was easing the flight attendant through the door into the waiting arms of Gale's medics, who gently lowerrd her onto a stretcher.

"Hey, Doc, I've got a live one in the cockpit."

"On my way," replied Gale.

"I could use your help too," Simon said to Pitt.

Pitt nodded. "Give me a couple of minutes to carry another from the aft section."

Hala slid to her knees and leaned over and looked into the mirror. There was enough light to clearly see her reflection. The face that stared back was flat-eyed and expressionless. It was also a disaster. She looked like an over-the-hill streetwalker who had been beaten up by her pimp.

She reached out and pulled several paper towels from a rack. She dipped them in the cold water, then wiped clear the clotted blood and lipstick which had smeared around her mouth. Her mascara and eye shadow looked as if they had been applied by Jackson Pollock on a drip painting. She wiped away that mess too. Her hair was still reasonably intact so she patted the loose ends into place.

She still looked awful, she thought despairingly. She forced a smile when Pitt reappeared, hoping she looked more presentable.

. He looked at her a long moment and then screwed his face into an expression of awed curiosity. "Excuse me, gorgeous creature, but have you seen an old crone anywhere?"

Tears welled in Hala's eyes and she half-laughed, halfcried. "You're a nice man, Mr. Pitt. Thank you."

"I try, God Icnows I try," he said humorously.

Pitt had returned with several blankets and he bundled them around her.

He placed one arm under her knees and the other around her waist and lifted her without the slightest sign of strain. As he carried her up the aisle his numbed legs began to give out and he stumbled for several steps before recovering.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"Nothing a shot of Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey won't cure."

"As soon as I return home I'll send you a whole case."

"Where's home?"

"At the moment, New York."

"Next time I'm in town, let's have dinner together."

"I'd consider it an honor, Mister Pitt."

"Likewise, Miss Kaniil."

Hala raised her eyebrows. "You recognized me, looking horrible like this?"

"I admit it wasn't until after you'd fixed your face a bit."

"Forgive me for putting you to all this trouble. Your legs and feet must be frozen stiff."

"A minor discomfort is a small price for freezing.I held the SecretaryGeneral of the U.N. in my arms."

Amazing, truly amazing, thought Pitt. This has to be a redbanner day.

Dating the only three women, and attractive ones at that, within two thousand miles of frigid desolation inside of minutes had to be some sort of record. The feat meant more to him than discovering the Russian submarine.

Fifteen minutes later, after Hala, Rubin and the flight attendant were comfortably settled inside the helicopter, Pitt stood in front of the cockpit and waved to Giordino, who acknowledged with a thumbs up sign.

The rotors were engaged and the craft rose in the air above a swirling cloud of snow, swung around a hundred and eighty degrees and headed for the Polar Explorer. Only when it was safely airborne and on its way did Pitt hobble over to the auxiliary heating unit.

He pulled off his waterlogged boots and soggy socks and dangled his feet over the exhaust, soaking up the heat and gratefully accepting the stabbing pain of recirculation. He became vaguely aware of Simon's approach.

Simon stopped and stood, gazing at the wrinkled sides of the aircraft.

It did not look forlorn any more. To him, the knowledge of the dead inside gave it a camel house appearance.

"United Nations delegates," Simon said distantly, "is that who they were?"

"Several were members of the General Assembly," answered Pitt. "The

. lized agencies.

According to Kamil, most of them were returning from a tour of their Field Service organizations."

"Who'd gain by murdering them?"

Pitt wrung out his socks and laid them over the heater tube. "I have no idea."

"Middle East terrorists?" Simon persisted.

"News to me they've taken up murder by poison."

"How're your feet?"

"In a state of gradual thaw. How about yours?"

"The Navy issues foul-weather boots. Mine are dry and warm as toast."

"Hooray for considerate admirals," Pitt muttered sardonically.

"I'd say one of the three survivors did the dirty work."

Pitt shook his head. "If in fact it proves to be poison, it probably was introduced into the meal at the food services kitchen before it was loaded on board the aircraft."

"The chief steward or a flight attendant could have done it in the galley."

"Too difficult to poison over fifty meals one at a time without being detected."

"What about the drinks?" Simon tested again.

"You're a persistent bastard."

"Might as well speculate until we're relieved?"

Pitt checked his socks. They were still damp. "Okay, drinks are a possibility, especially coffee and tea."

Simon seemed pleased that one of his theories had been accepted. "Okay, smartass, of the three survivors who's your candidate for most duly suspect?"

"None of the above."

"You saying the culprit knowingly took the poison and committed suicide."

"No, I'm saying it was the fourth survivor."

"I only counted three."

"After the plane crashed. Before that there were four,"

"You don't mean the little Mexican fellow in the copilot's seat?"

"I do."

Simon looked totally skeptical. "What brilliant logic brought you to that conclusion?"

"Elementary," Pitt said with a sly grin. "The killer in the best murder-mystery tradition is always the least obvious suspect.

"Who dealt this mess?"

Julius Schiller, Under Secretary for Political Affairs, grimaced good-naturedly as he studied his cards. His teeth clamped on a cold stogie, he looked up and peered over his hand, his intelligent blue eyes moving from player to player.

Four men sat across the poker table from him. None smoked, and Schiller diplomatically refrained from lighting his cigar. A small bundle of cedar logs crackled in an antique mariner's stove, taking the edge off an early fall chill. The burning cedar gave an agreeable aroma to the teak-paneled dining saloon inside Schiller's yacht. The beautifully proportioned 35-meter-motor sailer was moored in the Potomac River near South Island just opposite Alexandria, Virginia.

Soviet Deputy Chief of Mission Aleksey Korolenko, heavybodied and composed, wore a fixed jovial expression that had become his trademark in Washington's social circles.

"A pity we're not playing in Moscow," he said in a stern but mocking tone. "I know a nice spot in Siberia where we could send the dealer."

"I second the motion," said Schiller. He looked at the man wfio had dealt the cards. "Next time, Date, shuffle them up."

"If your hands are so rotten," growled Dale Nichols, Special Assistant to the President, "why don't you fold?"

Senator George Pitt, who headed up the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, stood and removed a salmon-colored sport jacket. He draped it over the back of the chair and turned to Yuri Vyhousky.

"I don't know what these guys are complaining about. You and I have yet to will a pot."

The Soviet Embassy's Special Adviser on American Affairs nodded. "I haven't seen a good hand since we all began playing five years ago."

The nightly poker sessions had indeed been held on Sctfiller's boat since 1986, and went far beyond a simple card game between friends who needed one evening out of the week to unwilld. It was originally set up as a small crack in the wall separating the opposing superpowers. Alone, without an official setting and inaccessible to the news media, they could informally give and take viewpoints while ignoring bureaucratic red tape and diplomatic protocol. ideas and information were exchanged that often had a direct bearing on Soviet-American relations.

"I open for fifty cents," announced Schiller.

"I'll raise that a dollar," said Korolenko.

"And they wonder why we don't trust them," Nichols groaned.

The Senator spoke to Korolenko without looking at him. "What's the prediction from your side on open revolt in Egypt, Aleksey?"

"I give President Hasan no more than days before his government is overthrown by Akhmad Yazid."

:'You don't see a prolonged fight?"

'No, not if the military throws its weight behind Yazid."

"You in, Senator?" asked Nichols.

"I'll go along for the ride."

"Yujri?"

Vyhousky dropped fifty-cent pieces in the pot.

"Since Husan took over after Mubarak's resignation," said Schiller,

"he's achieved a level of stability. I he'll holdon ' . 'You said the same about the Shah of Iran," Korolenko goaded.

"No denying we called the wrong shots." Schffler paused and dropped his throwaway cards on the table. "Let me have two."

Korolenko held up one finger and received his card. "You might as well pour your massive aid into a bottomless pit. The Egyptian masses are on the brink of starvation. A situation that fuels the surge of religious fanaticism sweeping the slums and villages. You stand as little chance of stopping Yazid as you did Khomeini."

"And what is the Kremlin's stance?" asked Senator Pitt.

"We wait," said Korolenko impassively. "We wait until the dust settles."

Schiller eyed his cards and shifted them around. "No matter the outcome, nobody wills."

"True, we all lose. You may be the great Satan in the eyes of Islamic fundamentalists, but as good Communist atheists we're not loved either.

I don't have to tell you the biggest loser is Israel. With the disastrous defeat of Iraq by Iran and the assassination of President Saddam Husayn, the road is now open for him and Syria to threaten the moderate Arab nations into combining forces for a massive three-front attack against Israel. The Jews will surely be defeated this time."

The Senator shook his head doubtfully. "The Israelis have the finest fighting machine in the Middle East. They've won before, and they're prepared to do it again."

"Not against 'human wave' attacks by nearly two million Arabs," warned Vyhousky. "Assad's forces will drive south while Yazid's Egyptians attack north across the Sinai, as they did in 'sixty-seven and

'seventy-three. Only this time h-an's army will sweep over Saudi Arabia and Jordan, crossing the River Jordan from the West. Despite their fighting skills and superior technology, the Israelis will be overwhelmed."

"And when the slaughter finally ends," added Korolenko ominously, "the West will be thrown into a state of economic depression when the united Muslim governments, with total control of fifty-five percent of the world's oil reserves, drive prices to astronomical heights. As they surely will."

"Your bet," Nichols said to Schiller.

"Two bucks."

"Raise you two," came Korolenko.

Vyhousky threw his cards on the table. "I fold."

The Senator contemplated his hand a moment. "I'll match the four and raise another four."

"The sharks are circling," said Nichols with a tight smile. "Count me out."

"Let's not kid ourselves," said the Senator. "It's no secret the Israelis have a small arsenal of nuclear weapons, and they won't hesitate to use them if they're down to the last roll of the dice."

Schiller sighed deeply. "I don't even like to think about the consequences." He looked up as his boat's skipper knocked on the door and hesitantly stepped in.

"Excuse me for interrupting, Mr. Schiller, but there's an important call for you."

Schiller pushed his cards toward Nichols. "No sense in prolonging the agony with this hand. Would you excuse me?"

One of the cardinal niles of the weekly get-together was no phone calls unless it was a matter of urgency that in some way concerned everyone at the table. The game continued, but the four men played automatically, their curiosity mounting.

"Your bet, Aleksey," said the Senator.

"Raise you another four dollars."

"I call."

Korolenko shrugged resignedly and laid down his cards face up. All he had was a pair of fours.

The Senator smiled wryly and turned over his cards. He won with a pair of sixes.

"Oh, good lord," moaned Nichols. "I dropped out with a pair of kings."

"There goes your lunch money, Aleksey." Vyhousky laughed.

"So we bluffed each other," said Korolenko. "Now I know why I won't buy a used car from an American politician."

The Senator leaned back in his chair and ran a hand through a thick mane of silver hair. "As a matter of fact I worked my way through law school selling cars. Best training I ever had for running for the Senate."

Schiller reentered the room and sat down at the table. "Sorry to leave, but I've just been notified that a chartered United Nations plane crashed on the coast of northern Greenland. Over fifty known dead. No word on survivors."

"any Soviet representatives on board?" asked Vyhousky. ... The passenger list hasn't come through yet."

"A terrorist bombing?"

"Too early to tell, but first sketchy reports say it was no accident."

"What flight was it?" Nichols asked.

"London to New York."

"Northern Greenland?" Nichols repeated thoughtfully. "They must have strayed over a thousand miles off course."

"Smells of a hijacking," suggested Vyhousky.

"Rescue units are on the site," explained Schiller. "We should know more within the hour."

The expression on Senator Pitts face darkened. "I have a dire suspicion that Hala Kamil was on that flight. She was due back at United Nations headquarters from Europe for next week's session of the General Assembly."

"I believe George is right," said Vyhousky. "Two of our Soviet delegates were traveling in her party."

"Madness," said Schiller, wearily shaking his head. "Utter madness. Who would gain by murdering a planeload of U.N. people?"

No one answered immediately. There was a long moment's silence.

Korolenko stared, expressionless, at the center of the table. Then he spoke in a quiet voice.

The Senator stared the Russian straight in the eye. "You knew."

"I guessed."

"You think Yazid ordered Kamil's death?"

"I can only say our intelligence sources discovered there was an Islamic faction in Cairo that was planning an attempt."

"And you stood by and said nothing while fifty innocent people died-"

"A miscalculation," admitted Korolenko. "We did not know how or when the assassination was to take place. It was assumed Kmfl's LIFE would be in danger only if she went to Egypt-not from Yazid lf, but rather his fanatical followers. Yazid has never been tied to any terrorist acts.

Your profile of him reads the same as ours: a brilliant man who thinkqs of himself as a Muslim Gandhi."

"So much for KGB and CIA profiles," said Vyhousky candidly.

"Another classic case of intelligence experts being suckered by a well-conceived public-relations campaign," sighed the Senator. "The man is a bigger psycho case than we figured."

Schiller nodded in agreement. "Yazid has to be responsible for the tragedy. His followers would never have considered it without his blessing."

"He had the motive," said Nichols. "Kamil has immense flair and charm.

Her level of popularity with the people and the military far exceeds President Hasan's. She was a strong buffer. If she's dead, Egypt is only hours away from a government led by extremist mullahs."

"And when Hasan falls?" asked Korolenko slyly. "What will be the White House position then?"

Schiller and Nichols exchanged knowing looks. "Why, the same as the Kremlin's," said Schiller. "We're going to wait until the dust settles."

for a moment the fixed smile faded from Korolenko's face. "And if, make that when, the combined Arab nations attack the Jewish state?"

"We'll back Israel to the hilt, as we have in the past."

"But will you send in American forces?"

"Probably not."

"Arab leaders might be less cautious if only they knew that. "

"Be our guest. Only remember, -this time, we're not going to use our leverage to stop the Israelis from taking Cairo, Beirut and Damascus."

"You're saying the President won't stand in their way if they resort to nuclear weapons?"

"Something like that," Schiller said with studied indifference. He turned to Nichols. "Whose deal?"

"I believe it's mine," said the Senator, trying his best to sound casual. This switch in the President's Middle East policy was news to him. "Shall we ante fifty cents?"

The Russians were not about to let loose.

"I find this most disturbing," said Vyhousky.

"A new posture had to come sometime," Nichols confessed. "The latest projections put United States oil reserves at eighty billion barrels.

With prices pushing fifty dollars a barrel, our oil companies can now afford to mount a massive exploration program. And, of course, we can still count on Mexican and South American reserves. The bottom line is that we no longer have to rely on the Middle East for oil. So we're cutting bait. If the Soviet government wants to inherit the Arab mess, take it as a gift."

Korolenko couldn't believe what he was hearing. His ingrained wariness made him skeptical. But he knew the Americans too well to doubt they would bluff or mislead him, on an issue of such magnitude.

Senator Pitt had his doubts, too, about the game plan the President was leaking to the Soviet representatives. There was a strong possibility oil would not flow over the Rio Grande when America needed it. Mexico was a revolution waiting for the starter's gun.

Egypt was cursed with a Dark Ages fanatic like Yazid. But Mexico had its madman in a Topiltzin, a Benito JuArez/Emilio Zapata messiah who preached a return to a religious state based on Aztec culture. Like Yazid, Topiltzin was supported by millions of his nation's poor, and he was also inches away from sweeping out the existing government.

Where were all the madmen coming from, the Senator wondered? Who was spawning these devils? He made a conscious effort to keep his hands steady as he began to deal.

"Five card stud, gentlemen, jokers wild."

Huge figures rose up in the eerie silence of the night and gazed through empty eyes at the barren landscape as if waiting for some unknown presence to bring them to life. The stark, rigid figures stood as tall as a two-story building, their grim, expressionless faces highlighted by a full moon.

A thousand years ago they had supported a temple roof that sat on top of the five-step pyramid of Quetzalcoatl in the Toltec city of Tula. The temple was gone but the pyramid remained and was reconstructed by archaeologists. The ruins stretched along a low ridge, and during the city's glory sixtythousand people lived and walked on its streets.

Few visitors found their way to the site, and those who took the trouble were awed by TVIa's haunted desolation.

The moon cast ghostly shadows through the dead city as a solitary man climbed the steep steps of the pyramid to the stone statues at the summit. He was dressed in a suit and tie and carried a leather attached case.

At each of the five terraces he stopped for a few moments and peered at the macabre sculptured friezes decorating the walls. Human faces protruded from the gaping mouths of serpents while eagles shredded human hearts with their beaks. He continued, passing an altar carved with skulls and crossbones, symbols used in later centuries by pirates of the Caribbean.

He was sweating when he finally reached the top of the pyramid and looked around. He was not alone. Two figures stepped forward and roughly searched him. They motioned at his attache case. He obligingly opened it and the men rummaged through the contents. Finding no weapons, they silently retreated to the edge of the temple platform.

Rivas relaxed and pressed a hidden switch on the handle of the case. A small tape recorder secreted inside the lid began to roll.

After a short minute had passed, a figure emerged from the shadows of the great stone statues. He was dressed in a floorlength robe of white cloth. His hair was long and tied at the base, giving it the look of a rooster tail. His feet were hidden under the robe, but the moon's light revealed circular bands around his arms that were carved from gold and inlaid with turquoise.

He was short, and the smooth, oval face suggested Indian ancestry. His dark eyes studied the tall, fair-complexioned man before him, taking in the oddly-out-of-place business suit. He crossed his arms and spoke strange words that sounded almost lyrical.

"I am Topiltzin."

"My name is Guy Rivas, Special Representative for the President of the United States."

Rivas had expected an older man. it was difficult to guess the Mexican messiah's age, but he didn't look a year over thirty.

Topiltzin gestured to a low wall. "Shall we sit while we talk?"

Rivas nodded a "Thank you" and sat down. "You chose a most unusual setting."

"Yes, I thought it appropriate." Topiltzin's tone suddenly turned contemptuous. "Your President was afraid for us to confer openly. He did not want to embarrass and anger his friends in Mexico City."

Rivas knew better than to be baited. "The President asked me to express his gratitude for allowing me to talk with you."

"I expected someone with a higher rank of state."

"Your conditions were you'd speak with only one man. We took that to mean no interpreter for our side. And since you do not wish to speak Spanish or English, I am the only ranking government official who has a tongue for Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs."

"You speak it very well."

"My family immigrated to America from the town of Escampo. They taught it to me when I was quite young."

"I know Escampo; a small village with proud people who barely survive."

"You claim you'll end poverty in Mexico. The President is most interested in your programs."

"Is that why he sent you?" Topiltzin asked.

Rivas nodded. "He wishes to open a line of communication. "

There was silence as a grim smile crossed Topiltzin's features. "A shrewd man. Because of my country's economic collapse he knows my movement will sweep the ruling Partido Revolutionary Institutional out of office, and he fears an upheaval in U.S. and Mexican relations. So he plays both ends against the middle."

"I can't read the President's mind."

"He will soon learn the great majority of Mexican people are finished with being doormats for the ruling class and wealthy. They are sick of political fraud and corruption. They are tired of digging garbage in the slums. They will suffer no more."

"By building a utopia from the dust of the Aztecs?"

"Your own nation would do well to return to the ways of your founding fathers."

"The Aztecs were the biggest butchers in the Americas. To fashion a modern government on ancient barbarian beliefs is . . ." Rivas paused.

He almost said "idiotic." Instead, he pulled back and said, "naive."

Topiltzin's round face tensed and his hands worked compulsively. "You forget, it was the Spanish conquistadors who slaughtered our common ancestors."

"Spain could say the same about the Moors, which would hardly justify restoring the Inquisition."

"What does your President want from me?"

"Merely peace and prosperity in Mexico," replied Rivas, holding the line. "And a promise you will not steer a course toward Communism."

"I am not a Marxist. I detest Communists as much as he does. No armed guerrillas exist among my followers."

"He'll be glad to hear it."

"Our new Aztec nation will attain greatness once the criminally wealthy, the corrupt officials, and present government and army leaders are sacrificed."

Rivas wasn't sure he interpreted right. "You're talking about the execution of thousands of people."

"No, Mr. Rivas, I'm talking sacrificial victims for our revered gods, Quetzalcoad, Huitzilopochtli, Tezcatlipoca."

Rivas looked at him, not comprehending. "Sacrificial victims?"

Topiltzin did not reply.

Rivas, staring at the stoic face, suddenly knew. "No!" he burst out.

"You can't be serious."

"Our country will again be known by its Aztec name of Tenochtitian,"

Topiltzin continued impassively. "We shall be a religious state.

Nahuatl will become our official language. Population will be brought under control by stern measures. Foreign industries will be the property of the state. Only the native born can be allowed to live within our borders. All others will be expelled from the country."

Rivas was stunned. He sat white-faced, listening in silence.

Topiltzin went on without pause. "No more goods are to be purchased from the United States nor will you be allowed to buy our oil. Our debts to world banks will be declared null and void, and all foreign assets confiscated. I also demand the return of our lands in California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. To ensure this return I intend to turn loose millions of my people across the border."

Topiltzin's threats were nothing short of frightening. Rivas's distraught mind could not conceive the terrible consequences.

"Pure madness," Rivas said desperately. "The President will never listen to such absurd demands."

"He will not believe what I say?"

"No sane man would."

Rivas in his uneasiness had stepped too far.

Topiltzin slowly rose to his feet, eyes unblinking, head lowered, and spoke in a toneless voice. "Then I must send him a message he will understand."

He raised his hands over his head, arms outstretched toward the dark sky. As if on cue four Indians appeared wearing white capes clasped at the neck and nothing else. Approaching from all sides, they quickly subdued Rivas, who froze in astonishment. They carried him to the stone altar sculpted with the skulls and crossbones and threw him on his back, holding him down by the arms and legs.

At first Rivas was too dazed to protest, too incredulous with shock to comprehend Topiltzin's intention. When horrorstruck realization came, he cried out.

"Oh, God! No! No!"

Topiltzin coldly ignored the terrified American, the pitiful fright in his eyes, and stepped to the side of the altar. He gave a nod, and one of the men ripped away Rivas's shirt, exposing the chest.

"Don't do this!" Rivas pleaded.

A razor-sharp obsidian knife seemed to materialize in Topiltzin's upraised left hand. The moonlight glinted from the black, glassy blade as it hung poised.

Rivas screamed-the last sound he would ever make.

Then the knife plunged.

The tall column-statues looked down upon the bloody act with stone-cold indifference. They had witnessed the horrible disPlay of inhuman cruelty thousands of times, a thousand years ago. There was no pity in their timeworn chiseled eyes as Rivas's still-beating heart was torn from his chest.

Despite the people and activity around him, Pitt was captivated by the dense silence of the cold north. There was an incredible stillness about it that seemed to overwhelm the voices and sounds of machinery. He felt as though he were standing in numbing solitude inside a refrigerator on a desolate world.

Daylight finally appeared, filtered by a peculiar gray mist that permitted no shadows. By midmorning the sun began to burn away the icy haze and the sky turned a soft orange-white. The ethereal light made the rocky peaks overlooking the fjord look like tombstones in a snow-covered cemetery.

The scene surrounding the crash site was beginning to resemble a military invasion. A fleet of five Air Force helicopters had been the first to arrive, ferrying an Army Special Service Force of heavily armed and determined-looking men who immediately cordoned off the fuselage and began patrolling the entire area. An hour later, Federal Aviation accident investigators landed and set about marking the scattered wreckage for removal. They were followed by a team of pathologists who tagged and removed the bodies to the helicopters, which quickly airlifted them to the morgue at Tule Air Force Base.

The Navy was represented by Commander Knight and the unexpected appearance of the Polar Explorer. All halted their grisly chores and turned their eyes toward the sea as a series of loud whoops from the ship's siren echoed -off the jagged mountains.

Dodging newly-formed ice calves, floating low and opaque, and the winter's first bergs, which resembled the ruins of Gothic castles, the Polar Explorer came about slowly and entered the mouth of the fjord. for a time the ash-blue sea hissed quietly past the scarred, and then it turned to white.

The immense prow of the icebreaker effortlessly bulldozed a path through the ice pack, heaving to less than fifty meters from the wreckage.

Knight stopped engines, climbed down a ladder to the ice and graciously offered the facilities of the ship to the security and investigation teams as a command post-an offer that was thankfully accepted without a second's hesitation.

Pitt was impressed with the security. The news blackout had not yet been penetrated: the story given out at Kennedy Airport revealed only that the U.N. flight was overdue. It was only a matter of another hour before a shrewd correspondent got wise and blew the whistle.

"I think my eyeballs just froze to their lids," Giordino said gloomily.

He was sitting in the pilot's seat of the NUMA helicopter, trying to drink a cup of coffee before it froze. ,Must be colder than a Minnesota dairy cow's tit in January."

Pitt gave his friend a dubious look. "How would you know?

You haven't been outside your heated cockpit all night."

"I get frostbite by looking at an ice cube in a glass of Scotch." Giordino held up one hand, five fingers an all spread.

"Look at that. I'm so stiff with cold I can't make a fist."

Pitt happened to glance out the side window and spotted Commander Knight trudging over the ice from the ship. He walked back to the cabin and opened the cargo door when Knight reached the boarding ladder. Giordino moaned in self-pity as his precious heat escaped and a frigid breeze engulfed the interior of the chopper.

Knight waved a greeting and climbed on board, exhaling clouds of vapor.

He reached inside his parka and produced a leather-covered flask.

"A little something from the sick bay. Cognac. Can't begin to guess the brand. Thought you might find a good use for it."

"I think you just sent Giordino to heaven," Pitt said, laughing.

"I'd rather be in hell," Giordino muttered. He tipped the flask and savored the brandy as it trickled into his stomach. Then he raised his hand again and made a fist. "I I'm cured."

"Might as well settle in," said Knight. "We've been ordered to remain on station for the next twenty-four hours. If you'll pardon the awful pun, they want to keep us on ice until the cleanup is over."

"How are the survivors doing?" inquired Pitt.

"Miss Kamil is resting comfortably. Incidentally, she asked to see you.

Something about having dinner together in New York. "

"Dinner?" asked Pitt innocently.

"fullny thing," Knight continued. "Just before Doc Gale surgically repaired the flight attendant's torn knee ligaments, she mentioned a dinner date with you too."

Pitt had a pure-as-the-driven-snow expression on his face. "I guess they must be hungry."

Giordino rolled his eyes and tilted the flask again. "I I've heard this song before."

"And the steward?"

"Rough shape," Knight replied. "But Doc thinks he'll pull through. His name is Rubin. While he was slipping under the anesthetic he babbled some wild story about the pilot murdering the first and second officers and then vanishing in flight."

"Maybe not so wild," said Pitt. "The pilot's body has yet to be found."

"Not my territory," Knight shagged. "I've got enough to worry about without getting bogged down in an unsolved air mystery.

"Where do we stand on the Russian sub?" asked Giordino.

"We keep the lid on our discovery until we can report face to face with the big brass at the Pentagon. Stupid to fumble away the ball away through a communications leak. A piece of luck, for us at any rate, the plane crashing. Gives us the logical excuse to set a course for home and our dock in Portsmouth as soon as the survivors can be airlifted to a stateside hospital. Let's hope the unexpected diversion will confuse Soviet intelligence analysts enough to get them off our back."

"Don't count on it," Giordino said, his face beginning to glow. "If the Russians had the slightest suspicion we struck pay dirt, and they're paranoid enough to think our side caused the plane crash as a diversion, they'll come charging in with salvage ships, a protective fleet of warships, a swarm of covering aircraft and, when they pinpoint the sub, raise and tow it back to their station at Severomorsk on the Kola Peninsula."

"Or blow it into smithereens," Pitt added.

"Destroy it?"

"The Soviets don't have major salvage technology. Their prime objective would be to make certain no one else laid hands on it."

Giordino passed the cognac to Pitt. "No sense debating the cold war here. Why don't we return to the ship, where it's nice and warm?"

"Might as well," said Knight. "You two have already done more than your share."

Pitt stretched and began zipping up his parka. "Think I'll take a hike."

"You're not coming back with us?"

"In a bit. Thought I'd look in on the archaeologists and see how they are."

"Wasted trip. Doc sent one of his medics over to their camp. He's already reported back. Except for a few bruises and strains they were all fine."

"Might find it interesting to see what they've dug up," Pitt persisted.

Giordino was an old hand at reading Pitts mind. "Maybe they've found a few old Greek amphoras lying around."

"Won't hurt to ask."

Knight gave Pitt the benefit of a hard stare. "Mind what you say."

"I have our geological survey story down pat."

"And the aircraft passengers and crew?"

"They were all trapped among the wreckage and died from hypothermia brought on by exposure to the frigid water."

"I think he's ready for the big sting," said Giordino dryly. "Good,"

Knight nodded. "You've got the right idea. Just don't suggest anything they have no reason to know."

Pitt opened the cargo door and gave a casual nod. "Don't wait up. Then he stepped into the cold.

"Persistent cuss," Knight muttered. "I didn't know Pitt was interested in antiquities."

Giordino gazed through the cockpit window as Pitt set off across the fjord. Then he sighed.

"Neither did he."

The ice field was firm and flat, and Pitt made good time across the fjord. He scanned the ominous gray cloud ceiling rolling in from the northwest. The weather could change from bright sunshine to a blinding blizzard within minutes and obliterate all landmarks. He wasn't keen on wandering lost without even a compass, and he increased his pace.

A pair of white gyrfalcons soared above him. Seemingly immune to the Arctic cold, they were a select group of birds that remained in the north during the harsh winter.

Moving in a southerly direction, he crossed the shoreline and kept his bearings on the smoke that rose above the archaeologists' hut. The distant and indistinct smudge appeared as though seen through the wrong end of a telescope.

Pitt was only ten minutes away from the camp when the storm struck. One minute he could see nearly twenty kilometers, the next his visibility was cut to less than five meters.

He started jogging, desperately hoping he was traveling in something remotely resembling a straight line. The horizontally driving snow came against his left shoulder and he leaned into it slightly to compensate for his drift.

The wind increased and beat against him until he could barely stand. He shuffled blindly forward, looking down at his feet, counting his strides, his arms huddled about his head. He knew it was impossible to walk sightless without gradually wandering in a circle. He was also aware that he could walk past the archaeolgists' hut, missing it by a few meters, and stumble on until he dropped from exhaustion.

Despite the high wind-chill factor, his heavy clothing kept him reasonably warm, and he could tell by his heartbeat that he was not unduly exerting himself.

Pitt paused when he calculated that he was in the approximate vicinity of the hut. He continued walking another thirty paces before stopping again.

He turned to his right and moved over about three meters until he could still see his footprints trailing off in the blowing snow from the opposite direction. Then he walked parallel to his original path, mowing the lawn as if he was searching for an object beneath the sea. He took about sixty steps before his old footprints faded and disappeared m the snow.

He walked five lanes before he swung to his right again, repeating the pattern until he was sure he had retraced the now obliterated center line. Then he picked up the grid again on the other side. On the third lane he stumbled into a snowdrift and fell against a metal wall.

He followed it around two corners before meeting a rope that led to a door. With a great sigh of relief, Pitt pushed open the door, savoring the knowledge that his life had been in danger and he had won. He stepped inside and tensed.

This was not the living quarters, but rather a large Quonsetlike shelter covering a series of excavations in the exposed earth. The interior temperature was not much above freezing, but he was thankful to be safe from the gale-force wind.

The only light came from a Coleman lantern. At first he thought the structure was deserted, but then a head and pair of shoulders seemed to rise up from a trough in the ground. The figure was kneeling, facing away from Pitt, and seeming absorbed in carefully scraping loose gravel from a small shelf in the trough.

Pitt stepped from the shadows and looked down.

"you'ready?" he asked.

Lily spun around, more puzzled than startled. The light was in her eyes and all she could make out was a vague form.

"Ready for what?"

"To go out on the town."

The voice came back to her. She lifted the lamp and slowly rose to her feet. She looked into his face, captivated once again by Pitts eyes, while he was taken by her dark red hair that looked like fire under the bright light of the hissing Coleman.

"Mr. Pitt . . . isn't it?" She slipped off her right glove and extended her hand.

He also removed his glove, reached out and gave her hand a firm squeeze.

"I prefer attractive ladies to call me Dirk."

She felt like an embarrassed little girl, mad at herself for not having any makeup On, wondering if he noticed the calluses on her hand. And to make it worse, she could feel herself blushing.

"Lily Sharp," she stammered. "My friends and I were hoping we could thank you for last night. I thought you were joking about dinner. I really didn't think I'd see you again."

"As you can hear-" he paused and tilted his head toward the moaning wind outside. a blizzard couldn't keep me away."

"You must be crazy."

"No, just stupid for thinking I could outrun an Arctic storm."

They both laughed and the tension fell away. Lily began to climb out of the excavation trough. Pitt took her arm and helped her up. She winced and he quickly released his grip.

"You shouldn't be on your feet."

Lily smiled gamely. "Stiff and a little sore from a sea of black-and-blue marks I can't show you, but I'll live."

Pitt held up the lantern and peered around the oddly grouped rocks and excavations. "Just what is it you have here?"

"An ancient Eskimo village, inhabited one hundred to five hundred years after Christ."

"Have you a name for it?"

"We call the site Gronquist Bay Village after Dr. Hiram Gronquist, who discovered it five years ago."

"One of the three men I met last night?"

"The big man who was knocked unconscious."

"How's he getting along?"

"Despite a large purplish dome on his forehead, he swears he doesn't suffer from headaches or dizziness. When I left the hut he was roasting like a turkey."

"Turkey?" Pitt repeated, surprised. "You must have a firstrate supply system."

"A vertical-lift Minerva aircraft, on loan to the university by a wealthy alumnus, flies in once every two weeks from Thule."

"I thought excavations this far north were limited to midsummer when above-freezing temperatures thawed the ground."

"Generally speaking that's true. But with the heated prefab shelter over the main section of the village, we can work from April through October."

"Find anything out of the ordinary, like an object that doesn't belong here?"

Lily gave Pitt a queer look. "Why do you ask?"

"Curiosity. "

"We've unearthed hundreds of interesting artifacts representing prehistoric Eskimo lifestyles and technology. We have them in the hut, if you care to examine them."

"How's chances of looking at them over the turkey?"

"Good to excellent. Dr. Gronquist cooks gourmet."

"I had hoped to invite you all to the ship's galley for dinner, but the sudden storm messed up my plans."

"We're always happy to see a new face at the table."

"You've discovered something unusual, haven't you?" Pitt asked abruptly.

Lily's eyes widened suspiciously. "How could you knowt' "Greek or Roman?"

"Roman Empire, Byzantium, actually."

"Byzantium what?" Pitt pushed her, his eyes turned hard.

"How old?"

"A gold coin, late fourth century."

He seemed to relax then. He took a deep breath and slowly let it out while she looked at him in confusion and no small degree of irritation.

"Make your point!" Lily snapped at him.

"What if I was to tell you," Pitt began slowly, "there is a trail of amphoras scattered along the seabed that leads into the fjord?"

"Amphoras?" Lily repeated in astonishment.

"I have them on videotape from our underwater cameras."

"They came." She spoke as in a trance. "They really crossed the Atlantic. The Romans set foot on Greenland before the Vikings."

"The evidence points in that direction." Pitt eased his arm around Lily's waist and aimed her toward the door. "Speaking of direction, are we stuck here for the duration of the storm or does that rope outside the door lead to your hut?"

She nodded. "Yes, the line stretches between the two buildings." She paused and stared into the excavation where she had discovered the coin.

"Pytheas, the Greek navigator, made an epic voyage in 350 B.c. The legends say he sailed north into the Atlantic and eventually reached Iceland. Strange there

are no records or legends telling of a Roman voyage this far north and west, seven hundred and fifty years later."

"Pytheas was lucky: he made it home to tell the tale."

,,You think the Romans who came here were lost on the return voyage?"

"No, I think they're still here." Pi pinned her with a determined grin,

"And you and i, lovely lady, are going to find them."