“What about radio contact?”
Pitt shook his head. “It’s as though the ship were carried away by aliens from space. The communications room can’t raise a response. And while we’re on the subject, the radio at the Argentinean research station has also gone dead.”
“Whatever disaster struck the ship and the station,” said Dempsey, “must have come on so fast none of the poor devils could get off a distress call.”
“Have Van Fleet and Fletcher uncovered any clues leading to the cause of the deaths?” asked Pitt.
“Their preliminary examination shows that the arteries ruptured at the base of the creatures’ skulls, causing hemorrhaging. Beyond that, I can tell you nothing.”
“Looks like we have a thread leading from a mystery to an enigma to a dilemma to a puzzle with no solution in sight,” Pitt said philosophically.
“If Polar Queen isn’t floating nearby or sitting on the bottom of the Weddell Sea,” Giordino said thoughtfully, “we might be looking at a hijacking.”
Pitt smiled as he and Giordino exchanged knowing looks. “Like the Lady Flamborough?”
“Her image crossed my mind.”
Dempsey stared at the deck, recalling the incident. “The cruise ship that was captured by terrorists in the port of Punta del Este several years ago.”
Giordino nodded. “She was carrying heads of state for an economic conference. The terrorists sailed her through the Strait of Magellan into a Chilean fjord, where they moored her under a glacier. It was Dirk who tracked her down.”
“Allowing for a cruising speed of roughly eighteen knots,” Dempsey estimated, “terrorists could have sailed Polar Queen halfway to Buenos Aires by now.”
“Not a likely scenario,” Pitt said evenly. “I can’t think of one solid reason why terrorists would hijack a cruise ship in the Antarctic.”
“So what’s your guess?”
“I believe she’s either drifting or steaming in circles within two hundred kilometers of us.” Pitt said it so absolutely he left little margin for doubt.
Dempsey looked at him. “You have a prognostication we don’t know about?”
“I’m betting my money that the same phenomenon that struck down the tourists and crewman outside the cave also killed everybody on board the cruise ship.”
“Not a pretty thought,” said Giordino, “but that would explain why she never returned to pick up the excursionists.”
“And let us not forget the second group that was scheduled to be put ashore twenty kilometers farther up the coast,” Dempsey reminded them.
“This mess gets worse by the minute,” Giordino muttered.
“Al and I will conduct a search for the second group from the air,” Pitt said, contemplating the image on the monitor. “If we can’t find any sign of their presence, we’ll push on and check on the people manning the Argentinean research station. For all we know they could be dead too.”
“What in God’s name caused this calamity?” Dempsey asked no one in particular.
Pitt made a vague gesture with his hands “The familiar causes for extermination of life in and around the sea do not fit this puzzle. Natural problems generally responsible for huge fish kills around the world, like fluctuations in temperatures of surface water or algal blooms such as red tides, do not apply here. Neither is present.”
“That leaves man-made pollution.”
“A possibility that also fails to measure up,” Pitt argued. “There are no known industrial sources for toxic pollution within thousands of kilometers. And no radioactive and chemical wastes could have killed every penguin in such a short time span, certainly not those that were safely nesting on land clear of the water. I fear we have a threat no one has faced before.”
Giordino pulled a massive cigar from the inside pocket of his jacket. The cigar was one of Admiral Sandecker’s private stock, made expressly for his private enjoyment. And Giordino’s too, since it was never discovered how he had helped himself to the admiral’s private stock for over a decade without ever getting caught. He held a flame to the thick dark brown shaft of tobacco and puffed out a cloud of fragrant smoke.
“Okay,” he said, enjoying the taste. “What’s the drill?”
Dempsey wrinkled his nose at the cigar’s aroma. “I’ve contacted officials of Ruppert & Saunders, the line that owns Polar Queen, and apprised them of the situation. They lost no time in initiating a massive air search. They’ve requested that we transport the survivors of the shore excursion to King George Island, where a British scientific station has an airfield. From there arrangements will be made to airlift them back to Australia.”
“Before or after we look for Polar Queen?” Giordino put to him.
“The living come first,” Dempsey replied seriously. As captain of the ship, the decisions belonged to him. “You two probe the coastline in your helicopter while I steer the Hunter on a course toward King George Island. After our passengers are safely ashore, we’ll make a sweep for the cruise ship.”
Giordino grinned. “By then, the Weddell Sea will be swarming with every salvage tug from here to Capetown, South Africa.”
“Not our problem,” said Dempsey. “NUMA isn’t in the ship salvage business.”
Pitt had tuned out of the conversation and walked over to a table where a large chart of the Weddell Sea was laid flat. He ignored any inclination to work by instinct and drove himself to think rationally, with his brain and not his gut. He tried to put himself onboard the Polar Queen when she was struck by the murdering scourge. Giordino and Dempsey went quiet as they stared at him expectantly.
After nearly a minute, he looked up from the chart and smiled. “Once we program the relevant data into the teleplotting analyzer, it should give us a ballpark location with a fighting chance for success.”
“So what do we feed into the brain box?” Dempsey’s term for any piece of electronics relating to the ship’s computer systems.
“Every scrap of data on wind and currents from the last three and a half days, and their effects against a mass the size of Polar Queen. Once we calculate a drift pattern, we can tackle the problem of whether she continued making way with a dead crew at the helm, and in what direction.”
“Suppose that instead of steaming around in circles, as you suggested, her rudder was set on a straight course?”
“Then she might be fifteen hundred kilometers away, somewhere in the middle of the South Atlantic and out of range of the satellite imaging system.”
Giordino put it to Pitt. “But you don’t think so.”
“No,” Pitt said quietly. “If the ice and snow covering this ship after the storm is any indication, Polar Queen has enough of the stuff coating her superstructure to make her nearly invisible to the satellite imaging system.”
“Enough to camouflage her as an iceberg?” asked Dempsey.
“More like a snow-blanketed projection of land.”
Dempsey looked confused. “You’ve lost me.”
“I’ll bet my government pension,” said Pitt with cast-iron conviction, “we’ll find the Polar Queen hard aground somewhere along the shore of the peninsula or beached on one of the outlying islands.”
Pitt and Giordino took off at four o’clock in the morning, when most of the crew of lee Hunter were still sleeping. The weather had returned to milder temperatures, calm seas and crystal-clear blue skies, with a light five-knot wind out of the southwest. With Pitt at the controls, they headed toward the old whaling station before swinging north in search of the second group of excursionists from Polar Queen.
Pitt could not help feeling a deep sense of sadness as they flew over the rookery’s killing ground. The shore as far as the horizon seemed carpeted with the bodies of the comical little birds. The Addlie penguins were very territorial, and birds from other rookeries around the Antarctic Peninsula were not likely to immigrate to this particular breeding ground. The few survivors who might have escaped the terrible scourge would require twenty years or more to repleni
sh the once numerous population of Seymour Island. Fortunately, the massive loss was not enough to critically endanger the species.
As the last of the dead birds flashed under the helicopter, Pitt leveled out at fifty meters and flew above the waterline, staring out the windscreen for any sign of the excursionists’ landing site. Giordino gazed out his side window, scanning the open-water pack ice for any glimpse of Polar Queen, occasionally making a mark on a folded chart that lay across his lap.
“If I had a dime,” Giordino muttered, “for every iceberg on the Weddell Sea, I could buy General Motors.”
Pitt glanced past Giordino out the starboard side of the aircraft at a great labyrinth of frozen masses calved from the Larsen Ice Shelf and driven northwest by the wind and current into warmer water, where they split and broke up into thousands of smaller bergs. Three of them were as big as small countries. Some measured three hundred meters thick and rose as high as three-story buildings from just the water surface. All were dazzling white with hues of blue and green. The ice of these drifting mountains had formed from compacted snow in the ancient past, before breaking loose and plowing relentlessly over the centuries toward the sea and their slow but eventual meltdown.
“I do believe you could pick up Ford and Chrysler too.”
“If Polar Queen struck any one of these thousands of bergs, she could have gone to the bottom in less time than it takes to tell about it.”
“A thought I don’t care to dwell on.”
“Anything on your side?” asked Giordino.
“Nothing but gray, undistinguished rock poking through a blanket of white snow. I can only describe it as sterile monotony.”
Giordino made another notation on his chart and checked the airspeed against his watch. “Twenty kilometers from the whaling station, and no sign of passengers from the cruise ship.”
Pitt nodded in agreement. “Certainly nothing I can see that resembles a human.”
“Maeve Fletcher said they were supposed to put the second party ashore at a seal colony.”
“The seals are there all right,” Pitt said, gesturing below. “Must be over eight hundred of them, all dead.”
Giordino raised in his seat and peered out the port window as Pitt banked the helicopter in a gentle descending turn to give him a better view. The yellow-brown bodies of big elephant seals packed the shoreline for nearly a kilometer. From fifty meters in the air, they looked to be sleeping, but a sharp look soon revealed that not one moved.
“It doesn’t look like the second excursion group left the ship,” said Giordino.
There was nothing more to see, so Pitt swung the aircraft back on a course over the surf line. “Next stop, the Argentinean research station.”
“It should be coming into view at any time.”
“I’m not looking forward to what we might find,” said Pitt uneasily.
“Look on the bright side.” Giordino smiled tightly. “Maybe everybody said to hell with it, packed up and went home.”
“Wishful thinking on your part,” Pitt replied. “The station is highly important for its work in atmospheric sciences. It’s one of five permanently occupied survey stations that measure the behavior and fluctuations of the Antarctic ozone hole.”
“What’s the latest news on the ozone layer?”
“Weakening badly in both Northern and Southern Hemispheres,” Pitt answered seriously. “Since the large cavity over the Arctic pole has opened, the amoeba shaped hole in the south, rotating in clockwise direction from polar winds, has traveled over Chile and Argentina as high as the forty-fifth parallel. It also passed across New Zealand’s South Island as far as Christchurch. The plant and animal life in those regions received the most harmful dose of ultraviolet radiation ever recorded.”
“Which means we’ll have to pile on the suntan lotion;” Giordino said sardonically.
“The least of the problem,” said Pitt. “Small overdoses of ultraviolet radiation badly damage every agricultural product from potatoes to peaches. If the ozone values drop a few more percentage points, there will be a disastrous loss of food crops around the world.”
“You paint a grim picture.”
“That’s only the background,” Pitt continued. “Couple that with global warming and increasing volcanic activity, and the human race could see a rise in sea level of thirty to ninety meters in the next two hundred years. The bottom line is that we’ve altered the earth in a terrifying way we don’t yet understand—”
“There!” Giordino abruptly cut in and pointed. They were coming over a shoulder of rock that sloped toward the sea. “Looks more like a frontier town than a scientific base.”
The Argentinean research and survey station was a complex of ten buildings, constructed with solid steel portal frames that supported dome roofs. The hollow walls had been thickly filled with insulation against the wind and frigid cold. The antenna array for gathering scientific data on the atmosphere festooned the domed roofs like the leafless branches of trees in winter. Giordino tried one last time to raise somebody on the radio while Pitt circled the buildings.
“Still quiet as a hermit’s doorbell,” Giordino said uneasily as he removed the earphones.
“No outstretched hand from a welcome committee,” Pitt observed.
Without a further word he settled the helicopter neatly beside the largest of the six buildings, the rotor blades whipping the snow into a shower of ice crystals. A pair of snowmobiles and an all-terrain tractor sat deserted, half buried in snow. There were no footprints to be seen, no smoke curled from the vents. No smoke or at least white vapor meant no, inhabitants, none that were alive at any rate. The place looked eerily deserted. The blanket of white gave it a ghostly look indeed, thought Pitt.
“We’d better take along the shovels stored in the cargo bay,” he said. “It looks like we’re going to have to dig our way in.”
It required no imagination at all to fear the worst. They exited the aircraft and trudged through snow up to their thighs until they reached the entrance to the central building. About two meters of snow had drifted against the door. Twenty minutes later they had removed enough to pull the door half ajar.
Giordino gave a slight bow and smiled grimly. “After you.”
Pitt never doubted Giordino’s fortitude for a minute. The little Italian was utterly fearless. It was an old routine they had practiced many times. Pitt led the way while Giordino covered any unexpected movement from the flanks and rear. One behind the other they stepped into a short tunnel ending at an interior door that acted as an additional cold barrier. Once through the inside door, they continued on down a long corridor that opened into a combination recreation and dining room. Giordino walked over to a thermometer attached to the wall.
“It’s below freezing in here,” he muttered.
“Somebody hasn’t been tending the heat,” Pitt acknowledged.
They did not have to go far to discover their first resident.
The odd thing about him was that he didn’t look like he was dead. He knelt on the floor, clutching the top of a table, staring open-eyed and unwinkingly at Pitt and Giordino as if he had been expecting them. There was something unnaturally wrong and foreboding about his stillness. He was a big man, bald but for a strip of black hair running around the sides of his head and meeting in the back. Like most scientists who spent months and sometimes years in isolated outposts, he had ignored the daily male ritual of shaving, as evidenced by the elegantly brushed beard that fell down his chest. Sadly, the magnificent beard had been soiled when he retched.
The frightening part about him, the part that made the nape of Pitt’s neck tingle, was the expression of abject fear and agony on the face that was frozen by the cold into a mask of white marble. He looked hideous beyond description.
The eyes bulged, and the mouth was oddly twisted open as if in a final scream. That this individual had died in extreme pain and terror was obvious. The fingernails of the white hands that dug into the tabletop were broken
and split. Three of them had left tiny droppings of icecrystalled blood. Pitt was no doctor and had never entertained the thought of becoming one, but he could tell this man was not stiffened by rigor mortis; he was frozen solid.
Giordino stepped around a serving counter and entered the kitchen. He returned within thirty seconds. “There are two more in there.”
“Worst fears confirmed,” said Pitt heavily. “Had just one of the station’s people survived, he’d have maintained the auxiliary motors to run the generators for electrical heat and power.”
Giordino looked down the corridors leading to the other buildings. “I’m not in the mood to hang around. I say we vacate this ice palace of the dead and contact Ice Hunter from the chopper.”
Pitt looked at him shrewdly. “What you’re really saying is that we pass the buck to Captain Dempsey and give him the thankless job of notifying the Argentinean authorities that the elite group of scientists manning their chief polar research station have all mysteriously departed for the great beyond.”
Giordino shrugged innocently. “It seems the sensible thing to do.”
“You could never live with yourself if you slunk off without making a thorough search for a possible survivor.”
“Can I help it if I have an inordinate fondness for people who live and breathe?”
“Find the generating room, fuel the auxiliary motors, restart them and turn on the electrical power. Then head for the communications center and report to Dempsey while I check out the rest of the station.”
Pitt found the rest of the Argentinean scientists where they had died, the same look of extreme torment etched on their faces. Several had fallen in the lab and instrument center, three grouped around a spectrophotometer that was used to measure the ozone. Pitt counted sixteen corpses in all, four of them women, sprawled in various compartments about the station. Everyone had protruding, staring eyes and gaping mouths, and all had vomited. They died frightened and they died in great pain, frozen in their agony. Pitt was reminded of the plaster casts of the dead from Pompeii.
Their bodies were fixed in odd, unnatural positions. None lay on the floor as if they had simply fallen. Most looked as if they had suddenly lost their balance and were desperately clinging to something to keep upright. A few were actually clutching carpeted flooring; one or two had hands tightly clasped against the sides of their head. Pitt was intrigued by the odd positions and tried to pry the hands away to see if they might have been covering any indications of injury or disease, but they were as rigid as if they had been grafted to the skin of the ears and temples.
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