The vomiting seemed an indication that death was brought about by virulent disease or contaminated food. And yet the obvious causes did not set right to Pitt’s way of thinking. No plague or food poisoning is known to kill in a few short minutes. As he walked in deep contemplation toward the communications room, a theory began unfolding in his mind. His thoughts were rudely interrupted when he entered and was greeted by a cadaver perched on a desk like a grotesque ceramic statue.
“How did he get there?” Pitt asked calmly.
“I put him there,” Giordino said matter-of-factly without looking up from the radio console. “He was sitting on the only chair in the room and I figured I needed it worse than he did.”
“He makes a total of seventeen.”
“The toll keeps adding up.”
“You get through to Dempsey?”
“He’s standing by. Do you want to talk to him?”
Pitt leaned over Giordino and spoke into the satellite telephone that linked him with almost any point of the globe. “This is Pitt. You there, skipper?”
“Go ahead Dirk, I’m listening.”
“Has Al filled you in on what we’ve found here?”
“A brief account. As soon as you can tell me there are no survivors, I will alert Argentinean authorities.”
“Consider it done. Unless I missed one or two in closets or under beds, I have a body count of seventeen.”
“Seventeen,” Dempsey repeated. “I read you. Can you determine the cause of death?”
“Negative,” Pitt answered. “The apparent symptoms aren’t like anything you’d find in your home medical guide. We’ll have to wait for a pathologist’s report.”
“You might be interested to know that Miss Fletcher and Van Fleet have pretty well eliminated viral infections and chemical contamination as the cause of death for the penguins and seals.”
“Everyone at the station vomited before they died. Ask them to explain that.”
“I’ll make a note of it. Any sign of the second shore party?”
“Nothing. They must still be on board the ship.”
“Very strange.”
“So what are we left with?”
Dempsey sighed defeatedly. “A big fat puzzle with too many missing pieces.”
“On the flight here we passed over a seal colony that was wiped out. Have you determined how far the scourge extends?”
“The British station two hundred kilometers to the south of you on the Jason Peninsula and a U.S. cruise ship that’s anchored off Hope Bay have reported no unusual events nor any evidence of mass creature destruction. By taking into account the area in the Weddell Sea where we discovered the school of dead dolphins, I put the death circle within a diameter of ninety kilometers, using the whaling station on Seymour Island as a center point.”
“We’re going to move on now,” Pitt notified him, “and make a sweep for Polar Queen.”
“Mind that you keep enough fuel in reserve to return to the ship.”
“In the bank,” Pitt assured Dempsey. “An invigorating swim in ice water I can do without.”
Giordino closed down the research station’s communications console, and then they stepped lively toward the entrance; jogged quickly was closer to the truth. Neither Pitt nor Giordino wished to spend another moment in that icy tomb. As they rose from the station, Giordino studied his chart of the Antarctic Peninsula.
“Where to?”
“The right thing to do is search in the area selected by Ice Hunter’s computer,” Pitt replied.
Giordino gave Pitt a dubious look. “You realize, of course, that our ship’s data analyzer did not agree with your idea of the cruise ship running aground on the peninsula or a nearby island.”
“Yes, I’m well aware that Dempsey’s brain box put Polar Queen steaming around in circles far out in the Weddell Sea.”
“Do I detect a tone of conflict?”
“Let’s just say a computer can only analyze the data that is programmed into it before offering an electronic opinion.”
“So where to?” Giordino repeated.
“We’ll check out the islands north of here as far as Moody Point at the tip of the peninsula. Then we’ll curve east and work out to sea until we converge with the Ice Hunter.”
Giordino well knew he was being baited and hooked by the biggest flimflam man in the polar seas, but he took the bait anyway. “You’re not strictly following the computer’s advice.”
“Not one hundred percent, no.”
Giordino could feel the jerk on the line. “I’d like a faint clue as to what’s going on in your devious mind.”
“We found no human bodies at the seal colony. So we now know the ship did not heave to for a shore excursion. Follow me?”
“Thus far.”
“Picture the ship steering north from the whaling station. The scourge, plague or whatever you want to call it, strikes before the crew has a chance to send the passengers ashore. In these waters, with ice floes and bergs floating all around like ice cubes in a punch bowl, there is no way the captain would have set the ship on automated control. The risk of collision is too great. He would have taken the helm himself, probably steering the ship from one of the electronic steering consoles on the port and starboard bridge wings.”
“Good as far as it goes,” Giordino said mechanically. “Then what?”
“The ship was cruising along the coast of Seymour Island when the crew was stricken,” Pitt explained.
“Now take your chart and draw a line slightly north of east for two hundred kilometers and cross it with a thirty kilometer arc. Then tell me where you are and what islands intersect the course.”
Before Giordino complied, he stared at Pitt. “Why didn’t the computer come to the same conclusion?”
“Because as a ship’s captain, Dempsey was more concerned with winds and currents. He also assumed, and rightly so for a master mariner, that the last act of a dying captain would be to save his ship. That meant turning Polar Queen away from the danger of grounding on a rocky shore and steering her toward the relative safety of the sea and taking his chances with the icebergs.”
“You don’t think that was the way it was.”
“Not after seeing the bodies at the research station. Those poor souls hardly had time to react much less carry out a sound decision. The captain of the cruise ship died in his own vomit while the ship was on a course parallel to the shore. With the rest of the ship’s officers and the engine room crew stricken, Polar Queen sailed on until she either beached on an island, struck a berg and sank, or steamed out into the South Atlantic until her engines ran out of fuel and she became a drifting derelict far off the known sea lanes.”
The absence of reaction to Pitt’s divination was almost total. It was as if Giordino expected it. “Have you ever thought seriously of becoming a professional palm reader?”
“Not until five minutes ago,” Pitt came back.
Giordino sighed and drew the course Pitt requested on the chart. After a few minutes he propped it against the instrument panel so Pitt could view his markings. “If your mystical intuition is on target, the only chance Polar Queen has for striking hard ground between here and the South Atlantic is on one of three small islands that are little more than pinnacles of exposed rock.”
“What are they called?”
“Danger Islands.”
“They sound like the setting of an adolescent pirate novel.”
Giordino thumbed through a coastal reference manual.
“Ships are advised to give them a wide berth,” he said. “High basalt palisades rising sharply from rough waters. Then it lists the ships that have piled up on them.” He looked up from the chart and reference manual and gave Pitt a very narrow look. “Not exactly a place where kids would play.”
From Seymour Island to the mainland the sea was as smooth as a mirror and just as reflective. The rockbound mountains soared above the water and their snowy mantles were reproduced by the water in exactin
g detail. West of the islands the sea was calmed by a vast army of drifting icebergs that rose from marine-blue water like frosted sailing ships from centuries past. Not one genuine vessel was in sight, nothing of human manufacture marred the incredibly beautiful seascape.
They skirted Dundee Island, not far below the extreme tip of the peninsula. Directly ahead of them Moody Point curled toward the Danger Islands like the bony finger of the old guy with the scythe signifying his next victim. The calm waters ended off the point. As if they had walked from a warm comfortable room through a door into a storm outside, they found the sea suddenly transformed into an unbroken mass of white-capped swells marching in from the Drake Passage. A buffeting wind also sprang up and caused the helicopter to sway like a toy locomotive hurtling around a model train layout.
The peaks of the three Danger Islands came into view, their rock escarpments rising out of a sea that writhed and thrashed around their base. They rose so steeply that even seabirds couldn’t get a foothold on their sheer walls. They thrust angrily from the sea in contempt of the waves that broke against the unyielding rock in rapid explosions of foam and spray. The basalt formation was so hard that a million years of onslaught by a maddened sea produced little weathering. Their polished walls ran up to vertical peaks that possessed no flat spaces wider than a good-sized coffee table.
“No ship could live long in that bedlam,” said Pitt.
“No shallow water around those pinnacles,” Giordino observed. “The water looks to drop off a hundred fathoms within a stone’s throw of the cliffs.”
“According to the charts, it drops over a thousand meters in less than three kilometers.”
They circled the first island in the chain, a wicked, brooding mass of ugly stone sitting amid the churning violence. There was no sign of floating debris on the tormented sea. They flew across the channel separating this island from the next, looking down on the rushing white capped surge that reminded Pitt of the spring floodwaters gushing down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. No ship’s captain would be crazy enough to take his vessel within a cannon shot of this place.
“See anything?” Pitt asked Giordino as he struggled to keep the helicopter stable against the unpredictable winds that tried to slam them against the towering cliffs.
“A seething mass of liquid only a white-water kayaker could love. Nothing more.”
Pitt completed the circumference and dipped the craft toward the third and outermost island. This one looked dark and evil, and it took surprisingly little imagination to see that the peak was shaped in the likeness of an upturned face, much like that of the devil, with slitty eyes, small rock protrusions for horns and a sharp beard below smirking lips.
“Now that’s what I call repugnant,” said Pitt. “I wonder what name it goes by.”
“No individual names are given on the chart,” Giordino replied.
A moment later, Pitt swung the helicopter on a parallel course with the wave-swept palisades and began circling the barren island. Suddenly, Giordino stiffened and peered intently through the front windscreen. “Do you see that?”
Pitt turned briefly from the spectacular collision between water and rock and gazed forward and down. “I see no flotsam.”
“Forget the water. Look over the top of that high ridge dead ahead.”
Pitt studied the strange rock formation that trailed from the main mass and led into the sea like a man-made breakwater. “That blob of white snow beyond the ridge?”
“That ain’t no blob of snow,” Giordino said firmly.
Pitt suddenly realized what it was. “I’ve got it now!” he said with mounting excitement. It was smooth and white and shaped like a triangle with the top cut off. The upper rim was black, and there was some sort of painted emblem on the side. “A ship’s funnel! And there’s her radar mast sticking up forty meters forward. You made a good call, pal.”
“If it’s Polar Queen, she must have struck the cliffs on the other side of that spur.”
But that was an illusion. When they flew over the natural seawall jutting into the sea it became apparent that the cruise ship was floating undamaged a good five hundred meters from the island. It was incredible, but there she was without a scratch.
“She’s still clear!” Giordino shouted.
“Not for long,” Pitt said. In an instant he took in the dire situation. The Polar Queen was steaming in large circles, her helm somehow jammed hard to starboard. They had arrived less than thirty minutes before her arc would bring her in collision with the sheer rocks, crushing her hull and sending everyone on board into deep, icy water.
“There are bodies on her deck,” said Giordino soberly.
A few lay scattered about the bridge deck. Several had fallen on the sundeck near the stern. A Zodiac, still attached to the gangway, was dragged along through the swells, two bodies lying on its bottom. That no one was alive was obvious by the fact they were all covered with a thin coating of snow and ice.
“Two more revolutions and she’ll kiss the rock,” said Giordino.
“We’ve got to get down there and somehow turn her about.”
“Not in this wind,” said Giordino. “The only open space is the roof over the bridge-deck quarters. That’s a tricky landing I wouldn’t want to try. Once we dump airspeed and hover prior to setting down, we’ll have as much control as a dry leaf. A sudden downdraft and we’ll end up in the mess down there.”
Pitt unsnapped his safety harness. “Then you drive the bus while I go down on the winch.”
“There are people under restraint in rubber rooms who aren’t that crazy. You’d be whipped around like a yo-yo on a string.”
“You know any other way to get on board?”
“Only one. But it’s not approved by the Ladies Home Journal.”
“The battleship drop in the Vixen affair,” said Pitt, recalling.
“One more occasion where you were damned lucky,” said Giordino.
There was no doubt in Pitt’s mind-the ship was going to pile up on the rocks. Once the bottom was torn out of her, she would sink like a brick. There was always the possibility that someone had survived the unknown plague as Maeve and her excursionists had in the cave. The cold, hard reality dictated that the bodies be examined in hopes of tracking down the cause of death. If there was the slightest chance of saving the Polar Queen, he had to take it.
Pitt looked at Giordino and smiled faintly. “It’s time to cue the daring young man on the flying trapeze.”
Pitt already wore thermal underwear made from heavy nylon pile to retain his body heat and shield him from frigid temperatures. Over this he pulled on a diver’s drysuit, specially insulated for polar waters. The purpose of the dry suit was twofold. The first was to protect him from the windchill while he was dangling beneath the moving helicopter. The second, to keep him alive in cold water long enough for rescue, should he drop too soon or too late and miss the ship entirely.
He strapped on a quick-release harness and tightened the chin strap to the heavy crash-type helmet that contained his radio headset. He looked through the compartment that held Van Fleet’s lab equipment and into the cockpit. “Do you read me okay?” he asked Giordino through the tiny microphone in front of his lips.
“A little fuzzy around the edges. But that should clear once you’re free of the engine’s interference. How about me?”
“Your every syllable is like a chime,” Pitt jested.
“Because the upper superstructure is crowded with the funnel, forward mast and a batch of electronic navigation equipment, I can’t risk dropping you amidships. It will have to be either the open bow or the stern.”
“Make it the sundeck over the stern. The bow contains too much machinery.”
“I’ll start the run from starboard to port as soon as the ship turns and the wind comes from abeam,” Giordino informed him. “I’ll come in from the sea and attempt to take advantage of the calmer conditions on the lee side of the cliffs.”
“Unde
rstood.”
“You ready?”
Pitt adjusted his helmet’s face mask and pulled on his gloves. He took the remote control unit to the winch motor in one hand, turned and pulled open the side entry hatch. If he hadn’t been dressed for the abrupt blast of polar frigidity he would have been frozen into a Popsicle within a few seconds. He leaned out the door and gazed at Polar Queen.
She was circling in closer and closer to her death. Only fifty meters separated her from destruction on this pass. The uncompromising rock walls of the outermost Danger Island seemed to beckon to her. She looked like an uncaring moth serenely gliding toward a black spider, Pitt thought. There wasn’t much time left. She was beginning her final circuit, which would bring her into collision with an immovable object. She would have died before but for the waves that crashed against the sheer rock and echoed back, delaying her trip to the bottom.
“Throttling back,” Giordino said, announcing the start of his run over the ship.
“Exiting now,” Pitt informed him. Pitt pressed the release button to reel out the cable. As soon as he had enough slack to clear the doorway he stepped into space.
The rush of wind took him in its grasp and strung his body out behind the underside of the helicopter. The rotor blades thumped above him, and the sound of the turbine exhaust came through his helmet and earphones. Whirling through the chilly air, Pitt felt the same sensation as that felt by a bungee jumper after the initial recoil. He focused his concentration onto the ship, which looked like a toy boat floating on a blanket of blue in the near distance. The superstructure of the ship rapidly grew until it filled most of his vision.
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