Suddenly he paused, cocked an ear and listened. Piano music was drifting from somewhere within the ship. He recognized the piece as an old jazz tune called “Sweet Lorraine.” Then, as suddenly as the music began, it stopped.
Pitt began to sweat under the dry suit. He paused for a couple of minutes and stripped it off. The dead won’t mind me walking around in my thermal underwear, he thought in grim humor. He pushed on.
He wandered into the kitchen. The area around the ovens and preparation tables was littered with the corpses of the chefs, ordinary kitchen help and waiters, lying two and three deep. There was a cold horror about the place. It looked like a charnel house but without the blood. Nothing but shapeless, lifeless forms frozen in their final act of clutching something tangible as if an unseen force were trying to drag them away. Pitt turned away, sickened, and rode the kitchen elevator up to the dining salon.
The tables were set for a meal unserved. Silverware, scattered by the ship’s violent motion, still lay on immaculately clean tablecloths. Death must have arrived just prior to the seating for the lunchtime meal. He picked up a menu and studied the entrees. Sea bass, Antarctic ice fish, toothfish (a giant cod) and veal steak for those without a taste for fish. He laid the menu on the table and was about to leave when he spotted something that was out of place. He stepped over the body of a waiter and walked to a table by one of the picture windows.
Someone had eaten here. Pitt stared at the dishes that still had scraps of food on them. There was a nearly empty bowl of what looked like clam chowder, broken rolls smeared with butter and a half-consumed glass of ice tea. It was as though someone had just finished lunch and left for a stroll around the deck. Had they opened the dining salon early for someone? he wondered. He rejected any thought that suggested a passenger had eaten here after the death plague struck.
Pitt tried to write off the intriguing discovery with a dozen different logical solutions. But subconsciously, a fear began to grow. Unthinkingly, he began to look over his shoulder every so often. He left the dining salon and moved past the gift shop and worked forward into the ship’s lounge. A Steinway grand piano was situated beside a small wooden dance floor. Chairs and tables were spaced around the lounge in a horseshoe arrangement. Besides the cocktail waitress who had fallen while carrying a tray of drinks, there was a party of eight men and women, mostly in their early seventies, who had been seated around a large table but now lay in grotesque positions on the carpet. As he studied the husbands and wives, some locked in a final embrace, Pitt experienced sadness and anguish at the same time. Overwhelmed with a sense of helplessness, he cursed the unknown cause of such a terrible tragedy.
Then he noticed another corpse. It was a woman, sitting on the carpet in one corner of the lounge. Her chin was on her knees, head cradled in her arms. Dressed in a fashionable short-sleeved leather jacket and wool slacks, she was not in a contorted position, nor did she appear to have vomited like all the others.
Pitt’s nerves reacted by sending a cold shiver up his spine. His heart sprinted from a slow steady beat to a rapid pace. Gathering control over his initial shock, he moved slowly across the room until he stood looking down on her.
He reached out and touched her cheek with a light exploring fingertip, experiencing an incredible wave of relief as he felt warmth. He gently shook her by the shoulders and saw her eyelids quiver open.
At first she looked at him dazed and uncomprehending, and then her eyes flew wide, she threw her arms around him and gasped. “You’re alive!”
“You don’t know how happy I am to see you are too.” Pitt said softly, his lips parted in a smile.
Abruptly, she pulled back from him. “No, no, you can’t be real. You’re all dead.”
“You needn’t be afraid of me,” he said in a soothing tone.
She stared at him through wide brown eyes rimmed red from weeping, a sad enigmatic gaze. Her facial complexion was flawless, but there was an unmistakable pallor and just a hint of gauntness. Her hair was the color of red copper. She had the high cheekbones and full, sculptured lips of a fashion model. Their eyes locked for a moment, and then he dropped his stare slightly. From what he could tell about her in her curled position, she had a fashion model’s figure Her bared arms looked muscular for a woman. Only when she lowered her eyes and peered at his body did he suddenly feel embarrassed to be standing in front of a lady in his long johns.
“Why aren’t you properly dressed?” she finally murmured.
It was an inconsequential question bred from a state of fear and trauma, not curiosity. Pitt didn’t bother to explain. “Better yet, you tell me who you are and how you survived when the others died.”
She looked as if she were about to fall over on her side, so he quickly bent down, circled his arm around her waist and lifted her into a leather chair next to a table. He walked over to the bar. He went behind the bar expecting to find the body of the bartender and was not disappointed. He took a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 Tennessee sour mash whiskey from a mirrored shelf and poured a shot glass.
“Drink this,” he said, holding the glass to her lips.
“I don’t drink,” she protested vaguely.
“Consider it medicinal. Just take a few sips.”
She managed to consume the contents of the glass without coughing, but her face twisted into a sour expression as the whiskey, smooth as summer’s kiss to a connoisseur, inflamed her tonsils. After she’d gasped a few breaths of air, she looked into his sensitive green eyes and sensed his compassion.
“My name is Deirdre Dorsett,” she whispered nervously.
“Go on,” he prompted. “That’s a start. Are you one of the passengers?”
She shook her head. “An entertainer. I sing and play the piano in the lounge.”
“That was you playing ‘Sweet Lorraine.’”
“Call it a reaction from shock. Shock at seeing everyone dead, shock at thinking it would be my turn next. I can’t believe I’m still alive.”
“Where were you when the tragedy occurred?”
She peered at the four couples lying nearby in morbid fascination. “The lady in the red dress and the silverhaired man were celebrating their fiftieth anniversary with friends who accompanied them on the cruise. The night before their private party, the kitchen staff had carved a heart and cupid out of ice to sit in the middle of a bowl of champagne punch. While Fred, he’s ...” She corrected herself, “He was the bartender, opened the champagne, and Marta, the waitress, brought in a crystal bowl from the kitchen, I volunteered to bring the ice carving from the storage freezer.”
“You were in the freezer?”
She nodded silently.
“Do you recall if you latched the door behind your?”
“It swings closed automatically.”
“You could lift and carry the ice carving by yourself?”
“It wasn’t very large. About the size of a small garden pot.”
“Then what did you do?”
She closed her eyes very tightly, then pressed her hands against them and whispered. “I was only in there for a few minutes. When I came out I found everyone on the ship dead.”
“Exactly how many minutes would you say?” Pitt asked softly.
She moved her head back and forth and spoke through her hands. “Why are you asking me all these questions?”
“I don’t mean to sound like a prosecuting attorney. But please, it’s important.”
Slowly she lowered her hands and stared vacantly at the surface of the table. “I don’t know, I have no way of knowing exactly how long I was in there. All I remember is it took me a little while to wrap the ice carving in a couple of towels so I could get a good grip on it and carry it without freezing my fingers.”
“You were very lucky,” he said. “Yours is a classic example of being in the right place at the right time. If you had stepped from the freezer two minutes before you did, you’d be as dead as all the others. You were doubly lucky I came on board the
ship when I did.”
“Are you one of the crew? You don’t look familiar.”
It was obvious to him she was not fully aware of the Polar Queen’s near brush with the Danger Islands. “I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself. My name is Dirk Pitt. I’m with a research expedition. We found your excursion party where they had been abandoned on Seymour Island and came looking for your ship after all radio calls went unanswered.”
“That would have been Maeve Fletcher’s party,” she said quietly. “I suppose they’re all dead too.”
“Two passengers and the crewman who took them ashore,” he answered. “Miss Fletcher and the rest are alive and well.”
For a brief instant her face took on a series of expressions that would have done a Broadway actress proud. Shock was followed by anger culminating in a slow change to happiness. Her eyes brightened and she visibly relaxed. “Thank God Maeve is all right.”
The sunlight came through the windows of the lounge and shone on her hair, which was loose and flowing about her shoulders, and he caught the scent of her perfume. Pitt sensed a strange mood change in her. She was not young but a confident woman in the prime of her early thirties, with strong inner qualities. He also felt a disconcerting desire for her that angered him. Not now, he thought, not under these circumstances. He turned away so she wouldn’t see the rapt expression on his face.
“Why...?” she asked numbly, gesturing around her. “Why did they all have to die?”
He stared at the eight friends who were enjoying a special moment before their lives were so cruelly stolen from them. “I can’t be totally certain,” he said in a voice solemn with rage and pity, “but I think I have a good idea.”
Pitt was fighting fatigue when Ice Hunter sailed off the radar screen and loomed over the starboard bow. After searching the rest of the Polar Queen for other survivors, a lost cause as it turned out, he only allowed himself a short catnap while Deirdre Dorsett stood watch, ready to wake him lest the ship run down some poor trawler fishing for ice-water cod. There are those who feel refreshed after a brief rest. Not Pitt. Twenty minutes in dreamland was not enough to reconstitute his mind and body after twenty-four hours’ of stress and fatigue. He felt worse than when he lay down. He was getting too old to jump out of helicopters and battle raging seas, he mused. When he was twenty, he felt strong enough to leap over tall buildings with a single bound. At thirty, maybe a couple of one-story houses. How far back was that? Considering his sore muscles and aching joints, he was sure it must be eighty or ninety years ago.
He’d been working too long for the National Underwater & Marine Agency and Admiral Sandecker. It was time for a career move, something not as rigorous, with shorter hours. Maybe weaving hats out of palm fronds on a Tahiti beach, or something that stimulated the mind, like being a door-to-door contraceptive salesman. He shook off the silly thoughts brought on by weariness and set the automated control system to ALL STOP.
A quick radio transmission to Dempsey on board Ice Hunter, informing him that Pitt was closing down the engines and requesting a crew to come aboard and take over the cruise ship’s operation, and then he picked up the phone and called Admiral Sandecker over a satellite link to give him an update on the situation.
The receptionist at NUMA headquarters put him straight through on Sandecker’s private line. Though they were a third of the globe apart, Pitt’s time zone in the Antarctic was only one hour ahead of Sandecker’s in Washington, D.C.
“Good evening, Admiral.”
“About time I heard from you.”
“Things have been hectic.”
“I had to get the story secondhand from Dempsey on how you and Giordino found and saved the cruise ship.”
“I’ll be happy to fill you in with the details.”
“Have you rendezvoused with Ice Hunter?” Sandecker was short on greetings.
“Yes, Sir. Captain Dempsey is only a few hundred meters off my starboard beam. He’s sending a boat across to put a salvage crew on board and take off the only survivor.”
“How many casualties?” asked Sandecker.
“After a preliminary search of the ship,” answered Pitt, “I’ve accounted for all but five of the crew. Using a passenger list from the purser’s office and a roster of the crew in the first officer’s quarters, we’re left with 20 passengers and two of the crew still among the living, out of a total of 202.”
“That tallies to 180 dead.”
“As near as I can figure.”
“Since it is their ship, the Australian government is launching a massive investigation into the tragedy. A British research station with an airfield is situated not far to the southwest of your position, at Duse Bay. I’ve ordered Captain Dempsey to proceed there and transport the survivors ashore. The cruise line owners, Ruppert & Saunders, have chartered a Qantis jetliner to fly them to Sydney.”
“What about the bodies of the dead passengers and crew?”
“They’ll be packed in ice at the research station and flown to Australia on a military transport. Soon as they arrive, official investigators will launch a formal inquiry into the tragedy while pathologists conduct postmortem examinations on the bodies.”
“Speaking of Polar Queen,” said Pitt. He gave the admiral the particulars of its discovery by him and Giordino and the near brush with calamity in the ferocious breakers around the base of the Danger Islands. At the end he asked, “What do we do with her?”
“Ruppert & Saunders are also sending a crew to sail her back to Adelaide, accompanied by a team of Australian government investigators, who will examine her from funnel to keel before she reaches port.”
“You should demand an open contract form for salvage. NUMA could be awarded as much as $20 million for saving the ship from certain disaster.”
“Entitled to or not, we’ll not charge one thin dime for saving their ship.” Pitt detected the silky tone of satisfaction in Sandecker’s voice. “I’ll get twice that sum in favors and cooperation from the Aussie government for future research projects in and around their waters.”
No one could ever accuse the admiral of being senile. “Niccolo Machiavelli could have taken lessons from you,” Pitt sighed.
“You might be interested in learning that dead marine life in your area has tapered off. Fishermen and research station support vessels have reported finding no unusual fish or mammal kills in the past forty-eight hours. Whatever the killer is, it has moved on. Now we’re beginning to hear of massive amounts of fish and unusually high numbers of sea turtles being washed up on beaches around the Fiji Islands.”
“Sounds suspiciously like the plague has a life of its own.”
“It doesn’t stay in one place,” said Sandecker grimly. “The stakes are high. Unless our scientists can systematically eliminate the possible causes and home in on the one responsible damned quick, we’re going to see a loss of sea life that can’t be replenished not in our lifetime.”
“At least we can take comfort in knowing it’s not a repeat of the explosive reproduction by the red tide from chemical pollution out of the Niger River.”
“Certainly not since we shut down that hazardous waste plant in Mali that was the cause,” added Sandecker. “Our monitors up and down the river have shown no further indications of the altered synthetic amino acid and cobalt that created the problem.”
“Do our lab geniuses have any suspects on this one?” inquired Pitt.
“Not on this end,” replied Sandecker. “We were hoping the biologists on board Ice Hunter might have come up with something.”
“If they have, they’re keeping it a secret from me.”
“Do you have any notions on the subject?” asked Sandecker. There was a careful, almost cautious probing in his voice. “Something juicy that I can give the hounds from the news media who are parked in our lobby nearly two hundred strong.”
A shadow of a smile touched Pitt’s eyes. There was a private understanding between them that nothing of importance was ever d
iscussed over a satellite phone. Calls that went through the atmosphere were as vulnerable to eavesdropping as an old farm-belt party line. The mere mention of the news media meant that Pitt was to dodge the issue. “They’re drooling for a good story, are they?”
“The tabloids are already touting a ship of the dead from the Antarctic triangle.”
“Are you serious?”
“I’ll be happy to fax you the stories.”
“I’m afraid they’ll be disappointed by my hypothesis.”
“Care to share it with me?”
There was a pause. “I think it might be an unknown virus that is carried by air currents.”
“A virus,” Sandecker repeated mechanically. “Not very original, I must say.”
“I realize it has a queer sound to it,” said Pitt, “about as logical as counting the holes in an acoustical ceiling when you’re in the dentist’s chair.”
If Sandecker was puzzled by Pitt’s nonsensical ramblings, he didn’t act it. He merely sighed in resignation as if he was used to chatter. “I think we’d better leave the investigation to the scientists. They appear to have a better grip on the situation than you do.”
“Forgive me, Admiral, I’m not thinking straight.”
“You sound like a man wandering in a fog. As soon as Dempsey sends a crew on board, you head for Ice Hunter and get some sleep.”
“Thank you for being so understanding.”
“Simply a matter of appreciating the situation. We’ll speak later.” A click, and Admiral Sandecker was gone.
Deirdre Dorsett went out onto the bridge wing and waved wildly as she recognized Maeve Fletcher standing at the railing of Ice Hunter. Suddenly free of the torment of being the only person alive on a ship filled with cadavers, she laughed in sheer unaffected exhilaration, her voice ringing across the narrowing breach between the two ships.
“Maeve!” she cried.
Maeve stared across the water, searching the decks of the cruise ship for the female calling her name. Then her eyes locked on the figure standing on the bridge wing, waving. For half a minute she stared, bewildered. Then as she recognized Deirdre, her face took on the expression of someone walking in a graveyard at night who was suddenly tapped on, the shoulder.
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