"Every alternative was neatly considered. We were all supposedly on a flight to Rondheim's northern estate for a day of salmon fishing. His group, the Hermit Limited bunch, were going to come on the next flight. At least, that's the story that will be handed out."
"What's to stop someone from accidentally discovering us at any moment?" Tidi asked, gently dabbing a trickle of blood from Pitts swollen mouth.
"It's fairly obvious," Pitt said, thoughtfully surveying the immediate surroundings. "We can't be Seen unless that someone is standing practically on top of us.
Add to that the fact we're probably in the most uninhabited area of Iceland, and the odds of being found begin to stretch to infinity."
"Now you can clearly see the picture," Lillie said.
"The helicopter had to be placed in the narrow confines of the ravine and then destroyed because it could not have been purposely crashed with any degree of accuracy-a perfect undetectable location. A search plane directly overhead could have no more than a second to spot the debris, a million-to-one chance at best. The next step was to scatter our bodies around the area.
Then, after two or three weeks of decomposition, the most a competent coroner could determine is that some of us died from injuries sustained from the phony crash and the rest from exposure and shock."
"Am I the only one who can walk?" Pitt asked harshly. His broken ribs ached like a thousand sores, but the hopeful stares, the miserable bit of optimism in the eyes of the men who knew death was only a few hours away, forced him to ignore the pain.
"A few can walk," Lillie answered. "But with broken arms, they'll never make it to the top of the ravine.
"Then I guess I'm elected."
"You're elected." Lillie smiled faintly. "If it's any consolation, you have the satisfaction of knowing Rondheim is up against a tougher man than his computers projected."
The encouragement in Lillie's eyes became the extra impetus Pitt needed. He rose unsteadily to his feet and looked down at the figure lying stiffly on the ground.
"Where did Rondheim bust you?"
"Both shoulders and-I'm guessing-my pelvis."
Lillie's tone was as calm as if he were describing the fractured surface of the moon.
"Kind of makes you wish you were back in St. Louis running the brewery, doesn't it?"
"Not really. Dear old Dad never had much confidence in his only son. If I… if I'm not alive and kicking when you come back, tell him-"
"Read him the riot act yourself. Besides, my heart wouldn't be in it." Pitt had to fight to keep his voice from faltering. 'I never liked Lillie beer anyway."
He turned away and knelt over Tidi.
"Where did they hurt you, dearheart?"
"My ankles are a little off center." She smiled gamely. "Nothing serious. I'm just lucky, I guess."
"I'm sorry," Pitt said. "You wouldn't be lying here if it wasn't for my bungling."
She took his hand and squeezed it. "It's more exciting than taking dictation and typing the admiral's letters."
Pitt bent over and lifted her in his arms and carried her tenderly a few feet and laid her beside Lillie.
"Here's your big chance, you little gold digger. A real live millionaire. And for the next few hours he's a captive audience. Mr. Jerome P. Lillie, may I present Miss Tidi Royal, the darling of the National Underwater Marine Agency. May you both live happily ever after."
Pitt kissed her lightly on the forehead, stumbled awkwardly once more to his feet and walked unsteadily over the water-soaked ground to the old man he knew simply as Sam. He thought of the distinguished manner, the warm, piercing eyes he had seen in the trophy room as he stared down and saw the legs, twisted outwards like the crooked branches of an oak tree, the blue eyes dulled by pain, and he forced himself to smile a confident, hopeful smile.
"Hang in there, Sam." Pitt leaned over and gently grasped the old man's shoulder. "I'll be back with the prettiest nurse in Iceland before, lunchtime."
Sam's lips gave the barest hint of a grin. "To a man my age, a cigar would prove much more practical."
"A cigar it is."
Pitt leaned over and shook Sam's hand. The blue eyes suddenly came to life and the old man raised up, griPPing Pitts outstretched hand with an intensity that Pitt didn't think was possible, and the lines of the tired, drawn face lightened into determined hardness.
"He must be stopped, Major Pitt." The voice was low, almost an insistent whisper. "James must not be allowed to go through with this terrible thing. His purpose glories in goodness, but the people he has surrounded himself with, glory only in greed and power."
Pitt only nodded without speaking.
"I forgive James for what he has done." Sam was talking, almost rambling to himself. "Tell him his brother forgives-"
"My God!" Pitts shock showed in his face.
"You're brothers?"
"Yes, James is my younger brother. I remained in the background these many years, handling the financial details and problems that plague a giant multinational corporation. James, a master at wheeling and dealing, enjoyed the center of attraction. Until now, we were a pretty successful combination." Sam Kelly bowed his head in a barely perceptible sign of farewell.
"God bring you luck." And then a smile slowly stretched across his face. "Don't forget my cigar."
"You can count on it," Pitt murmured. He turned away, his mind swirling with conflicting images and emotions, then slowly clearing and settling on one permanent irresistible purpose that held his mental processes in a viselike grip. The driving force, the hatred that had been smoldering within him since Rondheim lashed out with the first crippling blow, now exploded into an intense burning flame that consumed his mind to the expulsion of all else, but then his thoughts were pulled back to reality by the low voice of the Russian diplomat, Tamareztov.
"The heart of a good Communist goes with you, Major Pitt."
Pitt barely paused to reply. "I'm honored. It's not often a Communist has to rely on a capitalist to save his life."
"It is not an easy pill to swallow."
Pitt stopped and looked down at Tamareztov in slow speculation, noting the arms lying limply on the ground, the unnatural angle of the left leg. Then his face softened.
"If you promise not to hold any party indoctrination lectures while I'm gone, I'll bring you back a bottle of vodka.", Tamareztov stared back at Pitt curiously. "A display of Yankee humor, Major? But I think you really mean what you say about the vodka."
A grin touched the corners of Pitts lips. "Don't misread my intentions. Since I'm already taking a short walk to the corner liquor store, I merely thought I'd save you the trip." Then, before the uncomprehending Russian could reply, Pitt turned and began climbing the embankment toward the top of the ravine.
Cautiously at first, a few inches at a time, trying to move at a pace that favored his cracked ribs, Pitt clawed at the soft, slippery earth and pulled himself upward without looking in any direction except straight ahead. The first twenty feet were easy. Then the slope steepened and the soil became more firm, making it difficult to dig the shallow hand and toeholds which afforded his only source of support.
The climb itself became a purgatory, unctuated by the agony of his injuries. All emotion had drained away, his movements became mechanical, dig and pull, dig and pull. He tried to keep count of each foot gained but lost track after thirty, his mind totally void of all mental function.
He was like a blind man moving through the daylight in a blind world, and the only sense he still possessed was the sense of touch. Then for the first time fear came to him-not fear of falling or fear of injury, but the honest, cold fear of failing over twenty people whose lives depended on his reaching that line between earth and sky that seemed so far above him. Minutes passed that seemed like hours. How many? He didn't know, would never know. Time as a means of measurement no longer existed. His body was simply a robot going through repeated motions without the benefit of constant commands from the mind.
He began counting again, only this time he stopped at ten. Then one minute of rest, he told himself, no more, and he began again. His breath was coming in heaving gulps now, his fingers were raw, the ends of the nails jagged and spotted with blood, his arm muscles aching from the continuous effort-a sure sign his body was about spent. Sweat trickled down his face, but the irritating tickle could not be felt through 'his agonized flesh. He paused and looked up, seeing little through the swollen slits that were his eyes. The edge of the ravine blended into a nebulous line of angles and shadowy profiles that defied any judgment of distance.
And then suddenly, almost with a sense of surprise, Pitts hands found the soft, crumbling edge of the slope. With strength he didn't think was possible, he pulled himself up onto flat ground and rolled over on his back, laying inert and to all appearances, dead.
For nearly five minutes, Pitt lay rigid, only his chest moving with the pulsating rise and fall of his breath. Slowly, as the waves of total exhaustion receded to a level of sufferable tolerance, he pulled himself to his feet and peered into the bottom of the narrow chasm at the tiny figures below. He cupped his hands to yell, then decided against it. There were no words he could think of to shout that had any meaning, any encouragement. All the people below could see was his head and shoulders over the level of the steep cliff. Then with a wave of the hand, he was gone.
Chapter 17
Pitt stood like a solitary tree on a great empty plain. A dark green mosslike vegetation spread in every direction as far as he could see, edged on one horizon by a range of high hills and cloaked by a sun-whitened mist on two others. Except for a few small rises dotting the desolate landscape, most of the ground was nearly flat. At first he thought he was completely alone. But then he saw a tiny snipe that soared across the sky like a dart in search of an unseen target. It came closer, and from a height of two hundred feet it circled and looked down at Pitt, as if curiously inspecting the strange animal that stood out so vividly in red and yellow plumage against the center of the unending green carpet. After three cursory sweeps, the little bird's inquisitiveness waned and it fluttered its wings against the air and continued on its seeming flight to nowhere.
As if perceiving the bird's thoughts, Pitt stared down at his offbeat clothing and murmured vaguely to himself, "I've heard of being all dressed up with no place to go, but this is ridiculous."
The sound of his voice suddenly woke him up to the fact that his mind was working again. He felt the relief that was due from overcoming the exhausting climb from the ravine, the high elation of being alive and the hope of finding help before the people below died from the near-freezing temperatures. Jubilantly he struck out across the tundra toward the distant hills.
Fifty feet, no further, that was as far as Pitt got when it abruptly hit him. He was lost. The sun was high above the skyline. There were no stars to guide him.
North, south, east and west were words that meant nothing, had no definition in terms of measurement or accuracy. Once he entered the mist that was crawling across the land toward him, he would have no guideline, no landmarks to take a sight on. He was lost, adrift without any sense of direction.
For once that cold, damp morning, he didn't feel the grip of fear.
It wasn't that he knew fear would cloud his thoughts, confuse his reasoning. He was consumed with sharp anger that he should have been so beautifully tricked into complacency, so ignorantly unaware that he was stumbling to his death. Every contingency, the computers of Hermit Limited, his arch-enemy, had mechanically figured on every contingency. The stakes were too high in the murderous game that Kelly, Rondheim and their group of incredibly ruthless business associates were playing. But he swore to himself that he wasn't going to be forced to land on Boardwalk and pay a rent he couldn't afford without passing Go. He stopped, sat down and took stock.
It didn't take any great ingenious deduction to determine that he was sitting somewhere in the middle of the uninhabited part of Iceland.
He tried to remember what little he had learned about the Eden of the North Atlantic, what few facts he bad absorbed when studying the flight maps on board the Catawaba. The island stretched one hundred ninety miles from north to south, he recalled, and nearly three hundred miles from east to west. Since the shortest distance between two points was north and south, the other two directions were eliminated. If he traveled south, there was every possibility that he would run onto the Vatnajbkull ice mass, not only Iceland's but Europe's largest glacier, a great frozen wall that would have signaled the end of every thing.
North it was, he decided. The logic behind his decision bordered on the primitive, but there was another reason, a compelling urge to outsmart the computers by traveling in the direction least expected, a direction that offered the least obvious chance of success. The average man in similar circumstances would have probably headed toward Reykjavik, the largest sprawl of civilization, far to the west and south. That is undoubtedly, he hoped, what the computers had been programmed for-the average man.
Now he had an answer, but it was only half an answer. Which way was north? Even if he knew for certain, he had no means to follow it along a straight line.
The accepted fact that a man who was right-handed would eventually make a great arc to his right without any landmarks to guide him, came back to haunt Pitts thoughts.
The whine of the jet engines interrupted his reverie and he looked up, holding his hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the cobalt blue sky, sighting a commercial airliner cruising serenely ahead of its long white contrails. Pitt could only wonder at the aircraft's course.
It could have been heading anywhere: west to Reykjavik, east to Norway, southeast to London. There was no way to tell for certain unless he had a compass.
A compass, the word lingered in his mind, savored like the thought of an ice-cold beer by a man dying of thirst in the middle of the Mojave Desert. A compass, a simple piece of magnetic iron mounted on a pivot and floating in a mixture of glycerin and water. Then a light suddenly clicked on deep in the recesses of his brain. A long-forgotten bit of outdoor lore he'd learned many years before during a four-day hike in the Sierras with his old Boy Scout troop began to break through the fog-shrouded barrier of time.
It took him nearly ten minutes of searching before he found a small pool of water trapped in a shallow depression beneath a dome-shaped hill. Quickly, as dexterously as his raw and bleeding fingers would allow, Pitt unclasped the brown sash and tore off the pin that held it in place. Wrapping one end of the long silk material around his knee, he knelt and pulled it taut with his left hand and with his right began stroking the pin from head to tip in a single direction against the silk, building friction and magnetizing the tiny piece of metal.
The cold was increasing now, creeping into his.sweat-soaked clothes and forcing a spasm of shivers to grip his body. The pin slipped through his fingers, and he spent useless minutes probing the mossy ground cover until he discovered the little silver sliver by accidentally running it a quarter of an inch under a fingernail.
He was almost thankful for the pain, as it meant there was still feeling in his hands. He kept pushing the pin back and forth across the silk, careful not to let it slip through his fingers again.
When he felt satisfied that further friction would add nothing more, he rubbed the pin over his forehead and nose, covering it with as much skin oil as it could hold. Then he took two slender bits of thread from the lining of his red jacket and doubled them loosely around the pin. The tricky part of the operation was yet to come, so Pitt relaxed for a moment flexing his fingers and massaging them much like a piano player preparing to tackle Chopin's Minute Waltz.
Feeling he was ready, he gingerly picked up the two loops and with painstaking slowness lowered the pin into the calm little pond. Holding a deep breath, Pitt watched the water bend under the weight of the metal. Then ever so gently his fingers cautiously slid the threads apart until the pin swam by itself, kept afloat by the oil and the surface tensi
on of the water.
Only a child at Christmastime, staring wide-eyed at an array of gifts under the tree, could have experienced the same feeling of wonder that Pitt did that moment as he sat entranced and watched that crazy little pin swing leisurely in a half circle until its head pointed toward magnetic north. He sat there unmoving for a full three minutes, staring at his makeshift compass, almost afraid that if he blinked his eyes, it would sink and disappear.
"Let's see your goddamned computer come up with that one," Pitt murmured to the empty air.
A tenderfoot might have impatiently started running in the direction the pin pointed, mistaken in the assumption that a compass always faithfully aims its point toward true north. Pitt knew that the only place where a compass would unerringly indicate the North Pole was a small area in the Great Lakes between the United States and Canada where by chance the North and Magnetic Poles come into line. As an experienced navigator, he was also aware that the Magnetic Pole lay somewhere beneath Prince of Wales Island above Hudson Bay, approximately one thousand miles below the Arctic Pole and only a few hundred miles above Iceland. That meant that the pin was pointing a few degrees north of west. Pitt figured his compass declination at about eighty degrees, a rough guess at best, but at least he was certain that north now stood at a near right angle to the head of the pin.
Pitt took his bearing and picked the rudimentary compass needle Out of the water and started walking into the mist. He hadn't covered a hundred yards when he could taste the blood springing from the open cuts on his inner lips, the teeth loosened in his gums, and with all he had already suffered, the pain inaugurated by Rondheim's kick to the groin, which made it impossible for him to walk without — a heavy limping gait. He forced himself to keep going, to cling tenaciously to the thread Of consciousness. The ground was rough and uneven and he soon lost count of the number of times he stumbled and fell, wrapping his arms around his chest in a vain attempt to deaden the torture from the cracked ribs.
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