“If the captain is trying to give us a good scare, he’s doing a damned fine job of it.”
“He must have a good reason for not returning.”
“Good reason or not, your company better be heavily insured because they’re going to get their ears sued off when we get back to civilization.”
Maeve was in no mood to argue. She turned her back on the killing ground and set off toward the storage cavern. The two men followed, their eyes searching over a menacing sea for something that wasn’t there.
To wake up after three days in a caw on a barren island in the middle of a polar storm and know you are responsible for three deaths and the lives of nine men and eleven women is not an enjoyable experience. Without any sign of the hoped-for arrival of the Polar Queen, the once cheerful excursion that came ashore to experience the wondrous isolation of the Antarctic had become a nightmare of abandonment and despair for the vacation travelers. And to add to Maeve’s desperation, the batteries of her portable communicator had finally gone dead.
Anytime now, Maeve knew she could expect the older members of the party to succumb to the harsh conditions inside the cave. They had lived their lives in warm and tropical zones and were not acclimated to the freezing harshness of the Antarctic. Young and hardy bodies might have lasted until help finally arrived, but these people lacked the strength of twenty- and thirty-year-olds. Their health was generally frail and vulnerable with age.
At first they joked and told stories, treating their ordeal as merely a bonus adventure. They sang songs, mostly “Waltzing Matilda,” and attempted word games. But soon lethargy set in, and they went quiet and unresponsive. Bravely, they accepted their suffering without protest.
Now, hunger overcame any fear of diseased meat, and Maeve stopped a mutiny by finally relenting and sending the men out to bring in several dead penguins. There was no problem of decomposition setting in since the birds had frozen soon after they were killed. One of the men was an avid hunter. He produced a Swiss army knife and expertly skinned and butchered the meat. By filling their bellies with protein and fat they would add fuel to maintain their body heat.
Maeve found some seventy-year-old tea in one of the whaler’s huts. She also appropriated an old pot and a pan. Next she tapped the casks for a liter of the remaining whale oil, poured it in the pan and lit it. A blue flame rose, and everybody applauded her ingenuity at producing a workable stove. Then she cleaned out the old pot, filled it with snow and brewed the tea. Spirits were buoyed, but only for a short time. Depression soon recast its heavy net over the cavern. Their determination not to die was being sapped by the frigid temperature. They morbidly began to believe the end was inevitable. The ship was never returning, and any hope of rescue from another origin bordered on fantasy.
It no longer mattered if they expired from whatever unknown disease, if any, killed the penguins. None were dressed properly to resist for long sustained temperatures below freezing. The danger of asphyxiation was too great to use the whale oil to build a bigger fire. The small amount in the pan merely produced a feeble bit of warmth, hardly sufficient to prolong life. Eventually the fatal tentacles of the cold would encircle them all.
Outside, the storm went from bad to worse and it began to snow, a rare occurrence on the peninsula during summer. Hope of a chance discovery was destroyed as the storm mounted in intensity. Four of the elderly were near death from exposure, and Maeve suffered bleak discouragement as all control began to slip through her frozen fingers. She blamed herself for the three that were already dead, and it affected her badly.
The living looked upon her as their only hope. Even the men respected her authority and carried out her orders without question. “God help them,” she whispered to herself. “I can’t let them know I’ve come to the end of my rope.”
She shuddered from an oppressive feeling of helplessness. A strange lethargy stole through her. Maeve knew she must see the terrible trial through to its final outcome, but she didn’t think she had the strength to continue carrying twenty lives on her shoulders. She felt exhausted and didn’t want to struggle anymore. Dimly, through her listlessness, she heard a strange sound unlike the cry of the wind. It came to her ears as though something were pounding the air. Then it faded. Only her imagination, she told herself. It was probably nothing but the wind changing direction and making a different howl through the air vent at the tunnel entrance.
Then she heard it again briefly before it died. She struggled to her feet and stumbled through the tunnel. A snowdrift had built up against the wind barrier and nearly filled the small opening. She removed several rocks to widen a passage and crawled outside into an icy world of wind and snow. The wind held steady at about twenty knots, swirling billows of snow like a tornado. Suddenly, she tensed and squinted her eyes into the white turbulence.
Something seemed to be moving out there, a vague shape with no substance and yet darker than the opaque veil that fell from the sky.
She took a step and pitched forward. For a long moment she thought of just lying there and going to sleep. The urge to give it all up was overwhelming. But the spark of life refused to diminish and blink out. She lifted herself to her knees and stared through the wavering light. She caught something moving toward her, and then a gust obliterated it. A few moments later it reappeared, but closer this time. Then her heart surged.
It was the figure of a man covered in ice and snow. She waved excitedly and called to him. He paused as if listening, then turned and began walking away.
This time she screamed, a high-pitched scream such as only a female could project. The figure turned and stared through the drifting snow in her direction. She waved both arms frantically. He waved back and began jogging toward her.
“Please don’t let him be a mirage or a delusion,” she begged the heavens.
And then he was kneeling in the snow beside her, cradling her shoulders in arms that felt like the biggest and strongest she had ever known. “Oh, thank God. I never gave up hoping you’d come.”
He was a tall man, wearing a turquoise parka with the letters NUMA stitched over the left breast, and a ski mask with goggles. He removed the goggles and stared at her through a pair of incredible opaline green eyes that betrayed a mixture of surprise and puzzlement. His deeply tanned face seemed oddly out of place in the Antarctic.
“What in the world are you doing here?” he asked in a husky voice tinged with concern.
“I have twenty people back there in a cavern. We were on a shore excursion. Our cruise ship sailed off and never returned.”
He looked at her in disbelief. “You were abandoned?”
She nodded and stared fearfully into the storm. “Did a worldwide catastrophe occur?”
His eyes narrowed at the question. “Not that I’m aware of. Why do you ask?”
“Three people in my party died under mysterious circumstances. And an entire rookery of penguins just north of the bay has been exterminated down to the last bird.”
If the stranger was surprised at the tragic news, he hid it well. He helped Maeve to her feet. “I’d better get you out of this blowing snow.”
“You’re American,” she said, shivering from the cold.
“And you’re Australian.”
“It’s that obvious?”
“You pronounce a like i.”
She held out a gloved hand. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you, Mr...?”
“My name is Dirk Pitt.”
“Maeve Fletcher.”
He ignored her objections, picked her up and began carrying her, following her footprints in the snow toward the tunnel. “I suggest we carry on our conversation out of the cold. You say there are twenty others?”
“That are still alive.”
Pitt gave her a solemn look. “It would appear the sales brochures oversold the voyage.”
Once inside the tunnel he set her on her feet and pulled off his ski mask. His head was covered by a thick mass of unruly black hair. His green eyes peered from beneath heavy dark eyebrows, and his face was craggy and weathered from long hours in the open but handsome in a rugged sort of way. His mouth seemed set in a casual grin. This was a man a woman could feel secure with, Maeve thought.
A minute later, Pitt was greeted by the tourists like a hometown football hero who had led the team to a big victory. Seeing a stranger suddenly appear in their midst had the same impact as winning a lottery. He marveled
