that they were all in reasonably fit shape, considering their terrible ordeal. The old women all embraced and kissed him like a son while the men slapped his back until it was sore. Everybody was talking and shouting questions at once. Maeve introduced him and related how they met up in the storm.
“Where did you drop from, mate?” they all wanted to know.
“A research vessel from the National’ Underwater & Marine Agency. We’re on an expedition trying to discover why seals and dolphins have been disappearing in these waters at an astonishing rate. We were flying over Seymour Island in a helicopter when the snow closed in on us, so we thought it best to land until it blew over.”
“There’re more of you?”
“A pilot and a biologist who remained on board. I spotted what looked like a piece of a Zodiac protruding from the snow. I wondered why such a craft would be resting on an uninhabited part of the island and walked over to investigate. That’s when I heard Miss Fletcher shouting at me.”
“Good thing you decided to take a walk when you did,” said the eighty-three-year-old great-grandmother to Maeve.
“I thought I heard a strange noise outside in the storm. I know now that it was the sound of his helicopter coming in to land.”
“An incredible piece of luck we stumbled into each other in the middle of a blizzard,” said Pitt. “I didn’t believe I was hearing a woman’s scream. I was sure it was a quirk of the wind until I saw you waving through a blanket of snow.”
“Where is your research ship?” Maeve asked.
“About forty kilometers northeast of here.”
“Did you by chance pass our ship, Polar Queen?”
Pitt shook his head. “We haven’t seen another ship for over a week.”
“Any radio contact?” asked Maeve. “A distress call, perhaps?”
“We talked to a ship supplying the British station at Halley Bay, but have heard nothing from a cruise ship.”
“She couldn’t have vanished into thin air,” said one of the men in bewilderment. “Not along with the entire crew and our fellow passengers.”
“We’ll solve the mystery as soon as we can transport all you people to our research vessel. It’s not as plush as Polar Queen, but we have comfortable quarters, a fine doctor and a cook who stands guard over a supply of very good wines.”
“I’d rather go to hell than spend another minute in this freeze box,” said a wiry New Zealand owner of a sheep station, laughing.
“I can only squeeze five or six of you at a time into the helicopter, so we’ll have to make several trips,” explained Pitt. “Because we set down a good three hundred meters away, I’ll return to the craft and fly it closer to the entrance to your cave so you won’t have to suffer the discomfort of trekking through the snow.”
“Nothing like curbside service,” Maeve said, feeling as if she had been reborn. “May I go with you?”
“Feel up to it?”
She nodded. “I think everyone will be glad to not have me ordering them about for a little while.”
Al Giordino sat in the pilot’s seat of the turquoise NUMA helicopter and worked a crossword puzzle. No taller than a floor lamp, he had a body as solid as a bee keg poised on two legs, with a pair of construction derricks for arms. His ebony eyes occasionally glanced into the snow glare through the cockpit windshield, then seeing nothing of Pitt, they refocused on the puzzle, Curly black hair framed the top of a round face, which was fixed with a perpetual sarcastic expression about the lips that suggested he was skeptical of the world and everyone in it, while the nose hinted strongly at his Roman ancestry.
A close friend of Pitt’s since childhood, they had been inseparable during their years together in the Air Force before volunteering for an assignment to help launch the National Underwater & Marine Agency, a temporary assignment that had lasted the better part of fourteen years.
“What’s a six-letter word for fuzzballed goondorpher that eats stinkweed?” he asked the man sitting behind him in the cargo bay of the aircraft, which was packed with laboratory testing equipment. The marine biologic from NUMA looked up from a specimen he’d collected earlier and raised his brows quizzically.
“There is no such beast as a fuzzballed goondorpher.”
“You sure? It says so right here.”
Roy Van Fleet knew when Giordino was sowing a cornfield with turnips. After three months at sea together Van Fleet had become too savvy to fall for the stubborn Italian’s con jobs. “On second thought, it’s a flying sloth from Mongolia. See if `slobbo’ fits.”
Realizing he had lost his easy mark, Giordino looks up from the puzzle again and stared into the falling snow “Dirk should have been back by now.”
“How long has he been gone?” asked Van Fleet.
“About forty-five minutes.”
Giordino screwed up his eyes as a pair of vague shapes took form in the distance. “I think he’s coming in now,” Then he added, “There must have been funny dust in that cheese sandwich I just ate. I’d swear he’s got soma one with him.”
“Not a chance. There isn’t another soul within thirty kilometers.”
“Come see for yourself.”
By the time Van Fleet had capped his specimen jar and placed it in a wooden crate, Pitt had thrown open the entry hatch and helped Maeve Fletcher climb inside.
She pushed back the hood on her orange jacket, fluffed out her long golden hair and smiled brightly. “Greetings, gentlemen. You don’t know how happy I am to see you.”
Van Fleet looked as if he had seen the Resurrection. His face registered total incomprehension.
Giordino, on the other hand, simply sighed in resignation. “Who else.” he asked no one in particular, “but Dirk Pitt could tramp off into a blizzard on an uninhabited backwater island in the Antarctic and discover a beautiful girl?”
Less than an hour after Pitt alerted the NUMA research vessel Ice Hunter, Captain Paul Dempsey braved an icy breeze and watched as Giordino hovered the helicopter above the ship’s landing pad. Except for the ship’s cook busily preparing hot meals in the galley, and the chief engineer, who remained below, the entire crew, including lab technicians and scientists, had turned out to greet the first group of cold and hungry tourists to be airlifted from Seymour Island.
Captain Dempsey had grown up on a ranch in the Beartooth Mountains astride the Wyoming-Montana border. He ran away to sea after graduating from high school and worked the fishing boats out of Kodiak, Alaska. He fell in love with the icy seas above the Arctic Circle and eventually passed the examination to become captain of an ice- breaking salvage tug. No matter how high the seas or how strong the wind, Dempsey never hesitated to take on the worst storms the Gulf of Alaska could throw al him after he’d received a call from a ship in distress, During the next fifteen years, his daring rescues of innumerable fishing boats, six coastal freighters, two oil tankers and a Navy destroyer created a legend that resulted in a bronze statue beside the dock at Seward, a source of great embarrassment to him. Forced into retirement when the oceangoing salvage company became debt ridden, he accepted an offer from the chief director of NUMA, Admiral James Sandecker, to captain the agency’s polar research ship, Ice Hunger.
Dempsey’s trademark, a chipped briar pipe, jutted from one corner of his tight but good-humored mouth. He was a typical tugman, broad shouldered and thick waisted, habitually standing with legs wide set, yet he presented a distinguished appearance. Gray haired, clean shaven, a man given to telling good sea stories, Dempsey might have been taken for a jovial captain of a cruise ship.
He stepped forward as the wheels of the chopper settled onto the deck. Beside him stood the ship’s physician, Dr. Mose Greenberg. Tall and slender, he wore his dark brown hair in a ponytail. His blue-green eyes twinkled, and he had about him that certain indefinable air of trustworthiness common to all conscientious, dedicated doctors around the world.
Dr. Greenberg, along with four crewmen bearing stretchers for any of the elderly passengers who found it difficult to walk on their own, ducked under the revolving rotor blades and opened the rear cargo door. Dempsey moved toward the cockpit and motioned to Giordino to open the side window. The stocky Italian obliged and leaned
