out.
“Is Pitt with you?” asked Dempsey loudly above the swoosh of the blades.
Giordino shook his head. “He and Van Fleet stayed behind to examine a pack of dead penguins.”
“How many of the cruise ship’s passengers were you able to carry?”
“We squeezed in six of the oldest ladies who had suffered the most. Four more trips ought to do it. Three to transport the remaining tourists and one to bring out Pitt, Van Fleet, the guide and the three dead bodies they stashed in an old whalers’ rendering shed.”
Dempsey motioned into the miserable mixture of snow and sleet. “Can you find your way back in this soup?”
“I plan to beam in on Pitt’s portable communicator.”
“How bad off are these people?”
“Better than you might expect for senior citizens who’ve suffered three days and nights in a frigid cave, Pitt said to tell Dr. Greenberg that pneumonia will be his main worry. The bitter cold has sapped the older folk’s energy, and in their weakened condition, their resistance is real low.”
“Do they have any idea what happened to their cruise ship?” asked Dempsey.
“Before they went ashore, their excursion guide was told by the first officer that the ship was heading twenty kilometers up the coast to put off another group of excursionists. That’s all she knows. The ship never contacted her again after it sailed off.”
Dempsey reached up and lightly slapped Giordino on the arm. “Hurry back and mind you don’t get your feet wet.” Then he moved around to the cargo door and introduced himself to the tired and cold passengers from the Polar Queen as they exited the aircraft.
He tucked a blanket around the eighty-three-year-old woman, who was being lifted to the deck on a stretcher, “Welcome aboard,” he said with a warm smile. “We have hot soup and coffee and a soft bed waiting for you in our officers’ quarters.”
“If it’s all the same to you,” she said sweetly, “I’d prefer tea.”
“Your wish is my command, dear lady,” Dempsey said gallantly. “Tea it is.”
“Bless you, Captain,” she replied, squeezing his hand.
As soon as the last passenger had been helped across the helicopter pad, Dempsey waved off Giordino, who immediately lifted the craft into the air. Dempsey watched until the turquoise craft dissolved and vanished into the white blanket of sleet.
He relit the ever-present pipe and tarried alone on the helicopter pad after the others had hurried back into the comfort of the ship’s superstructure to get out of the cold. He had not counted on a mission of mercy, certainly not one of this kind. Ships in distress on ferocious seas he could understand. But ship’s captains who abandoned their passengers on a deserted island under incredibly harsh conditions he could not fathom.
The Polar Queen had sailed far more than 25 kilometers from the site of the old whaling station. He knew that for certain. The radar on Ice Hunter’s bridge could see beyond 120 kilometers, and there was no contact that remotely resembled a cruise ship.
The gale had slackened considerably by the time Pitt, along with Maeve Fletcher and Van Fleet, reached the penguin rookery. The Australian zoologist and the American biologist had become friendly almost immediately. Pitt walked behind them in silence as they compared universities and colleagues in the field. Maeve plagued Van Fleet with questions pertaining to her dissertation, while he queried her for details concerning her brief observation of the mass decimation of the world’s most beloved bird.
The storm had carried the carcasses of those nearest the shoreline out to sea. But by Pitt’s best calculation a good forty thousand of the dead birds still lay scattered amid the small stones and rocks, like black-and-white gunnysacks filled with wet grain. With the easing of the wind and sleet, visibility increased to nearly a kilometer.
Giant petrels, the vultures of the sea, began arriving to feast upon the dead penguins. Majestic as they soared’ gracefully through the air, they were merciless scavengers of meat from any source. As Pitt and the others watched in disgust, the huge birds quickly disemboweled their lifeless prey, forcing their beaks inside the penguin carcasses until their necks and heads were red with viscera and gore.
“Not exactly a sight I care to remember,” said Pitt.
Van Fleet was stunned. He turned to Maeve, his eyes unbelieving. “Now that I see the tragedy with my own eyes I find it hard to accept so many of the poor creatures dying within such a concentrated space in the same time period.”
“Whatever the phenomenon,” said Maeve, “I’m certain it also caused the death of my two passengers and the ship’s crewman who brought us ashore.”
Van Fleet knelt and studied one of the penguins. “No indication of injury, no obvious signs of disease or poison. The body appears fat and healthy.”
Maeve leaned over his shoulder. “The only nonconformity that I found was the slight protrusion of the eyes.”
“Yes, I see what you mean. The eyeballs seem half again as large.”
Pitt looked at Maeve thoughtfully. “When I was carrying you to the cave, you said the three who died did so under mysterious circumstances.”
She nodded. “Some strange force assaulted our senses, unseen and nonphysical. I have no idea what it was. But I can tell you that for at least a full five minutes it felt like our brains were going to explode. The pain was excruciating.”
“From the blue coloring on the bodies you showed me in the rendering shed.” said Van Fleet, “the cause of death appears to be cardiac arrest.”
Pitt stared over the scene of so much annihilation. “Not possible that three humans, countless thousands of penguins and fifty or more leopard seals all expired together from a heart condition.”
“There must be an interrelating cause,” said Maeve.
“Any connection with the huge school of dolphins we found out in the Weddell Sea or the pod of seals washed up just across the channel on Vega Island, all deader than petrified wood?” Pitt asked Van Fleet.
The marine biologist shrugged. “Too early to tell without further study. There does, however, appear to be a definite link.”
“Have you examined them in your ship’s laboratory?” asked Maeve.
“I’ve dissected two seals and three dolphins and found no hook 1 can hang a respectable theory on. The primary consistency seems to be internal hemorrhaging.”
“Dolphins, seals, birds and humans,” Pitt said softly. “They’re all vulnerable to this scourge.”
Van Fleet nodded solemnly. “Not to mention the vast numbers of squid and sea turtles that have washed ashore throughout the Pacific and the millions of dead fish found floating off Peru and Ecuador in the past two months.”
“If it continues unstopped there is no predicting how many species of life above and under the sea will become extinct.” Pitt turned his gaze toward the sky at the distant sound of the helicopter. “So what do we know except that our mystery plague kills every living thing in air and liquid without discrimination?”
“All within a matter of minutes,” added Maeve.
Van Fleet came to his feet. He appeared badly shaken. “If we don’t determine whether the cause is from natural disturbances or human intervention of some kind, and do it damned quick, we may be looking at oceans devoid of all life.”
“Not just oceans. You’re forgetting this thing also kills on land,” Maeve reminded him.
“I don’t even want to dwell on that horror.”
For a long minute no one said a word, each trying to comprehend the potential catastrophe that lay somewhere in and beyond the sea. Finally, Pitt broke the silence.
“It would appear,” he said, a pensive look on his craggy face, “that we have our work cut out for us.”
Pitt studied the screen of a large monitor that displayed a computer-enhanced satellite image of the Antarctic Peninsula and the surrounding islands. He leaned back, rested his eyes a moment and then stared through the tinted glass on the navigation bridge of Ice Hunter as the sun broke through the dissipating clouds. The time was
