eleven o’clock on a summer’s evening in the Southern Hemisphere, and daylight remained almost constant.
The passengers from Polar Queen had been fed and bedded down in comfortable quarters charitably provided by the crew and scientists, who doubled up. Doc Greenberg examined each and every one and found no permanent damage or trauma. He was also relieved to find only a few cases of mild colds but no evidence of pneumonia. In the ship’s biolaboratory, two decks above the ship’s hospital, Van Fleet, assisted by Maeve Fletcher, was performing postmortem examinations on the penguins and seals they had airlifted from Seymour Island in the helicopter. The bodies of the three dead were packed in ice until they could be turned over to a professional pathologist.
Pitt ran his eyes over the huge twin bows of the Ice Hunter. She was not your garden-variety research ship but one of a kind, the first scientific vessel entirely computer designed by marine engineers working with input from oceanographers. She rode high on parallel hulls that contained her big engines and auxiliary machinery. Her space- age rounded superstructure abounded with technical sophistication and futuristic innovations. The quarters for the crew and ocean scientists rivaled the staterooms of a luxury cruise ship. She was sleek and almost fragile looking, but that was a deception. She was a workhorse, born to ride smooth in choppy waves and weather the roughest sea. Her radically designed triangular hulls could cut through and crush an ice floe four meters thick.
Admiral James Sandecker, the feisty director of the National Underwater & Marine Agency, followed her construction from the first computerized design drawing to her maiden voyage around Greenland. He took great pride in every centimeter of her gleaming white superstructure and turquoise hulls. Sandecker was a master of obtaining funds from the new tightfisted Congress, and nothing had been spared in Ice Hunter’s construction nor her state-of-the-art equipment. She was without argument the finest polar research ship ever built.
Pitt turned and refocused his attention on the image beamed down from the satellite.
He felt almost no exhaustion. It had been a long and tiring day, but one filled with every emotion, happiness and satisfaction at having saved the lives of over twenty people and sorrow at seeing so many of nature’s creatures lying dead almost as far as the eye could see. This was a catastrophe beyond comprehension. Something sinister and menacing was out there. A hideous presence that defied logic.
His thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of Giordino and Captain Dempsey as they stepped out of the elevator that ran from the observation wing above the navigation bridge down through fifteen decks to the bowels of the engine room.
“Any glimpse of Polar Queen from the satellite cameras?” asked Dempsey.
“Nothing I can positively identify,” Pitt replied. “The snow is blurring all imaging.”
“What about radio contact?”
Pitt shook his head. “It’s as though the ship were carried away by aliens from space. The communications room can’t raise a response. And while we’re on the subject, the radio at the Argentinean research station has also gone dead.”
“Whatever disaster struck the ship and the station,” said Dempsey, “must have come on so fast none of the poor devils could get off a distress call.”
“Have Van Fleet and Fletcher uncovered any clues leading to the cause of the deaths?” asked Pitt.
“Their preliminary examination shows that the arteries ruptured at the base of the creatures’ skulls, causing hemorrhaging. Beyond that, I can tell you nothing.”
“Looks like we have a thread leading from a mystery to an enigma to a dilemma to a puzzle with no solution in sight,” Pitt said philosophically.
“If Polar Queen isn’t floating nearby or sitting on the bottom of the Weddell Sea,” Giordino said thoughtfully, “we might be looking at a hijacking.”
Pitt smiled as he and Giordino exchanged knowing looks. “Like the Lady Flamborough?”
“Her image crossed my mind.”
Dempsey stared at the deck, recalling the incident. “The cruise ship that was captured by terrorists in the port of Punta del Este several years ago.”
Giordino nodded. “She was carrying heads of state for an economic conference. The terrorists sailed her through the Strait of Magellan into a Chilean fjord, where they moored her under a glacier. It was Dirk who tracked her down.”
“Allowing for a cruising speed of roughly eighteen knots,” Dempsey estimated, “terrorists could have sailed Polar Queen halfway to Buenos Aires by now.”
“Not a likely scenario,” Pitt said evenly. “I can’t think of one solid reason why terrorists would hijack a cruise ship in the Antarctic.”
“So what’s your guess?”
“I believe she’s either drifting or steaming in circles within two hundred kilometers of us.” Pitt said it so absolutely he left little margin for doubt.
Dempsey looked at him. “You have a prognostication we don’t know about?”
“I’m betting my money that the same phenomenon that struck down the tourists and crewman outside the cave also killed everybody on board the cruise ship.”
“Not a pretty thought,” said Giordino, “but that would explain why she never returned to pick up the excursionists.”
“And let us not forget the second group that was scheduled to be put ashore twenty kilometers farther up the coast,” Dempsey reminded them.
“This mess gets worse by the minute,” Giordino muttered.
“Al and I will conduct a search for the second group from the air,” Pitt said, contemplating the image on the monitor. “If we can’t find any sign of their presence, we’ll push on and check on the people manning the Argentinean research station. For all we know they could be dead too.”
“What in God’s name caused this calamity?” Dempsey asked no one in particular.
Pitt made a vague gesture with his hands “The familiar causes for extermination of life in and around the sea do not fit this puzzle. Natural problems generally responsible for huge fish kills around the world, like fluctuations in temperatures of surface water or algal blooms such as red tides, do not apply here. Neither is present.”
“That leaves man-made pollution.”
“A possibility that also fails to measure up,” Pitt argued. “There are no known industrial sources for toxic pollution within thousands of kilometers. And no radioactive and chemical wastes could have killed every penguin in such a short time span, certainly not those that were safely nesting on land clear of the water. I fear we have a threat no one has faced before.”
Giordino pulled a massive cigar from the inside pocket of his jacket. The cigar was one of Admiral Sandecker’s private stock, made expressly for his private enjoyment. And Giordino’s too, since it was never discovered how he had helped himself to the admiral’s private stock for over a decade without ever getting caught. He held a flame to the thick dark brown shaft of tobacco and puffed out a cloud of fragrant smoke.
“Okay,” he said, enjoying the taste. “What’s the drill?”
Dempsey wrinkled his nose at the cigar’s aroma. “I’ve contacted officials of Ruppert & Saunders, the line that owns Polar Queen, and apprised them of the situation. They lost no time in initiating a massive air search. They’ve requested that we transport the survivors of the shore excursion to King George Island, where a British scientific station has an airfield. From there arrangements will be made to airlift them back to Australia.”
“Before or after we look for Polar Queen?” Giordino put to him.
“The living come first,” Dempsey replied seriously. As captain of the ship, the decisions belonged to him. “You two probe the coastline in your helicopter while I steer the Hunter on a course toward King George Island. After our passengers are safely ashore, we’ll make a sweep for the cruise ship.”
Giordino grinned. “By then, the Weddell Sea will be swarming with every salvage tug from here to Capetown, South Africa.”
“Not our problem,” said Dempsey. “NUMA isn’t in the ship salvage business.”
Pitt had tuned out of the conversation and walked over to a table where a large chart of the Weddell Sea was laid flat. He ignored any inclination to work by instinct and drove himself to think rationally, with his brain and not his gut. He tried to put himself onboard the Polar Queen when she was struck by the murdering scourge. Giordino and Dempsey went quiet as they stared at him expectantly.
After nearly a minute, he looked up from the chart and smiled. “Once we program the relevant data into the teleplotting analyzer, it should give us a ballpark location with a fighting chance for success.”
“So what do we feed into the brain box?” Dempsey’s term for any piece of electronics relating to the ship’s
