computer systems.
“Every scrap of data on wind and currents from the last three and a half days, and their effects against a mass the size of Polar Queen. Once we calculate a drift pattern, we can tackle the problem of whether she continued making way with a dead crew at the helm, and in what direction.”
“Suppose that instead of steaming around in circles, as you suggested, her rudder was set on a straight course?”
“Then she might be fifteen hundred kilometers away, somewhere in the middle of the South Atlantic and out of range of the satellite imaging system.”
Giordino put it to Pitt. “But you don’t think so.”
“No,” Pitt said quietly. “If the ice and snow covering this ship after the storm is any indication, Polar Queen has enough of the stuff coating her superstructure to make her nearly invisible to the satellite imaging system.”
“Enough to camouflage her as an iceberg?” asked Dempsey.
“More like a snow-blanketed projection of land.”
Dempsey looked confused. “You’ve lost me.”
“I’ll bet my government pension,” said Pitt with cast-iron conviction, “we’ll find the Polar Queen hard aground somewhere along the shore of the peninsula or beached on one of the outlying islands.”
Pitt and Giordino took off at four o’clock in the morning, when most of the crew of lee Hunter were still sleeping. The weather had returned to milder temperatures, calm seas and crystal-clear blue skies, with a light five-knot wind out of the southwest. With Pitt at the controls, they headed toward the old whaling station before swinging north in search of the second group of excursionists from Polar Queen.
Pitt could not help feeling a deep sense of sadness as they flew over the rookery’s killing ground. The shore as far as the horizon seemed carpeted with the bodies of the comical little birds. The Addlie penguins were very territorial, and birds from other rookeries around the Antarctic Peninsula were not likely to immigrate to this particular breeding ground. The few survivors who might have escaped the terrible scourge would require twenty years or more to replenish the once numerous population of Seymour Island. Fortunately, the massive loss was not enough to critically endanger the species.
As the last of the dead birds flashed under the helicopter, Pitt leveled out at fifty meters and flew above the waterline, staring out the windscreen for any sign of the excursionists’ landing site. Giordino gazed out his side window, scanning the open-water pack ice for any glimpse of Polar Queen, occasionally making a mark on a folded chart that lay across his lap.
“If I had a dime,” Giordino muttered, “for every iceberg on the Weddell Sea, I could buy General Motors.”
Pitt glanced past Giordino out the starboard side of the aircraft at a great labyrinth of frozen masses calved from the Larsen Ice Shelf and driven northwest by the wind and current into warmer water, where they split and broke up into thousands of smaller bergs. Three of them were as big as small countries. Some measured three hundred meters thick and rose as high as three-story buildings from just the water surface. All were dazzling white with hues of blue and green. The ice of these drifting mountains had formed from compacted snow in the ancient past, before breaking loose and plowing relentlessly over the centuries toward the sea and their slow but eventual meltdown.
“I do believe you could pick up Ford and Chrysler too.”
“If Polar Queen struck any one of these thousands of bergs, she could have gone to the bottom in less time than it takes to tell about it.”
“A thought I don’t care to dwell on.”
“Anything on your side?” asked Giordino.
“Nothing but gray, undistinguished rock poking through a blanket of white snow. I can only describe it as sterile monotony.”
Giordino made another notation on his chart and checked the airspeed against his watch. “Twenty kilometers from the whaling station, and no sign of passengers from the cruise ship.”
Pitt nodded in agreement. “Certainly nothing I can see that resembles a human.”
“Maeve Fletcher said they were supposed to put the second party ashore at a seal colony.”
“The seals are there all right,” Pitt said, gesturing below. “Must be over eight hundred of them, all dead.”
Giordino raised in his seat and peered out the port window as Pitt banked the helicopter in a gentle descending turn to give him a better view. The yellow-brown bodies of big elephant seals packed the shoreline for nearly a kilometer. From fifty meters in the air, they looked to be sleeping, but a sharp look soon revealed that not one moved.
“It doesn’t look like the second excursion group left the ship,” said Giordino.
There was nothing more to see, so Pitt swung the aircraft back on a course over the surf line. “Next stop, the Argentinean research station.”
“It should be coming into view at any time.”
“I’m not looking forward to what we might find,” said Pitt uneasily.
“Look on the bright side.” Giordino smiled tightly. “Maybe everybody said to hell with it, packed up and went home.”
“Wishful thinking on your part,” Pitt replied. “The station is highly important for its work in atmospheric sciences. It’s one of five permanently occupied survey stations that measure the behavior and fluctuations of the Antarctic ozone hole.”
“What’s the latest news on the ozone layer?”
“Weakening badly in both Northern and Southern Hemispheres,” Pitt answered seriously. “Since the large cavity over the Arctic pole has opened, the amoeba shaped hole in the south, rotating in clockwise direction from polar winds, has traveled over Chile and Argentina as high as the forty-fifth parallel. It also passed across New Zealand’s South Island as far as Christchurch. The plant and animal life in those regions received the most harmful dose of ultraviolet radiation ever recorded.”
“Which means we’ll have to pile on the suntan lotion;” Giordino said sardonically.
“The least of the problem,” said Pitt. “Small overdoses of ultraviolet radiation badly damage every agricultural product from potatoes to peaches. If the ozone values drop a few more percentage points, there will be a disastrous loss of food crops around the world.”
“You paint a grim picture.”
“That’s only the background,” Pitt continued. “Couple that with global warming and increasing volcanic activity, and the human race could see a rise in sea level of thirty to ninety meters in the next two hundred years. The bottom line is that we’ve altered the earth in a terrifying way we don’t yet understand—”
“There!” Giordino abruptly cut in and pointed. They were coming over a shoulder of rock that sloped toward the sea. “Looks more like a frontier town than a scientific base.”
The Argentinean research and survey station was a complex of ten buildings, constructed with solid steel portal frames that supported dome roofs. The hollow walls had been thickly filled with insulation against the wind and frigid cold. The antenna array for gathering scientific data on the atmosphere festooned the domed roofs like the leafless branches of trees in winter. Giordino tried one last time to raise somebody on the radio while Pitt circled the buildings.
“Still quiet as a hermit’s doorbell,” Giordino said uneasily as he removed the earphones.
“No outstretched hand from a welcome committee,” Pitt observed.
Without a further word he settled the helicopter neatly beside the largest of the six buildings, the rotor blades whipping the snow into a shower of ice crystals. A pair of snowmobiles and an all-terrain tractor sat deserted, half buried in snow. There were no footprints to be seen, no smoke curled from the vents. No smoke or at least white vapor meant no, inhabitants, none that were alive at any rate. The place looked eerily deserted. The blanket of white gave it a ghostly look indeed, thought Pitt.
“We’d better take along the shovels stored in the cargo bay,” he said. “It looks like we’re going to have to dig our way in.”
It required no imagination at all to fear the worst. They exited the aircraft and trudged through snow up to
