“Do I detect a tone of conflict?”
“Let’s just say a computer can only analyze the data that is programmed into it before offering an electronic opinion.”
“So where to?” Giordino repeated.
“We’ll check out the islands north of here as far as Moody Point at the tip of the peninsula. Then we’ll curve east and work out to sea until we converge with the Ice Hunter.”
Giordino well knew he was being baited and hooked by the biggest flimflam man in the polar seas, but he took the bait anyway. “You’re not strictly following the computer’s advice.”
“Not one hundred percent, no.”
Giordino could feel the jerk on the line. “I’d like a faint clue as to what’s going on in your devious mind.”
“We found no human bodies at the seal colony. So we now know the ship did not heave to for a shore excursion. Follow me?”
“Thus far.”
“Picture the ship steering north from the whaling station. The scourge, plague or whatever you want to call it, strikes before the crew has a chance to send the passengers ashore. In these waters, with ice floes and bergs floating all around like ice cubes in a punch bowl, there is no way the captain would have set the ship on automated control. The risk of collision is too great. He would have taken the helm himself, probably steering the ship from one of the electronic steering consoles on the port and starboard bridge wings.”
“Good as far as it goes,” Giordino said mechanically. “Then what?”
“The ship was cruising along the coast of Seymour Island when the crew was stricken,” Pitt explained.
“Now take your chart and draw a line slightly north of east for two hundred kilometers and cross it with a thirty kilometer arc. Then tell me where you are and what islands intersect the course.”
Before Giordino complied, he stared at Pitt. “Why didn’t the computer come to the same conclusion?”
“Because as a ship’s captain, Dempsey was more concerned with winds and currents. He also assumed, and rightly so for a master mariner, that the last act of a dying captain would be to save his ship. That meant turning Polar Queen away from the danger of grounding on a rocky shore and steering her toward the relative safety of the sea and taking his chances with the icebergs.”
“You don’t think that was the way it was.”
“Not after seeing the bodies at the research station. Those poor souls hardly had time to react much less carry out a sound decision. The captain of the cruise ship died in his own vomit while the ship was on a course parallel to the shore. With the rest of the ship’s officers and the engine room crew stricken, Polar Queen sailed on until she either beached on an island, struck a berg and sank, or steamed out into the South Atlantic until her engines ran out of fuel and she became a drifting derelict far off the known sea lanes.”
The absence of reaction to Pitt’s divination was almost total. It was as if Giordino expected it. “Have you ever thought seriously of becoming a professional palm reader?”
“Not until five minutes ago,” Pitt came back.
Giordino sighed and drew the course Pitt requested on the chart. After a few minutes he propped it against the instrument panel so Pitt could view his markings. “If your mystical intuition is on target, the only chance Polar Queen has for striking hard ground between here and the South Atlantic is on one of three small islands that are little more than pinnacles of exposed rock.”
“What are they called?”
“Danger Islands.”
“They sound like the setting of an adolescent pirate novel.”
Giordino thumbed through a coastal reference manual.
“Ships are advised to give them a wide berth,” he said. “High basalt palisades rising sharply from rough waters. Then it lists the ships that have piled up on them.” He looked up from the chart and reference manual and gave Pitt a very narrow look. “Not exactly a place where kids would play.”
From Seymour Island to the mainland the sea was as smooth as a mirror and just as reflective. The rockbound mountains soared above the water and their snowy mantles were reproduced by the water in exacting detail. West of the islands the sea was calmed by a vast army of drifting icebergs that rose from marine-blue water like frosted sailing ships from centuries past. Not one genuine vessel was in sight, nothing of human manufacture marred the incredibly beautiful seascape.
They skirted Dundee Island, not far below the extreme tip of the peninsula. Directly ahead of them Moody Point curled toward the Danger Islands like the bony finger of the old guy with the scythe signifying his next victim. The calm waters ended off the point. As if they had walked from a warm comfortable room through a door into a storm outside, they found the sea suddenly transformed into an unbroken mass of white-capped swells marching in from the Drake Passage. A buffeting wind also sprang up and caused the helicopter to sway like a toy locomotive hurtling around a model train layout.
The peaks of the three Danger Islands came into view, their rock escarpments rising out of a sea that writhed and thrashed around their base. They rose so steeply that even seabirds couldn’t get a foothold on their sheer walls. They thrust angrily from the sea in contempt of the waves that broke against the unyielding rock in rapid explosions of foam and spray. The basalt formation was so hard that a million years of onslaught by a maddened sea produced little weathering. Their polished walls ran up to vertical peaks that possessed no flat spaces wider than a good-sized coffee table.
“No ship could live long in that bedlam,” said Pitt.
“No shallow water around those pinnacles,” Giordino observed. “The water looks to drop off a hundred fathoms within a stone’s throw of the cliffs.”
“According to the charts, it drops over a thousand meters in less than three kilometers.”
They circled the first island in the chain, a wicked, brooding mass of ugly stone sitting amid the churning violence. There was no sign of floating debris on the tormented sea. They flew across the channel separating this island from the next, looking down on the rushing white capped surge that reminded Pitt of the spring floodwaters gushing down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. No ship’s captain would be crazy enough to take his vessel within a cannon shot of this place.
“See anything?” Pitt asked Giordino as he struggled to keep the helicopter stable against the unpredictable winds that tried to slam them against the towering cliffs.
“A seething mass of liquid only a white-water kayaker could love. Nothing more.”
Pitt completed the circumference and dipped the craft toward the third and outermost island. This one looked dark and evil, and it took surprisingly little imagination to see that the peak was shaped in the likeness of an upturned face, much like that of the devil, with slitty eyes, small rock protrusions for horns and a sharp beard below smirking lips.
“Now that’s what I call repugnant,” said Pitt. “I wonder what name it goes by.”
“No individual names are given on the chart,” Giordino replied.
A moment later, Pitt swung the helicopter on a parallel course with the wave-swept palisades and began circling the barren island. Suddenly, Giordino stiffened and peered intently through the front windscreen. “Do you see that?”
Pitt turned briefly from the spectacular collision between water and rock and gazed forward and down. “I see no flotsam.”
“Forget the water. Look over the top of that high ridge dead ahead.”
Pitt studied the strange rock formation that trailed from the main mass and led into the sea like a man-made breakwater. “That blob of white snow beyond the ridge?”
“That ain’t no blob of snow,” Giordino said firmly.
Pitt suddenly realized what it was. “I’ve got it now!” he said with mounting excitement. It was smooth and white and shaped like a triangle with the top cut off. The upper rim was black, and there was some sort of painted emblem on the side. “A ship’s funnel! And there’s her radar mast sticking up forty meters forward. You made a good call, pal.”
“If it’s Polar Queen, she must have struck the cliffs on the other side of that spur.”
But that was an illusion. When they flew over the natural seawall jutting into the sea it became apparent that the cruise ship was floating undamaged a good five hundred meters from the island. It was incredible, but there she
