Giordino nodded. 'I'll stay on the ground outside and cover you with my Bushmaster.'
Pitt climbed back into the Snow Cruiser, shifted the gear lever into reverse, and sent the vehicle back about fifty feet, keeping the tires in the packed depressions made by the Sno-cat for better traction. He paused, grasped the wheel tightly in both hands, and burrowed down in the seat, in case the ice should crash through the windshield. Then he shifted into first and jammed the accelerator pedal flat against the floorboards. With a roar from its exhaust, the big mechanical goliath leaped forward, gathered speed, and then smashed into the frozen wall, rumbling the ground beneath Giordino's feet.
The ice exploded and shattered into a great splash of glittering fragments that showered over the red Snow Cruiser like so many glass shards from a fallen crystal chandelier. The sound of the impact came like a giant gnashing his teeth. At first, Giordino thought the vehicle might have to ram the thick, solidified ice wall several times before breaking through, but he was almost left behind as it bulldozed its way through on the first try and disappeared on the other side. He chased after it, gun cradled in his arms, like an infantryman following a tank for cover.
Once through, Pitt brought the Snow Cruiser to a halt and brushed the glass from his face and chest. A large block of ice had burst through the center windshield, narrowly missing him before it fell to the floor and shattered. His face was cut on one cheek and across the forehead. Neither gash was deep enough to require stitches, but the blood that flowed made him look as though he were badly injured. He wiped the crimson from his eyes onto his sleeve and looked to see where the Snow Cruiser had come to rest.
They were sitting inside a large-diameter ice tunnel, with the vehicle's front end firmly embedded in a frozen wall opposite the shattered entry. In both directions the tunnel looked deserted. Seeing no sign of hostility, Giordino rushed into the Snow Cruiser and climbed the ladder to the control cabin. He found Pitt smiling hideously through a mask of blood.
'You look bad,' he said, attempting to help Pitt from the driver's seat.
Pitt gently pushed him away. 'It's not nearly as bad as it looks. We can't afford time for a clinical repair. You can patch me up with that old first-aid kit in the crew cabin. In the meantime, I vote we follow the tunnel toward the left. Unless I miss my guess, that will lead us to the mining compound.'
Giordino knew it was senseless to contest the issue. He dropped down to the crew cabin and returned with a first-aid kit that hadn't been opened since 1940. He cleaned away the congealing blood on Pitt's face, then smeared the cuts with the antiseptic of the era, iodine, whose sharp sting had Pitt cursing in no quiet tones. Then he dressed the skin cuts. 'Another life saved by the capable hands of Dr. Giordino, surgeon of the Antarctic.'
Pitt looked into the face that was reflected in a side-view mirror. There was enough gauze and tape to cover a brain transplant. 'What did you do?' he asked sourly. 'I look like a mummy.'
Giordino feigned a hurt look. 'Aesthetics is not one of my strong points.'
'Neither is medicine.'
Pitt gunned the engines and maneuvered the hulking vehicle back and forth until he was able to straighten it around for a journey through the tunnel. For the first time, he wound down his window and studied the width of the tunnel. He figured the clearance between the ice and the vehicle's wheel hubs and its roof was no more than eighteen inches. He turned his attention to a large round pipe that ran along the outer arc of the tunnel, with small tubes running vertically from its core into the ice.
'What do you make of that?' he said, pointing to the pipe.
Giordino stepped from the Snow Cruiser, squeezed himself between the front tire and the pipe, and laid his hands on it. 'Not an electrical conduit,' he announced. 'It must serve another purpose.'
'If it's what I think it is…' Pitt's voice dropped portentously.
'Part of the mechanism to break loose the ice shelf,' said Giordino, finishing his friend's train of thought.
Pitt stuck his head out his window and stared back into the long tunnel that stretched away to a vanishing point. 'It must extend from the mining compound fourteen hundred miles to the opposite end of the ice shelf.'
'An inconceivable feat of engineering to bore a tunnel that was equal to the distance between San Francisco and Phoenix.'
'Inconceivable or not,' said Pitt, 'the Wolfs did it. You must remember, it's much easier to bore a tunnel through ice than hard rock.'
'What if we cut a gap in the line and stop whatever activation system they've created to split off the ice shelf?' asked Giordino.
'A break might trigger it prematurely,' answered Pitt. 'We can't take the chance unless we find ourselves left with no other alternative. Only then can we risk dividing the line.'
The tunnel looked like a great gaping black mouth. Except for the dim glow of the sun through the thick ice, there was no illumination. An electrical conduit with halogen bulbs spaced every twenty feet ran along the ceiling, but the power must have been shut down at the main junction box, because the lights were dark. Pitt turned on the two small headlights mounted on the lower front end of the Snow Cruiser, engaged gears, and drove off, increasing his speed through the tunnel until they were moving at twenty-five miles an hour. Though it was a pace easily sustained by a bicycle rider, it seemed a breakneck speed through the narrow confines of the tunnel.
While Pitt focused on keeping the Snow Cruiser from brushing against the unsympathetic ice, Giordino sat in the passenger seat, his rifle propped on one knee, eyes fastened as far as the headlights could throw their beams, watching for a sign of movement or any object other than the seemingly unending pipe with its intersecting tubes that ran down into the floor and through the roof of the tunnel.
The ominous fact that the tunnel was deserted suggested to Pitt that the Wolfs and their workers were abandoning the mining facility and preparing to escape to their giant ships. He pushed the Snow Cruiser as fast as it would go, occasionally spinning the wheel hubs into the ice walls and carving a trench before steering the vehicle straight again. Dread began clouding his mind. They had lost too much time crossing the ice shelf. The timetable that Karl Wolf had boasted of in Buenos Aires at the ambassador's party had been four days and ten hours.
The four days had passed, as had eight hours and forty minutes, leaving only an hour and twenty minutes until Karl Wolf threw the doomsday switch.
Pitt estimated that one mile, maybe one and half, separated them from the heart of the facility. He and Giordino were not given satellite maps of the layout, so finding the control center once they were inside would be pure guesswork. The questions nagging his mind were whether the Special Forces team had arrived and had been successful in eliminating the army of mercenaries. The latter would put up a bitter fight- the Wolfs had surely promised to save them and their families from the cataclysm. Any way he looked at it, the thought did not present a rosy picture.
AFTER another eighteen minutes of negotiating the tunnel in silence, Giordino hunched forward and gestured ahead. 'We're coming to a crossroads.'
Pitt slowed the Snow Cruiser, as they came to an intersection where five tunnels spread off into the ice. The dilemma was maddening. Time did not allow them to make the wrong choice. He leaned out the side window again and studied the frozen floor of the tunnel. Wheeled tracks branched into them all, but the deepest ruts appeared to travel into the one on the right. 'The tube on the right looks like it's had the heaviest traffic.'
Giordino jumped down out of the Snow Cruiser and disappeared up the tunnel. In a few minutes, he returned. 'About two hundred yards farther on, it looks like the tunnel opens into a large chamber.'
Pitt gave a brief nod and turned the vehicle and followed the tracks into the tunnel on his right. Strange structures began appearing locked in the ice, vague and indistinguishable but with the straight lines of objects that were man-made rather than a creation of nature. As Giordino had reported, the tunnel soon widened into a vast chamber whose curved roof was covered by ice crystals that hung down like stalactites. Light filtered down from several openings in the roof that illuminated the interior with an eerie glow. The effect seemed extraterrestrial, magical, timeless, and miraculous. Awed by the sight, Pitt slowly brought the Snow Cruiser to a halt.
The two men went silent in astonishment.
They found themselves parked in what was once the main square, surrounded by the icebound buildings of an ancient city.
42
