the line of priority. He rubbed the frost from his glasses and saw that the needles on the gauge were falling faster and rapidly approaching their normal operating temperature.
Twenty more seconds, he told himself, then another twenty. What was the old ditty, 'Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall'? Then came relief and exultation, as the temperature gauges registered nearly normal again.
There was no need to shout through the hatch down to Giordino in the engine compartment. The little Italian sensed when the time was ripe by placing a hand momentarily on the top of a radiator. He slammed shut the door, sealing off the frightful force of wind and ice, but not before throwing the interior heater switches as high as they could go. Then he rushed up to the control cabin and roughly pulled Pitt from behind the steering wheel.
'You've done enough for the cause,' he said, troubled at seeing Pitt so close to death from hypothermia. 'I'll help you down to the engine compartment where you can warm up.'
'The Snow Cruiser…' Pitt barely murmured through frozen lips. 'Don't let it wander.'
'Don't burden yourself. I can drive this mechanical mastodon as well as you.'
After setting Pitt on the floor between the big diesels where he could get warm again, Giordino climbed back into the icy control cabin, sat behind the steering wheel, and engaged first gear. Within sixty seconds, he had the grand vehicle boring through the storm once again at twenty-four miles an hour.
The consistent knock of the diesels, running smoothly once again, was more than music to Pitt's ears, it was a symbol of renewed hope. Never in his entire life had anything ever felt so good as the warmth that emanated from the engines and was absorbed by his half-frozen body. His blood soon thinned and circulated again, and he allowed himself he luxury of simply relaxing for half an hour while Giordino held the Wheel.
Almost morbidly, he began to wonder, had the special military force landed? Were they lost and dying in the same treacherous blizzard?
39
Painted in a charcoal gray with no markings but a small American flag on the vertical stabilizer, the McDonnell Douglas C-17 soared above an ocean of pearl-white clouds blanketing the glaring ice of Antarctica like a giant, featherless pterodactyl over a Mesozoic landscape.
Air Force Captain Lyle Stafford was quite at home in his cockpit office flying over the frozen continent. Normally, he flew back and forth between Christchurch, New Zealand, and the American ice stations scattered around Antarctica, transporting scientists, equipment, and supplies. This trip they had been abruptly pressed into service to fly the hurriedly assembled assault teams to the Ross Ice Shelf and drop them over the Destiny Enterprises mining facility.
Stafford looked more like a public relations director than a pilot. Graying hair neatly trimmed, always ready with a smile, he was always volunteering to help out Air Force service and charity organizations. On most flights, he read a book, while his copilot, Lieutenant Robert Brannon, a long-boned Californian whose knees came halfway to his chin when he was seated, tended the controls and instruments. Almost reluctantly, he glanced from his book, The Einstein Papery by Craig Dirgo, out his side window and then at the Global Positioning System display.
'Time to go back to work,' he announced, putting aside the book. He turned and smiled at Major Tom Cleary, who sat perched on a stool behind the pilots. 'It's almost time to begin prebreathing, Major, and acclimate yourselves to the oxygen.'
Cleary stared through the windshield over the pilot's heads, but all he saw was cloud cover. He assumed that a corner of the Ross Ice Shelf was looming unseen ahead and below the aircraft. 'How's my time?'
Stafford nodded at the instrument panel. 'We'll be over your release point in one hour. Are your men ready and eager?'
'Ready, maybe, but I'd hardly describe them as eager. They've all jumped from a jet aircraft at thirty-five thousand feet at one time or another, but not while it was traveling at four hundred miles an hour. We're used to feeling the aircraft slow down before the ramp lowers.'
'Sorry I can't bring you in closer, slower, and lower,' said Stafford sympathetically. 'The trick is for you and your men to land on the ice without your chutes being discovered in the air. My orders state in no uncertain terms for me to make my routine supply run to McMurdo Sound in my normal flight pattern. I've shaved it as close as I dare without raising suspicion. As it is, you'll have to glide nearly ten miles to your target zone just outside the security fences.'
'The wind is blowing from the sea, so that's in your favor,' offered Brannon.
'The cloud cover helps, too,' Cleary said slowly. 'And if they have a functioning radar system, the operator will have to have four eyes to detect us from the exact moment we exit until we deploy our canopies.'
Stafford made a slight course change and then said, 'I don't envy you, Major, jumping from a nice warm airplane into an icy blast one hundred degrees below zero.'
Cleary smiled. 'At least you didn't hand me the tired old pilot's line about `jumping from a perfectly good airplane.' I appreciate that.'
They all laughed for a few moments at the inside joke among professionals. For decades, parachutists had been posed the question, 'Why do you jump from a perfectly good airplane?' usually by pilots. The stock answer Cleary usually gave was 'When a perfectly good airplane exists, then I'll quit jumping.'
'As for the cold,' Cleary continued, 'our electrically heated thermal suits will keep us from turning into icicles while we descend to a warmer altitude.'
'The clouds extend, too, within a thousand feet of the ground, so you'll be falling blind most of the way, since your compasses and GPS instruments are ineffective,' said Brannon.
'The men are well trained for that. The key to a successful high-altitude, low-opening infiltration jump is to exit at the correct grid coordinate upwind, and have everyone under canopy at relatively the same altitude.'
'We'll put you out on a silver quarter. But it won't be no picnic.'
'No,' said Cleary solemnly. 'I'm sure that in the first minute after we drop from the plane, we'll wish we were falling into a fiery hell instead.'
Stafford checked the instrument panel again. 'After you and your men finish prebreathing, I'll decompress the cabin. Immediately afterward, I'll pass on the twenty and ten-minute warnings to you and my crew. Then I'll notify you over the intercom when we're six minutes from the release point. At two minutes out, I'll lower the ramp.'
'Understood.'
'At one minute out,' Stafford went on, 'I'm going to ring the alarm bell once. Then, when we're directly over the release point, I'll turn on the green light. At the airspeed we'll be flying, you'll have to get out quickly as a group.'
'Our intentions exactly.'
'Good luck to you,' said Stafford, twisting in his pilot's seat and shaking hands with the major.
Cleary smiled faintly. 'Thanks for the ride.'
'Our pleasure,' Stafford said genuinely. 'But I hope we don't have to do it again anytime soon.'
'Nor do I.'
Cleary stood and straightened, left the cockpit, and walked aft into the aircraft's cavernous cargo bay. The sixty-five men seated inside were a serious-faced group, dogged and dead calm, considering the uncertain peril they were about to encounter. They were young. Their ages ranged from twenty to twenty-four. There was no laughter or unproductive conversation, no grousing or complaining. To a man they were absorbed in checking and rechecking their equipment. They were a composite of America's finest fighting men, hastily thrown together on the spur of the moment from special units nearest to Antarctica that were on counter-drug operations throughout South America. A team of Navy SEALs, members of the Army's elite Delta Force and a Marine Force Recon team… a combined band of secret warriors on a mission unlike any ever conceived.
Once the alert had been given the Pentagon by the White House, the one thing they had in short supply was time. A larger Special Forces unit was on the way from the United States but was not expected to reach Okuma
