'She didn't burn,' said Giordino. 'That's a piece of luck.'
He held up his hand to shade his eyes from the dazzling reflection as the helicopter's lights swept the airliner's length. 'Talk about highly polished skin. Her maintenance people took good care of her. I'd guess she was a Boeing 720-B. any sign of life?'
'None,' replied Pitt. 'it doesn't look good.'
'How about identification markings?'
'Three stripes running down the hull, light blue and purple separated by a band of gold.'
'Not the colors of any airline i'm familiar with.'
'Drop down and circle her,' said Pitt. 'While you spot a landing site, I'll try and read her lettering.'
Giordino banked and spiraled toward the wreckage. The landing lights, mounted on bow and tail of the helicopter, exposed the half-sunken aircraft in a sea of brilliance. The name above the decorative stripes was in a slanted-style instead of the usual easier to read block-type letters.
'NEBULA,' Pitt read aloud. 'NEBULA AIR.'
'Never heard of it,' said Giordino, his eyes fixed on the ice.
'A plush airline that caters to vips.
'What in hell is it doing so far from the beaten track?'
'We'll soon know if anybody's alive to tell us.'
Pitt turned to the eight men sitting comfortably in the warm belly of the chopper. They were all appropriately clothed in blue Navy Arctic weather gear. One was the ship's surgeon, three were medics, and four were damage- control experts. They chatted back and forth as casually as if they were on a bus trip to Denver. Between them, tied down by straps in the center of the floor, boxes of medical supplies, bundles of blankets and a rack of stretchers sat stacked beside asbestos suits and a crate of firefighting equipment.
An auxiliary-powered heating unit was secured opposite the main door, its hoisting cables attached to an overhead winch. Next to it stood a compact snowmobile with an enclosed cabin and side tracks.
The gray-haired man seated just aft of the cockpit, with gray mustache and beard to match, looked back at Pitt and grinned. 'About time for us to earn our pay?' he asked cheerfully.
Nothing, it seemed, could dim Dr. Jack Gale's merry disposition.
'We're setting down now,' answered Pitt. 'Nothing stirring around the plane. No indication of fire. The cockpit is buried and the fuselage looks distorted but intact.'
'Nothing ever comes easy.' Gale shrugged. 'Still, it beats hell out of treating burn cases.'
'That's the full news. The tough news is the main cabin is filled with nearly a meter of water, and we didn't bring our galoshes.'
Gale's face turned serious. 'God help any injured who didn't stay dry.
They wouldn't have lasted eight minutes in freezing water.'
'If none of the survivors can open an emergency exit, we may have to cut our way inside.'
'Sparks from cutting equipment have a nasty habit of igniting sloshing jet fuel,' said Lieutenant Cork Simon, the stocky leader of the Polar Explorer's damage-control team. He bore the confident look of a man who knew his job inside out and then some. 'Better we go in through the main cabin door. Doc Gale, here, will need all the space he can get to remove any stretcher cases.'
'I agree,' said Pitt. 'But a pressurized door that's been jammed against its stops by the distortion of the crash will take time to force open. people may be freezing to death in there. Our first job is to make an opening to insert the vent pipe from the heater.'
He broke off as Giordino cut a steep Turn and dropped down toward a flat area only a stone's throw from the wreck. Everyone tensed in readiness.
Outside, the beat of the rotor blades whiPPed up a small blizzard of snow and ice particles, turning the landing site into an alabaster-colored stew that wiped out all vision.
Giordino had barely touched the wheels to the ice and set the throttles on idle when Pitt shoved open the loading door, jumped into the cold and headed toward the wreckage. Behind him Doc Gale began directing the unloading of supplies while Cork Simon and his team willched the auxiliary heater and the snowmobile onto the ice.
Half-running, half-slipping, pi made a visual inspection of the interior of the fuse lage, carefully avoiding open breaks in the ice.
The air reeked with the unwelcome smell of jet fuel. He climbed up the ice MOUnd that was piled a meter thick over the cockpit windows.
Climbing the slick surface was like crawling up a greased ramp. He tried to scoop an opening into the cockpit, but quickly gave it up: it would have taken an hour or more to dig through the packed ice and then tunnel inside.
He slid down and ran around to the remaining wing. The right section was twisted and broken from its supporting mounts, the tip pointing toward the tail. it lay on the ice, crushed against the sunken fuselage only an arm's length below the row of windows. Using the wing as a platform over the open water, Pitt dropped to his hands and knees and tried to peer inside. The lights from the helicopter reflected off the Plexiglas, and he had to cup his hands around his eyes to close out the glare, At first he could not detect any movement, only darkness and a deathly stillness.
Then, quite suddenly, a grotesque face materialized on the other side of the window, scant centimeters from Pitts eyes.
He unconsciously stepped back. The sudden appearance of a woman with a cut over one eye and blood flowing over half the features, all distorted by the hairline cracks running through the window, startled Pitt momentarily.
