important.'
'Will do.'
Lemk took a sip of his coffee, set it aside and returned to the cockpit.
The first officer, his copilot, was gazing out the side window at the lights of Wales to the north, while behind him the engineer was occupied with computing fuel consumption.
Lemk turned his back to the others and slipped a small case from the breast pocket of his coat. He opened it and readied a syringe containing a highly lethal nerve agent called sarin. Then he faced his crew again and made a fumbling step as if losing his balance and grabbed the arm of the second officer for support.
'Sorry, Frank, I tripped on the carpet.'
Frank Hartley wore a bushy mustache, had thin gray hair and a long, handsome face. He never felt the needle enter his shoulder. He looked up from the gauges and lights of his engineer's panel and laughed easily. 'You're going to have to lay off the sauce, Dale.'
'I can fly straight,' Lemk replied good-naturedly. 'It's walking that gives me a hard time.'
Hartley opened his mouth as if to say something, but suddenly a blank expression crossed his face. He shook his head as if to clear his vision. Then his eyes rolled upward, and he went limp.
Leaning his body against Hartley so the engineer would not fall to one side, Lemk withdrew the syringe and quickly replaced it with another.
'I think something is wrong with Frank.'
Jerry Oswald swung around in the copilot's seat. A big man with the pinched features of a desert prospector, he stared questioningly. 'What ails him?'
'Better come take a look.'
Oswald twisted his bulk past the seat and bent over Hartley. Lemk jabbed the needle and pushed the plunger, but Oswald felt the prick.
'What the hell was that?' he blurted, whirling around and gazing dumbly at the hypodermic needle in Lemk's hand. He was far heavier and more muscular than Hartley, and the toxin did not take effect immediately.
His eyes widened in sudden comprehension, and then he lurched forward, gripping Lemk by the neck.
'You're not Dale Lemk,' he snarled. 'Why are you made up to look like him?'
The man who called himself Lemk could not have answered if he wanted.
The great hands were choking the breath out of him. Crammed against a bulkhead by the immense weight of Oswald, he tried to gasp out the words of a lie, but no words could come. He rammed his knee into the engineer's groin. The only reaction was a short grunt. Blackness began to creep into the corners of his vision.
Then, slowly, the pressure was released and Oswald reeled backward. His eyes became terror-stricken as he realized he was dying. He looked at Lemk in confused hatred. With the few final beats left in his heart he swung his fist, landing a solid blow into Lemk's stomach.
Lemk drifted to his knees, dazed, the breath punched out of him. He watched as if looking through fog as Oswald fell against the pilot's seat and crashed to the cockpit floor. Lemk slid to a sitting position and rested for a minute, gasping for air, massaging the pain in his gut.
He rose awkwardly to his feet and listened for any curious voices coming from the other side of the door. The main cabin seemed quiet. None of the passengers or flight crew had heard anything unusual above the monotonous whine of the engines.
He was drenched in sweat by the time he manhandled Oswald into the copilot's seat and strapped him in. Hartley's safety belt was already fastened so Lemk ignored him. At last he settled behind the control column on the pilot's side of the cockpit and plotted the aircraft's position.
Forty-five minutes later, Lemk banked the plane from its scheduled flight path to New York onto a new heading, toward the frozen Arctic.
It is one of the most barren spots on the earth and one never seen or experienced by tourists. In the last hundred years, only a handful of explorers and scientists have trod its forbidding landscape. The sea along the rugged shore is frozen for all but a few weeks each year, and in the early fall temperatures hover around - 73 degrees the cold sides for the long winter months, and even in summer, dazzling sunshine can be replaced by an impenetrable gale in less than an hour.
Yet, shadowed by scarred mountains and swept by a constant wind, the magnificent desolation in the upper reaches of Ardencaple Fjord on the northeast coast of Greenland was inhabited nearly two thousand years ago by a band of hunters. Radiocarbon dating on excavated relics indicated the site was occupied from A.D. 200 to A.D. 400, a Short time span for the archaeological clock. But they left behind twenty dwellings which had been preserved by the frigid ice.
A prefabricated aluminum structure had been airlifted by helicopter and assembled over the ancient village by scientists from the University of Colorado. A balky heating arrangement and foam-glass insulation fought a lopsided battle against the cold, but at least denied entry to the never-ending wind moaning eerily around the outside walls. The shelter also enabled an archaeological team to work the site into the beginning stages of winter.
Lily Sharp, a professor of anthropology at Colorado, was oblivious to the cold that seeped into the covered village. She rested on her knees on the floor of a single-family dwelling, carefully scraping away the frozen earth with a small hand trowel. She was alone and lost in deep concentration as she probed the distant past belonging to the prehistoric people.
They were sea-mammal hunters who spent the harsh Arctic winters in dwellings dug partially into the ground, with low walls of rock and turf roofs often supported by whale bones. They entertained themselves with oil lamps, passing the long dark months carving miniature sculptures out of driftwood, ivory and antlers.
They had settled this part of Greenland during the first centuries after Christ. Then, inexplicably, at the height of their culture, they pulled up stakes and vanished, leaving behind a revealing cache of relics.
Lily's perseverance paid off. While the three men on the archaeology team relaxed after dinner in the hut that was their living quarters, she had returned to the protected settlement and continued to excavate, unearthing a length of caribou antler with twenty bearlike figures sculpted on its surface, a delicately carved woman's comb and a stone cooking pot.
