powerful figures in international finance. As he stood there staring down, his mind simply could not associate the ashes at his feet with the flesh-and-blood person the world's newspapers referred to as the apotheosis of the swinging intellectual jetsetter- Perhaps if he had met the celebrated Kristjan Fyrie, an emotion of some sort might be present now. But then, Pitt truly doubted it. He wasn't one to impress easily. Take away the clothes of the greatest living man, his father once told him, and you behold a very embarrassed, naked and defenseless animal.
Pitt looked at the twisted metal rings for a moment and then passed them back to Hunnewell, and as he did he heard the faint sound of movement somewhere on the deck above. He froze, listening intently.
But the sound had died in the blackness beyond the upper hatchway. There was something sinister in the quality of the silence that hung over the devastated cabin-a feeling that someone was observing their every motion, listening to their every word. Pitt nerved himself for an act of defense, but it was too late. A powerful light beam played into the room from the top of the ladder, blinding his eyes in its blazing glare.
'Robbing the dead, gentlemen? By God, I do believe you two are capable of most anything.' The face was hidden behind the light, but the voice unmistakably belonged to Commander Koski.
Chapter 4
Without moving, without replying, Pitt stood in the middle of the charred deck. He stood there, it seemed to him, for a decade while his brain worked to explain Koski's presence. He had expected the Commander to arrive on the scene eventually, but not for at least another three hours. It was now obvious that instead of waiting until the prescribed rendezvous time, Koski had altered his heading and pushed the Catawaba at full speed along Hunnewell's plotted course into the ice pack as soon as the helicopter was out of sight.
Koski swung the flash beam to the ladder, exposing Dover's face beside him. 'We have much to talk about. Major Pitt, Dr. Hunnewell, if you please.'
Pitt thought of a cleverly worded comeback but dismissed it. Instead, he said, 'Up your ass, Koski! You come down! And bring that hulking goon of an exec officer if it will make you feel any safer.'
There was almost a full minute of angry silence before Koski replied, 'You're hardly in a position to make rash demands.'
'Why not? There's too much at stake for Dr. Hunnewell and me to sit here and suck our thumbs while you play amateur detective.' Pitt knew his words were, arrogant, but he had to get the upper hand over Koski.
'No need to get nasty, Major. An honest explanation will go a long way. You've Lied since the moment you set foot on my ship. The Novgorod indeed. The greenest cadet at the Coast Guard Academy wouldn't think of identifying this hulk as a Russian spy trawler.
The radar antennas, the highly sophisticated electronic gear you described with such authority-did the equipment evaporate? I didn't buy you and Hunnewell from the beginning, but your stories were convincing. and my own headquarters, however mysteriously, backed you up. You've used me. Major. My crew, my ship, as you would a streetcar or a service station. An explanation?
Yes, I don't think it's asking too much. Merely the answer to one simple question: what in hell is coming Off?' Koski was in the fold now, Pitt thought. The cocky little commander wasn't demanding, he was asking.
'You still have to come down to our level. Part of the answer lies here in the ashes.'
There was a moment's hesitation, but they came.
Koski, followed by the mammoth form of Dover, climbed down the ladder and faced Pitt and Hunnewell.
'Okay, gentlemen, let's have it.'
'You've seen most of the ship?' Pitt asked.
Koski nodded. 'Enough. Eighteen years of rescue C, at sea, and I've never seen a vessel gutted as bad as this one.'
'Do you recognize it?'
'Impossible. What's left to recognize? It was a pleasure craft, a yacht. That much is certain. Beyond that you can flip a coin.' Koski looked at Pitt, a faint puzzlement in his eyes. 'I'm the one who expects answers. What are you leading up to?'
'The Lax. Ever hear of it?'
Koski nodded. 'The Lax disappeared over a year ago with all hands, including its owner, the Icelandic mining magnate-' he hesitated, recalling, 'Fyrie, Kristjan Fyrie. Christ, half the Coast Guard searched for months. Didn't find a sign. So what about the Lax?'
'You're standing on it,' Pitt said slowly, letting his words sink in. He aimed his flashlight at the deck.
'And this cremated mess is all that's left of Kristjan Fyrie.'
Koski's eyes widened and the color drained from his face. He took a step forward and stared down at the thing in the yellow circle of light. 'Good God, are you sure?'
'Burned beyond recognition is a gross understatement, but Dr. Hunnewell is ninety percent certain of Fyrie's personal effects.'
'Yes, the rings. I overheard.'
'Not much, perhaps, but considerably more than we could find on the other bodies.'
'I've never seen anything like this,' Koski said in wonder. 'It can't be. A ship this size couldn't vanish without a trace for nearly a year and then pop up burned to a cinder in the middle of an iceberg.'
'It would seem that it did just that,' Hunnewell said.
'Sorry, Dog' Koski said, staring into Hunnewell's eyes. 'Though I'm the first to admit that I'm not in your league when it comes to the science of ice formations, I've kicked around the North Atlantic long enough to know that an iceberg might get sidetracked by currents, drifting in circles, or scrape along the Newfoundland Coast for up to three years-ample time for the Lax, by some remote chance, to become trapped and entombed. But, if you'll forgive the word play, the theory doesn't hold water.'
'You're quite correct, Commander,' Hunnewell said. 'The chances are extremely remote for such an occurrence, but nonetheless conceivable. As you know, a fire-gutted ship takes days to cool. If a current or wind pushed and held the hull against the iceberg, it would only take forty-eight hours or less before this entire ship imbedded itself under the berg's mantle. You can achieve the same situation by holding a red-hot poker against an ice block. The poker will melt its way into the block until it cools. Then the ice, if refrozen around the metal, locks it tight.'
'Okay, Dog you score on that one. However, there's one important factor no one has considered.'
'Which is?' Pitt prompted.
'The final course of the Lax,' Koski said firmly.
'Nothing strange about that,' Pitt offered. 'It was in all the newspapers. Fyrie with his crew and passengers left Reykjavik on the morning of April tenth of last year and laid a direct heading for New York. He was last sighted by a Standard Oil tanker six hundred miles off Cape Farewell, Greenland. After that, nothing more was seen or heard of the Lax again.'
'That's fine as far as it goes.' Koski pulled his coat collar around his ears and fought to keep his teeth from chattering. 'Except the sighting took place — near the fiftieth parallel-too far south of the iceberg limit.'
'I would like to remind you, Commander,' Hunnewell said, raising an intimidating eyebrow, 'that your own Coast Guard has logged as many as fifteen hundred bergs in one year below the forty-eighth parallel.'
'And I'd like to remind you, Dog' Koski persisted, 'that during the year in question the number of iceberg sightings below the forty-eighth parallel came to zero.'
Hunnewell merely shrugged.
'It would be most helpful, Dr. Hunnewell, if you'd explain how an iceberg appeared where none existed, then with the Lax frozen in its clutches ignored the prevailing currents for eleven and a half months and cruised four degrees north while every other berg in the Atlantic was drifting south at the rate of three knots an hour.'
'I can't,' Hunnewell said simply.
'You can't?' Koski's face went blank with disbelief. He looked at Hunnewell, then at Pitt, then back to Hunnewell again. 'You rotten bastards!' he said savagely. 'Don't lie to me!'
'That's pretty salty terminology, Commander,' Pitt said harshly.
