He turned his head away. The stench of burnt paint, fabric and fuel, mixed with torched metal, rose from the opening.
"That should prove I can detect smells through an ice cube," Pitt said.
"Yes, you've passed the nose test," Hunnewell said smilingly. "But you've failed miserably on your thermite charge theory. "That's nothin' but a burned-out hulk down there." he paused to give Pitt a scholarly gaze over the tops of his spectacles. "We could have blasted until next summer without doing any damage to the derelict."
Pitt shrugged. "Win a few, lose a few." He passed a spare flashlight to Hunnewell. "I'll go first. Give me five minutes before you follow."
Hunnewell crouched at the edge of the ice tunnel as Pitt knelt to enter.
"Two. I'll give you two minutes, no more. Then I'll be right behind you."
The tunnel, illuminated by the shattered rays of the sun through the ice crystals above, ran downward at a thirty-degree angle for twenty feet, stopping at the blackened steel plates, charred and bent, of the hull.
The smell by this time was so strong that Pitt found it an effort just to breathe. He shook off the irritating odor and dragged himself to within a foot of the fire-scarred metal, discovering that the tunnel curved and parallelled the hull for another ten feet, ending finally at an open hatch. savagely twisted and distorted. He could only wonder at the wite-hot temperatures responsible.
Crawling over the jagged edge of the hatchway, he stood up and swung the beam of his flashlight, surveying the heat-defaced walls. It was impossible to tell what purpose the compartment served. Every square inch was' gutted by the terrible intensity of the fire. Pitt suddenly felt a dread of the unknown. He stood dead-still for several minutes, forcing his mind to regain control of his emotions before he stepped across the debris toward the door leading to the alleyway and shone the light into the darkness beyond.
The beam torched the whole black length as far as the stairway to a lower deck. 'The corridor was barren except for the charred ashes of a carpet. It was the silence that was eerie. No creaking of the plates, no throb of the engines, no lapping of water against a weedencrusted hull, nothing, only the complete soundlessness of a void.
He hesitated in the doorway for a long minute, his first thought, conviction rather, was that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong with Admiral Sandecker's plans. This wasn't what they had been led to expect at all.
Hunnewell came through the hatchway and joined him. He stood next to Pitt, staring at the blackened walls, the distorted and crystallized metal, and the melted hinges that once held a wooden door. Wearily he leaned the doorway, his eyes half closed, shaking his head as it coming out of a trance.
"We'll find precious little that's of any use to us."
"We'll find nothing," Pitt said firmly. "What the fire left, our unknown friends have undoubtedly picked clean." As if to emphasize his words, he played the beam on the deck, revealing several overlapping footprints in the soot traveling to and from the open hatchway. "Let's see what they've been up to."
They went out into the alleyway, stepping through the ashes and debris on the deck, moved to the next compartment, and entered. It had been the radio room.
Most of the ruins were scarcely recognizable. The bunk and furniture were skeletons of charred wood, the remains of the radio equipment one congealed mess of melted metal and hardened drippings of stained solder.
Their senses by now had become accustomed to the overpowering stench and the grotesque carbonized surroundings, but they weren't the least bit prepared for the hideously misshapen form on the deck.
"Oh, good God!" Hunnewell gasped. He dropped his flashlight and it rolled across the deck and came to rest against the shockingly disfigured remains of a head, illuminating the skull and teeth where they burst from the incinerated flesh.
"I don't envy him his death," Pitt murmured.
The ghastly sight was too much for Hunnewell. He staggered off into one corner and retched for several minutes. When he finally returned to Pitts side. he looked as if he'd recently returned from the grave "I'm sorry," he said sheepishly. "I've never seen a cremated corpse before. I didn't have the vaguest idea what one looked like-never gave it much thought really. It's not a pretty sight, is it?"
"There's no such thing as a pretty corpse," Pitt said. He was beginning to feel a touch of sickness himself. "If that lump of ashes on the deck is any indication of things to come, we should find at least fourteen more just like it."
Hunnewell grimaced as he stooped and picked up his flashlight. Then he slipped a notebook from a pocket, held the light under his arm and flipped through several pages. "Yes, you're right. The ship sailed with six crewmen and nine passengers: fifteen in all." He fumbled a little before finding another page. "This poor devil must be the radio operator-Svendborg-Gustav Svendborg."
"Maybe, maybe not. The only one who can tell for certain is his dentist." Pitt stared at what had once been a breathing, flesh-and-blood man, and he tried to imagine how the end had come. A furnacelike wall of red and orange flame, a brief unearthly scream, the searing shock of pain that drove the mind into instant insanity, and the limbs flailing in the contorted dance of death.
To die by fire, he reflected, the last seconds of life spent in indescribable agony, was an extinction abhorred by every living man and beast.
Pitt kneeled down and studied the body more closely. His eyes squinted and his mouth tightened. It must have been almost as he had visualized, but not quite. The scorched form was curled in the fetus position, the knees drawn up almost to the chin and the arms pulled tightly against the sides, contracted by the mt-nse heat upon the flesh. But there was something else that caught Pitts attention. He focused the flashlight on the deck beside the body, illuminating dimly the twisted steel legs of the radio operator's chair where they protruded from beneath his disfigured remains.
Hunnewell, his face void of all color, asked: "What do you find so interesting in that grisly thing?"
"Have a look," Pitt said. "It would seem that poor Gustav was sitting down when he died. His chair literally burned out from under him."
Hunnewell said nothing, only eyed Pitt questioningly.
"Doesn't it strike you strange," Pitt continued, "that a man would calmly burn to death without bothering to stand up or make an effort to escape?"
"Nothing strange about it," Hunnewell said stonily. "The fire probably engulfed him while he was hunched over the transmitter sending out a Mayday."
He began to choke with sickness again. "God, we're not doing him any good with our conjectures. Let's get out of here and search the rest of the ship while I'm still able to walk."
Pitt nodded and turned and passed through the doorway. Together they made their way into the bowels of the derelict. The engine room, the galley, the salon, everywhere they went their eyes were laid on the same horrifying spectacle of death as in the radio room. By the time they discovered the thirteenth and fourteenth bodies in the wheelhouse, Hunnewell's stomach was slowly becoming immune. He consulted his notebook several more times, marking certain pages with a pencil until only one name between the padded covers remaimed that didn't have a neat line drawn through it.
"That's about it," he said, snapping the book shut.
"We've found them all except the man we came for."
Pitt lit a cigarette and blew a long cloud of blue smoke and seemed to consider for a moment. "They were all charred so far beyond recognition, he could have been any one of them."
"But he wasn't," Hunnewell said positively. "The body won't be too difficult to identify, at least not for me." He paused. "I knew our quarry rather well, you know."