"Then emtombing the Lax was a neat little piece of deception," Pitt said. "That was your drawing card.
Hunnewell was bound to come forward as an investigator when the admiral here asked him out of what Hunnewell probably couldn't seemed sheer coincidence. believe his luck. He immediately volunteered, not to see what happened to his old friend Kristjan Fyrie-he'd already guessed that-or to inspect the strange phenomenon of a ship locked in ice, but rather to discover what had become of his precious undersea probe."
"Again, Yes. Major."
Kippmann handed Pitt several glossy photographs. "Here are pictures taken from the submarine that kept a watch on the Lax for almost three weeks. They show an unusual feature about the crew."
Pitt ignored him, and looked up at Sandecker evenly and steadily. "The truth comes out at last. The Lax was found by the search fleet and then tailed until it burned."
Sandecker shrugged. "Mr. Kippmann took the trouble to notify me of that interesting little fact only last night." The tight grin on his griffineke features hardly indicated friendliness toward Kippmann.
"Reproach us if you will," Kippmann said seriously, "but it was vital that you both were kept on the sidelines as much as possible. If Kelly or Rondheim or Particularly Hunnewell had smelled your connection with us, our whole operation would have bombed." He stared at Pitt, his voice low. "Major, you were simply to act as pilot for Hunnewell while he inspected the Lax. You then were to fly him to Reykjavik where we would have again taken over our observation of his movements."
"It didn't quite work out that way, did it?"
"We underestimated the other side," Kippmann said candidly.
Pitt inhaled on a cigarette and idly watched the smoke curl toward the ceilng. "You haven't explained how the Lax came to be in the iceberg. Nor have you shed any light on what happened to the pirate crew, or given a hint as to how Fyrie and his crew and scientists could disappear for over a year and then suddenly hove their charred bodies turn up on the ship again."
"The answer to both questions is simple," Kippmann said. "Fyrie's crew never left the ship."
Sandecker took his hands from behind his head and slowly leaned forward, placing them palms down on the desk in front of him. His eyes were rock-hard. "Matajic reported a crew of Arabs, not fair-haired Scandinavians."
"That's true," Kippmann agreed. "I think if you gentlemen will oblige me by glancing at these photographs, you'll see what I mean about the crew."
He passed the prints to Sandecker and extra copies to Pitt. He then sat down in a chair and lit a cigarette after inserting it in a long holder. Kippmann was totally relaxed. Pitt — was beginning to think the man would have yawned if he'd been stabbed in the crotch.
"Please note photo number one," Kippmann said.
"It was taken with a very sharp telephoto lens through a periscope. As you can see, it clearly shows ten crew members going about their duties on various parts of the ship. There isn't a dark-skinned man in the bunch."
"Coincidence," Sandecker said guardedly. "The Arabs Matajic reported seeing might have been below."
"A slim possibility, Admiral, providing we stopped at one picture.
However, the other photos were taken at different times and on different days. By comparing them all together, we get a count of approximately fourteen men, not one of Arab ancestry. Surely, gentlemen, if there were even one arab on that ship, he would have had to make an appearance during a three-week period." Kippmann broke in and tapped his cigarette holder against the rim of an ashtray. "Also, we have definitely identified the faces in the photographs as the same people who set sail on the Lax shortly before it vanished."
"And what of Matajic?" Sandecker asked, probing. "He was a top scientist, trained in accurate observation. Surely he was positive of what he saw' "Matajic saw men who were made up to look like other nationalities," Kippmann said. "The crew should have been masters at disguise by the time he stumbled onto them-remember they had visited a number of ports. They took no chances of recognition- It's only guesswork, of course, we'll never know for certain, but it's fairly safe to say the crew caught O'riley watching them and slipped into their phony pose before Matajic came on board for supper."
"I see," Pitt said mildly. "And then what?"
"You can guess the rest, if you don't already know it." Kippmann toyed with his cigarette holder a moment and then continued. "Somehow, it's not difficult to imagine, the celtinium-279 ignited and transformed the Lax into a floating incinerator. Our submarine could only stand by and watch helplessly-it happened so quickly, there were no survivors. Fortunately the Navy had put a fast-thinking skipper in command of the sub.
A storm was approaching and he knew it was only a question of time before the red-hot plates on the Lax's hull cooled and contracted, bursting their seams and letting the sea water flood in and sink her, a finale further speeded by the Force Eight storm building on the horizon."
"So he turned a twenty-million-dollar submarine into a tugboat and nudged the burning hulk against a convenient iceberg until it melted its way inside," Pitt sat there looking at Kippmann, his expression pleasant.
"Your theory is quite correct, Major," Kippmann said thinly" Not my theory." Pitt smiled. "Dr. Hunnewell's. It was he who came up with the hot poker in ice proposal."
"I see," Kippmann said, but he didn't.
"The next question that interests me directly" Pitt hesitated, mashing out his cigarette-"is why did you send Hunnewell and me chasing all over the North Atlantic hunting down a particular iceberg after you erased all of its distinguishable markings? Why did you set Hunnewell up to find the Lax and then deliberately try to hide it?"
Impassively Kippmann stared at Pitt. "Thanks to you, Major, my men were forced to work their asses off in freezing temperatures, chipping the Coast Guard's red dye marker from the iceberg simply because you showed up two days ahead of schedule."
"You were going over the Lax with a fine-toothed comb and hadn't finished when Hunnewell and I appeared on the scene. Is that it?"
"Precisely," Kippmann said. "Nobody expected you to fly a helicopter through the aftermath of the season's worst storm."
"Then your men were there-" Pitt broke off, looked at Kippmann for a long speculative moment, then went on quietly, "Your agents were concealed on the berg the entire time Hunnewell and I explored the Lax."
Kippmann shrugged. "You didn't give us a chance to pull them off."
Pitt half rose from the couch. "You mean they stood by and did nothing when Hunnewell and I damned near fell from the berg into the sea, no rope, no help, no encouraging word, nothing?"
"In our business we have to be ruthless." Kippmann offered a tired smile. "We don't like it, but we have to. It's just that it's the nature of the game."
"A game?" Pitt said. "A fantasy of intrigue? A sport of make-believe dog eat dog? You're in a rotten occupation?"
"A never-ending cycle, my friend," Kippmann said acidly. "We didn't start out to be this way. America has always been the good guy. But you can't play knit when the other side uses every dirty rule in the book."
"Granted, we're the land of suckers, always believing that good never fails to triumph over evil. But where does that leave us? Back in Disneyland?"