“Three people in my party died under mysterious circumstances. And an entire rookery of penguins just north of the bay has been exterminated down to the last bird.”
If the stranger was surprised at the tragic news, he hid it well. He helped Maeve to her feet. “I’d better get you out of this blowing snow.”
“You’re American,” she said, shivering from the cold.
“And you’re Australian.”
“It’s that obvious?”
“You pronounce a like i.”
She held out a gloved hand. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you, Mr...?”
“My name is Dirk Pitt.”
“Maeve Fletcher.”
He ignored her objections, picked her up and began carrying her, following her footprints in the snow toward the tunnel. “I suggest we carry on our conversation out of the cold. You say there are twenty others?”
“That are still alive.”
Pitt gave her a solemn look. “It would appear the sales brochures oversold the voyage.”
Once inside the tunnel he set her on her feet and pulled off his ski mask. His head was covered by a thick mass of unruly black hair. His green eyes peered from beneath heavy dark eyebrows, and his face was craggy and weathered from long hours in the open but handsome in a rugged sort of way. His mouth seemed set in a casual grin. This was a man a woman could feel secure with, Maeve thought.
A minute later, Pitt was greeted by the tourists like a hometown football hero who had led the team to a big victory. Seeing a stranger suddenly appear in their midst had the same impact as winning a lottery. He marveled that they were all in reasonably fit shape, considering their terrible ordeal. The old women all embraced and kissed him like a son while the men slapped his back until it was sore. Everybody was talking and shouting questions at once. Maeve introduced him and related how they met up in the storm.
“Where did you drop from, mate?” they all wanted to know.
“A research vessel from the National’ Underwater & Marine Agency. We’re on an expedition trying to discover why seals and dolphins have been disappearing in these waters at an astonishing rate. We were flying over Seymour Island in a helicopter when the snow closed in on us, so we thought it best to land until it blew over.”
“There’re more of you?”
“A pilot and a biologist who remained on board. I spotted what looked like a piece of a Zodiac protruding from the snow. I wondered why such a craft would be resting on an uninhabited part of the island and walked over to investigate. That’s when I heard Miss Fletcher shouting at me.”
“Good thing you decided to take a walk when you did,” said the eighty-three-year-old great-grandmother to Maeve.
“I thought I heard a strange noise outside in the storm. I know now that it was the sound of his helicopter coming in to land.”
“An incredible piece of luck we stumbled into each other in the middle of a blizzard,” said Pitt. “I didn’t believe I was hearing a woman’s scream. I was sure it was a quirk of the wind until I saw you waving through a blanket of snow.”
“Where is your research ship?” Maeve asked.
“About forty kilometers northeast of here.”
“Did you by chance pass our ship, Polar Queen?”
Pitt shook his head. “We haven’t seen another ship for over a week.”
“Any radio contact?” asked Maeve. “A distress call, perhaps?”
“We talked to a ship supplying the British station at Halley Bay, but have heard nothing from a cruise ship.”
“She couldn’t have vanished into thin air,” said one of the men in bewilderment. “Not along with the entire crew and our fellow passengers.”
“We’ll solve the mystery as soon as we can transport all you people to our research vessel. It’s not as plush as Polar Queen, but we have comfortable quarters, a fine doctor and a cook who stands guard over a supply of very good wines.”
“I’d rather go to hell than spend another minute in this freeze box,” said a wiry New Zealand owner of a sheep station, laughing.
“I can only squeeze five or six of you at a time into the helicopter, so we’ll have to make several trips,” explained Pitt. “Because we set down a good three hundred meters away, I’ll return to the craft and fly it closer to the entrance to your cave so you won’t have to suffer the discomfort of trekking through the snow.”
“Nothing like curbside service,” Maeve said, feeling as if she had been reborn. “May I go with you?”
“Feel up to it?”
She nodded. “I think everyone will be glad to not have me ordering them about for a little while.”
Al Giordino sat in the pilot’s seat of the turquoise NUMA helicopter and worked a crossword puzzle. No taller than a floor lamp, he had a body as solid as a bee keg poised on two legs, with a pair of construction derricks for arms. His ebony eyes occasionally glanced into the snow glare through the cockpit windshield, then seeing nothing of Pitt, they refocused on the puzzle, Curly black hair framed the top of a round face, which was fixed with a perpetual sarcastic expression about the lips that suggested he was skeptical of the world and everyone in it, while the nose hinted strongly at his Roman ancestry.
A close friend of Pitt’s since childhood, they had been inseparable during their years together in the Air Force before volunteering for an assignment to help launch the National Underwater & Marine Agency, a temporary assignment that had lasted the better part of fourteen years.
“What’s a six-letter word for fuzzballed goondorpher that eats stinkweed?” he asked the man sitting behind him in the cargo bay of the aircraft, which was packed with laboratory testing equipment. The marine biologic from NUMA looked up from a specimen he’d collected earlier and raised his brows quizzically.
“There is no such beast as a fuzzballed goondorpher.”
“You sure? It says so right here.”
Roy Van Fleet knew when Giordino was sowing a cornfield with turnips. After three months at sea together Van Fleet had become too savvy to fall for the stubborn Italian’s con jobs. “On second thought, it’s a flying sloth from Mongolia. See if `slobbo’ fits.”
Realizing he had lost his easy mark, Giordino looks up from the puzzle again and stared into the falling snow “Dirk should have been back by now.”
“How long has he been gone?” asked Van Fleet.
“About forty-five minutes.”
Giordino screwed up his eyes as a pair of vague shapes took form in the distance. “I think he’s coming in now,” Then he added, “There must have been funny dust in that cheese sandwich I just ate. I’d swear he’s got soma one with him.”
“Not a chance. There isn’t another soul within thirty kilometers.”
“Come see for yourself.”
By the time Van Fleet had capped his specimen jar and placed it in a wooden crate, Pitt had thrown open the entry hatch and helped Maeve Fletcher climb inside.
She pushed back the hood on her orange jacket, fluffed out her long golden hair and smiled brightly. “Greetings, gentlemen. You don’t know how happy I am to see you.”
Van Fleet looked as if he had seen the Resurrection. His face registered total incomprehension.
Giordino, on the other hand, simply sighed in resignation. “Who else.” he asked no one in particular, “but Dirk Pitt could tramp off into a blizzard on an uninhabited backwater island in the Antarctic and discover a beautiful girl?”
Less than an hour after Pitt alerted the NUMA research vessel Ice Hunter, Captain Paul Dempsey braved an icy breeze and watched as Giordino hovered the helicopter above the ship’s landing pad. Except for the ship’s cook busily preparing hot meals in the galley, and the chief engineer, who remained below, the entire crew, including lab technicians and scientists, had turned out to greet the first group of cold and hungry tourists to be airlifted from Seymour Island.