“Maeve!” she cried.
Maeve stared across the water, searching the decks of the cruise ship for the female calling her name. Then her eyes locked on the figure standing on the bridge wing, waving. For half a minute she stared, bewildered. Then as she recognized Deirdre, her face took on the expression of someone walking in a graveyard at night who was suddenly tapped on, the shoulder.
“Deirdre?” she shouted the name questioningly.
“Is that any way to greet someone close who’s returned from the dead?”
“You ... here ... alive?”
“Oh, Maeve, you can’t know how happy I am to see you alive.”
“I’m shocked to see you too,” said Maeve, slowly taking rein of her senses.
“Were you injured while ashore?” Deirdre asked as if concerned.
“A mild case of frostbite, nothing more.” Maeve gestured to the Ice Hunter crewmen who were lowering a launch. “I’ll hitch a ride and meet you at the foot of the gangway.”
“I’ll be waiting.” Deirdre smiled to herself and stepped back into the wheelhouse, where Pitt was talking over the radio to Dempsey. He nodded and smiled at her before signing off.
“Dempsey tells me Maeve is on her way over.”
Deirdre nodded. “She was surprised to see me.”
“A fortunate coincidence,” said Pitt, noting for the first time that Deirdre was nearly as tall as he, “that two friends are the only members of the crew still alive.”
Deirdre shrugged. “We’re hardly what you’d call friends.”
He stared curiously into brown eyes that glinted from the sun’s rays that shone through the forward window. “You dislike each other?”
“A matter of bad blood, Mr. Pitt,” she said matter-of-factly. “You see, despite our different surnames, Maeve Fletcher and I are sisters.”
The sea was thankfully calm when Ice Hunter, trailed by Polar Queen, slipped under the sheltering arm of Duse Bay and dropped anchor just offshore from the British research station. From his bridge, Dempsey, instructed the skeleton crew on board the cruise ship to moor her a proper distance away so the two ships could swing on their anchors with the tides without endangering each other.
Still awake and barely steady on his feet, Pitt had not obeyed Sandecker’s order that he have a peaceful sleep. There were still a hundred and one details to be attended to after he turned over operation of Polar Queen to Dempsey’s crew. First he put Deirdre Dorsett in the boat with Maeve and sent them over to Ice Hunter. Then he spent the better part of the sunlit night making a thorough search of the ship, finding the dead he had missed on his brief walk-through earlier. He closed down the ship’s heating system to help preserve the bodies for later examination, and only when Polar Queen was safely anchored under the protecting arm of the bay did he hand over command and return to the NUMA research ship. Giordino and Dempsey waited in the wheelhouse to greet and congratulate him. Giordino took one look at Pitt’s exhausted condition and quickly poured him a cup of coffee from a nearby pot that was kept brewing at all times in the wheelhouse. Pitt gratefully accepted, sipped the steaming brew and stared over the rim of the cup toward a small craft with an outboard motor that was chugging toward the ship.
Almost before the anchor flukes of Ice Hunter had taken bite of the bottom, representatives from Ruppert & Saunders had departed their aircraft and boarded a Zodiac for the trip from shore. Within minutes they climbed aboard the lowered gangway and quickly climbed to the bridge, where Pitt, Dempsey and Giordino awaited them. One man cleared the steps three at a time and pulled up short, surveying the three men standing before him. He was big and ruddy and wore a smile a yard wide.
“Captain Dempsey?” he asked.
Dempsey stepped forward and extended his hand. “I’m he.”
“Captain Ian Ryan, Chief of Operations for Ruppert & Saunders.”
“Happy to have you aboard, Captain.”
Ryan looked apprehensive. “My officers and I are here to take command of Polar Queen.”
“She’s all yours, Captain,” Dempsey said easily. “If you don’t mind, you can send back my crew in your boat once you’re aboard.”
Relief spread across Ryan’s weathered face. It could have been a delicate situation. Legally, Dempsey was salvage master of the cruise ship. Command had passed to him from the dead captain and the owners. “Am I to understand, sir, that you are relinquishing command in favor of Ruppert & Saunders?”
“NUMA is not in the salvage business, Captain. We make no claim on Polar Queen.”
“The directors of the company have asked me to express our deepest thanks and congratulations for your efforts in saving our passengers and ship.”
Dempsey turned to Pitt and Giordino and introduced them. “These are the gentlemen who found the survivors on Seymour Island and kept your company’s ship from running onto the Danger Island rocks.”
Ryan pumped their hands vigorously, his grasp strong and beefy. “A remarkable achievement, absolutely remarkable. I assure you that Ruppert & Saunders will prove most generous in their gratitude.”
Pitt shook his head. “We have been instructed by our boss at NUMA headquarters, Admiral James Sandecker, that we cannot accept any reward or salvage monies.”
Ryan looked blank. “Nothing, nothing at all?”
“Not one cent,” Pitt answered, fighting to keep his bleary eyes open.
“How bloody decent of you,” Ryan gasped. “That’s unheard of in the annals of marine salvage. I’ve no doubt our insurance carriers will drink to your health every year on the anniversary of the tragedy.”
Dempsey gestured toward the passageway leading to his quarters. “While we’re on the subject of drinks, Captain Ryan, may I offer you one in my cabin?”
Ryan nodded toward his officers, who were grouped behind him. “Does that include my crew?”
“It most certainly does,” Dempsey said with a friendly smile.
“You save our ship, rescue our passengers and then stand us a drink. If you don’t mind my saying so,” said Ryan in a voice that seemed to come from his boots, “you Yanks are damned odd people.”
“Not really,” Pitt said, his green eyes twinkling through the weariness. “We’re just lousy opportunists.”
Pitt’s movements were purely out of habit as he took a shower and shaved for the first time since before he and Giordino took off to find Polar Queen. He came within an eye blink of sagging to his knees and drifting asleep under the soothing splash of the warm water. Too tired even to dry his hair, he tucked a bath towel around his waist and stumbled to his queen-sized bed-no tight bunk or narrow berth on this ship-pulled back the covers, stretched out, laid his head on the pillow and was gone.
His unconscious mind didn’t register the knock on his cabin door. Normally alert to the tiniest peculiar sound, he did not awaken or respond when the knock came a second time. He was so dead to the world there wasn’t the slightest change in his breathing. Nor was there a flutter of his eyelids when Maeve slowly opened the door, peered hesitantly into the small anteroom and softly called his name.
“Mr. Pitt, are you about?”
Part of her wanted to leave, but curiosity drew her on. She moved in cautiously, carrying two short-stemmed snifter glasses and a bottle of Remy Martin XO cognac loaned to her by Giordino from his private traveling stock. The excuse for her barging in like this was to properly thank Pitt for saving her life.
Startled, she caught her reflection in a mirror above a desk that folded from the wall. Her cheeks were flushed like those of a young girl waiting for her date to the high school prom to show up. It was a condition she’d seldom experienced before. Maeve turned away, angry at herself. She couldn’t believe she was entering a man’s quarters without being invited. She hardly knew Pitt. He was little more than a stranger. But Maeve was a lady used to striking out on her own.