"d.a.m.n!" muttered Giordino. "Just when I was coming to the exciting climax."

"Relax. You have another ten minutes to finish it. Besides, I already know how it comes out."

Giordino looked over at him. "You do?"

Pitt nodded seriously. "The butler did it."

Giordino gave a menacing Fu Manchu squint to his eyes and went back to his book.

The Moller M400 did not fly directly over the lights of the shipyard and the great ships nearby in the fjord. Instead, as if it had a mind of its own, which it did, it banked on a course southwest. Pitt could do little but gaze at the blaze of lights rising on the starboard side of the aircraft.

"Finished." Giordino sighed. "And in case you're interested, it wasn't the butler who killed ten thousand people, it was a mad scientist." He stared out the canopy at the thousands of lights. "Won't they pick us up on their detection systems?"

"A slim possibility at best. The Moller M400 is so small, it's invisible to all but the most sophisticated military radar."

"I hope you're right," said Giordino, stretching. "I'm very modest when it comes to welcome committees."

Pitt beamed a little penlight on his chart. "At this point the computer is giving us a choice between swimming underwater for two miles or walking four miles across a glacier to reach the shipyard."

"Hiking across a glacier in the dark doesn't sound inviting," said Giordino. "What if Mrs. Giordino's little boy falls down a creva.s.se and isn't found for ten thousand years?"

"Somehow I can't picture you lying in a display case in a museum, being stared at by thousands of people."

"I see nothing wrong with being a star attraction from another time," Giordino said pompously.

"Did it ever occur to you that you'd probably be viewed in the nude? You'd hardly set an example as a manly specimen from the twenty-first century."

"I'll have you know I can hold my own with the best of them."

All further conversation came to an end as the Moller's ground speed began to fall away and it lost alt.i.tude. Pitt elected to make their approach underwater, and he programmed the computer, instructing it to land at a preplanned site near the sh.o.r.eline that had been pinpointed by satellite photo a.n.a.lysts at the CIA. Minutes later, the M400's cascade vane systems on the engines altered their thrust through the duct exits and the craft came to a complete stop, hovering in the air in preparation for setting down. All Pitt could see in the darkness was that they were about thirty feet over a narrow ravine. Then the Moller descended and lightly touched the hard-rock ground. Seconds later, the engines ceased their revolutions and the systems shut down. The navigation readout proclaimed that it had landed only four inches off its programmed mark.

"I've never felt so useless in my life," said Pitt.

"It does tend to make one feel redundant," Giordino added. Only then did he peer out of the canopy. "Where are we?"

"In a ravine about fifty yards from the fjord."

Pitt unlatched the canopy, raised it, and stepped out of the flying vehicle onto the hard ground. The night was not silent. The sounds of shipyard machinery working around the clock could be heard over the water. He opened the rear seat and storage section and began pa.s.sing the dive gear to Giordino, who laid the air tanks, back-mounted buoyancy compensators, weight belts, fins, and masks in a parallel row. They both pulled on their boots and hoods, slipped into the compensators, and hoisted the twin air tanks onto each other's back. Both carried chest packs, containing handguns, lights, and Pitt's trusty Globalstar phone. The final items of equipment they removed from the M400 were two Torpedo 2000 diver propulsion vehicles, with dual battery-powered hulls, attached in parallel, that looked like small rockets. Their top speed under water was 4.5 miles an hour, with a running time of one hour.

Pitt strapped a small directional computer, similar to the one he'd used in the Pandora Mine, on his left arm and set it to lock in on the GPS satellites. He then punched in a code that translated the data onto a tiny monitor that showed their exact position in relation to the shipyard and the fjord's channel leading to it.

Giordino adjusted a spectral imaging scope over his face mask and switched it on. The landscape suddenly materialized before his eyes, slightly fuzzy but distinct enough to see pebbles on the ground half an inch in diameter. He turned to Pitt.

"Time to go?"

Pitt nodded. "Since you can see our way on land, you lead off and I'll take over when we reach the water."

Giordino simply gave a brief nod and said nothing. Until they could safely penetrate the security defenses around the shipyard, there was nothing to say. Pitt did not require telepathic powers to know what was in Giordino's mind. He was mentally reliving the same thing as Pitt.

They were back six thousand miles in distance and twenty hours in time in Admiral Sandecker's office in the NUMA headquarters, talking their way into what had to be a scheme born under a cloud of madness.

"MISTAKES were made," said the admiral solemnly. "Dr. O'Connell is missing."

"I thought she was under round-the-clock surveillance by security agents," Pitt said, annoyed at Ken Helm.

"All anyone knows at this point is that she drove her daughter to get some ice cream. While the guards sat outside the store in their car, Dr. O'Connell and her daughter went inside and never came out. It seems impossible that such a spur-of-the-moment event by O'Connell could be known in advance by the abductors."

"Meaning the Wolfs." Pitt slammed his fist on the table. "Why do we continually underestimate these people?"

"I suppose you'll be even less happy to hear the rest," Sandecker said somberly.

Pitt looked at him, his face clouded with exasperation. "Let me guess. Elsie Wolf has disappeared from the clinic, along with the body of her cousin, Heidi."

Sandecker wiped an imaginary speck from the polished surface of the conference table. "Believe me, it must have taken a magician," said FBI agent Ken Helm. "The clinic has the latest technology in security-detection equipment."

"Didn't your surveillance cameras reveal her escape?" asked Pitt irritably. "Elsie obviously didn't walk through the front door with her dead cousin thrown over her shoulder."

Helm gave a brief tilt of his head. "The cameras were fully operational, and the monitors observed every second. I'm sorry-no, shocked-to say that no trace of the breakout was recorded."

"These people must have the ability to slip through cracks," said Giordino, who had seated himself at the opposite end of the table from Sandecker. "Or else they developed a pill for invisibility."

"Neither," said Pitt. "They're shrewder than we are."

"All that we have, and it's fifty percent speculation," Helm admitted, "is that an executive jet belonging to Destiny Enterprises took off from an airport near Baltimore and set a course due south-"

"To Argentina," Pitt finished.

"Where else would they take her?" added Giordino. "Doesn't figure they'd keep her in the States, where they have little or no control over government investigative agencies."

Ron Little of the CIA cleared his throat. "The question is why? At one time we were led to believe they wanted to eliminate Mr. Pitt, Mr. Giordino, and Dr. O'Connell because of their discoveries of the chamber in Colorado and its inscriptions. But now, too many people are knowledgeable about the messages left by the ancient people. So the effort to keep it secret becomes immaterial."

"The only practical answer is that they need her expertise," suggested Helm.

"When I asked Elsie Wolf how many Chambers the Amenes had built, she claimed there was a total of six," Pitt said. "We had found two and they had found one. Of the others, two were destroyed by natural causes. Only one remains unfound, and she said it was somewhere in the Andes of Peru, but the directions were vague. I'll bet that despite all the experts in their computer software division, they couldn't crack the code giving instructions on how to find the remaining lost chamber."

"So they s.n.a.t.c.hed her, thinking she could crack the code," said Sandecker.

"Makes sense," Helm said slowly.

Giordino leaned across the table. "Knowing Pat only a short time as I do, I have my doubts she'd cooperate."

Little smiled. "They also have Dr. O'Connell's fourteen-year-old daughter. All the Wolfs have to do is threaten to harm her."

"She'll talk," Helm said gravely. "She has no choice."

"So we go in and get her out," said Pitt.