So Pitt told him.

AN hour and thirty minutes later, Dad and his crew, along with Frank Cash, stood and watched silently as the big red vehicle, belching a black cloud of exhaust into the crystal blue sky, lumbered across the frozen landscape toward the horizon.

"I never got Dad's name," said Pitt, as he sat hunched over the steering wheel, gazing through the windshield and studying the ice field ahead for cracks and obstacles.

Giordino stood behind Pitt in the Snow Cruiser's confined chart and control room, studying a topographical map of the ice pack. "The name on an envelope that was sticking out of his pocket read 'Clive Cussler.' "

"That is an odd name. Yet it sounds vaguely familiar."

"Whoever," said Giordino indifferently.

"I hope I didn't step into a minefield when I promised to bring back his off-road vehicle in the same condition he loaned it to us."

"If we put a scratch on it, have him send the bill to Admiral Sandecker."

"Got a heading for me?" Pitt asked.

"Where's your GPS unit?"

"I forgot it in the rush. Besides, they didn't have a Global Positioning System in 1940."

"Just head that way," Giordino said, pointing vaguely into the distance.

Pitt's eyebrows rose. "That's the best you can do?"

"No directional instrument ever created can beat an eyeball."

"Your logic defies sanity."

"How long do you think it will take to get there?" Giordino asked.

"Sixty miles, at only twenty miles an hour," Pitt murmured. "Three hours, if we don't run into any barriers in the ice and have to detour around them. I only hope we can get there before the a.s.sault team. A full-scale attack might force Karl Wolf to slice off the ice shelf ahead of schedule."

"I have a sour feeling in my stomach that we won't be as lucky sneaking in here as we were at the shipyard."

"I hope you're wrong, my friend, because a lot of people are going to be very unhappy if we fail."

38

THE SUN BLAZED FROM an azure blue sky, its intensity tripled by the reflection off the crystallized surface as the big red Snow Cruiser crawled over the freeze-dried landscape like a bug over a wrinkled white sheet. Veiled by a gossamer of snow, she trailed a light haze of blue from her twin diesels' exhaust drifting in the air. The huge wheels crunched loudly as they rolled over the snow and ice, their crude crosscut tread gripping without slippage. She moved effortlessly, almost majestically, as she was meant to do, created by men who had not lived to see her fulfill their expectations.

Pitt sat comfortably straight in the driver's seat, and gripping the buslike steering wheel, drove the Cruiser in a straight line toward a range of mountains looming far off to the horizon. He peered through heavily polarized sungla.s.ses. Snow blindness was an ominous threat in cold climates. It was caused by conjunctival inflammation of the eye by the sun, whose glare reflected a low-spectrum ultraviolet ray. Anyone unlucky enough to suffer the malady felt like sand was being rubbed in their eyes, followed by blindness that lasted anywhere from two to four days.

Frostbite, though, wasn't a hazard. The heaters in the Snow Cruiser kept the cabins at a respectable sixty-five degrees. Pitt's only small but irritating problem was the constant buildup of frost on the three windshields. The window vents did not put out enough air to keep them clear. Though he drove wearing only an Irish-knit wool sweater, he kept his cold-weather clothing nearby, in case he had to leave the cruiser for whatever emergency might rear its unwelcome head. As beautiful as the weather looked, anyone familiar with either pole knew it could turn deadly in less time than it took to tell about it.

When added up, more than a hundred and fifty deaths had been recorded in Antarctica since exploration had begun, when a Norwegian sailor on a whaling ship, Carstens Borchgrevink, had become the first man to step ash.o.r.e on the continent in 1895. Most were men who had succ.u.mbed to the cold, like Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his party, who'd frozen to death on their return trip after trekking to the South Pole. Others had become lost and wandered aimlessly before they died. Many were killed in aircraft crashes and other unfortunate accidents.

Pitt wasn't in the mood to expire, certainly not yet; not if he and Giordino were to stop the Wolfs from launching a frightful horror on mankind. Besides manhandling the Snow Cruiser over the ice shelf, his first order of business was to get to the mining facility as quickly as possible. His handheld GPS was of no use. The geographic display on Pitt's unit was incapable of showing his exact position within a thousand miles of the pole. Because the satellites that relayed the position belonged to the military, who had not planned on conducting a war in Antarctica, they were not in orbit over that part of the globe.

He called down to Giordino, who was standing below and behind him, hunched over a chart table studying a map of the Ross Ice Shelf. "How about giving me a heading?"

"Just keep the front end of this geriatric antique aimed toward the highest peak of those mountains dead ahead. And, oh yes, be sure to keep the sea on your left."

"Keep the sea on my left," Pitt repeated in exasperation.

"Well, we certainly don't want to run off the edge and drown, do we?"

"What if the weather closes in and we can't see?"

"You want a heading," Giordino said cynically. "Pick any compa.s.s direction you want. You've got three hundred and sixty choices."

"I stand chastised," Pitt said wearily. "My mind was elsewhere. I'd forgotten that all compa.s.s readings down here point north."

"You'll never get on Jeopardy."

"Most of the category questions are beyond my meager mental capacity anyway." He turned to Giordino and made a shifty grin. "I'll bet you tell b.l.o.o.d.y horror bedtime stories to little children."

Giordino looked at Pitt, trying to decipher his meaning. "I what?"

"The cliffs at the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf reach two hundred feet above and nine hundred feet below the surface of the sea. From the top edge to the sea is a sheer drop. We drive off the ledge, there won't be enough left of us to sail anywhere."

"You have a point," Giordino grudgingly conceded.

"Besides falling into a bottomless creva.s.se or becoming lost and freezing to death in a blizzard, our only other dilemma is if the ice we're driving on breaks loose or calves and carries us out to sea. Then all we'll be able to do is sit and wait for a cataclysmic tidal wave launched by the polar shift to sweep us away."

"You should talk," Giordino said, his voice heavy with sarcasm. "Your bedtime stories make mine sound like Mother Goose science fiction tales."

"The skies are darkening," Pitt said, staring upward through the windshield.

"Do you still think we can make it in time?" asked Giordino.

Pitt glanced down at the odometer. "We've come twenty-one miles in the last hour. Barring unforeseen delays, we should be there in just less than two hours."

They had to make it in time. If the special a.s.sault team failed, then he and Giordino were the only hope, as inadequate for the job as any two men seemed. Pitt did not bask in an aura of optimism. He well knew the terrain ahead was fraught with obstacles. His biggest fears were rotting ice and creva.s.ses seen too late. If he wasn't constantly alert, he could drive the Snow Cruiser into a deep creva.s.se and send it plunging hundreds of feet into the Antarctic Sea below. So far, the frozen wasteland lay fairly flat. Except for thousands of ripples and ruts like those found in a farmer's plowed field, the ride was reasonably smooth. Occasionally, he'd spot a creva.s.se hiding in the ice ahead. After a quick stop to appraise the situation, he'd find a way to detour around it.

The thought that he was driving a thirty-five-ton lethargic monster of steel across an icy plain with deep fissures looming unseen in every direction was not comforting. Few words in a dictionary could describe the feeling. Suddenly, a crack in the ice became visible, but only after he was almost on top of it. With a hard twist of the wheel, he slewed the Snow Cruiser around sideways, stopping it within five feet of the edge. After driving parallel to the chasm for half a mile, he finally found a firm surface five hundred yards from where it vanished in the ice.

He glanced at the speedometer and noted that the speed had slowly crept up to twenty-four miles an hour. Giordino, down in the engine room, was fussing with the two big diesel engines, delicately adjusting the valves on the fuel intake pumps and increasing the flow. Because Earth's air is thinner at the poles due to a faster rate of spin, and because it is extremely dry and cold, the fuel ratio needed to be reset, a ch.o.r.e Dad and his crew had not yet performed. Fuel injection was constant on newer diesel engines, but on the sixty-year-old c.u.mmins, the fuel flow to the injectors could be altered.

The frozen desert ahead was bleak, desolate and menacing, while at the same time a landscape of beauty and magnificence. It could be tranquil one moment and frightening the next. In Pitt's mind, it suddenly became frightening. His feet stomped the brake and clutch of the Snow Cruiser, and he watched stunned as a creva.s.se no more than a hundred feet away opened and spread apart, the crack stretching as far as he could see in both directions across the ice pack.

Dropping down the ladder from the control cabin, he threw open the entry door, stepped outside, and walked to the edge of the creva.s.se. It was a terrifying sight. The color of the ice on the sides that fell out of sight turned from white at the edge of a beautiful silver-green. Its gap spanned almost twenty feet. He turned as he heard the crunch of Giordino's feet behind him.