"What is it?" Hugo yelled above the gunfire.

But in that instant, Sergeant Mendoza squinted at the head behind the crosshairs inside his sniper scope and gently pulled the trigger of his Eradicator. The guard dropped dead at Hugo's feet, neither hearing nor feeling the bullet enter his right temple and exit the left. The message he had urgently wished to report, on the destruction in the aircraft hangar by a strange vehicle, died with him.

GARNET'S Marines linked up with Sharpsburg's Delta team and took cover, as the four Sno-cats withdrew from chasing Jacobs and attacked them in a double column from the rear. They came on oblivious to the two ant.i.tank weapons aimed at them by the Marines, who at less than a hundred yards couldn't miss. The lead Sno-cats went up in an explosion of fire and flying debris and bodies, forming an effective road-block that prevented the remaining vehicles from striking the already beleaguered Americans.

Cleary realized quickly that the reprieve had only short-term benefits and was temporary. It would be only a question of time before the security guards wised up to the fact that no more ant.i.tank sh.e.l.ls were being fired because the supply was exhausted. Then the armored Sno-cats would attack, and there would be no stopping them. When Jacobs and his team hit the barricade from the flank, hopefully the advantage would swing to their side.

IN Washington, the battlefield reports from the men under fire made it evident that the a.s.sault force was in deep trouble. It was becoming more obvious by the minute that Cleary and his men were being shot to pieces. The President and the Joint Chiefs could not believe what they heard. What had been launched as a daring mission had turned into a slaughter and a disaster. They were shocked by the growing realization that the mission had failed, and that the entire inhabited world was in jeopardy of vanishing, a nightmare they found impossible to accept.

"The aircraft carrying the main force," the President said, his thinking becoming disoriented, "when ... ?"

"They won't be over the compound for another forty minutes," answered General South

"And the countdown?"

"Twenty-two minutes until the currents are right for the ice shelf to break off."

"Then we've got to send in the missiles."

"We will be killing our own men as well," cautioned General South.

"Do we have another option?" the President put to him.

South looked down at his open hands and slowly shook his head. "No, Mr. President, we don't."

Admiral Eldridge asked, "Shall I alert the commander of the Tucson to launch missiles?"

"If I may suggest," said the Air Force chief of staff, General Coburn, "I think it best that we send in the Stealth bombers. Their aircrews are more accurate in guiding their missiles to a target than an unmanned Tomahawk launched from a submarine."

The President quickly made his decision. "All right, alert the bomber pilots, but tell them not to fire until ordered. We never know when a miracle might happen and Major Cleary can force his way into the control center and halt the countdown."

As General Coburn issued the order, General South muttered under his breath, "A miracle is exactly what it will take."

43

STREETS RAN OFF THE square between buildings that protruded from the ice. They were not on the ma.s.sive scale of much later civilizations, but their architectural characteristics were unlike any Pitt and Giordino had ever seen in their travels. There was no telling how many acres or square miles the city covered. What they saw was only a fraction of the magnificence that was the Amenes.

Rising up from one end of the square, an immense, richly ornate structure with triangular columns supported a pediment decorated with fleets of ancient ships in relief over a frieze carved with intricate sculptures of animals mingling with people wearing the same dress found on the mummies at St. Paul Island. The basic design of the colossal building was unlike any still standing from the ancient world. It would have been obvious to the eye of an architect that its basic structural form had been pa.s.sed down through the millennia and copied by later builders of the great temples of Luxor, Athens, and Rome. The columns, however, were triangular, and looked foreign when compared to the much later round, fluted Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns.

A large entrance yawned beyond the columns. There were no stairs. The upper levels were reached by gradually sloping ramps. Spellbound, Pitt and Giordino exited the Snow Cruiser and walked past the columns. Inside the main chamber, a vast corbeled triangular roof soared above the ice-covered, rock-hewn floor. In huge niches along the walls were stone statues of what must have been Amenes kings, powerful-looking creations with round eyes and narrow faces carved out of granite rich in quartz that shimmered as they walked past them. Sculptured heads of men and a few women were set in the floor, staring upward through their thin coating of ice, with Amenes inscriptions engraved above and below them.

In the center of the great chamber, a life-size sculpture of an ancient ship, complete with banks of oars, full sails, and crews, stood on a pedestal. The sight was nothing less than spectacular. The sheer artistry, craft, and technical mastery of stone gave it an eerie mystique that mocked modern sculpture.

"What do you make of it?" asked Giordino reverently, as if he were standing in a cathedral. "A temple to their G.o.ds?"

"More likely a mausoleum or a shrine," said Pitt, gesturing at the heads rising from the floor. "These look like memorials, perhaps to revered men and women who explored the ancient world and those who were lost at sea."

"It's amazing the roof didn't collapse after the comet's impact or the later acc.u.mulation of ice."

"Their builders must have worked under exceptionally high standards that were possible only under a structured culture."

They gazed in fascination down a network of windowless corridors whose interior walls were beautifully painted with scenes of spectacular seascapes that began with calm waters and progressed to waves whipped by hurricane furies beating against rocky sh.o.r.elines. If modern men and women looked to the heavens for their G.o.d, the Amenes had looked to the seas. Their statuaries were of men and women, not stylized versions of G.o.ds.

"A long-lost race who discovered the world," Giordino said philosophically. "And yet there are no artifacts lying around, and no sign of the inhabitants' remains."

Pitt nodded at the network of narrow pa.s.sages carved into the ice. "No doubt recovered by the n.a.z.is who discovered it, and later taken by the Wolfs to their museums on board the Ulrich Wolf."

"Doesn't look like they excavated more than ten percent of the city."

"They had more mundane things on their mind," said Pitt sardonically, "like hiding n.a.z.i treasures and secret relics, extracting gold from seawater, and planning to destroy the world so they could make it over into their image."

"Too bad we haven't the time to explore the place."

"There's nothing I'd like better than to take the grand tour," said Pitt, shaking off his captivation, "but we have twenty-five minutes or less to find the control center."

Wishing they could linger, Pitt and Giordino reluctantly turned their backs on the great edifice and hurried back to the square and climbed into the Snow Cruiser. Still following the tracks left by a Sno-cat, Pitt steered the big cruiser through the heart of the haunting ghost city and rolled it into a tunnel beyond the mausoleum of the Amenes. Pitt drove less cautiously the closer they came to the mining compound, while Giordino crouched below the instrument panel with his Bushmaster sticking through the shattered middle windshield.

Almost a mile deeper into the tunnel, they rounded a bend and found themselves confronted with an electric auto coming in the opposite direction. The three startled security guards in the other vehicle, easily recognizable in their black uniforms, stared incredulously at the monster bearing down on them. The driver panicked and slammed on his brakes, skidding across the ice floor of the tunnel without reducing his speed in the slightest. The other two guards had a higher regard for self-preservation and leaped from the auto in a futile attempt at prolonging their lives.

There was a series of shrill screeches from shredding and grinding metal as the Snow Cruiser smashed into the electric auto and rolled over it as though it were a tricycle mashed by a garbage truck. The driver disappeared, along with his crumpled vehicle, under the Cruiser, while the other two guards were crushed against the ice walls of the tunnel by the great tires. As Pitt stared back in his side-view mirror, he saw only a pile of twisted junk sitting flattened on the floor of the tunnel.

Giordino twisted around in his seat and stared back through the slanted rear window of the control cab. "I hope you paid your insurance premiums."

"Only liability and property damage. I never take out collision."

"You should reconsider."

Another two hundred yards through the tunnel, groups of workers in red coveralls were moving wooden crates onto a train of flatbed cars that were connected to a large Sno-cat. Forklifts were transporting the crates past a thick silver steel door whose mounting bolts led deep into the ice. The ma.s.sive door looked like the types that were used in banks to safeguard the contents of their vaults. A short entryway through the ice led into a s.p.a.cious cavern.

Two security guards stood stunned at the sight of the gargantuan Snow Cruiser, plunging from what should have been an abandoned tunnel. They stood transfixed in the glare of the headlights. Only when Giordino fired a short burst from his Bushmaster through the broken windshield into the forklift did workers and security guards come alive and scramble back into the cavern to save themselves from being mashed by the mechanical avalanche bearing down on them.

"The door!" Pitt shouted, slamming on the brakes.

Giordino did not acknowledge or question. Almost as if he'd read Pitt's mind, he leaped from the Snow Cruiser and ran to the steel door, as Pitt squeezed off several rounds from his Colt .45 through the doorway to the cavern to cover him. Giordino was surprised by the light touch it took to push the door closed. He'd expected to exert every ounce of strength in his body, but the heavy steel door swung as easily as if it hung in air. Once it clicked against its stops, he turned the locking wheel until the bars slid into their sockets, sealing it closed. Then he found a chain on the forklift and wrapped it around the wheel, securing the end to a wheel of a flatbed car loaded with crates, until it was impossible to turn from the inside. Now the Wolf security guards and workers were effectively imprisoned without any prospect of a quick escape.

"I wonder what's inside the crates?" Giordino said, as he climbed back into the control cab.

"Artifacts from the city of the Amenes, I'd guess." Pitt ran the Snow Cruiser through the gears until he had regained top speed again. An angel perched on the roof of the cab might have helped them this far on their wild pa.s.sage, but they still had a long way to go. True, surprise was theirs, but it seemed remarkable that they had come this far without a shot being fired at them, a situation that could quickly change, Pitt well knew. The powers of their angel had her limits, a.s.suming that it was a she. Events had been met and overtaken. Once the Snow Cruiser burst out into the open, it would be a different story. Every gun in the compound would train on it.

At a wide bend in the tunnel, they suddenly burst out into the almost measureless hangar housing the Destiny Enterprises jet aircraft. Without lifting his foot from the gas pedal, Pitt quickly surveyed the two Airbus A340-300 pa.s.senger and cargo planes parked in the center of the hangar. A Sno-cat with a train of flatbed cars was stretched beneath the cargo door of the first aircraft, the familiar wooden crates riding up inside the fuselage on a conveyor belt. Wolf Enterprise engineers and workers were climbing boarding steps at the other plane for the trip to the giant superships. Sitting off to one side was a sleek executive jet that was in the process of being refueled.