Atlantis Found (56 page)

“How do you intend to transport her back to the States?” asked Giordino.

“I’ve chartered a small cargo ship that is moored off the ice shelf. We’ll drive her across the ice, up a ramp, and onto the ship.”

“If she performs according to expectations,” said Pitt, “can we borrow her for a couple of days?”

Dad looked blank. Then he turned and stared at Cash. “He’s joking.”

Cash shook his head. “He’s not joking. These men desperately need transportation to the Wolf mining facility.”

Dad squinted at Pitt as he refilled his wineglass. “I should say not. By the time I’m finished, I will have spent over three hundred thousand dollars to pull her out of the ice, restore her to running condition, and transport her back to the Smithsonian in Washington. When I first discussed my dream of saving the vehicle, everyone laughed at me. My crew and I dug under the worst weather conditions imaginable. It was a major feat to lift her back to the surface again, and we’re all damned proud. I’m not about to hand her over to a couple of strangers who want to go joyriding around the ice pack.”

“Trust me,” said Pitt earnestly. “We’re not going for a joyride. As bizarre as it sounds, we are trying to avert a worldwide catastrophe.”

“The answer is no!”

Pitt and Giordino exchanged cold looks. Then Pitt removed a small folder from the breast pocket of his arctic survival coat and pushed it across the table at Dad. “Inside, you will find several phone numbers. They list, in order, the Oval Office of the White House, the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, the chief director of NUMA, and the Congressional Security Committee. There are also names of other important people who will back up our story.”

“And what, may I ask, is your story?” Dad asked skeptically.

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 assault 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 sunglasses. 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 ashore on the continent in 1895. Most were men who had succumbed 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 compass 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 compass 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 bloody 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 crevasse 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 assault 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 crevasses seen too late. If he wasn’t constantly alert, he could drive the Snow Cruiser into a deep crevasse 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 crevasse 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 chore Dad and his crew had not yet performed. Fuel injection was constant on newer diesel engines, but on the sixty-year-old Cummins, 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 crevasse 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 crevasse. 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.

“What now?” questioned Giordino. “This thing must run forever.”

“Frank Cash mentioned that the wheels could retract to cross a crevasse. Let’s check out the operation manual that Dad gave us.”

As Dad had told them, the Snow Cruiser’s designer, Thomas Poulter, had come up with an ingenious solution for the crevasse problem. The underside of the cruiser’s belly was flat like a ski, with a front and rear overhang of eighteen feet on both ends from the wheels. Following the instructions in the manual, Pitt pressed the levers that retracted the front wheels vertically until they were level with the body. Then, using the rear wheels for traction, he drove the Cruiser slowly forward until the front section slid across the crevasse and rolled past the opposite edge a safe distance for stability. Next Pitt extended the front wheels and retracted the wheels in the rear. Now using the front-wheel drive, the rear half of the cruiser was pulled the rest of the way over the chasm. After, extending the rear wheels, they were on their way again.

“I do believe I’d call that a brilliant innovation,” Giordino said admiringly.

Pitt shifted gears and turned the bow of the Snow Cruiser back toward the peak that had expanded into a range of mountains. “Amazing how he could be farsighted on one mechanism and yet badly underestimate the gearing and tire tread.”

“No one is flawless. Except me, of course.”

Pitt accepted the bluster with practiced patience. “Of course.”

Giordino took the manual with him into the engine compartment, but not before pointing to the twin temperature gauges on the instrument panel. “The engines are running hotter than normal. Better keep an eye on them.”

“How can they run hot when it’s twenty degrees below zero outside?” Pitt queried.

“Because their radiators are not exposed. They’re mounted directly in front of the engines inside the compartment. It’s almost as if they overheat themselves.”

Pitt had hoped darkness would cloak their arrival at the mining compound, but at this time of year in the Antarctic, the sunset had barely occurred before it was dawn again. He didn’t fool himself into thinking they could infiltrate the facility without being detected, certainly not in a gargantuan fire-engine-red snow vehicle. He knew he’d have to think of something in the next hour and a half. Soon, very soon, the buildings of the extraction plant would appear on the horizon along the base of the mountains.