Текст книги "Atlantis Found"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 29 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

"My name is a bit strange, so my crew, who are all forty years younger than I am, just call me Dad," he said, shaking hands. "What can I do for you?"

"Haven't we met before?" asked Pitt, studying the old man.

"It's possible. I get around quite a bit."

"The Snow Cruiser," said Pitt, cutting to the heart of his request, "is it in any condition to drive to the South Pole?"

"That's what she was built to do, but if you'd have asked that question sixty years ago, or even a week ago, I'd have said no. On dry land it proved a remarkable machine, but on the ice it was a dismal failure. For one thing, the tires were smooth and spun ineffectively without friction. And the gearing in the reduction unit was all wrong. Driving her up a slight hill was like an eighteen-wheeler semi-truck and trailer attempting to pull a load up the Rocky Mountains in sixteenth gear. The engine would lug itself to death. By changing the gears and cutting treads in the tires, we think we can demonstrate that she might have lived up to expectations and actually reached the Pole."

"What if she came up against a crevasse too wide for her to drive over?" inquired Giordino.

"Thomas Poulter, the cruiser's designer and builder, came up with an ingenious innovation. The big wheels and tires were positioned close to the center of the body, which left an overhang front and rear of eighteen feet. The wheels were capable of retracting upward until they were level with the underside of the body. When the driver came to a crevasse, he lifted the front wheels. Then the rear-wheel traction pushed the forward section over the crevasse. Once the front wheels were safe on the opposite side, they were lowered. Finally, the rear wheels were retracted and the front then pulled the cruiser to the other side. A very ingenious system that actually works."

"Where did you find sixty-year-old gears that would fit the reduction unit?"

"The unit, or transmission, was not the only one built. We analyzed the problem and how to fix it before we came down here. The original manufacturer is still in business and had a bin of old parts buried deep in their warehouse. Fortunately, they had the gears we needed to make the necessary changes."

"Have you tested her yet?" asked Giordino.

"You've arrived at an opportune moment," replied Dad. "In the next hour, we hope to run her out onto the ice for the first time since she came to rest in 1940, and see what she can do. And just in time, too. Another couple of weeks and the ice floe would have broken and carried her out to sea, where she would have eventually sunk."

"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 conjunctiva 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 vas almost on top of it. With a hard twist of the wheel, he dewed 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 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.

He began to feel a tinge of hope, but then, as if an unseen force was working against him, the atmosphere grew heavy and congealed like a lace curtain. The wind suddenly swept in from the interior of the continent with the force of a tidal wave. One minute, Pitt could see for sixty miles. The next it was as though he was gazing through a film of water, fluid in motion, iridescent and ephemeral. The sky was gone in the blink of an eye and the sun totally blotted out, as the wind charged over the ice shelf like a raging monster. The world became a swirling pall of pure white.

He kept the accelerator pressed to the metal floor and clenched the steering wheel, not turning it, keeping the big vehicle moving in a straight line. They were in a hurry, and no tempestuous behavior from Mother Nature was going to slow them down.

A man wanders in circles during a whiteout, not because he's right-handed and tends to go in that direction, but because almost all humans unknowingly have one leg that is a millimeter shorter than the other. The same factor held true with the Snow Cruiser. None of the tires had come out of the mold symmetrically perfect with each other. If the steering wheel was locked in place while the vehicle was moving straight, it would gradually begin turning in an arc.

Nothing held substance. It was as if the world no longer existed. The gale-force windstorm seemed to drain the color out of everything. The ice storm swirled and gusted with such force that the driving hail of ice particles bombarded the windshield like tiny nails. Their impact against the glass came like a crescendo of clicking sounds. Pitt felt himself idly wondering if the onslaught would mar the old prewar safety glass. He lurched forward as the Snow Cruiser bounced over a frozen ice ridge unseen under the white maelstrom. He braced for a second bump, but it never came. The ice ran smooth.

The old line "It never rains but it pours," flashed through Pitt's mind when Giordino shouted through the hatch from the engine compartment, "Check your gauges. The engines are still running hot. With no air circulation down here, I have steam coming out of the radiator overflow tubes."

Pitt stared at the temperature gauges on the instrument panel. He'd spent so much effort concentrating on keeping the great vehicle moving on an undeviating course, he'd neglected to check the gauges. Oil pressure was slightly low, but the water temperatures were already crossing into the red zone. In less time than it takes to boil an egg, the radiators would boil over and blow a water hose from the engine. After that, there was no way of telling how long the engines would turn until their pistons burned and froze inside the cylinders. Already, he could hear the engines beginning to misfire as combustion occurred early from the acute heat.

"Throw on your cold-weather gear," Pitt shouted. "When you're ready, open the outside door. The flood of cold air should cool down the engines."

"And freeze us into Popsicles at the same time," Giordino came back.

"We'll have to suffer until they're running at normal temperatures again.

Both men donned their heavy-weather coveralls and hooded parkas again, Pitt struggling with the heavy clothing while he kept the Cruiser on a steady course through the storm. When they were fully dressed and fortified for the cold, Giordino opened the door. A howling chaos surged into the control cabin, the wind moaning and screaming as it whipped through the doorway. Pitt huddled over the steering wheel and stared through half-screwed-shut eyes as the blast of cold flung itself into the control cabin with a banshee shriek that drowned out all sounds from the diesel engines.

He could not have envisioned the profound shock that came from having the temperature inside the cabin drop eighty degrees within thirty seconds. When a human is appropriately clothed for extreme cold, he can endure temperatures of 120 degrees below freezing for twenty to thirty minutes at a time without suffering injury. But when the windchill factor adds another fifty degrees to the temperature, the drastic frigidness can kill within a few short minutes. Pitt's cold-weather clothing could protect him from mere cold, but the chill from the gale sucked the body heat right out of him.

Down in the engine compartment, Giordino sat between the two engines and savored what little heat he could soak up from the exhaust heaters and the radiator fans. He was deeply concerned about how Pitt could survive until the engine temperatures dropped. There was no more communication. The screaming wind made voice contact impossible.

The next few minutes were the longest Pitt had ever spent. He had never known such cold. It felt as if the wind went right through him, cutting his insides as it traveled. He stared at the needles on the engine temperature gauges and saw them drop with agonizing slowness. The ice crystals smashed into the windshields like a never-ending swarm. They hurtled through the door and into the control cabin, quickly covering Pitt and the instrument panel in a white glaze. The heater could no longer cope with the frozen air, and the inside of the windshield quickly frosted over, while the wipers on the outside were overwhelmed and soon became locked in a thickening blanket of ice. Unable to see past the steering wheel, Pitt sat like a rock as the torrent of white curled around him. He felt as though he were being swallowed by a ghost with thousands of tiny teeth.

He clenched his own teeth to keep them from chattering. Fighting forces far beyond his control, and realizing that he might be responsible for saving billions of lives, was not pleasant, but it drove him to stay the course against the screaming wind and stinging ice. What frightened him most was the prospect of driving into a crevasse that was impossible to see before it was too late. The sane thing to do was to slow the Snow Cruiser to a snail's crawl and send Giordino ahead to test the ice, but besides risking his friend's life, it would have cost them precious time, and time was an extravagance they did not have. His numbed right foot could no longer move up and down on the accelerator pedal, so he kept it fully pressed down, frozen in place to the floorboard.

Their drive across that deceptive and treacherous ice field had turned into a freezing nightmare.

There was no point of no return. It was finish the mission or die. The shrieking fury of the ice storm showed no signs of diminishing. Pitt wiped the thickening veneer of ice from the instrument panel at last. The temperature gauge needles were slowly dropping out of the red now. But if he and Giordino wanted to reach their destination without further interruption, the needles would have to fall another twenty degrees.

He was a blind man in a world of the blind. He was even denied a sense of touch. His hands and legs soon went numb, with all feeling lost. His body no longer felt a part of him and refused to respond to his commands. He found it next to impossible to breathe. The bitter cold seared his lungs. The thickening of the blood, the chill seeping through his skin, the stinging pain that was torturing his flesh, despite the insulation of his clothing, drained his strength. He never knew a man could freeze to death so fast. It required a concentrated effort of willpower not to give in and order Giordino to close the door. His bitterness against failing was as strong as the terrible wind.

Pitt had stared the grim reaper in the face before, and he had spat on him. As long as he was still breathing and able to think straight, he still had a chance. If only the wind would die. He knew that storms could vanish as quickly as they were born. Why can't this one die? he implored no one but himself. A horrible emptiness settled over him. His vision was darkening around the edges of his eyes, and still those vexing needles hadn't wavered into the normal temperature range.

He did not exist by any preposterous illusion of hope. He believed in himself and in Giordino and in luck. The Almighty could come along, too, if He was agreeable. Pitt had no wish to welcome the great beyond with open arms. He'd always believed he'd have to be dragged away by either angels or demons, fighting to the end. The jury was still out on whether his good virtues outweighed the bad. The only undeniable, uncontested reality was that he had little to say in the matter and was within minutes of freezing into a block of ice.

If there was a purpose for adversity, Pitt was damned if he knew what it was. Somewhere beyond it all, he stepped from being a mere mortal to a man outside himself. His mind was still clear, still capable of weighing the odds and the consequences. He pushed back the dark nightmare that was closing in on him. Suffering and foreboding no longer had meaning for him. He refused to accept an inevitable end. Any thought of dying became abhorrent and stillborn.

He almost gave way to an overpowering instinct to throw in the towel and surrender, but steeled himself to hold out another ten minutes. There was never a doubt in his mind that he and Giordino would see it through together, nor was there a moment of panic. Save the engines, save himself, and then save the world. That was the line of priority. He rubbed the frost from his glasses and saw that the needles on the gauge were falling faster and rapidly approaching their normal operating temperature.

Twenty more seconds, he told himself, then another twenty. What was the old ditty, "Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall"? Then came relief and exultation, as the temperature gauges registered nearly normal again.

There was no need to shout through the hatch down to Giordino in the engine compartment. The little Italian sensed when the time was ripe by placing a hand momentarily on the top of a radiator. He slammed shut the door, sealing off the frightful force of wind and ice, but not before throwing the interior heater switches as high as they could go. Then he rushed up to the control cabin and roughly pulled Pitt from behind the steering wheel.

"You've done enough for the cause," he said, troubled at seeing Pitt so close to death from hypothermia. "I'll help you down to the engine compartment where you can warm up."

"The Snow Cruiser…" Pitt barely murmured through frozen lips. "Don't let it wander."

"Don't burden yourself. I can drive this mechanical mastodon as well as you."

After setting Pitt on the floor between the big diesels where he could get warm again, Giordino climbed back into the icy control cabin, sat behind the steering wheel, and engaged first gear. Within sixty seconds, he had the grand vehicle boring through the storm once again at twenty-four miles an hour.

The consistent knock of the diesels, running smoothly once again, was more than music to Pitt's ears, it was a symbol of renewed hope. Never in his entire life had anything ever felt so good as the warmth that emanated from the engines and was absorbed by his half-frozen body. His blood soon thinned and circulated again, and he allowed himself he luxury of simply relaxing for half an hour while Giordino held the Wheel.

Almost morbidly, he began to wonder, had the special military force landed? Were they lost and dying in the same treacherous blizzard?