Текст книги "Treasure"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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PART I

October 12, 1991

Heathrow Airport, London

No one paid the slightest attention to the pilot as he slipped around the crowd of media correspondents who overflowed from the interior of the VIP lounge. Nor did any of the passengers sitting in the waiting area of gate 14 notice that he carried a large duffel bag instead of a briefcase. He kept his head down, eyes straight ahead, carefully avoiding the battery of TV cameras aimed at a attractive woman with a smooth brown face and compelling coal-black eyes, who was the hub of the noisy activity.

The pilot quickly walked through the enclosed boarding ramp and halted in front of a pair of airport security agents. They wore plain clothes and blocked the aircraft door. He threw a casual wave and tried to shoulder his way past them, but a hand firmly grasped his arm.

"One moment, Captain."

The pilot stopped, a questioning but friendly expression on his dark-skinned face. He seemed idly amused at the inconvenience.

His olive-brown eyes had a gypsylike piercing quality about them. The nose had been broken more than once, and a long scar ran down the base of his face.

He stood nearly six feet four inches, thickset, with a slightly rounded paunch. Seasoned, confident, and standing straight in a tailored uniform, he looked like any one of ten thousand airline pilots who captained international passenger jets.

He removed his identification from a breast pocket and handed it to the security agent.

"Carrying VIPs this trip?" he asked innocently.

The British guard, correct, immaculately dressed, nodded. "A body of United Nations people returning to New York including the new SecretaryGeneral."

"Hala Kamil?"

"Yes."

"Hardly the job for a woman."

"Sex didn't prove a hindrance for Prime Minister Thatcher."

"She wasn't in water over her head."

"Kamil is an astute lady. She'll do all right."

"Providing Moslem fanatics from her own country don't blow her away,"

replied the pilot in a decided American accent.

The Britisher gave him a strange look indeed but made no further comment as he compared the photo on the I.D. card with the face before him and read the name aloud. "Captain Dale Lemk."

"any problem?"

"No, simply preventing any," the guard replied flatly.

Lemk extended his arms. "Do you want to frisk me too?"

"Not necessary. A pilot would hardly hijack his own airplane. But we must check your credentials, to be certain you're a genuine crew member."

"I'm not wearing this uniform for a costume party."

"May we see your carry bag?"

"Be my guest." He set the blue nylon bag on the floor and opened it. The second agent lifted out and riffled the pages of the standard pilot's aircraft and flight operations manuals and then held up a mechanical device with a small hydraulic cylinder.

"Mind telling us what this is?"

"An actuator arm for an oil-cooling door. It stuck in the open position, and our maintenance people at Kennedy asked me to hand-carry it home for inspection."

The agent poked at a bulky object tightly packed on the bottom of the bag. "Hello, what do we have here?" Then he looked up, a curious expression in his eyes. "Since when do airline pilots carry parachutes?"

Lemk laughed. "My hobby is skydiving. Whenever I have an extended layover, I jump with friends at Croydon."

"I don't suppose you would consider jumping from a jetliner?"

"Not from one flying five hundred knots at thirty-five thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean."

The agents exchanged satisfied glances. The duffel bag was closed and the I.D. card was passed back.

"Sorry to have delayed you, Captain Lemk."

"I enjoyed the chat."

"Have a good flight to New York."

"Thank you."

Lemk ducked into the plane and entered the cockpit. He locked the door and switched off the cabin lights so any casual observer could not view his movements through the windows from the concourse above. In well-rehearsed sequence, he knelt behind the seats, pulled a small flashlight from his coat pocket and raised a trapdoor leading to the electronics bay below the cockpit, a compartment that was named by some long-forgotten joker as the "hell hole." He dropped down the ladder into pure darkness, underscored by the murmur of the flight attendants'

voices as they prepared the main cabin for boarding and the thump of the luggage being loaded in the rear by the baggage handlers.

Lemk reached up and tugged the duffel bag down after him and switched on the penlight. A glance at his watch told him he had about five minutes before his flight crew arrived. In an exercise he had practiced nearly fifty times, he retrieved the actuator arm from the bag and connected it to a miniature device he had concealed in his flight cap.

He attached the assembled unit to the hinges of a small access door to the outside used by ground/maintenance mechanics. Then he laid out the parachute.

When his first and second officers arrived, Lemk was sitting in the pilot's seat, his face buried in an information manual. They exchanged casual greetings and began running through their preflight check routine. Neither the copilot nor the engineer perceived that Lemk seemed unusually quiet and withdrawn.

Their senses might have been sharper if they had known this was to be their last night on earth.

Inside the crowded lounge, Hala Kamil faced a forest of microphones and glaring camera lights. With seemingly inexhaustible patience, she fielded the barrage of questions thrown at her by the mob of inquisitive reporters.

Few asked about her sweep through Europe and the nonstop meetings with heads of state. Most probed for insights on the imminent overthrow of her Egyptian government by Moslem fundamentalists.

The extent of the turmoil was unclear to her. Fanatical mullahs, led by Akhmad Yazid, an Islac law scholar, had ignited religious passions that ran through the millions of destitute villagers of the Nile and the impoverished masses in the slums of Cairo. High-ranking officers in the army and air force were openly conspiring with the Islamic radicals to remove the recently installed president, Nadav Hasan. The situation was extremely volatile, but Hala had received no up-to-the-minute intelligence from her government, and she was forced to keep her answers vague and ambiguous.

On the surface Hala appeared infinitely poised and sphinxlike as she replied calmly, without emotion. Inwardly she floated between confusion and spiritual shock. She felt distant and alone, as though uncontrollable events were swirling around someone else, someone beyond help for whom she could only feel sorrow.

She could have posed for the painted portrait bust of Queen Nefertiti in the Berlin museum. They both possessed the same long-stemmed neck, delicate features and haunting look. Forty-two years old, slim, black eyes, flawless tawny complexion and long jet-black silken hair brushed straight and falling down to her shoulders. She stood five feet eleven inches in heels, and her lithe, shapely body was enhanced by a designer suit with pleated skirt.

Hala had enjoyed the attentions of four lovers over the years but had never married. A husband and children seemed foreign to her. She refused to spare the time for long-term attachments, and making love held little more ecstasy for her than buying a ticket and attending the ballet.

As a child in Cairo, where her mother was a teacher and her father a shoemaker, she had spent every minute of her free time sketching and digging in the ancient ruins within bicycle distance of her home. A gourmet cook and an artist with a Ph.D. in Egyptian antiquities, she had landed one of the few jobs open to Moslem women, as researcher for the Ministry of Culture.

With great individual effort and prodigious energy, she then successfully fought Islamic discrimination and worked up to Director of Antiquities and later head of the Department of information-She caught the eye of then President Mubarak, who asked her to serve on the Egyptian delegation to the United Nations General Assembly. Five years later, Hala was named Vice Chairman when Javier P6rez de Cudllar stepped down in the middle of his second tour during an upheaval when five Moslem-run nations withdrew from the charter during a controversy over demands for religious reform. Because the men in line ahead of her refused the job, she was appointed to serve as SecretaryGeneral in a tenuous hope she might mend the widening cracks in the organization's foundation.

Now, with her own government teetering on the brink of disintegration, there was a good chance she might become the first chief representative of the United Nations without a good try.

An aide came up and whispered in her ear. She nodded and held up one hand.

"I'm told the plane is ready to take off," she said. "I'll take one more question."

Hands flew up and a dozen queries filled the air at once. Hala pointed to a man standing at the doorway holding a tape recorder.

"Leigh Hunt of BBC, Madame Kamil. if Akhmad Yazid replaces President Hasan's democratic government with an Islamic republic, will you return to Egypt?"

"I am a Moslem and an Egyptian. if my country's leaders, regardless of the government in power, wish me to come home, I will comply."

"Even though Akhmad Yazid has called you a heretic and a traitor?"

"Yes," Hala replied evenly.

"If he's half as fanatical as the Ayatollah Khomeini, you might be running into an execution. Would you care to comment?" Hala shook her head, smiled gracefully and said, "I must leave now. Thank you."

A circle of security guards escorted her from the throng of reporters and onto the boarding ramp. Her aides and a large delegation from UNESCO were already seated. Four members of the World Bank were sharing a bottle of champagne and conversing in low tones in the pantry. The main cabin smelled of jet fuel and Beef Wellington.

Wearily Hala fastened the catch of her seat belt and glanced out the window. There was a light mist and the blue lights along the taxi strips blurred into a dull glow before disappearing completely. She removed her shoes, closed her eyes and gratefully dozed off before the stewardess could offer her a cocktail.

After waiting its Turn behind the warm exhaust of a TWA 747, United Nations charter Flight 106 finally moved onto the end of the runway.

When takeoff clearance came down from the control tower, Lemk eased the thrust levers forward and the Boeing 720-B rolled over the damp concrete and rose into the soggy air.

As soon as he reached his cruising altitude of 10,500 meters and engaged the autopilot, Lemk unbuckled his belt and rose from his seat.

"A call of nature," he said, heading for the cabin door. His second officer and engineer, a freckle-faced man with sandy hair, smiled without turning from the instrument panel. "I'll wait right here."

Lemk forced a short laugh and stepped into the passenger cabin. The flight attendants were preparing the meal service. The aroma of Beef Wellington came stronger than ever. He made a gesture and drew the chief steward aside.

"Can I get you anything, Captain?"

"Just a cup of coffee," replied Lemk. "But don't bother, I can manage."

"No bother." The steward stepped into the pantry and poured a cup.

"There is one other thing.

"sir?"

"The company has asked us to take part in a government sponsored meteorology study. When we're twenty-eight hundred kilometers out from London, I'm going to drop down to fifteen-hundred meters for about ten minutes while we record wind and temperature readings. Then return to our normal altitude."

"Hard to believe the company went along. I wish my bank account totaled what it will cost in lost fuel."

"You can bet those cheap bastards in top management will send a bill to Washington."

"I'll inform the passengers when the time comes so they won't be alarmed."

"You might also announce that if anyone spots any lights through the windows, they'll be coming from a fishing fleet."

"I'll see to it."

Lemk's eyes swept the main cabin, pausing for an instant on the sleeping form of Hala Kamil before moving on. "Did it strike you that security was unusually heavy?" Lemk asked conversationally.

"Of those reporting told me Scotland Yard caught wind of a plot to assassinate the SecretaryGeneral."

"They act as though there's a terrorist plot under every rock. I had to show my identification while they searched my flight bag."

The steward shrugged. "What the hell, it's for our protection as well as the passengers'."

Lemk motioned down the aisle. "At least none of them looks like a hijacker."

"Not unless they've taken to wearing three-piece suits."

"Just to be on the safe side, I'll keep the cockpit door locked. Call me on the intercom only if it's important."

"Will do."

Lemk took a sip of his coffee, set it aside and returned to the cockpit.

The first officer, his copilot, was gazing out the side window at the lights of Wales to the north, while behind him the engineer was occupied with computing fuel consumption.

Lemk turned his back to the others and slipped a small case from the breast pocket of his coat. He opened it and readied a syringe containing a highly lethal nerve agent called sarin. Then he faced his crew again and made a fumbling step as if losing his balance and grabbed the arm of the second officer for support.

"Sorry, Frank, I tripped on the carpet."

Frank Hartley wore a bushy mustache, had thin gray hair and a long, handsome face. He never felt the needle enter his shoulder. He looked up from the gauges and lights of his engineer's panel and laughed easily. "You're going to have to lay off the sauce, Dale."

"I can fly straight," Lemk replied good-naturedly. "It's walking that gives me a hard time."

Hartley opened his mouth as if to say something, but suddenly a blank expression crossed his face. He shook his head as if to clear his vision. Then his eyes rolled upward, and he went limp.

Leaning his body against Hartley so the engineer would not fall to one side, Lemk withdrew the syringe and quickly replaced it with another.

"I think something is wrong with Frank."

Jerry Oswald swung around in the copilot's seat. A big man with the pinched features of a desert prospector, he stared questioningly. "What ails him?"

"Better come take a look."

Oswald twisted his bulk past the seat and bent over Hartley. Lemk jabbed the needle and pushed the plunger, but Oswald felt the prick.

"What the hell was that?" he blurted, whirling around and gazing dumbly at the hypodermic needle in Lemk's hand. He was far heavier and more muscular than Hartley, and the toxin did not take effect immediately.

His eyes widened in sudden comprehension, and then he lurched forward, gripping Lemk by the neck.

"You're not Dale Lemk," he snarled. "Why are you made up to look like him?"

The man who called himself Lemk could not have answered if he wanted.

The great hands were choking the breath out of him. Crammed against a bulkhead by the immense weight of Oswald, he tried to gasp out the words of a lie, but no words could come. He rammed his knee into the engineer's groin. The only reaction was a short grunt. Blackness began to creep into the corners of his vision.

Then, slowly, the pressure was released and Oswald reeled backward. His eyes became terror-stricken as he realized he was dying. He looked at Lemk in confused hatred. With the few final beats left in his heart he swung his fist, landing a solid blow into Lemk's stomach.

Lemk drifted to his knees, dazed, the breath punched out of him. He watched as if looking through fog as Oswald fell against the pilot's seat and crashed to the cockpit floor. Lemk slid to a sitting position and rested for a minute, gasping for air, massaging the pain in his gut.

He rose awkwardly to his feet and listened for any curious voices coming from the other side of the door. The main cabin seemed quiet. None of the passengers or flight crew had heard anything unusual above the monotonous whine of the engines.

He was drenched in sweat by the time he manhandled Oswald into the copilot's seat and strapped him in. Hartley's safety belt was already fastened so Lemk ignored him. At last he settled behind the control column on the pilot's side of the cockpit and plotted the aircraft's position.

Forty-five minutes later, Lemk banked the plane from its scheduled flight path to New York onto a new heading, toward the frozen Arctic.

It is one of the most barren spots on the earth and one never seen or experienced by tourists. In the last hundred years, only a handful of explorers and scientists have trod its forbidding landscape. The sea along the rugged shore is frozen for all but a few weeks each year, and in the early fall temperatures hover around – 73 degrees the cold sides for the long winter months, and even in summer, dazzling sunshine can be replaced by an impenetrable gale in less than an hour.

Yet, shadowed by scarred mountains and swept by a constant wind, the magnificent desolation in the upper reaches of Ardencaple Fjord on the northeast coast of Greenland was inhabited nearly two thousand years ago by a band of hunters. Radiocarbon dating on excavated relics indicated the site was occupied from A.D. 200 to A.D. 400, a Short time span for the archaeological clock. But they left behind twenty dwellings which had been preserved by the frigid ice.

A prefabricated aluminum structure had been airlifted by helicopter and assembled over the ancient village by scientists from the University of Colorado. A balky heating arrangement and foam-glass insulation fought a lopsided battle against the cold, but at least denied entry to the never-ending wind moaning eerily around the outside walls. The shelter also enabled an archaeological team to work the site into the beginning stages of winter.

Lily Sharp, a professor of anthropology at Colorado, was oblivious to the cold that seeped into the covered village. She rested on her knees on the floor of a single-family dwelling, carefully scraping away the frozen earth with a small hand trowel. She was alone and lost in deep concentration as she probed the distant past belonging to the prehistoric people.

They were sea-mammal hunters who spent the harsh Arctic winters in dwellings dug partially into the ground, with low walls of rock and turf roofs often supported by whale bones. They entertained themselves with oil lamps, passing the long dark months carving miniature sculptures out of driftwood, ivory and antlers.

They had settled this part of Greenland during the first centuries after Christ. Then, inexplicably, at the height of their culture, they pulled up stakes and vanished, leaving behind a revealing cache of relics.

Lily's perseverance paid off. While the three men on the archaeology team relaxed after dinner in the hut that was their living quarters, she had returned to the protected settlement and continued to excavate, unearthing a length of caribou antler with twenty bearlike figures sculpted on its surface, a delicately carved woman's comb and a stone cooking pot.

Suddenly Lily's trowel clinked on something. She repeated the movement and listened carefully. Fascinated, she tapped again. It was not the familiar sound from the edge of the trowel striking a rock. Though a bit flat, it had a definite metallic ring to it.

She straightened and stretched her back. Strands of her dark red hair, long and thick, shining under the glare from the Coleman lantern, fell from under her heavy woolen cap. Her blue-green eyes mirrored skeptical curiosity as she gazed at the tiny speck protruding from the charcoal-black earth.

A prehistoric people lived here, she pondered. They never knew iron or bronze.

Lily tried to stay calm, but a feeling of astonishment crept over her.

Then excitement, followed by urgency. She missed the archaeologist's fussbudget passion for prudence. She scraped and dug furiously at the hard-crusted soil. Every few minutes she stopped and painstakingly brushed away the loose dirt with a small painter's brush.

At last the artifact lay fully exposed. She leaned over for a closer look, staring in awe as it glimmered yellow under the bright white from the Coleman lantern.

Lily had excavated a gold coin.

A very old one, by the look of the worn edges. There was a tiny hole and a piece of rotted leather thong on one side, suggesting that it had once been worn as a pendant or personal amulet She sat back and took a deep breath, almost wanting to reach down and touch it.

Five minutes later, Lily was still crouched there on her knees, her mind trying to create a solution, when abruptly the shelter's door opened and a large-bellied man with a blackwhiskered, kindly-looking face stepped in from the cold, accompanied by a swirl of snow. He exhaled clouds of steam as he breathed. His eyebrows and beard were matted with ice, which made him look like some frozen monster from a science-fiction movie until he broke into a great toothy smile.

it was Dr. Hiram Gronquist, the chief archaeologist of the four-person dig.

"Sorry to interrupt, Lily," he said in his soft, deep voice, "but you've been pushing too hard. Take a break. Come back to the hut, warm up and let me pour you a good stiff brandy."

"Hiram," said Lily, doing her best to stifle the excitement in her voice, "I want you to see something."

Gronquist moved closer and knelt down beside her. "What have you found?"

"See for yourself."

Gronquist fumbled for his reading glasses inside his parka and slid them over his red nose. He bent over the coin until his face was only inches away and studied it from every angle. After several moments, he looked up at Lily, an amused twinkle in his eyes.

"You putting me on, lady?"

Lily looked at him sternly, then relaxed and laughed. "Oh, my God, you think I salted it?"

"You've got to admit, it's like finding a virgin in a bor dello."

"Cute."

He gave her a friendly pat on one knee. "Congratulations, this is a rare discovery."

"How do you suppose it got here?"

"There isn't a workable gold deposit within a thousand miles, and it certainly wasn't minted by the early inhabitants. Their level of development was only a notch above Stone Age. The coin obviously came from another source at a later date. "

"How do you explain the fact it was buried with artifacts we've dated within a century either side Of A.D. 300?"

Gronquist shrugged. "I can't."

"What's your best guess?" asked Lily.

"Off the top of my head, I'd say the coin was probably traded or lost by a Viking."

"There is no record of Vikings sailing this far north along the East Coast," said Lily.

"Okay, maybe Eskimos from a more recent time frame traded goods with the Norse settlements to the south and used this site to camp during hunting expeditions."

"You know better, Hiram. We've found no evidence of habitation after A.D. four hundred."

Gronquist gave Lily a scolding look. "You never give in, do you? We don't even have a date on the coin."

"Mike Graham is an expert on ancient coins. One of his specialties is dating sites around the Mediterranean. He might identify it."

"Won't cost us a nickel for an appraisal," said Gronquist agreeably.

"Come along. Mike can examine it while we have that brandy."

Lily donned her heavy fur-lined gloves, adjusted the hood of her parka and turned down the Coleman. Gronquist switched on a flashlight and held the door open for her. She stepped into the agony of the numbing cold and wind that groaned like a ghost in a churchyard. The freezing air struck her exposed cheeks and made her shudder, a reaction that always seemed to sneak up on her even though she should have been quite used to it by now.

She grasped the rope that led to the living quarters and groped along behind the protecting bulk of Gronquist. She stole a glance upward. The sky was unclouded and the stars seemed to melt into one vast carpet of shimmering diamonds illustrating the barren mountains to the west and the sheet of ice that ran down the fjord to sea in the east. The strange beauty of the Arctic was a compelling mistress, Lily decided.

She could understand why men lost their souls to its spell.

After a thirty-yard hike through the dark, they entered the storm corridor of their hut, walked another ten feet and opened a second door to the living quarters inside. To Lily, after the abominable cold outside, it was like stepping inside a furnace. The aroma of coffee caressed her nostrils like perfume and she immediately pulled off her parka and gloves and poured herself a cup.

Sam Hoskins, neck-length blond hair matching an enormous blond handlebar mustache, was hunched over a drafting board. A New York architect with a love for archaeology, Hoskins allowed two months a year out of his busy schedule to rough it on digs around the world. He provided invaluable assistance by rendering detailed drawings of how the prehistoric village might have looked seventeen hundred years ago.

The other team member, a light-skinned man with thinning sandy hair, reclined on a cot, reading a dog-eared paperback novel. Lily couldn't remember seeing Mike Graham without an adventure book in one hand or stuffed in a coat pocket. One of the leading field archaeologists in the country, Graham was as laid back as a mortician.

"Hey, Mike!" Gronquist boomed. "Take a look at what Lily dug up."

He flipped the coin across the room. Lily gasped in shock, but Graham expertly snatched it out of the air and peered at the face.

After a moment he looked up, his eyes narrowed doubtfully. "You're putting me on."

Gronquist laughed heartily. "My exact words when I laid eyes on it. No gag. She excavated it at site eight."

Graham pulled a briefcase from under his cot and retrieved a magnifying glass. He held the coin under the lens, examining it from every angle.

"Well, what's the verdict?" Lily asked impatiently.

"Incredible," murmured Graham, captivated. "A Gold Miliarensia. About thirteen and a half grams. I've never seen one before. They're quite rare. A collector would -probably pay between six and eight thousand dollars for it."

"Who is the likeness on the face?"

"A standing figure of Theodosius the Great, Emperor of the Roman and Byzantine Empires. His position is a common motif found on the face of coins from that era. if you look closely, you can make out captives at his feet while his hands hold a globe and a labarum."

"A labarum?"

"Yes, a banner bearing the Greek letters XP and forming a kind of monogram meaning the the name of Christ." The Emperor Constantine adopted it after his conversion to Christianity and it was handed down through his successors."

"What do you make of the lettering on the reverse?" asked Gronquist.

Graham's eyeball enlarged out of proportion through the glass as he studied the coin. "Three words. First one looks like TRIVMFATOR. Can't make out the other two. They're nearly worn smooth. A collector's catalogue should give a description and Latin translation. I'll have to wait until we return to civilization before I can look them up."

"Can you date it?"

Graham stared at the ceiling thoughtfully. "Coined during the reign of Theodosius, which, if I remember correctly, was from A.D. 379 to 395."

Lily stared at Gronquist– "Right in the ballpark."

He shook his head. "Sheer fantasy, to suggest fourth-century Eskimos had contact with the Roman Empire."

"We can't rule out the infinity of chance," Lily persisted.

"Once this gets out, there will be a flood of speculation and hype by the news media," said Hoskins, inspecting the coin for the first time.

Gronquist took a swallow of his brandy. "Ancient coinage has turned up in odd places before. But the date and source of its deposit could rarely be proven to the full satisfaction of the archaeologists'

community."

"Perhaps," said Graham slowly. "But I'd give my Mercedes convertible to know how it turned up here."

They all gazed at the coin for a few moments without speaking, each lost in their own thoughts.

Finally Gronquist broke the silence. "It seems the only thing we know for certain is that we have a real mystery on our hands.

Shortly before midnight, the imposter began his practiced drill to abandon the jetliner. The air was sparkling clear and the dim smudge that was Iceland rose above the flat, black horizon line of the sea. The small island country was outlined by a faint but eerie display of greenish rays from the Aurora Borealis.

He was oblivious to the dead men around him. He had grown used to the smell of blood and it no longer sickened him. Death and gore simply went with the job. He was as indifferent to mutilated bodies as a pathologist or the neighborhood butcher.

The imposter was quite clinical about killing. Numbers of dead were merely mathematical sums. He was paid well; he was a mercenary, as well as a religious fanatic who murdered for a cause. Oddly, the only part of his work that offended him was being called an assassin or a terrorist. He detested the words. They had a political ring about them, and he nurtured a passionate dislike for politicians.

He was a man of a thousand identities, a perfectionist who rejected random gunfire in crowds or sloppy car bombs, considering them tools for juvenile idiots. His methods were far more subtle. He never left anything to chance. International investigators found it difficult to separate many of his hits from what appeared to be accidents.

The death of Hala Kamil was more than an assigned task. He considered it a duty. His elaborate plan had taken five months to perfect, followed by the patient wait for the opportune moment.

Almost a waste, he mused. Kamil was a beautiful woman. But she was a threat that had to be nullified.

He gently eased back on the throttles and nudged the control column forward, beginning a shallow rate of descent. To anyone but another pilot the slight drop in speed and altitude was imperceptible.

The main cabin crew had not troubled him. By now the passengers were dozing, attempting but failing to fall into the deep sleep so elusive on long aircraft flights.

for the twentieth time he re-checked his heading and studied the computer he had reprogrammed to indicate the time and distance to his drop zone.