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Sandecker switched on the phone and spoke into it again. "This is Sandecker."
"Admiral?" came the familiar voice of his longtime secretary, Martha Sherman. Her normally formal tone was nervous with excitement. "Please stand by. I'm going to relay a call to you."
"Is it important?" he asked irritably. "I'm not in the mood for official business."
"Believe me, you'll want to take this call," she informed him happily. "One moment while I switch you over."
A pause, then, "Hello," said Sandecker. "Who's this?"
"Good morning from Down Under, Admiral. What's this about you dawdling around blue Hawaii?"
Sandecker was not the kind of man to tremble, but he trembled now and felt as if the deck had fallen from under his feet. "Dirk, good Lord, is it you?"
"What's left of me," Pitt replied. "I'm with AI and Maeve Fletcher."
"I can't believe you're all alive," Sandecker said as if an electrical surge was coursing through his veins.
"AI said to save him a cigar."
"How is the little devil?"
"Testy because I won't let him eat."
"When we learned that you were cast adrift by Arthur Dorsett in the path of a typhoon, I moved heaven and earth to launch a massive search, but the long arm of Dorsett frustrated my rescue efforts.
After almost three weeks with no word, we thought you were all dead. Tell me how you survived all this time."
"A long story," said Pitt. "I'd rather you brought me up-to-date on the acoustic plague."
"A story far more involved than yours. I'll give you the particulars when we meet. Where are the three of you now?"
"We managed to reach Gladiator Island. I'm sitting in Arthur Dorsett's study as we speak, borrowing his telephone."
Sandecker went numb with disbelief. "You can't be serious."
"The gospel truth. We're going to snatch Maeve's twin boys and make our getaway across the Tasman Sea to Australia." He said it in such a way as to sound like he was walking down the street to buy a loaf of bread.
Cold fear replaced Sandecker's earlier anxiety, but it was the shocking fear of helplessness. The news struck with such unexpectedness, such suddenness, that he was incapable of words for several seconds until Pitt's inquiring voice finally penetrated his shock.
"Are you still there, Admiral?"
"Pitt, listen to me!" demanded Sandecker urgently. "Your lives are in extreme danger! Get off the island!' Get off now!"
There was a slight pause. "Sorry, sir, I don't read you--"
"I've no time to explain," Sandecker interrupted. "All I can tell you is a sound ray of incredible intensity will strike Gladiator Island in less than twenty minutes. The impact will set up seismic resonance that is predicted to blow off the volcanoes on opposite ends of the island. If the eruption takes place on the western side, there will be no survivors. You and the others must escape to sea while you still can. Talk no further. I am cutting off all communications."
Sandecker switched off his phone, capable of nothing but the realization that he had unknowingly and innocently sealed a death warrant on his best friend.
The shocking knowledge struck Pitt like the thrust of a dagger. He stared through a large picture window at the helicopter sitting on the yacht moored to the pier in the lagoon. He estimated the distance at just under a kilometer. Burdened by two young children, he figured they would need a good fifteen minutes to reach the dock. Without means of transportation, a car or a truck, it would be an extremely close timetable. The time for caution had flown as if there had never been such a time. Giordino and Maeve should have found her sons by now. They had to have found them. If not, something must have gone terribly wrong.
He turned his gaze first toward Mount Winkleman, and then swept the saddle of the island, his eyes stopping on Mount Scaggs. They looked deceptively peaceful. Seeing the lush growth of trees in the ravines scoring the slopes, he found it hard to imagine the two mounts as menacing volcanoes, sleeping giants on the verge of spewing death and disaster in a burst of gaseous steam and molten rock.
Briskly, but not in a hurried panic, he rose out of Dorsett's leather executive chair and came around the desk. At that instant, he halted abruptly, frozen in
the exact center of the room as the double doors to the main interior of the house swung open, and Arthur Dorsett walked in.
He was carrying a cup of coffee in one hand and a file of papers under an arm. He wore wrinkled slacks and what had once been white but was now a yellowed dress shirt with a bow tie. His mind seemed elsewhere. Perceiving another body in his study, he looked up, more curious than surprised.
