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"What in God's name caused this calamity?" Dempsey asked no one in particular.
Pitt made a vague gesture with his hands "The familiar causes for extermination of life in and around the sea do not fit this puzzle. Natural problems generally responsible for huge fish kills around the world, like fluctuations in temperatures of surface water or algal blooms such as red tides, do not apply here. Neither is present."
"That leaves man-made pollution."
"A possibility that also fails to measure up," Pitt argued. There are no known industrial sources for toxic pollution within thousands of kilometers. And no radioactive and chemical wastes could have killed every penguin in such a short time span, certainly not those that were safely nesting on land clear of the water. I fear we have a threat no one has faced before."
Giordino pulled a massive cigar from the inside pocket of his jacket. The cigar was one of Admiral Sandecker's private stock, made expressly for his private enjoyment. And Giordino's too, since it was never discovered how he had helped himself to the admiral's private stock for over a decade without ever getting caught. He held a flame to the thick dark brown shaft of tobacco and puffed out a cloud of fragrant smoke.
"Okay," he said, enjoying the taste. "What's the drill?"
Dempsey wrinkled his nose at the cigar's aroma. "I've contacted officials of Ruppert & Saunders, the line that owns Polar Queen, and apprised them of the situation. They lost no time in initiating a massive air search. They've requested that we transport the survivors of the shore excursion to King George Island, where a British scientific station has an airfield. From there arrangements will be made to airlift them back to Australia."
"Before or after we look for Polar Queen?" Giordino put to him.
"The living come first," Dempsey replied seriously. As captain of the ship, the decisions belonged to him. "You two probe the coastline in your helicopter while I steer the Hunter on a course toward King George Island. After our passengers are safely ashore, we'll make a sweep for the cruise ship."
Giordino grinned. "By then, the Weddell Sea will be swarming with every salvage tug from here to Capetown, South Africa."
"Not our problem," said Dempsey. "NUMA isn't in the ship salvage business."
Pitt had tuned out of the conversation and walked over to a table where a large chart of the Weddell Sea was laid flat. He ignored any inclination to work by instinct and drove himself to think rationally, with his brain and not his gut. He tried to put himself onboard the Polar Queen when she was struck by the murdering scourge. Giordino and Dempsey went quiet as they stared at him expectantly.
After nearly a minute, he looked up from the chart and smiled. "Once we program the relevant data into the teleplotting analyzer, it should give us a ballpark location with a fighting chance for success."
"So what do we feed into the brain box?" Dempsey's term for any piece of electronics relating to the ship's computer systems.
"Every scrap of data on wind and currents from the last three and a half days, and their effects against a mass the size of Polar Queen. Once we calculate a drift pattern, we can tackle the problem of whether she continued making way with a dead crew at the helm, and in what direction."
"Suppose that instead of steaming around in circles, as you suggested, her rudder was set on a straight course?"
"Then she might be fifteen hundred kilometers away, somewhere in the middle of the South Atlantic and out of range of the satellite imaging system."
Giordino put it to Pitt. "But you don't think so."
"No," Pitt said quietly. "If the ice and snow covering this ship after the storm is any indication, Polar Queen has enough of the stuff coating her superstructure to make her nearly invisible to the satellite imaging system."
"Enough to camouflage her as an iceberg?" asked Dempsey.
"More like a snow-blanketed projection of land."
Dempsey looked confused. "You've lost me."
"I'll bet my government pension," said Pitt with cast-iron conviction, "we'll find the Polar Queen hard aground somewhere along the shore of the peninsula or beached on one of the outlying islands."
Pitt and Giordino took off at four o'clock in the morning, when most of the crew of lee Hunter were still sleeping. The weather had returned to milder temperatures, calm seas and crystal-clear blue skies, with a light five-knot wind out of the southwest. With Pitt at the controls, they headed toward the old whaling station before swinging north in search of the second group of excursionists from Polar Queen.
Pitt could not help feeling a deep sense of sadness as they flew over the rookery's killing ground. The shore as far as the horizon seemed carpeted with the bodies of the comical little birds. The Addlie penguins were very territorial, and birds from other rookeries around the Antarctic Peninsula were not likely to immigrate to this particular breeding ground. The few survivors who might have escaped the terrible scourge would require twenty years or more to replenish the once numerous population of Seymour Island. Fortunately, the massive loss was not enough to critically endanger the species.
As the last of the dead birds flashed under the helicopter, Pitt leveled out at fifty meters and flew above the waterline, staring out the windscreen for any sign of the excursionists' landing site. Giordino gazed out his side window, scanning the open-water pack ice for any glimpse of Polar Queen, occasionally making a mark on a folded chart that lay across his lap.
"If I had a dime," Giordino muttered, "for every iceberg on the Weddell Sea, I could buy General Motors."
Pitt glanced past Giordino out the starboard side of the aircraft at a great labyrinth of frozen masses calved from the Larsen Ice Shelf and driven northwest by the wind and current into warmer water, where they split and broke up into thousands of smaller bergs. Three of them were as big as small countries.
Some measured three hundred meters thick and rose as high as three-story buildings from just the water surface. All were dazzling white with hues of blue and green. The ice of these drifting mountains had formed from compacted snow in the ancient past, before breaking loose and plowing relentlessly over the centuries toward the sea and their slow but eventual meltdown.
"I do believe you could pick up Ford and Chrysler too."
