"I hope you're wrong, my friend, because a lot of people are going to be very unhappy if we fail."
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 lands