"Let me have a look." Graham pried away the hands and unzipped the front of Hoskins's jumpsuit. He took a flashlight from a pocket and pushed the switch. He could not suppress a smile. "Your wife will need another excuse to dump you. There's no sign of blood. Your sex life is secure."
"Where's Lily . . . and Gronquist?" Hoskins asked haltingly.
"About two hundred meters back. We've got to make our way around the ice opening and check out their situation."
Hoskins rose painfully to his feet and hobbled to the edge of the ice break. Amazingly, the snowmobile's headlamp was still burning, its dim glow playing on the bottom of the flord while backlighting the bubbles that traveled up six meters to the surface. Graham walked over and peered down. Then they looked at each other.
"As lifesavers," said Hoskins dejectedly, "we'd better stick with archaeology-"
"Quiet!" Graham snapped suddenly. He cupped his mittens to his ears and turned from side to side like a radar dish. Then he stopped and pointed excitedly at flashing lights in the distance. "Hot damn!" he shouted.
"There's a helicopter coming up the fjord."
Lily floated in and out of reality.
She could not understand why it became increasingly difficult for her to think straight. She lifted her head and looked around for Gronquist. He lay unmoving several meters away. She shouted, desperately trying to get a response, but he lay as though dead. She gave up and gradually entered a halfdream world as her legs lost all sensation of feeling.
Only when she began to shiver did Lily realize she was in a mild state of shock.
She was certain Graham and Hoskins would return any moment, but the moments soon grew into painful minutes, and they did not show. She felt very tired and was about to gratefully slip away into sleep when she heard a strange thumping sound approaching from overhead. Then a dazzling light cut the dark sky and blinded her eyes. Loose snow was kicked up by a sudden windstorm and swept around her. The thumping sound died in intensity and a vague figure, encircled by the light, came toward her.
The figure became a man in a heavy fur parka who immediately summed up the situation, took a strong - grip on the snowmobile and heaved it off her legs to an upright position.
He walked around her until the light illuminated his face. Lily's eyes weren't focusing as they should but they stared into a pair of sparkling green eyes that took her breath away. They seemed to reflect hardness, gentleness and sincere concern in one glinting montage. They narrowed a fraction when he saw that she was a woman. She wondered dizzily where he came from.
Lily couldn't think of anything to say except, "Oh, am I ever glad to see you."
"Name's Dirk Pitt," answered a warm voice. "If you're not busy, why don't you have dinner with me tomorrow night?"
Lily looked up at Pitt, trying to read him, not sure she had heard him correctly. "I may not be up to it."
He pushed back the hood of his parka and ran his hands up and down her legs. He gently squeezed her ankles. "No apparent breaks or swelling,"
he said in a friendly voice. "Are you in pain?"
"I'm too cold to hurt."
Pitt retrieved a pair of blankets that had been pitched from the sled d you get here?"
he asked her.
"I'm one of a team of archaeologists doing an excavation on an ancient Eskimo village. We heard the plane come up the fjord and ran out of our hut in time to see it land on the ice. We were heading for the crash site with blankets and medical supplies when we . . ." Lily's words became vague and she weakly gestured
toward the overturned sled.
"We?"
In the light from the helicopter Pitt quickly read the accident in the snow coating the ice: the straight trail of the snowmobile, the abrupt swerve around the severed aircraft wing, the sharp cuts made by the runners of the out-of-control sledonly then did he glimpse another human form lying nearly ten meters beyond the wing.
"Hold on."
Pitt walked over and knelt down beside Gronquist. The big archaeologist was breathing evenly. Pitt gave him a cursory examination.
Lily watched for a few moments, and then asked anxiously, "Is he dead?"
"Hardly. A nasty contusion on his forehead. Concussion, most likely.
Possible fracture, but I doubt it. He has a head like a bank vault."