Treasure (Dirk Pitt 9)

"Pure madness," Rivas said desperately. "The President will never listen to such absurd demands."

"He will not believe what I say?"

"No sane man would."

Rivas in his uneasiness had stepped too far.

Topiltzin slowly rose to his feet, eyes unblinking, head lowered, and spoke in a toneless voice. "Then I must send him a message he will understand."

He raised his hands over his head, arms outstretched toward the dark sky. As if on cue four Indians appeared wearing white capes clasped at the neck and nothing else. Approaching from all sides, they quickly subdued Rivas, who froze in astonishment. They carried him to the stone altar sculpted with the skulls and crossbones and threw him on his back, holding him down by the arms and legs.

At first Rivas was too dazed to protest, too incredulous with shock to comprehend Topiltzin's intention. When horrorstruck realization came, he cried out.

"Oh, God! No! No!"

Topiltzin coldly ignored the terrified American, the pitiful fright in his eyes, and stepped to the side of the altar. He gave a nod, and one of the men ripped away Rivas's shirt, exposing the chest.

"Don't do this!" Rivas pleaded.

A razor-sharp obsidian knife seemed to materialize in Topiltzin's upraised left hand. The moonlight glinted from the black, glassy blade as it hung poised.

Rivas screamed-the last sound he would ever make.

Then the knife plunged.

The tall column-statues looked down upon the bloody act with stone-cold indifference. They had witnessed the horrible disPlay of inhuman cruelty thousands of times, a thousand years ago. There was no pity in their timeworn chiseled eyes as Rivas's still-beating heart was torn from his chest.

Despite the people and activity around him, Pitt was captivated by the dense silence of the cold north. There was an incredible stillness about it that seemed to overwhelm the voices and sounds of machinery. He felt as though he were standing in numbing solitude inside a refrigerator on a desolate world.

Daylight finally appeared, filtered by a peculiar gray mist that permitted no shadows. By midmorning the sun began to burn away the icy haze and the sky turned a soft orange-white. The ethereal light made the rocky peaks overlooking the fjord look like tombstones in a snow-covered cemetery.

The scene surrounding the crash site was beginning to resemble a military invasion. A fleet of five Air Force helicopters had been the first to arrive, ferrying an Army Special Service Force of heavily armed and determined-looking men who immediately cordoned off the fuselage and began patrolling the entire area. An hour later, Federal Aviation accident investigators landed and set about marking the scattered wreckage for removal. They were followed by a team of pathologists who tagged and removed the bodies to the helicopters, which quickly airlifted them to the morgue at Tule Air Force Base.

The Navy was represented by Commander Knight and the unexpected appearance of the Polar Explorer. All halted their grisly chores and turned their eyes toward the sea as a series of loud whoops from the ship's siren echoed -off the jagged mountains.

Dodging newly-formed ice calves, floating low and opaque, and the winter's first bergs, which resembled the ruins of Gothic castles, the Polar Explorer came about slowly and entered the mouth of the fjord. for a time the ash-blue sea hissed quietly past the scarred, and then it turned to white.

The immense prow of the icebreaker effortlessly bulldozed a path through the ice pack, heaving to less than fifty meters from the wreckage.

Knight stopped engines, climbed down a ladder to the ice and graciously offered the facilities of the ship to the security and investigation teams as a command post-an offer that was thankfully accepted w

ithout a second's hesitation.

Pitt was impressed with the security. The news blackout had not yet been penetrated: the story given out at Kennedy Airport revealed only that the U.N. flight was overdue. It was only a matter of another hour before a shrewd correspondent got wise and blew the whistle.

"I think my eyeballs just froze to their lids," Giordino said gloomily.

He was sitting in the pilot's seat of the NUMA helicopter, trying to drink a cup of coffee before it froze. ,Must be colder than a Minnesota dairy cow's tit in January."

Pitt gave his friend a dubious look. "How would you know?

You haven't been outside your heated cockpit all night."

"I get frostbite by looking at an ice cube in a glass of Scotch." Giordino held up one hand, five fingers an all spread.

"Look at that. I'm so stiff with cold I can't make a fist."

Pitt happened to glance out the side window and spotted Commander Knight trudging over the ice from the ship. He walked back to the cabin and opened the cargo door when Knight reached the boarding ladder. Giordino moaned in self-pity as his precious heat escaped and a frigid breeze engulfed the interior of the chopper.