Treasure (Dirk Pitt 9)

As he stared he heard a deadened bass drumlike sound. It reminded the Senator of the rumble from a minor earthquake.

He stepped back abruptly, reeling at the implication of what he'd discovered.

Hala saw him stiffen. "What is it?" she asked anxiously.

What did you see?"

He turned and looked at her blankly, his mouth working until words finally formed ' "They've anchored us against a huge glacier," he said finally. "The ice wall can break away at any time and crush the ship like paper."

Twenty thousand meters above the Antarctic peninsula, the delta-wing reconnaissance plane slipped through the rarefied air at 3,200

kilometers per hour. She was designed to fly twice that altitude at twice the speed, but her pilot held her at 40 percent throttle to conserve fuel and give the cameras a chance to sharpen earth images under the slower speed.

Unlike her ancestor, the SR-71 "blackbird," whose natural titanium wings and fuselage wore the color of deep indigo, the ,,stealth" technology of the more advanced SR-90 created an incredibly tough, lightweight plastic skin that was tinted graywhite. Nicknamed "the Casper" after the cartoon ghost, she was almost as impossible to detect by eye as she was by radar.

Her five cameras could capture half the length of the United States in one hour with only one pass. Her photographic package filmed in black-and-white, color, infrared, three-dimensional, and a few imagery techniques that were highly classified and totally unknown to commercial photographers Lieutenant Colonel James Slade had little to do. It was a long, boring reconnaissance from his base in California's Mojave Desert.

The only time he took manual control in flight was during refueling operations. The Casper's engines had a heavy thirst. She had to be refueled twice on each leg of the flight by aerial tankers.

Slade examined the instruments with a critical eye. The Casper was a new plane, and she had yet to reveal all her bugs. Thankful to find normal readings across the board, he sighed and pulled a miniature electronic game from a pocket of his flight suit. He began pressing the buttons below a small viewing window, trying to get a tiny diver past a giant octopus to reach a treasure chest.

After a few minutes he tired of the game and gazed ahead and down at the frozen isolation that was Antarctica. Far below, the curved, beckoning finger of the northern peninsula and its adjoining islands sparkled under a diamond-clear sky.

The ice and rock and sea created a beautiful vastness, awesome to the eye, intimidating to the soul. The sight may have looked appealing from twenty kilometers overhead, but Slade knew better. He'd once flown supplies to a scientific station at the South Pole and quickly learned the beauty and the hostility in the permanent domain of cold went hand in hand.

He well remembered the chilling temperatures. He didn't believe it possible to spit and see the saliva freeze before it hit the ground. And he never forgot the ferocious winds that scourge the coldest of all continents. The 160-kilometer gusts were unimaginable until he experienced them for the first time.

Slade could never fathom why some men were so attracted to that frozen hell. He had a facetious urge to call a travel agent after he returned to base and inquire about reservations at a good resort hotel close to the polar center.

Suddenly a female voice spoke over one of the three cockpit speakers.

"Attention, please. You are about to cross the outer limit of your flight path where seventy degrees longitude and seventy degrees latitude intersect. Disengage auto pilot and come around a hundred and eighty degrees beginning . . . now. The new heading for your return is programmed into the computer. Please enter the appropriate code. Have a good trip home."

Slade followed the instructions and made a lazy Turn. As soon as the computer locked on the return heading he went back on auto pilot and shifted to a more comfortable position in his cramped seat.

Like so many other men who flew reconnaissance missions, he fantasized about the face and body that went with the embodied voice. Rumor had it she weighed two-hundred pounds, was sixty years old and a grandmother twelve times. No pilot with a sound imagination could believe such a myt."shattering thought. She had to look like Sigourney Weaver. Maybe it was Sigoumey Weaver. He decided to explore the tantalizing possibility on his return home.

That delicate problem solved, Slade re-checked his instrument panel and then relaxed while the icebound land drifted away behind his tail. Over the sea again, he returned to his little electronic treasure game.

He saw little purpose in continuing to watch the world roll by, especially since Tierra del Fuego was covered by thick blankets of charcoal clouds. He'd studied enough geography to know it was a wretched land of constant wind, rain and snow.

Slade was almost thankful he couldn't see the monotonous landscape. He left it to Casper's infrared camera to penetrate the dark overcast and record the desolate, dead end of the continent.

Captain Collins stared into Ammar's mask and had to force himself not to avert his gaze. There was something evil, something inhuman in the eyes of the urbane leader of the hijackers. Collins could sense a chilling unconcern for mere human life about the man.

"I demand to know when you're going to release my ship," said Collins in a precise tone.

Arnmar set a cup of tea on a saucer, patted his lips with a table napkin and looked at Collins detachedly.

"Can I offer you some tea?"

"Not unless you offer it to my passengers and crew as well," Collins replied dryily. He stood erect in his summer white uniform, bitterly cold and shivering.

"The very answer I expected." Ammar turned the empty cup upside down and leaned back. "You'll be happy to know my men and I expect to leave sometime tomorrow evening. If you give me your word there will be no foolish attempt to retake the ship or escape to the nearby shore before we depart, no one will be harmed and you can resume command."

"I'd rather you heat the ship and feed everyone now. We're desperately short of warm clothing and blankets to ward off the cold. No one has eaten in days. The pipes have frozen, blocking all water. And I don't have to mention the sanitation problems. "

"Suffering is good for the soul," Animar said philosophically.