By the time Van Fleet had capped his specimen jar and placed it in a wooden crate, Pitt had thrown open the entry hatch and helped Maeve Fletcher climb inside.
She pushed back the hood on her orange jacket, fluffed out her long golden hair and smiled brightly.
"Greetings, gentlemen. You don't know how happy I am to see you."
Van Fleet looked as if he had seen the Resurrection. His face registered total incomprehension.
Giordino, on the other hand, simply sighed in resignation. "Who else." he asked no one in particular,
"but Dirk Pitt could tramp off into a blizzard on an uninhabited backwater island in the Antarctic and discover a beautiful girl?"
Less than an hour after Pitt alerted the NUMA research vessel Ice Hunter, Captain Paul Dempsey braved an icy breeze and watched as Giordino hovered the helicopter above the ship's landing pad.
Except for the ship's cook busily preparing hot meals in the galley, and the chief engineer, who remained below, the entire crew, including lab technicians and scientists, had turned out to greet the first group of cold and hungry tourists to be airlifted from Seymour Island.
Captain Dempsey had grown up on a ranch in the Beartooth Mountains astride the Wyoming-Montana border. He ran away to sea after graduating from high school and worked the fishing boats out of Kodiak, Alaska. He fell in love with the icy seas above the Arctic Circle and eventually passed the examination to become captain of an icebreaking salvage tug. No matter how high the seas or how strong the wind, Dempsey never hesitated to take on the worst storms the Gulf of Alaska could throw al him after he'd received a call from a ship in distress, During the next fifteen years, his daring rescues of innumerable fishing boats, six coastal freighters, two oil tankers and a Navy destroyer created a legend that resulted in a bronze statue beside the dock at Seward, a source of great embarrassment to him. Forced into retirement when the oceangoing salvage company became debt ridden, he accepted an offer from the chief director of NUMA, Admiral James Sandecker, to captain the agency's polar research ship, Ice Hunger.
Dempsey's trademark, a chipped briar pipe, jutted from one corner of his tight but good-humored mouth. He was a typical tugman, broad shouldered and thick waisted, habitually standing with legs wide set, yet he presented a distinguished appearance. Gray haired, clean shaven, a man given to telling good sea stories, Dempsey might have been taken for a jovial captain of a cruise ship.
He stepped forward as the wheels of the chopper settled onto the deck. Beside him stood the ship's physician, Dr. Mose Greenberg. Tall and slender, he wore his dark brown hair in a ponytail. His blue-green eyes twinkled, and he had about him that certain indefinable air of trustworthiness common to all conscientious, dedicated doctors around the world.
Dr. Greenberg, along with four crewmen bearing stretchers for any of the elderly passengers who found it difficult to walk on their own, ducked under the revolving rotor blades and opened the rear cargo door. Dempsey moved toward the cockpit and motioned to Giordino to open the side window. The stocky Italian obliged and leaned out.
"Is Pitt with you?" asked Dempsey loudly above the swoosh of the blades.
Giordino shook his head. "He and Van Fleet stayed behind to examine a pack of dead penguins."
"How many of the cruise ship's passengers were you able to carry?"
"We squeezed in six of the oldest ladies who had suffered the most. Four more trips ought to do it.
Three to transport the remaining tourists and one to bring out Pitt, Van Fleet, the guide and the three dead bodies they stashed in an old whalers' rendering shed."
Dempsey motioned into the miserable mixture of snow and sleet. "Can you find your way back in this soup?"
"I plan to beam in on Pitt's portable communicator."
"How bad off are these people?"
"Better than you might expect for senior citizens who've suffered three days and nights in a frigid cave, Pitt said to tell Dr. Greenberg that pneumonia will be his main worry. The bitter cold has sapped the older folk's energy, and in their weakened condition, their resistance is real low."
"Do they have any idea what happened to their cruise ship?" asked Dempsey.
Before they went ashore, their excursion guide was told by the first officer that the ship was heading twenty kilometers up the coast to put off another group of excursionists. That's all she knows. The ship never contacted her again after it sailed off."
Dempsey reached up and lightly slapped Giordino on the arm. "Hurry back and mind you don't get your feet wet." Then he moved around to the cargo door and introduced himself to the tired and cold passengers from the Polar Queen as they exited the aircraft.
He tucked a blanket around the eighty-three-year-old woman, who was being lifted to the deck on a stretcher, "Welcome aboard," he said with a warm smile. "We have hot soup and coffee and a soft bed waiting for you in our officers' quarters."
"If it's all the same to you," she said sweetly, "I'd prefer tea."
"Your wish is my command, dear lady," Dempsey said gallantly. "Tea it is."
"Bless you, Captain," she replied, squeezing his hand, As soon as the last passenger had been helped across the helicopter pad, Dempsey waved off Giordino, who immediately lifted the craft into the air. Dempsey watched until the turquoise craft dissolved and vanished into the white blanket of sleet.
He relit the ever-present pipe and tarried alone on the helicopter pad after the others had hurried back into the comfort of the ship's superstructure to get out of the cold. He had not counted on a mission of mercy, certainly not one of this kind. Ships in distress on ferocious seas he could understand. But ship's captains who abandoned their p
assengers on a deserted island under incredibly harsh conditions he could not fathom.