Iceberg (Dirk Pitt 3)

Pitt could barely make out the words. The voice wasn't from Tidi's lips, that much he was certain; the tone was too deep, too masculine.

"They worked him over pretty thoroughly," said the unidentified voice. "Better he'd died without rezonaining consciousness.

Judging from the looks of things, none of us will live to see-"

"He'll make it." It was Tidi again. "He's got to he's just got to. Dirk is our only hope."

74

"Hope . . . Hope?" Pitt whispered. "Dated a girl named Hope once."

The agony in his side stabbed and twisted like white-hot iron, but strangely his face felt nothing; the tortured flesh was numb. Then he knew why, knew why he saw only shadows. His sight, or at least thirty percent of it, returned as Tidi lifted a piece of thin damp fabric, the nylon of her pantyhose, from his face. Pitts torn and swollen features felt nothing because Tidi had been constantly soaking the cuts and bruises in ice water from a nearby mud puddle to relieve the intense swelling.

The mere fact that Pitt could see anything at all through the tiny slits around his bloated eyes attested to her successful efforts.

Pitt focused his eyes with difficulty. Tidi was gazing down at him, her long fawn-colored hair framing a pale and anxious face. Then the other voice spoke and the tone was no longer strange.

"Did you get the license number of the truck, Major: Or was it a bulldozer that mashed your already ugly profile?"

Pitt turned his head and looked into the smiling, but tight-muscled face of Jerome P. Lillie. "Would you believe a giant with muscles like tree trunks?"

"I suppose," Lillie said expectantly, "your next words will be-if you think I look bad, you should see the other guy."

"You'd be disappointed. I didn't lay so much as a fingertip on him."

"You didn't fight back?"

"I didn't fight back."

Lillie showed pure astonishment. "You stood there and took . . . took this terrible beating and did nothing?"

"Oh, will you two shut up!" Tidi's voice held a mixture of irritation and distress. "If any of us are to survive, we must get Dirk on his feet. We can't just sit here and gossip."

Pitt pulled himself to a sitting position and gazed in agony through a red haze of pain as his broken rib cried in protest. The unthinking sudden movement made his side feel as if someone had squeezed his chest between a giant pair of pliers and twisted. Carefully, gently, he eased himself forward until he could see around him.

The sight that met his eyes looked like something out of a nightmare. For a long moment he stared at the unreal scene and then at Tidi and Lillie, his face a study of bewildered incomprehension. Then a shred of understanding crept into his head and with it some certainty of where he was. He reached out a hand to steady himself and muttered to no one in particular.

"My God, it's not possible."

For maybe ten seconds, maybe twenty, in one of those silences they refer to as pregnant, Pitt sat there, as still and unmoving as a dead man, staring at the broken helicopter a scant ten yards away. The jagged remains of the hulk lay half sunk in mud at the bottom of a deep ravine whose walls rose in sharp sloping angles to seemingly come together and meet a hundred feet toward the Iceland sky. He noted that the shattered craft was large, probably one of the Titan class, capable of carrying thirty passengers. Whatever colors or markings the copter may have been painted originally, it was impossible to recognize them now. Most of the fuselage back of the cockpit was crumpled like a bellows, the remaining framework a myriad of twisted metal.

Pitts first frightful impression, the one that ruled his confused mind, was that no one from the crash could have survived. But there they were: Pitt, Tidi, Lillie, and scattered about the steep slopes of the ravi

ne in unnatural pain-contorted positions, the same group of men who had stood beside Pitt in Rondheim's trophy room, the same group who had opposed F. James Kelly and Hermit Limited.

They all appeared to be alive, but most were badly injured; the grotesque angles of their arms and legs revealed a terrible array of smashed and broken bones.

"Sorry to ask the inescapable question," Pitt mumbled, his voice hoarse, though now under control, "but what in hell happened?"

"Not what you think," Lillie replied.

"What then? It's obvious . . . Rondheim was abducting all of us somewhere when the aircraft crashed."

"We didn't crash," Lillie said. "the wreck has been here for days, maybe even weeks."

Pitt stared incredulously at Lillie, who seemed to be lying comfortably on the damp ground, oblivious of the wetness soaking through his clothing. "You'd better fill me in. What happened to these people? How did you come to be here? Everything."

"Not too much to my story," Lillie said quietly.