“As they say in N'Awlins,” Sarah said with a laugh, “Laisse^ k bon temps rouler.”
Ed Stimson peered intently at a weather radar monitor watching a slight buildup of white electronic clouds fuzz up the upper portion of the green screen. It was a moderate storm front, some two hundred miles to the southwest, that Stimson accurately predicted would douse their island with several days of soggy weather. His concentration was interrupted by a rapping sound overhead. Barnes was still up on the tin roof fooling with the anemometer.
Static-filled chatter suddenly blared through the hut from a radio set mounted on a corner wall. Nearby fishing boats, their captains yakking about the weather, constituted most of the garbled radio traffic received on the island. Stimson did his best to tune out the meaningless chatter and, at first, failed to detect the odd whooshing sound. It was a low resonance emanating from outside. Then the radio fell silent for a moment and he could clearly hear a rushing sound in the distance, something similar to a jet aircraft. For several long seconds, the odd noise continued, seeming to diminish slightly in intensity before ending altogether in a loud crack.
Thinking it might be thunder, Stimson adjusted the scale view on his weather radar to a twenty-mile range. The monitor showed only a light scattering of clouds in the immediate vicinity, with nothing resembling thunderheads. Must be the Air Force up to some tricks, he figured, recalling the heavy air traffic in the Alaskan skies during the days of the Cold War.
His thoughts were broken by a crying wail outside the door from the pet husky named Max.
“What is it, Max?” Stimson called out while opening the door to the hut.
The Siberian husky let out a death-shrieking howl as it turned, shaking, toward his master in the doorway. Stimson was shocked to see the dog's eyes glazed in a vacant stare while thick white foam oozed from his mouth. The dog stood teetering back and forth for a moment, then keeled over on its side, hitting the ground with a thud.
“Jesus! Mike, get down here quick,” Stimson yelled to his partner.
Barnes was already climbing down the ladder from the roof but was having a hard time catching the rungs with his feet. Nearing the ground, he missed the last rung with his left foot altogether and lurched to the ground, staying semierect only by a hearty hand grasp on the ladder's rung.
“Mike, the dog just ... are you okay?” Stimson asked, realizing something was not right. Running to his partner's side, he found Barnes in a state of labored breathing, and his eyes were nearly as glassy as Max's. Throwing his arm around the younger man's shoulder, Stimson half carried, half dragged Barnes into the shack and set him down in a chair.
Barnes bent over and retched violently, then sat upright, clinging to Stimson's arm for support. Gasping in a hoarse voice, he whispered, “There's something in the air.”
No sooner had the words left his mouth when his eyes rolled up into the back of his head and he fell over stone dead.
Stimson stood up in a state of shock, then found that the room was spinning like a top before his eyes. A throbbing pain racked his head while the grip of an iron vise suddenly began squeezing the air out of his lungs. Staggering to the radio, he tried to let out a brief cry for help but was unsure whether his lips could move because of numbness to his face. A burst of heat flared internally, like an invisible fire was consuming his organs. Choking for air and losing all sense of vision, he staggered and fell hard to the floor, dead before he hit the ground.
Four miles east of the Coast Guard station, the three CDC scientists were just finishing their lunch when the invisible wave of death struck. Sarah was the first to detect something wrong when a pair of birds flying overhead suddenly stopped in mid flight as if they had struck an invisible wall and then fell to the ground wriggling. Sandy fell victim first, clutching her stomach and doubling over in agony.
“Come now, my chili wasn't that bad,” Fowler joked before he, too, became light-headed and nauseous.
Sarah stood and took a few steps toward the cooler to retrieve some bottled water when fire shot through her legs and her thigh muscles began to spasm.
“What's happening?” Fowler gasped as he tried to comfort Sandy before staggering to the ground in distress.
For Sarah, time seemed to slow as her senses became dulled. Sluggishly, she dropped to the ground as her muscles weakened and refused to obey the commands sent by her brain. Her lungs seemed to constrict upon themselves, making each breath a painful stab of agony. A thumping noise began to ring through her ears as she fell prone on her back and stared blurry-eyed at the gray sky above. She felt the blades of grass dance and rustle against her body, but she was frozen, unable to move.
Gradually, a fog enveloped her mind and a field of blackness began to encroach the edges of her vision. But a sudden intrusion jarred her senses momentarily. Into the sea of gray popped an apparition, a strange ghost with a tuft of black hair over a rubbery face that seemed to melt away like plastic. She felt the alien gaze upon her with frightening giant, three-inch-wide crystal eyes. But there appeared to be another set of eyes beyond the crystal lenses, gazing intently at her with a sense of grace and warmth. A pair of deep, opaline green eyes. Then everything turned to black.
Sarah opened her eyes to a gray canopy above her, only this one was flat and without clouds. Shaking off the blurriness, her eyes slowly regained focus and she could see that it was not the sky above her but a ceiling. A softness beneath her revealed that she was lying in a bed with a thick pillow under her head. An oxygen mask was covering her face, which she removed, but she left alone the intravenous needle that was stuck in her arm. Carefully taking in the surroundings, her eyes gazed upon a small, simply decorated room featuring a small writing desk in one corner with an impressive painting of an old ocean liner above it, while off to the side was a small bath. The bed she lay in was mounted to the wall and the open door to a hallway had a step over threshold. The whole room seemed to be rolling, and she was uncertain if it was her head creating the motion as a result of the deep throbbing sensation that pounded at her temples.
A movement caught her eye and she turned back to the doorway to find a figure standing there, looking at her with a slight grin. He was a tall man, broad-shouldered, but on a fit and somewhat wiry frame. He was young, perhaps in his late twenties, she guessed, but moved with the confidence of a more mature man. His skin showed the deep tan of someone who spent a good deal of time outdoors. Wavy black hair set off a rugged face that was more intriguing than classically handsome. But it was the eyes that radiated an aura about the man. They were a deep shade of iridescent green and revealed a sense of intelligence, adventure, and integrity all rolled into one. They were the eyes of a man who could be trusted. And they were the same green eyes, Sarah recalled, that she had seen before blacking out at the camp.
“Well, hello, Sleeping Beauty.” The words came from a warm, deep voice.
“You ... you're the man at the camp,” Sarah stammered.
“Yes. My apologies for not properly introducing myself on the island, Sarah. My name is Dirk Pitt.” He neglected to add “Junior,” although he shared the same name as his father.
“You know who I am?” she asked, still confused.
“Well, not intimately,” Dirk smiled non threateningly “but a brainy scientist named Irv told me a little about you and your project on Yu-naska. Irv seemed to think he poisoned everyone with his chili.”
“Irv and Sandy! Are they all right?”
“Yes. They took a little nap, like you, but are fine now. They're resting just down the hall,” Dirk said, motioning with his thumb toward the corridor. He could see the look of bewilderment in Sarah's eyes and touched her shoulder with his hand in a reassuring squeeze.
“Don't worry, you're in good hands. You're aboard the National Underwater and Marine Agency research ship Deep Endeavor. We were returning from an underwater survey of the Aleutian Basin when we picked up a distress call from the Coast Guard weather station on Yu-naska. I flew to the station in a helicopter we have on board and happened to see your camp while flying back to the ship. I gave you and your friends an all-expense-paid aerial tour of Yunaska, but you slept through the whole thing,” Dirk added with mock disappointment.
“I'm sorry,” Sarah murmured, feeling somewhat bashful. “I guess I owe you a big thanks, Mr. Pitt.”
“Please, call me ”Dirk.“ ”
“Okay, Dirk,” Sarah replied with a smile, feeling an odd flutter as she spoke his name. “How are the Coast Guard people?”
Dirk's face went dark and a look of sorrow crossed his brow. “I'm afraid we didn't make it in time. We found two men and a dog at the station. They were all dead.”
A shiver went up Sarah's spine. Two men dead, and she and her companions nearly as well. None of it made any sense.
“What on earth happened?” Sarah asked in shock.
“We don't know for sure. Our ship's doctor is running some tests, but, as you can imagine, his resources are somewhat limited. It appears to have been some sort of airborne fume or toxin. All we know for sure is that the Coast Guard station thought there was something in the air. We flew in with gas masks and were not impacted. We even took some white mice from our shipboard lab with us. They all survived fine, without any apparent symptoms. Whatever it was, it must have dissipated by the time we landed at the Coast Guard station. You and your team were apparently far enough away from the source to be impacted less severely. You probably didn't receive a full dose of whatever it was.”
Sarah's eyes dropped and she fell quiet. The horror and pain of the whole ordeal came back to her with a showering of fatigue. She wanted to sleep it all off and hope it was just a bad dream.
“Sarah, I'll have the doctor check on you, then let you sleep some more. Perhaps later I can buy you a plate of king crab legs for dinner?” Dirk asked with a smile.
Sarah smiled briefly in return. “I'd like that,” she murmured, then fell fast asleep.
Kermit Burch stood at the helm reading a fax communique when Dirk stepped into the bridge from the starboard wing door. The seasoned captain of the Deep Endeavor shook his head slightly as he read the document, then turned to Dirk with a slightly annoyed look on his face.
“We've notified the Coast Guard and the Department of Homeland Security, but nobody intends to do anything until the local authorities have filed their report. The village public safety officer from Atka is the area law enforcement official and he can't get to the island until morning,” Burch snorted. “Two men dead and they treat it as an accident.”
“We don't have much to go on,” Dirk replied. “I spoke with Carl Nash, our saltwater environmental analyst, who is well versed on terrestrial pollutants. According to Nash, there are naturally occurring environmental emissions, such as sulfuric volcanic releases, which could have killed the men. High concentrations of industrial pollutants are another potential culprit, although I'm not aware of any neighborhood chemical plants in the Aleutians.”
“The public safety officer told me it sounds to him like a classic case of carbon monoxide poisoning from the station house generator. Of course, that doesn't explain our friends from the CDC succumbing to similar effects four miles away.”
“Nor does it explain the dog I found dead outside of the station house,” Dirk added.
“Well, perhaps the CDC crew can shed some light on the matter. How are our three guests doing, by the way?”
“A little groggy still. They don't remember much, other than that it struck pretty rapidly.”
“The sooner we get them to a proper medical facility, the sooner I'll rest easier. The nearest airfield is Unalaska, which we can make in under fourteen hours. I'll radio ahead for a medical flight to transfer them to Anchorage.”
“Captain, I'd like to take the helicopter back out and reconnoiter the island. We didn't have much of a chance to look around on the last flight. Maybe there's something we missed. Any objections?”
“No ... just so long as you take that Texas joker with you,” Burch replied with a pained grin.
As Dirk ran through a preflight checklist from the pilot seat of the NUMA Sikorsky S-76C+ offshore helicopter, a sandy-haired man with a bushy mustache ambled across the flight platform. With scuffed cowboy boots, chiseled arms, and a ubiquitous scowl that hid a mordant sense of humor, Jack Dahlgren looked like a bull rider who got lost on the way to the rodeo. A notorious practical joker, Dahlgren had already worked his way under Burch's skin by spiking the galley's coffee urn with a cheap bottle of rum on their first night at sea. An engineering whiz who grew up in west Texas, Dahlgren knew his way around horses and guns, as well as every type of mechanical equipment that operated above or below the sea.
“Is this the scenic island tour my travel agent recommended?” he asked Dirk, sticking his head through a sliding cockpit window.
“Step right up, sonny boy, you won't be disappointed. All the water, rocks, and sea lions your eyes can absorb.”
“Sounds swell. I'll give you an extra quarter if you can find me a bar with a short-skirted waitress.”
“I'll see what I can do,” Dirk grinned as Dahlgren climbed into the copilot's seat.
The two men had become fast friends years before, while studying ocean engineering at Florida Atlantic University. Avid divers, they regularly cut classes together in order to spearfish the coral reefs lying off Boca Raton, using their fresh-caught fish to woo local sorority girls with barbecues on the beach. After graduating, Jack completed his college ROTC commitment in the Navy while Dirk obtained a master's degree from the New York Maritime College and trained at a commercial dive school. The two men were reunited when Dirk joined his father at NUMA as a special projects director and convinced his old friend to accompany him at the prestigious research agency.
After years of diving together, there was almost an unspoken bond between the two men. They knew they could depend on each other and performed at their best when the chips were down. Dahlgren had seen the look of determination in Dirk's eyes before and knew the dogged persistence that came with it. The mysterious events on Yu-naska were weighing on his friend, Dahlgren noticed, and he wasn't likely to let it go.
The main rotor blade of the Sikorsky wound to a high pitch as Dirk gently eased the helicopter up and off a small landing platform mounted amidships of the Deep Endeavor. Climbing to one hundred feet, Dirk held the helicopter stationary for a moment, admiring the bird's-eye view of the NUMA research ship. The wide-beamed, turquoise-colored survey ship had a stubby look to her 270-foot length. But the lack of a svelte streamline made for a stable work platform, ideal for operating the myriad of cranes and hoists strategically positioned about the large, open stern deck. In the middle of the deck, a bright yellow submersible sparkled like a jewel in the late afternoon sunlight as it rested on a large wooden cradle, while several technicians tinkered with its thrusters and electronics. One of the technicians stood and waved his cap toward the suspended helicopter. Dirk threw the man a quick wave, then banked the chopper and headed northeast toward the island of Yunaska, less than ten miles away.
“Back to Yunaska?” asked Dahlgren.
“The Coast Guard station we scouted this morning.”
“Great,” Dahlgren moaned. “We acting as a flying hearse?”
“No, just checking out the source of whatever killed the men and dog.”