Clive Cussler - Iceberg

And then suddenly, almost with a sense of surprise, Pitts hands found the soft, crumbling edge of the slope. With strength he didn't think was possible, he pulled himself up onto flat ground and rolled over on his back, laying inert and to all appearances, dead.

For nearly five minutes, Pitt lay rigid, only his chest moving with the pulsating rise and fall of his breath. Slowly, as the waves of total exhaustion receded to a level of sufferable tolerance, he pulled himself to his feet and peered into the bottom of the narrow chasm at the tiny figures below. He cupped his hands to yell, then decided against it. There were no words he could think of to shout that had any meaning, any encouragement. All the people below could see was his head and shoulders over the level of the steep cliff. Then with a wave of the hand, he was gone.

Pitt stood like a solitary tree on a great empty plain. A dark green mosslike vegetation spread in every direction as far as he could see, edged on one horizon by a range of high hills and cloaked by a sun-whitened mist on two others. Except for a few small rises dotting the desolate landscape, most of the ground was nearly flat. At first he thought he was completely alone. But then he saw a tiny snipe that soared across the sky like a dart in search of an unseen target. It came closer, and from a height of two hundred feet it circled and looked down at Pitt, as if curiously inspecting the strange animal that stood out so vividly in red and yellow plumage against the center of the unending green carpet. After three cursory sweeps, the little bird's inquisitiveness waned and it fluttered its wings against the air and continued on its seeming flight to nowhere.

As if perceiving the bird's thoughts, Pitt stared down at his offbeat clothing and murmured vaguely to himself, "I've heard of being all dressed up with no place to go, but this is ridiculous."

The sound of his voice suddenly woke him up to the fact that his mind was working again. He felt the relief that was due from overcoming the exhausting climb from the ravine, the high elation of being alive and the hope of finding help before the people below died from the near-freezing temperatures. Jubilantly he struck out across the tundra toward the distant hills.

Fifty feet, no further, that was as far as Pitt got when it abruptly hit him. He was lost. The sun was high above the skyline. There were no stars to guide him.

North, south, east and west were words that meant nothing, had no definition in terms of measurement or accuracy. Once he entered the mist that was crawling across the land toward him, he would have no guideline, no landmarks to take a sight on. He was lost, adrift without any sense of direction.

For once that cold, damp morning, he didn't feel the grip of fear.

It wasn't that he knew fear would cloud his thoughts, confuse his reasoning. He was consumed with sharp anger that he should have been so beautifully tricked into complacency, so ignorantly unaware that he was stumbling to his death. Every contingency, the computers of Hermit Limited, his arch-enemy, had mechanically figured on every contingency. The stakes were too high in the murderous game that Kelly, Rondheim and their group of incredibly ruthless business associates were playing. But he swore to himself that he wasn't going to be forced to land on Boardwalk and pay a rent he couldn't afford without passing Go. He stopped, sat down and took stock.

It didn't take any great ingenious deduction to determine that he was sitting somewhere in the middle of the uninhabited part of Iceland.

He tried to remember what little he had learned about the Eden of the North Atlantic, what few facts he bad absorbed when studying the flight maps on board the Catawaba. The island stretched one hundred ninety miles from north to south, he recalled, and nearly three hundred miles from east to west. Since the shortest distance between two points was north and south, the other two directions were eliminated. If he traveled south, there was every possibility that he would run onto the Vatnajbkull ice mass, not only Iceland's but Europe's largest glacier, a great frozen wall that would have signaled the end of every thing.

North it was, he decided. The logic behind his decision bordered on the primitive, but there was another reason, a compelling urge to outsmart the computers by traveling in the direction least expected, a direction that offered the least obvious chance of success. The average man in similar circumstances would have probably headed toward Reykjavik, the largest sprawl of civilization, far to the west and south. That is undoubtedly, he hoped, what the computers had been programmed for-the average man.

Now he had an answer, but it was only half an answer. Which way was north? Even if he knew for certain, he had no means to follow it along a straight line.

The accepted fact that a man who was right-handed would eventually make a great arc to his right without any landmarks to guide him, came back to haunt Pitts thoughts.

The whine of the jet engines interrupted his reverie and he looked up, holding his hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the cobalt blue sky, sighting a commercial airliner cruising serenely ahead of its long white contrails. Pitt could only wonder at the aircraft's course.

It could have been heading anywhere: west to Reykjavik, east to Norway, southeast to London. There was no way to tell for certain unless he had a compass.

A compass, the word lingered in his mind, savored like the thought of an ice-cold beer by a man dying of thirst in the middle of the Mojave Desert. A compass, a simple piece of magnetic iron mounted on a pivot and floating in a mixture of glycerin and water. Then a light suddenly clicked on deep in the recesses of his brain. A long-forgotten bit of outdoor lore he'd learned many years before during a four-day hike in the Sierras with his old Boy Scout troop began to break through the fog-shrouded barrier of time.

It took him nearly ten minutes of searching before he found a small pool of water trapped in a shallow depression beneath a dome-shaped hill. Quickly, as dexterously as his raw and bleeding fingers would allow, Pitt unclasped the brown sash and tore off the pin that held it in place. Wrapping one end of the long silk material around his knee, he knelt and pulled it taut with his left hand and with his right began stroking the pin from head to tip in a single direction against the silk, building friction and magnetizing the tiny piece of metal.

The cold was increasing now, creeping into his.sweat-soaked clothes and forcing a spasm of shivers to grip his body. The pin slipped through his fingers, and he spent useless minutes probing the mossy ground cover until he discovered the little silver sliver by accidentally running it a quarter of an inch under a fingernail.

He was almost thankful for the pain, as it meant there was still feeling in his hands. He kept pushing the pin back and forth across the silk, careful not to let it slip through his fingers again.

When he felt satisfied that further friction would add nothing more, he rubbed the pin over his forehead and nose, covering it with as much skin oil as it could hold. Then he took two slender bits of thread from the lining of his red jacket and doubled them loosely around the pin. The tricky part of the operation was yet to come, so Pitt relaxed for a moment flexing his fingers and massaging them much like a piano player preparing to tackle Chopin's Minute Waltz.

Feeling he was ready, he gingerly picked up the two loops and with painstaking slowness lowered the pin into the calm little pond. Holding a deep breath, Pitt watched the water bend under the weight of the metal. Then ever so gently his fingers cautiously slid the threads apart until the pin swam by itself, kept afloat by the oil and the surface tension of the water.