Clive Cussler - White Death

Ben nodded and walked back to meet Ryan. They became en- gaged in what looked like a heated discussion. Then Ryan put his arm around Ben and guided him back to the memorial. He turned back once, to glare at Austin, who shrugged off the evil eye and headed back to his car.

Twenty minutes later, Austin strolled into the Air and Space Museum on Independence Avenue. He took the elevator to the third floor, and was headed toward the library, when he encountered a middle-aged man in a wrinkled tan suit who had stepped out of a side room.

"Kurt Austin, as I live and breathe!" the man said.

"I wondered if I'd bump into you, Mac."

"Always a good chance of that around here. I practically live within these walls. How's the pride ofNUMA these days?"

"Fine. How's the Smithsonian's answer to St. Julien Perlmutter?"

MacDougal chortled at the question. Tall and lean, with fine sandy hair and a hawk-nose that dominated his narrow face, he was the physical antithesis of the portly Perlmutter. But what he lacked in girth he made up for with an encyclopedic knowledge of air history that was every bit the equivalent of Perlmutter's grasp of the sea.

"St. Julien carries much more, um, weight in the historical world than I do," he said, with a twinkle in his gray eyes. "What brings you into the rarified atmosphere of the Archives Division?"

'I'm doing some research on an old airship. I was hoping I'd find something in the library."

"No need to go to the archives. I'm on my way to a meeting, but we can talk on the way." Austin said. "Have you ever come across a mention of an airship called the Nietzsche?"

"Oh, sure. Only one airship had that name-the one that was lost on the secret polar expedition of 1935."

"You know it, then?" He nodded. "There were rumors that the Germans had sent an airship to the North Pole on a secret mission. If it had succeeded, it was meant to cow the Allies and tout the glories of German Kultur in the propaganda war. The Germans denied it, but they couldn't ex- plain the disappearance of two of their greatest airship pioneers, Heinrich Braun and Herman Lutz. The war came along, and the sto- ries faded."

"So that was it?" "Oh no. After the war, papers were discovered that suggested strongly that the flight had indeed taken place, with an airship sim- ilar to the Graf Zeppelin. The airship supposedly sent a radio message as it neared the pole. They had discovered something of interest on the ice."

"They didn't say what?" "No. And some people believe it was a fabrication, anyhow. Maybe something Josef Goebbels made up."

"Butyo believe the accounts." "It's entirely possible. Certainly the technology was there."

"What could have happened to the airship?" "There are all sorts of possibilities. Engine failure. Sudden storm. Ice. Human error. The Graf Zeppelin was a highly successful aircraft, but we're talking about operating in extreme conditions. Other air- ships have come to similar fates. It could have crashed into the pack ice, been carried hundreds of miles away and gone into the sea when the ice melted." His face lit up. "Don't tell me! You've found traces of it at the bottom of the sea?"

"Unfortunately, no. Someone mentioned it to me… and, well, my scientific curiosity got the better of me."

"I know exactly what you mean." He stopped in front of a door. "Here's my meeting. Come by again and we'll talk some more." "I will. Thanks for your help."

Austin was glad that Mac wasn't pressing him further. He didn't like being evasive with old friends.

MacDougal paused with his hand on the doorknob. "The fact that we're talking about the Arctic is a funny coincidence. There's a big reception tonight to open a new exhibition on Eskimo culture and art.

'People of the Frozen North,' or something like that. Dogsled races, the whole thing."

"Dogsled races in Washington?"

"I said the same thing, but apparently it's so. Why don't you come by and see for yourself? "

"I may just do that."

As he was leaving the museum, Austin stopped at the information booth and picked up a brochure for the exhibition, which was in fact called Denizens of the Frozen North. The opening night reception was by invitation only. He ran his eye down the brochure and stopped at the name of the sponsor: Oceanus.

He tucked the brochure in his pocket and drove back to his office. A few calls later, he had wrangled an invitation, and, after working awhile longer on his report to Gunn, he went home to change. As he walked past the bookshelves in his combined living room-library, he ran his fingers along the spines of the neatly shelved volumes. The voices of Aristotle, Dante and Locke seemed to speak to him.

Austin's fascination with the great philosophers went back to his college days and the influence of a thought-provoking professor. Later, philosophy provided a distraction from his work and helped shed light on the darker elements of the human soul. In the course of his assignments, Austin had killed men and injured others. His sense of duty, justice and self-preservation had shielded him from crippling, and perhaps dangerous, self-doubt. But Austin was not a callous man, and philosophy gave him a moral compass to follow when he examined the rightness of his actions.

He extracted a thick volume, flicked on the stereo so that the liq- uid notes flowed from John Coltrane's saxophone, then went out on the deck and settled into a chair. Riffling through the pages, he quickly found the quote he'd been thinking about since MacDougal had mentioned a blimp named Nietzsche.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you lool into an abyss, the abyss also loofs into you.

He stared off into space for a few moments, wondering if he had seen the abyss, or more important, whether it was looking back at him. Then he closed the book, put it back on the shelf and went to get ready for the reception.

A HUGE BANNER EMBLAZONED with the words Denizens of the Frozen North was draped over the Mall entrance to the National Museum of Natural History. Painted on the banner, so there would be no mistaking the subject of the show, were figures in hooded fur parkas riding dogsleds across a forbidding Arctic land- scape. Mountainous hulking icebergs loomed in the background.

Austin walked between the portico columns and stepped into the museum's expansive octagonal rotunda. At the center of the eighty- foot-wide space was a masterpiece of taxidermy, an African elephant charging across an imaginary savanna. The twelve-ton animal dwarfed the petite decent standing under its upraised trunk.

"Good evening," the young woman said with a smile, handing Austin a program. She was wearing a lightweight facsimile of tradi- tional Eskimo dress. "Welcome to the Denizens of the Frozen North exhibition. Go through that door and you'll see the displays in the special exhibition hall. A movie on Eskimo culture will be showing every twenty minutes in the I max Theater. The sled dog and harpoon competitions will be held on the Mall in about fifteen minutes.

Should be quite exciting!"

Austin thanked the guide and trailed the guests into the special ex- hibit area. The well-lit display cases were filled with Eskimo art- work and ivory carvings, tools for hunting and fishing, cleverly fashioned skin suits and boots that would keep their owners warm and dry in the coldest of Arctic temperatures, driftwood sleds, canoes and whaleboats. A doleful chant backed by the beat of a tom-tom came from speakers scattered around the hall.

The chattering crowd was the usual combination of Washington politicians, bureaucrats and press. For all its importance in the world, Washington was still a small town, and Austin recognized a number of familiar faces. He was talking to a historian from the Navy Mu- seum who was a kayak enthusiast, when he heard his name called. Angus MacDougal from the Air and Space Museum was making his way through the milling guests. He took Austin's arm.