Clive Cussler - Treasure

The mist and the darkness made it impossible for Hollis to see more than a few meters ahead. He navigated and watched over his tiny fleet through an infrared scope. He kept them tightly grouped within a three-meter radius, quietly giving directions over his miniature radio whenever one began to stray.

He turned the scope on the Lady Flamborough. Her beautiful lines now looked like a grotesque ice carving floating in front of the cracked porcelain wall of an antique bathtub. Hollis judged her to still be a good kilometer away.

After exacting its toll, the tide suddenly began to slacken and their speed soon picked up almost a knot. The welcome relief came almost too late. Hollis could see his men were wearing down under the constant, arduous paddling. They were men hardened by rigid training, and all lifted weights on a regular basis. They dug the paddles into the water noiselessly and heaved against the merciless tide, but their muscles were beginning to stiffen and each stroke became an effort.

The protective mist was beginning to . lift In his mind was the fear that they would become sitting ducks in the water. Hollis looked upward, his confidence ebbing with the tide. Through the mist's open patches he could see a sky that was turning from black to an ever lighter blue.

His boats were in the middle of the fjord, and the nearest shore that offered any degree of cover was half a kilometer farther away than the Lady Flamborough.

"Put your backs into it, men," he urged. "We're in the home stretch. Go for it."

The weary fighters reached deep for their reserve strength and increased the length and speed of their strokes. It felt to Hollis as if the inflatable boats were spurting through the water. He put aside the scope and paddled furiously.

They might make it, just might make it, he thought hopefuly as they began to rapidly close on the ship.

But where was Dillenger? he wondered bitterly. What in hell had happened to the assault team on the glacier?

Dillenger was having no picnic himself. He was even more vague on the situation. Immediately after jumping from the C-140 wmsport, he and his men had been immediately hurle, all over the sky by the heavy, blowing winds.

Tight-faced, Dillenger looked up and around to see how his team was Managing. Each man carried a small blue light, but the driving sleet made it impossible for him to see them. He lost them almost the instant his chute opened.

He reached down and pressed the switch of a little black box strapped to his leg. Then he spoke into his tiny transmitter.

"This is Major Dillenger-I have turned on my marker beacon. have a seven-kilometer glide, so try and stay close to me and home in on my position after you land."

"In this crap we'll be lucky to come down on the island," some malcontent muttered.

"Radio silence except for emergency," Dillenger ordered.

He looked down and saw nothing beyond his survival-and-weapons pack that dangled on a two-meter line beneath his harness-He took his bearings from the luminous dial of a combination compass and altimeter that extended in front of his forehead like the mirror worn by ear, nose and throat physicians.

Without reference points or a homing beacon dropped on the landing zone in advance-a luxury too great to risk alerttng the hiJackers-Dillenger had to try and fly by the seat of his pants and mentally judge glide angle and distance.

His primary concern was overshooting the edge of the glacier and landing m the fjord. He hedged his bet and came down short-nearly a full kilometer too short.

The glacier materialized through the darkness, and Dillenger saw he was descending directly over a crevasse. A sudden side gust caught his rectangular canopy and it began to oscillate. He jockeyed the shrouds to compensate and twisted into a landing attitude just as his dangling pack struck the inner wall of the crevasse and bounced over the lip. A layer of snow cushioned his impact and he made a perfect landing on his feet, only two meters from the ice fracture.

He popped his release and the parachute collapsed before it could be caught by the wind. He didn't bother to roll it up and hide it in the ice for later retrieval. There was no time to waste. The taxpayers would have to eat the lost chute.

"This is Dillenger. I'm down. Home in on my position."

He pulled a plastic whistle from a pocket of his coat and blew through it once every ten seconds while facing in a different direction. for the first few minutes there was nobody to be seen.

Then, slowly, the first of his men appeared and jogged toward him. They had been widely scattered. Their progress across the uneven surface of the glacier took them far longer than Dillenger had anticipated.

Soon the others straggled in. One man had suffered a broken shoulder, another had cracked an ankle. His sergeant favored a wrist Dillenger suspected was broken, but the man carried on as though it was little more than a slight sprain, and Dillenger needed him too badly to write him off.

He turned to the two injured men. "You won't be able to keep up with the rest of us, but follow along in our tracks as best you can. Just make sure your lights are hooded." Then Dillenger nodded at his sergeant, Jack Foster. "Let's rope together and move out, Sergeant.

I'll take the lead."

Foster gave a brief salute and began checking the team.

The going was treacherous across the broken ice surface, yet they moved along at an easy dogtrot. Dillenger had no fear of falling into an open lead; the line around his waist was anchored to enough beef and brawn to lift a truck off the ground. Twice he called for a brief stop to catch his bearings, and then they were off again.

They crawled over jagged ice ridges and one open lead that all but defeated them. They wasted seven minutes before an ice grapnel bit in the opposite side and the lightest man on the team crossed hand over hand to secure the grip. Another ten minutes was gone before the last man made it over.

A sense of urgency mushroomed inside Dillenger. His team was down two seven men and they were falling farther and farther behind the timetable. He sullenly regretted not taking Giordino's unsolicited advice and doubling his estimated time from air drop to attack.

He prayed the dive team wasn't waiting, freezing to death in the water beneath the Flamborough's hull. He tried repeatedly to signal Hollis and apprise the Colonel of his tardy situation, but there was no reply.

The first faint traces of dawn were breaking behind him, revealing the surface of the glacier. There was a numbing desolation about it, a terrifying strangeness. He could also see the faint glimmering of the fjordand suddenly he realized why there was a communications breakdown.

Hollis could see the ship clearly now without the infrared scope. And if a hijacker with a keen eye had looked in the right direction, he'd have spied the shadows of the inflatable boats outlined against the dark gray water. Hollis hardly dared breathe as the distance narrowed.

Hoping against hope, Hollis never let up on his plea for radio communications with Dillenger. "Shark to Falcon, please respond." He was about to try for the hundredth time when Dillenger's voice abruptly boomed through his earpiece.

"This is Falcon, go ahead."

"You're late!" Hollis hissed quietly. "Why didn't you respond to my calls?"

"Just now came within range. We were out of horizontal sight of you.

Our signals couldn't penetrate the ice wall."

"Are you in position?"

"Negative," Dillenger said flatly. "We've stumbled on a delicate situation which will take a while to correct."

"What do you call delicate?"

"A string of explosives in an ice fracture behind the glacial front, armed and ready to be detonated by radio signal."

"How long to disarm?"