The sharp, cold air made the glacier appear near enough to reach out and touch. He pushed the throttles forward and hauled back on the control column again. It gave sluggishly, like the wheel of a speeding car that lost its power steering, and inched back.

With agonizing slowness the Boeing lifted its nose and swept past the icy peak with less than a hundred feet to spare.

Down on the glacier, the man who had murdered the bona fide Flight 106

pilot, Date Lemk, in London and taken his place, peered into the distance through a pair of night glasses. The northern lights had faded to a dim glow, but the uneven rim of the Hofsjokull still showed against the sky.

The air was hushed with expectancy. The only sounds came from the two-man crew who were loading the flights transmitter beacon into the hull of a helicopter.

Suleiman Aziz Arnmar's eyes became accustomed to the darkness, and he could make out the broken ridges scarring the wall of the ice floe.

Ammar stood like a statue, counting the seconds, waiting for the small speck of flame that would mark the crash of Flight 106. But the distant fireball did not materialize.

Finally Ammar lowered the glasses and sighed. The stillness of the glacier spread around him, cold and remote. He pulled off the gray-haired wig and threw it into the darkness. Next he removed a pair of specially handcrafted boots and took out the four-inch risers in the heels. He became aware of his servant and friend, Ibn Telmuk, standing beside him.

"Good makeup job, Suleiman, I wouldn't recognize you," said Ibn, a swarthy type with a curly mass of ebony hair. "The equipment loaded?"

Ammar asked.

"All secured. Was the mission a success?"

"A minor miscalculation. The plane somehow cleared the crest. Allah has given Miss Kamil a few more minutes of life."

"Akhmad Yazid will not be pleased."

"Kamil will die as planned," Annnar said confidently. "Nothing was left to chance."

"The plane still flies."

"Even Allah can't keep it in the air indefinitely."

"You have failed," said a new voice.

Ammar swung and stared into the frozen scowl of Muhammad Ismail. The Egyptian's round face was a curious blend of malevolence and childish innocence. The beady black eyes gazed with evil intensity over a heavy mustache, but they lacked the power of penetration. Bravado without substance, a facade of toughness, pulling a trigger was his only skill.

Ammar had had little choice in working with lsmail. The obscure village mullah had been forced on him by Akhmad Yazid. The Islamic idol hoarded his trust Re a miser, rationing it out only to those he believed possessed a fighting spirit and a traditionalist's devotion to the original laws of Islam. Firm religious traits meant more to Yazid than competency and professionalism.

Ammar professed to being a true believer of the faith, but Yazid was wary of him. The assassin's habit of talking to Moslem leaders as though they were mortal equals did not sit well with Yazid. He insisted that Ammar carry out his death missions under the guarded eye of Ismail.

Ammar had accepted his watchdog without protest. He was a master at the game of deceit. He quickly reversed Ismail's role into that of a dupe for his own intelligence purposes.

But the stupidity of Arabs was a constant irritation to Ammar. Cold, analytical reasoning was beyond them. He shook his head wearily and then patiently explained the situation to Ismail.

"Events can happen beyond our control. An updraft, a malfunction in the automatic pilot or altimeters, a sudden change in the wind. A hundred different variables could have caused the plane to miss the peak. But all probabilities were considered. The automatic pilot is locked on a course toward the pole. No more than ninety minutes of air time is left."

"And if someone discovers the bodies in the cockpit and one of the passengers knows how to fly?" Ismail persisted.

"The dossiers of all on the plane were carefully examined. None indicated any pilot experience. Besides, I smashed the radio and navigation instruments. Anyone attempting to take control will be lost.

No compass, no landmarks to give them a direction. Hala Kamil and her U.N. bedfellows will vanish in the cold waters of the Arctic sea."

"Is there no hope for survival?" asked Ismad. "None," said Ammar firmly.

"Absolutely none."

Dirk Pitt relaxed and slouched in a swivel chair, stretching out his legs until his six-foot-three-inch body was on a near horizontal plane.

Then he yawned and ran his hands through a thick mat of wavy black hair.

Pitt was a lean, firm-muscled man in prime physical shape for someone who didn't run ten miles every day or look upon the exertion and sweat of bodybuilding as a celestial tonic against old age. His face wore the tanned, weathered skin of an outdoorsman who preferred the sun to the fluorescent lighting of an office. His deep green, opaque eyes radiated a strange combination of warmth and cruelty while his lips seemed eternally locked in a friendly grin.

He was a smooth article who moved easily among the rich and powerful, but preferred the company of men and women who drank their liquor straight up and liked to get their hands dirty.

A product of the Air Force Academy, he was listed on active status with the rank of Major, although he had been on loan to the National Underwater & Marine Agency (NUMA) for nearly six years as their Special Projects Director, Along with Al Giordino, his closest friend since childhood, he had lived and adventured in every sea, on the surface and in the depths, encountering in half a decade more wild experiences than most men would see in ten lifetimes. He had found the vanished Manhattan Limited express train after swimming through an underground cavern in New York, salvaged a few passengers before being sent to the bottom of the Saint Lawrence River with a thousand souls. He had hunted down the lost nuclear submarine Starbuck in the middle of the Pacific and tracked the ghost ship Cyclops to her grave under the Caribbean. And he raised the Titanic.

He was, Giordino often mused, a man driven to rediscover the past, born eighty years too late.

"You might want to see this," Giordino said suddenly from the other side of the room.

Pitt turned from a color video monitor that displayed a view of the seascape one hundred meters beneath the hull of the icebreaker survey ship Polar Explorer. She was a sturdy new vessel especially built for sailing through ice-covered waters. The massive boxlike superstructure towering above the hull resembled a five-story office building, and her great bow, pushed by 80,000-horsepower engines, could pound a path through ice up to one-and-a-half meters thick.

Pitt placed one foot against a counter, flexed his knee and pushed. The motion was honed through weeks of practice and with the gentle roll of the ship for momentum. He twisted 180 degrees in his swivel chair as its castors carried him some meters across the slanting deck of the electronics compartment.

"Looks like a crater coming up."

Al Giordino sat at a console studying an image on the Klein sidescan sonar recorder. Short, standing a little over 162 centimeters in stockinged size-eleven feet, broadened with beefy shoulders in the shape of a wedge, he looked as if he were assembled out of spare bulldozer parts. His hair was dark and curly, an inheritance from Italian ancestry, and if he had worn a bandanna and an earring he could have moonlighted as an organ-grinder. Dry-humored, steadfast and reliable as the tides, Giordino was Pitts insurance policy against Murphy's Law.