"We'll stand by," Graham assured him.

Pitt leaned over Lily and squeezed her hand. "Don't forget our date,"

he said.

Then he yanked the parka hood over his head, turned and jogged back to the helicopter.

Rubin felt a great weight smothering him from all sides as if some relentless force was driving him backward. The seat belt and harness pressed cruelly into his gut and shoulders. He opened his eyes and saw only vague and shadowy images. As he waited for his vision to clear he tried to move his hands and arms, but they seemed locked in place.

Then his eyes gradually focused and he saw why.

An avalanche of snow and ice had forged through the shattered windshield, entrapping his body up to the chest. He made a desperate attempt to free himself. After a few minutes of struggling, he gave up.

The unyielding pressure held him like a straitjacket. There was no way he could escape the cockpit without help.

The shock slowly began to fade and he gritted his teeth from the pain that erupted from his broken legs. Rubin thought it strange that his feet felt as though they were immersed in water. He rationalized that it was his own blood.

Rubin was wrong. The plane had settled through the ice in water nearly three meters deep and it had flooded the cabin floor up to the seats.

Only then did he remember Ybarra. He turned his head to his right and squinted through the darkness. The starboard side of the aircraft's bow had been crushed inward almost to the engineer's panel. All he could see of the Mexican delegate was a rigid, upraised arm protruding from the snow and telescoped wreckage.

Rubin turned away, sick in the sudden realization that the little man who had sat at his side throughout the terrible ordeal was dead, every bone crushed. Rubin also realized he had only a short time to live before he froze to death.

He began to cry.

"She should be coming up!" Giordino shouted over the engine and rotor noise.

Pitt nodded and stared down at the gouge that cut across the merciless ice, its sides littered with bits and pieces of jagged debris. He saw it now. A tangible object with mamnade straight lines imperceptibly appeared in the gloom ahead. Then they were on top of it.

There was a sad and ominous appearance about the crumPlead aircraft. One wing had completely ripped off and the other was twisted back against the fuselage. The tail section was buckled at a pathetic angle. The remains had the look of a mashed bug on a white carpet.

... The fuselage sank through the ice and two-thirds of it is immersed in water," Pitt observed.

"She didn't burn," said Giordino. "That's a piece of luck."

He held up his hand to shade his eyes from the dazzling reflection as the helicopter's lights swept the airliner's length. "Talk about highly polished skin. Her maintenance people took good care of her. I'd guess she was a Boeing 720-B. any sign of life?"

"None," replied Pitt. "it doesn't look good."

"How about identification markings?"

"Three stripes running down the hull, light blue and purple separated by a band of gold."

"Not the colors of any airline i'm familiar with."

"Drop down and circle her," said Pitt. "While you spot a landing site, I'll try and read her lettering."

Giordino banked and spiraled toward the wreckage. The landing lights, mounted on bow and tail of the helicopter, exposed the half-sunken aircraft in a sea of brilliance. The name above the decorative stripes was in a slanted-style instead of the usual easier to read block-type letters.

"NEBULA," Pitt read aloud. "NEBULA AIR."

"Never heard of it," said Giordino, his eyes fixed on the ice.

"A plush airline that caters to vips.

"What in hell is it doing so far from the beaten track?"

"We'll soon know if anybody's alive to tell us."

Pitt turned to the eight men sitting comfortably in the warm belly of the chopper. They were all appropriately clothed in blue Navy Arctic weather gear. One was the ship's surgeon, three were medics, and four were damage-control experts. They chatted back and forth as casually as if they were on a bus trip to Denver. Between them, tied down by straps in the center of the floor, boxes of medical supplies, bundles of blankets and a rack of stretchers sat stacked beside asbestos suits and a crate of firefighting equipment.

An auxiliary-powered heating unit was secured opposite the main door, its hoisting cables attached to an overhead winch. Next to it stood a compact snowmobile with an enclosed cabin and side tracks.

The gray-haired man seated just aft of the cockpit, with gray mustache and beard to match, looked back at Pitt and grinned. "About time for us to earn our pay?" he asked cheerfully.

Nothing, it seemed, could dim Dr. Jack Gale's merry disposition.

"We're setting down now," answered Pitt. "Nothing stirring around the plane. No indication of fire. The cockpit is buried and the fuselage looks distorted but intact."

"Nothing ever comes easy." Gale shrugged. "Still, it beats hell out of treating burn cases."

"That's the full news. The tough news is the main cabin is filled with nearly a meter of water, and we didn't bring our galoshes."

Gale's face turned serious. "God help any injured who didn't stay dry.

They wouldn't have lasted eight minutes in freezing water."

"If none of the survivors can open an emergency exit, we may have to cut our way inside."

"Sparks from cutting equipment have a nasty habit of igniting sloshing jet fuel," said Lieutenant Cork Simon, the stocky leader of the Polar Explorer's damage-control team. He bore the confident look of a man who knew his job inside out and then some. "Better we go in through the main cabin door. Doc Gale, here, will need all the space he can get to remove any stretcher cases."

"I agree," said Pitt. "But a pressurized door that's been jammed against its stops by the distortion of the crash will take time to force open. people may be freezing to death in there. Our first job is to make an opening to insert the vent pipe from the heater."

He broke off as Giordino cut a steep Turn and dropped down toward a flat area only a stone's throw from the wreck. Everyone tensed in readiness.

Outside, the beat of the rotor blades whiPPed up a small blizzard of snow and ice particles, turning the landing site into an alabaster-colored stew that wiped out all vision.

Giordino had barely touched the wheels to the ice and set the throttles on idle when Pitt shoved open the loading door, jumped into the cold and headed toward the wreckage. Behind him Doc Gale began directing the unloading of supplies while Cork Simon and his team willched the auxiliary heater and the snowmobile onto the ice.

Half-running, half-slipping, pi made a visual inspection of the interior of the fuse lage, carefully avoiding open breaks in the ice.

The air reeked with the unwelcome smell of jet fuel. He climbed up the ice MOUnd that was piled a meter thick over the cockpit windows.

Climbing the slick surface was like crawling up a greased ramp. He tried to scoop an opening into the cockpit, but quickly gave it up: it would have taken an hour or more to dig through the packed ice and then tunnel inside.

He slid down and ran around to the remaining wing. The right section was twisted and broken from its supporting mounts, the tip pointing toward the tail. it lay on the ice, crushed against the sunken fuselage only an arm's length below the row of windows. Using the wing as a platform over the open water, Pitt dropped to his hands and knees and tried to peer inside. The lights from the helicopter reflected off the Plexiglas, and he had to cup his hands around his eyes to close out the glare, At first he could not detect any movement, only darkness and a deathly stillness.