"Where are we going?" Pat asked, regaining a small measure of composure.

"Before we catch our plane," answered Pitt, "we have to take a little boat trip."

He caught her by the arm and dragged her behind him, as Giordino hustled Megan along. They ran along the track until they reached the stairs leading down to Pier Number One. As Pitt suspected, the security guards had encircled the station at Z Section two hundred yards farther up the track in the center of the marina. Confusion reigned, as the tram car shot past the station and around the next bend on its way along the port side of the ship. The guards, completely deluded into thinking their prey was still hiding in the speeding car, hurriedly launched a pursuit, as the security director in command ordered the power circuits for the tram system to be closed down.

Pitt figured it would take them another seven minutes before the guards could reach the stopped car and realize that it was empty. If he and the others weren't off the ship by then, capture was a foregone conclusion.

None of the workers on the pier paid any attention to them as they calmly strolled down the steps and onto the pier. There were three boats moored between the first and second piers, a small twenty-four-foot sailboat, a vessel that Pitt recognized as a forty-two-foot Grand Banks cabin cruiser, and a twenty-four-foot classic runabout. "Climb aboard the big powerboat," said Pitt, walking placidly across the pier.

"I guess we're not going to retrieve our dive gear," said Giordino.

"Pat and Megan could never make it back alive in the water. Better we take our chances on the surface."

"The runabout is faster," Giordino pointed out.

"True," Pitt agreed, "but the security force will be suspicious of a fast boat speeding away from the shipyard. The Grand Banks powerboat, cruising calmly across the water, won't create near the attention."

There was a dockhand hosing down the deck when Pitt walked up and stopped at the gangway. "Nice boat," he said, smiling.

"Heh?" The dockhand looked at him, unable to understand English.

Pitt moved up the gangway and gestured at the no-nonsense lines of the Grand Banks 42. "She's a nice boat," he repeated, boldly stepping into the bridge cabin.

The dockhand followed him inside, protesting his trespass on the boat, but once they were out of sight of other workers on the pier, Pitt lashed out with his fist and decked him with a solid blow to the jaw. Then he leaned out the doorway and announced, "Al, cast off the lines. You ladies, all aboard."

Pitt stood for a moment and studied the instruments on the console. He turned the key and hit the twin starter buttons. Down below in the engine compartment, a pair of big marine diesel engines turned over, the fuel inside their firing chambers compressing and igniting to the tune of high-pitched clacking. He slid open the starboard window and peered out. Giordino had untied the fore and aft lines and was climbing on board.

Pitt engaged the reverse drive and very slowly began edging the boat away from the pier and backing it toward the open water twenty yards astern. He passed two dockworkers installing a railing around the pier, and waved. They waved back. It's so much easier to be sneaky, he thought, than to burst out of the corral like a wild bull.

The boat passed the end of the pier into open water. Now the stern of the great ship soared above them. Pitt moved the shift lever into Forward and steered the Grand Banks on a course along the Ulrich Woof. To reach the fjord and escape the shipyard, they had to cruise entirely around the floating titan. Pitt set the throttles until the speed instruments read eight knots, a pace that he hoped would not arouse suspicions. So far, there had been no shouts, no bells or whistles, no signs of a chase or searchlights pinning them against the dark water.

At this speed, it would take fifteen minutes to pass the entire length of the supership and turn the bow until they could move a safe distance away and out from under the glare of the lights from the shipyard. Fifteen agonizing minutes that would seem like fifteen years. That was only the first hurdle. They still had the patrol boats to contend with, and by then there was every possibility their crews would have been alerted to the fugitives' escape in the Grand Banks cabin cruiser.

There was nothing they could do except remain inside the main cabin out of sight and stare up at the immense monster as they crept alongside. From bow to stern, the great mass of glass was a blaze of light inside and out, giving it the effect of a baseball stadium during a night game. The famous classic liners of their time, Titanic, Lusitania, Queen Mary, Queen Elisabeth, and Normandy, if anchored in a row, would still have come up short next to the Ulrich Wolf.

"I could use a hamburger about now," said Giordino, trying to relieve the tension.

"Me, too," said Megan. "All they fed us was yucky nutritional stuff."

Pat smiled, though her face looked strained. "It won't be long, honey, and you'll get your hamburger."

Pitt turned from the helm. "Were you treated badly?"

"No abuse," answered Pat, "but I've never been ordered around by so many nasty and arrogant people. They worked me twenty hours a day."

"Deciphering Amenes inscriptions from another chamber?"

"They weren't from another chamber. They were photos taken of inscriptions they found at a lost city in the Antarctic."

Pitt looked at her curiously. "The Antarctic?"

She nodded solemnly. "Frozen in the ice. The Nazis discovered it before the wax."

"Elsie Wolf told me they'd found evidence the Amenes built six chambers."

"I can't say," admitted Pat. "All I can tell you is that I got the impression they're using the ice city for some purpose. What, I didn't find out.

"Did you learn anything new from the inscriptions they forced you to decipher?"

As she talked, Pat no longer looked sad and forlorn. "I was barely into the project when you burst through the door. They were extremely interested in what me deciphered in the Colorado and St. Paul chambers. It appeared that the Wolfs were desperate to study the accounts passed down by the Amenes describing the effects of the cataclysm."

"That's because any inscriptions they found inside the lost city came before the cataclysm." He paused and nodded toward her briefcase.

"Is that what's in there?"

She held it up. "The photos from the Antarctic chamber. I couldn't bring myself to leave them behind."

He looked at her steadily. "They don't make women like you anymore."

Pitt might have said more, but a boat was crossing his bow about a hundred yards ahead. It looked to be a workboat, and its course remained steady as it turned and passed on the Grand Bank's port side. The crew seemed intent on their labors and didn't pay the slightest attention to the cabin cruiser.

Relaxing a bit as they neared the forward section of the Ulrich Wolf without any sign of pursuit, Pitt asked, "You said they're studying what conditions will be like in the aftermath of the cataclysm?"

"In a big way. I assume they want every bit of data they can glean for their survival."

"I'm still at a loss as to why the Wolfs are so positive a comet is going to return and collide with Earth within days of the prediction made by the Amenes nine thousand years ago," Pitt said.

Pat shook her head slowly. "I have no answers to that."

Still crawling along at eight knots, Pitt gently turned the wheel, sending the Grand Banks on a wide arc around the bow of the Ulrich Wolf and passing the end of the dock, now swarming with shipyard workers and security guards checking the identification of every man and woman in red coveralls. He passed a small powerboat running with no lights that ominously swung around in a 180-degree turn and began following in their wake. He set his directional computer on the frame of the windshield and studied the readings that would lead him through the darkness to the ravine that held the Skycar.