They grabbed onto the boat, and began to kick. The Zodiac moved, but the rollers pushed them toward shore. The muffled roar of waves breaking on the beach grew louder. No more gunshots came their way and they began to hope that the shooters were gone. That optimism would have eroded quickly if they had been able to see beyond the grass crowning the dunes. A line of razor-sharp sabers was raised high in the sun like the blades of a giant threshing machine, ready to cut them to ribbons as soon as they crawled ashore.

NUMA 3 - Fire Ice

-4-

HIGH ABOVE THE overturned Zodiac, a turquoise aircraft that resembled a winged canoe wheeled in a lazy circle. The broad-shouldered man at the controls rolled the ultralight airplane into a tight banking turn and peered down through tinted goggles, squinting against the reflected glare with eyes the color of coral underwater. His wind-burnished face was creased in a look of puzzlement.

Moments before, he had seen swimmers in the water next to the overturned inflatable. He glanced away to get his bearings, and when he looked again the swimmers were gone.

Kurt Austin had been chasing the Zodiac like an aerial motorcycle cop hot on the tail of a speeder, and had seen the boat flip over. He couldn't figure out why it had gone out of control. The seas were moderate, and no rocks or other submerged objects were visible. Austin wondered if the inflatable, or the fishing boat he had seen steaming away from the coast, had anything to do with the television crew he was looking for. Probably not. The crew should be on its way to meet the NUMA survey ship Argo, not heading for this desolate stretch.

Austin was aboard the Argo as a deep-ocean consultant on loan from his duties as leader of NUMA's Special Assignments Team. The other members of the team, Joe Zavala and Paul and Gamay Trout, had been given different and undemanding assignments in scattered projects around the globe. NUMA director James Sandecker had insisted that they take working vacations after the team had crossed swords with the hired killers of a megacorporation that wanted to take over the freshwater resources of the world. He had been particularly worried about Austin's attachment to the beautiful, brilliant Brazilian scientist who had sacrificed herself to bring down the conspiracy.

The Argo was in the Black Sea, collecting information on wave and wind action for an international data bank. With his master's degree in systems management from the University of Washington and his vast practical knowledge as a diver and undersea investigator, Austin had been invaluable in helping to set up the sophisticated remote-sensing survey instruments.