MIKE NEILSEN: Pilot hired to fly Hughes to Mount Forel

WOODY CAMPBELL: Drunk in Greenland who rents Cabrillo a snowcat

ALEIMEIN AL-KHALIFA: Terrorist planning to bomb London

SCOTT THOMPSON: Leader of the team on the Free Enterprise

THOMAS "TD" DWYER: CIA scientist who discovers the meteorite's danger

MIKO "MIKE" NASUKI: NOAA astronomer who assists Dwyer

SAUD AL-SHEIK: Saudi procurement official for the hajj

JAMES BENNETT: Pilot who transports the meteorite from the Faeroe Islands to

England

NEBILE LABABITI: Terrorist for London operation

MILOS COUSTAS: Captain of the Larissa, the ship that delivers the bomb to

England

BILLY JOE SHEA: Owner of a 1947 MG TO Cabrillo borrows to chase the bomb

CAST OF CHARACTERS

ROGER LASSITER: Disgraced CIA agent who delivers the meteorite to

Maidenhead

ELTON JOHN: Legendary musician

AMAD: Young Yemeni who will deliver the bomb DEREK GOODLIN: Whorehouse owner in London

JOHN FLEMING: Head of MI5

DR. JACK BERG: CIA doctor who forces Thompson to talk

WILLIAM SKUTTER:' Air Force captain who leads the team in Medina

PATRICK COLGAN: Army warrant officer heading the team to recover prayer

rugs in Riyadh

3

I

PROLOGUE

FIFTY THOUSAND YEARS ago, and millions of miles from Earth, a

planet was twitching convulsively to herald her destruction. The planet

was ancient but her eventual demise had been cast from the start. She

was an unstable orb with poles that constantly shifted polarity.

The planet consisted of rock and magma with a metal core. Over

the countless eons since it had formed and cooled, an atmosphere was

born. The gaseous layers were comprised of argon, helium and some hydrogen.

Life was born on the surface of the planet-a low, base form of

microbe.

The planet never really had a chance to develop complicated life

forms. The microbes consumed oxygen molecules to multiply, keeping

the surface and atmosphere barren of cells that could evolve. The planet's

surface rock turned into superheated liquid mush as each revolution

around its sun drew it closer toward the fiery furnace. The planet revolved

not in a spin around her axis like Earth, but rather in an everincreasing

barrel roll as the poles shifted, and the melted rock surface

began to spread like lava from a volcano.

6 CLIVE CUSSLER

^

Each hour, each minute, each second brought her closer to her sun,

and she gradually shed her skin as if the hand of God were scraping her

surface with a wire brush.

The stellar dandruff that was cast into the atmosphere reached the

edge of the gaseous envelope and was turned white-hot by the sun, bursting

with the force of a thousand nuclear bombs. Sucked back to the surface

by gravity, the reentering projectiles ripped more of the fragile crust

away. More and more of the crust dissolved.

The doomed planet had only a short time to live.

As the protective covering was lost to space, the inner metal core

temperature continued to rise and the orb inside began to spin. Large