None of the navigation instruments was fullctioning. All communications

equipment was dead. Not one of the passengers had ever flown an

aircraft, even a light plane. He was totally disoriented and hopelessly

lost. Inexplicably the needles on the fuel gauges wavered on "Empty."

His mind strained at the confusion of it all.

Where was the pilot? What caused the flight officers' deaths? Who

was behind this insane madness?

The questions swarmed in his mind, but the answers remained wrapped in

frustration.

Rubin's only consolation was that he was not alone. Another man shared

the cockpit.

Eduardo Ybarra, a member of the Mexican delegation, had once served as a

mechanic in his country's air force. Thirty years had passed since he

wielded a wrench on propellerdriven aircraft, but bits and pieces of the

old knowledge had returned to him as he sat in the copilot's

seat-reading the instruments for Rubin and taking command of the

throttles.

Ybarra's face was round and brown, the hair thick and black with traces

of gray, the brown eyes widely spaced and expressionless. In his

three-piece suit, he seemed out of place in the cockpit. Oddly there

was no beaded perspiration on his forehead, and he had not loosened his

tie or removed his coat.

He motioned upward at the sky through the windshield. "Judging from the

stars, I'd say we're on a heading toward the North Pole."

"Probably flying east over Russia for all I know," Rubin said grimly. "I

haven't a vague idea of our direction."

"That was an island we left behind us."

"Think it was Greenland?"

Ybarra shook his head. "We've had water under us for the last few

hours. We'd still be over the icecap if it was Greenland. My guess is

we crossed Iceland."

"My God, how long have we been heading north?"

"No telling when the pilot turned off his London-to-New York course."

Another fear added to Rubin's aching confusion. Calamity was piling on

calamity. The one-in-a-thousand chance of coming through alive had

rapidly risen to one in a million. He had to make a desperate decision,

the only decision.

"I'm going to bring her around ninety degrees to port."

"We have no other choice," Ybarra agreed solemnly.

"A few might survive if we crash on land. Near impossible to pull off a

water landing on high waves in the dark, even by an experienced pilot.

And if by some miracle we set her down intact, no human dressed in

street clothes could last more than a few minutes in a freezing sea."

"We may already be too late." The U.N. delegate from Mexico nodded at

the instrument panel. The red fuel warning lights were flashing across

the board. "I fear our time in the air has run out."

Rubin stared in astonishment at the telltale instruments. He did not

realize that the Boeing flying 200 knots at 1,500 meters ate up the same

amount of fuel as it did when flying 500 knots at 10,500 meters. "Okay

we head west until she drops from under us."