“She's a friend of mine. How is she?”

“Few broken bones, some burns. But the doctors expect that she'll pull through. Sounds like a tough lady.”

“She is. Could you give her a message?”

Of course.

“Tell her I'll be over to see her as soon as she's feeling better.” “Will do.”

Austin thanked the captain and hung up. He stared into space, his jaw muscle working, his blue-green eyes at the topaz level on Moh's scale of hardness. He was thinking of Jorgensen's horsy smile and pia's kindness. Barker, or Toonook, or whatever his name was, had made the mistake of his life. By killing the professor and injuring Pia, he had made it personal.

NUMA 4 - White Death

30

THE SINGLE-ENGINE floatplane flew low, looking like a toy against the vastness of the Canadian wilderness. Therri Weld sat next to the pilot in the front passenger seat, where she had a good view of the ranks of sharp, pointed treetops, any one of which could have ripped the belly out of the fuselage.

The first part of the flight had been spent in white-knuckled ter- ror. Therri had not been reassured when she saw the pair of fuzzy dice hanging in the cockpit. But as the flight proceeded without a hitch, she had concluded that the pilot, an enormous, grizzled man whose name was Bear, actually seemed to know what he was doing.

“Don't get up here very often,” Bear shouted over the roar of the engine. “Too remote for most of the 'sportsmen' who come up to go hunting and fishing. Their idea of roughing it is staying at a lodge with inside plumbing.” Bear pointed through the windshield at the featureless terrain. "Coming up on Looking Glass Lake. It's really two lakes joined by a short connector. Locals call it the Twins, al- though one's bigger than the other. We'll drop down on the little guy

in a few minutes."

“All I see is trees and more trees,” said Marcus Ryan, who sat be- hind the pilot.

“Yeah, bound to find trees in these parts,” Bear said, with a cheer- ful grin. He glanced over to see if Therri appreciated the joke on Ryan. She smiled gamely, but her heart wasn't in it. She would have felt far more confident if Ben Nighthawk were with them. Her calls to his apartment had gone unanswered. She'd wanted to keep trying, but Marcus had been in a hurry to get rolling.

“You can pull out if you want to,” Ryan had said. “Chuck and I can go it alone, but we've got to move fast because the plane's wait- ing for us.” Therri barely had time to pack before Ryan picked her up. Before long, they were piling into the SOS executive jet with Chuck Mercer, the former first mate of the Sea Sentinel. With his ship on the bottom, Mercer was eager to see action.