They skirted Dundee Island, not far below the extreme tip of the peninsula. Directly ahead of them Moody Point curled toward the Danger Islands like the bony finger of the old guy with the scythe signifying his next victim. The calm waters ended off the point. As if they had walked from a warm comfortable room through a door into a storm outside, they found the sea suddenly transformed into an unbroken mass of white-capped swells marching in from the Drake Passage. A buffeting wind also sprang up and caused the helicopter to sway like a toy locomotive hurtling around a model train layout.
The peaks of the three Danger Islands came into view, their rock escarpments rising out of a sea that writhed and thrashed around their base. They rose so steeply that even seabirds couldn't get a foothold on their sheer walls. They thrust angrily from the sea in contempt of the waves that broke against the unyielding rock in rapid explosions of foam and spray. The basalt formation was so hard that a million years of onslaught by a maddened sea produced little weathering. Their polished walls ran up to vertical peaks that possessed no flat spaces wider than a good-sized coffee table.
"No ship could live long in that bedlam," said Pitt.
"No shallow water around those pinnacles," Giordino observed. "The water looks to drop off a hundred fathoms within a stone's throw of the cliffs."
"According to the charts, it drops over a thousand meters in less than three kilometers."
They circled the first island in the chain, a wicked, brooding mass of ugly stone sitting amid the churning violence. There was no sign of floating debris on the tormented sea. They flew across the channel separating this island from the next, looking down on the rushing white capped surge that reminded Pitt of the spring floodwaters gushing down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. No ship's captain would be crazy enough to take his vessel within a cannon shot of this place.
"See anything?" Pitt asked Giordino as he struggled to keep the helicopter stable against the unpredictable winds that tried to slam them against the towering cliffs.
"A seething mass of liquid only a white-water kayaker could love. Nothing more."
Pitt completed the circumference and dipped the craft toward the third and outermost island. This one looked dark and evil, and it took surprisingly little imagination to see that the peak was shaped in the likeness of an upturned face, much like that of the devil, with slitty eyes, small rock protrusions for horns and a sharp beard below smirking lips.
"Now that's what I call repugnant," said Pitt. "I wonder what name it goes by."
"No individual names are given on the chart," Giordino replied.
A moment later, Pitt swung the helicopter on a parallel course with the wave-swept palisades and began circling the barren island. Suddenly, Giordino stiffened and peered intently through the front windscreen. "Do you see that?"
Pitt turned briefly from the spectacular collision between water and rock and gazed forward and down. "I see no flotsam."
"Forget the water. Look over the top of that high ridge dead ahead."
Pitt studied the strange rock formation that trailed from the main mass and led into the sea like a man-made breakwater. "That blob of white snow beyond the ridge?"
"That ain't no blob of snow," Giordino said firmly.
Pitt suddenly realized what it was. "I've got it now!" he said with mounting excitement. It was smooth and white and shaped like a triangle with the top cut off. The upper rim was black, and there was some sort of painted emblem on the side. "A ship's funnel! And there's her radar mast sticking up forty meters forward. You made a good call, pal."
"If it's Polar Queen, she must have struck the cliffs on the other side of that spur."
But that was an illusion. When they flew over the natural seawall jutting into the sea it became apparent that the cruise ship was floating undamaged a good five hundred meters from the island. It was incredible, but there she was without a scratch.
"She's still clear!" Giordino shouted.
"Not for long," Pitt said. In an instant he took in the dire situation. The Polar Queen was steaming in large circles, her helm somehow jammed hard to starboard. They had arrived less than thirty minutes before her arc would bring her in collision with the sheer rocks, crushing her hull and sending everyone on board into deep, icy water.
"There are bodies on her deck," said Giordino soberly.
A few lay scattered about the bridge deck. Several had fallen on the sundeck near the stern. A Zodiac, still attached to the gangway, was dragged along through the swells, two bodies lying on its bottom. That no one was alive was obvious by the fact they were all covered with a thin coating of snow and ice.