White Death nf-4

by Clive Cussler

  "Fine. How's the Smithsonian's answer to St. Julien Perlmutter?"

  MacDougal chortled at the question. Tall and lean, with fine sandy hair and a hawk-nose that dominated his narrow face, he was the physical antithesis of the portly Perlmutter. But what he lacked in girth he made up for with an encyclopedic knowledge of air history that was every bit the equivalent of Perlmutter's grasp of the sea.

  "St. Julien carries much more, um, weight in the historical world than I do," he said, with a twinkle in his gray eyes. "What brings you into the rarified atmosphere of the Archives Division?"

  'I'm doing some research on an old airship. I was hoping I'd find something in the library."

  "No need to go to the archives. I'm on my way to a meeting, but we can talk on the way." Austin said. "Have you ever come across a mention of an airship called the Nietzsche?"

  "Oh, sure. Only one airship had that name-the one that was lost on the secret polar expedition of 1935."

  "You know it, then?" He nodded. "There were rumors that the Germans had sent an airship to the North Pole on a secret mission. If it had succeeded, it was meant to cow the Allies and tout the glories of German Kultur in the propaganda war. The Germans denied it, but they couldn't ex- plain the disappearance of two of their greatest airship pioneers, Heinrich Braun and Herman Lutz. The war came along, and the sto- ries faded."

  "So that was it?" "Oh no. After the war, papers were discovered that suggested strongly that the flight had indeed taken place, with an airship sim- ilar to the Graf Zeppelin. The airship supposedly sent a radio message as it neared the pole. They had discovered something of interest on the ice."

  "They didn't say what?" "No. And some people believe it was a fabrication, anyhow. Maybe something Josef Goebbels made up."

  "Butyo believe the accounts." "It's entirely possible. Certainly the technology was there."

  "What could have happened to the airship?" "There are all sorts of possibilities. Engine failure. Sudden storm. Ice. Human error. The Graf Zeppelin was a highly successful aircraft, but we're talking about operating in extreme conditions. Other air- ships have come to similar fates. It could have crashed into the pack ice, been carried hundreds of miles away and gone into the sea when the ice melted." His face lit up. "Don't tell me! You've found traces of it at the bottom of the sea?"

  "Unfortunately, no. Someone mentioned it to me… and, well, my scientific curiosity got the better of me."

  "I know exactly what you mean." He stopped in front of a door. "Here's my meeting. Come by again and we'll talk some more." "I will. Thanks for your help."

  Austin was glad that Mac wasn't pressing him further. He didn't like being evasive with old friends.

  MacDougal paused with his hand on the doorknob. "The fact that we're talking about the Arctic is a funny coincidence. There's a big reception tonight to open a new exhibition on Eskimo culture and art.

  'People of the Frozen North,' or something like that. Dogsled races, the whole thing."

  "Dogsled races in Washington?"

  "I said the same thing, but apparently it's so. Why don't you come by and see for yourself? "

  "I may just do that."

  As he was leaving the museum, Austin stopped at the information booth and picked up a brochure for the exhibition, which was in fact called Denizens of the Frozen North. The opening night reception was by invitation only. He ran his eye down the brochure and stopped at the name of the sponsor: Oceanus.

  He tucked the brochure in his pocket and drove back to his office. A few calls later, he had wrangled an invitation, and, after working awhile longer on his report to Gunn, he went home to change. As he walked past the bookshelves in his combined living room-library, he ran his fingers along the spines of the neatly shelved volumes. The voices of Aristotle, Dante and Locke seemed to speak to him.

  Austin's fascination with the great philosophers went back to his college days and the influence of a thought-provoking professor. Later, philosophy provided a distraction from his work and helped shed light on the darker elements of the human soul. In the course of his assignments, Austin had killed men and injured others. His sense of duty, justice and self-preservation had shielded him from crippling, and perhaps dangerous, self-doubt. But Austin was not a callous man, and philosophy gave him a moral compass to follow when he examined the rightness of his actions.

  He extracted a thick volume, flicked on the stereo so that the liq- uid notes flowed from John Coltrane's saxophone, then went out on the deck and settled into a chair. Riffling through the pages, he quickly found the quote he'd been thinking about since MacDougal had mentioned a blimp named Nietzsche.

  Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you lool into an abyss, the abyss also loofs into you.

  He stared off into space for a few moments, wondering if he had seen the abyss, or more important, whether it was looking back at him. Then he closed the book, put it back on the shelf and went to get ready for the reception.

  24

  A HUGE BANNER EMBLAZONED with the words Denizens of the Frozen North was draped over the Mall entrance to the National Museum of Natural History. Painted on the banner, so there would be no mistaking the subject of the show, were figures in hooded fur parkas riding dogsleds across a forbidding Arctic land- scape. Mountainous hulking icebergs loomed in the background.

  Austin walked between the portico columns and stepped into the museum's expansive octagonal rotunda. At the center of the eighty- foot-wide space was a masterpiece of taxidermy, an African elephant charging across an imaginary savanna. The twelve-ton animal dwarfed the petite decent standing under its upraised trunk.

  "Good evening," the young woman said with a smile, handing Austin a program. She was wearing a lightweight facsimile of tradi- tional Eskimo dress. "Welcome to the Denizens of the Frozen North exhibition. Go through that door and you'll see the displays in the special exhibition hall. A movie on Eskimo culture will be showing every twenty minutes in the I max Theater. The sled dog and harpoon competitions will be held on the Mall in about fifteen minutes.

  Should be quite exciting!"

  Austin thanked the guide and trailed the guests into the special ex- hibit area. The well-lit display cases were filled with Eskimo art- work and ivory carvings, tools for hunting and fishing, cleverly fashioned skin suits and boots that would keep their owners warm and dry in the coldest of Arctic temperatures, driftwood sleds, canoes and whaleboats. A doleful chant backed by the beat of a tom-tom came from speakers scattered around the hall.

  The chattering crowd was the usual combination of Washington politicians, bureaucrats and press. For all its importance in the world, Washington was still a small town, and Austin recognized a number of familiar faces. He was talking to a historian from the Navy Mu- seum who was a kayak enthusiast, when he heard his name called. Angus MacDougal from the Air and Space Museum was making his way through the milling guests. He took Austin's arm.

  "Come over here, Kurt, there's someone I want you to meet." He led Austin to a dignified-looking gray-haired man and intro- duced him as Charles Gleason, the curator of the exhibition.

  "I told Chuck that you were interested in Eskimos," MacDougal said.

  "Actually, they prefer to be called 'Inuit; which means, 'the Peo- ple,' " Gleason said. " 'Eskimo was a name the Indians gave them. It means 'eaters of raw flesh.' Their name for themselves is 'Nakooruk; which means 'good.' " He smiled. "Sorry for the lec- ture. I taught college for many years, and the pedagogue in me keeps reasserting itself."

  "No apology necessary," Austin said. "I never resist the opportu- nity to learn something new."

  "That's very kind of you. Do you have any questions on the exhi- bition?"

  "I was wondering about the sponsor," Austin said. He read the placard stating that items in the case were on loan from Oceanus, and he decided to take a long shot. "I've heard the head of Oceanus is a man named Toonook."

  Toonook?

 
"That's right."

  Gleason gave him a wary look. "You're serious?"

  "Very. I'd like to meet the gentleman."

  Gleason replied with a strange half smile and made a sound be- tween a chortle and a snicker. Unable to contain himself, he burst forth with a loud guffaw. "Sorry," he said, "but I'd hardly call Toonook a gentleman. Toonook is the Inuit name of an evil spirit. He's considered to be the creator and destroyer."

  "You're saying Toonook is a mythological name?"

  "That's right. The Inuit say he's in the sea, the earth and the air. Every time there's an unexpected noise, like the ice cracking under- foot, it's Toonook, looking for a victim. When the wind howls like a pack of hungry wolves, it's Toonook."

  Austin was confused. Toonook was the name Therri had given him as the head of Oceanus. "I can see why my question made you laugh," Austin said, with an embarrassed smile. "I must have mis- understood."

  "There's no misunderstanding as far as the Inuit are concerned," Gleason said. "When they travel alone, they keep an eye out for Toonook. They carry a bone knife and wave it around to keep Toonook at bay."

  Austin's eye drifted past Gleason's shoulder. "Something like the little pig sticker in that display case?"

  Gleason tapped the glass in front of the ornately carved white blade. "That's a very rare and unusual item."

  "In what way?" "Most Inuit knives were tools mainly used for skinning. That

  knife was made with one purpose: to kill other human beings." "Odd," Austin said, "I had always heard that the Eskimos were a peaceful and good-natured people."

  "Very true. They live in close quarters in a harsh and demanding environment where tempers could easily flare into violence. They know cooperation is vital to survival, and so they've evolved a whole set of rituals and customs to diffuse aggression." "That knife looks about as aggressive as it gets." Gleason nodded in agreement. "The Inuit are subject to the same dark passions as the rest of humankind. The people who made that weapon were from a tribe that broke the peaceful mold. We think they came from Siberia in prehistoric times and settled in northern Quebec. They tended toward rape, pillage, human sacrifice… very nasty. The other communities banded together many years ago and drove them off. They named them 'Kiolya.' "

  "Doesn't ring a bell."

  "It's the Inuit name for the aurora borealis, which the Arctic peo- ple regard as the manifestation of evil. The real name of the tribe, no one knows."

  "What happened to the Kiolya?"

  "They scattered around Canada. Many of them ended up in the cities, where their descendants formed criminal enterprises. Murder for hire and extortion, mainly. Some of them retained their old tribal customs, such as the vertical tattoos over the cheekbones, until they found that it identified them easily to the police."

  "I'm curious. How is an exhibition like this pulled together?"

  "In many different ways. With this one, a public relations firm from Oceanus approached the museum and asked if we would be in- terested in placing the show. They said the sponsors had a strong in- terest in educating the public on Inuit culture, and they would organize the exhibition and pay all costs. Well, we couldn't resist. It's a fascinating show, don't you think?"

  Austin stared at the Kiolya knife, which was identical to the weapon that had slashed his chest open at the Faroe Islands fish farm. He was thinking about the vertical tattoos on the face of the man who'd wielded the knife. "Yes, fascinating," he said.

  "Since I can't introduce you to Toonook, perhaps you'd like to meet the representative from Oceanus."

  "He's here?"

  "I just spoke to him a few minutes ago in the diorama room. Fol- low me."

  The lights in the diorama room had been dimmed to simulate the Arctic night. Lasers projected a moving display of the northern lights on the ceiling. Standing alone in front of a life-sized diorama show- ing a seal hunt was a tall, well-built man with a shaved head. Dark sunglasses covered his eyes.

  Gleason approached the man and said, "Dr. Barker, I'd like you to meet Kurt Austin. Mr. Austin is with the National Underwater and Marine Agency. You must know of it."

  "I would have to come from another planet not to know NUMA."

  They shook hands. Austin felt like his fingers were clutching a frozen side of beef.

  "I hope you don't mind if I share our little joke," Gleason said to Kurt. "Mr. Austin thought that the head of Oceanus was named Toonook."

  "Mr. Gleason explained that Toonook was not a man, but an evil spirit," Austin said.

  Barker stared at Austin through the dark lenses. "It's more com- plicated than that," he said. "Toonook is considered to be evil in the Inuit culture. He is the embodiment of that clever light display on the ceiling. But like others through history, the people of the North wor- shipped the thing they feared the most."

  "Toonook is a god, then?"

  "Sometimes. But I assure you that the head of Oceanus is very human."

  "I stand corrected. If it's not Toonook, what is his real name?"

  "He prefers to keep his identity a secret. If you'd like to call him Toonook, feel free to do so. He has been called worse names by his competitors. He stays out of the limelight, and it falls upon his em- ployees to represent him. In my case, I work for a company named Aurora, which is a subsidiary of Oceanus."

  "What sort of work do you do for Aurora?"

  "I'm a geneticist." Austin glanced around the room. "This is a wide departure from genetics."

  "I like to get out of the lab. I suggested that Oceanus sponsor this exhibition. I have a direct interest in the Kiolya. My great-great- grandfather was a New England whaling captain. He stayed with the tribe and tried to stop the walrus hunting that led to its dissolution." "Mr. Gleason tells me that the other Eskimos ran the Kiolya off because they were thieves and murderers."

  "They did what they had to do to survive," Barker said. "I'd love to continue this discussion," Gleason said, "but you'll

  have to excuse me. I see an assistant who needs my attention. Please give me a call sometime, and we can talk at length, Mr. Austin." When Gleason was gone, Austin said, "Tell me, Dr. Barker, what part of business is Oceanus involved in that would require the serv- ices of a geneticist?"

  The frozen smile disappeared. "Come on, Austin. We're alone, so we don't need to play games, anymore. You know very well what Oceanus does. You broke into our Faroe Islands operation, caused a lot of damage and killed one of my men. I won't forget it."

  "Gee," Austin said. "Now you've got me confused. You've obvi- ously mistaken me for someone else."

  "I don't think so. The Danish press published your picture every- where. You're quite the hero in Denmark, you know, for rescuing their sailors after that collision."

  "A collision which your company engineered," Austin said, drop- ping all pretense.

  "And which would have worked, except for your meddling." The soft, cultivated voice had become a snarl. "Well, that ends now. You've interfered in my business for the last time."

  "Your business? I thought you were a humble employee for Oceanus, Dr. Barker… or should I call you Toonook?"

  Barker removed his glasses and stared at Austin with pale-gray eyes. The moving colors played across his ashen features as if pro- jected on a screen. "Who I am is not important. What I am has a di- rect bearing on your future. I am the instrument of your death. Turn around."

  Austin glanced over his shoulder. Two swarthy men stood behind him, blocking the way. They had closed the door to keep the other guests out. Austin wondered which would offer him the better chance, pushing Barker through the display glass or bulling his way between the men at the door. He had already decided he didn't like either option and was groping for a third, when there was a knock at the door and MacDougal stuck his head in.

  "Hey, Kurt," he called out. "I'm looking for Charlie Gleason. Sorry to interrupt you."

  "Not at all," Austin said. MacDougal wasn't the Seventh Cavalry, but he would do.

  The guards looked
for direction to Barker. He replaced his sun- glasses, gave Austin his glacial smile and said, " 'Til we meet again," and made for the door. The guards stepped aside to let him through, and a second later, all three men were lost in the crowd.

  Austin's reunion with MacDougal didn't last long. As they merged with the crowd, Mac spotted a senator who was a friend of the Smith- sonian, and he dashed off to collar him for funding. Austin mingled with the other guests until he heard an announcement saying that the dogsled races were about to begin. He was heading back to the ro- tunda when he caught a glimpse of chestnut hair cascading to bare shoulders. Therri must have felt his attention. She turned and glared in his direction. Then she smiled.

  "Kurt, what a nice surprise," she said. As they shook hands, she eyed him from head to toe. "You look quite handsome in your tuxedo."

  Austin hadn't expected the friendly greeting after the acrimony of their parting exchange on Roosevelt Island. "Thanks," he said. "Hope it doesn't smell too strongly of mothballs."

  She adjusted one of his lapels as if she were his prom date. "You smell quite nice, as a matter of fact."

  "The same thing that attracted you. I'm sure it didn't escape your attention that these displays are the property of Oceanus."

  "That's the main reason we're here." Therri glanced off to the side of the rotunda, where Ben Nighthawk stood. He looked uneasy in his black tuxedo, unsure of what to do with his hands, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. She waved him over.

  "You remember Ben," Therri said.

  'Good to see you again," Austin said, shaking hands. "Nice tux." 'Thanks," Nighthawk said, without enthusiasm. "It's rented." He glanced around at the other guests. "I'm a little out of my element." "Don't worry," Austin said. "Most of the people who come to these receptions are here for the food and the gossip."

  "Ben agreed to escort me," Therri said. "Marcus thought Ben's memory might be jogged by something he saw." "Has it been?"

  "Not yet," Therri said. "What about you? Have you learned any- thing?"