Drexler felt a tiresome buzzing in his head as he contemplated the wreckage of all his plans, all his hopes. "No. My men never emerged."
"Well, we can get more, yes?"
"No, Max. The cave is demolished. My men may never have gotten out."
"But you just said Hart was out!"
"That's my suspicion." He said it in a small voice. "Greta would never do this alone." He looked at the splinters of petri dish. "This means we're dead men, Max, unless we catch her. If she has the drug she's our only hope." He swallowed and glanced at the ladder. "I closed the hatch. Maybe it won't spread."
"You must be joking." Schmidt pointed at the vents. "We're talking about escaping germs, not escaping rabbits. It's been sucked all over the ship by now. Everyone is infected. It will be like the Bergen. Why on earth did you trust her?"
Drexler looked hollow. "I didn't trust her. I thought I could control her." Then he glared at Schmidt. "Thought you could control her! My God, trussed up by a woman?"
"By a sneaking, conniving— "
Drexler held up his hand, suddenly weary. "All right. Enough. Enough recrimination. How much time do we have before the symptoms appear?"
Schmidt shook his head. "Hours. Maybe a day."
"And where did she go? Where on the island did they hide? Another cave?"
"Good point," said Schmidt. "They can't have gone far on an island. Maybe we can find them and get the drug back." He thought a moment. "And they can't operate a submarine, not alone. They can't leave Antarctica without us. If we die, they die, no?"
"I don't think they plan to die. They're too infatuated with each other for self-sacrifice."
"Then they have an alternate plan," Schmidt reasoned. "A radio. A rescue. An airplane…"
Mention of the plane jogged Drexler's memory. The lonely Dornier he'd spied on the snowy plateau the last trip, the seaplane that had allowed the American's escape. So there had to be a vehicle this time as well, yes? But where? Ah, of course. Now he remembered! Now he realized what they'd missed on last night's search! The couple's furtive discussion at the cave mouth! The tiny bay they'd surveyed together. That was their escape hatch! There was something there. Something to get them out. That was where they'd run.
He hauled up Schmidt. "I know where they're going, I think. A bay on the other side of the volcano below the new cave. We can intercept them there. Not over the rim: that takes too long. Around by sea. If we do that, we live."
Schmidt looked at the SS colonel with hope. They banged open the hatch and climbed out. "Freiwald!"
The captain was in the control room looking worried. "Aren't you letting out the— "
"It's already out," Drexler said brusquely. "It's all over the ship. You're breathing it now." The submariner looked aghast. "Never mind that. How soon can we get underway?"
"Our plan was not to go for a day or two."
"Our plans have obviously changed."
The captain frowned. "I had the engineers strip the diesels. We're doing some routine maintenance. It will take several hours to put them back together."
"What?"
"We can't sail before noon."
Schmidt looked dumbly at his watch. "Good God."
"We can't wait that long," Jürgen said. "I'll take the motor launch and my men to catch them. You follow in the submarine. Captain, if you don't get this boat moving soon, all of you are going to die. Do you understand? Owen Hart and my wife have escaped with the antibiotic and they're our only hope."
Freiwald nodded fearfully and opened his mouth to say something.
Instead, he sneezed.
"God bless you," said Schmidt.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The slender reed that supported the couple's hope of escape looked to Greta's weary mind like a cradle in the snow, a refuge into which she wanted to curl and sleep until they were far, far away. It wouldn't be that easy, of course. The lifeboat's very presence was a grim reminder of how difficult it might prove to get away from the Antarctic island. The two surviving Norwegians from the Bergen had tried and failed.
When Hart first crawled out of the cave six years ago it was utter exhaustion that had allowed him to spot the craft. He'd collapsed on the lava ledge too tired to even lift his head and as his eyes adjusted to the stark polar light he found them idly tracing the fractal geometry of the shoreline far below. It was the leaf-shaped regularity of the abandoned boat's gunwale that caught his eye. He'd risked the time for inspection and found that the artifact was the Norwegian lifeboat, perfectly preserved by the Antarctic dry freeze. The memory had stuck in his mind ever since.
The overturned craft now remained impervious to time. Its wood was bleached gray but it seemed as sound as when it had first left the Bergen. The craft's fittings were only lightly rusted. A few cans of food, a blanket, and a seaman's wool watch cap were frozen onto its bottom floorboards in defiance of gravity. Even the lines were still there, stiff with cold but little decayed. The mast had been unstepped and hastily lashed to the thwarts and its fringe of tattered canvas told what must have happened. The Norwegians' sail had blown out in a storm and they'd been driven back to the island. Either a wave had tossed the boat high on shore or the whalers themselves had dragged the boat away from the reach of the sea. Then the men had disappeared. The pilot supposed they were somewhere nearby, entombed in snow.
"It's not the best of boats to change our luck in," he admitted to Greta.
"I think it's beautiful because it's ours," she replied. "The first part of our new life."
They used ice axes to chop the boat free from its frozen fusion and then rolled it onto its keel. Hart stepped the mast, fastened the boom, and tied on the sail he'd liberated from the motor launch, using as rigging both the lines in the boat and additional ones Greta had stuffed in their packs. The fit was inexact but would serve. Then they put their shoulders to the stern and pushed.
"Heave!" Hart shouted. "Heave with all your might!"
She leaned and let out a Valkyrie cry. The lifeboat broke free and tobogganed into the water, Owen snaring the stern line to keep it from drifting away.
She glanced back up the volcanic slope above the cove. No sign of Jürgen. "They haven't found us yet. We might just make it."
"If we hurry. We're a long ways from the open sea and we'll have to row quite a distance to weave out of this pack ice."
"Do you still have strength for rowing?"
"I'll row to New York to get away from here."
The floating pack ice was a problem for the German launch as well. After motoring out of the caldera entrance Drexler and his SS detachment of five surviving men had to swing wide around the flank of the island to avoid its encircling rind. Being outside the protective crater and on the open sea made Drexler nervous. He really didn't like Antarctica's expansive emptiness, he admitted to himself. The excitement he'd felt about the continent when the Schwabenland had first cast off from Germany had long since disappeared. What made it such a dreadful place, he thought, was that it was beyond human control. Not a house nor a light nor a refuge nor a path. To his mind, there was nothing liberating about such wilderness: he felt like he had to squeeze himself to prevent being pulled apart by Antarctica's vacuum, pieces of him sailing off in all directions like an explosion in space. Accordingly, he'd been looking forward to the cubbyhole embrace of the steel submarine on the long voyage home, his victory ensured in ranks of neatly labeled bottles of a revolutionary biology. Now he was driving through water so cold it was like dark syrup, a sea so chill that the snow which fell on it didn't melt but instead undulated on its top like gray skin. A monstrous place!