Deep Ice (6 page)

Two Naval guards stood outside the door to the HQ. A glance at the colour of the badge that hung from Henry’s parka evoked an immediate salute. He smiled at them and returned the salute. “Aye aye, guys, and back atcha’. Is the general having tea?”

“Can’t say, sir,” said one, opening the door.

The collapsible metal chairs that filled the room were in disarray. There had been a lot of activity here recently. Probably several hurried briefings.

General Hayes bent over a table, pondering a map.

As Henry entered the room he stood up, smiled briefly as though it hurt, and took out a pack of cigarettes. He offered one, but Henry shook his head. “Last time I took one of those it was almost the death of me.”

Embry Hazelton, examining the maps alongside Hayes, laughed spontaneously.

“Oh, yes,” said the general, searching his memory.

“Your. . . what was it?
Faux
-Norwegians? Cigarettes. . . Good, Henry. You still have your wits together. That’s good.” He looked out the window. “I heard the jet. F-18A. The artist should be here soon. You stick around.”

“Oh, I intend to. Those terrorist fucks nearly killed me – twice – and they killed my dogs. I mean to see them fry.”

Grimes came in from the next room. Through its door Henry could see bristling communications gear.

“Our best guess, General,” said Grimes without waiting for Hayes’s attention, “is that the icebreaker will be here in six hours. The pack ice is still pretty solid. Slower going then they thought. They say they can run a cable from their generators to McMurdo. . . and we can use their radio. Luckily the Cobra’s radio was shielded.”

“Bottomline it for me, Grimes,” said the general.

“Too soon, sir,” said the SEAL. “The geologists will take days to figure this out.”

“Weeks or even months,” injected Henry, to Hayes’s surprise. “I assume you’re talking about assessing the impact on the ice. Correct?”

Hayes nodded. “We’re the ones President Kerry will be asking for when the calls get through. You know, of course, that the nuke’s electromagnetic pulse knocked out all the electronic gear in the place?”

“Know it? Shit, we saw it in the chopper,” said Henry. “And I just talked to Josh Wallis. The main generator’s kaput, he says.”

“The thing we’re trying to sort out here, Henry,” said Grimes, walking to the table and pointing at the map, “is that we have a hole in the ice a thousand feet deep. We have a billion tons of radioactive steam flowing in towards the pole. And, most of all, we have big ice that’s. . .”

“. . . about to start floating?” interrupted Henry. “I don’t think so. Not after only one blast. This ice is too big to be melted with nukes. That’s a harebrained idea.”

“You sound pretty sure of yourself,” remarked Grimes.

“Well, Henry,” said the general with a bleak, humourless smile, “I’ll just hand you the phone when the President calls and asks for our evaluation, shal I? But didn’t the announcement at the UN specify more than one nuke in the deep ice? What’s your expert opinion on
that
?”

“Even with three. . .” began Henry.

The general lost his temper. He slammed his fist on the table. “I’ll do the briefing, here, Gibbs,” he said.

“Your duty as an American is going to be to keep your opinions to yourself. . . on
everything
other than the faces of those terrorists you saw.”

“With all due respect, sir. . .” Henry began. Then Kai Grimes caught his eye. The SEAL shook his head slightly, indicating Henry was close to pressing all the general’s wrong buttons. At the same moment a small voice at the back of Henry’s mind told him that whether he was a civilian or not didn’t matter any more. These were special times: hard times for the world. Looked at that way, he had to admit that, when his nation call ed, he had to answer like any other American. He’d have expected it of anyone else. So he bit his lip and let the general brief him.

When Hayes had suitably vented his stored-up adrenaline he waited for Henry’s retort. When it didn’t come, he smiled and apologized for barking.

Henry looked at Grimes, then back at the general.

“I’m sorry, sir. You’re absolutely right.”

The mood in the room seemed to mellow a bit after that. But deep in Henry’s mind he yearned to get the hell out of there. He walked to the window and looked towards the east. The mushroom cloud was gone, but in its place a cloud of rising steam clearly marked the site of the blast. He wondered what would possess a person to take such action against the world.

The door opened and a woman in a green flight suit and helmet entered the building. She looked pale. The men in the room smiled in unison when they saw her. Henry figured they were all wondering about the diapers.

The general held out his hand. “Sarah Jordan French, artist, I believe? FBI? I hope you had a pleasant flight.”

The woman took the general’s hand and looked around the room, examining the faces of the men. Her eyes rested for a moment on Henry. Then her gaze returned to the general. “Yes, sir.”

From the moment she’d entered the room, Henry had been unable to take his eyes off her. She removed the helmet and red hair spilled onto her shoulders.
I guess I’ve been too long on the ice,
he thought,
if a woman in a flight suit is a turn-on.

“May I get cleaned up, sir?” the artist was saying to Hayes.

“Quickly,” he replied. “We’ll need you to get to work sketching as soon as you’re ready.”

He tersely told his aide to take her to a nearby facility, then looked at his watch. “Do make it quick, please, French. I want some faces to fax by the end of the day.”

She nodded and followed Hazelton from the room. Henry hoped he wouldn’t get too distracted by the woman when he was trying to conjure the faces of the terrorists. “Just my luck,” he said under his breath.

“What’s that, Gibbs?” asked Hayes brusquely. “You have a problem?”

“Not at all, sir,” said Henry.

#

Sarah French returned to the room in fifteen minutes flat. She’d changed into blue jeans and a bulky green sweater whose sleeves were pushed up to her elbows. She was carrying a smal black case that Henry assumed must contain her sketching materials.

Hayes ushered the pair of them into an adjacent meeting room, performing a perfunctory introduction as he did so. Turning back to the door, he looked at Henry and said, “Do your best, Gibbs.”

Sarah and Henry looked at each other with embarrassed smiles. She sat down and opened her black case, flipped open a pocket, and pulled out a thin electric cord with a small black box attached to it.

“Plug?” she said, searching the baseboards.

Henry noticed a wall outlet behind her chair. “Right behind you.” Thank God for the backup generators. Instead of drawing materials, the woman was carrying a laptop computer. On its lid, stamped in white, was: “Property of the FBI.”

Sarah plugged in the laptop and inserted a CD-ROM disk from a pocket in the computer case. It, too, was marked with an FBI stamp. Henry sat next to her, quietly watching her put together the gear. After she was satisfied everything was connected right, she pushed a button, sat back and looked at him. “Almost ready.”

He hoped she didn’t realize he’d developed a ferocious hard-on. He smiled desperately at her, trying to act nonchalant, trying desperately to remain mindless of his body’s urgings. Half his mind was attempting to figure out why he’d had that reaction to her setting up her electronic gear; the other half knew why.
She bent over, you dope.

“Hard trip?” he said.

She moved her head pertly in response to his question, then smiled. “Boring,” she said. “But rippin’.”

Then she became absorbed again in her computer as images began to glow on the screen. She punched a few keys and squinted.

“I thought you were an artist?”

“I am,” she said. “I use a computer. I’m a Mac- head.”

“A what?” He crossed his legs.

“We use computer graphics to make people, these days.” She picked up the laptop and pushed her chair back from the table so that she was facing him. Fixing her gaze squarely on his eyes, she crossed her own legs and said, “Okay. Let’s do it.”

Henry blushed.

Sarah noticed the colour-change. “What? Nervous or something?”

“No, ma’am,” said Henry. “What do, um, I do?”

“First tell me about the people you saw. You know. What type of people they were. Tell me things like – oh, long faces or short faces. Did the guy have a long thin face or a short fat one? Stuff like that. You know. Race. . .”

Henry did his best to wrench his mind back to being shot, out there on the big ice. He felt betrayed by his manhood. He knew the importance of their job. The world was waiting outside the door to beam the electronic image she produced to law-enforcement agencies all over the world.

He took a deep breath.

If the truth were told, the face of the man who’d shot him was always before him, engraved in a horrible way in his memory. Carved in stone. Full colour. 3-D.

“He had a dark complexion. Round face. He had a parka hood up so I can’t say about his hair. I remember his face, though.”

“A good start. Go, Henry.” Her fingers clicked the computer keys.

As he concentrated on the face of his would-be killer, his body forgot the woman. Suddenly he noticed he was free of his erection. The thought of the terrorist clearly had an adverse effect on his libido.
Oh, my, I must remember that in future. A sure-fire remedy for ill-timed erections.
He laughed at the thought.

“What’s so funny?”

“Can’t say, Miss French.”

“It’s ‘Sarah’. Now just concentrate on the face. Did he have any. . . distinguishing features? Large nose?

Facial hair?”

Henry remembered the man’s close-cropped beard, greying at the fringes, his coffee-coloured skin and large brown eyes. All these he described as thoroughly as he could recal.

Eventually Sarah put the computer on the table so he could see the screen.

“How’re we doin’, Henry?”

She had done a good job of reconstructing the image he saw in his memory. Even the parka looked right. But somehow the face didn’t remind Henry of the man who’d shot him.

He shook his head.

“Let’s save this guy,” said Sarah, “and go on to one of the others. Can you remember them?”

For the next hour Henry did his level best to conjure the faces of the men who’d assaulted him. The best he could come up with was three round-faced men in parkas, a Mediterranean, a Nord or a Brit with a red moustache, and a man who looked like an American or another Brit.

The door opened and Hazelton came in with coffee and sandwiches. “I hope you guys like ham salad. That’s all I could find. The coffee’s fresh, though. The general was wondering if. . .”

Sarah spun the laptop so the man could see the screen. “Look like anyone you know?” she said with a dangerous smile.

Hazelton looked at the screen. “I guess not. Well, uh, good luck. Tell us when. . .”

“Don’t worry. We’ll let you know,” said Sarah.

#

A long while later they were still no further along. Hazelton had appeared every hour on the hour. Finally Hayes himself opened the door.

“I just had a pleasant chat with President Kerry,” he said. “He was. . . inquiring why no images have been received by the FBI in Washington.”

“Trouble is, General,” said Sarah, “Henry here can’t give me much because he didn’t see much. I have three images and will radio what I have at zero eight hundred, but I don’t think it’ll help. Henry saw their faces only, and one of them wore shades.”

Hayes hung his head in disappointment. “Is that the best you can do?”

“Yes, sir.”

Henry looked up at the general. “I’m. . . we’re really doin’ our best, sir,” he said. “But all I saw was their faces. . . like she said. Hel, I’m lucky the nuke left me with any memory at all,” he added in frustration.

“What nuke?” said Sarah.

“Gibbs,” interposed the general, “I want you to try some more. We’ll radio what you have from the
Glomar
icebreaker in an hour.”

He disappeared with the slam of the door.

“Want another sandwich?” said Henry. “I could use some more coffee.”

“What nuke, Henry?”

For the next fifteen minutes he told the full story.

When he’d finished, Sarah sat wide-eyed. “So you were shot twice, left for dead on the ice, hiked fifty miles, and then got
nuked
?”

“So far.”

She reflected on Henry’s experiences for a second, then asked, “What do you think will happen to the ice?”

“Me? I’m no expert,” said Henry. “I only work here.”

“You must have some kind of idea,” she protested.

“Tell me what you know.”

In truth, Henry had spent many a lonely hour out on the ice reading by lantern light the material available on the subject. For a layman he knew quite a lot about the deep ice. He had read that the Ross Ice Shelf was like a huge glacier. Vast flows of ancient ice, very deep, move slowly from the continent’s interior. Different kinds of ice move in different ways, so ice in one place can flow faster than ice in another; the why of it is still mostly guesswork. In truth, very little was known about the deep ice, because scientists had only recently had the tools or the money to probe its secrets.

“When you realize how deep the ice shelf is, considering its weight and all,” Henry told her, “well, it’s a different kind of animal. Nothing else like it in the whole world. Not a glacier, not a river. It’s a kind of immense
thing
that moves forever from the pole to the ocean, calving icebergs sometimes as big as whole countries. The ice shelves could supply the world with fresh water forever, if we ever figured out how to do it.”

“So what would a nuke do?” said Sarah. “Nothing, right?”

“Right,” said Henry after a moment’s hesitation.

“Except, if it breaks the ice free of the bedrock and the ice floats. You see, all that thick ice isn’t floating. It’s attached to the rock.”

She stared at him in disbelief as he told her there was water beneath the vast sea of ice. He described the tidal wave that might occur if a major chunk of the shelf should suddenly sink into the water, inundating coastal cities all over the world.