Ice Hunt (62 page)

Frowning, he lifted the binoculars again.

Just as he raised them to his face, the world ignited to the north. The flash of green through the scopes whited out the view, blinding him. Stumbling back, he let the scopes drop around his neck.

He blinked away the glare and stared to the north. Something was wrong with the horizon. It was no longer a smooth arc. It now bowed up, rising like a wave.

He snatched the binoculars and stared again. A deep green glow marked the center of the cresting wave, like a signal buoy riding a wave.

Then it was gone.

A roar like the end of the world rumbled over the ice.

He continued to stare. The bomb had clearly gone off, but what was happening? He couldn’t understand what he was seeing through the scopes.

Then it hit him. He suddenly understood why the glow at the center of the explosion had vanished. It was blocked from his view—by a wall of ice rolling toward him, as wide as the horizon.

As he stared, the cresting wave spread out from ground zero, like a boulder dropped into a still lake.

A tidal wave of ice.

His heart leaped to his throat as he ran for the idling helicopter. “Go!” he screamed as the world continued to rumble ominously. Instead of the explosion fading and echoing away, it was growing louder.

He fled to the Seahawk’s door.

One of his men pushed the door open. “What’s happening?”

Wilson dove in. “Get this bird in the air! Now!”

The pilot heard him. The rotors immediately began to kick up, spinning faster, rotating toward lift off.

Wilson dove to the copilot’s seat.

The blast wave of ice raced toward them.

He stared upward, praying. Overhead, the rotors spun to a blur. The Seahawk lifted from its skids, bobbling a bit as the rotors dug at the frigid air, trying to find purchase.

“C’mon!” Wilson urged.

He stared as the horizon closed in on them.

Then the bird took to the air, shooting straight up.

Wilson judged the distance of the surging ice-tsunami.
Was its speed slowing? Fading?

It seemed to be.

It was!

They were going to make it.

Then a half mile away, something blew under the ice. The entire cap slammed up at them, striking the skids of the helicopter. It tilted savagely.

Wilson screamed.

The amplified wave struck the helicopter, swatting it out of the sky.

9:18 P.M.
USS
POLAR SENTINEL

Amanda stared at the screen of the DeepEye. A moment ago, the monitor’s resolution had fogged from a deep sonar pulse, wiping out detail. Then worse—the screen went suddenly
blue
.

Only one effect registered that hue on a sonar device.

A nuclear explosion.

John Aratuk stood beside her. The elderly Inuit maintained his vigil in the Cyclops room. He stared up through the dome of Lexan glass. The seas lay dark around them. They were nearly at crush depth. Here the world was eternally sunless.

John pointed.

A star bloomed in the darkness. Off to the south, high above.

Ground zero.

The old man turned to Amanda. He didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. His grief was plain in every line of his face. He had aged decades in a single moment.

Amanda spoke. “I’m so sorry.”

He closed his eyes and turned away, inconsolable.

Amanda turned back to the DeepEye. The man’s daughter, all the others, they had sacrificed everything in an attempt to save the world.

But had they wasted their lives?

The Polaris trigger had blown. That was plain on the DeepEye monitor. But what of Amanda’s attempt to block the two amplifiers?

She stared at the blued-out screen. Her idea had been a simple one, employed rapidly. She had ordered the
Polar Sentinel
to dive deep. She needed distance from the surface.

As the submarine had plummeted into the Arctic depths, she had rapidly punched in the coordinates and aligned the DeepEye toward the locations of the two nearest amplifiers in the array. Once it was deep enough, she had pointed the DeepEye and widened the breadth of the sonar cone to encompass both devices, needing the distance and depth to accomplish this. Then she had turned the full strength of the DeepEye upon the pair of amplifiers and prayed.

For Polaris to work, the array had to propagate a perfect harmonic wave, just the right frequency to generate an ice-shattering effect. But if the DeepEye was transmitting across the wave front, it could alter the harmonics just enough to disrupt and perhaps jangle the wave front from igniting the two amplifiers within the DeepEye’s cone.

Amanda stared over at the monitor, waiting for it to clear.

Had her plan worked?

9:18 P.M.
RUSSIAN I-SERIES SUB

Burrowed between two mattresses, Jenny clung to Matt. The world cartwheeled around them both, not smoothly, but jarringly, like a paint shaker. Even with the cushioning, she felt battered and bruised. Her head rang from the concussion of the explosion.

But she was still alive.

They both were.

Matt hugged her tight, his legs and arms wrapped around her. “We’re heading down,” he yelled in her ears.

She also felt the increasing pressure.

After a long minute, the world slowed its spin, settling out into a crooked angle.

“I think we’ve stabilized.” Matt slid an arm from her and peeled away one edge of the mattress to peek out.

Jenny joined him.

In a berth across from them, Kowalski had already poked his head out. He waved a field flashlight up and down the crew quarters. The floor was tilted down and canted to the side, still rolling slightly. “Is everyone okay?” he called out.

Like butterflies leaving cocoons, the rest of the party emerged. Muffled barking confirmed Bane’s status.

Magdalene cried from farther back. “Zane…he fell out…!”

Zane answered faintly from the other direction, “No, I’m okay. Broke my wrist.”

Everyone slowly crawled free, checking their own limbs. Washburn carried Maki. She sang softly to the child, soothing him.

Tom worked his way up the narrow passage between the stacked bunks. His eyes were on the walls and ceilings. Jenny knew why. She heard the creak of seams, the pop of strained joints. “We’re deep,” he muttered. “The explosion must have thrust us straight down.”

“But at least we
survived
the explosion,” Ogden said.

“It was the ice around the sub,” Tom said dully. “It shielded us. The hollow sea cave was a structural weak point of the station. It simply shattered away, carrying us with it.”

“Are we going to sink to the bottom?” Magdalene asked.

“We’ve positive buoyancy,” Tom answered. “We should eventually surface like a cork. But…”

“But what?” Zane asked, cradling his arm.

All of the Navy crew stared at the walls as they continued to groan and scrape. Kowalski answered, “Pray we don’t reach crush depth first.”

9:20 P.M.
UNDER THE ICE…

With a start, Craig woke in darkness, upside down. He tasted blood on his tongue, his head ached, and his shoulder flared with a white-hot fire.
Broken clavicle
. But none of this stimulation woke him.

It was the spray of cold water in his face.

In the darkness, it took him a moment to orient himself. As he righted himself, his hands reached out to glass walls. He felt the source of the jetting spray. A crack in the tank’s glass door. The water was ice-cold.

His eyes strained for any sign of where he was. But the world remained as dark as oil. Water rose under him, filling the tank. He could hear the bubble of escaping air. The tank was no longer intact. He had survived the shockwave of the bomb, but he was deep underwater.

And still falling.

The spray grew fiercer as the depth grew deeper.

Ice water soaked through him, thigh-high now. His teeth chattered, half from cold, half from shock, but mostly from growing panic.

He secretly feared being buried alive. He had heard tales of agents being eliminated in such a manner.

This was worse.

The cold rose through him faster than the water. Which would kill him first, he wondered, hypothermia or drowning?

After a full minute, the answer came.

The loud bubbling stopped, and the spray of water slowed to a trickle, then stopped. He had reached some equilibrium point. The pocket of air was holding the water back…at least for now.

But he was far from safe. The small pocket would quickly stale, and even before that, the cold would kill him.

Or maybe not.

Fingers scrambled into the pocket of his parka. The clink of glass sounded. His fingertips touched broken glass, cutting. Still, he searched and found what he sought. He pulled out one of the glass syringes, unbroken. He had taken two samples from the ice lab, insurance at the time.

Now it was survival.

He thumbed off the needle cap.

There was no way he could find a vein in the dark.

With both hands, he stabbed the long point into the flesh of his belly. The pain was exquisite. He shoved the plunger, pushing the elixir into his peritoneal cavity. From there, it should slowly absorb into his bloodstream.

Once emptied, he pulled the syringe free and dropped it into the icy pool at his waist. His teeth chattered uncontrollably, his limbs soon followed.

A fear rose through his panic.

Would the cryogenic elixir absorb fast enough?

Only time would tell.

9:21 P.M.
RUSSIAN I-SERIES SUB

Holding his breath, Matt stood with the others. The old sub groaned and popped. Kowalski swung his flashlight up and down the passage. Distantly a soft hiss of water whispered in the boat. A leak. The darkness pressed down upon them.

Jenny held his hand, fingers tight, palms damp.

Then Matt felt the shift under his legs, a slight rolling of his stomach. He turned to Kowalski and Tom, trusting the Navy men’s senses more than his own.

Tom confirmed his hope. “We’re rising.”

Jenny’s fingers squeezed his. They were heading back up.

Murmurs of relief echoed among the others.

But Kowalski’s face remained tight. Tom did not look any more relieved.

“What’s wrong?” Matt asked.

“There’s no way to alter our buoyancy,” Tom answered.

Kowalski nodded. “It’s an uncontrolled ascent. We’re going to keep climbing faster and faster.”

Matt understood, remembering Tom’s earlier analogy. The sub was like a cork shoved deep into the water. It was now back on its way up, gaining speed, propelled by its own buoyancy. Matt’s gaze drifted up, picturing what would happen.

Once they reached the surface, the speed of their ascent would be deadly. They’d strike the underside of the polar ice cap like a train wreck.

“Back into the mattresses?” Matt asked.

“That won’t do much good,” Kowalski said. “It’ll be pancake city once we hit the surface.”

Still they had no other recourse. The party fled back to the padding and security of the mattresses. Matt pushed in next to Jenny. He sensed their rate of ascent accelerating. He felt it in his ears, a popping sensation. The incline of the sub grew steeper as it rose.

Jenny sought him with her hands. He curled into her, not knowing if this would be his last chance to do so. His hands reached to her cheeks. They were damp.

“Jen…”

She shook in his arms.

“I love you,” he whispered. “I always have. I never stopped.”

Her body quaked with silent sobs, but still she reached him with her lips, seeking his mouth. She kissed him deeply, hugely. She didn’t have to speak. She answered with her entire body and soul.

They clung to each other, shutting out the world, the terror. Here, in this moment, there was only forgiveness and love and simple need. One for another. How could they have forgotten something so simple?

The moment stretched to a crystalline eternity.

Then the sub hit the surface.

9:23 P.M.
ABOVE THE ICE…

The moon was full, a bright coin breaking through the storm clouds. Its light cast the Arctic stillness into silver, shining off the ice. The only blemish was a half-mile-wide dark hole, still smoldering and smoking. The rest of the world remained a perfect plain of sterling silver.

But it was not to last. Perfection never did.

A mile from the hole, something smashed through from below, a black whale breaching from the water. It thrust itself high into the air, leaving the seas fully behind. It hung in the air until gravity claimed it again.

The length of iron and steel crashed, belly first, to the sea, vanishing under the ice for a moment, then rolling back up, sloshing and rocking in the slush.

9:24 P.M.
RUSSIAN I-SERIES SUB

Matt lay in a tangle with Jenny. In the darkness, pressed between mattresses, it was hard to say whose limbs were whose.

A moment ago, they had struck the surface. They must have. Locked in each other’s arms, they had been thrown upward, held weightless for a long breath as if they were flying. Then they were inexplicably falling again.

The crash jarred them back to their berth, landing them in a pile.

Cries of surprise reached them from the others.

The sub rolled and canted.

Matt extracted himself from Jenny and helped them both from their nest. His feet were unsteady—or was it the rocking sub? Matt kept one hand clutched to the frame of his berth. “What just happened?” he asked.

Kowalski scratched his head with his flashlight. “We should be dead. Crushed.” He sounded oddly disappointed, his firm faith in the physics of buoyancy and ice betrayed.

“Well, I’m not complaining,” Matt said, gaining his balance as the sub settled. “Let’s see where we are.”

Keeping a firm grip on Jenny’s hand, he led the party back to the center of the boat. The inner hatch was unlocked. It dropped open, drenching Kowalski with water.