The Ice Limit

by Douglas Preston; Lincoln Child

  “It’s purely cosmetic.”

  “I intend to spend the next several days making sure of that.” She pointed toward some large projections from the side of the superstructure. “What’s behind those forward bulkheads?”

  “Additional security equipment,” Glinn said. “We’ve taken every possible safety precaution, and then some.”

  “Interesting.”

  Lloyd gazed at her profile curiously. “Eli here has said nothing about you,” he said. “Can you fill me in on your background?”

  “I was a ship’s officer for five years, and a captain for three.”

  Lloyd caught the past tense. “What kind of ships?”

  “Tankers and VLCCs.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Very Large Crude Carriers. Over two hundred and fifty thousand tons displacement. Tankers on steroids, basically.”

  “She’s gone around the Horn on several occasions,” said Glinn.

  “Around the Horn? I didn’t know that route was still used.”

  “The big VLCCs can’t go through the Panama Canal,” said Britton. “The preferred route is around the Cape of Good Hope, but occasionally schedules require a Horn passage.”

  “That’s one reason we hired her,” said Glinn. “The seas down there can be tricky.”

  Lloyd nodded, still gazing at Britton. She returned the look calmly, unruffled by the pandemonium taking place below her. “You know about our unusual cargo?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “And you have no problem with it?”

  She looked at him. “I have no problem with it.”

  Something in those clear green eyes told Lloyd a different story. He opened his mouth to speak, but Glinn interrupted smoothly. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you the cradle.”

  He motioned them farther down the catwalk. Here the ship’s deck lay directly below, wreathed in clouds of welding smoke and diesel exhaust. Deckplates had been removed, exposing a vast hole in the ship. Manuel Garza, chief engineer for EES, stood at its edge, holding a radio to his ear with one hand and gesturing with the other. Catching sight of them overhead, he waved.

  Peering down into the exposed space, Lloyd could make out an amazingly complex structure, with the elegance of a crystal lattice. Strings of yellow sodium lights along its edges made the dark hold sparkle and glow like a deep, enchanted grotto.

  “That’s the hold?” Lloyd asked.

  “Tank, not hold. Number three center tank, to be precise. We’ll be placing the meteorite at the very center of the ship’s keel, to maximize stability. And we’ve added a passageway beneath the maindeck, running from the superstructure forward, to aid access. Note the mechanical doors we’ve installed on each side of the tank opening.”

  The cradle was a long way down. Lloyd squinted against the glow of the countless lights.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said suddenly. “Half of it’s made of wood!” He turned to Glinn. “Cutting corners already?”

  The corners of Glinn’s mouth jerked upward in a brief smile. “Wood, Mr. Lloyd, is the ultimate engineering material.”

  Lloyd shook his head. “Wood? For a ten-thousand-ton weight? I can’t believe it.”

  “Wood is ideal. It gives ever so slightly, but never deforms. It tends to bite into heavy objects, locking them in place. The type of oak we’re using, greenheart laminated with epoxy, has a higher shear strength than steel. And wood can be carved and shaped to fit the curves of the hull. It won’t wear through the steel hull in a heavy sea, and it doesn’t suffer metal fatigue.”

  “But why so complicated an arrangement?”

  “We had to solve a little problem,” said Glinn. “At ten thousand tons, the meteorite must be absolutely locked into place, immobilized in the hold. If the Rolvaag encounters heavy weather on the way back to New York, even a tiny shift of the meteorite’s position could fatally destabilize the ship. That network of timbers not only locks the thing into place, but distributes its weight evenly throughout the hull, simulating the loading of crude oil.”

  “Impressive,” said Britton. “You took the internal frames and partitioning into account?”

  “Yes. Dr. Amira is a computational genius. She worked up a calculation that took all of ten hours on a Cray T3D supercomputer, but it gave us the configuration. We can’t finish it, of course, until we get the exact dimensions of the rock. We’ve built this based on Mr. Lloyd’s flyover data. But when we actually unearth the meteorite, we’ll build a second cradle around it that we can plug into this one.”

  Lloyd nodded. “And what are those men doing?” He pointed to the deepest depths of the hold, where a gaggle of workmen, barely visible, were cutting through the hull plates with acetylene torches.

  “The dead man’s switch,” said Glinn evenly.

  Lloyd felt a surge of irritation. “You’re not really going through with that.”

  “We’ve already discussed it.”

  Lloyd struggled to sound reasonable. “Look. If you open up the bottom of the ship to dump the meteorite in the middle of some storm, the damn ship’s going to sink anyway. Any idiot can see that.”

  Glinn held Lloyd with his gray, impenetrable eyes. “If the switch is thrown, it will take less than sixty seconds to open the tank, release the rock, and reseal it. The tanker won’t sink in sixty seconds, no matter how heavy the seas are. On the contrary, the inrush of water will actually compensate for the sudden loss of ballast when the meteorite goes. Dr. Amira worked that all out, too. And a pretty little equation it was.”

  Lloyd stared back at him. This man actually derived pleasure from having solved the problem of how to send a priceless meteorite to the bottom of the Atlantic. “All I can say is, if anyone throws that dead man’s switch on my meteorite, he’s a dead man himself.”

  Captain Britton laughed—a high, ringing sound that carried above the clangor below. Both men turned toward her.

  “Don’t forget, Mr. Lloyd,” she said crisply, “it’s nobody’s meteorite yet. And there’s a long stretch of water ahead of us before it is.”

  Aboard the Rolvaag,

  June 26, 12:35 A.M.

  MCFARLANE STEPPED through the hatchway, carefully closed the steel door behind him, and walked out onto the fly deck. It was the very highest point of the ship’s superstructure, and it felt like the roof of the world. The smooth surface of the Atlantic lay more than a hundred feet below him, dappled in faint starlight. The gentle breeze carried the distant cry of gulls, and smelled wonderfully of the sea.

  He walked over to the forward railing and wrapped his hands around it. He thought about the huge ship that would be his home for the next few months. Directly below his feet lay the bridge. Below that lay a deck left mysteriously empty by Glinn. Farther below lay the rambling quarters of the senior officers. And a full six stories down, the maindeck, stretching ahead a sixth of a mile to the bow. An occasional dash of starlit spray washed over the forecastle head. The network of piping and tank valves remained, and placed around it were a maze of old containers—the laboratories and workspaces—like a child’s woodblock city.

  In a few minutes his presence would be required at the “night lunch,” which would be their first formal meal on board ship. But he had come up here first to convince himself that the voyage had really begun.

  He breathed in, trying to clear his head of the last frantic days, setting up labs and beta-testing equipment. He gripped the railing tighter, feeling a swell of exhilaration. This is more like it, he thought. Even a jail cell in Chile seemed preferable to having Lloyd constantly looking over his shoulder, second-guessing, worrying over trivial details. Whatever lay at the end of their journey—whatever it was that Nestor Masangkay had found—at least they were on their way.

  McFarlane turned and made the long walk across the deck to the aft rail. Although the thrum of engines came faintly from the depths of the ship, up here he could feel no hint of vibration. In the distance he could see the Cape May lighthouse winking, on
e short, one long. After Glinn secured their clearance papers through some private means of his own, they had left Elizabeth under cover of darkness, maintaining secrecy to the last. They would soon be in the main shipping lanes, beyond the continental shelf, and would then turn due south. Five weeks from now, if all went as planned, they would see the same light again. McFarlane tried to imagine what it would be like if they did recover it successfully: the furious outcry, the scientific coup—and, perhaps, his own personal exoneration.

  Then he smiled cynically to himself. Life didn’t work like that. It was so much easier to see himself back again in the Kalahari, a little more money in his pocket, a little chubby from ship’s food, tracking down the elusive Bushmen and renewing his search for the Okavango. And nothing would erase what he had done to Nestor—particularly now that his old friend and partner was dead.

  As he gazed out over the ship’s stern, McFarlane became aware of another odor on the sea air: tobacco. Looking around, he realized he wasn’t alone. From the far side of the fly deck, a small pinpoint of red winked against the dark, then disappeared again. Someone had been quietly standing there; a fellow passenger enjoying the night.

  Then the red ember jerked and bobbed as the person rose to approach him. With surprise, he realized it was Rachel Amira, Glinn’s physicist, and his own alleged assistant. Between the fingers of her right hand were the final inches of a thick cigar. McFarlane sighed inwardly at having his solitary reverie intruded upon, especially by this sardonic woman.

  “Ciao, boss. Any orders for me?”

  McFarlane remained silent, feeling a swell of annoyance at the word “boss.” He hadn’t signed on to be a manager. Amira didn’t need a nursemaid. And she didn’t seem too pleased with the arrangement either. What could Glinn have been thinking?

  “Three hours at sea, and I’m bored already.” She waved the cigar. “Want one?”

  “No thanks. I want to taste my dinner.”

  “Ship’s cooking? You must be a masochist.” She leaned against the rail beside him with a bored sigh. “This ship gives me the willies.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s just so cold, so robotic. When I think of going to sea, I think of iron men running all over the decks, jumping at barked orders. But look at this.” She jerked a finger over her shoulder. “Eight hundred feet worth of deck, and nothing stirring. Nothing. It’s a haunted ship. Deserted. Everything’s done by computer.”

  She has a point, McFarlane thought. Even though by modern supertanker standards the Rolvaag was only moderate sized, it was still huge. Yet only a skeleton crew was necessary to man it. With all the ship’s complement, the EES specialists and engineers, and the construction crew, there were still fewer than one hundred people aboard. A cruise ship half the Rolvaag’s size might carry two thousand.

  “And it’s so damned big,” he heard her say, as if answering his own thoughts.

  “Talk to Glinn about that. Lloyd would have been happier spending less money for less boat.”

  “Did you know,” said Amira, “that these tankers are the first man-made vessels big enough to be affected by the earth’s rotation?”

  “No, I didn’t.” Here was a woman who liked the sound of her own voice.

  “Yeah. And it takes three sea miles to stop this baby with engines full astern.”

  “You’re a regular fund of tanker trivia.”

  “Oh, I’m good at cocktail conversation.” Amira blew a smoke ring into the darkness.

  “What else are you good at?”

  Amira laughed. “I’m not too bad at math.”

  “So I’ve heard.” McFarlane turned away, leaning over the rail, hoping she would take the hint.

  “Well, we can’t all be airline stewardesses when we grow up, you know.” There was a moment of blessed silence as Amira puffed at the cigar. “Hey, you know what, boss?”

  “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t call me that.”

  “It’s what you are, right?”

  McFarlane turned to her. “I didn’t ask for an assistant. I don’t need an assistant. I don’t like this arrangement any more than you do.”

  Amira puffed, a sardonic smile hovering, her eyes full of amusement.

  “So I’ve got an idea,” McFarlane said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Let’s just pretend you’re not my assistant.”

  “What, you firing me already?”

  McFarlane sighed, suppressing his first, impulsive reaction. “We’re going to be spending a lot of time together. So let’s work together as equals, okay? Glinn doesn’t need to know. And I think we’d both be happier.”

  Amira examined the lengthening ash, then tossed the cigar over the rail into the sea. When she spoke, her voice sounded a little more friendly. “That thing you did with the sandwich cracked me up. Rochefort’s a control freak. It really pissed him off, getting covered with jelly. I liked that.”

  “I made my point.”

  Amira giggled and McFarlane glanced in her direction, at the eyes glinting in the half-light, at the dark hair disappearing into the velvet behind her. There was a complex person in there, hiding behind the tomboy, one-of-the-guys facade. He looked back out to sea. “Well, I’m sure I’m not going to be Rochefort’s good buddy.”

  “Nobody is. He’s only half human.”

  “Like Glinn. I don’t think Glinn would even take a leak without first analyzing all possible trajectories.”

  There was a pause. He could tell his joke had displeased her.

  “Let me tell you a little about Glinn,” Amira said. “He’s only had two jobs in his life. Effective Engineering Solutions. And the military.”

  There was something in her voice that made McFarlane glance back at her.

  “Before starting EES, Glinn was an intelligence specialist in the Special Forces. Prisoner interrogation, photo recon, underwater demolition, that kind of stuff. Head of his A-Team. Came up through Airborne, then the Rangers. Earned his bones in the Phoenix program during Vietnam.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Damn right.” Amira spoke almost fiercely. “They excelled in hot-war situations. From what Garza tells me, the team’s kill-loss ratio was excellent.”

  “Garza?”

  “He was engineer specialist on Glinn’s team. Second in command. Back then, instead of building things, he blew stuff up.”

  “Garza told you all this?”

  Amira hesitated. “Eli told me some of it himself.”

  “So what happened?”

  “His team got their asses kicked trying to secure a bridge on the Cambodian border. Bad intel on enemy placements. Eli lost his whole team, everyone except Garza.” Amira dug into her pocket, pulled out a peanut, shelled it. “And now Glinn runs EES. And does all the intel himself. So you see, Sam, I think you’ve misread him.”

  “You seem to know a lot about him.”

  Amira’s eyes suddenly grew veiled. She shrugged, then smiled. The ardent look faded as quickly as it had appeared. “It’s a beautiful sight,” she said, nodding out across the water toward the Cape May light. It wavered in the velvety night: their last contact with North America.

  “That it is,” McFarlane replied.

  “Care to bet how many miles away it is?”

  McFarlane frowned. “Excuse me?”

  “A small wager. On the distance to that lighthouse.”

  “I’m not a betting man. Besides, you probably have some arcane mathematical formula at your fingertips.”

  “You’d be right about that.” Amira shelled some more peanuts, tossed the nuts into her mouth, then flung the shells into the sea. “So?”

  “So what?”

  “Here we are, bound for the ends of the earth, out to snag the biggest rock anybody’s ever seen. So, Mr. Meteorite Hunter, what do you really think?”

  “I think—” McFarlane began. Then he stopped. He realized he wasn’t allowing himself to hope that this second chance—which after all had come out of nowhere—
might actually work out.

  “I think,” he said aloud, “that we’d better get down to dinner. If we’re late, that captain of ours will probably keelhaul us. And that’s no joke on a tanker.”

  Rolvaag,

  June 26, 12:55 A.M.

  THEY STEPPED out of the elevator. Here, five decks closer to the engines, McFarlane could feel a deep, regular vibration: still faint, yet always present in his ears and his bones.

  “This way,” Amira said, motioning him down the blue-and-white corridor.

  McFarlane followed, glancing around as they went. In dry dock, he’d spent his days and even most nights in the container labs on deck, and today marked his first time inside the superstructure. In his experience, ships were cramped, claustrophobic spaces. But everything about the Rolvaag seemed built to a different scale: the passages were wide, the cabins and public areas spacious and carpeted. Glancing into doorways, he noticed a large-screen theater with seats for at least fifty people, and a wood-paneled library. Then they rounded a corner, Amira pushed open a door, and they stepped into the officer’s mess.

  McFarlane stopped. He had been expecting the indifferent dining area of a working ship. But once again the Rolvaag surprised him. The mess was a vast room, extending across the entire aft forecastle deck. Huge windows looked out onto the ship’s wake, boiling back into the darkness. A dozen round tables, each set for eight and covered with crisp linen and fresh flowers, were arranged around the center of the room. Dining stewards in starched uniforms stood at their stations. McFarlane felt underdressed.

  Already, people were beginning to gravitate toward the tables. McFarlane had been warned that seating arrangements on board ship were regimented, at least at first, and that he was expected to sit at the captain’s table. Glancing around, he spotted Glinn standing at the table closest to the windows. He made his way across the dark carpeting.

  Glinn had his nose in a small volume, which he quickly slipped into his pocket as they approached. Just before it vanished, McFarlane caught the title: Selected Poetry of W. H. Auden. Glinn had never struck him as a reader of poetry. Perhaps he had misjudged the man after all.