The Ice Limit

by Douglas Preston; Lincoln Child

  “Luxurious,” McFarlane said as he looked around. “Especially for an oil tanker.”

  “Actually, this is fairly standard,” Glinn replied. “On such a large vessel, space is no longer at a premium. These ships are so expensive to operate, they spend practically no time in port. That means the crews are stuck on board for many, many months. It pays to keep them happy.”

  More people were taking their places beside the tables, and the noise level in the room had increased. McFarlane looked around at the cluster of technicians, ship’s officers, and EES specialists. Things had happened so quickly that he only recognized perhaps a dozen of the seventy-odd people now in the room.

  Then quiet fell across the mess. As McFarlane glanced toward the door, Britton, the captain of the Rolvaag, stepped in. He had known she was a woman, but he wasn’t expecting either her youth—she couldn’t be more than thirty-five—or her stately bearing. She carried herself with a natural dignity. She was dressed in an impeccable uniform: naval blazer, gold buttons, crisp officer’s skirt. Small gold bars were affixed to her graceful shoulders. She came toward them with a measured step that radiated competence and something else—perhaps, he thought, an iron will.

  The captain took her seat, and there was a rustle as the rest of the room followed her lead. Britton removed her hat, revealing a tight coil of blond hair, and placed it on a small side table that seemed specially set up for that purpose. As McFarlane looked closer, he noticed her eyes betrayed a look older than her years.

  A graying man in an officer’s uniform came up to whisper something in the captain’s ear. He was tall and thin, with dark eyes set in even darker sockets. Britton nodded and he stepped back, glancing around the table. His easy, fluid movements reminded McFarlane of a large predator.

  Britton gestured toward him with an upraised palm. “I’d like to introduce the Rolvaag’s chief mate, Victor Howell.”

  There were murmured greetings, and the man nodded, then moved away to take his position at the head of a nearby table. Glinn spoke quietly. “May I complete the introductions?”

  “Of course,” the captain said. She had a clear, clipped voice, with the faintest trace of an accent.

  “This is the Lloyd Museum meteorite specialist, Dr. Sam McFarlane.”

  The captain grasped McFarlane’s hand across the table. “Sally Britton,” she said, her hand cool and strong. And now McFarlane identified the accent as a Scottish burr. “Welcome aboard, Dr. McFarlane.”

  “And this is Dr. Rachel Amira, the mathematician on my team,” Glinn continued, continuing around the table. “And Eugene Rochefort, chief engineer.”

  Rochefort glanced up with a nervous little nod, his intelligent, obsessive eyes darting about. He was wearing a blue blazer that might have looked acceptable if it had not been made of polyester that shined under the dining room lights. His eyes landed on McFarlane’s, then darted away again. He seemed ill at ease.

  “And this is Dr. Patrick Brambell, the ship’s doctor. No stranger to the high seas.”

  Brambell flashed the table a droll smile and gave a little Japanese bow. He was a devious-looking old fellow with sharp features, fine parallel wrinkles tracing a high brow, thin stooped shoulders, and a head as glabrous as a piece of porcelain.

  “You’ve worked as a ship’s doctor before?” Britton inquired politely.

  “Never set foot on dry land if I can help it,” said Brambell, his voice wry and Irish.

  Britton nodded as she slipped her napkin out of its ring, flicked it open, and laid it across her lap. Her movements, her fingers, her conversation all seemed to have an economy of motion, an unconscious efficiency. She was so cool and poised it seemed to McFarlane a defense of some kind. As he picked up his own napkin, he noticed a card, placed in the center of the table in a silver holder, with a printed menu. It read: Consommé Olga, Lamb Vindaloo, Chicken Lyonnaise, Tiramisu. He gave a low whistle.

  “The menu not to your liking, Dr. McFarlane?” Britton asked.

  “Just the opposite. I was expecting egg salad sandwiches and pistachio ice cream.”

  “Good dining is a shipboard tradition,” said Britton. “Our chief cook, Mr. Singh, is one of the finest chefs afloat. His father cooked for the British admiralty in the days of the Raj.”

  “Nothing like a good vindaloo to remind you of your mortality,” said Brambell.

  “First things first,” Amira said, rubbing her hands and looking around. “Where’s the bar steward? I’m desperate for a cocktail.”

  “We’ll be sharing that bottle,” Glinn said, indicating the open bottle of Chateau Margaux that stood beside the floral display.

  “Nice wine. But there’s nothing like a dry Bombay martini before dinner. Even when dinner’s at midnight.” Amira laughed.

  Glinn spoke up. “I’m sorry, Rachel, but there are no spiritous liquors allowed on board the ship.”

  Amira looked at Glinn. “Spiritous liquors?” she repeated with a brief laugh. “This is new, Eli. Have you joined the Christian Women’s Temperance League?”

  Glinn continued smoothly. “The captain allows one glass of wine, taken before or with dinner. No hard liquor on the ship.”

  It was as if a lightbulb came on over Amira’s head. The joking look was replaced by a sudden flush. Her eyes darted toward the captain, then away again. “Oh,” she said.

  Following Amira’s glance, McFarlane noticed that Britton’s face had turned slightly pale under her tan.

  Glinn was still looking at Amira, whose blush continued to deepen. “I think you’ll find the quality of the Bordeaux makes up for the restriction.”

  Amira remained silent, embarrassment clear on her face.

  Britton took the bottle and filled glasses for everyone at the table except herself. Whatever the mystery was, McFarlane thought, it had passed. As a steward slipped a plate of consommé in front of him, he made a mental note to ask Amira about it later.

  The noise of conversation at the nearest tables rose once again, filling a brief and awkward silence. At the nearest table, Manuel Garza was buttering a slab of bread with his beefy paw and roaring at a joke.

  “What’s it like to handle a ship this big?” McFarlane asked. It was not simply a polite question to fill the silence: something about Britton intrigued him. He wanted to see what lay under that lovely, perfect surface.

  Britton took a spoonful of consommé. “In some ways, these new tankers practically pilot themselves. I keep the crew running smoothly and act as troubleshooter. These ships don’t like shallow water, they don’t like to turn, and they don’t like surprises.” She lowered her spoon. “My job is to make sure we don’t encounter any.”

  “Doesn’t it go against the grain, commanding—well—an old rust bucket?”

  Britton’s response was measured. “Certain things are habitual at sea. The ship won’t remain this way forever. I intend to have every spare hand working cleanup detail on the voyage home.”

  She turned toward Glinn. “Speaking of that, I’d like to ask you a favor. This expedition of ours is rather … unusual. The crew have been talking about it.”

  Glinn nodded. “Of course. Tomorrow, if you’ll gather them together, I’ll speak to them.”

  Britton nodded in approval. The steward returned, deftly replacing their plates with fresh ones. The fragrant smell of curry and tamarind rose from the table. McFarlane dug into the vindaloo, realizing a second or two later that it was probably the most fiery dish he had ever eaten.

  “My, my, that’s fine,” muttered Brambell.

  “How many times have you been around the Horn?” McFarlane asked, taking a large swig of water. He could feel the sweat popping out on his brow.

  “Five,” said Britton. “But those voyages were always at the height of the southern summer, when we were less likely to encounter bad weather.”

  Something in her tone made McFarlane uneasy. “But a vessel this big and powerful has nothing to fear from a storm, does it?”

  Britton sm
iled distantly. “The Cape Horn region is like no place else on earth. Force 15 gales are commonplace. You’ve heard of the famed williwaws, no doubt?”

  McFarlane nodded.

  “Well, there’s another wind far more deadly, although less well known. The locals call it a panteonero, a ‘cemetery wind.’ It can blow at over a hundred knots for several days without letup. It gets its name from the fact that it blows mariners right into their graves.”

  “But surely even the strongest wind couldn’t affect the Rolvaag?” McFarlane asked.

  “As long as we have steerage, we’re fine, of course. But cemetery winds have pushed unwary or helpless ships down into the Screaming Sixties. That’s what we call the stretch of open ocean between South America and Antarctica. For a mariner, it’s the worst place on earth. Gigantic waves build up, and it’s the only place where both waves and wind can circle the globe together without striking land. The waves just get bigger and bigger—up to two hundred feet high.”

  “Jesus,” said McFarlane. “Ever taken a boat down there?”

  Britton shook her head. “No,” she said. “I never have, and I never will.” She paused for a moment. Then she folded her napkin and gazed across the table at him. “Have you ever heard of a Captain Honeycutt?”

  McFarlane thought a moment. “English mariner?”

  Britton nodded. “He set off from London in 1607 with four ships, bound for the Pacific. Thirty years before, Drake had rounded the Horn, but had lost five of his six ships in the process. Honeycutt was determined to prove that the trip could be made without losing a single vessel. They hit weather as they approached the Strait of Le Maire. The crew pleaded with Honeycutt to turn back. He insisted on pushing on. As they rounded the Horn, a terrible gale blew up. A giant breaking wave—the Chileans call them tigres—sank two of the ships in less than a minute. The other two were dismasted. For several days the hulks drifted south, borne along by the raging gale, past the Ice Limit.”

  “The Ice Limit?”

  “That’s where the waters of the southern oceans meet the subfreezing waters surrounding Antarctica. Oceanographers call it the Antarctic Convergence. It’s where the ice begins. At any rate, in the night, Honeycutt’s ships were dashed against the side of an ice island.”

  “Like the Titanic,” Amira said quietly. They were the first words she had spoken for several minutes.

  The captain looked at her. “Not an iceberg. An ice island. The berg that wrecked the Titanic was an ice cube compared to what you get below the Limit. The one that crushed Honeycutt’s ships probably measured twenty miles by forty.”

  “Did you say forty miles?” McFarlane asked.

  “Much larger ones have been reported, bigger than some states. They’re visible from space. Giant plates broken off the Antarctic ice shelves.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Of the hundred-odd souls still alive, perhaps thirty managed to crawl up onto the ice island. They gathered some wreckage that had washed up, and built a small fire. Over the next two days, half of them died of exposure. They had to keep shifting the fire, because it kept sinking into the ice. They began to hallucinate. Some claimed a huge shrouded creature with silky white hair and red teeth carried away members of the crew.”

  “Goodness gracious,” said Brambell, arrested in the vigorous act of eating, “that’s straight out of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.”

  Britton paused to look at him. “That’s exactly right,” she said. “In fact, it’s where Poe got the idea. The creature, it was said, ate their ears, toes, fingers, and knees, leaving the rest of the body parts scattered about the ice.”

  As he listened, McFarlane realized that conversation at the closest tables had fallen away.

  “Over the next two weeks, the sailors died, one by one. Soon their numbers had been reduced to ten by starvation. The survivors took the only option left.”

  Amira made a face and put down her fork with a clatter. “I think I know what’s coming.”

  “Yes. They were forced to eat what sailors euphemistically call ‘long pig.’ Their own dead companions.”

  “Charming,” Brambell said. “I understand it’s better than pork, if cooked properly. Pass the lamb, please.”

  “Perhaps a week later, one of the survivors spotted the remains of a vessel approaching them, bobbing in the heavy seas. It was the stern of one of their own ships that had broken in two during the storm. The men began to argue. Honeycutt and some others wanted to take their chances on the wreck. But it was lying low in the water, and most did not have the stomach to take to the seas on it. In the end only Honeycutt, his quartermaster, and one common seaman braved the swim. The quartermaster died of the cold before he could clamber aboard the hulk. But Honeycutt and the seaman made it. Their last view of the massive ice island came that evening, as it turned southward in the swells, heading slowly for Antarctica and oblivion. As it faded into the mists, they thought they saw a shrouded creature, tearing apart the survivors.

  “Three days later, the wreck they were on struck the reefs around Diego Ramirez Island, southwest of the Horn. Honeycutt drowned, and only the seaman made it ashore. The man lived off shellfish, moss, cormorant guano, and kelp. He kept up a constant fire of turf, on the remote chance some vessel would pass by. Six months later, a Spanish ship saw the signal and brought him aboard.”

  “He must’ve been glad to see that ship,” said McFarlane.

  “Yes and no,” said Britton. “England was at war with Spain at the time. He spent the next ten years in a dungeon in Cádiz. But in time he was released, and he returned to his native Scotland, married a lass twenty years his junior, and lived out a life as a farmer far, far from the sea.”

  Britton paused, smoothing the thick linen with the tips of her fingers. “That common seaman,” she said quietly, “was William McKyle Britton. My ancestor.”

  She took a drink from her water glass, dabbed at her mouth with the napkin, and nodded to the steward to bring on the next course.

  Rolvaag,

  June 27, 3:45 P.M.

  MCFARLANE LEANED against the maindeck railing, enjoying the lazy, almost imperceptible roll of the ship. The Rolvaag was “in ballast”—its ballast tanks partially filled with seawater to compensate for a lack of cargo—and consequently rode high in the water. To his left rose the ship’s aft superstructure, a monolithic white slab relieved only by rheumy windows and the distant bridge wings. A hundred miles to the west, over the horizon, lay Myrtle Beach and the low coastline of South Carolina.

  Assembled on the deck around him were the fifty-odd souls who made up the crew of the Rolvaag, a small group, considering the vastness of the ship. What struck him most was the diversity: Africans, Portuguese, French, English, Americans, Chinese, Indonesians, squinting in the late-afternoon sunlight and murmuring to each other in half a dozen languages. McFarlane guessed they would not take well to bullshit. He hoped Glinn had also registered that fact.

  A sharp laugh cut across the group, and McFarlane turned to see Amira. The only EES staffer in attendance, she was sitting with a group of Africans who were stripped to the waist. They were talking and laughing animatedly.

  The sun was dropping into the semitropical seas, sinking into a line of peach-colored clouds that stood like mushrooms on the distant horizon. The sea was oily and smooth, with only the suggestion of a swell.

  A door in the superstructure opened and Glinn emerged. He walked slowly out along the central catwalk that ran, arrow straight, over a thousand feet to the Rolvaag’s bows. Behind him came Captain Britton, followed by the first mate and several other senior officers.

  McFarlane watched the captain with renewed interest. A somewhat abashed Amira had told him the full story after dinner. Two years earlier, Britton had run a tanker onto Three Brothers’ Reef off Spitsbergen. There had been no oil in the hold, but the damage to the ship had been considerable. Britton had been legally intoxicated at the time. Though there was no proof that her drinking caused the ac
cident—it appeared to be an operational error by the helmsman—she had been without a command ever since. No wonder she agreed to this assignment, he thought, watching her step forward. And Glinn must have realized that no captain in good standing would have taken it. McFarlane shook his head curiously. Glinn would have left nothing to chance, especially the command of the Rolvaag. He must know something about this woman.

  Amira had joked about it in a way that made McFarlane a little uncomfortable. “It doesn’t seem fair, punishing the whole ship for the weakness of one person,” she’d said to McFarlane. “You can bet the crew is none too pleased. Can’t you just see them in the crew’s mess, sipping a glass of wine with dinner? Lovely, with just a touch of oak, wouldn’t you say?” She had finished by making a wry face.

  Overhead, Glinn had now reached the assembly. He stopped, hands behind his back, gazing down at the maindeck and the upturned faces.

  “I am Eli Glinn,” he began in his quiet, uninflected voice. “President of Effective Engineering Solutions. Many of you know the broad outlines of our expedition. Your captain has asked me to fill in some of the details. After doing so, I’ll be happy to take questions.”

  He glanced down at the company.

  “We are heading to the southern tip of South America, to retrieve a large meteorite for the Lloyd Museum. If we’re correct, it will be the largest meteorite ever unearthed. In the hold, as many of you know, there is a special cradle built to receive it. The plan is very simple: we anchor in the Cape Horn islands. My crew, with the help of some of you, will excavate the meteorite, transport it to the ship, and place it in the cradle. Then we will deliver it to the Lloyd Museum.”

  He paused.

  “Some of you may be concerned about the legality of the operation. We have staked mining claims to the island. The meteorite is an ore body, and no laws will be broken. There is, on the other hand, a potential practical problem in that Chile does not know we are retrieving a meteorite. But let me assure you this is a remote possibility. Everything has been worked out in great detail, and we do not anticipate any difficulties. The Cape Horn islands are uninhabited. The nearest settlement is Puerto Williams, fifty miles away. Even if the Chilean authorities learn what we are doing, we are prepared to pay a reasonable sum for the meteorite. So, as you can see, there is no cause for alarm, or even anxiety.”