The Ice Limit

by Douglas Preston; Lincoln Child

  Beyond the two men lay the storm-tossed sea. As night had fallen, they had darkened the ship in an attempt to elude Vallenar’s guns. But a huge southern moon, a day from full, had risen in a crystalline night sky to thwart their hopes. To Britton, it almost looked as if it was smiling mockingly at them. A panteonero was a strange form of weather: it usually ended in a clear night of maddening, murderous wind. In the moonlight, the moiling surface of the ocean had a ghastly luminescence. The surreal ocean continued to launch a procession of gigantic breakers past them, looming above the ship, periodically throwing it into darkness deeper than night, subsiding in huge roars as the ship broke out once again into the moonlight, the tumbling white water, and the banshee winds.

  An abrupt report, faint but audible above the storm, shook the bridge windows. Others followed in measured cadence. Britton saw a row of geysers climbing down the face of a wave to the north, one after another, heading toward the Rolvaag along the line of its former course.

  The great ship’s head labored and wallowed in the seas. Turn, you bitch, she thought.

  Suddenly, the ship bucked and shuddered. A great billow of ugly yellow smoke shot from the bow, hot metal whining upward, trailing streamers. A thunderous report immediately followed. One of the king posts jerked into the air, twisting as it fell back, the guy wires whiplashing across the deck. Then the geysers were erupting ahead of them and turning wide as the fire passed their position.

  There was a deathly moment of stasis.

  Britton was the first to recover. She raised her glasses and examined the bow area. It appeared that at least one shell had ripped through the forecastle. The great ship rose on the next wave; in the bright moonlight, she could see water running into the exposed chain locker and out a ragged hole, well above the waterline.

  “General alarm,” she said. “Mr. Howell, send a damage-control team forward. Assemble a fire team with AFFF foam and an Explosimeter. And I want a lifeline rigged up along the maindeck, bow to stern.”

  “Aye aye, ma’am.”

  Almost involuntarily, she glanced at Glinn.

  “Cut the engines,” he murmured. “Veer away from the wind. Cut ECM. Pretend we’re crippled. That will stop his firing for now. Give it just five minutes, then we’ll run again. That will force him to repeat his range-finding. We must make those ice islands.”

  She watched him step away to confer with his operative in low tones.

  “Mr. Howell,” she said. “All engines stop. Left thirty degree rudder.” The ship continued forward under its immense inertia, slowly turning.

  She looked at Lloyd. His face had gone gray, as if the firing had shocked him to the core. Perhaps he believed he was about to die. Perhaps he was thinking about what it would be like to be sinking in the cold, black, two-mile-deep water. She had seen that look before, on other ships in other storms. It was not a pretty sight.

  She dropped her gaze to the radar. It was getting a lot of sea return, but it cleared every time the Rolvaag rose. They were now twenty-five miles from the Ice Limit and the pair of ice islands. The beam sea was slowing down the Chilean ship by as much as a knot, but it was still closing the gap steadily, relentlessly. As she looked out over the boiling seas, she wondered how the destroyer could possibly be surviving.

  Suddenly the door to the bridge burst open. And there, framed in the doorway, was McFarlane. He took a step forward, Rachel following close behind.

  “The meteorite,” McFarlane said as he struggled for air, his face wild.

  “What about the meteorite?” Glinn asked sharply.

  “It’s breaking free.”

  Rolvaag,

  3:55 P.M.

  GLINN LISTENED as McFarlane gasped out his story, feeling an unfamiliar—and unpleasant—sensation of surprise drift over him. But it was with his usual, unhurried economy of motion that he turned toward a telephone. “Sick bay? Get Garza on the horn.”

  In a moment, Garza’s weakened voice came across the line. “Yes?”

  “Glinn here. The meteorite’s breaking its welds. Get Stonecipher and the backup team down there at once. You lead it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There’s something else,” said McFarlane. He was still struggling for breath.

  Glinn turned.

  “The rock reacts to salt. Salt, not touch. That’s what sets it off, what killed Garza’s team. Rachel and I strapped tarps over the web. But whatever you do, for God’s sake keep salt water off it. And it’s still throwing off a lot of radio noise. Radio communication will be spotty, at least for an hour or so.”

  Glinn took this in, then raised the phone and spoke again to Garza. As he was finishing, he heard a fumbling sound on the other end, followed by the nasal, angry voice of Brambell. “What’s this devilment? I forbid this man leaving sick bay. He has head trauma, concussion, a hyperextended wrist, and—”

  “No more talk, Dr. Brambell. I must have Garza’s expertise at whatever cost.”

  “Mr. Glinn—”

  “The life of the ship depends on it.” He lowered the phone and looked at Britton. “Is there any way to reduce the ship’s list in these waves?”

  Britton shook her head. “In seas this heavy, ballast shifting would only make the ship more unstable.”

  The Rolvaag continued driving southward, the raging sea alternately burying its maindeck in the water, then forcing it skyward, water thundering out the scuppers. Two of the containers had torn free and washed overboard, and several others were now shifting in their lashings.

  “What the hell were those explosions?” McFarlane asked Glinn.

  “We were fired on by the Chilean ship.” He looked first at McFarlane, and then at Amira. “Do you have any idea why salt affects the meteorite?”

  “It doesn’t seem like a chemical reaction,” McFarlane said. “None of the meteorite was consumed in the explosions, and there sure as hell wasn’t enough salt to generate that kind of energy.”

  Glinn looked at Amira.

  “It was too big an explosion to be either a chemical or catalytic reaction,” she said.

  “What other kind of reaction is there? Nuclear?”

  “That’s one unlikely possibility. But I think we’re not looking at this problem from the right perspective.”

  Glinn had seen this before. Amira’s mind had a tendency to jump out of everyone else’s groove. What resulted was either genius or idiocy. It was one of the reasons he had hired her, and even at this extremity he knew better than to ignore it. “How so?” he asked.

  “It’s just a feeling. We keep trying to understand it from our point of view, thinking of it as a meteorite. What we need to do is look at it from its point of view. Salt is important to it, somehow—something either dangerous, or … necessary.”

  Howell’s voice filled the resulting silence. “Captain, more ranging shots being fired from the Ramirez.” The chief mate hunched over the Doppler radar. There was a long moment of silence, and he looked up, a grin on his face. “A snowsquall just cut us off from the Ramirez. The bastards can’t see us, Captain. They’re running blind.”

  “Come right, steady on one nine zero,” said Britton.

  Glinn moved to the GPS chart, staring at its arrangement of green dots. The chess game was drawing to a close; the board was cleared of all but a few pieces. Their fate had been reduced to a combination of four factors: two ships, the storm, the ice. He examined them intently for thirty minutes, the positions of the two ships changing ever so slightly, his mind intensely concentrated. He closed his eyes, retaining the image of the green dots in his mind. In that simplicity lay a deadly lack of options. Like a chess master, he had played out in his mind each possible sequence of moves. All but one led to one hundred percent probability of failure. And the probability of success on the last option remained exceedingly low. For this last play to succeed, everything would have to happen perfectly—and on top of that, they would need luck. Glinn hated luck. A strategy that required luck was often fatal. And now that
which he hated, he needed most of all.

  He opened his eyes, focusing immediately on the chart. The green dot representing the Rolvaag was now thirty minutes from the Ice Limit and a few minutes more from the two gigantic ice islands.

  Glinn’s radio chirped and he snapped it on.

  “Garza here,” came the weakened voice over a wash of static. “In the tank. There’s a lot of radio interference, don’t know how long we can talk.”

  “Go on.”

  “There are welds failing with each roll of the ship.”

  “Cause?”

  “The meteorite’s discharge snapped some critical points on the web and weakened others. Also, Rochefort designed the cradle for a maximum thirty-five-degree roll. We’re still ten degrees below the limit—” For a moment, the radio cut out. “But of course the meteorite is two hundred and fifty percent heavier than Rochefort initially anticipated. We might be a bit short on the engineering.”

  “How short?”

  “Hard to say without—” The radio cut out a second time. “Still a certain amount of overengineering was built into the design, even beyond double-overage. Stonecipher thinks we might be able to go a long way like this. On the other hand, if some key points go, the rest could fail quickly.”

  “I don’t like these words ‘might’ and ‘could.’ ”

  “It’s impossible to be more precise.”

  “So how quickly is ‘quickly’?”

  “We’d have five, ten minutes, maybe. Maybe more.”

  “And then?”

  “The meteorite will shift. Even a few inches might be fatal, cause hull failure.”

  “Reinforce those critical point welds.”

  There was a crackling pause. Glinn knew what Garza was thinking about: what happened the last time they welded the cradle.

  “Yes, sir,” Garza said finally.

  “And keep the salt water off it.”

  The only answer was another buzz of static.

  The great ship Rolvaag drove southward, ever southward.

  Rolvaag,

  5:00 P.M.

  AT THE rear of the bridge was an observation alcove, a small area sandwiched between the radio room and the chart room. Except for the tall expanse of windows, it was devoid of furniture or decoration. At the windows stood Glinn, binoculars to his eyes, looking aft between the stacks. The snowsquall, a wavering gray line to the north, was passing. It had given them sixty minutes. They needed another twenty. But as the bright moonlight once again lay a carpet of illumination across the raging seas, it became clear that they were not going to get it.

  As if on cue, the Ramirez came blowing out of the distant curtain of snow. It was shockingly close now, no more than four miles away, lights ablaze. Its bow rose and fell in the violent sea, and he thought he could even see the forward guns trained on them, etched against the night sky behind. The Rolvaag would be as clear to them as the Ramirez was to him. There was a sudden murmur on the bridge, followed by an unbearably tense silence. Vallenar was wasting no time: the forward guns quickly adjusted their elevation.

  Even worse, with another gun the Ramirez began firing a string of white phosphorus “Willey Peters,” which popped on and drifted slowly down, brilliantly lighting up the Rolvaag and the sea around it.

  Vallenar was methodical, not rushed. He was being careful. He knew he had them. Glinn glanced at his gold pocket watch. At four miles, the Ramirez would just fire away, not bothering to get their range. The Rolvaag was twenty minutes from the ice islands. They would need twenty minutes of luck.

  “Crossing the Ice Limit, ma’am,” said Howell to Britton.

  Glinn glanced down to the sea. Even in the moonlight, he could easily make out the abrupt color change in the water: from a deep green to a clear, almost bluish black. He came to the front of the bridge now, searching the southern horizon with his binoculars. He could see thin patches of brash ice lifting and falling, and as the ship rose he caught a striking glimpse of the ice islands—two low, flat lines of turquoise. He raised his binoculars and examined them more closely. The one to the east was huge, perhaps twenty miles long; the one to the west about five. They rode steady in the water, vast still mesas above the changeable sea—so large that even this violent sea could not raise and lower them. There was a gap between the islands of perhaps a thousand yards.

  “No sign of fog,” said Britton, coming up beside him with her own binoculars.

  As Glinn continued gazing southward, a terrible feeling, perhaps the most terrible he had ever felt, constricted his solar plexus. The Ice Limit had not brought them cover. If anything, the sky to the south was clearer. The brilliant moonlight, silvering the enormous waves, was like a searchlight across the sea. The Willey Peters, slowly dropping about them, made the landscape as bright as day. There was no place to hide. They were completely vulnerable. It was intolerable, an exquisite pain unique in Glinn’s experience.

  With supreme self-mastery, he once again raised the binoculars and examined the islands. The Ramirez was not firing, taking her time, sure now of the kill. Minutes passed as his mind traveled back down all the dead avenues it had explored before. Again and again his mind probed farther, deeper down the branches of possibility, trying to reach another solution to their problem. But there were no others: just the one far-fetched plan. The silence stretched on.

  A shell came screaming down past the superstructure, sending up a delicate plume of spray. And another, and another, closing on their position.

  He quickly turned to Britton. “Captain,” he murmured, “pass between the two islands, staying close to the larger island. Understand me now: as close as you possibly can. Then bring the ship into its lee and heave to.”

  Britton had not dropped her binoculars. “That’s going to turn us into a sitting duck as soon as he comes around the island. This is not a viable plan, Eli.”

  “It’s our only chance,” he answered. “Trust me.”

  A geyser erupted off their port side, and another, the shells once again walking through their position. There was no time to turn, no point in evasive action. Glinn braced himself. Tall columns of water shot up around them, moving closer. There was a brief lull, pregnant and terrible. And then a terrific explosion jerked Glinn from his feet and threw him to the deck. Some of the bridge windows blew out, scattering jeweled shards across the deck and letting in the howling of the wind.

  As Glinn lay on the deck, half stunned, he heard—or perhaps felt—a second explosion. And that was when the lights went out.

  Rolvaag,

  5:10 P.M.

  THE FIRING stopped. Britton, lying amid shards of Plexiglas, instinctively listened for the engines. They were still running, but the vibration was different. Different, and ominous. She rose shakily as the orange emergency lights snapped on. The ship rolled with the terrifying sea, and now the roar of the wind and waves, blasting through the broken windows, filled her ears, along with stinging sheets of salt spray and gusts of subzero air. The storm was now inside the bridge. She staggered over the main console, which was covered with blinking lights, shaking chips of plastic out of her hair.

  She found her voice. “Status, Mr. Howell.”

  He was also on his feet, punching buttons on the console, speaking into the phone. “Losing power to the port turbine.”

  “Ten degrees left rudder.”

  “Ten degrees left rudder, aye, ma’am.” Howell spoke briefly into the intercom. “Captain, it looks like we received two hits on C deck. One in six starboard, the other in the vicinity of the engine room.”

  “Get damage control on it. I need damage assessment and casualty count, and I need them now. Mr. Warner, start the bilge pumps.”

  “Start the bilge pumps, aye, ma’am.”

  Another gust of wind blasted through the bridge, bringing with it another sheet of spray. As the temperature on the bridge dropped, the spray was starting to freeze on the deck and consoles. But Britton hardly felt the cold.

  Lloyd approached, shru
gging glass from his clothes. A nasty cut across his forehead was bleeding profusely.

  “Mr. Lloyd, report to sick bay—” Britton began automatically.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said impatiently, wiping the blood off his brow and flinging it to one side. “I’m here to help.”

  The blast seemed to have shocked him back to life. “Then you can get us all foul-weather gear,” Britton said, gesturing toward a storage locker at the rear of the bridge.

  A radio crackled and Howell answered. “Waiting on the casualty list, ma’am. Damage control reports fire in the engine room. It was a direct hit.”

  “Can it be contained with portable extinguishers?”

  “Negative. It’s spreading too fast.”

  “Use the fixed CO2 system. And I want water fog on the exterior bulkheads.”

  She glanced over at Glinn. He had been speaking urgently to his operative at the EES console. The man stood and vanished from the bridge.

  “Mr. Glinn, I need a report from the hold, please,” she said.

  He turned to Howell. “Patch Garza through.”

  A minute later, the overhead speaker crackled. “Jesus, what the hell’s going on?” Garza asked.

  “We’ve received two more hits. What’s your status?”

  “Those explosions came on a roll. They broke additional welds. We’re working as fast as we can, but the meteorite—”

  “Keep on it, Manuel. Smartly.”

  Lloyd returned from the locker and began distributing gear to the bridge crew. Britton accepted hers, pulled it on, and looked forward. The ice islands now loomed up, faintly blue in the moonlight, barely two miles distant, rearing two hundred feet or more out of the water, the surf tearing and ripping at their bases.

  “Mr. Howell, what is the position of the enemy ship?”

  “Just at three miles and closing. They’re firing again.”