Fast Ice

by Clive Cussler

  Reaching the roof of the third deck, he slid forward, came to a stop and then jumped to his feet as quickly as possible. Bullets struck the ice around him, but dressed in white, running across the snow-covered hull in the middle of a storm, Kurt made an elusive target.

  Reaching the edge of the third deck, he dropped over the side and landed on the roof of deck two. Pressing his back against the ice, he was now effectively out of sight.

  With a second to breathe, Kurt rummaged in his pocket for the radio headset. Pulling it out, he placed it over his ears and switched it on. Swinging the mic close to his mouth, he switched the transmitter to the voice-activated setting.

  “Joe, do you read?”

  A few seconds went by.

  “Come on, buddy,” Kurt said. “Pick up.”

  * * *

  —

  Joe was following the men and women from the pump room as they raced down the passageway and charged up the stairs. They climbed five flights, gathered up a stray crewman they encountered and turned toward the stern.

  Joe checked the corridor and followed.

  By now, the Goliath was listing twenty degrees. Joe wondered how Kurt was faring and then remembered the headset.

  He pulled it from his pocket and put it on.

  Kurt’s voice came through almost immediately. “Don’t know if you can hear me, amigo. This ship is about to meet a rock ledge in the worst possible way. Get topside, if you haven’t already.”

  “I’m heading aft,” Joe said. “Hoping they haven’t run out of boats at the local marina. Got my reservation in a little late.”

  “I’m trapped on the low side near the bow,” Kurt replied. “If the rental line isn’t too long, come get me.”

  “Will do.”

  The group ahead of Joe had pushed through a hatchway. Joe eased up to it and cracked it open. Inside lay a vast compartment, half filled with water. Several tenders were tied up in there along with a couple ribbed inflatables.

  The scene was oddly jumbled, as the list had caused the water to flow to the low side and the boats were all bunched up.

  As the others climbed aboard one of the tenders, Björn forced a lever on the wall from the closed position to open. Machinery cranked to life and the doors at the far end of the compartment began to open.

  A wave of water surged in, jostling the boats and banging them against one another. The self-leveling dock rose and the boats along with it. Joe raced up the steps as Björn and his mates cut the mooring line and shoved off, pushing toward the gap.

  Joe jumped into a ribbed inflatable, which he chose for its speed, maneuverability and overall toughness.

  He released the line, started the outboard motor and spun the boat around.

  As he finished the turn, he saw the tender lifted on a swell that had surged into the compartment. The wave pinned it against a low-hanging section of the ceiling, its roof snagging on a bundle of pipes and cables.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Joe said.

  Whoever was manning the tender’s controls gunned the throttle. The engine revved and the prop churned the water, but the tender was caught like a truck that had gone under too low of an overpass.

  Joe was considering how he might give them a push, or otherwise free them, when the swell outside the ship turned into a trough. The water surged toward the exit, dropping rapidly and sweeping the tender out of the compartment and into the bay.

  Joe had no desire to get pinned up against the overhanging pipes and cables, especially as the inflatable lacked a roof to protect his head.

  He spun the inflatable in a circle as the next wave rushed in and then pointed the bow toward the exit as it pressed him up near the ceiling.

  Joe raced out of the ship and turned toward the bow. “I’m on my way,” he shouted into the radio. “Get as close to the edge as you can.”

  * * *

  —

  Bloodied and beaten, Ryland heaved the captain up to his feet. “Get control of this ship,” he demanded. “We’re heading for the cliffs.”

  “It’s not the cliffs that are the problem,” the captain said. “It’s the rocks.”

  Grunting with pain, he slammed the engines into full reverse and grabbed the rudder control, pushing it as far to the left as possible.

  The Goliath began to shudder as the rudders deflected to their stops. The nose of the ship began to swing away from the cliffs, but the turn transferred all the ship’s weight and momentum to the low side of the hull.

  The list worsened to thirty degrees and then forty. The ship continued toward the submerged outcropping of rock.

  “Why aren’t we slowing?” Ryland demanded.

  The Goliath’s captain just stared at the screen. “We’re too heavy,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  The ice ship ran across the submerged shelf at fifteen knots. Boulders the size of railcars were blasted loose, while similar-sized chunks of ice were carved from the bottom of the ship. The deepest part of Goliath’s V-shaped keel ground into the ridge and broke through it. And at a terrible cost. The heavy thruster pods and thousands of tons of ballast were scraped from the hull.

  The massive weight and momentum of the huge ship allowed it to continue forward as if it were merely shrugging off the blow. The captain knew better, as he stared apoplectically out the bridge window at the tilting horizon.

  * * *

  —

  Kurt felt the ship’s rudder go hard over. He knew this would mean the end. The ship simply could not turn away from the danger and not capsize. Not with all its weight on one side.

  The outer edge of the main deck dipped into the water. Kurt dug the spikes of his boots in and leaned back, trying to keep from sliding. His perch grew steeper and more precarious as the big ship rolled. Soon, he was back on his haunches like a man shingling a steeply pitched roof.

  From the corner of his eye, he spotted an inflatable with an outboard racing toward him. It rode up on the water that was engulfing the Goliath’s hull.

  Kurt’s left foot slipped, then his right. He slid down the angled deck toward the water, digging his boots in at the last second and jumping for the inflatable. He landed in the bow, crashing awkwardly and staying down as Joe gunned the throttle and turned away.

  Looking up, he saw the Goliath standing on its side, stretching upward and then leaning over like a skyscraper about to fall. It picked up speed as it sank down. Joe cut away, racing to escape the pending collapse.

  * * *

  —

  Back on the bridge, Ryland shook with rage and panic. He grabbed a pipe overhead to keep from falling. The ship was rolling.

  “Do something,” he shouted.

  The captain didn’t even respond. He just kept staring out the window.

  The ship rolled past fifty degrees and then past sixty. The bulkhead wall became the floor.

  The dark sea appeared through the windows. Ryland stared as it surged upward toward them and smashed home like a tsunami.

  The surviving windows imploded and the seawater blasted in. The swirling water was frigid and unmerciful. It filled the compartment, battering everyone inside and forcing the air out of their lungs.

  Ryland felt himself tumbling uncontrollably. He crashed into the wall and the floor and then ended up on the ceiling as the furious motion subsided. His lungs were filled with water, his eyes wide open, as his body went limp and still.

  66

  The storm would continue to blow for the next three days. By the time it waned, the Providence had arrived at the mouth of Fimbul Bay. It came upon the Goliath, floating, inverted, like a giant dead whale. The only thing that made it look like a ship were the red-painted propeller shafts and the broken stub of one rudder.

  Kurt and Joe had set up shelter nearby, surviving the storm and guarding twenty-six members of Ryland’s crew, most of wh
om were too cold and hungry to walk by the time they were rescued.

  Kurt called in to Rudi as soon as they were on board the ship. He found that the SEAL teams and the British SAS units had done their jobs flawlessly. Liang’s tankers had all been captured. All the boardings had gone without incident except one, where the captain of the ship had shot the saboteur after realizing what the man intended to do.

  With Kurt and Joe safely aboard the Providence, a C-130 equipped with skis took off from McMurdo Station, crossing Antarctica toward Ryland’s Base Zero.

  Touching down on the glacier, the aircraft rumbled to a stop but kept its engines running. Three figures got off and rushed toward the habitat. Rudi Gunn led the charge, having flown from Washington in the aftermath of the operation only to be forced to wait out the storm.

  He found the structure just as Kurt had described it, though now it was almost completely buried in snow.

  Pushing his way inside the first module of Ryland’s former base, Rudi saw no sign of life. He feared the worst. They hadn’t heard from Paul or Gamay even as conditions cleared and satellite communications were restored.

  “Split up,” he ordered, sending the two Navy medics with him in different directions.

  Each of them entered a different module, with Rudi following his nose. He smelled smoke and followed it through the building.

  Pulling open an inner door, he spotted two figures lying on the floor, covered in blankets. A small fire crackled in front of them. A makeshift chimney constructed of PVC pipe evacuated the smoke through a hole in the roof above.

  Neither of the figures stirred upon his arrival and Rudi stepped closer without saying a word. He touched Gamay on the shoulder and called her name. Her eyes opened slowly. She looked pale and seemed dazed.

  “Rudi,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “We came to get you,” he replied. He looked to Paul, who still hadn’t stirred. “Is he—”

  “It’s okay,” Gamay said. “He’s still with us.”

  She pulled back the blanket and revealed a line connecting her arm to Paul’s. “I gave him a transfusion. I’m a universal donor. Lucky for my husband, whose blood type I should really know.”

  Paul opened his eyes, looked briefly at Rudi and then drifted back into unconsciousness.

  “You’re a miracle worker,” Rudi said as the medics joined them and began to undo her work. “Now, let’s get both of you out of here.”

  67

  FIMBUL BAY

  THREE WEEKS LATER

  The Antarctic winter was beginning to set in as a small fleet finished up the salvage job around the Goliath.

  Kurt, Joe and Rudi led the team. There were also a dozen ships on-site from various countries.

  The initial effort had kept any algae that might be leaking from the ice ship from reaching the open ocean. For that reason, long floating barriers, known as booms, similar to those used to contain oil spills, were stretched around the ship in concentric rings.

  Other ships housed crews that had cut into the ice, eventually allowing access to the storage tanks, which were then pumped full of sterilizing algicide. Another salvage vessel was on hand to off-load the diesel oil and other contaminants lest the ship break up and start leaking.

  Ryland’s body had been recovered the first week. Eighty-four others had been recovered since. According to the survivors, including Björn, the toll accounted for the entire crew.

  On a short day, when the sun barely made it off the horizon, the operation was deemed complete. The salvage ships and oceangoing tugs that had come to participate in the cleanup left the bay one at a time. Soon only NUMA’s Providence remained.

  Kurt was busy breaking down the last vestiges of equipment on the shore when Rudi and Joe arrived to pick him up in an orange-hulled tender.

  The bow of the small craft slid up onto the stony beach and Rudi stepped forward. “Time for us to go.”

  “So soon,” Kurt said. He was joking of course. The frigid days and long, dark nights had made three weeks feel like an eternity.

  “I have a date with Leandra,” Joe said. “I’d like to make it back to Johannesburg before she forgets who I am. And if I remember rightly, you owe Lieutenant Zama and his crew a round of drinks in Cape Town.”

  “That’s true,” Kurt admitted.

  “And I,” Rudi said, “have to figure out how to pay for Paul and Gamay’s month in the Seychelles along with a shopping spree in Milan.”

  Kurt gave him a sideways look.

  Rudi shook his head. “Don’t ask.”

  “Well, that should help Paul heal up at any rate,” Kurt said.

  “It better,” Rudi told him. “In the meantime, this ship will remain frozen in the solid ice. Six months from now we’ll come back down and finish up. And when we do, I’ll make sure there’s something in the budget for the excavation and salvage of a certain aircraft left over from 1939.”

  “So the Trouts get sunshine and golden sand, and we get to dig in the ice and snow, is that it?” Kurt laughed. “I must have been born under a lucky star.”

  “Don’t try to kid me,” Rudi said. “If I didn’t send you two back down here, you’d probably take all your vacation time and come south on your own. This way at least I get to keep an eye on you.”

  Kurt laughed again and carried the final crate of equipment to the tender. With everything packed and ready to go, he took a moment to look around. He noticed his boots firmly planted on a thin section of ice that had formed between the rocks where the water was shallow. It cracked under his feet but remained in place.

  As the nights grew longer and colder, the fast ice was stretching across the bay from both shores. At the same time, sea ice was filling the sound in from the middle. He pointed out the one thing they couldn’t account for. “You know, we can’t be certain we’ve contained all the algae.”

  Rudi disagreed. “A hundred samples of water say otherwise. We’ve tested, tested and retested. No sign of algae in the bay.”

  “And the Goliath?”

  “We’ve pumped everything out of it, surrounded the hull with rings of containment booms and used sixty thousand gallons of algicide to sterilize the tanks inside. I doubt anything has gotten past us.”

  Kurt nodded. He figured that was as much as they could do. “What about the samples we sent back to Washington?”

  “A team of experts are studying them now,” Rudi said. “It was Cora’s idea that we might use the algae as a bandage to keep some of the world’s glaciers from melting, at least until humanity can create a future where the environment is more stable. It’ll be up to the nations of the world to decide if that’s possible . . . or if it’s wise. But at least we’ve averted one disaster.”

  Kurt climbed into the boat and took a seat. “Cora would have liked that,” he said. “Who knows, with a little luck, she might have changed the world after all.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Clive Cussler was the author of more than seventy books in five bestselling series, including Dirk Pitt, NUMA Files, Oregon Files, Isaac Bell, and Sam and Remi Fargo. His life nearly paralleled that of his hero Dirk Pitt. Whether searching for lost aircraft or leading expeditions to find famous shipwrecks, he and his NUMA crew of volunteers discovered and surveyed more than seventy-five lost ships of historic significance, including the long-lost Confederate submarine Hunley, which was raised in 2000 with much publicity. Like Pitt, Cussler collected classic automobiles. His collection featured more than one hundred examples of custom coachwork. Cussler passed away in February 2020.

  Graham Brown is the author of Black Rain and Black Sun, and the coauthor with Cussler of Devil's Gate, The Storm, Zero Hour, Ghost Ship, The Pharaoh's Secret, Nighthawk, The Rising Sea, and Sea of Greed. He is a pilot and an attorney.

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