by Karen Dionne
“What?”
“Don’t look at me like that. It couldn’t be helped. This iceberg is so huge, LANDSAT got it. My contact sent word as soon as the pictures came in, but in a few hours the wire services will pick it up, and the whole world will know.”
“For crying out loud.” Ben dragged a hand over his head. It figured. He and his engineers had been waiting for months for a decent-sized iceberg to break loose; then when one finally did, it was so huge its existence immediately became public knowledge. That meant they were going to have to fight the Australians for it, and Gillette was not going to be happy about that.
In hindsight, Ben never should have consulted with Australia Telephone and Telegraph. But after two years of struggling, his engineers had hit a wall. The problem lay in the strength of the beam. Soldyne’s satellites produced low-frequency radio communication level microwaves—not even remotely close to the ten-gigawatt output needed to melt ice. Their challenge was finding a way to boost each satellite’s power and join them in a phased array. Richard Mawson was the genius behind the microwave telephone relay system crisscrossing Australia’s outback, and a leading authority on focused microwave signals. With a reputation for making the impossible a reality, everyone Ben consulted agreed that Mawson was his man.
But instead of Ben learning Mawson’s trade secrets, Mawson had discerned his, and Ben learned the hard way that industrial espionage didn’t necessarily come in the form of furtive men dressed in black spandex; it could be as innocuous as a charming Aussie accent saying “G’day.” His only consolation was that the scale of their operation was so large, it would have been impossible to shield it from prying eyes indefinitely anyway. Wherever there were profits to be made, the vultures were always waiting on the sidelines. Even so, knowing that the Australians had gotten free what had taken his team three years and $2 billion to produce still made Ben ill.
“So they know.” Gillette spoke from the doorway, his bulky frame filling the opening like a cork in a bottle. He was scowling, and his arms were crossed over his chest.
Ben scrambled to his feet. “We have to assume that, yes,” he said, hurrying out from behind his desk to pull up another chair. How had Donald gotten wind of the situation so quickly?
Gillette remained standing. “And what else are we assuming?”
“We have to assume they’ll go for it,” Ben admitted. “The Australians are just as eager to try out the technology as we are, and they’ve been waiting for a suitable iceberg just as long. But honestly, Donald, I’m confident this is not going to be a problem. This berg calved off the Larson, near the Antarctic Peninsula, just four hundred miles from Eugene’s crew in Punta Arenas. The location couldn’t have been more ideal if we’d planned it. The Australians have to come all the way around the continent; four, maybe five times as far. There’s no way they’ll get to it first. This baby is ours.”
“I hope you’re right,” Gillette said, and Ben caught the unspoken implication: for your sake. “We can’t carry this project indefinitely.”
“I understand that.”
“This project has to pay off now.”
“It will.”
“It better.”
Or what? Ben wanted to retort. He was so weary of Gillette’s threat-and-innuendo style. It wasn’t hard to imagine the tyrant he must be at home: “Clean your room”; “Fix my dinner”; “Bring me my slippers.” Ben sighed. All he’d ever wanted was to help make the world a better place. How had he ended up with a boss who could have been Hitler’s sidekick and a project as doomed as the Titanic?
Chapter 8
Raney Station, Antarctic Peninsula
The small group assembled in Elliot’s office: Zo, Mac, Dr. Rodriguez, Elliot, and Ross stood in a silent circle around Elliot’s desk, studying the objects Zo had laid out for them. Each person wore an expression fit for a funeral. And, in a way, Zo thought it was—the death of one era and the beginning of another, the new and unimproved version in which Antarctica’s vast untapped resources were up for grabs, ready to be carved up by whoever could get to them first and sold to the highest bidder. The destruction of the Larson was going to go down in the annals as one of the most audacious eco-crimes ever committed—worse than the Exxon Valdez disaster, worse in some respects even than Chernobyl or Bhopal, because unlike the others, this incident was no accident.
“All right,” Elliot began, “if you would be so good as to close the door, Dr. Roundtree . . . thank you, yes—we’ll get started.”
With his clean-shaven face, crisp white shirt, dark jeans, and conservative tie, Elliot could have passed for an IT executive addressing a boardroom, except that his skin was brown and weathered, the past ten Antarctic summers written on his face. The others accorded him the commensurate respect, not just because he was station director, or because he was older than the rest of them by at least a decade, but because he was the most senior scientist present. Elliot had made his mark years ago as one of the group of scientists who published the original article in Nature alerting the world to the dangers of CFCs and the hole in the ozone layer. Currently he was investigating whether other chemicals might not also be contributing factors in order to ensure that whatever gases took the place of chlorofluorocarbons in the world’s millions of air-conditioners and refrigerators didn’t cause further depletion. As staunch an advocate of environmental protection as any, Zo didn’t have to guess what her husband would think if he found out her role in the present debacle.
He indicated the detritus on the table. “All right. It’s clear what we have here is explosives residue. It’s equally obvious that the explosion Zo witnessed was responsible for the creation of yesterday’s iceberg. But before we consider the implications, I’d like to know exactly what we’re looking at. I don’t suppose any of you know anything about explosives?”
“I worked highway construction in Montana,” Mac offered. “We did a lot of blasting in the Badlands.”
Zo wasn’t surprised Mac was able to come through for them. He’d worked a broad enough range of jobs before becoming an ornithologist to have learned a little something about everything. Rail thin, horse-faced, Thaddeus “Mac” Everingham was a Woody Allen look-alike whose frizzy blond hair bore an uncanny resemblance to the yellow tufts on his precious Macaroni penguins. Ever since his chicks had hatched, Mac had been working nonstop; taking the Zodiac inflatable to Torgeson Island early each morning and staying late, the endless days allowing him to work as long as he liked. There were six hundred breeding pairs on the island, and he needed a blood sample from every chick to resolve questions about cuckolding and parentage. He spent his days on his hands and knees, snatching chicks from their parents’ brood patches and enduring bites and beatings from the adults’ powerful flippers in order to steal the tiniest bit of blood for DNA testing. His arms and legs were covered with bruises, and the smell he brought back was indescribable. Once the weather warmed up, the island swam with what looked like slimy brown mud, which was actually penguin guano.
Zo felt her stomach contents rising at the thought. She swayed, suddenly dizzy, and leaned against the desk. Two trips across the peninsula in less than twenty-four hours with very little sleep, hardly anything to eat, to say nothing of her near-death experience were more than enough to send her blood sugar off the charts. She’d have to go shoot up as soon as the meeting was over. Meanwhile, it was a wonder she was still standing. She moved a stack of papers off the extra chair and sat down.
“This sack held ammonium nitrate,” Mac indicated an empty burlap bag, “which means the drums in Zo’s pictures likely contained fuel oil. Ammonium nitrate mixed with fuel oil makes ANFO, the logical weapon of choice, since ANFO has excellent cold weather blasting properties. This is detonating cord, and this,” he picked up a cylindrical object, “is a cast booster. Cast boosters are primed with a mixture of PETN and TNT and are used to initiate the boreholes.” He hefted the cylinder, then tossed it to Dr. Rodriguez. “It’s not live,” he added, after the phy
sician managed a deft, white-faced catch.
“Are you sure about the boreholes?” Dr. Rodriguez asked as he returned the cylinder gingerly to the table. “Drilling sounds like a great deal of unnecessary work. The ice shelves are riddled with cracks; no doubt some of them go almost to the bottom. If the blast zone were set up along a pre-existing fault line, breaking the ice shelf in two wouldn’t have taken much more effort than a blow from a hammer.”
“Well yeah, they could have done it that way. Except the evidence says otherwise.” Mac waved his hand over the table. “And remember, this is only a fraction of what Zo found. This garbage went on for miles.”
“I followed the trail for at least ten before I turned back,” she said. “The Larson is—was—approximately thirty miles wide at that point. The blast zone probably stretched all the way across. An air reconnaissance could confirm that.”
It felt strange to be speaking of the ice shelf in the past tense. She still couldn’t wrap her mind around the idea that it was over. Never mind that when her hut was swept away, all of her research had been lost; the whole project was a bust now that the object of her study had been reduced to a free-floating, one-thousand-square-mile iceberg named Larson D according to the satellite images and news wire reports. Separated from the continent by a stretch of open water perhaps half a mile wide by her direct observation, the Larson Ice Shelf was now a giant blue ice cube two hundred feet high, its sides as straight and as sheer as if it had been sliced from the continent with a knife.
“So who swung the hammer?” Dr. Rodriguez asked.
“That’s the million-dollar question,” Mac said. “Followed closely by ‘Why?’ ”
Zo, of course, knew the answer to both. “Who” was the Soldyne Corporation, and “why” was because they were greedy self-serving bastards who couldn’t wait for nature to take its course. To think she’d actually believed Adam when he told her Soldyne’s water-producing scheme was going to benefit the environment. “Think of all that fresh water melting into the sea,” her former college dorm mate turned Soldyne engineer turned traitor had said. “The consequences to salinity levels would be horrific. Not only would the immediate ecosystem be ruined, but the influx of all that fresh water could permanently alter the oceans’ currents. Imagine what would happen to the world’s weather if the Gulf Stream shifted course. We could be looking at a climate change as disastrous as the last Ice Age. Now think of all the people who need that water,” he’d continued, knowing exactly which aspect would tug at her heartstrings most. “African women who walk twenty miles every day to draw water from a contaminated well; their crops withering; their cattle dying; their children going hungry—even starving, to say nothing of suffering from disease. Just send us copies of the scans, and we’ll do the rest. Help us monitor the ice shelves, and everybody wins.” Right. As long as everybody was named Soldyne, that is. She turned her attention back to the meeting.
“Well, if you’re right about them using ANFO,” Ross was saying, “then this operation didn’t originate in the States. Ever since Oklahoma City, no one can purchase large quantities without sending up red flags. There’s no way anyone could have pulled this off without alerting authorities.”
“Someone from the Middle East?” Dr. Rodriguez offered. “Or perhaps one of the ’stans?”
“I don’t get the sense that this was an act of terrorism. It doesn’t feel politically motivated. Figure out who has the most to gain, and you’ll find out who’s responsible.”
“A logical approach,” Elliot said, “and one we’ll have time to pursue later. Right now, we need to decide what we’re going to do with this information.”
“What’s to decide?” Ross said. “We report what we know, and the sooner the better. Whoever destroyed the ice shelf has to be punished.”
“Report it to whom?” Mac asked. “Which agency? Which authority? Don’t get me wrong, Ross, I’m as outraged as you are. But you seem to have forgotten there is no law in Antarctica. Even our own dear United States government is so ineffective they can’t collect income tax from the people who work here. What makes you think another government will do any better?”
“I was referring to an appeal made under the Antarctic Treaty,” Ross said, and Zo’s hackles rose. It wasn’t so much what he said, as the way he said it that made his pronouncements so hard to swallow. Ross’s attitude had rubbed her the wrong way ever since their first conversation after her orientation meeting. All she’d done was ask in all innocence what he was researching, and Ross had responded with a ten-minute lecture on the wonders of extremophiles that began with the high-minded presumption that she’d never even heard of the things. While she hadn’t known that jeans manufacturers used extremophiles in their stone-washing process (“The bacteria that live in acidic environments produce an enzyme that prevents the acids the manufacturers use in the bleaching process from destroying the cloth. Oh, come now, Dr. Zelinski. You didn’t really think they used stones, did you?”), she was certainly aware that Antarctica’s sealed underground lakes were prime locales for discovering new ones. That she’d subsequently learned he treated everyone as if their IQs were twenty points beneath his didn’t make his arrogance any easier to bear.
“The treaty’s protocol on environmental protection designates Antarctica a conservation area dedicated to peace and science,” Ross continued. “Surely destroying the ice shelf violates the spirit of the treaty.”
“The Antarctic Treaty’s nothing but a piece of paper,” Mac said. “Forty-three member nations agreeing to a bunch of lofty principles. But without an enforcement agency, the treaty is meaningless. I would think you of all people should understand that.”
“I refuse to believe there’s nothing we can do. What about environmental organizations? Greenpeace would love to sink their teeth into this. They’ll take pictures, bring in journalists, get the public involved. Don’t underestimate them; they’re a very powerful organization.”
“Which is exactly why they shouldn’t find out,” Mac countered. “I don’t want people coming here and disrupting our research. TV reporters, news crews, government officials, scientists, protesters—What a disaster. Think tour ship times ten. My penguin chicks won’t wait while we deal with the fallout. Call me selfish, but I’m not willing to sacrifice my research for a pile of ice. I say we sit on this information until after Raney shuts down for the season; then you can announce it on CNN for all I care.”
“I agree with Mac,” Dr. Rodriguez said, and Zo turned to him in surprise. She’d always had him pegged as more altruist than pragmatist.
“Raney can’t handle an influx of the size he predicts,” he continued. “Too many people crammed too tightly together is asking for an outbreak of disease. We’re overcrowded as it is. The iceberg isn’t going anywhere, and neither are the facts surrounding its creation. Better to wait until everyone goes home before revealing what we know, and then let the chips fall where they may.”
“I don’t believe this.” Ross shook his head. “The deliberate destruction of the ice shelf is despicable. Despicable. An act of environmental vandalism of the worst degree. But there’s a greater sin. Condoning the act is worse than committing it. When I think of all the atrocities committed down through history that could have been prevented if decent, ordinary people hadn’t looked the other way—”
He drew himself up to his full height. All eyes turned to the imposing figure in denim shirt and faded jeans. Zo noted that in addition to his usual silver crescent earrings, he wore a turquoise-silver bracelet and a bear-tooth amulet on a leather cord around his neck. Two small feathers dangled from the end of his long braid. How was it that Native American men could wear so much jewelry and still look so masculine?
“Man is ruining the earth, and she can’t do anything to stop it. Antarctica can’t speak for herself. If we keep silent, we’ve sold her out.”
For a moment, the room was quiet. Then, “Thank you, Dr. Roundtree,” Elliot said. He turned to Zo. “What about
you? You’re most affected by this. What do you think? Should we tell the world now, or break the news to them later?”
She bit her lip. It was a tough call. In principle, she agreed with Ross: The destruction of the ice shelf was a terrible crime for which the guilty party should be called to account. Unfortunately, that included her. There was no way she could keep her complicity hidden indefinitely, but if the vote swung toward keeping silent for the next few weeks, she’d gladly take the reprieve.
“Later.” She glanced at Ross, then looked away.
