Fast Ice

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Fast Ice Page 19

by Clive Cussler


  Paul frowned. “A sad end for a man who clearly never wanted to be a Nazi. What was he working on?”

  Gamay paused. There was a code name connected to his assignment, but the computer program hadn’t come up with a direct English translation. She clicked on the menu and then tapped the option that asked the computer to guess.

  A little hourglass appeared on the screen. It flipped over several times before vanishing just as the answer appeared.

  “He was assigned to a project known as . . . Fast Ice.”

  31

  NUMA HEADQUARTERS

  Rudi Gunn found himself in NUMA’s latest teleconference room. Arranged in a triangular shape, it had a table at the back wall and a pair of jumbo-sized screens along the other two sides.

  Sitting at the conference table, Rudi could converse with NUMA personnel all around the world and it would feel as if they were sitting in the same room.

  After initially dismissing the idea as a waste of money, Rudi had come to embrace the setup. Seeing his teams live and up close gave him a chance to make eye contact, a chance to study their body language and read the expressions on their faces.

  At the current moment, Kurt and Joe graced one screen while the Trouts appeared in high definition on the other.

  Paul and Gamay were easy to read. A sense of quiet triumph came from their screen. On the other side, Joe was like the kid who couldn’t wait to get out of class, fidgeting in his seat, and building a structure with Post-its and paper clips just to pass the time.

  Kurt was the outlier and a study in quiet intensity. He was calm and relaxed, but the set of his jaw told Rudi he was coiled like a steel spring, ready to get back into the fight, a fight that was a long way from over.

  Gamay proudly summed up what she and Paul had learned in Berlin, finishing on a down note. “Unfortunately, there’s no information on the nature of the Fast Ice project.”

  “That’s not quite true,” Rudi said.

  On-screen, Kurt leaned forward as if he hadn’t heard right. “I thought you said Hiram’s computers had come up empty?”

  “They did,” Rudi insisted. “But someone else has succeeded where all our technology failed.”

  Rudi turned in his chair and pointed to the man sitting beside him.

  St. Julien Perlmutter was immense in size and nattily dressed. Weighing in at almost four hundred pounds, Perlmutter was an unapologetic fan of fine dining and a connoisseur of the best wines, bourbons and cognacs. More importantly, he was a superb historian and a collector of all things nautical, with a near-photographic memory.

  Perlmutter had an extensive library in his home. Or, more accurately, had turned his sprawling home into a storehouse of old books. Thousands of rare volumes filled the structure, stored here and there in every possible nook and cranny. They competed for space with old charts, hand-drawn maps, nautical diaries and stack upon stack of ships’ logs. The vast majority remained where he placed them, arranged in an order only he could ever recall or understand.

  Many of his volumes were one-offs or the last-known versions of their kind. If a fire ever took down St. Julien’s house, the world would lose a treasure trove it never knew it had.

  “St. Julien,” Kurt announced. “Good to see you. Forget what they say about the cameras, this one hasn’t added a single pound to your svelte frame.”

  St. Julien grinned. “Nor has it darkened your overgrown and graying hair. Shouldn’t you be applying for Social Security by now?”

  “I’d take it if they offered,” Kurt said.

  St. Julien loved to joke and he appreciated getting it back in return, especially from his closest friends, of whom Kurt was one.

  Rudi intervened to prevent the two of them from trying to one-up each other. “If you would, St. Julien.”

  “Without delay,” Perlmutter said. He began to speak, enunciating his words in the jovial voice of a man who enjoyed the spotlight. “Hiram’s computers couldn’t find any record of the Fast Ice project for the same reason you’ve never heard of it, my boy. Because almost no one knows of its existence.”

  “Aside from you,” Kurt said.

  “And very few others,” Perlmutter said. “We can assume the Nazis destroyed all record of it. Or perhaps there were few made in the first place. I only know of it by chance as I have in my collection the unpublished diary of a Nazi U-boat captain who was assigned to the venture. I won’t be specific about his written description—it would be impolite, considering the choice words he used—but I will say this. The Germans can swear with the best of them.”

  On the wall-sized screens, Paul and Gamay laughed.

  Joe broke into a broad smile. “A skipper who didn’t like the orders from the high command. Who ever heard of such a thing?”

  “Even the Nazis thought their superiors were Dummkopfs,” Perlmutter announced.

  “What was this U-boat captain so all fired up about?” Kurt asked.

  “The impossible task,” Perlmutter said. “Fast Ice was a long-shot Nazi project. Much like the atomic bomb, or the cannon designed to shell London from the shores of France. Only, in scale it was much more audacious.”

  “More audacious than the atomic bomb?” Kurt asked.

  “In terms of feasibility, yes,” Perlmutter said.

  Rudi interrupted. “We all love a good story, St. Julien, but this time we should probably cut to the chase. Tell them what you found.”

  “Of course,” Perlmutter said. “Fast Ice was a desperate attempt to save the Third Reich from fighting a two-front war. It was initiated by the high command, probably by Admiral Doenitz or even by Hitler himself. The timeline is a little unclear, but it was given the green light sometime in 1942.”

  “After the invasion of Russia bogged down,” Paul noted.

  “Precisely,” St. Julien replied. “As you know, Hitler launched his invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941. His armies had reached the gates of Moscow by that winter, at which point a stalemate set in. The Nazis weren’t winning and the Russians were bleeding them dry.

  “Hoping to keep the Soviets in the war, the Allies began sending convoys filled with supplies to Russia. But the only feasible route was through the Arctic Sea, traveling up over the top of Norway and east to the Russian ports. The convoys made for Archangel in the summer and were forced to take the more dangerous route to Murmansk in the winter.”

  “Why Murmansk?” Joe asked.

  “It was the only Russian port not frozen solid during the winter months,” Perlmutter explained.

  “Ah,” Joe said. “Makes sense.”

  “The Nazis had some early success in attacking these convoys,” Perlmutter continued. “Particularly the disaster of convoy PQ-17. That convoy was lightly defended and, fearing a mass attack, the ships scattered. U-boats and German aircraft sank twenty-four of the thirty-five vessels. That only prodded the Allies into providing stronger escorts for the convoys, deploying the type of naval power the Nazis could not hope to match.”

  Perlmutter cleared his throat and continued. “Knowing that adequate supplies would allow Russia to continue fighting and killing Germans, Hitler and Doenitz grew desperate. They came up with a different plan. If they couldn’t stop the Allies’ ships from sailing, perhaps he could stop them from entering the ports and unloading their cargo.”

  This was Rudi’s cue. After a nod from St. Julien, he tapped the keyboard in front of him, bringing up a map of the Arctic Sea and the Russian coastline. “As St. Julien mentioned, Archangel and Murmansk were the only Russian ports the Allies could reach. With Archangel ice-locked in the winter months, Hitler knew that shutting down Murmansk would starve the Russians of food, fuel and ammunition, forcing them to sue for peace. The Fast Ice project was born from this thinking.”

  Perlmutter took back the conversation. “The idea, as bold as it was, depended on the use of freighters, oceangoing
tugs and submarines equipped with battering rams to push, pull and otherwise maneuver icebergs into choke points in the narrow channel leading to the harbor. If this could be accomplished, Hitler reasoned, the icebergs would create an impenetrable barrier through which the convoys could not pass.”

  “Couldn’t the Russians just use icebreakers to clear the way?” Paul asked.

  “Icebreakers ride up on relatively thin sections of sea ice,” Perlmutter explained. “Breaking the ice by crushing it down with their great weight. Such ships are useless against a million-ton iceberg.”

  “As are submarines and tugboats,” Kurt pointed out.

  Perlmutter laughed. “Quite right,” he said. “It was a ridiculous notion. Though, I must point out, moving the ice would not have been impossible. The Germans had already identified favorable ocean currents and winds they could use to their advantage. Indeed, part of the plan entailed men going aboard and rigging giant sails across the top of the bergs to take advantage of these winds. By the Germans’ estimate, a speed of three knots could be attained and kept up throughout most of the process.”

  “Faster than Washington traffic at rush hour,” Joe noted. “What the heck was supposed to happen when these icebergs reached port?”

  “They were never actually supposed to reach the port,” Perlmutter said. “The facilities at Murmansk are twenty miles upriver from the sea. The icebergs needed only to reach the channels leading in from the ocean. Once lodged there, they would become immovable.”

  Rudi clarified. “The idea was to run the icebergs up the channel, timing the entry with the incoming tide. They would hope to run aground precisely at the high-water mark. When the tide went out, their great weight would drive the underside of the iceberg down into the sediment. At that point, there would be no force on Earth that could move them.”

  “Yes,” Perlmutter said. “In addition, the Nazis hoped that the outer sections of the icebergs would collapse once their massive weight was no longer supported by the seawater. The idea being that once the tide went out, and buoyancy was lost, large sections of the iceberg would fracture along existing lines of stress. In one or two cycles, these fractures would give way. The unsupported parts of the iceberg breaking off and crashing into the area around them. The rest of the channel would be sealed, preventing inbound ships from skirting the edges of the obstruction. As an added bonus, they expected this to cause massive flooding due to both the calving effect of the iceberg and the backing up and diversion of river water caused by the frozen plug in the heart of the river.”

  “Before you tell yourself this couldn’t happen,” Rudi said, “recall that Alaska, North Dakota and Minnesota have all experienced massive flooding caused by ice-jammed rivers. This would be far worse.”

  “Flooding from a collapsing iceberg would be no picnic either,” Joe said. “I’ve seen a few glaciers calve up close. The waves are second only to those of a tsunami.”

  Rudi noticed Kurt nodding almost imperceptibly.

  “I can see why this idea would be attractive to the Nazis,” Kurt said. “But towing an iceberg is a monumental task. Even with a dozen submarines and as many tugs to do the job.”

  “Quite right,” Perlmutter said. “It would also be incredibly dangerous. Even if the ships avoided structural damage from the ice, they would be vulnerable to attacks from the Russian aircraft and vessels when they neared their objective.”

  “Did this ever get beyond the planning stage?”

  Perlmutter shook his head. “A few minor tests were carried out. Some by our U-boat captain with a flair for profanity, others by the tugboat fleet. It was decided that more power would be needed. When they drew up a plan to modify the battleship Tirpitz for the job, Hitler vetoed that idea because the Bismarck had recently been sunk and he didn’t want to lose any more capital ships. That put it back to the submarines and it pretty much just sat there.”

  “Why call the plan Fast Ice?” Gamay asked. “Sounds like the process is pretty slow to me.”

  Rudi answered this one. “Fast ice is the version that is secured—and made fast to—the shoreline. Its properties are similar in nature to free-floating sea ice, except that it grows thicker and sticks around longer because the land it’s attached to is colder than the seawater. That’s why you can walk on the ice near shore in the early winter even when the middle of a lake is still liquid.”

  St. Julien jumped back in to finish things up. “Part of the German plan, vague as it was, intended that the presence of the icebergs would chill the stagnant water that remained behind in the harbor. This chilling effect would cause everything to freeze solid well into the spring.”

  “What would happen when the ice melted?” Joe asked.

  “It would have taken years for an iceberg of any size to melt down completely,” Perlmutter said. “By then, the war would be over. One way or another.”

  “It’s bold,” Kurt said, “I’ll give them that. But how does the former Lufthansa pilot fit into all this? He wasn’t a submarine commander or part of the German Navy. He was barely even a Nazi, by the sound of things.”

  “We’re not sure,” Perlmutter said. “There’s no reference to him in the diary. But there is a cryptic note in the commander’s final entry before the U-boats were released from the project. It reads, ‘Will this ludicrous dream never end? Now we’re told of a new plan—to freeze Murmansk solid by use of a “magic liquid” from under the glacier. Save us from these fools and let us go fight properly, as men of the Kriegsmarine are supposed to.’”

  “Magic liquid?” Joe said.

  “That’s the translation,” Perlmutter replied. “There is nothing more about it.”

  Paul offered a knowing look. “Sounds a lot like Yvonne Lloyd’s theory suggesting there’s living material under the glaciers that would cause the Earth to freeze over.”

  “And Jurgenson’s explanation of his crash,” Gamay added. “The report said it was caused by rapid icing on the aircraft due to an agent in the lake water.”

  Rudi saw the connection as well. It lined up perfectly. “It’s possible he crashed because the aircraft and the lake had become covered with this magic liquid that made the water freeze more quickly.”

  Gamay nodded. “That would explain why the SS snatched him out of retirement, promoted him to major and sent him north to study the glaciers. They wanted him to look for lakes like the one he’d landed on in hopes of finding a similar catalyst that would allow them to freeze the Russian ports the way it froze his plane.”

  Rudi nodded. He and Perlmutter had come to that same conclusion before the conference began. He was encouraged that his team was reaching the same answer. He summed up the idea. “The way I see it,” he said, “Cora and Yvonne must have discovered the German records from the Bremerhaven expedition while they were searching for proof of this Snowball Earth Theory. Recognizing that the rapid icing of Jurgenson’s plane was a clue pointing directly at what they were looking for, they ran off to Antarctica, following in Jurgenson’s footsteps and drilling their own ice cores.

  “After finding something promising, Cora sent her message, telling us she’d made a discovery that would change the world. They made their way back to the Grishka and that’s when Ryland attacked them. Taking the ship, the computers and the ice cores to stop them from sharing what they’d discovered.”

  “Adversaries to the end,” Gamay suggested of Ryland and Yvonne. “One trying to melt the Antarctic, the other trying to keep it frozen.”

  Rudi nodded, looking at his team in all their high-definition glory. Paul and Gamay were convinced and content. Joe wore his regular grin, enhanced by having answers to some of the questions they’d been asking. Only Kurt’s appearance struck Rudi as suspicious.

  Kurt’s eyes had a thousand-mile stare. As if he were looking right through Rudi, on through the wall and all the way off to infinity. Rudi had seen that look before. It mea
nt Kurt was considering the question from a different angle than everyone else. Flipping it around in his head, looking at it sideways, backward and forward, upside down. Laser-focused on some detail the rest of them had missed.

  Rudi saw the color return to Kurt’s face, watched his clenched jawline relax. And even saw him nod slightly. Kurt had found what he was looking for.

  “You’re absolutely right,” Kurt said, firmly back in the here and now. “And completely wrong.”

  32

  I assure you, Kurt,” Perlmutter said, “we’ve gone through the data from top to bottom and back again. Odd as it might be, this is the only conclusion that makes any logical sense.”

  Kurt stood up, accepting the challenge. “I have no doubts about your research, St. Julien. In fact, I’d just as soon question the firmness of the Earth as I would question your knowledge of obscure nautical history. I also accept the fact that Jurgenson found something on the ice when he crash-landed down there. And the idea of a Nazi plan to seal the Russians in their icehouse of a country by freezing the ports solid seems par for the course when talking about that particular regime.”

  “If you agree with me,” St. Julien said, “how can I also be wrong?”

  “Not you,” Kurt said. “Rudi.”

  “Well,” Perlmutter said, grinning. “In that case, go on.”

  Perlmutter might have been happy, but Rudi was less so. He folded his arms across his chest. “What, exactly, have I gotten wrong?”

  “Not much,” Kurt said. “You have most of it correct. Cora’s movements, her connection with Yvonne, the two of them becoming friends and fellow idealists and traveling to Helsinki and Berlin and then to Antarctica together. And your conclusion that Cora found what she was looking for on the glacier is the epitome of hitting the nail on the head. It’s the final piece of the puzzle that you’ve placed wrong.”

 

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