Fast Ice

by Clive Cussler

  Kurt nodded. He was in no position to argue, even if Zama and his men were endangering themselves on his account. He stood down as the men moved across the rope. It was a dangerous way to go from ship to ship.

  At one point the trawler came toward them again, trying to sideswipe the patrol boat. When the South African helmsman reacted by turning away to keep them at a safe distance, the trawler swung abruptly in the other direction.

  “Back to starboard,” Zama ordered.

  The patrol boat leaned into the turn, but one of the lines had become stretched. It pulled free before pressure could be relieved and two of the commandos were dumped in the sea.

  They swept out behind the speeding ships, bobbing to the surface thanks to the buoyancy of their life jackets.

  “They’ll be okay,” Zama said. “Keep us in tight.”

  By now the other two commandos had reached the trawler and dropped onto the deck. They were immediately outnumbered and pinned down.

  “Let’s go,” Zama said to the last of his men.

  The two of them hooked into the line and began pulling themselves across the churning waves. As they went over, Kurt watched the trawler like a hawk, looking for any sign that it was about to turn.

  With the South Africans halfway across, the Chinese ship began to roll to the outside, a sure sign that it was turning toward the patrol boat again. This time, the line sagged. Kurt grabbed it and pulled, taking up some of the slack.

  “She’s turning in,” he shouted to the helmsman. “Pull away, but not too hard. Be ready to turn back as soon as she rolls level.”

  The pilot did as Kurt suggested. Between the course change and Kurt’s effort, they managed to keep the line from dipping in the water.

  Kurt cut his eyes to the stern of the trawler. A change in the rudder position would cause an instant change in the eddies swirling around the stern of the ship. It would be visible crucial seconds before the two-hundred-foot vessel began to swing away from them.

  Leaning back with the line hooked tight around his arm, Kurt saw the water change from frothing white to dark sea green. The rudder had swung opposite.

  “Back to starboard,” he shouted.

  The trawler was turning away. The rope connecting the two ships rose as the gap widened. It began to pull taut. Kurt released the slack and the patrol boat responded to the helm, easing back toward the trawler and narrowing the gap once more.

  With the line remaining anchored, Zama reached the trawler and dropped onto the deck. The commando behind him was not as lucky.

  The Chinese man with the machine gun had reappeared, this time accompanied by several friends. They took up positions around the superstructure, sniping at the boarders down below them.

  As the gunfire rained down, another crewman took a fire ax to the remaining line. It broke loose with a single chop and a third South African went into the water.

  At almost the same time, a separate group of Chinese sailors appeared near the aft section of the fishing boat. They lit and hurled Molotov cocktails toward Zama and his men. One of the makeshift grenades exploded on the deck. A second fell amid a stack of nets that quickly burst into flames.

  The South Africans had no choice but to open fire, cutting down two of the attackers and causing a third to take cover, but the act had turned the tables. Kurt could see more crewmen on the tail end of the ship gathering up fishing gaffs. It had the look of a mob ready to charge. And with smoke from the fire obscuring this new threat, Zama and his men were in trouble.

  “Pull in closer,” Kurt shouted to the helmsman.

  “My orders are to maintain station,” the helmsman shouted back.

  “Closer and forward,” Kurt demanded, “or you’re going to lose your commanding officer and the rest of the team.”

  The helmsman was no fool. He could see the situation was getting out of control. He did as Kurt requested, though he had no idea what this American had in mind.

  Kurt wasn’t exactly sure either, he was making it up as he went along, but it dawned on him that outflanking the Chinese would make it possible to beat them at their own game. He grabbed the last of the rocket-propelled harpoon canisters, disconnected the line and slung it over his back using the shoulder strap.

  As he readied himself, the patrol boat picked up speed, drawing even with the outstretched fishing boom. “Get in front of the boom and drop back.”

  The helmsman didn’t question Kurt this time and the patrol boat pulled wide, surged forward and then tucked itself back in close. Kurt raced to the stern as the patrol boat lost a few knots of speed and drifted into the boom.

  Kurt didn’t even have to jump. He just grabbed the boom, pulled himself up and crawled the rest of the way. In a few seconds, he’d dropped neatly onto the trawler’s deck.

  He took cover as the dull and rapid hammering of the machine guns continued, broken occasionally by the sharp crack of the assault team’s carbines and shouts on both sides. Smoke billowed out from the gunfire, making it impossible to see the stern, but Kurt knew the mob was back there.

  He needed a quick way to end this and there was only one person on board who could make that happen. The trawler’s captain.

  Moving with surprising speed considering the bazooka he was carrying, Kurt ducked around the front bulkhead of the superstructure, reaching the far side of the ship. With all eyes focused to port, where the South African patrol boat and the commandos were, Kurt found it easy to race up the starboard ladder and push his way onto the bridge.

  He found three men inside, one of them at the wheel, the other two squinting through the port windows, looking out into the smoke.

  All three turned with a start. One of them charged at Kurt, but Kurt swung the launch tube around, catching the man in the side of the head. The sailor tumbled to the deck and lay still.

  The remaining two stared at Kurt in shock. Their attention went from his face to the pointed end of the harpoon that was aimed directly at them.

  Kurt targeted the man with the more impressive uniform. “Tell your men to surrender.”

  For effect, he switched the safety off, causing several lights to illuminate on the trigger housing.

  The helmsman raised his hands and stood back from the wheel. Kurt nodded, making sure to look pleased. The captain stood stubbornly, so Kurt reached toward the panel, grabbed the microphone that connected to the ship’s PA system and tossed it to him.

  The captain got the picture. He took the microphone, switched the selector to shipwide and gave the order to stop fighting.

  Kurt stood there, keeping the captain under guard, as Zama and his men disarmed and secured the Chinese crew. It took several minutes. Once it was done, Lieutenant Zama made his way to the bridge.

  He pulled the door open and stopped. He stood there in shock, staring at Kurt, then glancing back toward the patrol boat and then turning to Kurt again.

  “What . . .” he began. “When . . . How . . .” Shaking his head in disbelief, the lieutenant got ahold of himself. “You’re supposed to be on the patrol boat.”

  Kurt shrugged. “I got caught up in the excitement,” he said. “And I figured you and your men could use a hand.”

  “How did you even get over here?”

  “Pirate-style,” Kurt said. “I came over on the outstretched boom.”

  Zama laughed heartily. “Of course you did.” He laughed again. “Okay,” he said. “Very good. Next time, you can go first.”

  Kurt found that offer acceptable. “Now,” he said. “Let’s find out what these men were hiding.”

  37

  With the South African crew in control of the Chinese trawler, the patrol boat circled back and recovered the commandos who’d fallen into the sea. One of the men had a dislocated shoulder. The other two were uninjured and happy to rejoin the boarding party.

  As the tactical team kept
the trawler’s crew under guard, Kurt and Zama searched the ship from top to bottom. Making their way to the hold, the smell of fish became overpowering.

  “This is why they ran,” Zama said.

  They’d come to the trawler’s processing deck. Heaps of recently captured tuna filled the deck, some as large as ten feet long from nose to tail. “Each one of these bluefin is worth a hundred thousand dollars.”

  Kurt nodded. He knew the price of tuna had soared in recent years. Especially for the larger fish. But tuna wasn’t all the ship held. In addition, they found dolphin carcasses and hundreds of fins cut from captured sharks, the bodies of which had been tossed overboard after the de-finning.

  “What a waste,” Kurt said. It was one thing to fish, even for sharks and dolphins, but shark finning was decimating the world’s shark population. And taking out apex predators was known to cause disastrous effects on the food chains on land and in the sea.

  To Kurt, it was no different than the killing of rhino and elephants for their horns and tusks, no different than the wholesale slaughter of the world’s tigers so their claws could be ground into powder for superstitious people to use in all manner of ridiculous ways.

  “So much of humanity is foolish and shortsighted,” Zama said.

  Kurt stood there quietly, looking at all that was left from a hundred dead sharks. More certainly needed to be done to protect the world’s ecological balance and save threatened species. But there was no call for cataclysmic plans like that of Ryland and his sister, which would destroy half the planet or more in the process.

  He turned away. “Let’s finish checking the ship.”

  “And then what?”

  “Can you spare a skeleton crew?” Kurt asked.

  “Prize crew for this ship? Of course. But what are you going to do with it?”

  “I’m going to point the bow south and let her run.”

  38

  HERMES 51

  OVER THE GREAT SOUTHERN OCEAN

  The sun flared through glass panels of the cockpit as the P-8 Poseidon banked into a turn at thirty-seven thousand feet. Commander Walter Hansen squinted and glanced down at the instrument panel so as not to take the full brunt of the sunlight.

  “Turning right to a heading of one-eight-zero,” he called out.

  “Roger that,” a voice replied over the intercom. “Continue on heading one-eight-zero, until I call out the mark.”

  From a distance the Poseidon looked like a modified Boeing 737, which it was. But that was the exterior. Inside, the aircraft was packed with advanced electronic equipment, sensors and various types of detectors, which the tactical systems operators used to track hostile submarines.

  These operators occupied a section in the center of the aircraft, where comfortable, padded seats were bolted to the floor in front of an expanse of computer terminals, with multiple screens, keyboards, joysticks and mouses.

  The aft section of the Poseidon was normally taken up by wine racks, which were cradles with slots in the side where sonobuoys were stored. These buoys were free-floating sensors that could be dropped from the aircraft into the sea, where they would listen for the sounds made by hidden submarines.

  But the wine racks had been removed from this particular aircraft. Replacing them was a high-intensity, millimeter-wave radar unit known as an SPS, or a surface-penetrating system.

  Hansen and his crew were the first to fly this model and had been testing it for months.

  “Please climb to new altitude of four-one-thousand,” the voice over the intercom said.

  The request came not from air traffic control but from Lieutenant Rebecca Collier, the recon systems operator who occupied the first row of the seats in the back of the aircraft.

  Though Hansen was the pilot and commanding officer, it was Collier who would call the shots during the data-gathering leg of the flight.

  When Hansen didn’t reply, Collier seemed to grow nervous, adding, “If that’s okay with you, sir.”

  Hansen grinned. Collier was green. She had a master’s degree in electronic something or other and was fresh out of OCS and two separate radar schools. She was a young high-tech expert stuck in a unit filled with crusty fifteen-year vets.

  So far, she’d held her own. But she hadn’t yet grown comfortable enough to crack a joke. Hansen was fine with that. He’d tell the lieutenant when it was her time to be funny. “Roger that, Lieutenant, climbing to flight level four-one-thousand.”

  Hansen pulled back on the control column and brought the nose up. With the aircraft climbing smoothly, Hansen glanced out at the ocean and the frozen continent beyond. “We’ll be over the ice in five minutes.”

  “Which begs the question,” Collier said. “What, exactly, are we doing here, sir? Aren’t we supposed to be hunting submarines?”

  Hansen had been wondering that himself. Since the end of World War II, the American surface fleet had reigned supreme, leading opponents to concentrate their efforts on building submarines.

  The Soviet Union had built a massive underwater fleet during the Cold War. Their designs included the largest, the fastest and the deepest-diving subs ever to prowl the depths.

  In the last decade, the Chinese had taken a similar path, constructing entire fleets of modern submarines, not to mention underwater drones, hyper-range torpedoes and submarine-launched cruise missiles that had one solitary purpose. To destroy American aircraft carriers.

  While the Russian subs had been loud and easy to track, the Chinese ones were smoother, quieter and covered in sonar absorbing layers of exotic materials. In some cases, they were made of nonferrous metals that made magnetic detection impossible.

  The Navy’s response was the radar in the back of Hansen’s P-8. Its beam looked down through the water. It couldn’t detect a submarine directly, but it was so precise it could pick up minute pressure variations caused by a submarine moving through the water, even if that submarine was operating at depths of several hundred feet.

  Like surface ships, submarines displaced water as they moved. Only they did so in three dimensions. And while the ocean currents and waves dampened the effect, some of that pressure still reached the surface, forming a barely detectible bulge similar to a ship’s wake that stretched and widened behind the submarine along the path it had just traveled.

  The SPS could track the wake, which was like a giant arrow pointing directly to the hidden vessel. And while the system was still being fine-tuned, it had already proven itself in calm weather over moderate seas.

  Hansen had been advised to expect more intense trials over the storm-tossed ocean, but no one had said anything about testing it over ice and snow. He couldn’t imagine what the brass was thinking.

  “It’s top-level stuff,” he told Collier. “You’re not meant to know. But considering we’ve had to refuel twice just to get here, someone must think it’s worth it.”

  “If you say so,” Collier replied. “As far as I’m concerned, some desk jockey at the Pentagon has lost his mind. Either that or he thinks there’s a submarine buried under the snow.”

  Hansen laughed at the idea. He did suppose there could be something else of interest down there. “Would the radar find it?” he asked. “If it was there? Can SPS look through snow and ice?”

  “Possibly,” Collier replied. “Unlike most materials, water actually becomes less dense as it solidifies. And snow is mostly air gaps. But I doubt we’ll spot anything. The system is dependent upon movement. A submarine keeping station or drifting cannot be detected. So, unless there’s something burrowing under the ice, we probably won’t find . . . um . . . squat, sir.”

  Hansen nodded, continued his scan of the instruments and watched as the sun disappeared over the horizon. It was already dark in the frozen land below. Dark and empty. He wondered once more what the Navy was really looking for, then decided he didn’t even want to know.
r />   39

  NUMA HEADQUARTERS

  Twelve hours later, in a room populated by computers and large screens, Hiram Yaeger and Rudi Gunn were wrestling with the information from the flight.

  Studying the screen showing the Great Southern Continent, Rudi saw no sign of a discovery. “Any progress?”

  Yaeger adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses and looked up. “We finished downloading the raw data from the Navy. But it’s just that. Raw data. We had to figure out how to work with it, so I ran it through an intense algorithm and assigned values to each of the signal responses.”

  “Normally, I’d ask you to spare me the technical mumbo jumbo,” Rudi said. “Since I sense you’re stalling, please do continue.”

  “I’m only stalling because even my computers have to manipulate the data before they make something useful out of it,” Yaeger insisted. “Just so you understand, we’re talking billions upon billions of data points here.”

  “How long before we see the results?”

  “The answer is coming,” Yaeger said, nodding toward tiny red and blue marks appearing in various places on the screen in front of them. “Decision time will soon follow.”

  Rudi focused on the screen. At first the tiny marks were scattered, dotting the image here and there like the first drops of rain hitting a dry sidewalk. But as the seconds passed, the minuscule dots began to create a shape, filling in a thin band over which the Poseidon had flown.

  “Zoom in,” Rudi said.

  Hiram adjusted the resolution and cropped the contours of the map. He continued to adjust the scale until it displayed only the section of land underneath the path of the reconnaissance flight and a small area around the perimeter.

  The region in question was thirty miles wide and almost five hundred miles in length. It covered the last-known flight path of Jurgenson’s Dornier. The increased level of magnification revealed thousands of additional marks. Had Hiram continued to zoom in, it would have revealed millions and eventually billions more, each one covering only inches of the Antarctic surface.