Fast Ice

by Clive Cussler

  Backing down the tunnel, Kurt leveled the MP5 and opened fire. Bullets hit and ricocheted off its bulbous nose. Dents appeared, along with several punctures, yet the machine kept coming. A second burst was similarly ineffective.

  Without warning, the nose began to spin. Superheated jets of water blasted out around the rim, scouring the walls and instantly filling the tunnel with steam. In seconds, the visibility dropped to mere feet. Still, Kurt could hear the machine grinding forward.

  He had no choice but to retreat as the monster emerged from the fog. He fired again and again and all he managed to do was punch a few more holes in the high-pressure dome. As a result, new blasts of steam shot forward, nearly scalding him.

  Kurt ducked and backed up farther. He had no desire to set off the last of the explosives, especially not in a tunnel with a thousand tons of ice hanging over his head, but could see no way around the machine and no way to stop it.

  Backing up to the vertical shaft, Kurt armed the last charge and slid it down the icy hall. It went right down the middle. “So glad I watched all that curling during the last Olympics.”

  Ducking around the corner of the shaft for cover, Kurt pressed the detonator switch.

  This time, the bomb went off.

  The blast traveled upward, through the heart of the relentless machine. Deflected by the ceiling, the pressure wave surged along the hall in both directions. It swept into the vertical shaft, slamming Kurt against the wall in the process.

  When the echo receded, Kurt looked around. He saw nothing but fog.

  “You okay down there?” Joe shouted.

  Kurt’s ears were ringing from the gunfire and the explosion. He could barely make out what Joe was saying.

  “Never better,” he shouted back.

  Stepping back into the tunnel, he found the visibility was no more than two or three feet. He moved forward, listening to the sounds of water dripping and steam hissing but not the squeaking of the tank-like tracks under the machine or the grinding of its rotary nose. A thin layer of boiling water trickled down the center of the hall.

  Easing forward, Kurt came upon the shattered aggressor. The tracks had been blown off to either side and much of the machinery bent and mangled. Water was leaking from its tanks while steam vented upward into the ceiling above.

  Kurt moved toward the less damaged side, easing past the wreckage, careful not to get scalded. He reached the far end and stopped.

  The explosion had literally brought the house down. An impassable jumble of ice filled the tunnel beyond. It had buried the back half of the machine and was blocking all access to the cave. More ominously, small chunks of ice were still shifting and falling while jets of steam sprayed upward from cracks in the machine’s boiler. Even now Kurt could see that the steam was cutting into the weakened ceiling.

  As Kurt stood there, contemplating how long it might take to dig through to the other side, the sound of cracking slithered through the hallway above him. Looking up, he saw a section of the reinforced ice shift and fall.

  “Time to go,” he said to himself.

  He slipped past the wreck and ran for the escape shaft. Reaching it, he jumped onto the platform and flipped the control lever to the rise position.

  The platform lurched upward, but the pace felt painfully slow to Kurt. He held on as the cavern shook and the platform swayed.

  A new explosion of steam surged upward as more of the tunnel below collapsed. Unfortunately, the imploding tunnel and shifting ice were destabilizing the vertical shaft. Cracks snaked up the side while sheets of curved ice broke loose and fell toward him.

  A small chunk hit one of the cables and started the platform rocking. A larger piece dropped from the wall fifty feet above and could have crushed him. Kurt dodged it, but it slammed into the platform, tilting the platform precariously to one side.

  Higher up, Joe and Gamay released the counterweights. The platform rose quickly, banging to a stop as it reached the top.

  As Kurt leapt off it, the ground beneath their feet shook and a large section of the shaft gave way.

  Kurt glanced back down into the well, the bottom third was plugged with ice and debris. There would be no getting through that. Nor was it safe to stay any longer.

  “We should probably get out of here,” Gamay said.

  The three of them ran for the exit, moving out into the frigid night and stopping only when they’d cleared the exploded doorway.

  “What happened down there?” Paul asked. “Did you blow the turbine?”

  Joe and Gamay looked at Kurt.

  Kurt looked off into the distance. The plumes of steam were still blasting from the exhaust pipes without any sign of the pressure waning.

  He looked back at the others and shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not yet.”

  54

  FIMBUL BAY, AT THE EDGE OF THE HOLTZMAN GLACIER

  Ryland Lloyd sat in a compartment that was a combination of luxurious and spartan appointments. An expensive Persian rug covered the floor. A crystal chandelier hung from the vaulted ceiling. Sleek furniture, bolted in place, occupied each corner of the suite.

  The walls, on the other hand, were gunmetal in color, cold and dim, made even duller by a layer of frost clinging to the surface. Pipes ran along the ceiling while insulated electrical lines, held in place with heavy-duty fasteners, snaked along the walls.

  The room temperature hovered in the mid-forties and Ryland wore a winter coat and ski pants while sitting at his desk. There were no portholes or skylights, but a false impression of the outside world was granted by a trio of high-definition screens set vertically in one wall. The screens were connected to the vessel’s camera system and often showed views directly outside the ship. At the moment, they displayed the image of a tropical island fronted by sandy beaches and turquoise seas.

  Ryland had taken the photo himself several years before while traveling the Indian Ocean aboard his yacht. The families that lived on the island had been in the process of moving to a larger and dryer island a hundred miles away.

  They left reluctantly and only because their island flooded more dangerously year after year. With climate change raising the seas and intensifying the storms, the place had become uninhabitable. But once Ryland’s efforts bore fruit, the situation would reverse itself. Ryland expected that island to double in size over the next ten years, growing as the sea level fell. It would become another sanctuary.

  Switching the image off, Ryland stood up, walked to the door and pulled it open. Stepping out into the corridor, he turned to the left, heading forward to the ship’s command center.

  This corridor was even colder than Ryland’s suite, but it had a different look. Instead of steel, the walls of the corridor were made of the gray-white ice. It was also covered with a cooling mesh, which kept things cold enough that it wouldn’t melt.

  Here and there, refrigeration coils could be seen looping in and out of the walls. They ran through the deeper parts of the structure, ensuring that the interior supports remained well below freezing, which was important since the vast majority of the ship he called the Goliath was made out of reinforced ice.

  Moving to the end of the corridor, Ryland stepped through a door into the ship’s bridge and control room. This was one of the few compartments in the vessel that allowed direct viewing of the exterior world. A bank of short but wide windows, covered with multiple layers of non-glare film, looked out over the bow of the vessel.

  All that could be seen was snow and ice. No funnels, no decks, no anchors or lifeboats. Just ice piled on top of ice and now covered with fresh snow.

  Seen from the outside, the ship appeared to be a small iceberg. All the lines were irregular. One side was mostly flat while an oddly shaped section on the port side cantilevered over the sea. A small hill of ice near the bow hid a bank of cameras and several satellite receivers. A larger mound
on the stern hid the ship’s helicopter bay. Insulated doors painted white and made to look like snow and ice would have been the envy of any Hollywood set designer. They could be opened at the touch of a button, while the helicopter moved in and out of launch position on a conveyor belt.

  The ship’s electrical power came from an array of well-disguised solar cells. But to move the ship’s massive bulk required power and torque. A pair of monstrous diesel engines, each the size of a city bus, took care of that. They drove four large screws hidden under the hull, while a trio of heavyweight thruster pods mounted directly under the center of the keel provided stability, ballast and maneuverability in tight quarters.

  Since hot exhaust was an infrared signal that could give them away, the engines were shut down when not in use. And when running, they vented their heat through a complex system that mixed it with supercooled air pumped in through openings located all around the vessel.

  Ryland knew his system wasn’t perfect. If the military of any major country started looking for him, they would find him eventually. And once that happened, he had no illusions about the Goliath’s ability to fight back. Aside from two batteries of anti-aircraft missiles, purchased on the black market in Angola, the ship had no war-making capability.

  But, then, it wouldn’t really need it. The Goliath’s “hull” was thirty feet thick, made from the reinforced ice, which was stronger than hardened concrete. Tomahawk missiles would splatter against its surface like spitballs. Thousand-pound bombs would bounce off the upper deck like acorns hitting the roof of a car. Ryland’s ship would shrug off any attack short of a nuclear weapon and keep plowing forward.

  They would get him, of course, but their nearest ships were half a world away at the moment. To win, all Ryland needed to do was get the Goliath into the West Wind Drift, where he could dump the algae now being pumped into the cavernous interior of the ship.

  Once he’d accomplished that, any furious bombardments would be for nothing. The new ice age would be seeded and inevitable.

  “What’s our status?” Ryland asked the ship’s captain.

  The captain deferred to Ober, who stood beside him. Ober had transferred from the oil platform to take charge of loading of the Goliath. It was a tricky operation. The vessel was longer, wider and larger in every respect than Liang’s supertankers.

  “Base Zero signaled the commencement of pumping two hours ago,” Ober replied.

  “And?”

  “It’s eighty miles from here,” Ober reminded him. “Even at the maximum flow rate, we won’t receive the first trickles of water for another hour.”

  “Are they pumping full out?”

  “That was the indication.”

  “Was the indication?” Ryland didn’t like sloppy behavior. “Why don’t you check with them to make sure?”

  “We’ve tried,” Ober said. “No response.”

  A warning went off. “What do you mean?”

  “We’ve tried shortwave and satellite,” the captain explained. “No response on the radio and no handshake from Yvonne’s satellite phone. It’s not linking up. Most likely the storm is interfering.”

  “I’ve used a satellite phone in a hurricane,” Ryland insisted.

  “A commercial one,” the captain reminded him. “We built our own system so no one could track us. It’s jury-rigged to a data platform from a single satellite. It’s not as robust as the commercial networks.”

  The captain’s reasoning was sound, but Ryland sensed danger. “Keep trying,” he said. “I want a report every thirty minutes until you reach them.” He turned back to Ober. “I want you to do anything you can to accelerate the loading process.”

  “We already are,” Ober said. “We’re drawing down the pressure on our end of the conduit. With negative pressure on our side and positive pressure on theirs, the water will flow that much faster. We should begin filling the tanks within the hour. Still, we’re looking at five or six hours to take on the full cargo.”

  Ryland understood that. It took a while to move a hundred million gallons of water. He looked at the pipeline indicators on a screen. Sensors placed upstream showed the first drops of lake water only twenty miles away. The flow rate and volume were both increasing steadily.

  He continued to feel uneasy, yet if anything had gone terribly wrong the pipeline would have been shut down. “Do everything you can to speed that timetable up,” he ordered. “And let me know when you’ve reached my sister.”

  55

  BASE ZERO

  Kurt and Joe stood in the dimly lit habitat module that had once been Yvonne’s command station. A few feet away, Paul lay on a makeshift bed with his leg elevated as Gamay dressed his wound with the medical supplies she’d found.

  With Paul in the best possible care they could provide, Kurt turned his attention to Yvonne’s laptop computer, which remained where she’d left it on the desk in the main habitat module. Its screen displayed a schematic of the pipeline’s route, complete with indicators relaying pressures, temperatures and flow rates.

  A secondary display showed the status of the turbine in the cavern beneath the surface of the glacier. It was operating with aggravating efficiency and the pipeline was shipping massive volumes of water.

  “We’ve done everything but shut this pipeline down,” Kurt said.

  “Bad luck that the collapse didn’t extend to the cavern,” Gamay said, still taping up Paul’s leg.

  “Luck had nothing to do with it,” Kurt said. “From my brief glimpse inside, it was pretty clear they’d shored up the roof and walls.”

  “Can you do anything with that computer?” Paul asked.

  Both Kurt and Joe had been trying. It wasn’t helping. “The system is locked out. It’s just a mirror of what the guy down in the cave is looking at. In other words, we can see what’s happening but we can’t do anything about it.”

  “What if we had the last pack of explosives?” Joe suggested. “The pack we lost in the avalanche.”

  “No telling where the pack would be,” Kurt said. “You started off next to the snowmobile and wound up a hundred yards away. Even if we did find it, four small charges won’t get us through that collapsed tunnel.”

  “And blowing it from the top isn’t feasible,” Gamay added. “Paul and I already determined that.”

  “Ah . . . ah, ouch,” Paul said, pushing Gamay’s hand away from his wound. “Easy with the antiseptic.”

  “At least you’re still feeling something,” she replied. “That’s good.”

  Kurt looked their way. Paul was no longer bleeding, but he looked pale.

  “What if we shut off the power?” Joe asked.

  “Believe it or not, they’re using a steam engine to spin that turbine,” Kurt said. “I was admiring it right before the old guy started shooting at me. I’m assuming it’s run off the same geothermal strike that they used to burn a hole through the glacier. Which means there’s no power to turn off, the whole thing is self-contained.”

  Kurt leaned closer to the computer screen, tracking the progress of the fluid through the pipes. Studying the numbers, he saw that the flow rate was picking up speed and increasing in volume while the pressure at the far end of the line was falling.

  “What do you make of that?” he asked Joe.

  “Has to be a vacuum system,” Joe said. “Like the hyper-loop idea. They’re lowering the pressure on the far end to reduce resistance and increase the flow. I’d say they’re using two pumps. One up here applies pressure and pushes the water forward, a second down there sucks it through the tunnel like a giant straw.”

  “Makes sense,” Kurt said. “Tunstall was shipping a pair of turbines and I only saw one down below.”

  “You seem happy about that,” Joe said. “What are you thinking?”

  “It’s simple,” Kurt said. “If we can’t turn off this pump, maybe we can get t
o the end of the pipeline and turn off the other one. Or switch it into reverse and blow the whole system.”

  “Is that possible?” Gamay asked.

  “It’s worth a shot,” Kurt said. “Especially if both setups have the same turbines at their heart. That would make them equal in strength. And if the pressure inside the pipeline goes sky-high, we might even be able to collapse it from the inside.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Joe said, standing up and stretching. “Or the beginning of one, anyway. But the end of that pipeline is eighty miles from here. How are we going to get there? Our snowmobile is barely holding a charge and the other one needs a new front end before it goes anywhere.”

  “Our sled will get us to the Jayhawk,” Kurt said.

  “Which is out of fuel,” Joe said.

  “True,” Kurt replied. “While we may not have fuel or batteries, we have wind. And once this storm completes its turn, it’ll be a downwind run from here directly to the coast.”

  “We’ll never beat the algae to the coast,” Joe said.

  “Nope,” Kurt admitted. “But with a little luck, we’ll get there before too much of it goes into the water.”

  56

  The ride to the helicopter was uneventful. The snowmobile performed flawlessly and its battery held. It was still showing a twelve percent charge as they pulled up to the snow-covered Jayhawk.

  “I’m surprised you remembered where we parked,” Kurt said, the headlights of the snowmobile shining on the helicopter.

  After brushing the snow away, they opened the helicopter door and retrieved the plastic case protecting the snow racer. Kurt opened the case and pulled out sections of the carbon fiber frame. Simple twists linked them together while levers that were easy to turn tightened and locked them in place.

  They mounted the frame on a tripod made from wide skis. While Kurt tightened everything down, Joe attached the hammock-style seats made of ballistic nylon.

  “Not exactly built for lumbar support,” he said.