Fast Ice

by Clive Cussler

  “I’d be happy if they included seat warmers,” Kurt said.

  Joe tossed the extra cold-weather gear they’d taken from Yvonne’s compound on the nylon seats. “Seat warmers,” he said. “As requested.”

  While Kurt installed the mast and rigged the sail, Joe placed their weapons, ammunition and every piece of equipment he thought might be useful into a cargo compartment. That done, he climbed into his seat.

  When Kurt was satisfied, he took his own seat and unfurled a bit of the sail. The wind caught it immediately and they moved off, heading for the glacier and out toward the coast.

  “Are we forgetting anything?” Kurt asked.

  “Only our sanity,” Joe said.

  With Joe navigating and Kurt following his directions, they moved off toward the glacier and turned toward the coast. They traveled mostly on soft snow laid down overnight or blown in by the storm. The ride was astonishingly smooth, though Kurt was constantly fighting the wind and adjusting the sail.

  For the most part, he used only half the available sail. It made for a more stable adventure and easier maneuvering. An hour into the journey, they’d covered thirty miles, their heated jackets, boots and gloves keeping them toasty warm. Hunger was an issue, but Joe had an answer for that. He broke out two bottles of a specialized beverage.

  “What is this stuff?” Kurt asked suspiciously.

  “A combination of protein powder, electrolytes and a high-calorie mix of lard and easily digestible carbs.” As Joe spoke, he shook up his own bottle, opened the top and took a sip. “Only one problem. We’re going to need a spoon.”

  Kurt gave Joe the reins, lowered the scarf and the balaclava and tipped his own bottle back.

  The mixture flowed like mud, but he was able to squeeze a portion into his mouth. “First beverage I ever had to chew,” he said. “It tastes like sawdust mixed with toothpaste and castor oil.”

  “Castor oil would improve it,” Joe said, then added, “It’s thirty-five hundred calories per bottle.”

  Kurt squished the bottle tighter and choked down more of the pasty mush. “A thousand calories’ worth is all I can take.”

  With the sky brightening, Kurt unfurled a little more of the sail and the snow racer stretched its legs. They were on the smoothest part of the journey, cruising atop the unbroken heart of the glacier on piles of deep, packed snow. With the wind directly behind them, they were traveling fifty miles an hour.

  Without much to do, Joe began studying the road ahead on the screen of the tablet. The route of the pipeline was superimposed over a satellite image of the terrain. Joe studied it, section by section, all the way down to the coast to where the pipeline ended in Fimbul Bay.

  Despite the reconnaissance flight by the Navy P-8 and an imaging pass by one of NUMA’s satellites prior to the storm hitting, Joe found nothing near the end of the pipeline that could be construed as another pumping station. Stranger still, he found a problem. Not for NUMA but for Ryland.

  “Tell me about the Fast Ice plan again,” he asked Kurt. “Not the part with the iceberg. The second part. Drafting Jurgenson and the search for the ‘magic liquid’ he found.”

  “They were going to release the algae into the bay and freeze the Russians in their port,” Kurt said.

  “That’s what I thought.” He held up the tablet for Kurt. “Take a look at Fimbul Bay. What do you see?”

  Kurt glanced over quickly before turning his attention back to the task at hand. “I see a deep bay with a hook of sea ice where it reaches the ocean. What am I missing?”

  “Nothing,” Joe said. “That’s what I see. But based on the contours alone, I can tell it’s a stagnant backwater without much circulation. Now, what do you think happens if Ryland starts pumping that algae into the bay?”

  “A quick freeze,” Kurt said. “The fast ice would grow out from the edges toward the middle, sealing the bay shut, just like the Nazis intended when they came up with the plan to begin with.”

  Joe nodded. “And the rest of the algae would be trapped in a pool behind it. Which is part of the reason the normal ice age process takes thousands of years. Because the algae tends to trap itself, only leaking out into the ocean in very small quantities over a period of centuries.”

  “An issue Ryland is trying to circumvent by filling tankers with the stuff and dumping it on the other side of the ocean,” Kurt replied.

  “And if he’s smart enough to do that,” Joe said, “he’s smart enough to do something similar down here. He’s not going to be content with letting the algae trickle into the bay and inch its way to the ocean fifty miles beyond.”

  “Could he have built a physical pipeline from the end of the ice tunnel out to the bay?” Kurt asked.

  “That depends,” Joe said. “How large would you say the conduit is?”

  “From what I saw in the cavern, the outgoing pipe was about four feet in diameter.”

  “That would match the estimate Hiram’s computer came up with for the underground tunnel,” Joe said. “How long do you think it would take to build a fifty-mile pipeline four feet in diameter?”

  Kurt continued to guide the craft while doing some mental calculations. “It took about three years to build the Alaska Pipeline,” he said. “It’s about eight hundred miles long, so that’s about twenty to thirty miles a month. And there were fifty thousand people working on it.”

  “And it was aboveground,” Joe said.

  “Good point,” Kurt said. “Even if Ryland had a thousand people for the job, which I doubt, he couldn’t possibly build more than a couple miles’ pipe per month in an ice-filled bay. Not even with multiple submarines.”

  “It’s slow work,” Joe said. “I’ve done some of it in the Gulf of Mexico and we had nice weather.”

  Kurt understood what Joe was getting at. “Ryland has a ship down there.”

  “That would be my guess,” Joe said. “A tanker. Or several of them.”

  Kurt tightened his grip on the tiller and leaned back. He repositioned the sail to keep the snow racer running in a broad reach. It whipped across the open field of white, picking up even more speed. A tanker meant the algae was being stored and contained. It meant the genie was still in the bottle and he and Joe had the chance to keep it there.

  “You’re a genius,” he told Joe. “Now, get on the satellite phone and give Rudi an update. Tell him to look for a ship in the bay and let him know if we stop the ship, we stop Ryland’s plan.”

  57

  Joe’s satellite call reached the NUMA tactical room in Washington, where Rudi had gathered with Hiram and Lee Garland.

  As Joe’s voice faded in and out, it became impossible to parse the words from the distortion and gaps in the signal. Rudi turned to the satellite wrangler. “Why is it so broken up?”

  “The storm is wreaking havoc with communications,” Garland said. “I’m amazed the call came through as well as it did.”

  “We need to hear what Joe’s saying,” Rudi replied. “Can you clear it up?”

  Garland shook his head. “We can boost our signal and get a message through to them, but the handheld unit isn’t going to suddenly double in transmission power and be able to cut through the storm. I suggest we tell them to use the datalink. It’s like texting. It uses far less bandwidth than voice communications and will be more likely to get through.”

  “Do it,” Rudi said.

  Garland tapped out a message explaining the difficulty they were having and the procedure for using the datalink. A minute went by before they got a response. The text appeared on a big screen at the front of the room. It read like a message from Tarzan.

  Pumps still in operation. Pipeline intact. Both out of reach. Ryland’s plan unaffected.

  Rudi read the message stoically.

  “Two strikes,” Hiram said from beside him, “but at least we’re still at bat.”

>   A second message followed.

  Be advised saboteurs ready on Liang’s ships. Must take by surprise or will scuttle.

  Rudi nodded to Garland. “Signal them ‘Understood.’ And get the saboteur information over to the Navy, they’re tracking down Liang’s ships.”

  “Are they close?” Yaeger asked.

  “Last I heard,” Rudi said. “As I understand it, SEAL teams are ready to pounce on three of the tankers, with British SAS units taking the other two. The plan is to hit them simultaneously.”

  As Garland typed the reply, a third message from Joe arrived.

  Paul and Gamay still at pumping station. Paul injured but stable. Suggest evac ASAP. We are heading to the coast. Ryland must have ship. Large ship. Find it in Fimbul Bay. We will disable. Somehow.

  For a second Rudi was baffled. “A ship?” he turned to Hiram. “Could they be right?”

  “I don’t see how,” Hiram said. “We had multiple satellite passes over that bay before the weather closed in. We would have seen a heat plume if there was a ship operating in the area. Especially a large one.”

  Rudi looked at Garland. “What do you think?”

  Garland offered a quick shake of the head. “The infrared detectors on our satellites are incredibly sensitive. A large ship operating in a cold ocean is the easiest thing in the world to spot. Don’t see how we could have missed a vessel operating in that area.”

  “What if it was a submarine?” Rudi asked.

  Hiram’s eyebrows went up. “That’s a possibility.”

  Rudi turned back to Garland. “Tell them we’ve seen nothing to indicate a ship but we’re considering the possibility of a submarine.”

  Garland sent the message out and everyone waited. The return text was adamant.

  Not a submarine. Has to be larger. Look for a supertanker or LNG or several. Ryland needs to get algae out of bay in large volume.

  Rudi now understood. He looked to Garland once more. “Can we run another pass?”

  “It won’t do any good,” Garland said. “The area is under a thick layer of cloud. We can’t see through it on a visible wavelength and infrared will be scattered and absorbed as well.”

  Rudi glanced at the weather screen, where the storm appeared as a swirling mass of clouds hiding everything underneath it in the fog of war.

  “What else do we have?” Rudi asked. “There has to be something.”

  “Radar might do it,” Garland said. “We have a long-wavelength system designed to give us land contours, but the image isn’t going to look like a photograph. More like an X-ray.”

  “Will it be able to distinguish a ship from the surroundings?”

  Garland nodded. “We should get a much stronger reflection off a steel-hulled vessel than from ice and snow or water.”

  Rudi was satisfied. “Get that satellite in place as fast as possible. We need to see through those clouds.”

  58

  The radar scan proved disappointing, showing no sign of a ship in the bay. Just ice, snow and water. Even when Hiram ran the data through a program that sharpened the details, there was nothing to see.

  “What are we overlooking?” Rudi asked.

  Hiram rubbed the stubble on his chin. “If a ship were hidden under a massive shelter, like the German submarine pens at Saint-Nazaire and Lorient, we wouldn’t pick it up.”

  That seemed unlikely to Rudi. “The largest U-boat pens were a few hundred feet in length. Ryland would have to construct a shelter ten times larger. It would have to be wider and higher. And he’d have to carve it out of unstable ice at the crumbling end of a glacier. Perhaps they’ve installed a man-made covering along the shoreline,” he mused. “White fabric coated with snow.”

  Hiram shook his head. “I’m not sure fabric could stand up to the punishing winds and weather there.”

  Garland chimed in. “The radar beam would pass through the fabric and light up the ship. We’d see it on the return like the image on an X-ray. Like a gun hidden in a suitcase.”

  Rudi acquiesced. “This is like searching for Harvey, the rabbit.”

  Hiram thought a moment. “Maybe not Harvey, but Habakkuk.”

  “Habakkuk the rabbit?” Rudi asked.

  “Habakkuk the prophet,” Hiram replied, retrieving a report from a folder in front of him. “Behold ye among the heathen, and regard, and wonder marvelously,” he quoted, “for I will work a work in your days, which ye will not believe, though it be told to you. Habakkuk, Chapter 1, Verse 5.”

  “Is that from the Old Testament?” Garland asked.

  “It is,” Hiram said. “Written by a Jewish prophet in the seventh century B.C. He was speaking to his people about God’s coming wrath. He was about to remake their world. And was going to do it violently.”

  “Sounds like something our apocalyptic friend Ryland would agree with,” Rudi said. “Why do you bring it up?”

  “Because Kurt saw the name on the model in Ryland’s office. He put them in his report, but he was more focused on the George Bernard Shaw quote about the value of the ‘unreasonable man.’ I pulled some research on both. Like everything else we’ve learned about Ryland, what’s presented up front is one thing, what’s hidden is something else.”

  Rudi wrinkled his brow. “I fail to see how a religious quotation from twenty-seven hundred years ago will help us now.”

  “Because it’s not just a scriptural quotation,” Hiram said. “It’s also the code name of a secret plan the Allies considered during World War Two. The Nazis had their secret plans involving ice and we had ours. In this case, Project Habakkuk.”

  “Go on,” Rudi said.

  “The idea was simple. During the early part of the war, German U-boats were hitting Allied convoys in the middle of the Atlantic with impunity. They remained stubbornly out of the Allies’ reach as even the longest-range aircraft, operating from the east coast of the U.S., the southern tip of Greenland and the west of England were unable to close that gap. A sprawling area a thousand miles across remained unpatrolled. And that’s where the wolf packs did their hunting.

  “To close that gap, a man named Geoffrey Pyke came up with an idea. He wanted to build a massive aircraft carrier and place it in the center of the ocean. His initial proposal suggested it be nearly three thousand feet in length, others proposed an even bigger structure the size of a land-based airfield. This aircraft carrier/base would allow anti-submarine planes to cover every inch of the Atlantic, putting an end to the wolf pack’s ability to hunt freely.”

  “Sounds far-fetched,” Garland said.

  “It was. Because such a ship would use as much steel as an entire fleet and the high command was not interested in diverting that much material for what they considered a long shot. But then Pyke suggested the massive ship could be built out of ice. He and his team even came up with a formulation of frozen water mixed with sawdust and wood pulp that proved much stronger than regular ice and more resistant to melting. He called it Pykrete and insisted it could be manufactured on blocks and then shaped and stacked as easily as bricks and mortar.”

  Rudi was silent. He’d heard of Pykrete and the Habakkuk idea long ago. “You think Ryland built a ship out of ice?”

  Hiram shrugged. “It’s the only explanation that fits all the facts. He needs a ship, it must be massive, as Joe told us, and it must be invisible to a radar scan looking for steel.”

  Rudi considered the idea. “Ryland and his friends do seem to be experts in the manipulation of frozen water. But as I recall, tests of the Pykrete idea for use in shipping failed miserably.”

  “I can’t say how they did it. Kurt’s description of the submarine that hit them is a possible clue,” Hiram replied. “He said the hull appeared almost translucent when the light hit it at a certain angle. More importantly, there’s Joe’s report of dirty ice all over the deck of the Grishka. It was piled up on the
side where the ship had obviously been in a collision. Joe described this ice as gray-yellow in color and containing a mesh-like network of fibrous material and a residue of dry powder. That’s about what Pykrete would look like if you used fiberglass instead of wood pulp.”

  Rudi tried to recall the details of Joe’s report. “It certainly does sound like Pykrete. Or a new and improved version.”

  “The Antarctic would be the place to build a ship out of ice,” Hiram said. “Aside from the fibers or resin you’d have to bring in, all your raw materials are right there at hand. It would be like building a giant igloo.”

  Garland added to the consensus. “A ship of ice would explain why we’re not getting a radar return. And by that I mean we’re getting one, it’s just indistinguishable from the surroundings.”

  “All right, let’s run with this,” Rudi said. “Compare the radar image with the visual and infrared images from twenty-four hours ago. And any older images you can find. Anything in the new image that wasn’t in the old one—that’s our ship of ice. And once we find it, we can sink it.”

  “That might prove easier said than done,” Hiram said. “The whole point of the Habakkuk project was to build a ship that was indestructible. In such a vessel, thick ice is necessary for strength and stability, but it also results in a hull that is impervious to bombs, mines and missiles. Even the original design for the Habakkuk was intended to be invulnerable to German torpedoes of the day—and those carried six-hundred-pound warheads designed to break the spine of a battleship. If Ryland has built his own Habakkuk, we could pound it for hours with everything in our arsenal and do nothing but deafen the people inside.”

  Rudi knew enough about engineering and ship construction to know that everything was a trade-off. Even a ship of great size and strength would have a weakness somewhere. “First things first,” he said. “Let’s find that ship and make sure we’re not guessing ourselves right out of the ballpark.”