by JE Gurley
He had never studied archaeology or kept abreast of marine biology discoveries, but for some reason, the idea of viable twenty-million-year-old crabs frightened him. “Why?” he asked.
“Do you mean why the new, previously believed extinct species? It’s possible they came up through the drill hole when the drill struck a cavity. Clark in the chemistry lab took gas bubble samples. He found a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and methane with traces of hydrogen sulfide. The kelp has a symbiotic relationship with sulfur-eating bacteria. That’s how it can survive without sunlight.” She smiled. “I think we’ve discovered an underwater biome, one that has survived since the Cenozoic Era, the Middle-Miocene Epoch, perhaps the Pliocene. This could make my career.”
He was glad someone on the Kulik was happy, but he hated to burst her bubble. “You’d better work fast. If this hole is dry, we may pack up and go home in a week or less.”
Her pale complexion paled even further. “We can’t. This is … this is a tremendous find.”
“Maybe so, but it won’t pay the bills, Ilsa. Global Petroleum isn’t in the noble benefactor business. They want oil.”
She rose from her seat. “I must speak to the captain. Maybe he—”
The entire cabin rose and fell like a rollercoaster car, leaving his stomach hanging somewhere halfway up his esophagus. Ilsa staggered into his arms. He grabbed her and held on tight, as both of them slammed into the wall. He turned to take the brunt of the impact. Her chair rolled across the room and crashed into the wall beside them with enough force to crack the wooden paneling. Glassware and laptops slid from her desk and lab tables and crashed to the floor amid a blossoming of glass fragments. Books spilled from shelves, pelting his body. The room danced for several seconds before settling again. Alarm bells began sounding throughout the ship. Ilsa stared at him stricken with horror. His stomach twisted itself into a hard knot.
“That’s no thruster malfunction,” he said.
“Rogue wave,” Ilsa suggested.
He shook his head. “In the Arctic? Not likely.”
The room righted itself but continued to shudder. He released Ilsa and stuck his head out the door to peer down the passageway. One of the staff raced down the passageway. Asa yelled at him. “Hey! What’s happening?”
The man barely glanced over his shoulder as he disappeared down the stairs. In a voice rife with panic, he yelled back, “We struck an air-filled pocket with the drill. The seafloor is collapsing beneath the ship.”
The tight knot in Asa’s stomach began to crawl back up his throat, threatening to squeeze the air from his lungs. His heart shuddered and skipped two beats before reasserting itself. A sudden volume of gas bubbles in the water could spell disaster. The 55,000-ton drillship could float on water, but not on air.
He turned to Ilsa. “We have to get to a lifeboat. Grab your coat, anything warm.” She stood and stared at him in confusion. “Move!” he yelled to snap her out of her stupor. To his relief, she took her heavy coat, a hat, and gloves from the coat rack. She glanced around the room, almost in tears at the disarray, before joining him. He had left his parka in the thruster control room, too far below decks to go after. He grabbed a voluminous bright red parka from the coat rack.
“That’s Anderson’s parka,” Ilsa said.
That explained the large size. Jason Anderson was one of the biggest men on the ship, most of it his rotund belly. “If we see him, I’ll give it back to him.”
He grabbed Ilsa’s hand and started down the passageway toward the stairs, lurching into the walls as the ship twisted and rolled from side to side. He worried that too much torque could snap the anchor chains. The thrusters alone could not hold the ship steady. He thought about the drill crew. Any roughnecks or drillers on the derrick and not harnessed in would have been flung into the freezing water or onto the steel deck below. If the ship rolled too far onto its side, the weight of the derrick would topple the ship.
On the way down the stairs, the abandon ship signal began to wail, seven long blasts on the air horn. He and Ilsa burst out of the hatch on the deck main level and stepped into chaos. Men bolted from open hatches and from beneath the two-hundred-foot drill tower, racing toward the four lifeboat stations in the bow, where the ships’ crew worked to winch them over the side and into the heaving sea. Ninety-foot-long joints of twelve-inch-diameter drill pipe shaken loose from the vertical pipe rack. Asa watched in mute horror as a fifteen-foot-long section of metal bracing from the collapsing derrick fell on top of one hapless worker, crushing him beneath tons of twisted steel. Ilsa screamed and froze.
As the ship shook itself to pieces around them, he dragged her toward the only lifeboat already over the side of the ship, one on the forward starboard side, straight through the hail of falling debris. He trusted to luck. He took a deep breath and didn’t look up or slow down in their headlong rush to reach salvation. If they stopped, they would die. If the derrick collapsed, they would have no time to avoid it. It would ensnare them in its miles of steel cable and sweep them into the depths of the sea.
The top-heavy drillship had become more unstable in the roiling sea. Sulfur hydroxide rose from bubbles breaking the surface around the ship, churning the water for five-hundred feet in all directions into a cauldron. A thick, swirling mist reeking of rotten eggs floated just above the surface, as warm water from the underwater caverns mixed with the frigid waters of the Chukchi Sea. Asa also recognized the stench as the sweet odor of dichloromethane, used as a degreaser. It occurred naturally when methane from decaying organic material mixed with chlorine under heat. If Ilsa were right, the cavern contained lots of algae and kelp.
The ship’s bow slid sideways several yards, as if yanked by a giant, invisible hand. The deck tilted ten degrees to starboard. The portside lifeboats careened wildly, bright orange-and- white pendulums crashing into their cranes and shattering their fiberglass hulls like cracking an egg. Ilsa fell, pulling Asa down to the deck on top of her, a position that at any other time he would have found pleasant. Now it only slowed them down. They slid across the sloping deck toward the railing, sections of which the crew had removed to lower the lifeboats. The yawning gap loomed directly in front of them. Ilsa screamed as she slid over the side, her eyes wide with fright. Asa made a frantic grab at a steel hawser with his free hand, as the other clung desperately to Ilsa. He managed to grasp the cable but felt it go slack in his hand as he continued to slide. Just as his legs dropped over the side, the cable snapped taut. The pressure on his right arm became unbearable, as Ilsa and his combined weights threatened to pull his arm from his shoulder.
Ilsa dangled below him, staring up at him and pleading with her eyes. His gaze fell to the sea below them, a churning frigid beast waiting to suck the heat from their bodies and devour them whole. Ignoring the wrenching pain in his shoulder, Asa summoned all his strength and slowly pulled Ilsa back up the side of the ship.
“Find a foothold,” he yelled down at her over the din of screeching metal and men’s screams. “Anywhere to brace your feet.”
He felt her scramble until she found purchase on a weld between hull plates. “Okay,” she said. Her voice quavered on the verge of tears, but she retained her wits, trusting him to save her. Asa hoped she had not misplaced her faith in him. He was determined to save them both.
“Okay, now climb up my arm.” She glanced back down at the sea below her and hesitated. “Hurry,” he urged. He didn’t know how much longer he could retain his grip in his rapidly numbing left hand.
Using the weld for traction, she climbed up his arm. The ship heaved back to port, aiding their frantic struggle to re-board the ship. As soon as she sprawled safely on the deck, Asa released her, shaking his numb arm to restart the circulation. He pulled himself farther away from the edge. Afraid to stand because of the tremors coursing through the ship like mini-earthquakes, they crawled across the deck toward the lifeboat, his dislocated right arm dragging uselessly behind him.
Despite their h
eroic efforts, they did not make it. The ship gave up the struggle to remain upright. The flexible riser pipe, stretched beyond its endurance, snapped at the moon pool. The tensioner cables parted with the gunshot crack of a volley from a firing squad. Like a Macy’s Thanksgiving balloon that had lost its tether, the drillship floated free, bobbing wildly on the churning water. The massive Global Kulik groaned out its death dirge, and like a whale in Sea World showing off for the spectators, rolled over onto its belly, catapulting him and Ilsa through the air like a pair well-tossed jai-alai balls. One dizzying moment they were flying, and then struggling in the frigid water the next. The shock of the near-freezing water numbed the pain produced from striking the surface. He remembered watching the hulk of the ship falling relentlessly toward them, and then the giant wave that separated him from Ilsa as the ship landed less than ten yards away, but little else.
The heavy borrowed coat became a shroud trying to drag him to the bottom. He shed it like a molting lobster, fighting through the folds of cloth to reach the surface. The cold water seared his exposed flesh like a fire, as he frantically searched the heaving sea for Ilsa. He saw a dozen men drifting away from the rapidly sinking ship but no sign of Ilsa. The sea had taken her, as it soon would take him.
He spotted a bright yellow neoprene equipment box floating fifteen yards away, his only hope of survival. With his injured arm, he could not swim, but he kicked his legs to move his body toward it. Using only his good left arm, it took all his strength and willpower to scramble atop the box. It was too small. Every movement threatened to overturn the wobbly makeshift life raft. He curled into fetal position to keep his extremities out of the water and to steady the raft. Surprisingly, he heard no screams, no cries for help. The eerie silence after four months of constant background throbbing frightened him almost as much as the ship’s sinking. He checked to make sure his earplugs weren’t in and discovered them still dangling around his neck. The silence was real and disconcerting.
Asa held out little hope for rescue. He didn’t know if the captain had time to radio a distress call or if any ships were in the immediate vicinity. The regular supply ship would not arrive for another day. He could expect no rescue from his fellow shipmates. None of the four lifeboats had gotten away. All had gone to the bottom with the ship. The few minutes warning would not have been enough for the crew sleeping below decks or the engine room crew to reach topside. If he had not found the kelp and taken it to Ilsa … In the end, it would not matter. He would die of hypothermia, a slower death than drowning but just as permanent. Already, he could feel his mind shutting down from the extreme cold. He tried to do simple math problems, recall the steps necessary to break down a carburetor, but his mind would not focus. His arms and legs grew numb, as his blood pooled in his body’s center to conserve heat.
Twenty minutes after the sinking, his strength almost gone, his body shivering out its last heat from his muscles, Asa saw a gray shape like a submarine’s sail break the surface. He tried to wave his good left arm to hail it, but could not move. As the gray silhouette drew nearer, he decided the shape too odd, triangular, rather than oblong, to be a conning tower, and a second, smaller sail seemed to move side to side behind it.
Slowly, the entire bulk of the object surfaced. It was not a submarine or rescue craft of any kind. At first, he thought his failing mind had conjured the unbelievable hallucination, a gray ghost Grim Reaper to take him away. He stared numbly at the largest shark he had ever seen, that he had ever imagined. He estimated its length at over a hundred-eighty feet. The pale gray dorsal fin he had mistaken for the conning tower of a submarine protruded twenty-five feet into the air. The shark glided like a silent nightmare toward several bodies floating on the surface. Asa watched in horror, as the shark swallowed three bodies in one massive gulp. That the creature’s eyes were dead, pupil-less white orbs only made the shark appear more ghostly. Sightless, it detected the corpses with its keen sense of smell.
Its meal finished, it turned and began circling him in a leisurely fashion. He willed his heart to stop beating, fearing the shark could hear its frantic hammering through the equipment box. He waited for the creature to eat him, almost welcoming the end to his current frozen misery. At least the entire crew of the Global Kulik would be together again.
To his surprise, the shark turned away and disappeared beneath the surface, leaving hardly a ripple. Had he imagined it? A few minutes later, the sound of a helicopter approaching him broke the stillness. He looked up and saw the white underbelly of a U.S. Coast Guard Sikorsky MH-60T Jayhawk helicopter hovering twenty feet above him. The whoosh of the rotors sounded like a voice speaking to him, but he could not make out the words. He tried to cry out for help with his frozen larynx and only produced a weak squeak. He watched with frozen tears, as a diver dropped from the open door and splashed into the sea beside him. He tried to help the diver fasten a harness around his chest and shoulders, but his arms and hands were too numb to work. He lay like a corpse and allowed the diver to buckle him in. He slid into the water, choking on a mouthful of icy water.
Then, he was flying again, rising in the air towards the helicopter. Helping hands drew him inside, unharnessed him, and laid him on a stretcher. He could not speak to thank them.
“He’s barely alive,” one of them said.
“Grab a heat pack and put it under his arms,” the other replied. “He’ll make it.”
They hovered while they recovered the diver; then, wrapped both of them in warm blankets.
Asa glanced back down at the sea below him, but saw no sign of the drillship, Ilsa, or the giant shark he might have imagined with his fevered mind. In fact, the sea showed no sign of human involvement, except for the floating yellow equipment box fading out of sight as the helicopter turned southeast toward the Alaskan coast. The Chukchi Sea had erased all traces of man’s attempt to subdue it, as easily as wiping a chalkboard.
But he was alive.
2
February 19, 2018 Prilagat’ Usiliya, Chukchi Sea, Russia–
The sea was a jigsaw puzzle scattered by the hand of a disgruntled giant. The pieces did not fit correctly. For kilometers in every direction, open leads of dark blue water wound between patches of two-meter-thick ice. To an untrained eye, the reflection of clouds on the softly undulating surface of the water produced the mirage of a solid ice pack. Anastasiy Berezhnoy, captain of the Arktika-class nuclear-powered Russian icebreaker Prilagat’ Usiliya, was no rookie. After forty-two years at sea and twenty-one years as a captain in the Arctic Ocean, he knew ice and snow as well as any native Inuit or Chukchi.
He wondered what he was doing in the Chukchi Sea. The Northern Sea Route was open. Ships plied the waters along Russia’s Siberian coast between Vankarem and Yanranay unimpeded by treacherous sea ice. The extent of ice in the Arctic was a million square kilometers less than the previous winter. The thermometer hugged the -3 degrees Celsius mark. It was unlikely the water would freeze again before the spring thaw. He would much prefer to be home in Tsilik with his wife and son than wasting time staring at sea ice, but he went where his superiors told him to go. It was a new Russia, but not so new that he could disobey orders. Like the name of his ship, he would endeavor.
The one-hundred-forty-five-meter-long, twenty-four-thousand-ton icebreaker presently made fifteen knots through open water. The twin OK-900A 171-megawatt nuclear engines could push her to a top speed of twenty-one knots, but he was ever wary of ice. The icebreaker’s double-hull could handle ice twice as thick as they would likely encounter, but ice was a monster lying in wait with only its eyes showing above the surface, bent on sending the unwary to an icy grave. Anastasiy was responsible for the one-hundred-forty-two lives aboard his ship—comrades and friends all. He turned to his first officer, Evgeni Aleyev, a swarthy native of the Urals. He and Aleyev had sailed together for twelve of his forty-two years as sea. The taciturn Kazakh was closer than was his own brother.
“Evgeni, inform the helmsman to steer ten degre
es north of our present position.”
Aleyev frowned. “Why the unscheduled change in course? Are we not still headed to the Siberian Sea as our orders read?”
Anastasiy allowed Aleyev a certain degree of familiarity that the rest of the crew did not have. None of them would dare question his command or feel it proper to remind him of his orders. “I wish to investigate the report of a fishing vessel sinking two-hundred kilometers west of Wrangel Island.”
“The report is over twenty-four hours old. Surely we can do nothing for it.”
“Perhaps not, but I am curious,” Anastasiy replied, grinning. “It is only an hour or so out of our way.”
Aleyev nodded and turned to the helmsman. “Ten degrees to starboard, Dima.”
Anastasiy returned to his position near the bridge wing rail and smiled at the sight of the crew chief, Kalek Guryev, leading the night watch in exercises on the forward deck. The physical exercises were more an effort to reduce boredom than to keep them in good physical condition. Life in the Arctic kept a man hard and ready for anything. Guryev was the exception. Tall and rotund, in his white parka he looked like a polar bear stalking the deck. Anastasiy half-expected someone to shoot him with a tranquilizer dart at any moment, and then tag him with a radio collar.
He felt a slight vibration through the deck, as the rudder swung about to move the ship to starboard on its new heading. He lightly patted the rail with his gloved hand. If a man could love an inanimate object, he loved the Prilagat’ Usiliya. Lately, he felt more at home aboard his ship than he did with his family. He would hate leaving her, but at fifty-six, retirement loomed before him like an iceberg, the exposed tip beckoning, but the unseen portion below the water frightened him. What would he do? Could he live on land for the remainder of his life without the familiar roll of a steel deck beneath his feet?