The Ice Limit

by Douglas Preston

  "Marvelous! Let's have at it, then."

  "We'll have to make do with this single bottle. This is a ship's bridge. Fear not—the moment we reach New York Harbor, I'll uncork the other ten myself. Meanwhile, please do the honors." And he gestured toward the cart.

  Lloyd strode over, slid the bottle out of the ice, and held it up with a grin.

  "Don't drop it this time, guv," Puppup said, almost inaudibly.

  Lloyd looked at Britton. "How much longer?"

  "Three minutes."

  The wind beat against the windows. The panteonero was growing, but—Britton had informed him—they would round Staten Island and be in the lee of Tierra del Fuego long before the southwesterly wind shifted to the more dangerous northwest. He unwired the cork and waited, the bottle cold in his hand.

  For a moment, the only sounds on the bridge were the moan of the wind and the distant thundering of the ocean. Then Britton looked up from the screen and glanced at Howell, who nodded his affirmation.

  "The Rolvaag has just crossed into international waters," she said quietly.

  A small cheer erupted. Lloyd popped the cork and began pouring judicious measures all around.

  Suddenly the grinning face of Puppup appeared before Lloyd, his skinny arms holding up two glasses. "Right here, guv. One for me and one for me friend." He ducked his head.

  Lloyd emptied the bottle into the glasses. "Who's your friend?" he asked, smiling indulgently. The man's role, though not large, had been crucial. He would find him a good job at the Lloyd Museum, in maintenance perhaps, or even security. Or maybe, as the last surviving Yaghan Indian, there might be something even better. Perhaps he should consider some kind of exhibit, after all. It would be tasteful and correct—a far cry from those nineteenth-century exhibitions of primitive people—but it could be a draw. Especially with Puppup on hand as the last living example. Yes, he would have to think about it...

  "Hanuxa," Puppup answered, with another duck and grin. Lloyd looked up in time to see his rabbitlike retreat, drinking two-fistedly from both glasses.

  The chief mate's voice broke through the hubbub. "I've got a surface contact at thirty-two miles, bearing three one five true at twenty knots."

  Instantly, the conversation ceased. Lloyd glanced over at Glinn, eager for assurance, and felt a prickly sensation stir in his gut. The man had an expression on his face he had never seen before: a look of sick surprise.

  "Glinn?" he said. "It's some merchant vessel, right?"

  Without answering, Glinn turned to his operative at the EES console and spoke a few words in an undertone.

  "It's the Almirante Ramirez," said Britton in an undertone.

  "What? How can you know that from the radar?" Lloyd asked, the prickly sensation turning into a flush of disbelief.

  Britton looked at him. "There's no way to tell for sure, but it's in the right place at the right time. Most shipping would be heading through the Strait of Le Maire, particularly in this weather. But this one's coming after us, with all it's got."

  Lloyd watched as Glinn conferred with the man at the computer. There was the faint sound of a dial tone, of highspeed dialing, the hiss of a digital handshake.

  "I thought you put that son of a bitch out of action," Lloyd said.

  Glinn straightened up, and Lloyd was immediately reassured to see that the collected, confident expression had returned to his face. "Our friend proves unusually resourceful."

  "Resourceful?"

  "Comandante Vallenar has managed to repair his vessel, at least partly. Quite an achievement. I can scarcely believe it possible. But it makes no difference."

  "Why not?" Britton asked.

  "It's all in the computer profile. He will not pursue us into international waters."

  "That's a rather arrogant prediction, if you ask me. The man's crazy. He might do anything."

  "You are in error. Comandante Vallenar, despite everything, is a naval officer at heart. He prides himself on his honor and loyalty, and on a set of abstract military ideals. For all these reasons, he will not pursue us beyond the line. To do so would be to embarrass Chile—and create an unpleasant incident with his country's largest supplier of foreign aid. Furthermore, he will not take a crippled ship too deeply into a building storm."

  "So why's he still coming?"

  "Two reasons. First, he doesn't know our exact location, and he still hopes to cut us off before we reach international waters. Second, our comandante is a man of the noble gesture. Like a dog running to the end of his chain knowing his quarry is out of reach, he will drive full bore to the edge of his country's waters, then turn back."

  "Fancy analysis," said Britton, "but is it right?"

  "Yes," said Glinn, "it is right." His voice was serene with conviction.

  Lloyd smiled. "I've made the mistake of not trusting you before. I'm satisfied. If you say he won't cross, he won't cross."

  Britton said nothing. Glinn turned to her with a personal, almost intimate gesture, and Lloyd was surprised to see him clasp her hands gently. He did not quite catch Glinn's words, but Britton appeared to flush.

  "All right," she said, in a voice that was just audible.

  Puppup suddenly appeared, both glasses empty, holding them up in a supplicating gesture. Lloyd glanced at him, noticing the way he unconsciously kept his balance despite an unusually heavy roll of the deck. "Any more, then?" the Yaghan asked. "For me and me friend, I mean."

  There was no time to answer. There was a sudden vibration, a subsonic boom, that shook the very frame of the tanker. The bridge lights flickered, and the banks of monitors sank into a wash of gray electronic snow. Immediately, Britton and the rest of the officers were at their stations. "What the hell was that?" Lloyd asked sharply.

  No one answered him. Glinn had returned to his operative's side and was conferring with him in low, urgent tones. There was a deep vibration in the ship, almost like a groan. It was followed by another.

  And then, as abruptly as it began, the disturbance ceased: the screens returned, the lights brightened and steadied. There was a chorus of chirps and whirrs as devices across the bridge rebooted.

  "We don't know what it was," Britton said, finally answering Lloyd's question. Her eyes swept over the instrumentation. "Some kind of general malfunction. An explosion, perhaps. It seems to have affected all ship's systems." She turned to the chief mate. "I want a damage assessment right away."

  Howell picked up the telephone and made two quick calls. After the second, he replaced the phone, face ashen. "It's the holding tank," he said, "the one with the meteorite. There's been a serious accident."

  "What kind of accident?" Glinn asked.

  "A discharge from the rock."

  Glinn turned to McFarlane and Amira. "Get on it. Find out what happened and why. And Dr. Brambell, you better get to—"

  But Brambell had already disappeared from the bridge.

  62: Almirante Ramirez

  8:30 A.M.

  VALLENAR STARED hard into the murk, as if the act of staring itself would bring the elusive tanker into view.

  "Status," he murmured again to the conning officer.

  "With the jamming, sir, it's hard to tell. My best estimate is that the target is heading zero nine zero at approximately sixteen knots."

  "Range?"

  "Sir, I can't tell exactly. Somewhere around thirty nautical miles. We wouldn't even have that close a fix, except their jamming seemed to drop briefly a few minutes ago."

  Vallenar could feel a rhythmic surge to his ship: a sickening lifting and dropping of the deck. He had only felt this motion once before, when he had been caught in a storm south of Diego Ramirez during a training mission. He knew what this odd motion meant: the distance between the wave crests had begun to exceed twice the length of the Almirante Ramirez. He could see the following sea from the aft windows: long muscular swells, topped with a breaking line of water, coming at his stern and foaming along the hull before disappearing forward into the darkness. Once in
a while a giant wave, a tigre, would come up from behind, the water piling up against the rudder, giving the helmsman a loose wheel and threatening to shove the destroyer around, causing it to broach to. It would only get worse when they turned south and took the sea on their beam.

  Reaching thoughtfully into his pocket, he withdrew a puro and examined its soiled outer leaves absently. He thought of the two dead divers, their cold stiff bodies wrapped in tarps and stored in sea lockers aft. He thought of the three others, who never resurfaced, and a fourth, shivering now in the last stages of hypothermia. They had done their duty—no more, and no less. The ship was seaworthy. True, they could make only twenty knots with their damaged propellers. But the tanker was only making sixteen. And the long eastward run toward international waters was giving him the time he needed to achieve his strategy.

  He glanced back at the conning officer. The crew was frightened: of this storm, of this chase. That fear was good. Frightened men worked faster. But Timmer had been worth any ten of them.

  He bit off the end of the cigar and spat it away. Timmer had been worth the entire complement...

  Vallenar mastered himself, taking the time to light the cigar carefully, methodically. The glowing red tip reflected back from the inky windows. By now they surely knew he was coming after them once again. This time he would be more careful. He had fallen into their trap once, and he would not allow it to happen again. Initially, his plan had been to cripple the ship. But now it was clear that Timmer was dead. The time for mere crippling was long past.

  Five hours, maybe less, would bring them into range of his four-inch guns. In the meantime, if there was even a short respite from jamming, the Exocets were ready to fire at a moment's notice.

  This time, there would be no mistake.

  63: Rolvaag

  9:20 A.M.

  AS MCFARLANE ran down the center corridor of the medical suite, Rachel on his heels, he almost collided with Brambell, stepping through the operating room door. He was a very different Brambell than the wry, dry man of the dinner table: this Brambell was grim, his movements brusque, his wiry frame tense.

  "We're here to see—" McFarlane began, but Brambell was stalking down the hall and disappearing behind another door, paying them not the slightest bit of attention. McFarlane glanced at Rachel.

  Following Brambell's path, they entered a brightly lit room. The doctor, who was still wearing a pair of surgical gloves, stood over a gurney, examining a motionless patient. The man's head was swathed in bandages, and the surrounding sheets were soaked in blood. As McFarlane watched, Brambell jerked a sheet over the man's head with a sharp, angry motion. Then he turned to a nearby sink.

  McFarlane swallowed hard. "We need to speak with Manuel Garza," he said.

  "Absolutely not," Brambell said as he broke scrub, ripping off the pair of bloody gloves and dashing his hands under hot water.

  "Doctor, we must question Garza about what happened. The safety of the ship depends on it."

  Brambell stopped in his tracks, looking at McFarlane for the first time. His face was somber but controlled. He said nothing for a moment, and McFarlane could see behind the mask the racing mind of a doctor making a decision under extreme pressure.

  "Room Three," he said as he pulled on a fresh pair of surgical gloves. "Five minutes."

  They found Garza in a small room, wide awake. His face was bruised, his eyes blackened, and his head heavily bandaged. When the door opened, he swiveled his dark gaze at them, then looked away immediately. "They're all dead, aren't they?" he whispered, eyes on the bulkhead.

  McFarlane hesitated. "All but one."

  "But he's also going to die." It was a statement, not a question.

  Rachel came over and laid a hand on his shoulder. "Manuel, I know how hard this must be for you. But we need to know what happened in the holding tank."

  Garza did not look at her. He pursed his lips, blinked his blackened eyes. "What happened? What do you think happened? That goddamn meteorite went off again."

  "Went off?" McFarlane repeated.

  "Yeah. It exploded. Just like it did with that guy Timmer." McFarlane and Rachel exchanged glances.

  "Which one of your men touched it?" Rachel asked.

  Garza suddenly turned to stare at her. McFarlane wasn't sure if his look was one of surprise, anger, or disbelief, the wide purple moon-holes of his eyes seemed to draw all expression from the rest of his face.

  "Nobody touched it."

  "Somebody must have."

  "I said nobody. I was watching every minute."

  "Manuel—" Rachel began.

  He rose angrily. "You think my men were crazy? They hated being near that thing, they were scared to death of it Rachel, I'm telling you, nobody got within five feet."

  He winced and lay back.

  After a moment, McFarlane spoke again. "We need to know exactly what you saw. Can you tell us what you remember, right before it happened? What was going on? Did you notice anything unusual?"

  "No. The men were almost finished with the welding. Some of them had finished. The job was virtually done. Everyone was still wearing their protective gear. The ship was heeling. It seemed to be taking a pretty big wave."

  "I remember that wave," Rachel said. "Are you sure nobody lost his balance, nobody put out an involuntary hand to steady—"

  "You don't believe me, do you?" he asked. "Tough shit, because it's true. Nobody touched the rock. Check the tapes yourself if you want."

  "Was there anything unusual about the meteorite?" McFarlane asked. "Anything funny?"

  Garza thought for a moment. Then he shook his head.

  McFarlane leaned closer. "That freak wave that heeled the ship. Do you think tilting the meteorite could have caused the explosion?"

  "Why? It was tilted, banged, and shoved all the way from the impact site to the holding tank. Nothing like this happened."

  There was a silence.

  "It's the rock," Garza murmured.

  McFarlane blinked, not sure he had heard correctly.

  "What?" he asked.

  "I said, it's the goddamn rock. It wants us dead. All of us."

  And with that, he turned toward the bulkhead and would not speak again.

  64: Rolvaag

  10:00 A.M.

  VIOLENT dawn rose beyond the windows of the bridge, revealing a wind-torn sea. A procession of gigantic swells, undulating, remorseless, came out of the storm-wracked western horizon and disappeared into the east. The panteonero continued to build, a screaming wind that seemed to rip pieces of sea from the tops of the waves and send them flying, shredding the water into white sheets of foam. The great ship heaved up, heaved down, rolling and pitching in agonizing slow motion.

  Eli Glinn stood alone at the windows, hands clasped behind his back. He gazed out at the violence, conscious of an internal serenity he had rarely felt since the project began. It had been a project fraught with unexpected turns and surprises. Even here, on the ship, the meteorite continued to bedevil them: Howell had returned from the sick bay with reports of six dead and Garza injured. Nevertheless, EES had succeeded. It was one of the greatest engineering feats ever.

  He would not care to repeat such a project again.

  He turned. Britton and the other ship's officers were glued to the surface radar, tracking the Almirante Ramirez.

  Lloyd hovered behind them. It was a tense-looking group. Clearly, his assurances about Comandante Vallenar had not convinced them. A natural, if illogical, position to take. But Glinn's proprietary profiling program had never been wrong in a critical prediction. Besides, he knew Vallenar. He had met the man on his own turf. He had seen the iron discipline on his ship. He had seen the man's skill as a naval officer, his overweening pride, his love of country. The man will not cross the line. Not for a meteorite. At the last minute would turn; the moment of crisis would pass; and they would be on their way home.

  "Captain," he asked, "what course do you propose to take us out of Drake Passage?"
<
br />   "As soon as the Ramirez turns around, I'll order a three three zero bearing to bring us back into the lee of South America and get us out of this gale."

  Glinn nodded approvingly. "That will be soon."

  Britton's eyes dropped back to the screen. She said nothing more.

  Glinn strolled over and stood with Lloyd behind Captain Britton. On the electronic chart, the green dot that represented Vallenar was fast approaching international waters. Glinn couldn't help but smile. It was like watching a horse race on television for which he alone knew the outcome.

  "Any radio contact from the Ramirez?"

  "No," Britton replied. "They've been maintaining radio silence throughout. Not even making contact with their own base. Banks heard the base CO order him back hours ago."

  Naturally, thought Glinn. It fit the profile.

  He allowed his gaze to linger on Britton: at the scattering of freckles on her nose, the poise in her bearing. She doubted his judgment now; but later she would see that he had been right. He thought about the courage she had shown, the unerring good sense, the coolness under pressure; the dignity, even while the bridge had been out of her command. This was a woman, he felt, he could finally trust. Perhaps this was the woman he had been looking for. It bore further consideration. He began thinking of the correct strategy to win her, potential avenues of failure, the likeliest path to success...

  He glanced back at the radar screen. The dot was now just minutes from the line. He felt the faintest twinge of nervousness disturb his serenity. But all factors had been taken into account. The man would turn.

  He looked deliberately away from the screen and strolled back to the window. It was an awesome sight. The waves were topping the maindeck, sweeping past in green sheets, streaming through the scuppers back into the sea. The Rolvaag, despite its movement, still felt quite stable—it was a following sea, which greatly aided stability. And the mass in the center tank acted as ballast.

  He glanced at his watch. Any moment now, Britton would report that the Ramirez had turned back.