He glanced over at Britton. She was staring at the radar, and the wavering green pip that represented the Almirante Ramirez.
"The Ramirez has matched our course for the last half hour," she said, without looking up. "One eight zero, dead astern, holding at twenty knots, constant bearing and decreasing range."
Glinn said nothing. It was incredible to him that Vallenar would take his ship into a beam sea like this. The giant Rolvaag was struggling, and it was far better at handling the storm than a destroyer with scarcely a forty-foot beam. It was truly insane. There was a good chance that the Almirante Ramirez would be capsized. But a good chance was still a chance, and Glinn had no idea what kind of seamanship Vallenar could bring to bear. He suspected first-rate.
"At current speed and bearing, he'll catch up with us at the Ice Limit," Britton said. "And he'll come within firing range considerably before then."
"In just over three hours," said Glinn. "Around dusk."
"Once we're in range, do you think he will fire?"
"I have no doubt of it."
"We have no defense. We'll be ripped to pieces."
"If we're unable to lose him in the darkness, that's unfortunately true."
She looked up at him. "What about the meteorite?" she asked in a low voice.
"What about it?"
She lowered her voice, glancing at Lloyd. "If we drop it, we'll be able to increase our speed."
Glinn felt himself stiffen. He glanced over at Lloyd, who stood frowning at the bridge windows, trunklike legs planted wide apart. He hadn't heard. When Glinn answered, he spoke slowly, reasonably.
"To jettison it, we have to bring the ship to an absolute halt. That would give Vallenar all the time he needs to catch us. We'd be sunk before we came to rest."
"Then you've run out of answers?" she asked, her voice even lower.
He looked into her green eyes. They were clear, and steady, and quite beautiful. "There is no such thing as a problem without a solution," he said. "We just have to find it."
Britton paused. "Before we left the island, you asked me to trust you. I hope that I can. I would like to very much."
Glinn looked away, feeling an unexpected flush of emotion. For a moment, his eyes fell on the GPS screen, and the dotted green line marked Ice Limit that ran across it. Then he looked back into her eyes. "You can trust me on this, Captain. I will have a solution for you. I promise."
She nodded slowly. "I don't believe you're a man who breaks his promises. I hope I'm right. Mr. Glinn—Eli—there's only one thing I want out of life right now. And that's to see my daughter again."
Glinn began to answer. But what came out instead was a hiss of surprise. He took an involuntary step back. In a blinding flash of insight brought on by Britton's final sentence, he understood what was driving Vallenar.
He turned and, without a word, abruptly left the bridge.
68: Rolvaag
12:30 P.M.
LLOYD PACED restlessly across the long expanse of the bridge. The storm battered furiously against the windows, but he had averted his eyes from the tearing seas. In all his life, he had never seen anything so frightening. It barely resembled water anymore, looking more like mountains, green and gray and black, rising, falling, sweeping, crumbling apart in gigantic creamy avalanches. He could hardly see how their ship—any ship—could survive five seconds in such a sea. Yet the Rolvaag plowed on. It was difficult to walk, but he needed the distraction of the physical activity. Reaching the starboard wing door, he pivoted brusquely and resumed pacing. He had been at it for sixty minutes, ever since Glinn had vanished without a word.
His head ached from the sudden reversals of fortune, the abrupt shifts in mood, the unbearable tension of the last twelve hours. Exasperation, humiliation, triumph, apprehension. He glanced up at the bulkhead clock, then at the faces of the bridge officers. Howell, his face set. Britton, expressionless, monitoring alternately the radar screen and the GPS chart. Banks, framed inside the door of the radio room. Lloyd felt like shaking some kind of answers out of them. But they had already told him everything there was to know. They had about two hours before the Ramirez would start edging into range.
Lloyd felt his limbs stiffen against a current of rage. It was Glinn's fault. It was overweening arrogance: he had studied the options so long the man believed himself incapable of failure. Think long, think wrong, someone had once said. If he'd been allowed to call in some favors, they wouldn't be helpless, like a mouse waiting for the cat to close in for the kill.
The door to the bridge opened and Glinn stepped in. "Good afternoon, Captain," he said nonchalantly.
More than anything, this air of nonchalance sent fury coursing through Lloyd. "God damn you, Glinn," he said, "where the hell have you been?"
Glinn's eyes drifted toward him. "I've been examining Vallenar's files. I know now what's driving him."
"Who the hell cares? He's the one who's driving us, right towards Antarctica."
"Timmer was Vallenar's son."
Lloyd stopped short. "Timmer?" he asked, confused.
"Vallenar's signal officer. The man who was killed by the meteorite."
"That's absurd. Didn't I hear Timmer had blond hair and blue eyes?"
"He was Vallenar's son by a German mistress."
"Is this another guess, or do you have evidence?"
"There's no record of a son, but it's the only explanation. That's why he was so anxious to get Timmer back when I visited. And that's why he initially refrained from attacking our ship: I told him Timmer was in the brig. But as soon as we left the island, he realized Timmer was dead. I believe he thinks we murdered him. That's why he pursued us into international waters. That's why he'll never give up until he dies. Or until we do."
The spasm of fury had left. Lloyd felt drained, exhausted.
Anger at this point was useless. He controlled his voice. "And how, pray tell, is this psychological insight going to help us?"
Instead of answering, Glinn glanced back at Britton. "How far are we from the Ice Limit?"
"It's seventy-seven nautical miles south of our position."
"Can you see any ice on your radar?"
Britton turned. "Mr. Howell?"
"Some drift ice at ten miles. A few growlers. Just at the Limit, the long-range surface radar's picking up a massive ice island. Two ice islands, actually; it looks like one broke in half."
"Bearing?"
"One nine one."
Glinn spoke: "I would suggest heading that way. Make a very slow turn. If it takes Vallenar a while to notice the course change, we might gain a mile or two."
Howell looked questioningly at Britton.
"Mr. Glinn," said Britton, "it's suicide to take a huge ship like this past the Ice Limit. Especially in this weather."
"There are reasons," said Glinn.
"Care to share them with us?" Lloyd asked. "Or are you going to keep us in the dark again? Maybe we could've used some freelance decision making back there."
Glinn's gaze fell first on Lloyd, then Britton, then Howell.
"Fair enough," he said, after a moment. "We are reduced to two options: turn away and try to outrun the destroyer. Or keep to this course and try to lose the destroyer below the Ice Limit. The former has a close to one hundred percent probability of failure; the latter, somewhat less. This latter plan also has the advantage of forcing the destroyer through a beam sea."
"What is this Ice Limit?" Lloyd asked.
"It's where the freezing waters around Antarctica meet the warmer northern waters of the Atlantic and Pacific. Oceanographers call it the Antarctic Convergence. It's known for impenetrable fogs and, of course, extremely dangerous ice."
"You're proposing to take the Rolvaag into an area of ice and fog? It does sound like suicide."
"What we need now is concealment, time to lose the destroyer long enough to lay a course away from it. In the darkness, in the ice and fog, we might just escape."
"We might just sink, too."
"The p
robability of hitting an iceberg is lower than the probability of being sunk by the destroyer."
"What if there's no fog?" asked Howell.
"Then we have a problem."
There was a long silence. And then Britton spoke: "Mr. Howell. Set a new course for one nine zero. Bring her head around slowly."
There was the briefest of hesitations. Then Howell relayed the order to the helmsman in clipped tones. As he spoke, his eyes never left Glinn's.
69: Rolvaag
2:00 P.M.
MCFARLANE SLUMPED back in the uncomfortable plastic chair, sighing and rubbing his eyes. Rachel sat beside him, cracking peanut shells and letting the debris fall onto the metal deck of the observation unit. The only light came from a single monitor set high in the bulkhead above them.
"Don't you ever get tired of those damn peanuts?" McFarlane said.
Rachel seemed to consider this a moment. "Nope," she replied.
They lapsed into silence. Conscious of an incipient headache and low-grade nausea, McFarlane closed his eyes. The moment he did so, the roll of the ship seemed to increase dramatically. He heard the tick of metal, the occasional drip of water. Other than that, the holding tank that yawned beneath them was quiet.
McFarlane opened his eyes with an effort. "Run it again," he said.
"But we've already viewed it five times," Rachel said. When McFarlane did not reply, she gave a disgusted snort and leaned forward to punch the transport controls.
Of the three security viewcams in the holding tank, only one had survived the explosion. He watched as Rachel ran the tape forward at high speed, slowing to normal speed a minute before the detonation. They watched in silence as the seconds counted down. Nothing new. Garza was right: nobody had touched the rock. Nobody had even been close.
McFarlane leaned back again with a curse, glancing out of the observation unit and along the catwalk, as if searching for an answer on the walls of the tank. Then he let his eyes travel slowly down the forty-foot span to the top of the meteorite. The explosion had gone off sideways, killing most of the lights in the tank, damaging communications networks both fore and aft, but leaving the catwalk and observation unit at the top of the tank unharmed. The web looked largely intact, although it was clear that some struts had been knocked out. Molten steel had sprayed in foamy streaks across the walls of the tank, and some of the massive laminated oak timbers were charred. Flecks of blood and red matter could be seen here and there at points the scrub team had missed. The meteorite itself looked unchanged.
What's the secret here? he thought. What is it we're missing?
"Let's go over what we know," he said. "The explosion seems to have been just like the one that killed Timmer."
"Perhaps even stronger," Rachel said. "One hell of an electrical blast. If there hadn't been so much metal around to absorb the charge, it might have blown the ship's electronics."
"And afterwards, the meteorite threw off a lot of radio noise," he said. "Just like with Timmer."
Rachel picked up her radio, turned it on, made a face at the roar of static, turned it off again. "And it's still throwing it off," she said.
They lapsed into silence again.
"I wonder if anything triggered the blast," said Rachel, rewinding the tape. "Maybe it was random."
McFarlane didn't respond. It couldn't be random; something must have triggered it. And despite Garza's remark—and the increasing nervousness of the crew—he didn't believe the meteorite was some malignant thing, actively seeking to hurt them.
McFarlane wondered if perhaps Timmer and Masangkay had never touched the thing, after all. But no; he'd analyzed it too carefully. The key to the mystery had to be Palmer Lloyd. He had placed his cheek against the rock and lived to tell the story. The two others had been blown up.
What was different about their touches?
He sat up in the chair. "Let's watch it again."
Wordlessly, Rachel punched the controls, and the monitor flickered to life.
The surviving camera had been placed almost directly above the rock, just below the observation unit. There was Garza, standing to one side, the welding diagrams unrolled before him. The TIG welders were spaced evenly around the rock, working on various nodes. They were kneeling, their bright points of flame leaving red tracks on the screen. In the lower right corner, a time display ran rapidly through the seconds.
"Turn up the sound," McFarlane said. He closed his eyes; the headache and nausea were getting worse. Seasickness.
Garza's voice leapt into the small enclosure. "How's it going?" he shouted. There was an answering shout: "Almost there." Scratchy silence; the trickle of water; the pop of a torch flaring out. Room tone, then a flurry of creaks and groans as the vessel began to heel. He heard Garza's voice: "Hold tight!"
And then it ended in a hiss of white noise.
McFarlane opened his eyes. "Back ten seconds."
They watched as it ran through again.
"It went off at the very top of the roll," Rachel said.
"But Garza's right. That thing was manhandled all the way down to the shore." McFarlane paused. "Could there be another workman, hidden by the rock? Somebody we're not seeing?"
"I thought of that. Six welders came in, plus Garza. Look, you can see them all there in the last frame, clearly visible. All well back from the meteorite."
McFarlane dropped his chin to his hands. Something about the video was nagging at him, but he couldn't put his finger on it. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe he was just too damn tired.
Rachel stretched, swept peanut shells from her knees. "Here we are, trying to second-guess Garza," she said. "But what if everybody's right?"
McFarlane glanced at her. "I don't understand."
"What if nobody touched the meteorite? What if it was something else that touched the meteorite?"
"Something else?" he replied. "But there was nothing else moving in that room—" He stopped abruptly, realizing what had been troubling him: the sound of water.
"Give me the last sixty seconds," he said. "Quickly."
He lifted his head toward the screen, searching for the source of the sound he'd heard. There it was, very faintly: a thin stream at one side, falling from above, disappearing into the depths of the tank. He stared at it. As the ship began the heavy roll, the stream of water pulled away from the bulkhead and began angling closer to the meteorite.
"Water," McFarlane said aloud.
Rachel looked at him curiously.
"There was a stream of water coming down the side of the tank. There must be a leak in the mechanical door. Look, you can still see it." He pointed up at a narrow stream trickling down the far longitudinal bulkhead. "The meteorite went off when that roll brought the water in contact with it."
"That's absurd. The meteorite's been sitting in waterlogged ground for millions of years. It got rained and snowed on. It's inert. How could water possibly affect it?"
"I don't know, but take a look." He replayed the video, demonstrating how, at the instant the water connected with the meteorite, the screen popped into snow.
"Coincidence?" she asked.
McFarlane shook his head. "No."
Rachel looked at him. "Sam, how could this water be different from all the other water that's touched the meteorite?"
And then, in a moment of revelation, it became clear. "Salt," he said. "It's salt water dripping into the hold."
After a shocked moment, Rachel suddenly gasped.
"That's it," she said. "And that's why Timmer and Masangkay set it off with their hands—their sweaty hands. There was salt in their touch. But Lloyd put his cheek to it on a bitterly cold day. There was no sweat in his touch. It must be highly reactive to sodium chloride. But why, Sam? What's it reacting to?"
McFarlane looked at her, then beyond, to where the trickle of seawater still glistened in the gloom, swaying with the gradual motion of the ship.
The motion of the ship...
"We'll worry about that later," he said. He
reached for his radio, snapped it on, heard the hiss of static.
"God damn it!" he said, shoving the radio back in his belt.
"Sam—" Rachel began.
"We've got to get out of here," he interrupted. "Otherwise, when the next big roll comes, we're toast."
He stood up just as she gripped his arm.
"We can't leave," she said. "Another explosion like that might break the web. If the meteorite gets loose, we'll all die."
"Then we have to keep the water from the rock."
For a moment, the two stared at each other. And then, as with a single thought, they sprinted down the catwalk toward the access tunnel.
70: Almirante Ramirez
2:45 P.M.
VALLENAR STOOD at the bridge, looking southward over the heaving seas, an old pair of binoculars cradled in his hands. The officers around him were struggling to remain on their feet in the wildly rolling ship, their faces frozen masks of neutrality. They were terrified. But now his regime of absolute discipline was paying off: the test had come, and those who remained were with him. They would follow him to hell, if necessary—and that, he thought as he glanced at the chart, was exactly where they were heading.
The snow and sleet had stopped, and the sky was clearing. Visibility was excellent. But the wind had, if anything, picked up, and the seas were mounting ever higher. When the ship sank into the bottom of the troughs, it became enshrouded in a midnight darkness, and the walls of black water rising on either side made him feel as if the ship were at the bottom of a vast canyon. At the bottom of these troughs, the wave crests were an astonishing twenty meters above the level of the bridge. He had never seen a sea like this in his life, and the increase in visibility, while useful to his plan, made it appear all the more dreadful. The normal procedure would be to head into the wind and ride it out. That was not an option. He had to keep a heading that put the wind and sea almost on his beam; otherwise, the heavier American ship would escape.
He watched as the bow of his destroyer plowed into the sea at the bottom of the long trough and came up slowly, the castillo thunderously shedding water; the ship leaned to starboard until the bridge was hanging over the open ocean, wracked with foam. Everyone grabbed a handhold. The bridge hung for frightening seconds, then slowly righted itself, the momentum dipping it to port. It was an especially ugly roll.
The Ice Limit Page 35