Ice Hunt Page 12

  She stood, surrounded by ice, but the back half of the chamber was solid rock. A bowl of stone encompassed the far wall and overhung the ceiling.

  Something touched her elbow, startling her. It was only Dr. Ogden. He drew her eyes back to him, his lips moving.

  “It’s the remnant of an ancient cliff face. At least according to MacFerran,” Henry said, naming the head of the geology team. “He says it must have broken from the landmass as the glacier calved and formed this ice island. It dates back to the last ice age. He immediately wanted to blast away sections and core out samples, but I had to stop him.”

  Amanda was still too stunned to speak.

  “On just cursory examination, I found dead lichen and frozen mosses. Searching the cliff pockets more thoroughly, I discovered three bird’s nests, one with eggs!” He began to speak more rapidly with his excitement. Amanda had to concentrate on his lips. “There were also a pack of rodents and a snake trapped in ice. It’s a treasure trove of life from that age, a whole frozen biosphere.” He led the way across the cavern toward the stone wall. “But that’s not all! Come see!”

  She followed, staring ahead. The wall was not as solid as it had first appeared. It was pocked with cubbies and alcoves. Some sections seemed broken and half tumbled out. Deep clefts also delved into the rock face, but they were too dark to discern how far they penetrated.

  Amanda crossed under the arch of stone and eyed with trepidation the slabs precariously balanced overhead. None of it seemed as solid as it had been a moment ago.

  Dr. Ogden grabbed her elbow, squeezing hard, stopping her. “Careful,” he said, drawing her eye, then pointing to the floor.

  A few steps ahead lay an open well in the ice-rink floor. It was too perfectly oval to be natural, and the edges were scored coarsely.

  “They dug one of them out from here.”

  Amanda frowned. “One of what?” She spotted other pits in the ice now.

  Henry tugged her to the side. “Over here.” He slipped a canteen of water from his belt. He motioned her down on a knee on the ice. They were now only a few yards from the shattered stone cliff. Hunched down, it was almost like they were on a frozen lake with the shore only a few steps away.

  The biologist whisked the ice with his gloved hand. Then placed his flashlight facedown onto the frozen lake. Lit from on top, the section of ice under them glowed. But details were murky because of the frost on the ice’s surface. Still, Amanda could make out the dark shadow of something a few feet under the ice.

  Henry sat back and opened his canteen. “Watch,” he mouthed to her.

  Leaning over, he poured a wash of water over the surface, melting the frost rime and turning the ice to glass under them. The light shone clearly, limning what lay below in perfect detail.

  Amanda gasped, leaning away.

  The creature looked as if it were lunging up through the ice at her, caught for a moment in a camera’s flash. Its body was pale white and smooth-skinned, like the beluga whales that frequented the Arctic, and almost their same size, half a ton at least. But unlike the beluga, this creature bore short forelimbs that ended in raking claws and large webbed hind limbs, spread now, ready to sweep upward at her. Its body also seemed more supple than a whale’s, with a longer torso, curving like an otter. It looked built for speed.

  But it was the elongated maw, stretched wide to strike, lined by daggered teeth, that chilled her to the bone. It gaped wide enough to swallow a whole pig. Its black eyes were half rolled to white, like a great white lunging after prey.

  Amanda sat back and took a few puffs from her air warmer as her limbs tremored from the cold and shock. “What the hell is it?”

  The biologist ignored her question. “There are more specimens!” He slid on his knees across the ice and revealed another of the creatures lurking just at the cliff face. This beast was curled in the ice as if in slumber, its body wrapped in a tight spiral, jaws tucked in the center, tail around the whole, not unlike a dog in slumber.

  Henry quickly gained his feet. “That’s not all.”

  Before she could ask a question, he crossed and entered a wide cleft in the rock face. Amanda followed, chasing after the light, still picturing the jaws of the monster, wide and hungry.

  The cleft cut a few yards into the rock face and ended at a cave the size of a two-car garage.

  Amanda straightened. Positioned against the back wall were six giant ice blocks. Inside each were frozen examples of the creatures, all curled in the fetal-like position. But it was the sight in the chamber’s center that had Amanda falling back toward the exit.

  Like a frog in a biology lab, one of the creatures lay stretched across the ice floor, legs staked spread-eagle. Its torso was cut from throat to pelvis, skin splayed back and pinned to the ice. From the frozen state of the dissection, it was clearly an old project. But she caught only a glimpse of bone and organs and had to turn away.

  She hurried back out onto the open frozen lake. Dr. Ogden followed. He seemed oblivious to her shock. He touched her arm to draw her eyes.

  “A discovery of this magnitude will change the face of biology,” Henry said, bending close to her in his insistence. “Now you can see why I had to stop the geologists from ruining this preserved ecosystem. A find like this…preserved like this—”

  Amanda cut him off. Her voice brittle. “What the hell are those things?”

  Henry blinked at her and waved a hand. “Oh, of course. You’re an engineer.”

  Though she was deaf, she could almost hear his condescension. She rankled a bit, but held her tongue.

  He motioned back to the cleft and spoke more slowly. “I studied the specimen back there all day. I have a background in paleobiology. Fossilized remains of such a species have been discovered in Pakistan and in China, but never such a preserved specimen.”

  “A specimen of what, Henry?” Her eyes were hard on the biologist.

  “Of Ambulocetus natans. What is commonly called ‘the walking whale.’ It is the evolutionary link between land-dwelling mammals and the modern whale.”

  She simply gaped at him as he continued.

  “It is estimated to have existed some forty-nine million years ago, then died out some thirty-six million years ago. But the splayed out legs, the pelvis fused into the backbone, the nasal drift…all clearly mark this as distinctly Ambulocetus.”

  Amanda shook her head. “You can’t be claiming that these specimens are so old. Forty million years?”

  “No.” His eyes widened. “That’s just it! MacFerran says the ice at this level is only fifty thousand years old, dating back to the last ice age. And these specimens bear some unique features. My initial supposition is that some pod of Ambulocetus whales must have migrated to the Arctic regions, like modern whales do today. Once here, they developed Arctic adaptations. The white skin, the gigantism, the thicker layer of fat. Similar to the polar bear or beluga whales.”

  Amanda remembered her own earlier comparison to the beluga. “And these creatures somehow survived up here until the last ice age? Without any evidence ever being discovered?”

  “Is it really so surprising? Anything that lived and died on the polar ice cap would have simply sunk to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, a region barely glimpsed at all. And on land, permafrost makes it nearly impossible to carry out digs above the Arctic Circle. So it is entirely possible for something to have existed for eons, then died out without leaving a trace. Even today we have barely any paleological record of this region.”

  Amanda shook her head, but she could not dismiss what she had seen. And she couldn’t discount his argument. Only in the past decade, with the advent of modern technology and tools, was the Arctic region truly being explored. Her own team back at Omega was defining a new species every week. So far, the discoveries were just new, unclassified phytoplankton or algae, nothing on the level of these creatures.

  Henry continued, “The Russians must have discovered these creatures when they dug out their base. Or maybe t
hey built the base here because of them. Who knows?”

  Amanda remembered Henry’s early claim: It’s the reason the station was built here. “What makes you think that?” She flashed back again to the discovery on Level Four. This new discovery, amazing as it was, seemed in no way connected to the other.

  Henry eyed her. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  Amanda scrunched her brow.

  “Ambulocetus fossils were only discovered in the past few years.” He pointed back to the cleft. “Back in World War Two, they knew nothing about them. So, of course, the Russians would come up with their own name for such a monster.”

  Her eyes grew wide.

  “They named their base after the creature,” Dr. Ogden explained needlessly. “A mascot of sorts, I imagine.”

  Amanda stared down at the frozen lake, at the beast lunging up at her. She now knew what she was truly seeing. The monster of Nordic legend.

  Grendel.

  Act Two

  Fire and Ice

  5

  Slippery Slope

  APRIL 8, 9:55 P.M.

  AIRBORNE OVER NORTH SLOPE, ALASKA

  Matt slumped in his seat. Snoring echoed throughout the cabin of the Twin Otter. It came not from the sleeping reporter nor from Jenny’s dozing father, but from the wolf sprawled on his back across the third row of seats. A particularly loud snort raised a ghost of a smile on Matt’s face.

  Jenny spoke from beside him. “I thought you were going to get his deviated septum fixed.”

  The ghost became a true smile. Bane had snored since he was a pup curled on the foot of their bed. It had been a source of amusement to both of them. Matt sat straighter. “The plastic surgeon out of Nome said it would require too extensive a nasal job. Too much trimming. He would end up looking like a bulldog.”

  Jenny didn’t respond, so Matt risked a glance her way. She stared straight out, but he noted the small crinkles at the corners of her eyes. Sad amusement.

  Crossing his arms, Matt wondered if that was the best he could manage with her. For the moment, it was enough.

  He gazed out the window. The moon was near to full, casting a silvery brilliance across the snowy plains. This far north, winter still gripped the land, but some signs of the spring thaw were visible: a trickle of misty stream, a sprinkling of meltwater lakes. A few caribou herds speckled the tundra, moving slowly through the night, following the snowmelt waterways, feeding on reindeer moss, sprigs of lingonberry, and munching through muskeg, the ubiquitous tussocks of balled-up grass, each the size of a ripe pumpkin, rooted in the thawing muck.

  “We were lucky to have radioed Deadhorse when we did,” Jenny mumbled beside him, drawing his eye.

  “What do you mean?”

  After clearing Arrigetch, they had managed to raise the airstrip at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s North Slope. They had alerted civil and military authorities to their chase through the Brooks Range. Helicopters would be dispatched in the morning to search for the debris of the Cessna. They should have answers on their pursuers shortly after that. Matt had also been able to reach Carol Jeffries, the bear researcher over in Bettles. She knew Jenny’s cabin and would send some folks to take care of the animals left behind. Craig had also relayed word to his own contact at Prudhoe. Once questioned and debriefed, the reporter would have one hell of a tale to tell. After making contact, and with the story of their ordeal now passed to the outside world, they had all relaxed.

  But now what was wrong? Matt pulled himself up in his seat.

  Jenny pointed out the Otter’s windshield—not to the tundra below, but to the clear skies.

  Matt leaned forward. At first, he saw nothing unusual. The constellation Orion hung brightly. Polaris, the North Star, lay directly ahead. Then he spotted the shimmering bands and streamers rising from the horizon, flickers of greens, reds, and blues. The borealis was rising.

  “According to the forecast,” Jenny said, “we’re due for a brilliant display.”

  Matt leaned back, watching the spectacle spread in colored fans and dancing flames across the night sky. Such a natural show went by many names: the aurora borealis, the northern lights. Among the native Athapascan Indians, it was called koyukon or yoyakkyh, while the Inuit simply named them spirit lights.

  As he watched, the wave of colors flowed over the arch of the sky, shimmering in a luminous corona and rolling in clouds of azures and deep crimsons.

  “We won’t be able to reach anyone for a while,” Jenny said.

  Matt nodded. Such a dazzling display, created as solar winds struck the upper atmosphere of the earth, would frazzle most communications. But they didn’t have very far to go. Another half hour at most. Already the northern horizon had begun to brighten with the lights of the oil fields and distant Prudhoe Bay.

  They flew in silence for several minutes more, simply enjoying the light show in the sky, accompanied by Bane’s snoring in the back. For these few moments, it felt like home. Maybe it was simply the aftereffects of their harrowing day, an endorphin-induced sense of ease and comfort. But Matt feared wounding it with speech.

  It was Jenny who finally broke the silence. “Matt…” The timbre of her voice was soft.

  “Don’t,” he said. It had taken them three years and today’s life-and-death struggle to bring them into one space together. He did not want to threaten this small start.

  Jenny sighed. He did not fail to note her tone of exasperation.

  Her fingers tightened on the wheel, moving with a squeak of leather on vinyl. “Never mind,” she whispered.

  The moment’s peace was gone—and it had not even taken words. Tension filled the cabin, raising a wall between them. The remainder of the journey was made in total silence, strained now, bitter.

  The first few oil derricks came into view, decorated in lights like a Christmas tree. Off to the left, a jagged silver line marred the perfect tundra, rising and falling over the landscape like a giant metal snake. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline. It ran from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s north coast to Valdez on Prince William Sound, a river of black gold.

  They were closing in on their destination. The pipeline led the way. Jenny followed it now, paralleling its run. She tried the radio, attempting to reach the airport tower at Deadhorse. Her frown was answer enough. The skies still danced and flashed.

  She banked in a slow arc. Ahead, the township of Prudhoe Bay—if you could call it a town—glowed in the night like some oilman’s Oz. It was mostly a company town, built for the sole purpose of oil production, transportation, and supporting services. Its average population was under a hundred, but the number of transient oil workers caused this number to vary, depending on the workload. There was also a small military presence here, protecting the heart of the entire North Slope oil production.

  Beyond the town’s border stretched the Beaufort Sea and the Arctic Ocean, but it was hard to tell where land ended and ocean began. Spreading from the shore were vast rafts of fast ice extending for miles into the ocean, fusing eventually with the pack ice of the polar cap. As summer warmed the region, the cap would shrink by half, retreating from shorelines, but for now, the world was solid ice.

  Jenny headed out toward the sea, circling Prudhoe Bay and positioning herself for landing at the single airstrip. “Something’s going on down there,” she said, tipping up on one wing.

  Matt spotted it, too: a flurry of activity at the edge of town. A score of vehicles were racing across the snowy fields from the military installation, hurrying out of town in their general direction. He glanced to the other side of their plane.

  Below lay the end of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. The giant buildings of Gathering Station 1 and Pump Station 1 were lit up behind Cyclone fencing. Here the North Slope oil was cooled, water removed, gas bled off, and the oil began its six-day, eight-hundred-mile journey to the tankers on Prince William Sound.

  As they crossed near Pump Station 1, Matt noted a section of the Cyclone fencing had been knocked down. He glanced back to the racing militar
y vehicles. Foreboding lanced through him.

  “Get us out of here!” Matt snapped.

  “What—?”

  The explosion ripped away any further words. The building that housed Gathering Station 1 burst apart in a fiery blast. A ball of flame rolled skyward. The sudden hot thermals and blast wave threw their plane up on end. Jenny fought the controls, struggling to keep them from flipping completely over.

  Yells arose from the backseats, accompanied by Bane’s barking.

  Swearing under her breath, Jenny rolled the Otter away from the conflagration. Flaming debris rained down around them, crashing into the snowy fields, into buildings. New fires erupted. Pump Station 1 blew its roof off next, adding a second ball of rolling flame. The four-foot-diameter pipe that led into the building tore itself apart, blasting up along its length. Burning oil jetted in all directions. It didn’t stop until it reached the first of the sixty-two gate valves, halting the destruction from escalating up the pipeline.

  In a matter of seconds, the wintry calm of the slumbering township became a fiery hell. Rivers of flame flowed toward the sea, steaming and writhing. Buildings burned. Smaller, secondary explosions burst from gas mains and holding tanks. People and vehicles raced in all directions.

  “Jesus Christ!” Craig exclaimed behind them, his face pressed to the glass.

  A new voice crackled from the radio, full of static, coming from the general channel. “Clear all airspace immediately! Any attempt to land will be met with deadly force.”

  “They’re locking the place down!” Jenny exclaimed, and banked away from the fires. She headed out over the frozen sea.

  Her father stared back to the coast. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Matt mumbled, watching the coastline burn. “Accident, sabotage…whatever it was it seemed timed to our arrival.”