Ice Hunt Page 46

  Matt snatched the ladder and climbed the rest of the way up. “Damn bastard!”

  Kowalski was already rolling into the hatch. “What?”

  Matt glanced back to the waters below. He had recognized the grendel who had just attacked him. He had noted the pocked and macerated bullet holes. It was the same creature that had hunted Amanda and him in the Crawl Space, the one that had stolen his pants.

  “Now the greedy bastard’s got my goddamn boot, too!”

  Kowalski shook his head and dropped down the hatch.

  Following him, Matt twisted to climb down the ladder when bullets ricocheted off the plate near his head. He ducked lower, crab-crawling down into the hatch.

  He looked back to the docking-bay doorway, spotting Craig. A rifle was leveled at Matt. Between them swam a small pod of grendels.

  There was no trace of the admiral’s body.

  How much time until—

  The answer came a moment later. The grendels suddenly went crazy. The waters churned as the monsters thrashed, rolling, leaping, snapping at the air.

  Matt understood what had upset the beasts, driving them to a frenzy. He felt it, too. From his head to his toes. A vibration through the station, like a tuning fork struck by a sledgehammer.

  A sonic pulse.

  Matt knew what it meant.

  Polaris had activated.

  Just as the admiral had described, the device would generate a sonic pulse. And according to Petkov, the pulse would last sixty seconds, then the nuclear trigger would blow, destroying the island and concussing out in a deadly shock wave.

  Across the churning lake, Craig had backed a step away, his rifle still in his hands, his head cocked, listening.

  Matt pushed up higher. “One minute!” he called over to Craig, tapping his empty wrist, repeating Petkov’s earlier warning.

  Craig’s gun dropped as the realization stuck him.

  The admiral was dead…the sonic pulse…

  Time had just run out for all of them.

  Satisfied by Craig’s look of horror, Matt dropped through the hatch, clanging it shut behind him. He dogged it tight and climbed down to the others.

  Kowalski sealed the inner hatch, locking it tight. Tom and Washburn held flashlights. No one spoke. Bane sensed the tension, whining at the back of his throat.

  There was no stopping Polaris now.

  9:17 P.M.

  USS POLAR SENTINEL

  “We have less than a minute?” Perry asked, incredulous.

  Scratchy static came over the phone as he listened. “Yes,” the man confirmed. “…can’t say…only seconds left!”

  Perry glanced over to Amanda. She had read his lips, saw his expression. She mirrored his reaction. The race was over before it began. They were defeated.

  “…nuclear trigger…” the man continued. “Get clear…”

  Before Perry could answer, Amanda’s fingers dug into his arm. Her voice slurred at her sudden anxiety. “Get us deep! Now!”

  “What?” he asked.

  But she was already running. “As deep as the boat will go!” she yelled back at him.

  Perry responded, trusting the woman’s urgency. “Emergency dive!” he yelled to the crew. “Flood negative! Now!

  Klaxons rang throughout the sub.

  9:17 P.M.

  ICE STATION GRENDEL

  Craig pounded down the hall of Level Four. He knew his destination, but did he have time? There was no telling. He patted his parka’s pocket, hearing a satisfying clink.

  He ran past one of the Delta Force team members. The sergeant major called to him as he fled past. “Sir…?”

  He didn’t slow, running headlong around the curving hall. His goal came in sight. He needed a secure place to hide, somewhere to ride out the blast wave, someplace waterproof. He knew only one sure place.

  The door to the solitary tank was still open, empty of its recent occupant, the Inuit boy. Craig dove inside. He twisted around and yanked the glass door closed. Still powered on the generators, it automatically locked down and was sealed, closing him in.

  But was it secure enough? He touched the glass. It vibrated from the sonic pulse of Polaris.

  Craig sank to the bottom of the cylinder, bracing himself.

  How much time was left?

  9:17 P.M.

  RUSSIAN I-SERIES SUB

  Matt lay with Jenny. In each other’s arms, the pair was nestled between two mattresses, crammed and sandwiched in one of the bunks. The others were similarly padded, limited two to a bunk. Washburn watched over Maki. Even Bane had been penned in a padded cell of mattresses.

  After boarding the sub, there had been no time for niceties or plans. They had all fled to the sub’s berths and found ways to secure themselves from the coming explosion.

  And now the waiting.

  Matt buried himself into Jenny. The admiral must have survived longer than he’d guessed. Or perhaps the lag time on the device was a bit longer than one minute.

  He clutched Jenny, and she him. Hands sought each other, moving from memory, reflexively. His mouth found hers. Soft lips parted under him. They murmured to each other, no words, merely a way to share their breath, reaching out to each other in all ways, a promise unspoken but heartfelt.

  He wanted more time with her.

  But time had run out.

  9:17 P.M.

  OUT ON THE ICE…

  Under the twilight sky, Command Sergeant Major Edwin Wilson, currently designated Delta One, stood on the ice. The Sikorsky Seahawk rested five paces behind him. Its rotors slowly spun, engines kept hot, ready for immediate action. As ordered, he had retreated thirty miles from the submerged ice island. With the discovery of the bomb at the station, it was up to him to protect the stolen journals. He was only to return if an all clear was dispatched by the mission’s operational controller.

  Until then, he waited. No further updates had been transmitted.

  Under his feet, the ice had begun to vibrate. At first he thought it was his imagination, but now he was not so certain. The trembling persisted.

  What was happening?

  He faced northeast, staring through high-powered binoculars, equipped with night vision. The terrain was so flat and featureless that he was able to make out the tall line of pressure ridges near the horizon.

  Nothing. No answers there.

  He checked his watch. According to the timetable of the original report, there were only a few more minutes to spare.

  Frowning, he lifted the binoculars again.

  Just as he raised them to his face, the world ignited to the north. The flash of green through the scopes whited out the view, blinding him. Stumbling back, he let the scopes drop around his neck.

  He blinked away the glare and stared to the north. Something was wrong with the horizon. It was no longer a smooth arc. It now bowed up, rising like a wave.

  He snatched the binoculars and stared again. A deep green glow marked the center of the cresting wave, like a signal buoy riding a wave.

  Then it was gone.

  A roar like the end of the world rumbled over the ice.

  He continued to stare. The bomb had clearly gone off, but what was happening? He couldn’t understand what he was seeing through the scopes.

  Then it hit him. He suddenly understood why the glow at the center of the explosion had vanished. It was blocked from his view—by a wall of ice rolling toward him, as wide as the horizon.

  As he stared, the cresting wave spread out from ground zero, like a boulder dropped into a still lake.

  A tidal wave of ice.

  His heart leaped to his throat as he ran for the idling helicopter. “Go!” he screamed as the world continued to rumble ominously. Instead of the explosion fading and echoing away, it was growing louder.

  He fled to the Seahawk’s door.

  One of his men pushed the door open. “What’s happening?”

  Wilson dove in. “Get this bird in the air! Now!”

  The pilot heard
him. The rotors immediately began to kick up, spinning faster, rotating toward lift off.

  Wilson dove to the copilot’s seat.

  The blast wave of ice raced toward them.

  He stared upward, praying. Overhead, the rotors spun to a blur. The Seahawk lifted from its skids, bobbling a bit as the rotors dug at the frigid air, trying to find purchase.

  “C’mon!” Wilson urged.

  He stared as the horizon closed in on them.

  Then the bird took to the air, shooting straight up.

  Wilson judged the distance of the surging ice-tsunami. Was its speed slowing? Fading?

  It seemed to be.

  It was!

  They were going to make it.

  Then a half mile away, something blew under the ice. The entire cap slammed up at them, striking the skids of the helicopter. It tilted savagely.

  Wilson screamed.

  The amplified wave struck the helicopter, swatting it out of the sky.

  9:18 P.M.

  USS POLAR SENTINEL

  Amanda stared at the screen of the DeepEye. A moment ago, the monitor’s resolution had fogged from a deep sonar pulse, wiping out detail. Then worse—the screen went suddenly blue.

  Only one effect registered that hue on a sonar device.

  A nuclear explosion.

  John Aratuk stood beside her. The elderly Inuit maintained his vigil in the Cyclops room. He stared up through the dome of Lexan glass. The seas lay dark around them. They were nearly at crush depth. Here the world was eternally sunless.

  John pointed.

  A star bloomed in the darkness. Off to the south, high above.

  Ground zero.

  The old man turned to Amanda. He didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. His grief was plain in every line of his face. He had aged decades in a single moment.

  Amanda spoke. “I’m so sorry.”

  He closed his eyes and turned away, inconsolable.

  Amanda turned back to the DeepEye. The man’s daughter, all the others, they had sacrificed everything in an attempt to save the world.

  But had they wasted their lives?

  The Polaris trigger had blown. That was plain on the DeepEye monitor. But what of Amanda’s attempt to block the two amplifiers?

  She stared at the blued-out screen. Her idea had been a simple one, employed rapidly. She had ordered the Polar Sentinel to dive deep. She needed distance from the surface.

  As the submarine had plummeted into the Arctic depths, she had rapidly punched in the coordinates and aligned the DeepEye toward the locations of the two nearest amplifiers in the array. Once it was deep enough, she had pointed the DeepEye and widened the breadth of the sonar cone to encompass both devices, needing the distance and depth to accomplish this. Then she had turned the full strength of the DeepEye upon the pair of amplifiers and prayed.

  For Polaris to work, the array had to propagate a perfect harmonic wave, just the right frequency to generate an ice-shattering effect. But if the DeepEye was transmitting across the wave front, it could alter the harmonics just enough to disrupt and perhaps jangle the wave front from igniting the two amplifiers within the DeepEye’s cone.

  Amanda stared over at the monitor, waiting for it to clear.

  Had her plan worked?

  9:18 P.M.

  RUSSIAN I-SERIES SUB

  Burrowed between two mattresses, Jenny clung to Matt. The world cartwheeled around them both, not smoothly, but jarringly, like a paint shaker. Even with the cushioning, she felt battered and bruised. Her head rang from the concussion of the explosion.

  But she was still alive.

  They both were.

  Matt hugged her tight, his legs and arms wrapped around her. “We’re heading down,” he yelled in her ears.

  She also felt the increasing pressure.

  After a long minute, the world slowed its spin, settling out into a crooked angle.

  “I think we’ve stabilized.” Matt slid an arm from her and peeled away one edge of the mattress to peek out.

  Jenny joined him.

  In a berth across from them, Kowalski had already poked his head out. He waved a field flashlight up and down the crew quarters. The floor was tilted down and canted to the side, still rolling slightly. “Is everyone okay?” he called out.

  Like butterflies leaving cocoons, the rest of the party emerged. Muffled barking confirmed Bane’s status.

  Magdalene cried from farther back. “Zane…he fell out…!”

  Zane answered faintly from the other direction, “No, I’m okay. Broke my wrist.”

  Everyone slowly crawled free, checking their own limbs. Washburn carried Maki. She sang softly to the child, soothing him.

  Tom worked his way up the narrow passage between the stacked bunks. His eyes were on the walls and ceilings. Jenny knew why. She heard the creak of seams, the pop of strained joints. “We’re deep,” he muttered. “The explosion must have thrust us straight down.”

  “But at least we survived the explosion,” Ogden said.

  “It was the ice around the sub,” Tom said dully. “It shielded us. The hollow sea cave was a structural weak point of the station. It simply shattered away, carrying us with it.”

  “Are we going to sink to the bottom?” Magdalene asked.

  “We’ve positive buoyancy,” Tom answered. “We should eventually surface like a cork. But…”

  “But what?” Zane asked, cradling his arm.

  All of the Navy crew stared at the walls as they continued to groan and scrape. Kowalski answered, “Pray we don’t reach crush depth first.”

  9:20 P.M.

  UNDER THE ICE…

  With a start, Craig woke in darkness, upside down. He tasted blood on his tongue, his head ached, and his shoulder flared with a white-hot fire. Broken clavicle. But none of this stimulation woke him.

  It was the spray of cold water in his face.

  In the darkness, it took him a moment to orient himself. As he righted himself, his hands reached out to glass walls. He felt the source of the jetting spray. A crack in the tank’s glass door. The water was ice-cold.

  His eyes strained for any sign of where he was. But the world remained as dark as oil. Water rose under him, filling the tank. He could hear the bubble of escaping air. The tank was no longer intact. He had survived the shockwave of the bomb, but he was deep underwater.

  And still falling.

  The spray grew fiercer as the depth grew deeper.

  Ice water soaked through him, thigh-high now. His teeth chattered, half from cold, half from shock, but mostly from growing panic.

  He secretly feared being buried alive. He had heard tales of agents being eliminated in such a manner.

  This was worse.

  The cold rose through him faster than the water. Which would kill him first, he wondered, hypothermia or drowning?

  After a full minute, the answer came.

  The loud bubbling stopped, and the spray of water slowed to a trickle, then stopped. He had reached some equilibrium point. The pocket of air was holding the water back…at least for now.

  But he was far from safe. The small pocket would quickly stale, and even before that, the cold would kill him.

  Or maybe not.

  Fingers scrambled into the pocket of his parka. The clink of glass sounded. His fingertips touched broken glass, cutting. Still, he searched and found what he sought. He pulled out one of the glass syringes, unbroken. He had taken two samples from the ice lab, insurance at the time.

  Now it was survival.

  He thumbed off the needle cap.

  There was no way he could find a vein in the dark.

  With both hands, he stabbed the long point into the flesh of his belly. The pain was exquisite. He shoved the plunger, pushing the elixir into his peritoneal cavity. From there, it should slowly absorb into his bloodstream.

  Once emptied, he pulled the syringe free and dropped it into the icy pool at his waist. His teeth chattered uncontrollably, his limbs soon followe
d.

  A fear rose through his panic.

  Would the cryogenic elixir absorb fast enough?

  Only time would tell.

  9:21 P.M.

  RUSSIAN I-SERIES SUB

  Holding his breath, Matt stood with the others. The old sub groaned and popped. Kowalski swung his flashlight up and down the passage. Distantly a soft hiss of water whispered in the boat. A leak. The darkness pressed down upon them.

  Jenny held his hand, fingers tight, palms damp.

  Then Matt felt the shift under his legs, a slight rolling of his stomach. He turned to Kowalski and Tom, trusting the Navy men’s senses more than his own.

  Tom confirmed his hope. “We’re rising.”

  Jenny’s fingers squeezed his. They were heading back up.

  Murmurs of relief echoed among the others.

  But Kowalski’s face remained tight. Tom did not look any more relieved.

  “What’s wrong?” Matt asked.

  “There’s no way to alter our buoyancy,” Tom answered.

  Kowalski nodded. “It’s an uncontrolled ascent. We’re going to keep climbing faster and faster.”

  Matt understood, remembering Tom’s earlier analogy. The sub was like a cork shoved deep into the water. It was now back on its way up, gaining speed, propelled by its own buoyancy. Matt’s gaze drifted up, picturing what would happen.

  Once they reached the surface, the speed of their ascent would be deadly. They’d strike the underside of the polar ice cap like a train wreck.

  “Back into the mattresses?” Matt asked.

  “That won’t do much good,” Kowalski said. “It’ll be pancake city once we hit the surface.”

  Still they had no other recourse. The party fled back to the padding and security of the mattresses. Matt pushed in next to Jenny. He sensed their rate of ascent accelerating. He felt it in his ears, a popping sensation. The incline of the sub grew steeper as it rose.

  Jenny sought him with her hands. He curled into her, not knowing if this would be his last chance to do so. His hands reached to her cheeks. They were damp.

  “Jen…”

  She shook in his arms.

  “I love you,” he whispered. “I always have. I never stopped.”