Ice Hunt

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 Je

He clutched Je

He wanted more time with her.

But time had run out.

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, spi

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.

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?

Burrowed between two mattresses, Je

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.

Je

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.”