Fast Ice Read online

  “They hit something,” Kurt said.

  “Ten will get you twenty that iceberg is the cause of the list,” Joe added.

  Kurt wasn’t so sure. “We’re about to find out,” he said. “Ready?”

  As Joe nodded in the affirmative, Kurt slid the helicopter’s door back, allowing a whirlwind of frigid air to sweep into the cabin. With the door locked in place, Kurt and Joe tossed out a pair of weighted ropes that were attached to anchors in the ceiling of the cabin. They eased backward toward the open door, gripping the ropes tight and leaning outward until they achieved a near-sitting position with their feet planted firmly at the edge of the doorway and their weight supported by the ropes.

  After a brief glance behind them, both men pushed out and dropped toward the ship. They slid down the ropes, descending a hundred feet in a matter of seconds, much faster than it would be coming down using the winch. They slowed their descent at the last instant, hitting the deck under complete control.

  Kurt felt his studded footwear dig in and hold tight. The frost was thicker than he’d expected, an inch of solid ice in some places.

  He and Joe detached themselves from the lines, motioning to the crewman in the back of the helicopter to haul the ropes in.

  “We’re down and clear,” Kurt said into the microphone attached to his headset. “What’s your fuel situation?”

  The pilot’s response carried the whine of the engines with it, sounding as if it was electronically altered. “Ten minutes before we have to head back to the Providence.”

  “No point hanging around,” Kurt said. “Head back now, refuel and stand by. We’ll radio the ship if we need help.”

  “You’re putting a lot of faith in this frozen rust bucket,” Joe said.

  Kurt looked around. “The sea is calm, the wind is nonexistent and this ship has been drifting for weeks. No reason it should suddenly go down now.”

  “Unless we’re the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” Joe pointed out.

  Kurt had to laugh. “So glad you’re an optimist. Let’s get moving and see what we can find.”

  7

  As the Jayhawk vanished to the north, the frozen deck of the Grishka grew deathly quiet. Kurt looked around. Every surface, every piece of machinery, every flat section or protrusion from the deck was covered in frost and ice.

  “How many ships have you salvaged in your day?” Joe asked.

  “Lost count years ago,” Kurt said.

  “Ever see one like this?”

  Kurt shook his head. As a salvage expert since his days in the Navy, Kurt had spent countless hours on stranded, drifting or sinking vessels. He’d fought fires on burning ships, shored up ruptured hull plating and had even run a vessel aground that could be stopped from sinking no other way. He’d investigated and refloated dozens of ships of every imaginable type. Each ship had a personality, each wreck its own story.

  A priceless yacht driven aground by an intoxicated owner smacked of arrogance. An overworked ferry, glued together by corrosion and the endless ingenuity of its crew, reminded him of a loyal dog that finally grew too tired to run with its master.

  He saw the Grishka as an apparition trapped between worlds. The gray ship had been made over in white. Strangely twisted icicles hung from every wire and overhang of the superstructure. It was a ghost, but one not quite ready to pass over to the other side.

  “Never seen curved icicles before,” Joe said.

  “They started off straight,” Kurt pointed out, “curving as the list grew worse. It means the ship took on water very slowly.”

  “We need to be careful,” Joe said. “With that much ice on the superstructure, it’s going to be top-heavy.”

  Kurt understood. Ice-covered ships could capsize suddenly even when otherwise seaworthy. “If she weren’t sitting so low in the water, I think she’d have rolled over already. The flooded compartments must be acting as ballast.”

  “Probably,” Joe said. “And that iceberg she’s attached herself to might be acting like a float. If that thing breaks free, we could be upside down in the blink of an eye.”

  A brief swirl of wind came up, causing the ship to creak and groan. A sound like breaking glass came from somewhere amidships as several dagger-shaped icicles broke loose and crashed to the deck.

  “We should be careful when we walk under these things,” Joe said.

  “Or over things,” Kurt said. He’d stopped at what appeared to be a mound of snow. Closer inspection revealed a body frozen to the deck. Frost and ice had covered the man’s features. Brushing away revealed the gray skin of his face and a circular swath of red staining the jacket he wore.

  “Blood,” Joe said. “The bright color suggests it froze before it coagulated.”

  “He’s been shot in the back,” Kurt said grimly. “I wasn’t expecting survivors, but this is a bad sign. Let’s make our way inside.”

  They moved across the deck, pausing beside the Grishka’s helicopter.

  The craft had frost on the windshield and some ice on its sheet metal, but the rotor blades and engine compartment were protected by weatherproof covers and those covers were clean and ice-free.

  “Electrical lines,” Joe said, pointing to cables coming from the bulkhead to the helicopter. “The covers are heated. Like our jackets.”

  “That explains the infrared signature that the satellite detected,” Kurt replied. “As long as the solar panels haven’t frozen over, there should be enough juice running through it.”

  “Makes you wonder why no one used it to get off the ship?”

  “Probably never got the chance,” Kurt said.

  Joe made his way over to the helicopter and scraped the frost off the curved windshield. The interior was dark and empty.

  “Let’s see how the rest of the ship looks,” Kurt said. “The engine room is probably flooded and useless, but there might be an auxiliary power unit we can fire up.”

  Leaving the helicopter behind, they crossed the deck to the nearest hatchway. Like everything else on the ship, it was locked in position by an accumulation of frozen water.

  Kurt pulled hard and, when that didn’t work, slammed a shoulder into the door to break the ice free. After kicking a few stray pieces away, he pulled back using both hands. It moved halfway before jamming up again. The gap was just wide enough for them to squeeze through.

  “Age before beauty,” Joe, deferring to Kurt, suggested.

  “You’re six months younger than me,” Kurt pointed out.

  “But twenty-seven percent more attractive,” Joe insisted.

  Kurt laughed and slipped through the door. “We really need to work on your math.”

  The tilted corridor was cluttered and dank. Light coming through the open hatchway revealed walls coated white from moisture getting inside and freezing. Farther on, a drab avocado green paint scheme revealed itself. The dingy layer of paint was peeling in places and long overdue for a touch-up.

  With his eyes slowly adjusting to the darkened corridor, Kurt reached toward a tab on his collar, clicking the button he found there. The LEDs on his jacket lit instantly to full brightness, providing a wide swath of light across the interior of the passageway.

  Stepping up beside him, Joe switched his lights on as well. Between the two of them, the hallway was now lit as if by one powerful floodlight. It showed the carnage had not been limited to the outside.

  They found nine bodies in the aft section of the deck. Each of them shot multiple times. A quick search of the crew quarters revealed five sailors shot in their beds at close range.

  “Whoever hit this ship, they came on hard and fast,” Joe said.

  “This was a one-sided battle,” Kurt replied. “These people never had a chance.”

  They continued the search without any expectation of finding survivors. They did find additional bodies in the stair
well and two more on the bridge. Heading belowdecks, they came to the science center and recognized immediately that something was amiss.

  Drawers and file cabinets had been left open and emptied. A tangled web of power cords and USB cables lined one desk, but the computers and laptops they might have once linked up to were nowhere to be seen. Two keyboards and a stray mouse pad randomly tossed to one side told the rest of the story.

  “This place has been ransacked,” Kurt said.

  Searching for anything that had been left behind, Kurt found a few random sheets of paper tucked down behind the printer.

  “Anything interesting?” Joe asked.

  Kurt leafed through the stack. One sheet was directions for rebooting the cooling system, several others proved to be scheduling sheets. The only thing of any interest was a black and white photo that had been printed on regular copy paper.

  The image showed several men standing in the snow. They wore heavy boots and cold-weather gear of vintage style. Someone had drawn on the photo with red ink, adding horns on the top of one man’s head. A Hitler mustache had been hastily applied to the face of another. A plaque in front of them read Deutsche Antarktische Expedition 1938–1939. Draped beneath it was the unmistakable banner of Nazi Germany.

  Kurt handed Joe the photo.

  “Well, that’s unexpected,” Joe said.

  Kurt nodded, shuffling through the rest of the scraps. He found nothing to explain the photo or the graffiti that had been scrawled on it. Nor did he find anything to suggest what the research team had been working on. Taking the photo back from Joe, he folded it up and slid it into a pocket. “Let’s see what’s next.”

  They moved to the adjoining compartment, discovering long, empty racks that ran the length of the room. The racks were stacked like shelves all the way up to the ceiling, but they held nothing.

  “Cold-storage room,” Joe said. “These shelves are designed to hold ice cores. We outfitted a NUMA vessel heading to Greenland last summer with a vault like this.”

  Kurt touched one of the cradles. It was no colder than the rest of the room. “What happened to the ice?”

  “Must have been taken,” Joe said. “Even with the system off-line, that much ice would never melt. Not with the whole ship frozen solid. I think we can safely assume that whoever hit this ship was after what Cora claimed to have found.”

  “Speaking of Cora,” Kurt said, “I haven’t seen her yet. We should keep looking.”

  He moved forward, heading for the next compartment and stopping beside a console that housed various controls and readouts. Scraping frost off the panel, he found a row of LEDs blinking a dim orange color. “This is the control system for the cryogenic unit,” he said. “It’s still functioning.”

  “Must be getting juice from the solar array,” Joe said. “Like the helicopter’s de-icing system.”

  “Makes sense,” Kurt replied. “But if the cryogenic unit is still on, why is this room the same temperature as the rest of the ship?”

  Kurt looked around for an answer to his own question. His gaze settled on a bundle of insulated hoses. Instead of connecting to the storage racks, the lines ran from the side of the cooling unit, along the floor of the compartment and down a scuttle to the deck below.

  Kurt pulled on the hoses. They wouldn’t budge. “We need to go down there.”

  “That will take us below the waterline,” Joe warned.

  “I have a feeling we’ll be skating instead of swimming.”

  Kurt squeezed through the circular opening and descended the ladder. Two-thirds of the way down, his foot hit something cold and wet. He pressed downward and felt his boot sliding into an icy mush.

  “I was half right,” he said.

  “That’s better than normal,” Joe replied.

  Kurt glanced at the slush below him and then scanned the compartment. It was flooded chest-high and the water had been turned to briny slush, with salt deposits coating the walls.

  Stepping off the ladder, Kurt sank up to his thighs. The chill ran through his exploration gear but was tempered by the insulated wetsuit he wore underneath.

  He moved away from the ladder, pushing through the heavy mixture and following the cryogenic hoses across the room.

  It took an unbelievable amount of effort to wade through the slush, as if he were walking with a fifty-pound weight attached to each leg. The farther aft he went, the denser the slush grew, finally turning to ice near the far end of the compartment. Kurt climbed up onto the ice and crawled the rest of the way.

  Arriving at the aft bulkhead, he was now up against the ceiling. This entire end of the compartment was solid ice. Ahead of him, he spied the top of a watertight door. The cryogenic lines were there as well, looping out of the solid block and back down into it.

  Kurt studied the arrangement as Joe crossed the compartment and joined him. “Tell me we didn’t freeze our extremities off just to find the ship’s sno-cone maker.”

  “We’ve found a lot more than that,” Kurt said. “Look at the hatch. It’s slightly ajar. Water was coming through. But someone stopped it by running these cryogenic tubes down here and freezing the water as it filled the compartment.”

  “That might explain the growth of ice attached to the hull,” Joe suggested. “The cold would radiate through to the gap in it. A coating of ice would build up, eventually sealing the puncture. But since no one ever turned this off, it would continue to grow.”

  “That explains why the attachment of ice is smooth and swept back like a wing. It formed slowly by accretion.”

  “That would be my thought,” Joe said. “But what happened to the people who came up with this plan? Did they get rescued before we got here?”

  “I wish that were the case,” Kurt said.

  Using the outside of his glove, he scraped at the frost beneath them, buffing it in a circular pattern until the rough, opaque veneer turned smooth and clear. A face appeared below it. A slightly distorted vision of a woman with dark hair, fine features and eyes that were peacefully closed. Her hands remained clasped around the cryogenic lines.

  “Is that who I think it is?”

  “Cora Emmerson,” Kurt said quietly. “Looks like she gave her life to save the ship.”

  “I’m sorry,” Joe said.

  Kurt stared for a long, silent moment. “Damn,” he whispered.

  He’d expected this would be the reality since they’d left Washington. That didn’t make it any easier.

  8

  RESEARCH VESSEL GRISHKA

  ANTARCTIC WATERS

  Having spent an hour chipping her from the ice, Kurt lifted Cora free and carried her to the Grishka’s sick bay.

  Searching for anything he might be able to bring home to her family, he found a necklace, an ID card and a phone, which remained frozen solid in its protective case. He slid the items into another pocket before covering her with a blanket.

  As Kurt stood up, Joe brought in the last of the dead crewmen, dragging the man on a collapsible litter. Sliding the body to a spot beside the bulkhead, Joe placed the end of the stretcher down and then picked up the manifest they’d discovered. Comparing the man’s ID tag to the list, he made a check mark.

  “Is that everyone?” Kurt asked.

  “We’re still missing one of the science team,” Joe said. “A woman named Yvonne Lloyd. I’ve searched everywhere. She’s not on the ship.”

  “Maybe that tells us something,” Kurt said. He looked at his watch. “Let’s get back to the bridge. It’s time to check in with Rudi.”

  Broadcasting from the bridge of the ship, Kurt and Joe spoke with Rudi Gunn via a small handheld satellite phone. A grainy picture of Rudi was displayed on the phone’s four-inch screen. Data lag caused the image to freeze and skip every few seconds. At times, it made Rudi’s movements look robotic.

  Kurt gave Rudi the
bad news about ship, the crew and Cora, explaining how she had courageously stopped the vessel from sinking. “She’d been shot,” Kurt explained. “A superficial head wound. Not fatal, but between the injury and the loss of blood, it’s hard to overstate the effort she made to keep the ship from going down.”

  Rudi took the news with notable silence, processing the sad reality with a military instinct. “I want to know who did this,” he said finally.

  “Whoever it was,” Kurt said, “didn’t leave many clues. Though there are a few things out of order.”

  “Such as?”

  “To start with, someone’s missing.”

  Joe explained. “Once we determined that the ship was stable, we began with a body count,” Joe said. “We brought all the dead crewmen to the main deck and matched ID tags and passports against the names on the manifest. When it was all said and done, everyone on the ship was accounted for except a woman named Yvonne Lloyd. She’s listed on the science team’s roster as a climatologist and paleomicrobiologist . . . Whatever that is.”

  “Maybe she got trapped belowdecks when the water came in,” Rudi suggested.

  “The only flooded compartments are the bilge and the engine room,” Kurt replied. “No reason for a scientist to be down there.”

  “Hiding is a reason,” Rudi said. “That ship was under attack.”

  “I doubt she got the chance,” Kurt said. “Looks like the ship was taken by surprise. Some of the crew were shot dead in their bunks.”

  “How do you take a ship by surprise in the middle of the open ocean?” Rudi asked.

  Kurt shook his head. He was having trouble with that one as well.

  “It’s possible she was taken hostage,” Joe said.

  “Hostage?”

  “The ship was cleaned out,” Kurt explained. “The ice cores are gone. And the computers and hard drives. Basically, the science lab looks like Whoville after the Grinch came to town.”