epicenter had been thirty-five miles nearer Edgeway than that of the initial shaker.
Gunvald took no comfort from the fact that the second quake had been less powerful than the first. The diminution in force was not absolute proof that the more recent temblor had been an aftershock to the first. Both might have been foreshocks, with the main event still to come.
During the Cold War, the United States had planted a series of extremely sensitive sonic monitors on the floor of the Greenland Sea, as well as in many other strategic areas of the world's oceans, to detect the nearly silent passage of nuclear-armed enemy submarines. Subsequent to the collapse of the Soviet Union, some of those sophisticated devices had begun doing double duty both monitoring submarines and providing data for scientific purposes. Since the second quake, most of the deep-ocean listening stations in the Greenland Sea had been transmitting a faint but almost continuous low-frequency grumble: the ominous sound of growing elastic stress in the crust of the earth.
A slow-motion domino reaction might have begun. And the dominoes might be falling toward Edgeway Station.
During the past sixteen hours, Gunvald had spent less time smoking his pipe than chewing nervously on the stem of it.
At nine-thirty the previous night, when the radio confirmed the location and force of the second shock, Gunvald had put through a call to the temporary camp six miles to the southwest. He told Harry about the quakes and explained the risks that they were taking by remaining on the perimeter of the polar ice.
“We've got a job to do,” Harry had said. “Forty-six packages are in place, armed, and ticking. Getting them out of the ice again before they all detonate would be harder than getting a politician's hand out of your pocket. And if we don't place the other fourteen tomorrow, without all sixty synchronized charges, we likely won't break off the size berg we need. In effect, we'll be aborting the mission, which is out of the question.”
“I think we should consider it.”
“No, no. The project's too damned expensive to chuck it all just because there might be a seismic risk. Money's tight. We might not get another chance if we screw up this one.”
“I suppose you're right,” Gunvald acknowledged, “but I don't like it.”
The open frequency crackled with static as Harry said, “Can't say I'm doing cartwheels, either. Do you have any projection about how long it might take major slippage to pass through an entire fault chain like this one?”
“You know that's anybody's guess, Harry. Days, maybe weeks, even months.”
“You see? We have more than enough time. Hell, it can even take longer.”
“Or it can happen much faster. In hours.”
“Not this time. The second tremor was less violent than the first, wasn't it?” Harry asked.
“And you know perfectly well that doesn't mean the reaction will just play itself out. The third might be smaller or larger than the first two.”
“At any rate,” Harry said, “the ice is seven hundred feet thick where we are. It won't just splinter apart like the first coat on a winter pond.”
“Nevertheless, I strongly suggest you wrap things up quickly tomorrow.”
“No need to worry about that. Living out here in these damned inflatable igloos makes any lousy shack at Edgeway seem like a suite at the Ritz-Carlton.”
After the conversation, Gunvald Larsson had gone to bed. He hadn't slept well. In his nightmares, the world crumbled apart, dropped away from him in enormous chunks, and he fell into a cold, bottomless void.
At seven-thirty in the morning, while Gunvald had been shaving, with the bad dreams still fresh in his mind, the seismograph had recorded a third tremor: Richter 5.2.
His breakfast had consisted of a single cup of black coffee. No appetite.
At eleven o'clock the fourth quake had struck only two hundred miles due south: 4.4 on the Richter scale.
He had not been cheered to see that each event was less powerful than the one that preceded it. Perhaps the earth was conserving its energy for a single gigantic blow.
The fifth tremor had hit at 11:50. The epicenter was approximately one hundred ten miles due south. Much closer than any previous tremor, essentially on their doorstep. Richter 4.2.
He'd called the temporary camp, and Rita Carpenter had assured him that the expedition would leave the edge of the icecap by two o'clock.
“The weather will be a problem,” Gunvald worried.
“It's snowing here, but we thought it was a local squall.”
“I'm afraid not. The storm is shifting course and picking up speed. We'll have heavy snow this afternoon.”
“We'll surely be back at Edgeway by four o'clock,” she said. “Maybe sooner.”
At twelve minutes past noon another slippage had occurred in the subsea crust, one hundred miles south: 4.5 on the Richter scale.
Now, at twelve-thirty, when Harry and the others were probably planting the final package of explosives, Gunvald Larsson was biting so hard on his pipe that, with only the slightest additional pressure, he could have snapped the stem in two.
12:30
Almost six miles from Edgeway Station, the temporary camp stood on a flat section of ice in the lee of a pressure ridge, sheltered from the pressing wind.
Three inflatable, quilted, rubberized nylon igloos were arranged in a semicircle approximately five yards from that fifty-foot-high ridge of ice. Two snowmobiles were parked in front of the structures. Each igloo was twelve feet in diameter and eight feet high at the center point. They were firmly anchored with long-shanked, threaded pitons and had cushiony floors of lightweight, foil-clad insulation blankets. Small space heaters powered by diesel fuel kept the interior air at fifty degrees Fahrenheit. The accommodations weren't either spacious or cozy, but they were temporary, to be used only while the team planted the sixty packages of explosives.
A hundred yards to the south, on a plateau that was five or six feet above the camp, a six-foot steel pipe rose from the ice. Fixed to it were a thermometer, a barometer, and an anemometer.
With one gloved hand, Rita Carpenter brushed snow from the goggles that protected her eyes and then from the faces of the three instruments on the pole. Forced to use a flashlight in the steadily deepening gloom, she read the temperature, the atmospheric pressure, and the wind velocity. She didn't like what she saw. The storm had not been expected to reach them until at least six o'clock that night, but it was bearing down hard and was liable to be on them in full force before they had finished their work and completed the return journey to Edgeway Station.
Awkwardly negotiating the forty-five-degree slope between the plateau and the lower plain, Rita started back toward the temporary camp. She could move
Though Rita was warm enough, the bitter-cold wind and the barren landscape chilled her emotionally. By choice, both she and Harry had spent a large portion of their professional lives in the Arctic and Antarctic; however, she did not share Harry's love of the vast open spaces, the monochromatic vistas, the immense curve of sky, and the primal storms. In fact, she'd driven herself to return repeatedly to those polar regions primarily because she was afraid of them.
Since the winter when she was six years old, Rita had stubbornly refused to surrender to
Now, as she approached the igloo on the west end of camp, with the wind hammering her back, she suddenly suffered a phobic reaction so intense that it nearly brought her to her knees. Cryophobia: the fear of ice and frost. Frigophobia: the fear of cold. Chionophobia: the fear of snow. Rita knew those terms because she
