The Ice Limit

Rolvaag plowed on. It was difficult to walk, but he needed the distraction of the physical activity. Reaching the starboard wing door, he pivoted brusquely and resumed pacing. He had been at it for sixty minutes, ever since Glinn had vanished without a word.

His head ached from the sudden reversals of fortune, the abrupt shifts in mood, the unbearable tension of the last twelve hours. Exasperation, humiliation, triumph, apprehension. He glanced up at the bulkhead clock, then at the faces of the bridge officers. Howell, his face set. Britton, expressionless, monitoring alternately the radar screen and the GPS chart. Banks, framed inside the door of the radio room. Lloyd felt like shaking some kind of answers out of them. But they had already told him everything there was to know. They had about two hours before the Ramirez would start edging into range.

Lloyd felt his limbs stiffen against a current of rage. It was Glinn's fault. It was overweening arrogance: he had studied the options so long the man believed himself incapable of failure. Think long, think wrong, someone had once said. If he'd been allowed to call in some favors, they wouldn't be helpless, like a mouse waiting for the cat to close in for the kill.

The door to the bridge opened and Glinn stepped in. 'Good afternoon, Captain,' he said nonchalantly.

More than anything, this air of nonchalance sent fury coursing through Lloyd. 'God damn you, Glinn,' he said, 'where the hell have you been?'

Glinn's eyes drifted toward him. 'I've been examining Vallenar's files. I know now what's driving him.'

'Who the hell cares? He's the one who's driving us, right towards Antarctica.'

'Timmer was Vallenar's son.'

Lloyd stopped short. 'Timmer?' he asked, confused.

'Vallenar's signal officer. The man who was killed by the meteorite.'

'That's absurd. Didn't I hear Timmer had blond hair and blue eyes?'

'He was Vallenar's son by a German mistress.'

'Is this another guess, or do you have evidence?'

'There's no record of a son, but it's the only explanation. That's why he was so anxious to get Timmer back when I visited. And that's why he initially refrained from attacking our ship: I told him Timmer was in the brig. But as soon as we left the island, he realized Timmer was dead. I believe he thinks we murdered him. That's why he pursued us into international waters. That's why he'll never give up until he dies. Or until we do.'

The spasm of fury had left. Lloyd felt drained, exhausted.

Anger at this point was useless. He controlled his voice. 'And how, pray tell, is this psychological insight going to help us?'

Instead of answering, Glinn glanced back at Britton. 'How far are we from the Ice Limit?'

'It's seventy-seven nautical miles south of our position.'

'Can you see any ice on your radar?'

Britton turned. 'Mr. Howell?'

'Some drift ice at ten miles. A few growlers. Just at the Limit, the long-range surface radar's picking up a massive ice island. Two ice islands, actually; it looks like one broke in half.'

'Bearing?'

'One nine one.'

Glinn spoke: 'I would suggest heading that way. Make a very slow turn. If it takes Vallenar a while to notice the course change, we might gain a mile or two.'

Howell looked questioningly at Britton.

'Mr. Glinn,' said Britton, 'it's suicide to take a huge ship like this past the Ice Limit. Especially in this weather.'

'There are reasons,' said Glinn.

'Care to share them with us?' Lloyd asked. 'Or are you going to keep us in the dark again? Maybe we could've used some freelance decision making back there.'

Glinn's gaze fell first on Lloyd, then Britton, then Howell.

'Fair enough,' he said, after a moment. 'We are reduced to two options: turn away and try to outrun the destroyer. Or keep to this course and try to lose the destroyer below the Ice Limit. The former has a close to one hundred percent probability of failure; the latter, somewhat less. This latter plan also has the advantage of forcing the destroyer through a beam sea.'

'What is this Ice Limit?' Lloyd asked.

'It's where the freezing waters around Antarctica meet the warmer northern waters of the Atlantic and Pacific. Oceanographers call it the Antarctic Convergence. It's known for impenetrable fogs and, of course, extremely dangerous ice.'

'You're proposing to take the Rolvaag into an area of ice and fog? It does sound like suicide.'

'What we need now is concealment, time to lose the destroyer long enough to lay a course away from it. In the darkness, in the ice and fog, we might just escape.'

'We might just sink, too.'

'The probability of hitting an iceberg is lower than the probability of being sunk by the destroyer.'

'What if there's no fog?' asked Howell.

'Then we have a problem.'

There was a long silence. And then Britton spoke: 'Mr. Howell. Set a new course for one nine zero. Bring her head around slowly.'

There was the briefest of hesitations. Then Howell relayed the order to the helmsman in clipped tones. As he spoke, his eyes never left Glinn's.

Rolvaag,

2:00 P.M.

MCFARLANE SLUMPED back in the uncomfortable plastic chair, sighing and rubbing his eyes. Rachel sat beside him, cracking peanut shells and letting the debris fall onto the metal deck of the observation unit. The only light came from a single monitor set high in the bulkhead above them.

'Don't you ever get tired of those damn peanuts?' McFarlane said.

Rachel seemed to consider this a moment. 'Nope,' she replied.

They lapsed into silence. Conscious of an incipient headache and low-grade nausea, McFarlane closed his eyes. The moment he did so, the roll of the ship seemed to increase dramatically. He heard the tick of metal, the occasional drip of water. Other than that, the holding tank that yawned beneath them was quiet.

McFarlane opened his eyes with an effort. 'Run it again,' he said.

'But we've already viewed it five times,' Rachel said. When McFarlane did not reply, she gave a disgusted snort and leaned forward to punch the transport controls.

Of the three security viewcams in the holding tank, only one had survived the explosion. He watched as Rachel ran the tape forward at high speed, slowing to normal speed a minute before the detonation. They watched in silence as the seconds counted down. Nothing new. Garza was right: nobody had touched the rock. Nobody had even been close.

McFarlane leaned back again with a curse, glancing out of the observation unit and along the catwalk, as if searching for an answer on the walls of the tank. Then he let his eyes travel slowly down the forty-foot span to the top of the meteorite. The explosion had gone off sideways, killing most of the lights in the tank, damaging communications networks both fore and aft, but leaving the catwalk and observation unit at the top of the tank unharmed. The web looked largely intact, although it was clear that some struts had been knocked out. Molten steel had sprayed in foamy streaks across the walls of the tank, and some of the massive laminated oak timbers were charted. Flecks of blood and red matter could be seen here and there at points the scrub team had missed. The meteorite itself looked unchanged.

What's the secret here? he thought. What is it we're missing?

'Let's go over what we know,' he said. 'The explosion seems to have been just like the one that killed Timmer.'

'Perhaps even stronger,' Rachel said. 'One hell of an electrical blast. If there hadn't been so much metal