The Ice Limit

windows, his beefy fingers twined like a knot as he looked southward over the ruthless seas. How difficult it must be to realize that money couldn't buy everything — even one's own life. How different he was, in the last analysis, from the man who stood beside him.

Her eyes moved to Glinn. She found herself becoming dependent on his judgment now, in a way she would never have allowed before he had been proven wrong — proven human, she thought.

Beyond the two men lay the storm-tossed sea. As night had fallen, they had darkened the ship in an attempt to elude Vallenar's guns. But a huge southern moon, a day from full, had risen in a crystalline night sky to thwart their hopes. To Britton, it almost looked as if it was smiling mockingly at them. A panteonero was a strange form of weather: it usually ended in a clear night of maddening, murderous wind. In the moonlight, the moiling surface of the ocean had a ghastly luminescence. The surreal ocean continued to launch a procession of gigantic breakers past them, looming above the ship, periodically throwing it into darkness deeper than night, subsiding in huge roars as the ship broke out once again into the moonlight, the tumbling white water, and the banshee winds.

An abrupt report, faint but audible above the storm, shook the bridge windows. Others followed in measured cadence. Britton saw a row of geysers climbing down the face of a wave to the north, one after another, heading toward the Rolvaag along the line of its former course.

The great ship's head labored and wallowed in the seas. Turn, you bitch, she thought.

Suddenly, the ship bucked and shuddered. A great billow of ugly yellow smoke shot from the bow, hot metal whining upward, trailing streamers. A thunderous report immediately followed. One of the king posts jerked into the air, twisting as it fell back, the guy wires whiplashing across the deck. Then the geysers were erupting ahead of them and turning wide as the fire passed their position.

There was a deathly moment of stasis.

Britton was the first to recover. She raised her glasses and examined the bow area. It appeared that at least one shell had ripped through the forecastle. The great ship rose on the next wave; in the bright moonlight, she could see water running into the exposed chain locker and out a ragged hole, well above the waterline.

'General alarm,' she said. 'Mr. Howell, send a damagecontrol team forward. Assemble a fire team with AFFF foam and an Explosimeter. And I want a lifeline rigged up along the maindeck, bow to stern.'

'Aye aye, ma'am.'

Almost involuntarily, she glanced at Glinn.

'Cut the engines,' he murmured. 'Veer away from the wind. Cut ECM. Pretend we're crippled. That will stop his firing for now. Give it just five minutes, then we'll run again. That will force him to repeat his range-finding. We must make those ice islands.'

She watched him step away to confer with his operative in low tones.

'Mr. Howell,' she said. 'All engines stop. Left thirty degree rudder.' The ship continued forward under its immense inertia, slowly turning.

She looked at Lloyd. His face had gone gray, as if the firing had shocked him to the core. Perhaps he believed he was about to die. Perhaps he was thinking about what it would be like to be sinking in the cold, black, two-mile- deep water. She had seen that look before, on other ships in other storms. It was not a pretty sight.

She dropped her gaze to the radar. It was getting a lot of sea return, but it cleared every time the Rolvaag rose. They were now twenty-five miles from the Ice Limit and the pair of ice islands. The beam sea was slowing down the Chilean ship by as much as a knot, but it was still closing the gap steadily, relentlessly. As she looked out over the boiling seas, she wondered how the destroyer could possibly be surviving.

Suddenly the door to the bridge burst open. And there, framed in the doorway, was McFarlane. He took a step forward, Rachel following close behind.

'The meteorite,' McFarlane said as he struggled for air, his face wild.

'What about the meteorite?' Glinn asked sharply.

'It's breaking free.'

Rolvaag,

3:55 P.M.

GLINN LISTENED as McFarlane gasped out his story, feeling an unfamiliar — and unpleasant — sensation of surprise drift over him. But it was with his usual, unhurried economy of motion that he turned toward a telephone. 'Sick bay? Get Garza on the horn.'

In a moment, Garza's weakened voice came across the line. 'Yes?'

'Glinn here. The meteorite's breaking its welds. Get Stonecipher and the backup team down there at once. You lead it.'

'Yes, sir.'

'There's something else,' said McFarlane. He was still struggling for breath.

Glinn turned.

'The rock reacts to salt. Salt, not touch. That's what sets it off, what killed Garza's team. Rachel and I strapped tarps over the web. But whatever you do, for God's sake keep salt water off it. And it's still throwing off a lot of radio noise. Radio communication will be spotty, at least for an hour or so.

Glinn took this in, then raised the phone and spoke again to Garza. As he was finishing, he heard a fumbling sound on the other end, followed by the nasal, angry voice of Brambell. 'What's this devilment? I forbid this man leaving sick bay. He has head trauma, concussion, a hyperextended wrist, and —'

'No more talk, Dr. Brambell. I must have Garza's expertise at whatever cost.'

'Mr. Glinn —'

'The life of the ship depends on it.' He lowered the phone and looked at Britton. 'Is there any way to reduce the ship's list in these waves?'

Britton shook her head. 'In seas this heavy, ballast shifting would only make the ship more unstable.'

The Rolvaag continued driving southward, the raging sea alternately burying its maindeck in the water, then forcing it skyward, water thundering out the scuppers. Two of the containers had torn free and washed overboard, and several others were now shifting in their lashings.

'What the hell were those explosions?' McFarlane asked Glinn.

'We were fired on by the Chilean ship.' He looked first at McFarlane, and then at Amira. 'Do you have any idea why salt affects the meteorite?'

'It doesn't seem like a chemical reaction,' McFarlane said. 'None of the meteorite was consumed in the explosions, and there sure as hell wasn't enough salt to generate that kind of energy.'

Glinn looked at Amira.

'It was too big an explosion to be either a chemical or catalytic reaction,' she said.

'What other kind of reaction is there? Nuclear?'

'That's one unlikely possibility. But I think we're not looking at this problem from the right perspective.'

Glinn had seen this before. Amira's mind had a tendency to jump out of everyone else's groove. What resulted was either genius or idiocy. It was one of the reasons he had hired her, and even at this extremity he knew better than to ignore it. 'How so?' he asked.

'It's just a feeling. We keep trying to understand it from our point of view, thinking of it as a meteorite. What we need to do is look at it from its point of view. Salt is important to it, somehow — something either dangerous, or... necessary.'

Howell's voice filled the resulting silence. 'Captain, more ranging shots being fired from the Ramirez.' The chief mate hunched over the Doppler radar. There was a long moment of silence, and he looked up, a grin on his face. 'A snowsquall just cut us off from the Ramirez. The bastards can't see us, Captain. They're running blind.'

'Come right, steady on one nine zero,' said Britton.

Glinn moved to the GPS chart, staring at its arrangement of green dots. The chess game was drawing to a close; the board was cleared of all but a few pieces. Their fate had been reduced to a combination of four factors: