Clive Cussler - Arctic Drift

The two men ran to the edge of the ice and reached out for Quinlon, desperately grasping a flailing arm. Pulling him closer, they tried to yank him from the water but could only get him a few inches out of the water before he fell back in. With his saturated boots and clothing, the average-built Quinlon now weighed over three hundred pounds. Realizing their error, Bue and Case lunged at the human load again, dragging and rolling him horizontally until finally coercing his entire body out of the water.

“We’ve got to get him out of the wind,” Bue said, looking around for shelter. All of the man-made remnants of the camp were gone, save for a small section of the crumpled storage shed now floating away on a car-sized chunk of ice.

“The snowbank by the runway,” Case replied, pointing through the swirling snow.

Quinlon’s efforts to keep the airfield clear had resulted in several deep snowbanks built up from his plowing. Though most of the airfield had now vanished, Case was right. There was a high mound of snow less than fifty yards away.

Each man grabbed one of Quinlon’s arms and began dragging him across the ice like a bag of potatoes. They knew the maintenance man was near death, and if he was to have any chance of survival, they would have to move him clear of the minus-twenty-degrees windchill. Panting and perspiring despite the bitter cold, they hauled Quinlon to the back side of the ten-foot snowbank, which blocked the worst of the westerly gale.

They quickly stripped off Quinlon’s wet clothes, which had already frozen stiff, then they briefly rubbed snow on his body to absorb the remaining moisture. Brushing the snow aside, they then wrapped his head and body in their own dry parkas. Quinlon was blue and shaking uncontrollably, but he was still conscious, which meant he had a chance at survival. Following Case’s lead, Bue helped dig a small hole in the side of the snowbank. Sliding Quinlon in first, the other two men crawled alongside, hoping to share body heat while cowering from the slashing winds.

Peering out of their meager cave, Bue could see a watery passage expanding between their shelter and the unbroken ice sheet. They were part of a separate ice floe now, drifting slowly into the Beaufort Sea. Every few minutes, the scientist would hear a deep thunderous crack as their floating ice shelf ruptured into smaller and smaller pieces. Propelled into the storm-driven waters, he knew it would be only a matter of time before their own frozen refuge would be battered to bits and all three men tossed into the sea.

With no one else even aware of their predicament, they had no hope for survival. Shivering in the frightful cold, Bue contemplated the merciless gray ship that had decimated the camp so unexpectedly and without reason. Try as it might, his frozen mind could make no sense of the brutal act. Shaking his head to clear away the marauding vessel’s ghostlike image, he peered at his comrades with sad compassion, then quietly awaited death to visit them all.

The radio call had arrived faintly and in a single transmission. Repeated efforts by the Narwhal ’s radio operator to verify the message were met with complete silence.

Captain Stenseth read the hand-scribbled message transcribed by his radioman, shook his head, and then read the message once more.

“Mayday, Mayday. This is Ice Lab 7. The camp is breaking up…” he recited aloud. “That’s all you got? ” he asked, his eyes glaring.

The radioman nodded silently. Stenseth turned and stepped to the helmsman.

“All ahead flank speed,” he barked. “Come left, steer course zero-one-five.” He turned to the executive officer. “I want a plot to the ice lab’s reported position. And call three additional look-outs to the bridge.”

In an instant, he was towering over the radio operator’s shoulder.

“Notify the regional U.S. and Canadian Coast Guards of the distress call and tell them that we are responding. Alert any local traffic, if there is any. Then get Gunn and Giordino to the bridge.”

“Sir, the nearest Coast Guard station is Canadian, at Tuktoyaktuk. That’s over two hundred miles away.”

Stenseth gazed at the blowing snow buffeting the bridge’s windscreens, his mind conjuring an image of the ice camp inhabitants. Softening his tone, he replied quietly, “Then I guess that means their only saving angel is wearing turquoise wings.”

The Narwhal was rated at twenty-three knots, but even running flat out the research ship could barely muster a dozen knots lunging through the storm-whipped seas. The storm had reached its peak, with winds gusting over seventy miles per hour. The sea was a violent turmoil of thirty-foot waves that pitched and rolled the ship like it was made of cork. The helmsman nervously monitored the ship’s autopilot, waiting for the mechanism to go tilt from the constant course corrections necessary to keep the vessel on a fixed northeast heading.

Gunn and Giordino soon joined Stenseth on the bridge, studying the ice camp’s Mayday message.

“It is a little early in the season for the ice to be breaking up in a cataclysmic fashion,” Gunn said, rubbing his chin. “Though the moving ice sheet can certainly fracture on short notice. Typically, you would have a little bit of a warning.”

“Perhaps they were surprised by a small fracture that struck a portion of the camp, such as their radio facility or even their power generators,” Stenseth suggested.

“Let’s hope it’s nothing worse than that,” Gunn agreed, gazing at the maelstrom outside. “As long as they have some degree of shelter from the storm, they should be all right for a while.”

“There is another possibility,” Giordino added quietly. “The ice camp may have been situated too close to the sea. The storm surge could have broken up the leading edge of the ice field, taking the camp apart in the process.”

The other two men nodded grimly, knowing that the odds of survival were severely diminished if that was the case.

“What’s the outlook on the storm?” Gunn asked.

“Another six to eight hours before it abates. We’ll have to wait it out before we can drop a search team on the ice, I’m afraid,” Stenseth replied.

“Sir,” the helmsman interrupted, “we’re seeing large ice in the water.”

Stenseth looked up to see a house-sized iceberg slip past the port bow.

“All engines back a third. What’s our distance to the ice camp? ”

“Just under eighteen miles, sir.”

Stenseth stepped over to a large radar screen and adjusted the range to a twenty-mile diameter. A thin, jagged green line crossed the screen near the top edge, which remained fixed in place. The captain pointed to a spot just below the line, where a concentric ring on the scope indicated a distance of twenty miles.

“Here’s the reported position of the camp,” he said somberly.

“If it wasn’t oceanfront property before, it is now,” Giordino observed.

Gunn squinted at the radarscope, then pointed a finger at a fuzzy dot at the edge of the screen.

“There’s a ship nearby,” he said.

Stenseth took a look, noting that the ship was headed to the southeast. He ordered the radio operator to hail the ship, but they failed to receive a response.

“Maybe an illegal whaler,” the captain suggested. “The Japanese occasionally slip into the Beaufort to hunt beluga whales.”

“In these seas, they’re probably too busy hanging on to their shorts to pick up the radio,” Giordino said.

The unknown vessel was quickly forgotten as they closed in on the ice shelf and the reported position of the ice camp. As the Narwhal crept closer to the site, larger and larger slabs of broken ice began clogging up the sea in front of them. By now, the entire ship’s complement had been alerted to the rescue mission. More than a dozen research scientists braved the harsh weather and joined the crew on deck. Dressed in full foul-weather gear, they lined the rails of the ominously rolling ship, scanning the seas for their fellow Arctic scientists.