Clive Cussler: Iceberg

Neth became aware of something now… something indistinct, something flying across the unseen threshold between imagination and reality. It slowly materialized into a tangible thing, a man-made form.

Finally, after what seemed an eternity to Rapp, Neth pulled his head back into the cabin, again closed the side window, and pressed the mike switch.

"Sloan? Did you see it?" The words sounded stiff and muffled, as if Neth were talking through a pillow.

At first, Rapp thought it was because Neth's jaw and lips were frozen with the cold, but then he sneaked a fast glance and was surprised to see Neth's face frozen, not with cold but with the blank look of genuine awe.

"I saw it." Sloan's voice came over the intercom like a mechanical echo. "But I didn't think it was possible."

"Neither did I," Neth said, "but it's down there-a ship, a goddamned ghost ship imbedded in the ice." He turned to Rapp, shaking his head as if he didn't believe is own words. "I couldn't make out any details. Just a blurred outline of the bow, or maybe the stern, it's impossible to tell for certain."

He slipped off the goggles and raised the thumb of his right hand in the air, motioning up. Gratefully Rapp sighed and leveled out the patrol plane, putting a comfortable margin of space between the aircraft's underbelly and the cold Atlantic.

"Excuse me, Lieutenant." Hadley came through over the headphones.

He was hunched over his radar set, painstakingly studying a little white blip almost in the exact center of the scope. "For what it's worth, the overall length of that thing in the berg is in the neighborhood of one hundred and twenty-five feet."

"A derelict fishing trawler, most likely." Neth vigorously massaged his cheeks, wincing at the pain as the circulation began to return.

"Shall I contact District Headquarters in New York and request a rescue party?" Rapp asked matterof-factly.

Neth shook his head. "No need to rush a rescue ship. It's obvious there are no survivors. We'll make a detailed report after we've landed in Newfoundland."

There was a pause. Then Sloan's voice came through.

"Make a pass over the berg, skipper. I'll drop a dye marker on it for quick identification."

"Right you are, Sloan. Make the drop at my signal." Neth turned again to Rapp. "Bring us over the high part of the berg at three hundred feet."

The Boeing, its four engines still turning at reduced power, swept over the stately iceberg like a monstrous Mesozoic bird in search of its primeval nest.

Back at the cargo door, Sloan raised his arm, pausing.

Then at Neth's spoken command, Sloan tossed a gallon pickle jar full of red dye out into space. The jar grew smaller and smaller, shrinking to a tiny speck before finally striking the smooth cliff face of the target. Peering back, Sloan could see a bright vermilion streak spreading slowly down the million-ton mound of ice.

"Right on the button." Neth almost sounded jovial. "The search party won't have any trouble spotting that one." Then suddenly grim-faced, he stared down toward the spot where the unknown ship lay entombed.

"Poor devils. I wonder if we'll ever know what happened to them?"

Rapp's eyes took on a thoughtful look. "They couldn't have asked for a bigger tombstone."

"It's only temporary. Two weeks after that berg drifts into the Gulf Stream, there won't be enough left of it to chill a six-pack of beer.

The cabin became clouded by a silence, a silence that seemed intensified by the incessant drone of the plane's engines. Neither man spoke for several moments, each lost in his own thoughts. They could only look at the ominous pinnacle of white rising out of the sea and speculate on the enigma locked beneath its icy mantle.

At last Neth slouched backward nearly horizontal in his seat and became his old imperturbable self again.

"I strongly suggest, Ensign, unless you have a hankering to ditch this lumbering bus in forty-degree water, you take us home before the fuel gauges die from thirst." He grinned menacingly. "And please, no interruptions."

Rapp threw Neth a withering look, then shrugged and turned the patrol plane once more on a course toward Newfoundland.

When the Coast Guard patrol plane had disappeared and the last steady beat of its engines had faded away in the cold salt air, the towering iceberg once again lay enshrouded in the deathly stillness it had endured since being broken from a glacier and forced into the sea off the west coast of Greenland nearly a year before.

Then suddenly there was a slight but perceptible movement on the ice just above the waterline of the berg.

Two indistinct shapes slowly transformed into two men who rose to their feet and stared in the direction of the retreating aircraft. From more than twenty paces they would have been invisible to the unaided eye-both wore white suits that blended in perfectly with the colorless background.

They stood there for a long time, patiently waiting and listening. When they were satisfied the patrol plane was not returning, one of the men knelt and brushed away the ice, revealing a small radio transmitter and receiver. Extending the ten-foot telescopic aerial, he set the frequency and began turning the crank handle. He didn't have to crank very hard or very long. Someone, somewhere, was keeping a tight watch on the same frequency, and the answer came almost immediately.

Lieutenant Commander Lee Koski clamped his teeth a notch tighter on the stem of a corncob pipe, jammed his knotted fists two inches deeper in his fur-lined windbreaker and shivered in the intense cold. Two months past forty-one years, eighteen of them in the service of the United States Coast Guard, Koski was short, very short, and the heavy, multi-layered clothing made him look nearly as wide as he was high. His blue eyes beneath the shaggy wheat-colored hair gleanyed with an intensity that never seemed to dim, regardless of his mood. He possessed the confident manner of a perfectionist, a quality that helped in no small measure in his section as commander of the Coast Guard's newest supercutter the Catawaba. He stood on the bridge like a gamecock, legs braced apart, and didn't bother to turn when he spoke to the tall mountain of a man standing beside him.

"Even with radar, they'll play hell finding us in this weather." The tone was as crisp and penetrating as the cold Atlantic air. "Visibility can't be more than a mile."

Slowly, deliberately, Lieutenant Amos Dover, the Catawaba's Executive Officer, flipped a cigarette butt ten feet straight into the air and watched with analytical interest as the smoking white tube was caught by the wind and carried over the ship's bridge, far out into the rolling sea.

"Wouldn't make any difference if they did," he mumbled through lips that were turning blue from the chilly breeze. "The way we're pitching, the pilot of that helicopter would have to be extremely dumb or dead drunk or both to even consider touching down back there." He nodded aft toward the Catawaba's landing platform, already wet from the blowing spray.

"Some people don't give a damn how they die," Koski said severly.

"No one can say they weren't warned." Dover not only looked like a big bear, but his voice seemed to growl from somewhere deep within his stomach, "I signaled the copter right after it left St. John's, informing it of the building sea and strongly advising against a rendezvous. All I got from the pilot was a polite thank you."

It was beginning to drizzle now, and the twenty-five-knot breeze flung the rain over the ship in driving sheets that soon sent all the men who were on duty above deck scurrying for their oilskins. Fortunately for the Catawaba and her crew, the air temperature held at 40'F, still eight degrees away from the dread of freezing, a nasty situation that would have quickly covered the entire ship with a blanket of ice.