Douglas Preston - The Ice Limit

"No," she replied, steadily. "That about covers it."

"I'll be frank, Captain. This assignment is very unusual. I have a short list of other masters I could approach, but I think they might well turn down the command."

"While I, on the other hand, am desperate." Britton continued staring out the windshield, speaking in a low voice.

"If you had been desperate, you would have taken that tramp Panama steamer offered you last November, or that Liberian freighter, with its armed guards and suspicious cargo." He watched her eyes narrow slightly. "You see, Captain Britton, in my line of work, I analyze the nature of failure."

"And just what is your line of work, Mr. Glinn?"

"Engineering. Our analysis has shown that people who failed once are ninety percent less likely to fail again." I myself am a living example of the truth of this theory.

Glinn did not actually utter this last sentence, but he had been about to. He allowed his eyes to sweep over Captain Britton for a moment. What had prompted him to almost drop a reserve as habitual as breathing? This merited later consideration.

He returned his eyes to the road. "We have evaluated your overall record thoroughly. Once you were a superb captain with a drinking problem. Now you are merely a superb captain. One on whose discretion I know I can rely."

Britton acknowledged this with a slight nod of her head. "Discretion," she repeated, with a faint sardonic note.

"If you accept the assignment, I will be able to say much more. But what I can tell you now is this. The voyage will not be a long one, perhaps three months at most. It will have to be conducted under great secrecy. The destination is the far southern latitudes, an area you know well. The financial backing is more than adequate, and you may handpick your crew, as long as they pass our background checks. All officers and crew will draw triple the normal pay."

Britton frowned. "If you know I turned down the Liberians, then you know I don't smuggle drugs, run guns, or deal in contraband. I will not break the law, Mr. Glinn."

"The mission is legal, but it is unique enough to require a motivated crew. And there is something else. If the mission is successful — I should say, when the mission is successful, because my job is to make sure it is — there will be publicity, largely favorable. Not for me — I avoid that sort of thing — but for you. It could be useful in a number of ways. It could get you reinstated onto the list of active masters, for example. And it would carry some weight with your child custody hearings, perhaps making these long weekend visitations unnecessary."

This last observation had the effect Glinn hoped for. Britton looked at him quickly, then glanced over her shoulder, as if at the swiftly retreating Georgian house, now many miles behind them. Then she looked back at Glinn.

"I've been reading W.H. Auden," she said. "On the train coming out this morning, I came across a poem called 'Atlantis.' The last stanza started out something like this:

All the little household gods

Have started crying, but say

Good-bye now, and put to sea."

She smiled. And, if Glinn paid attention to such things, he would have insisted that the smile was distinctly beautiful.

Port of Elizabeth,

June 17, 10:00 A.M.

PALMER LLOYD paused before the windowless door, a grimy rectangle in the vast expanse of metal building that reared up before him. From behind, where his driver leaned against a limousine reading a tabloid, he could hear the roar of the New Jersey Turnpike echoing across the dead swamplands and old warehouses. Ahead, beyond the Marsh Street dry docks, the Port of Elizabeth glittered in the summer heat. Nearby, a crane nodded maternally above a container ship. Beyond the port, a brace of tugboats was pushing a barge burdened with cubed cars. And even farther beyond, poking above the blackened backside of Bayonne, the Manhattan skyline beckoned, gleaming in the sun like a row of jewels.

Lloyd was momentarily swept by a feeling of nostalgia. It had been years since he was last here. He remembered growing up in ironbound Rahway, near the port. In his poverty-stricken boyhood, Lloyd had spent many days prowling the docks, yards, and factories.

He inhaled the industrial air, the familiar acrid odor of artificial roses mingling with the smell of the salt marshes, tar, and sulfur. He still loved the feel of the place, the stacks trailing steam and smoke, the gleaming refineries, the thickets of power lines. The naked industrial muscle had a Sheeler-like beauty to it. It was places like Elizabeth, he mused, with their synergy of commerce and industry, that gave the residents of the suburbs and the phony boutique artiste towns the very wherewithal that allowed them to sneer at its ugliness from their own perches of comfort. Strange how much he missed those lost boyhood days, even though all his dreams had come true.

And even stranger that his greatest achievement should be launched from here, where his own roots lay. Even as a boy he had loved collecting. Having no money, he had to build up his natural history collection by finding his own specimens. He picked up arrowheads out of eroded embankments, shells from the grimy shoreline, rocks and minerals from abandoned mines; he dug fossils from the Jurassic deposits of nearby Hackensack and caught butterflies by the dozen from these very marshes. He collected frogs, lizards, snakes, and all manner of animal life, preserving them in gin swiped from his father. He had amassed a fine collection — until his house burned down on his fifteenth birthday, taking all his treasures with it. It was the most painful loss of his life. After that, he never collected another specimen. He'd gone to college, then into business, piling success upon success. And then one day, it dawned on him that he could now afford to buy the very best the world could offer. He could, in an odd way, erase that early loss. What started as a hobby became a passion — and his vision for the Lloyd Museum was born. And now here he was, back at the Jersey docks, about to set off to claim the greatest treasure of all.

He took a deep breath and gripped the handle of the door, a tingle of anticipation coursing through him. Glinn's thin folder had been a masterpiece — well worth the million he had paid for it. The plan it outlined was brilliant. Every contingency had been accounted for, every difficulty anticipated. Before he'd finished reading, his shock and anger at the price tag had been replaced by eagerness. And now, after ten days of impatient waiting, he would see the first stage of the plan nearing completion. The heaviest object ever moved by mankind. He turned the handle and stepped inside.

The building's facade, large as it was, only hinted at the vastness of its interior. Seeing such a large space without internal floors or walls, completely open to its high ceiling, temporarily defeated the eye's ability to judge distances, but it seemed at least a quarter mile in length. A network of catwalks stretched through the dusty air like metal spiderwebbing. A cacophony of noise rolled through the cavernous space toward him: the chatter of riveting, the clang of steel, the crackle of welding.

And there, at the center of furious activity, it lay: a stupendous vessel, propped up in dry dock by great steel buttresses, its bulbous bow towering above him. As oil tankers go, it was not the biggest, but out of the water it was just about the most gigantic thing Lloyd had ever seen. The name Rolvaag was stenciled in white paint along the port side. Men and machines were crawling around it like a colony of ants. A smile broke out on Lloyd's face as he inhaled the heady aroma of burnt metal, solvents, and diesel fumes. A part of him enjoyed watching the flagrant expenditure of money — even his own.