James Rollins - Ice Hunt

They traveled in silence for another five minutes. Jenny barely breathed, waiting for the props to choke out as her greedy engines consumed the last of her fuel.

“There!” Tom suddenly blurted, jamming an arm between Jenny and Kowalski. Bane lifted his head.

Jenny tried to follow where the ensign pointed. “I don’t see—”

“Ten degrees to starboard! Wait for the wind to let up!”

Jenny concentrated on where he indicated. Then, as the snow eddied out in a wild twist, she spotted a light ahead, glowing up at them. “Are you sure that’s the place?”

Tom nodded.

“Ice Station Grendel,” Kowalski moaned.

Jenny began her descent, studying her altimeter. Without fuel, they needed a place to land. They couldn’t go back to Omega and to touch down in the wasteland of the polar cap was certain death. There was only one other place that offered adequate shelter. The ice station.

It was risky, but not totally foolhardy. The Russians would not be expecting them. If they could land out of direct sight, Tom Pomautuk knew the layout of the station well enough to possibly get them into one of the exterior ventilation shafts that brought fresh air down to the buried station. They could hole up there until the Russians left.

And besides, their dwindling fuel situation left them little other choice.

The Otter lurched as the portside engine coughed. The prop skipped a beat, fluttering. In a heartbeat, the Twin Otter became a Single Otter. Flying on one engine, Jenny fought to hold the plane even while dropping her flaps. She dove steeply. “Hold tight!”

Kowalski had a death grip on both armrests. “I got that covered.”

There was no sight line to the ice fields below. Jenny watched her altimeter wheel down. The winds continued to fight, grabbing the plane, trying to hold it aloft.

Jenny bit her lower lip, concentrating. She tried to fix the position of the station’s beacon light, now gone again, in her mind’s eye. A map formed in her head, fed by data from her instruments and her own instinct.

As the altimeter dropped under the two-hundred-foot ceiling, she focused on her trim, fighting both the wind and the dead engine to hold herself level. The snow became thicker, not just from the sky but now blowing up at her from the ice plain below.

She intended to descend from here as gradually as possible. It was the only safe way to land blind. Slow and even…as long as the last engine held. She watched the altimeter drop under a hundred…then seventy…then—

“Watch out!” Tom called from the backseat.

Her gaze flicked up from her focus on her instruments. Out of the storm ahead, the winds parted in places to reveal a wall of ice ahead of them, broken and thrust up into jagged teeth, misted with blowing snow. It lay less than a hundred yards ahead. She thought quickly, weighing options in a heartbeat. She plainly didn’t have the engines to make it over them.

Beside her, Kowalski swore a constant string, his version of a prayer.

Jenny gnashed her teeth, then jammed her stick forward, diving more steeply. Screw it, she thought, I’m sticking this landing . She dropped the plane the last fifty feet, sweeping out of the sky, plunging toward the peaks of ice.

The ground was nowhere in sight.

Kowalski’s prayer became more heartfelt, finishing with “I really, really hate you!”

Jenny ignored him. She concentrated on her instruments, trusting them. They promised the ground was down there somewhere. She completely dropped her flaps; the plane dipped savagely.

It was too much for her last engine. The motor gasped, choked, and died. In that moment, they became a frozen rock with wings, hurtling earthward.

“Fuuuucccckkkk!” Kowalski cried, hands now pressed to the side window and dash.

Jenny hummed. The momentum of the glide continued to hold — barely. The needle on the altimeter slipped lower and lower, then settled to zero. There was still no sign of the ground.

Then her skis hit the ice, soft and even.

She punched up her flaps to brake their speed. They had landed at speeds much faster than she liked.

As the Otter continued to race over the slick surface, side winds threatened to topple it over on a wing, attempting to cartwheel them off to oblivion. But Jenny worked her flaps, plied the Otter with skill, and adjusted their course to keep the wings up.

“Ice!” Tom called from the backseat.

The peaks were rushing at them. The plane’s speed had hardly slowed. With skis for landing gear, the Otter had no hydraulic brakes — just flaps and friction. She had plenty of the former, little of the latter.

Still, after a decade of mushing in a dog sled, Jenny knew the delicate physics of ice and steel runners.

The Otter continued to skate toward the towering cliffs, sliding toward a certain crash. Jenny had already recognized the inevitable.

She was going to lose her plane.

“This is going to hurt,” she mumbled.

As the plane swept toward the cliff face, she prayed the ice remained slick. Everything depended on her flaps — and timing.

She watched the cliffs grow in front of her. She counted in her head, then at the last moment, she dropped the flaps on the starboard side and continued to brake with the other. The nimble plane fishtailed, spinning around like an Olympic figure skater.

The tail assembly swept backward and struck the cliff, absorbing a fair amount of the impact and tearing away in the process. Jenny jerked in her seat harness as the plane jarred. The wing glanced next, taking more of the impact, crumpling up and away. Then the cabin hit, striking the cliff broadside — but since the worst of the impact had already been absorbed by the tail and wing, their collision was no more than a fender bender.

Everyone was shaken but alive.

Bane climbed back into his seat from the floor, looking none too pleased by the whole experience. Jenny turned to Kowalski. He reached out with both hands, grabbed her cheeks, and kissed her full on the mouth.

“Let’s never fight again,” he said.

Outside, the engine on the crumpled wing broke away and hit the ice.

“We’d better get out of here,” Tom said.

They hauled out of the plane. Before climbing free, Jenny removed some supplies from the emergency locker: a flashlight, a pair of extra parkas and mittens, a large coil of poly-line rope, a flare gun, and a pocketful of extra flares. She glanced to the empty hooks that normally held her service shotgun and silently cursed Sewell for confiscating it.

She exited the broken plane and tossed one of the spare parkas to Kowalski.

“Looks like Christmas came early,” he muttered as he pulled into it. It was too small for his large frame. The sleeves rode four inches up his forearm, but he didn’t complain.

Jenny quaked in the winds, but at least she was sheltered by the cliffs, the worst of the storm blunted. She quickly donned her parka.

Bane trotted around the wreckage, then lifted his leg. His yellow stream misted steamily in the frigid cold.

Kowalski stared a moment. “Damn smart dog. If I had to go, I’d be doing the same thing, too. Remind me from here on out never to get into anything smaller than a 747.”

“Be respectful. She gave all she had to get you here.” Jenny stared at the wreckage, feeling a surprisingly deep pang of regret at the loss.

Tom tugged his parka tighter around his boyish shoulders. “Where now?”

“Off to where we’re not welcome,” Kowalski answered. He pointed to the mountain range. “Let’s see if we can sneak in the back door.”

As they headed off, Jenny asked, “Where does this supposed hidden ventilation shaft lead?”

Tom explained the base’s air circulation system. It functioned without pumps. Shafts were simply drilled from the surface to the deepest levels of the station — even below the station. The colder surface air, being heavier than the warmer air below would sink into these shafts and displace the warmer stagnant air. “This creates a passive circulation system,” Tom finished. “The fresh air is pocketed in a cavern system that wraps around the station. A reservoir of clean air, so to speak. It is then heated through baffles and used to service the station.”