Robert Masello - Blood and Ice

Despite the roar of the sea outside, the slashing of the rain and the howling of the winds that seemed to be coming from all directions at once, the atmosphere in the bridge quickly returned to the tranquillity of an operating room. The flat white light panels in the ceiling cast a cold even glow around the blue walls of the room, and the officers all spoke to each other in low, deliberate tones, their eyes fixed on the instrument arrays before them.

“Port engine, full forward,” the captain said, and Lieutenant Commander Ramsey, whom Michael had met a couple of times, reached for a short red-handed throttle. He repeated the captain's words as he executed the order.

Then, Ramsey nodded discreetly toward Michael-who was still standing around like a kid who'd been haled into the principal's office-and said offhandedly to Purcell, “If Mr. Wilde is no longer needed here, sir, perhaps he should join the Ops in the aloft con? It's impossible to fall overboard from there, and he might like to see how the ship is steered.”

Purcell blew out a breath of disgust, and without turning around, said, “If he does fall out, tell him he can float all the way back to Chile before I turn this ship around.”

Michael didn't doubt it, and he took it as his cue to step toward the spiral stair that Ramsey gestured at, and swiftly start climbing.

“How'd you like some company, Kathleen?” he heard Ramsey say into his headset, but he didn't slow up to find out if he wasn't welcome. He went straight up until he was well out of the bridge, and found himself standing on a platform in a virtually black funnel, with only a steel ladder leading higher. The ship juddered, and his shoulders crashed against the rounded wall; he felt like he was in the chimney of the house in The Wizard of Oz, the one that got picked up by the tornado and spun all around. Up above, at least twenty or thirty feet, he could see a blue glow, a lot like you'd get off a TV screen, and he could hear the beeping and hum of machinery.

He put his boot on the bottom rung of the ladder and slowly started to climb. When the prow of the ship came up, he was slung backwards off the ladder, and when the ship righted itself, he was flung forward again; once, he narrowly missed knocking out his front teeth, and he had a sudden terrible flash of having his dental clearance revoked. The rungs were cold and clammy, and he had to grip each one firmly before reaching for the next. As he went up the last few, he saw first a pair of black, rubber-soled shoes, then a pair of blue trousers. He hauled himself up the rest of the way, and when the ship seemed level for a second or two, clambered to his feet.

The Ops was holding steady to a smaller version of the wheel down below, her stern expression illuminated by a GPS screen and a couple of other scopes that Michael couldn't identify. Her eyes were set straight ahead and her jaw was locked; a headset clung to her short brown hair. The aloft con itself-the modern-day equivalent of the crow's nest-was barely big enough for the two of them, and Michael tried not to breathe down Kathleen's neck.

“Going out on deck was a very bad idea,” she said, reminding Michael that she was the one who'd busted him. “We're clocking winds of over a hundred miles per hour.”

“Got it,” he said. “The captain happened to mention it, too.” Then, hoping to change the subject, he said, “So you're up here, all alone in the driver's seat?” On all sides, there were reinforced windows, equipped with Kent screens-whirling discs powered by centrifugal force to throw off water like windshield wipers-that provided an unobstructed, 360-degree view of the boiling ocean all around. Behind him, on the aft deck, one side of the helicopter tarp had ripped loose and was flapping like an enormous, dark green bat's wing.

If only he'd been able to get some decent shots of all this…

“When visibility is as limited as it is now-with such high seas,” she said, “control of the vessel is often passed to the aloft con.”

Michael could see why. Everywhere he looked, the vista was in violent motion, the gray sea heaving and churning for miles, with great blocks of jagged ice bobbing and sinking and slamming into each other. Waves higher than any he had ever imagined rushed at the prow of the ship, crashing down on the bow deck and sending a freezing spume into the air. The spray flew as high as the windows of their aerie.

And all of it-the mad, seething sea and the roiling sky above it, the black specks of birds driven like leaves before the screaming wind-were bathed in the unnatural light of the austral sun, a dull copper orb stubbornly fixed on the northern horizon. It was as if the whole tumultuous picture were lighted from below by a giant lantern that was burning its last few drops of oil.

“Welcome to the Screaming Fifties,” the Ops added, in a slightly more congenial tone. “Once you get below fifty degrees latitude south, that's when you hit the real weather.”

The cutter's prow went up, as easily as if it had been lifted from below, until it was pointing nearly straight up at the shredded storm clouds racing across the southern sky. Kathleen clung to the wheel, her feet braced far apart, and Michael tried to steady himself on the handrail. He knew what was coming… because what went up must come down.

Moments later, the crest passed under them-he could feel the swell of it tingling in his feet-and once gone, the ship teetered, then dropped like a stone skittering down the side of a steep hill. Through the front of the conning tower, Michael could look straight down into a massive trough, a dark cleft as wide as a ravine, but with nothing in it but a watery bottom that seemed to recede even as the ship raced headlong into it.

Kathleen said, “Aye, aye, sir,” into the headset and notched the wheel to the right. Michael could taste the pasta he'd had for dinner. “Depth, one thousand five hundred meters,” she confirmed to the captain below.

The ship plunged down, down, then stopped, then spun-with water rising up in sheer walls all around it-before turning to starboard. Even there, easily ninety feet above the deck and twice as far from the diesel turbines, Michael could hear the engines revving and roaring, the propellers turning-sometimes in nothing but air-as the ship tried to forge its own course through the ice-strewn minefield that engulfed it.

“If you're a praying man,” the Ops said, sparing her first glance directly at Michael, “do it now.” She twisted the wheel again to the right. “You're passing over the wrecks of no less than eight hundred ships and ten thousand sailors.”

The ship charged toward an iceberg that suddenly loomed up before it like a triton.

“Shit, I should have seen that,” Kathleen muttered, and a moment later, said, “Yes, sir,” into her headset. “I do see it, sir. I will,” she added, twisting the wheel.

“Hope I didn't distract you,” Michael said over the pelting sleet and wind. “If it's any comfort, I didn't see that coming, either.”

“It's not your job,” she said. “It is mine.”

Michael fell silent, to let her concentrate, thinking instead of the graveyard that lay below him, the wreckage of hundreds of ships-schooners and sloops, brigs and frigates, trawlers and whalers-mauled by the ice, broken by the waves, ripped to pieces by the searing wind. And he thought of the thousands of men who had fallen into the raging, empty, endless maw, men whose last sight might have been the masts of their ships snapping like twigs, or a slab of glistening ice tumbling over their heads and plunging them down-what had she said, one thousand five hundred meters? — toward the bottom of a sea so deep no light had ever penetrated it.

What exactly lay right below them, many fathoms under their hull, frozen to the floor of the ocean for all eternity?