Tom Grace - Polar Quest

TOM GRACE

Polar Quest

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

AVON

A division of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in the U.S.A as Twisted Web by Pocket Books, New York, NY, 2003

Copyright © 2003 The Kilkenny Group, LLC

Tom Grace asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollins Publishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9781847561244

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2010 ISBN: 9780007420216

Version: 2018-07-09

To Robert Hopps, who shared with me a daughter and a lifetime of interesting stories

To Craig Hopps, who lived a full life in far too brief a time

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

1 JANUARY 22 Tucson, Arizona

2 JANUARY 24 LV Research Station, Antarctica

3 JANUARY 25 Ann Arbor, Michigan

4 JANUARY 30 LV Research Station, Antarctica

5 JANUARY 31 Skier-98

6

7

8

9

10 FEBRUARY 1 Rio Gallegos, Argentina

11 FEBRUARY 2 Lake Vostok, Antarctica

12 FEBRUARY 2 Tucson, Arizona

13 FEBRUARY 8 New York City

14

15 FEBRUARY 14, 11:30 PM Ann Arbor, Michigan

16 FEBRUARY 15, 1:20 AM Ann Arbor, Michigan

17 FEBRUARY 15, 6:45 AM Ann Arbor, Michigan

18 FEBRUARY 15, 1:45 PM Ypsilanti, Michigan

19 FEBRUARY 17 LV Station, Antarctica

20 FEBRUARY 18, 9:00 AM Ann Arbor, Michigan

21 FEBRUARY 18, 9:25 AM Langley, Virginia

22 FEBRUARY 18, 5:35 PM Livonia, Michigan

23 FEBRUARY 22 Langley, Virginia

24 FEBRUARY 24 Christchurch, New Zealand

25 FEBRUARY 27 Ann Arbor, Michigan

26

27 MARCH 4

28 MARCH 5 Waco, Texas

29 MARCH 6 Tucson, Arizona

30 MARCH 8 Ann Arbor, Michigan

31 MARCH 9 Rio de Janeiro

32 MARCH 11 George Town, Grand Cayman

33

34

35

36 MARCH 12 Langley, Virginia

37 MARCH 14 New York City

38 Ann Arbor, Michigan

39

40

41 MARCH 16 New York

42 MARCH 17 Bridgewater, New Jersey 12:30 AM

43

44

45 MARCH 17 3:45 AM New York City

46 MARCH 17 6:20 AM Bridgewater, New Jersey

47 MARCH 17 9:00 PM Ann Arbor, Michigan

48 MARCH 18

49

50 MARCH 19 Paris

51 MARCH 20 Evry, France

52 Paris

53 MARCH 21 Paris

54 MARCH 22 Paris

55 Evry, France

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65 Paris

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the same author

About the Publisher

The Ice Queen – a sexy Nordic blonde with pouty lips and ice blue eyes – gazed down at Kuhn. Her lusty smile and the mink bikini that barely contained her physical charms were warm reminders of his past. Like a Vargas pinup girl, she sat atop a globe that displayed her frozen domain: Antarctica.

Kuhn ran his hand over the aircraft’s smooth aluminum skin, paying his respects. The patches on Kuhn’s weathered aviator jacket matched those on the aircraft: US NAVY VXE-6 SQUADRON. Beneath the side cockpit window, just above the rendered image of the Ice Queen, stenciled letters read:

CDR GREGORY KUHN

COMMANDING OFFICER

For almost a quarter century, Kuhn had piloted XD-10, the Ice Queen. She was a Lockheed LC-130R, a variant of the venerable C-130 Hercules transport equipped with skis mounted to her fuselage so she could land on ice.

As ungainly as she looked, the Hercules could actually fly and was designed to do one thing: lift heavy loads. Except for the cockpit, the fuselage of the Ice Queen was a cavern of empty space big enough to accommodate several large trucks. Ninety-eight feet in length, she sat low to the ground, like a cylindrical railroad car with a ramp in her tapered tail that folded down like a drawbridge. Her wings spanned 132 feet, and the Ice Queen used every inch of her lifting surface and every ounce of power from the four Allison T56 prop engines to propel her into the sky.

The Ice Queen and her sisters once formed the backbone of the VXE-6 Squadron. Since the mid-fifties, the squadron had fulfilled the mission objectives of the ongoing Operation Deep Freeze, providing logistical support to research stations in the Antarctic. It was a tough job that earned the unit the unofficial nickname Ice Pirates. VXE-6 had owned the skies over the frozen southern continent until the end of the 1999 season, when the squadron returned to its home base at Point Mugu Naval Air Station and was disestablished.

Like many veterans of VXE-6, Kuhn felt anger and a sense of loss when the squadron was phased out, its planes mothballed and its mission reassigned to a National Guard air wing. He’d flown over Antarctica for twenty-four years and had fallen in love with the icy untamed wilderness.

In the years since, the Ice Queen sat tightly wrapped in a plastic cocoon in the high desert air of Arizona.She was one of the hundreds of military and commercial aircraft that sat row upon row in the Boneyard, as the Aircraft Storage and Reclamation Facility was known.

‘The old bitch looks pretty good, eh, Greg?’

Kuhn turned as Len Holland walked up.

‘Is that any way to talk about a lady?’ Kuhn asked.

Holland shook Kuhn’s hand, then looked over at the Ice Queen. ‘Hard to believe our planes have been sitting in the desert all these years.’

‘No different than the day we left them here.’ Kuhn nodded down the flight line at another LC-130R. ‘Polar Pete came out of hibernation just fine, too. Where’s the rest of the guys?’

‘Right behind me.’

Ten men emerged from the flight operations building, all sporting aviator jackets similar to Kuhn’s. Each plane flew with a crew of six men – a pilot, a copilot, a navigator, a flight engineer, and two cargo handlers. Escorting the flight crews was a man in a button-down shirt with a bolo tie and a clipboard.

‘Commander Kuhn,’ the escort said warmly. ‘I’m Jim Evers, the manager here at ASRF.’ Evers pronounced the facility acronym ay-surf. ‘Both XD-10 and XD-11 have been checked out, and all systems are flight ready.’