Clive Cussler - Fast Ice

The engine roared that much louder as Joe gave it full power. The helicopter rose up, lifting Kurt free of the water. They’d climbed no more than fifty feet when the dark submersible passed underneath.

Kurt watched as it rammed the floating acetylene tanks, breaking them apart and shrugging off the minor explosion that resulted.

From directly above, Kurt got a clear look at the vessel. It was completely streamlined, shaped like a tadpole, but with a more bulbous front and a longer, narrower tail. A jagged section jutting from the bow looked to be the broken shaft of the spike it had plunged into the Grishka ’s side.

The hull had an incredibly smooth texture, appearing part and parcel of the water it was slicing through. As it caught the light, it looked almost translucent. It passed beneath them, submerged and vanished from sight.

11

NUMA VESSEL PROVIDENCE

The communications suite of the Providence was the modern version of a ship’s radio room. It sat behind the bridge in its own dedicated compartment. Instead of old-fashioned transmitters and a telegraph machine tapping out Morse code, the suite was filled with computers, flat-screen monitors and satellite communications gear.

In Kurt’s mind, there was only one drawback to all the technology. Radio calls could be made while wearing pajamas, with crazy hair and three days’ stubble on one’s face. But if you were going to be on-screen in high definition, you had to be presentable to whoever was on the other side. In this case, that meant Rudi Gunn and NUMA’s Director of Technology, Hiram Yaeger.

In his own way, Hiram was the exception to the rule Kurt had just laid down. A computer genius who’d designed and built most of NUMA’s top-end technology, Hiram wore granny glasses and had his hair in a ponytail, which he’d been promising to cut for years. He was dressed in blue jeans and a long-sleeved Harley-Davidson T-shirt, which proudly identified the Cabo San Lucas dealership as its place of origin.

Despite the counterculture look, Hiram was sharp as a knife. If he ever retired from NUMA—something Rudi insisted would never be allowed—a bidding war for his services would erupt in Silicon Valley within the hour.

As Rudi questioned Kurt and Joe about the incident, Hiram sat by, tapping notes into his laptop.

“Did you get a good look at the submarine?” Rudi asked.

“Several looks,” Kurt said. “A hundred feet in length, no conning tower or sail. It was fast and highly maneuverable. I’d say it was constructed of an unusual material.”

“That’s very descriptive,” Rudi said. “Care to narrow it down for us?”

“I didn’t have time to get a sample,” Kurt said. “But it wasn’t steel and it wasn’t the type of coating we use to cover our boats. Appeared slightly translucent and nonmetallic. My assumption would be a new type of sonar-absorbent material. Plastic or a synthetic polymer. Which might explain the translucent effect.”

“Which suggests a very advanced operator,” Rudi noted with disdain. He turned to Hiram. “See what you can find in the database about new materials being developed for submersibles. That might tell us something.”

Hiram nodded and typed more notes. Rudi continued the questioning. “How about from your vantage point, Joe?”

“I saw what Kurt saw,” Joe replied. “Very stealthy. Turned on a dime. From stem to stern, not the type of equipment you could buy off the shelf.”

“Military?” Rudi asked.

Joe shook his head. “Unarmed. It didn’t fire anything at the helicopter and it used a ram to sink the Grishka. Doubt they’d have chosen the giant can opener approach if they carried torpedoes or missiles.”

“Well,” Rudi said. “At least that tells us something.”

Something but not much, Kurt thought. “Did you find anything on the missing scientist?”

“We did,” Rudi said. “For one thing, she’s almost famous. But I’ll let Hiram explain.”

Yaeger adjusted his glasses and began to speak. “Yvonne Lloyd is a thirty-four-year-old Dutch national. Though she was born in Amsterdam, she was raised in South Africa, where she attended Stellenbosch University. She majored in climatology and political science, graduating summa cum laude . After several months in Antarctica as part of a UN expedition, she went back to school and earned a doctorate in paleomicrobiology.”

Joe raised his hand as if he were in class. “As a student whose most advanced degree is underwater basket weaving, I have to ask. What, exactly, is paleomicrobiology?”

“It’s the study of microscopic organisms using the fossil record,” Hiram replied. “A paleobiologist performs research into bacteria, algae and viruses that lived in previous epochs before dying off or evolving into the organisms we have with us today.”

“Ah,” Joe said. “That’s what I thought. Just wanted to be sure.”

Yaeger continued. “Her earliest published work revolves around the concept of the Earth as a living organism, while comparing modern humans and our activities to a bacterial infestation. Finishing her doctoral program, she produced a dissertation on what scientists now call the Snowball Earth Theory .”

“Sounds like a winter-themed amusement park,” Kurt said.

Rudi jumped in. “I can promise you, there was little to be amused about during that era. If the Snowball Earth Theory is correct, the entire planet was frozen.”

“Like an ice age?” Joe asked.

“Worse,” Rudi said. “Consider it a super ice age. One that would bury all the major land masses in glaciers a mile deep. It would turn the upper layer of the oceans into ice, beneath which briny slush would ooze and barely move. If the theory is to be believed, only a narrow band around the equator remained warm enough for water to remain liquefied and thus support life.”

“Pretty sure my toes would have been cold,” Kurt said. “How does this connect with Cora and whatever she might have been searching for in Antarctica?”

Yaeger jumped back in to explain. “Yvonne’s dissertation proposed that one cause of this Snowball Earth era was microbes that no longer exist today. Her research showed that these microbes became so efficient at removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere that they left only traces of carbon dioxide and methane behind. The result was a crystal clear atmosphere with no greenhouse blanket left to warm it.”

Joe chimed in. “Like the way a desert at night is a whole lot colder than a tropical island even if the desert is much hotter during the day.”

“That’s the exact effect,” Yaeger said. “But further compounding this effect is the reflection issue.”

“Which is?” Kurt asked.

“The obvious effect of cold temperatures on water,” Yaeger said. “Turning it to snow and ice. With the Earth cooling rapidly, snow fell more often and stayed a lot longer. Eventually, the continents were covered in snowpack year-round and most of the world’s oceans were crusted over with ice. This coating reflected a much larger percentage of the incoming solar radiation back into space than what’s reflected today. So instead of absorbing heat in the daylight hours, the planet was cooling during the day as well as cooling at night.”

“A classic negative feedback loop,” Kurt noted. “The colder it got, the more it cooled down. So how, precisely, did the world get out of this super ice age?”

“No one’s quite sure,” Yaeger said. “Some scientists disagree with the theory based on the belief that the planet could not escape such a frozen state and therefore it could never have happened. Others point to a meteor impact or a strong wave of volcanic activity as events that would impart enough energy to begin the thaw. While those ideas are still being debated, Yvonne proposed a second theory that took this idea further, applying it on a smaller scale to the regular reoccurrence of normal ice ages, which have been coming and going for the last million years with incredible consistency.”