Clive Cussler - Fast Ice

“Did he?” Kurt asked. “I know that’s what he said, look at the way he said it. He claimed ‘Antarctica was a worthless wasteland’ and that an oil spill would be ‘good for the environment.’ All that did was raise the volume of the conversation up to eleven. It invited attacks not only on his company but on every other corporation that ever dreamed of industrializing Antarctica. Effectively ending any possibility of it ever happening.”

“You think he doth protest too much,” St. Julien said, vaguely quoting Hamlet.

“I do,” Kurt replied. “No CEO talks like that. They promise to drill cleanly. They insist they’ll use best environmental practices and blah-blah-blah . . . Even if they don’t mean it, they say it. And that’s because they want the world to relax and let them go about their business. Yet Ryland doesn’t play that game. He invites the firestorm, he stirs it up, stoking it, pouring fuel on it, making it impossible for anyone listening to forget what drilling and fracking and mining do to the planet.”

“There are plenty of powerful people who think they can say whatever they want and the rest of us should just deal with it,” Rudi said.

“True,” Kurt said. “But ignore what he says and look at what he does. He claims to value profits above all else, yet according to Wall Street he never manages to make one. His mines don’t produce much, his oil wells are old and declining. Instead of sinking more wells or turning to methods like fracking or high-pressure injections, he just lives with a dwindling income and borrows more money.”

Kurt took a breath and then continued. “His personal actions are even more of a giveaway. His game lodge had a large aquarium on the main floor. I noticed a pair of endangered species tucked safely inside. His preserve is home to lions and tigers and elephants rescued from zoos and circuses. According to what Leandra told us, there are three hundred black rhino on his property. These are rare, nearly extinct creatures numbering only a few thousand left in the rest of the world.”

“As I understand it, those animals are there to be hunted for sport.”

“One or two, perhaps,” Kurt admitted. “Not the younger animals or the breeding pairs. And even that’s all just part of the show.”

Perlmutter spoke up. “So, if he’s not this base industrialist, who is he?”

“An ally of Yvonne’s,” Kurt said. “A partner instead of an enemy. He once told a reporter he and his sister were ‘of one mind and purpose.’ I’m suggesting they still are.”

Rudi nodded. “That would explain why he took her off the ship after they shot everyone else.”

“It would also explain how he knew about the ship in the first place,” Kurt said. “It would explain how he knew what it was carrying and where to find it and how to intercept it. It would explain why a half dozen of the crew were shot dead in their bunks.”

“Because Yvonne shot them while they were sleeping,” Rudi said.

Kurt nodded.

St. Julien shook his head sadly. “Poor Cora.”

“Poor Cora indeed,” Rudi added. “She thought they were being followed and tracked, she thought they were in danger. She never guessed the mole was her partner in crime.”

Kurt wondered if Cora had an inkling who it was that had betrayed her. The secret message she’d sent to Rudi suggested she was worried it might be someone close to her. “The bottom line is, once Yvonne knew that Cora was going to share what she’d found with NUMA, Ryland had no choice, he had to take action. He couldn’t wait for the ship to reach Cape Town because there was always a chance that a NUMA vessel would meet them before they got home. Or that Cora would send more information.”

“If they’re all on the same side, why turn on Cora?” Gamay asked.

“Because in the end,” Kurt said, “Cora was one of us and not one of them. And what they’re planning to do is not something a reasonable person would come up with.”

“Which is what?” Rudi asked.

Kurt could only guess at this point, but he had a fairly good idea. “They’re going to use what Cora discovered to cause a new ice age, maybe even turn the world back into Snowball Earth.”

33

Rudi considered Kurt’s theory. “Bury the world in ice,” he said. “What would be the point? Where’s the profit in that?”

“There isn’t one,” Kurt said. “Not in dollars. But Ryland is an unreasonable man. He measures himself by how successfully he bends the world to his will. For a person like that, altering the course of humanity would be the ultimate victory. The ultimate act of vainglory.”

Perlmutter raised another objection. “I must point out, my boy, that if Ryland is truly an environmentalist, he’d be aware of the damage an ice age would cause. It would wipe out as many species as any level of global warming. If not significantly more.”

Gamay, a biologist, chimed in next. “An ice age would be devastating. Anything close to a Snowball Earth would qualify as a mass extinction.”

“Ryland has spent billions on large tracts of land in multiple countries along the equator,” Kurt said. “This makes absolutely no sense if he’s expecting a radically hotter world. If he’s expecting an ice age, it makes all the sense in the world. These holdings are isolated and remote. In most cases, they’re hundreds of miles from the nearest population center. And if we look close enough, we’ll see that they are self-sufficient and easily defendable. These holdings are his ships made of gopher wood. His Noah’s arks. He can fill them with whatever animals he chooses. He can breed different species, keep them in captivity or let them roam free. But as the rest of the world slowly freezes, his sanctuaries along the equator will be largely unaffected.”

“That works for the islands as well,” Joe pointed out. “He’s bought at least two dozen islands. They’re dotted throughout the tropical seas. If the ice age happens and the glaciers rebuild themselves, the seas will drop, we know that. Depending on the severity of the ice growth, sea level could fall a hundred feet. At that point, his low-lying islands would look more like a Tahitian paradise than atolls just barely poking up above the surface.”

Kurt nodded. “And just like the landlocked preserves he’s set up, these islands are all a long way from civilization.”

“Safe zones,” Gamay suggested.

Rudi shook his head. “He’d have to be deranged. And we’ve encountered enough madmen to know this type of God complex exists. As a friend of mine used to say, when a lunatic is shooting at you, you don’t stop and wonder what made the man go crazy. You get a rifle and fire back. So, assuming you’re right, and that Ryland and his sister are hell-bent on causing a new ice age, how do you propose we stop him?”

“We beat him to the punch and cut him off at the pass.”

“Which is?”

“The glacier. And the lake that Captain Jurgenson landed on,” Kurt said. “For Ryland’s plan to work, he needs to transport large quantities of the algae from the lake to the sea. The most efficient way to do that is by pumping them. Considering that Eileen Tunstall’s company makes turbines for pipeline systems, I’d bet that Ryland’s building a conduit, one that runs directly from glacial lake to ocean.”

“That should be easy enough to spot,” Rudi pointed out. “And to destroy.”

“Not this one,” Kurt said. “It won’t be made of iron and steel. It’ll be a tunnel through the ice, right through the heart of the glacier and out to the ocean. It might be hundreds of feet beneath the surface, which will make it impervious to whatever type of bomb you throw at it.”

“That’s one hell of a tunneling job,” Rudi said.