Clive Cussler - Fast Ice

She dropped beside Captain Laskey, hoping against reason that she might find a pulse, but he was cold and stiff. “What have I done?” she said, sobbing. “What have I done?”

Tears streamed down her face, while waves of guilt surged through her body. She was the cause of this brutal attack. Her discovery had made them all a target. And now, somehow, only she remained alive.

The sobbing subsided quickly. Her body was too tired to conjure more emotion. She looked up, her attention drawn to a strange beeping sound.

Standing once more, she moved to the helm. The ship was moving in a westerly direction, but there was no one to control it.

She glanced out the bridge windows. Open ocean lay ahead of them, dotted here and there with whitecaps and a few chunks of free-floating ice.

She looked to the radio shack and found it had been shot to pieces. The chirping alarm was coming from somewhere else. She scanned the damaged control console and spied a flashing indicator on its panel.

Water was coming in and the bottom deck was flooding. The bilge pumps were operating, but the watertight doors were stuck in the open position.

The Grishka was riding low. She could feel it wallowing in the swells. They were taking on more water than the pumps could handle.

She gave up on calling for help. If she didn’t stop the water from rising, the Grishka would be long gone before anyone arrived to rescue her.

She stumbled from the bridge, moving as fast as her injured feet would allow. Reaching the center stairwell, she was able to drop down quickly, arriving on the lower deck near a small laboratory where she’d spent much of her time.

The place had been ransacked. Everything turned over and taken. “Of course,” she muttered to herself. “That’s what they came for.”

It was irrelevant now, nothing mattered but saving the ship. She passed through the laboratory and reached the cold-storage vault, where her team had preserved the hundreds of ice cores taken from the glaciers over the last month.

The frigid compartment was also empty, the ice cores had been removed.

At the far end of the compartment, she came to a circular hatch. A ladder dropped through it straight down into the bilge. The sailors called it a scuttle.

She looked through the scuttle to see water swirling on the deck below. It bubbled and churned, flowing in from a hidden puncture.

She climbed down through the scuttle and stepped into it calf-high. The flooding was coming from the next compartment, spilling over the sill under the door. The door was closed but hadn’t sealed properly.

That was no surprise. Not on a forty-year-old ship that had survived storms, groundings and at least two collisions. Time and work had done hidden damage to the bones of the vessel. As a result, the bulkheads were slightly warped and none of the hatches were truly watertight. If she was going to survive, Cora needed to make this one secure.

Knee-deep in the frigid water, Cora struggled to think.

She knew enough about damage control to give her a fighting chance. She grabbed a towel and a section of pipe from a workbench. Rolling the towel up, she wedged it into the curved gap, forcing it into place with the pipe. Smashing a chair to get bits of wood, she jammed those into place as well, using them like shims.

Standing up straight, she felt suddenly dizzy. She stumbled backward and nearly lost her balance. She dropped the pipe and grabbed the ladder to keep from falling.

When the vertigo passed, she looked over at her work. She’d cut the flow of water in half, yet it was still coming in. Even at this rate, it would slowly flood the ship, filling the lower deck and rising through gaps and scuttles that were no longer sealed properly.

The sinking appeared inevitable.

Physically exhausted, Cora sagged with the weight of the moment. Though her body was spent, her mind was still churning.

She wouldn’t give up. Not now, not after finding what she’d been after for years and having it taken from her. Not after seeing friends and colleagues murdered for it.

She thought of her training, of her time with NUMA. There had to be a way to stop the ship from sinking. There had to be.

She looked around in all directions and then upward through the scuttle and into the storage vault. An idea came to her. An idea so brilliant, she couldn’t help but smile.

With all the energy she had left, Cora climbed back up the ladder and found all she needed to save the dying ship.

3

POTOMAC RIVER

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Cold air whipped past Kurt Austin’s face as he leaned backward, his right hand hauling on a rope, his left gripping the tiller beside him.

A triangular sail stretched taut ahead of him, filled to capacity by the brisk north wind. The strain on the sail bent a carbon fiber mast forward, pulling Kurt’s small craft at breakneck speed.

Though his vessel was powered by the wind and racing along the Potomac River, it was no sailboat or schooner. Kurt was at the helm of an ice yacht, a tripod-shaped craft with a long, thin body and runners attached to the bottom of the hull. One blade was set forward, in the nose, with two others connected to a pair of outriggers stretching away from him on either side.

The stainless steel runners were shaped like samurai swords, their sharpened edges cutting into the frozen surface of the Potomac and allowing the yacht to corner hard in the turns and run fast on the straightaways.

Gazing ahead, Kurt focused on a brightly colored pylon. He was approaching it rapidly. Too rapidly.

He loosened his grip on the rope, spilling some of the wind from the sail. At the same moment, he swung his body around, switching sides from the right to the left. Seated again, he leaned back and started the turn.

The ice yacht rounded the pylon, cutting hard. Its forward runner chattered as it scraped across the ice. The far runner took the strain and held.

Despite Kurt’s effort, the runner beneath him came up in the air and the entire craft threatened to heel, riding only on the other blade. Kurt leaned farther, stretching his body and straining his muscles, to keep the yacht from tipping.

As he guided the yacht onto the straightaway, the tipping force vanished and the runner beneath Kurt dropped back on the ice. With all three blades digging into the frozen surface, the machine shot forward.

A voice on the headset Kurt wore expressed relief. “That was close, Kurt. For a second, I thought I was going to have to call the paramedics.”

“Walk in the park,” Kurt replied. “But, um, keep the number handy. I can’t promise we won’t wreck.”

The voice on the other end of the line was that of Joe Zavala, Kurt’s closest friend. Joe had helped build the ice yacht, working on the sail and the fiberglass body.

“There’s no ‘we’ out on that yacht,” Joe said with a laugh . “Just ‘you.’ And just so you know, I took out triple insurance on that machine. If you wipe out, I’ll be a rich man. So, pour on the speed.”

Kurt laughed and adjusted his position, getting into the most aerodynamic shape possible. He was on the straightaway, heading toward Joe, with the wind gusting from directly behind him. If he was going to break his own personal speed record, it would happen now.

“Going for one hundred,” he said.

“Let it run. I’ll call out the speed as you near the finish line.”

Kurt pulled the sail taut once again, drawing his arms in and holding the rope in a grip of steel.

Though he’d spent half his life at sea, Kurt had never been a big fan of soft water sailing. It was too slow and ponderous, requiring too much work for such ordinary speeds and offering too much idle time between moments of activity.