The door opened and Hazelton came in with coffee and sandwiches. “I hope you guys like ham salad. That’s all I could find. The coffee’s fresh, though. The general was wondering if…”
Sarah spun the laptop so the man could see the screen. “Look like anyone you know?” she said with a dangerous smile.
Hazelton looked at the screen. “I guess not. Well, uh, good luck. Tell us when…”
“Don’t worry. We’ll let you know,” said Sarah.
A long while later they were still no further along. Hazelton had appeared every hour on the hour. Finally Hayes himself opened the door.
“I just had a pleasant chat with President Kerry,” he said. “He was… inquiring why no images have been received by the FBI in Washington.”
“Trouble is, General,” said Sarah, “Henry here can’t give me much because he didn’t see much. I have three images and will radio what I have at zero eight hundred, but I don’t think it’ll help. Henry saw their faces only, and one of them wore shades.”
Hayes hung his head in disappointment. “Is that the best you can do?”
“Yes, sir.”
Henry looked up at the general. “I’m… we’re really doin’ our best, sir,” he said. “But all I saw was their faces… like she said. Hel, I’m lucky the nuke left me with any memory at all,” he added in frustration.
“What nuke?” said Sarah.
“Gibbs,” interposed the general, “I want you to try some more. We’ll radio what you have from the Glomar icebreaker in an hour.”
He disappeared with the slam of the door.
“Want another sandwich?” said Henry. “I could use some more coffee.”
“What nuke, Henry?”
For the next fifteen minutes he told the full story.
When he’d finished, Sarah sat wide-eyed. “So you were shot twice, left for dead on the ice, hiked fifty miles, and then got nuked?”
“So far.”
She reflected on Henry’s experiences for a second, then asked, “What do you think will happen to the ice?”
“Me? I’m no expert,” said Henry. “I only work here.”
“You must have some kind of idea,” she protested.
“Tell me what you know.”
In truth, Henry had spent many a lonely hour out on the ice reading by lantern light the material available on the subject. For a layman he knew quite a lot about the deep ice. He had read that the Ross Ice Shelf was like a huge glacier. Vast flows of ancient ice, very deep, move slowly from the continent’s interior. Different kinds of ice move in different ways, so ice in one place can flow faster than ice in another; the why of it is still mostly guesswork. In truth, very little was known about the deep ice, because scientists had only recently had the tools or the money to probe its secrets.
“When you realize how deep the ice shelf is, considering its weight and all,” Henry told her, “well, it’s a different kind of animal. Nothing else like it in the whole world. Not a glacier, not a river. It’s a kind of immense thing that moves forever from the pole to the ocean, calving icebergs sometimes as big as whole countries. The ice shelves could supply the world with fresh water forever, if we ever figured out how to do it.”
“So what would a nuke do?” said Sarah. “Nothing, right?”
“Right,” said Henry after a moment’s hesitation.
“Except, if it breaks the ice free of the bedrock and the ice floats. You see, all that thick ice isn’t floating. It’s attached to the rock.”
She stared at him in disbelief as he told her there was water beneath the vast sea of ice. He described the tidal wave that might occur if a major chunk of the shelf should suddenly sink into the water, inundating coastal cities all over the world.
“Are you sure of all this?” she petitioned.
“That’s just it,” Henry replied with a look of sympathy. “Nobody really knows. But if it goes… well, it goes. Mind you, this is all theory. Some scientists think the ice is floating already.”
“Did the nuke crack the ice?”
“Big-time. I saw the shelf crack open myself — with my own eyes. God, you should have heard it!”
He stared past her as he remembered the sound of the ice breaking. “Still, I don’t think it did the job.”
She smiled. As much as Henry wanted to take advantage of that smile, he felt it wasn’t fair to keep her in the dark about the second bomb.
“Hate to tell you this, my friend, but there’s another nuke, and I don’t think anyone but those terrorists knows where it is. If they trigger that one, the shelf could really go.”
Sarah thought for a moment, then her face lit up with a bright idea. “It should be easy to find, though,” she said, looking at her powerbook. “They’ll have planted it where they reckon it’d do the most damage, and they’ll have used a computer to work that out. Assuming they used publicly available data, any other computer fed the same data will make the same estimates of the best place to plant a nuke. Isn’t that right?”
“But of course! Hel, we should tell the general,” said Henry.
He got up and opened the door, calling for Hayes. But Hayes was nowhere to be seen.
“Elvis has left the building,” said Grimes with a grin.
He was sitting at the desk where the general had been, facing the door to the conference room. His feet were up on the desk and he was fiddling with the knobs on a plastic radio. “You two need room service? How about a mint on your pillows?”
Henry ignored Grimes’s heavy comedy and told him about Sarah’s idea.
Grimes sat up. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think we discussed that. But I’ll bet they more’n likely have eggheads tellin’ ’em that right now in Washington.”
Sarah joined Henry in the doorway. Grimes pointed to her. “Your job, miss, as I understand it, is to identify the folks who are trying to turn Antarctica into Swiss cheese. The general wants a picture for his buds in Washington, and he means to have it even if he sends them your picture. Get the drift?”
Henry was growing impatient. “We’ll be sending them shit, Grimes, if it ain’t right. I can see those bastards in my head, but she can’t read my damned mind. Besides, what I remember is three soldiers in parkas with their hoods up, lookin’ like any other motherf… person on the ice.” He glanced at Sarah sheepishly. “Sorry for my language, ma’am.”
She paid his apology no attention. “As Henry says, he can see them in his mind but getting that on screen isn’t easy. Sometimes it takes days.”
“Shit!” said Grimes. “We don’t have days.”
“Let’s keep trying, Henry,” said Sarah. “We still have twenty minutes before the deadline. I want to run some variations. Maybe the computer can hit on a random that’ll do it for you.”
“Not a bad idea,” said Grimes. “By the way, Sarah — that was a good thought. I’ll pass it on to the general when he gets back.”
When the President of the United States next call ed, the general was in his office, in his chair and connected to the Armed Forces intranet’s south polar uplink.
“I’m glad to hear that was the first thing the geologists thought of, sir. Bright boys,” he said into the mouthpiece. He rolled his eyes at Sarah and Henry.
A moment later he winced. “Well, we — you — may be a bit disappointed, sir.” He squirmed in his seat. “But I’m sending the images anyway. I’m uploading them now, sir. You have to realize that Gibbs, the witness, saw them close-up for only a few seconds, and they were dressed like ev…”
The general was apparently interrupted mid- sentence. He nodded at Sarah and Henry. Then he said, “I’ll keep at ’em, sir,” and hung up the phone.