“It’s only water on top. There’s ice just under it. If you go fast, you’ll be fine.”
“That water is what… like thirty degrees?”
“In and out,” said Clinton. “Otherwise, it gets deeper east and west of here.”
“But thirty degrees—”
Clinton said calmly, “Just keep moving. The boots are waterproof. If you get wet, the wool socks will keep in heat. What’s the matter, tough Marine? You chicken?”
“I’ll go first,” I said, to shut them up.
He was right. It was easy. The water came up to my ankles. But the ice held, and we passed. The socks held the extreme cold off my feet.
We built up speed, made good time, the wind at our backs for a while, which made no sense, but then, nothing did here. Then the wind dropped and the light turned gray and ahead rose a range of looming shadows. Ice mountains. My heart sank. Ivu, Clinton called it, the upthrust edges of two floes that had collided.
“We have to climb that?” Eddie said beside me. They had to be at least forty feet high. Forty feet of ice. A four-story building. How do you climb up forty feet of ice, with sleds?
Wind hissed down from the saddle shape above, whooshed into our faces, and drove ice pellets into our exposed skin.
Clinton said, “It’s not that hard.”
“Maybe not for you,” Eddie said.
“Either way, Jarhead, you do it.”
“You have a problem with Marines, Clinton?”
“You have a problem with Army, elitist?”
The sleds seemed to weigh double poundage going up over the ice. We all hauled and pulled, helping each other, inching them up, and trying to keep them from crashing down, and finally, exhausted, we got over the top.
One Marine had sprained an ankle. We were beat. We’d been out for seven hours, but had probably suffered an equivalent energy drain of two days of normal athletic activity. The storm had dulled senses and battered bodies and I knew that it might make us careless.
So I called another rest, a longer one, and two sleepless hours later, we pushed off again and made decent time overcoming a much smaller pressure ridge, pros at this now, pushing through an ice field — and two hours after that, from the top of yet another ridge, and through still falling snow, I looked down, a quarter mile ahead, and glimpsed the long dark form of a nuclear submarine along the edge of a lead in the ice.
We made it.
It was like seeing a sub beside the bank of a river, except instead of land on either side, there was solid snow-covered ice, which just looked like land.
I recognized the configuration of the sub.
It was the Montana.
Nearby, on the ice, sat a motley collection of oblong-shaped covered black life rafts, with tented roofs, and a couple of orange Arctic tents. The survivors would be inside. The small generators running the heaters inside the shelters sat on the ice, rumbling and sending up thin plumes of grayish smoke. I saw no people.
My spirits lifted, but as we started down the rubbly incline, the ice began shaking. There was a sound like a railroad train, and the deep vibrations began again, from below. To me it sounded the same as before, but Clinton stopped abruptly, cocked his head, and held a hand up to halt us. He began scanning the ice plain spread out at the foot of the pressure ridge. And we waited with him.
Suddenly I heard a deep ripping noise, a shredding sound reverberating inside the wind, low, alive. It echoed far in the distance, thunder exploding many miles away, except sound was all wrong up here, I knew. So maybe it wasn’t far. Maybe it was close. And then I saw, with horror, only four hundred yards from the collection of tents and rafts, a jagged shadow appear on the surface. It ran quickly toward us for a quarter mile, from the open water right up to the rubbly hills where we stood, watching.
“It’s breaking up,” said Karen. “My God!”
The crack had missed the tents, but it was widening. It stopped suddenly, as if an earthquake had ended.
It’s going to start up again. This ice is unstable.
We climbed down, hauling sleds, in a different sort of race now. At bottom, we raced toward the tents, as men, Montana crew, several upright, in parkas… or on all fours, began emerging into the snow.
They moved like apes, half hunched over, swaying, cavemen, Neanderthals, evolutionary throwbacks. One man fell down. Men waving. Burned, sick men. Now a woman, coughing, half bent.
These were probably the healthier ones.
The ice underfoot was a shattered mirror.
Sick or not, I’ve got to get that crew out, fast.
TWELVE
Captain Zhou Dongfeng, commander of People’s Republic of China nuclear attack submarine type 094, its newest Jin-class underwater craft, lowered his periscope, and ordered the vessel backward, quietly, away from the American Marines skiing toward the crippled USS Montana. He was a medium-sized, thickly black-haired, superbly postured thirty-three-year-old, and he was furious that they’d beaten him here, but he also knew they had no idea he was present. This meant he still might be able to complete his mission.
I have never failed and I will not now, he thought, recalling the admiral’s call to him, a day ago, as he cruised north of Alaska, west of the cyclone. The admiral was a well-known leader in the Chinese Navy, whom Captain Zhou admired, and studied, but had never met.
“The American submarine is carrying the prototype Mark 80 torpedo, most advanced underwater weapon in the world. It is also possible that they carry some bioweapon that released. We have heard there is a strange deadly illness aboard. This sickness greatly troubles me.”
Captain Zhou Dongfeng had beaten long odds since he was ten years old, son of a poor farmer in China’s arid northwest. He’d hated pig farming and had excelled at school, and then at Naval entrance exams, driving himself to succeed, working, sleepless, while all around him, privileged sons of government or military officials rose through the ranks with assisted ease.
Now his ceaseless work had paid off. He had been entrusted with one of the People’s Republic’s newest submarines, dispatched to the High North, a region that Beijing believed would be crucial to the twenty-first century. When the call came, he had been patrolling new ice-free areas, which Beijing believed would soon become shortcuts for Chinese commercial vessels. He was carrying forty crack Marines. Captain Zhou knew that the United States had stationed long-range missiles in Alaska, aimed at China. If war ever came in the future, and more than a few officers he knew believed this a possibility, knowledge of northern routes and undersea terrain could make a difference. Jin-class subs carried nuclear missiles.
“As you know, our relationship with America is bad at the moment,” the admiral had said. “Two weeks ago one of their ships hit a Chinese submarine in the South China Sea, during their war games. The Americans claim this was an accident, that our vessel ran so silently they did not know it was there. Twenty-eight Chinese died. The sub was lost.”
The admiral’s fury was palpable. “Beijing has chosen to accept the U.S. explanation.”
It was clear that the admiral believed, as Captain Zhou did, that the Americans had no business conducting war exercises so close to China, and that the alleged “accident” had been either a deliberate challenge, or the natural result of American aggressive posturing. Neither was acceptable, and the loss of the sub and so many lives had been a humiliation and disaster.