Ice Hunt

UNDER THE ICE…

Aboard the Polar Sentinel, Amanda crouched beside Captain Greg Perry. Together they studied the monitor of the sub’s DeepEye sonar. Others gathered behind them, some watching the screen, others staring out the Lexan eye of the sub.

Greg rested a hand on her knee. He was clearly not letting her out of his reach…and she was fine with this arrangement.

Half an hour ago, back at Omega, she had been in full panic. She had struggled to raise the alarm among the others—about the deceit planned by the Delta Force leaders and of the nerve-jangling sonar frequency, indicating the presence of grendels. But it hadn’t been grendels. It had been the Polar Sentinel activating its DeepEye sonar.

Before she could even get Commander Sewell’s attention, the double doors to the barracks had popped open and Greg had rushed into the room with a small squad. He had ordered everyone to remain quiet.

Too shocked by the miracle, Amanda had flown into his arms. Ignoring decorum, he had pulled her to him, kissed her, and whispered that he loved her.

Together, they had waited until the Delta Force helicopter lifted off. Then they were all running. With Greg in the lead, they raced through the shadows to the oceanography shack. Inside, Amanda found a strange sight. Thrust up within the lab’s main research room stood the conning tower of the Polar Sentinel. The sub had surfaced its tower through the square hole cut in the ice. The small port was normally used by the oceanographers to raise and lower their two-man bathysphere. But now it serviced the sub’s tower, the proverbial square peg in a round hole.

With time ticking down, the party had fled into the submarine.

As soon as all were aboard, Greg had ordered the submarine to crash-dive. The Polar Sentinal fell away like a brick. They were at forty fathoms when the Russian V-class incendiaries blew off the top of their world.

Amanda had been in Cyclops at the time. She had witnessed the blinding flash, the impossible sight of flames shooting down through the water. The submarine had been rocked, shoved deep, but with the insulation of almost three hundred feet of water, they had survived, no more than rattled.

Greg had then related her father’s frantic VLF message, his warning about the ultimate mission of the Delta strike team. “I was already here, planning a rescue attempt under the Russians’ noses. I never imagined that I’d have to rescue you from our own forces.” This last was spoken bitterly.

He had also shared the news about her father’s medical condition. A heart attack. But he was recovering well in the naval hospital on Oahu. “Even before he’d let them treat him, he insisted the warning be sent first.”

The timing had saved them.

Now once again, the Polar Sentinel spied from below. This time the submarine hovered beside the inverted mountain of ice that hid Ice Station Grendel. Through the DeepEye’s penetrating sonar, they had watched the assault upon the buried station. It was eerie watching the silent play unfold on the screen, the ghostly images of men and gunfire.

Then the explosion erupted, appearing as a wash of yellow on the monitor.

It slowly cleared.

Greg squeezed her knee, indicating he wanted to speak to her. She turned and looked at him. “I don’t know what we can do to help,” he said. “It looks like the entrance collapsed. They’re trapped in there.”

Over Greg’s shoulder, a figure stirred, moving forward. “Jenny.” It was the woman’s father. He pointed to the screen and tapped one of the phantoms, the form billowy from the sonar. “That’s my daughter.”

Amanda glanced back to him. “Are you sure?”

He leaned forward and ran his finger down the figure’s lower half. “She broke her leg when she was twenty-two. They had to pin it back together.”

Amanda focused the DeepEye slightly. The old man could be right. The penetrating sonar was similar to X rays. And there appeared to be a distinct metallic density in the lower extremities. It could be her.

She turned to John and read the raw fear in his face. He knew it was his daughter. Amanda struggled to think of some other way to rescue Jenny and any other folk trapped between the two forces.

Greg pointed to the monitor. Throughout the upper levels of the station, spats of yellow appeared on the monitor. She didn’t have to read his lips to know what it was. Gunfire.

A large flare of amber flashed midlevel in the station.

She turned to him.

“Grenade,” he mouthed.

She turned back as flashes and flares continued to descend into the depths of the station.

It was all out-war.

8:22 P.M.

ICE STATION GRENDEL

Another grenade exploded, rocking the floor under Jenny. In her arms, she held the Inuit boy. He screamed and sobbed, covering his ears, squeezing his eyes tightly closed. She rocked him as she crouched.

Matt hovered over them both, a rifle in his hand.

Screams and shouts wafted up the central shaft, along with billows of smoke and soot. Fires were raging somewhere below. Most of the base was steel, brass, and copper. But a significant part of its infrastructure was straw and flammable composites.

It was burning.

Even if the Delta Force team could commandeer the station, what then? They would either die in flames or be buried in the ice as the station collapsed.

And then there was always the third possibility.

Hovering amid the column of smoke, the large titanium sphere rested on the elevator platform. One of the soldiers, a demolition expert, knelt in front of an open hatch at the bottom of the sphere. He had been studying it for the past ten minutes, tools spread at his knees, untouched. It was not a good sign.

Craig barked at her shoulder as the gunfire ebbed below. He was yelling into his radio while he surveyed the level. Two other Delta Force soldiers held positions by the shaft. The remainder of the squad continued its guerrilla war down below.

Lowering his throat mike, Craig stepped to them. He eyed the collapsed exit. “There’s no way for the few men left above to dig us out. It would take days. Any attempt to blast a way through with a missile would just get us all killed.”

“So what are they going to do?”

Craig closed his eyes, then opened them. He stared over to the bomb. “I ordered them to stand down, to retreat thirty miles off. I can’t risk losing the journals.”

“Thirty miles?” Matt asked. “Isn’t that overkill?”

Craig nodded to the device being examined over the shaft. “It’s nuclear. That’s as much as Sergeant Conrad can tell us right now. Unless we can deactivate it…” He shrugged.