Ice Hunt

“These underwater devices have no military application?” Mikovsky pressed. “Like listening in on the Americans?”

Viktor simply glanced over and shrugged. He allowed the captain to misread his silence. It was sometimes best to allow someone’s suspicions to run to the most obvious conclusion.

“Ah…” Mikovsky nodded, eyeing the sphere with more respect, believing he understood the intrigues here.

Viktor turned his own attention back to the monitors. Over the years, the young captain might learn that there were deeper levels to the games played by those in power.

A decade ago, Viktor had employed a handpicked team of scientists from AARI and began a covert project out of Severomorsk Naval Complex. Such a venture was not unique. Many polar research projects were run out of Severomorsk. But what was unusual about this particular project, titled Shockwave, was that it was under the direct supervision of then-captain Viktor Petkov. The researchers answered directly to him. And in the hinterlands of the northern coastlands, far from prying eyes, it was easy to bury one project among the many others. No one questioned this work, not even when the six researchers on the project had all died in an airplane crash. With their deaths two years ago, so had died Project Shockwave.

Or so it appeared.

No one but Viktor knew the research had already been completed. He stared out as the divers retreated from the sphere of titanium.

It had all started with a simple research paper published in 1979, tying carbon dioxide to the gradual warming of the globe. Fears of melting polar ice caps created horrible scenarios of rising ocean levels and devastating worldwide flooding. Of course, the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg was the central agency in Russia assigned to investigate such threats. It accumulated one of the world’s largest databases on global ice. It was eventually discerned that while the melting of the ice found atop Greenland and the continent of Antarctica could potentially raise the world’s oceans by a dramatic two hundred feet, the northern polar ice cap did not pose such a risk. Since its ice was already floating atop an ocean, it displaced as much water as it would produce if it melted. Like cubes of ice in a full glass of water, the melt of the polar cap would not lead to a rise in ocean levels. It was simply no threat.

But in 1989, one of the AARI researchers realized a greater danger posed if the polar ice cap should suddenly vanish from the top of the world. The ice cap, if gone, would no longer act as an insulator for the Arctic Ocean. Without its ability to reflect the sun’s energy, the ocean would evaporate more rapidly, pouring vast amounts of new water into the atmosphere, which would lead in turn to massive amounts of precipitation in the form of rain, snow, and sleet. The AARI report concluded that such a change in world climate would wreak havoc on weather systems and ocean currents, resulting in flooding, agricultural destruction, ecosystem disintegration, and worldwide environmental collapse. It would devastate countries and world economies.

The hard truth of this prediction was seen in 1997 when a simple shift in currents in the Pacific Ocean, known as El Niño, occurred. According to UN agencies, the cost to the world was over $90 billion and led to the death of over fifty thousand people—and this was a single shift in currents over the course of one year. The loss of the northern polar ice cap would stretch over decades and reverberate over all oceans, not just the Pacific. It would be a disaster unlike any seen during mankind’s history.

So, of course, such a report led to the investigation of any possible military applications. Could one destroy the polar ice cap? Studies quickly showed that the power needed to melt the vast ice sheet was beyond the grasp of even current nuclear technology. It seemed such a possibility would remain theoretical.

But one of the scientists at AARI had come up with an intriguing theory. One didn’t need to melt the cap—only to destabilize it. If the cap were partially melted and the rest of the solid ice sheet shattered, a single Arctic summer could do the rest. With the cap turned into an Arctic slush pile, the sun’s energy would have greater access to a larger surface area of the Arctic Ocean, warming the waters around the fragmented ice, thus leading to the meltdown of the remaining ice pack. One didn’t need man-made nuclear energy to destroy the cap—not when the sun itself was available. If the polar ice cap could be shattered in the late spring, by the end of summer it would be gone.

But how did one destabilize the ice cap? That answer came in 1998 when another scientist from AARI, studying the crystallization of ice in the Arctic ice pack and the relation of ocean currents to pressure ridge formation, came up with his theory of harmonics. That ice was like any other crystalline structure, especially under extreme pressure, and at the right pitch in vibration, its structure could be shattered like a crystal goblet.

It was this study that became the basis for Project Shockwave: to artificially create the right set of harmonic waves and heat signatures to blast apart the polar ice cap.

On the monitor, the titanium sphere glowed out in the dark waters as the sub’s exterior lights dimmed. Viktor checked his thick wrist monitor. The plasma screen depicted a five-pointed star. Each point glowed. In the center, the master trigger awaited deployment.

It wouldn’t be long.

Victor stared at the glowing points on the wrist monitor.

The dead scientists had named this configuration the Polaris Array, after the Polyarnaya Zvezda, the North Star. But the nuclear-powered master trigger went by a more technical designation: a subsonic disrupter engine. When it was activated, its effect was twofold. First, it would act as a conventional weapon, blasting a crater a mile wide. But next, rather than sending out an EM pulse like a regular nuclear weapon, this engine would transmit a harmonic wave through the ice. The wave front would strike the five spheres simultaneously and trigger them to explode, propagating and amplifying the harmonics in all directions with enough energy and force to shatter the entire polar ice cap.

Viktor cleaned a smudge off the screen of the monitor. Tucked away in the corner of the screen was a small red heart that flashed in sync with his pulse.

Soon…

For now, he would spend the rest of the night running diagnostics on the project, making sure all was in order.

He had waited sixty years…he could wait another day.

In fact, after the completion of Project Shockwave, he had held off implementing his plan for two years. He had found a certain peace of mind in simply having Polaris at his command. Now he believed it had been fate that held his hand. Ice Station Grendel had been rediscovered, the very tomb of his father. Surely this was a sign. He would retrieve his father’s body, collect the prize buried within the heart of the station, and then detonate Polaris, changing the world forever.