1
CLIVE CUSSLER _ ICEBERG
Prologue
The drug-induced sleep wore off into nothingness, and the girl began the agonizing struggle back to consciousness. A dim and hazy light greeted her slowly opening eyes while a disgusting, putrid stench invaded her nostrils. She was nude, her bare back pressed flat against a damp, yellow, slime-coated wall. It was unreal, an impossibility, she tried to tell herself upon awakening. It had to be some kind of horrifying nightmare. Then suddenly, before she had a chance to fight the panic mushrooming inside her, the yellow slime on the floor rose and began working up the thighs of her defenseless body.
Terrified beyond all reason, she began screaming screaming insanely as the abomination crawled ever upward over the naked sweating skin. Her eyes bulged from their sockets and she struggled desperately.
It was useless-her wrists and ankles were chained tightly to the ooze-covered surface of the wall. Slowly, ever slowly, the ungodly slime crept across her breasts.
And then, just as the unspeakable horror touched the girl's lips, a vibrating roar and a phantom, unseen voice echoed throughout the darkened chamber.
"Sorry to interrupt your study period, Lieutenant, but duty calls."
Lieutenant Sam Neth snapped the book in his hands shut. "Dammit, Rapp," he said this to the sour-faced man seated beside him in the cockpit of the droning aircraft-"every time I come to an interesting part, you butt in."
Ensign James Rapp nodded toward the book, its paperback cover illustrating a girl struggling in a pool of yellow slime-kept afloat, Rapp deduced, by a pair of immense buoyant breasts. "How can you read that crap?"
"Crap?" Neth grimaced painfully. "Not only do you invade my privacy, Ensign, you also fancy yourself my personal literary critic!" He threw his big hands up in mock despair. "Why do they always assign me a copilot whose primitive brain refuses to accept contemporary style and sophistication?" Neth reached over and placed the book in a crudely constructed rack hanging from the side panel by a coat hanger. Several dog-eared magazines, depicting the unclothed female body in numerous seductive positions, also rested in the rack, making it quite apparent that Neth's taste in literature didn't exactly take in the classics.
Neth sighed, then straightened up in his seat and peered through the windshield at the sea below.
The United States Coast Guard patrol plane was four hours, twenty minutes into a dull and routine eight-hour iceberg surveillance and charting mission. Visibility was diamond-clear under a cloudless sky, and the wind barely moved the rolling swells-a unique condition for the North Atlantic in the middle of March. In the cockpit, Neth, with four of the crew members, piloted and navigated the huge four-engined Boeing aircraft, while the other six crewmen took up office in the cargo section, eyeballing the radar scopes and other scientific instruments. Neth checked his watch and then turned the plane on a sweeping arc, settling the nose on a straight course toward the Newfoundland coast.
"So much for duty." Neth relaxed and reached for his horror book.
"Please show a little initiative, Rapp. No more interruptions till we make St. John's."
"I'll try," Rapp responded dourly. "If that book's so absorbing, how about letting me borrow it when you're finished?"
Neth yawned. "Sorry. I make it a point never to lend out my private library." Suddenly the headset crackled in his ear, and he picked up a microphone. "Okay Hadley, what have you got?"
Back in the dimly lighted belly of the plane, Seaman First Class Buzz Hadley stared intently at the radar set, his face reflecting an unearthly green glow from the scope. "I have a weird reading, sir. Eighteen miles, bearing three-four-seven."
Neth clicked the mike switch. "Come, come, Hadley. What do you mean by weird? Are you reading an iceberg, or have you tuned your set into an old Dracula movie?"
"Maybe he's picking up your sexy terror novel," Rapp grunted.
Hadley came back on. "Judging from the configuration and size, it's a berg, but my signal is much too strong for ordinary ice."
"Very well." Neth sighed. "We'll have a look-see."
He frowned at Rapp. "Be a good boy and bring us around to course three-four-seven."
Rapp nodded and turned the control column, executing the course change. The plane, accompanied by the steady roar of the four Pratt-tney piston engines and their endless vibrating beat, gently banked toward a new horizon.
Neth picked up a pair of binoculars and trained them on the unending expanse of blue water. He adjusted the focus knobs and held the glasses as steady as possible against the quivering movement of the aircraft.
Then he glimpsed it-a white inanimate speck, sitting serenely on a glistening sapphire sea. Slowly, the iceberg grew larger inside the two circular walled tunnels of the binoculars as the cockpit's windshield closed the distance. Then Neth picked up the microphone.
"What do you make of it, Sloan?"
2
Lieutenant Jonis Sloan, the chief ice observer aboard the patrol plane, was already studying the berg through a half-open cargo door behind the control cabin.
"Run-of-the-mill, garden variety," Sloan's robotlike voice came over the earphones. "A tabular berg with a mesa top. I'd guess about two hundred feet high, probably about one million tons."