“Don’t know, Jay,” his buddy called from the second fighter jet. “I didn’t expect it to be so big.”
Jockey was amazingly calm. He always got calm when the stress was high, and right now he sounded like he might nod off.
“Let’s intercourse those cold bitches,” Captain Jerome “Jay” White said, and he headed for Cone Alpha.
“Affirmative.” Jockey zeroed in on Cone Beta.
They were armed with something new—nuclear bunker busters, which made all previous bunker busters look like firecrackers. These babies were designed to create a narrow percussive shock like nothing ever witnessed before. Theoretically, it would turn carbon into consommé.
That was the idea anyway. They had only been monkey-rigged into existence within the past forty- eight hours and nobody knew what they would actually do.
White leveled off at thirty thousand feet and approached the cone. Luckily the gap at the top was open like a funnel, a mile across. It wouldn’t be a tough target. The steam pressure—Jay had been told—would slow the bomb during its descent, so it shouldn’t impact hard enough to disable it. The fins would shear off at a certain pressure level and allow it to penetrate even deeper through the steam until it reached the correct altitude for detonation. The correct altitude was three or four miles below the visible surface, where a vent of rock allowed the release of all that superheated water.
It would blow, collapse the vent and the cone, and that hole would be corked. For how long, nobody knew.
“I’m dropping my package,” White announced, and hit the button sequence that sent the bomb down into the billowing steam shaft.
“Mine’s going now,” Jockey replied a moment later.
Jay sped away and banked steeply, and witnessed the collapse of the cone. It was too big to be real. It was like watching the Rocky Mountains collapse into rubble.
“Christ, the tremor is unbelievable,” announced the commander at base, thousands of miles away.
“You seeing this?” Jay asked.
“On video it looks like the steam is stopped,” the base commander said.
“Yeah, it’s stopped. Jockey?”
A hundred miles away, at the remains of Cone Beta, Jockey whooped. “She’s plugged up tight!”
“Keep an eye on those bitches,” the commander ordered.
Jay and Jockey traded jokes for a half an hour as they each made wide, lazy circles over the fields of crumbled ice where the cones had been. Jay descended to two thousand feet, eyes on the alert for traces of steam.
At the geographic South Pole, the seismic team had been watching the needles. They had jumped all over the paper when the cones crumbled, and then there were just a few shivers.
Twenty-two minutes after the bombs, the shivers became substantial tremors.
“Just more settling,” the seismologist said dismissively.
“Not pressure?” asked the Department of Defense liaison on the open radio channel.
“Too big, too soon. It’ll take a while for pressure to start building.”
Another series of shakes sent the needles flying. The seismologist eyed the black marks suspiciously. “Man, that’s steady.”
“For settling?” his liaison demanded.
“It has to be settling.”
“Why?”
“Because pressure can’t build up that fast. I’ve crunched the numbers. The pressure coming out of those vents was something we could estimate and account for.”
“What if the pressure increases?” his DOD liaison asked.
“Enough to break through again? Can’t happen—not that fast.”
The needle clicked against the sides of the paper feed.
“I’m calling my men out of there,” the DOD liaison declared.
Jay answered the call. “Yeah, base?”
“You boys increase your altitude right away. I mean now.”
“Understood.”
“Acknowledge, Jockey,” their base commander demanded.
“Understood. I’m—” Jockey shouted something wordless.
Jay banked hard, just in time to see the distant, tiny bomber intersect with the mile-wide steam shaft that had just spewed from the crumbled ice. The force of the shaft must have been tremendous—it sent Jockey’s jet tumbling up into the sky. The G-forces were unthinkable. Jockey would already be dead.
Jay yanked the stick and fed fuel to the engines, and began climbing steeply. Below him, where there had been nothing just seconds ago, the Antarctic exploded open and ten thousand tons of ice fragments were hurled skyward. It was ice dust by the time it buffeted the aircraft. Jay knew what would come next.
A fraction of a second later, the bomber was engulfed in superheated steam. The impact killed Jay White before the heat could even reach him.
Chapter 47
Remo paddled the little canoe slowly across the empty surface of the sunny tropical ocean.
“I feel like a guy on the front of a vacation brochure,” he growled. “Not some idiot squid chaser.”
“You are not chasing the squid. It is the other way around,” Chiun reminded him.
“Instead of you, I ought to have a blond babe in a bikini,” Remo observed. “If this were a vacation brochure, I mean.”
“Do not ever think of asking me to wear a bikini.”
Remo glared at the horizon unhappily. “I’m going in.”
“You will not!”
Remo paddled them for another ten minutes. There was no sign of the squid.
“Little Father, I’m going in.”
Chiun sighed. “I know.”
“It’s the right thing to do,” Remo said.
“It will be your death,” Chiun said simply.
Remo glowered. “You told me to find my instinct and then honor it with faith. I have faith in this decision.”
“That does not mean it is the correct decision.” Remo knew he had a good reason all ready, but he didn’t know just how to put it into words. “Chiun, I looked back at what happened at that castle in Scotland and I was filled with all this regret for something that didn’t happen. Now I’m acting on faith, and maybe preventing something worse from happening. If I fail, so what?”
Chiun’s eyes flashed. “I have explained to you just what may occur if you are enslaved by the thing that awaits you in there.”
“But so what? In the end, Sa Mangsang wins, right? With me as his gofer or without me. Maybe if I go there I can do something about this whole mess.”
“You cannot,” Chiun declared. “I will allow this only if I accompany you.”
Remo nodded. “I know.”
They made it to the sailboat without being attacked. They set sail and headed into the Corridor. No squid.
“Of course not. They want you to come,” Chiun pointed out. “When they attacked us it was only to protect their precious Faithful.”
The squid showed themselves again as the current began to pick up under the sailboat. A ring of colossal creatures bobbed just under the surface behind the boat.
“Don’t worry. We’re not changing our minds,” he shouted.
The squid were taken by the current just as surely as the sailboat. Remo collapsed the sails and he and Chiun stood on either side of the small craft, shifting their own weight to compensate for the gyrations of the craft in the current.
“There’s land,” Remo announced finally. “What a mess,” he added minutes later, as they began to make out the jungle of shipwrecks that lined the shore.
“Our boat shall join the others,” Chiun said.
“Hey, I gave that nice man a security deposit,” Remo said.
But there was nothing that could be done. As the current slung the tiny craft at the dark basalt slope, Chiun and Remo stepped out on either side and ran up the shore. The sailboat skidded over the rock and bellied up against the hull of a Coast Guard cutter that had been there for days.