Iceberg

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?"

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."

"Run-of-the-mill?" Neth sounded almost surprised. "Garden variety? Thank you, Sloan, for your highly enlightening description. I can hardly wait to visit there someday." He turned to Rapp. "What's our altitude?"

Rapp kept his eyes glued straight ahead. "One thousand feet. The same altitude we've been at all day… and yesterday… and the day before that-"

"Just checking, thank you," Neth interrupted pontifically. "You'll never know, Rapp, how increasingly secure my old age becomes with your able talents at the controls."

He fitted a battered pair of flying goggles to his eyes, braced himself for the blasting cold, and opened his side window for a closer look. "Here she is," motioning to Rapp. "Make a couple of passes, and we shall see what we shall see."

It took only a few seconds for Neth's face to feel like the embattled surface of a pin cushion; the icy air tore at his skin until it thankfully turned numb. He gritted his teeth and kept his eyes glued to the berg.

The huge ice mass looked like a ghostly clipper ship under full sail as it floated gracefully beneath the cockpit windows. Rapp eased the throttles back and twisted the controls slightly, sending the patrol plane into a wide, sweeping bank to port. He ignored the bank and turn indicator and judged his angle by peering over Neth's shoulder at the gleaming mound of ice.

Three times he circled, waiting for a sign from Neth to level the plane out. Finally Neth pulled his head in and picked up the microphone.

"Hadley! That berg is as bare as a newborn baby's ass."

"There's something down there, Lieutenant," Hadley came back. "I've got a beautiful blip on my-"

"I think I've spotted a dark object, skipper," Sloan interrupted. "Down near the waterline on the west face."

Neth turned to Rapp. "Swing down to a hundred feet."

It took only minutes for Rapp to comply. More minutes passed and still he circled the berg, holding the aircraft's speed a bare twenty miles an hour above stalling.

"Closer," Neth murmured intently, "another hundred feet."

"Why don't we simply land on the damn thing," Rapp offered conversationally. If he was overly concerned, he didn't look it. His face wore the expression of one who was about to fall asleep. Only the tiny beads of sweat on his brow betrayed the total concentration upon the risky flying job at hand. The blue swells seemed so near, he felt as if he could reach past Neth's shoulder and touch them. And to add fuel to his growing tenseness, the walls of the iceberg now towered above the plane, the summit disappearing entirely above the frames of the cockpit windows. One twitch, he thought, one tricky air current, and the port wing tip could catch on a wave crest and instantly transform the giant aircraft into a self-destructing cartwheel.