“Chief?” Krail was saying. “Chief? How’s it looking?”
Charon awoke from his reverie, if only to prevent Krail from calling him “Chief” one more time — another disregard for proper rank.
“Give us another hour on B-82 to complete the trigger. Assuming we get all green lights on the trigger panel, we’ll be ready to blow.”
“Excellent, Matt. Excellent.” If “Chief” was bad, “Matt” was worse.
Krail seemed to think that as long as Charon was technically retired from military service, as long as Krail held “situational authority,” he could call Charon anything that came to mind.
“Save it for the blow,” Charon said. “We’re not at the whorehouse yet.”
“Yeah, but the neon sign’s in view.”
Charon closed his eyes again, aware only of the gentle vibration of the hull beneath him and the wire unraveling behind, back into the blackness shrouding his extremely generous gift to his friends in Delhi.
“We haven’t had much need for ice wrangling around here because the pack is either frozen year-round, or the current carries it past us, to the north,” Stimson explained to Garner as he returned from the Phoenix.
The two men were now in the communications van, examining the latest ice-cover data from the NOAA satellites.
“We still practice it, of course, same as lifeboat and fire drills. But it’s a lot easier to do with tugboats and water cannons than what you’re proposing with those big-assed ships. Don’t they have anything smaller they could use to retrieve some more manageable pieces?”
“They have a hovercraft aboard the Phoenix,” Garner mused. “I doubt Byrnes would be fond of intentionally running it over the hot ice, but it’s worth a shot.”
Stimson looked dubious.
“What’s the horsepower?”
“Beats me, but it’s a good-sized vehicle.”
“Too bad we can’t get a couple of the Navy’s hovercrafts up here on short notice,” Stimson said. “I’ll talk to Scott and see what he can do.”
Garner once again reviewed the uncomfortably narrow margin for error between the position of the C-4 array, the cratering charges, and the footprint of the rig itself. Krail was right. There was no way to physically enlarge this distance for greater safety, so the ripple effects produced within five miles of the detonation site were unavoidable no matter how much explosive force was used.
“It’s your house,” Garner said, meaning B-82. “I just hope we don’t huff and puff and blow it all down.”
“The GBS itself is designed to withstand six million tons of ice, which the engineers say we’d only get around here once in ten thousand years,” Stimson said with pride.
“Well, let’s hope this isn’t the year,” Garner cautioned. “I’d say what we’re planning to do in the next few hours throws any engineering specs out the window.”
“Agreed. We’ll be ready for it. Matt has checked in with Krail on the Hawkbill. He’s nearly ready, and they expect to get the fireworks started a little early.”
This was good news. The weather more blowing snow than a true blizzard was still forecast to pass directly over their location before continuing more or less eastward toward the ships performing the containment operation. The key meteorological ingredient was not visibility or wind chill though these would certainly affect the comfort and safety of the containment crews but the wind’s speed.
Sudden strong gusts or erratic whirls could damage or destroy the nets, or, worse, send the slick spinning in a direction radically different than what was anticipated.
The slick, its volume, direction, and degree of radioactivity, was constantly on Garner’s mind. A new color-enhanced image from the NRO polar orbit satellite showed the radioactivity as it stretched across the surface to the east of their location. The angry red swath was now nearly thirty miles long and half a mile wide, gliding steadily through the western terminus of Fury and Hecla Strait.
Once the leak at the bottom of the Devil’s Finger was plugged and the radioactive source cut off, the overall length of the slick would gradually diminish from tail to head, but it would continue to follow the current toward Foxe Basin and, beyond, the North Atlantic. No longer an ice age in the making, but still potentially devastating to the Grand Banks and the eastern seaboard, not to mention the entire fresh water supply for the top of the world. As the Des Groseilliers and the Sovietsky Soyuz started to control the slick with containment booms, the shape of the menace would change once again, pooling into a rounder, deeper formation that might easily sink below or flood over the booms, especially in rough seas. Once the slick was captured and the Ulva and Thiouni-saturated ice pieces were securely corralled, the ice would still have to be neutralized and disposed of as quickly as possible. Garner still hadn’t thought of a way they could do this, and it nagged at the back of his mind, a migraine in the making.
Garner picked up the radio and placed a call to the Phoenix over a secure channel. Frisch patched him through to Byrnes, and Garner relayed their thoughts on using the hovercraft to help wrangle the ice.
“Dammit. Not my best toy,” Byrnes whined. “She’s practically still in the box. The last thing I want to do is get her cooked like everything else on this ship.”
“We haven’t got another choice,” Garner said. “There’s only so much ice you’ll be able to corral between the larger boats. After that, you’ll need to push or pull as many smaller pieces as you can into the nets.” Unlike the wake pushing employed by tugboats and rig support vessels, the hovercraft rode atop the water on a cushion of air. It would have to push much smaller pieces of ice with its rounded nose, and even then, the craft might simply pop up and over the calf it was trying to wrangle. The pieces selected would have to be very small to be manageable, and that meant collecting a daunting number of them, or dynamiting larger pieces into a more cooperative scale.
“Sergei isn’t going to like it,” Byrnes warned. “We just got the A-frame rigged, now we’ll have to pull it all off to remove the hovercraft from the aft hangar.”
“Serg doesn’t like anything,” Garner assured him. “Besides, it’ll be good practice for when he tries to explain the setup to the Soviets. In the meantime, we’ll work on getting some Navy hovercrafts up here.”
Garner heard Byrnes chuckle.
“Sure, why not? Let’s haul even more floating iron up here.”
Garner agreed.
“Either this operation will end up cooking half the U.S. fleet or—”
“Or the polar bears can walk from deck to deck and forget about how contaminated the water is.”
“How are your provisions holding out?”
Byrnes quickly checked with Carol, who conferred with Halford in the galley.
“Water’s fine. Food’s a little low.”
“Don’t tell me you’re down to filet mignon and coq au vin?”
“Those are Crations in Halford’s book.” Byrnes laughed. “He says we’re practically down to crackers and we may have to start eating Jell-o powder right out of the box.”
“Maybe we can scrounge something from B-82 or the Rushmore,” Garner said. “They should have something to spare.”
“Anything. At least some fruit slices to go with the Jell-o. We can do Jell-o, but just Jell-o really sucks.”