They spent most of the day within two miles of the Phoenix, attempting to wrangle the smaller pieces of ice into a large seine Zubov had rigged behind the craft. The thick radiation suits that protected Byrnes and Zubov were clearly nor designed for this kind of work; movement was awkward, and as the day warmed to twenty degrees Fahrenheit, the interior climate of the suits became stifling.
Zubov actually welcomed the chance to uncoil himself from the low cockpit and climb out onto the cushion to maneuver the ice into the seine using a long piece of steel rebar. Even under comparatively calm conditions, the sea surface was a problem: huge chunks of ice floated everywhere in fractured assemblages rising from the water a few inches to ten feet. In addition to navigating the tight and treacherous confines, both men in the hovercraft had to keep constant watch that they didn’t back over the seine itself — at one point Byrnes compared the process to trying to spread a picnic blanket from the basket of a Tilt-A-Whirl. Worst of all were the heavier, overturned “blue” bergs that lurked just under the surface. They were as hazardous as a submerged log, or “deadhead,” to an ordinary boat. A deadhead could tear the keel off a boat, or worse, suddenly upend it and toss its occupants into the water.
As if the driving process wasn’t demanding enough, the ice itself seemed determined to mock their efforts, allowing itself to be wrangled only in infrequent and patronizing intervals. The largest pieces were far too heavy to tow, even for the craft’s ample horsepower. The smallest pieces hardly seemed worth the effort, but following Zubov’s direction and profanity-laced encouragement, they repeatedly packed the seine. When filled, it would be towed back to the larger nets strung between the Phoenix, the North Sea, and the Vagabond, where its meager but essential load was deposited. The smaller pieces not only increased the total surface area available to receive the Ulva, but also kept the larger pieces from rolling against each other and destabilizing the load in the nets.
“Nice work, fellas,” someone called down from the North Sea. “At this rate you should have a hundred square yards collected by the year 3000.”
“Great idea, Brock,” Byrnes muttered under his breath as he reversed the craft and pulled around for another load. “Really glad we listened to you.”
“Now you understand my pain,” Zubov said as he stepped through the hatch to attend to the next herd of ice.
On the bridge of the Phoenix, Carol had regained a regimented command that would be the envy of any field general. The skeleton crew that remained aboard continued to work in round-the-clock shifts to control all the ship’s main functions and, under Junko’s watchful direction, monitor everyone’s overall health and analyze the data coming in from the gamma spectrometers. Despite their grumbling, Byrnes and Zubov were working minor miracles with the hovercraft, chasing down the smaller fragments of floating ice as effectively as any sheepdog. The captains of the North Sea and the Vagabond maintained their flanking positions with an expert hand, confidently steering the ungainly, forty-five-thousand-ton wagon train in a direct path along the slick.
Roland Alvarez called from Dalhousie and described to Carol what he believed would be the most likely place to find surface concentrations of Ulva morina.
His first and second suggestions were off the southern and eastern coasts of Iceland, respectively, but there was no way the water bombers would have that kind of range. His third choice was off the southern tip of Greenland, not quite half the distance, but they would be gambling that the area would have enough Ulva for their needs. To confirm or refute this, Alvarez needed to consult the regional mean water temperatures over the preceding winter, and he had yet to find the data he needed. If anything, he suggested hopefully, the spring conditions and the breakup of the pack ice greatly improved their chances of finding Ulva spores floating freely in the surface waters of the Atlantic.
Averaging just twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, the area south of Greenland typically had the coldest surface temperatures of any ocean in the world, conditions in which the microscopic Ulva apparently thrived.
Armed with this news, Carol elected to gamble. Within hours, the Canadian government had commandeered the only flight of Martin Mars bombers east of the Rocky Mountains and Carol relayed the flight plan to the bomber crews. Three bombers would collect the Ulva from the waters offshore of Nuuk, then head almost directly west some seven hundred miles to the corridor of ocean containing the slick. Together, the three planes could douse nearly twelve acres of the surface with the Ulva solution, dropping more than twenty-one thousand gallons of the displaced seawater onto the site in less than a minute.
Once the surface water had been seeded with the algae, the three icebreakers would continue their journey east, toward the containment booms moving up Fury and Hecla Strait. After much discussion with the ships’ crews and the biologists among them, it was clear that the ice would have to be towed slowly enough to allow the Ulva to take up the hot Thiouni and adhere itself to the ice, yet quickly enough to collect all the algae in this manner before it began to settle from the surface waters. The phytoplankton cells were too small to be killed by the two-hundred-foot drop from the belly of the bombers, but no one was willing to bet that the Ulva would not be destroyed by sudden changes in salinity, temperature, or air pressure. In Halifax, Alvarez and his students were trying to find out.
To the east, now just forty miles off and closing slowly, the Des Groseilliers and the Sovietsky Soyuz had received their containment booms and were attempting to define the best place to position them.
First they needed to isolate the slick between the five vessels three to the west and two to the east. As a containment pen was rigged around the condensed slick and the coordinates confirmed, the team would begin dredging the sediment and open a pit in the seafloor big enough to bury the solid mass of Plasroc.
All this only if Garner was right. This time Carol knew he was really pushing it.
She had been keeping a constant eye on the weather reports and was anticipating the thick gray bank of clouds that appeared hours later on the western horizon.
For once, unfortunately, the forecasts of the meteorologists had been correct.
With the front came low level fog mixed with snow flurries, and soon after that, all communication with Garner and Krail faded out. Frisch assured her it was only a temporary condition.
Communicating with Garner directly did not seem to be an option at the moment.
The bulk of the bad weather now sat squarely between B-82 and the Phoenix and was slowly whirling and churning its way in their direction. While messages could be relayed from the Rushmore to the Des Groseilhers, then back to the Phoenix, direct communication with the Rushmore seemed to be temporarily interrupted. Frisch said it was because of the atmospheric disturbance created by the storm and launched into some long-winded discussion about how radio waves could bounce off the ionosphere at certain angles, spanning hundreds of miles over one arc, but completely missing another.
“So much for all our high-tech toys,” Carol muttered. “Can we work around it?”