“He’s dead, Carol.” Krail’s voice wavered. “A lot of men are dead.”
Carol’s heart thudded heavily in her chest. “Where’s Brock?” More silence.
“Scott where’s Brock?”
“We don’t know,” Krail admitted. “Tibbits and Dunlop were taking him to your location. They radioed back that they couldn’t find you, then we lost track of them. They may have gone down enroute but we haven’t picked up any locator beacons.”
“Are you looking for them?” Now anger was rising in Carol’s voice.
“Carol, we’ve got other situations on our hands,” Krail said. “If we send anyone else up in this weather they’ll likely come down as hard. We’re trying “
“Then try harder!” she screamed into the microphone, then tossed it at Frisch as she stormed out of the radio room.
Carol headed directly to the airlock and dressed in an exposure suit.
She found Zubov and Byrnes tending to the wrangling nets strung between the Phoenix and the North Sea. About a mile to the west, the third Mars bomber finished releasing its load into the ocean — from there, the surface currents would allow the Ulva to mix with the contaminated Thiouni. They had less than an hour to get the rigging rebuilt and return to pushing the ice together.
“How bad is it?” she asked them.
“Twisted to shit, but we’ll live to bitch another day,” Byrnes said.
Carol nodded at the team of SEALS clambering onto the net from the other end.
“Can those guys handle it alone?”
“If they have to. Why?”
“Get the hovercraft fueled up. Brock was on his way to warn us about the soliton and his helicopter may have gone down.”
Zubov paled.
“Where?”
“That’s what Patrick and I are going to find out,” she said. “They’ve got to be closer to us than them.”
She sensed Zubov’s immediate reservations with this idea.
“Serg, we need you here. And Patrick is the only one checked out to pilot the hovercraft.”
“That’s debatable,” Zubov muttered, still rattled from Byrnes’s bump-and-grind driving style.
“No arguments,” Carol said. She looked at Byrnes. “Let’s go. Now.” She turned on her heel, then grabbed a passing technician by the arm of his suit.
“Looking for something to do?” she asked the young man. “Uh, actually I was gonna—”
“Good. Get someone out there in a Zodiac. Get a water sample and have it analyzed. See if we’ve even got any Ulva here, then find out the cell concentration.”
She turned back to Zubov.
“Get up to the bridge and see if there’s anything anything those bombers can do to help Scott. Got it?”
“Got it,” Zubov said, then moved off at a trot.
Carol and Byrnes were mobile ten minutes later. Byrnes jettisoned the seine from the hovercraft, checked the fuel tanks, then took them along Melville Peninsula and across the sea ice on the eastern shore of Committee Bay on a beeline back toward B-82.
Over level ground or water, the hovercraft could reach twenty-five knots, and for nearly an hour, Byrnes pushed the throttle forward for optimum speed.
Visibility was still bad they could probably drive over a downed helicopter without seeing it but the winds appeared to be subsiding.
“I hope you can see better than me,” Byrnes said.
Carol held the safety rail against the rapid vibrating and jostling of the craft.
“I’m trying,” she said. “Keep the radio on for any news. From anyone.”
Just as Byrnes reached for the radio, there came a massive jolt to the craft’s port-side bow. They had hit something either a rock or a hummock of ice. There was a tremendous crack as the fiberglass hull split open from the impact. Both Carol and Byrnes were thrown roughly against their seat belts, then the cockpit tilted over at a crazy angle.
Carol braced herself and realized that the hovercraft was bouncing along on its right-side cushion. The ice streaked by only inches outside her window; Byrnes was suspended above her, wrestling the controls.
“Hold on!” Byrnes shouted. “We’re gonna flip!”
Carol heard the pitch of the hovercraft’s engine change, then felt her entire weight fall against the seat belt. Ice scraped along the roof of the craft, now its bottom.
There was a second impact and the sound of tearing fiberglass was overwhelming.
The cockpit seemed to be disintegrating all around them. The craft bounced again, then rolled over onto the sea. A bolt of pain shot through Carol’s legs, making her scream. Stunned by the impact, she could only watch as the hovercraft lurched to a stop and began to fill with water.
As she started to lose consciousness, she wondered how close they were to the slick, and whether the liquid death rising toward her was radioactive or not.
Either way, the cold would probably kill her first.
24
A strong, remarkably warm breeze straight down the Strait of Juan de Fuca, caressing the San Juan Islands. The sound of a new nylon sheet gliding through its eyelets and the wind and the snap of canvas as the Albatross’s mainsail billowed full against the wind. Not just sailing, floating. Flying—
Garner regained consciousness with a start. All around him was the sound of wind, not breathing life into the sails of the Albatross after all, but ravaging the torn fuselage of the helicopter. His body was still strapped into his seat, which was tipped over on its side. His lips tasted of copper and salt: blood.
His face was apparently covered by it, growing thickest near a savage pain that crossed his forehead. Then he remembered the Sikorsky going down — this time for real, as opposed to a hundred illusory instances of the same event. For all his fears and white-knuckled worrying, he had still been utterly unprepared for the reality.
Cold. Twilight faded into night.
Garner closed his eyes again and focused on moving each of his limbs and their respective digits. Aside from the gash in his forehead, he was apparently intact and unbroken. His chest hurt like hell from the harness, probably bruised black, but the seat itself had been torn out of the fuselage and lay on the ice next to the rest of the wreckage.
Intended or not, Tibbits had been correct about the “safety” of facing the rear. Garner owed him his life.
Tibbits… Garner struggled to his feet and stepped over to what was left of the helicopter. It looked as though the cockpit had torn away from the other pieces and rolled to its present position. The rest of the wreckage was hurled in all directions during the spiraling fall from the sky. The main cabin, where Garner had been seated, was nowhere to be seen. The instrument panel, too, appeared to have sheared away, leaving only a tangle of wires and the hollow ribs of the airframe in its place. The areas housing the radio and the helicopter’s emergency beacon were smashed almost beyond recognition. All the windows were punched out, and the rear of the helicopter, including the rotors and the engines, was entirely torn off. The wind gusted freely though the shredded remains of the fuselage, fluttering the remaining shards of torn aluminum.
The metal around the pilots had been stripped away, replaced by a gouged and ice-encrusted swath of snow littered with blood and shards of metal. Tibbits had an ugly gash below his helmet and, from the disjointed angle of his head, his neck was probably broken. Garner checked Dunlop’s broken body for a pulse, to no avail.
The sensation of guilt, of grief, struck Garner as painfully as the fresh gouge in his skull. The knowledge that he had dragged the pilots out in this weather chilled him more than any arctic wind ever could.