Under the Ice

Frank Lansing had worked three decades on improving this device. For the past five years, Laurie had been actively involved with his tireless effort, and at long last an actual working unit had been placed inside the USS Defiance. As fate would have it, her father did not live long enough to see his dream fulfilled. Now it was up to her to insure that his life’s work was not in vain.

This was a great responsibility, and one that Laurie did not take lightly. Her life, and the lives of one-hundred and seven others, were on the line, for the slightest miscalculation could prove fatal. Only last week, the Defiance had participated in three harrowing collisions with the pack ice. By the grace of God, a submerged ridge hadn’t ripped the submarine’s hull open like a can opener.

The Defiance had been given a reprieve, and in this respite Laurie had one last chance to clear her father’s name. She could not afford to fail this time around.

Setting the pad she’d been scribbling on down on the desk, Laurie glanced at the photograph she had propped up on the nearby bookshelf. She hadn’t seen this particular picture in years, then had found it stuck between the pages of one of her father’s journals, the one she had been skimming through earlier in the day.

Laurie remembered this snapshot well, for it had been taken on her twenty-first birthday. Having just graduated from MIT summa cum laude the month before, she’d been presented with a very special present — a trip to the Virgin Islands. This was to be her first visit to the Caribbean, and the photograph showed her and her father decked out in bathing suits on the deserted, white-sand beach of St. John’s exclusive Turtle Bay resort. These were happy, carefree days, and the spirit of them was conveyed in their joyous expressions.

Though this trip took place over eight years ago, Laurie would never forget how very special it had been. After four years of grueling school work, doing nothing all day but eating, swimming, and sunbathing was a welcome change of pace.

The seawater was warm and crystal clear. Decked out in mask, snorkel, and fins she explored a seemingly untouched realm. A coral reef lay right off the central beach, and it attracted many brightly colored species of tropical fish and marine life. Her favorites were the giant turtles for which the area was known, and the graceful, strangely shaped stingrays.

Her father accompanied her on these underwater excursions, and afterwards, over beach side lunch or dinner, they compared notes. It was during these sessions that a new understanding developed between them. For the first time ever, Laurie felt like his equal.

No longer merely daddy’s little girl. At twenty-one years of age, with four years of college behind her, she was an adult, well on her way to choosing her particular path in life.

It was during one of the dinners they shared, while the full moon rose in all its magnificence over the adjoining bay, that the subject of Laurie’s mother came up. Since she’d died in a plane crash when Laurie was only five years old, she had always been a shadowy, enigmatic character. A nanny had taken her place, and Laurie had grown up with little knowledge of the woman from whom she’d inherited her tall, shapely figure, dark eyes, long, black silky hair, and, as she was soon to learn, her probing, keen intellect.

Her father had always been hesitant to talk about his first and only wife. In fact, there was only one photograph of her in the entire house, and this was but an informal framed snapshot placed on the mantel over the fireplace.

With his tongue loosened by several powerful rum cocktails, he did finally open his soul to Laurie, however.

For the first time she was told that her mother had been an up and coming anthropologist, whose expertise centered on the native peoples living above the Arctic Circle. Her travels took her to such far-off, exotic locations as Norway, Finland, and Siberia. In them she studied the natives’ religious rites, with a particular focus on their musical traditions. While she was on a field trip in Northern Alaska, the small plane she had been flying was lost in a violent snow storm. Her body was never recovered, and for many years Laurie’s father lived with the slim hope that his wife was really not dead. He even made several futile trips up into Brooks Range to investigate, but each time came back with his hopes crushed.

Laurie found it remarkable that in all the years that followed her father had been able to keep so much to himself. He had to have been full of pain, yet heedless of his personal concerns, he’d dedicated himself to his young daughter’s development and to his career.