Under the Ice

Also on his way to the Defiance, Harper had stopped off at the lab first to pick up a program manual. Once inside, he’d decided to see if the project’s director needed a lift to the docks. Poking his head into Frank Lansing’s office, he found the white-haired researcher slumped over his desk. At first Will Harper assumed that Lansing had only fallen asleep.

But as he took a step inside, he realized that their venerated director was no longer breathing. Harper called 911, and then began a frenzied attempt at pulmonary resuscitation. His efforts were futile. Ten minutes later the paramedics arrived and pronounced Dr. Frank Lansing dead from an apparent heart attack.

Laurie’s initial reaction was one of shocked disbelief.

She demanded that she be taken to the hospital where her father’s body had been transferred. And only when she had personally viewed his corpse did cold reality suddenly sink in. Numbed into speechlessness, she sat in the morgue and contemplated her loss, and for the first time in her relatively young life tasted the bitter fruit of real loneliness.

Tears clouded Laurie Lansing’s eyes as she sighed heavily and tore her gaze away from the photograph that had triggered these intense memories. Absentmindedly scanning the cramped cabin of her current submerged home, she could only wonder what her father would have to say about her present duty.

Surely he’d be immensely proud of her. In his earlier days, Frank Lansing had spent many months at a time beneath the world’s oceans, while in the midst of a variety of experiments designed to enhance the nation’s fledgling nuclear submarine fleet. Yet the culmination of his long, selfless career wouldn’t be attained until his most cherished project went operational.

And it was up to Laurie to insure that it did.

The throbbing hum of a muted turbine sounded in the distance. Other than this barely audible noise, there was no hint of the true nature of her current means of transport. There was no shifting of the deck, no feeling of movement, as the 4,600-ton nuclear-powered attack sub cut through the icy Atlantic depths at a steady twenty knots of forward speed.

Truly this craft was an incredible engineering feat, and to be a part of a project intended to make such a technological marvel even better was a stimulus to the twenty-nine-year-old research engineer.

Chapter Seven

The view from the Antonov An-22 airliner was a limited one. Since it had crossed the Ural Mountains just south of the Siberian city of Vorkuta, the weather had progressively worsened. Even at its present cruising altitude of 12,500 meters, the sky was filled with nothing but roiling, black storm clouds. Accompanying this front were stiff northerly head winds, and because of the resulting turbulence, the pilot had long ago activated the seatbelt sign.

Peering out the rounded viewing port. Admiral of the Fleet Mikhail Kharkov looked out to the stormy skies and tried his best to ignore the mad, shaking vibration of the plane’s fuselage. Thankfully, he wouldn’t be in this bumpy, unstable craft much longer. For his immediate destination, Murmansk airport, was less than twenty-five kilometers distant.

Encountering an air pocket, the massive An-22 suddenly lost altitude, and Mikhail found himself tightly gripping his seat’s armrests as the plane sickeningly plunged downward. To the grinding roar of its four dual-propped Kuznetsov turboprop engines, the mammoth transport vehicle strained to stabilize itself.

Somehow it did so, yet Mikhail couldn’t help but wonder how the plane’s frame was able to stay in one piece.

The largest aircraft in the world apart from the American C-5A, the An-22 was a marvel of Soviet engineering. Not only could it carry a squad of T-62 battle tanks in its lower hold, but up to 100,000 kilograms of freight and 29 passengers as well.

Currently seated in the passenger cabin situated immediately aft of the flight deck, Mikhail Kharkov knew that he was very fortunate to get this lift. The route from Irkutsk to Murmansk was not a popular one, and nonstop flights were few and far between.

Originally having taken off from Vladivostok, the An-22 had subsequently been diverted to an unscheduled stop in Irkutsk by a single call from General Ivan Zarusk. Though the spirited Defense Minister would have liked to join Mikhail on this trip, affairs of state had sent him packing back to Moscow, along with Dmitri Tichvin and Yuri Kasimov.