Pitt glanced at Sandecker and Pat, then back to Friend. "There can be no mistake?"
Friend shrugged. "A margin of error of perhaps two hundred years, but certainly no more. The only other large object to enter Earth's atmosphere in recorded history was the one that flattened those eight hundred square miles in Siberia. Only now are astronomers beginning to believe that, instead of a colossal impact, it was actually a near miss."
"Surely the Wolfs must have had access to the same data," said Loren, looking bewildered. "It doesn't make sense for them to liquidate every asset of the family after having spent billions of dollars building a fleet of ships to survive a cataclysm they know is not about to happen."
"We all agree with you," said Sandecker. "It may simply be that the Wolf family is nothing more than a bunch of fruitcakes."
"Not only the family," said Giordino, "but two hundred and seventy-five thousand other people who work for them and look forward to the voyage to nowhere."
"That doesn't sound like an insignificant cult of crazies to me," said Loren.
"Very true," Pitt agreed. "When Al and I infiltrated the supership, we found a dedicated fanaticism with surviving the deluge."
"I reached the same conclusion," added Pat. "The conversations I overheard regarding the coming cataclysm were resolute. There was not the slightest doubt in their minds that disaster would overtake the world and that they had been given the gift of rebuilding a new civilization without the handicaps of the old."
Giordino looked at Pat. "An echo of Noah and his ark."
"But on a far grander scale," Pitt reminded him.
Sandecker shook his head slowly. "I have to admit that this whole dilemma is a mystery to me."
"The Wolf family must have a solid motive." Pitt paused, as everyone stared at him in silence. "There can be no other answer. If they are convinced the civilized world is going to be swept away and buried for all time, they must know something no one else on Earth knows."
"I can assure you, Admiral," said Friend, "that disaster is not soaring in from the solar system. Certainly not in the next few days. Our tracking network sees no large asteroids or comets coming anywhere close to Earth's orbit in the foreseeable future, certainly not before the end of the next century."
"So what else could produce such a disaster? Is there any way of predicting a crust displacement or a polar shift?" Yaeger asked Friend.
"Not without the opportunity to study such a phenomenon at first hand. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunami waves have been witnessed and recorded. But no crust movements or polar shifts have occurred since earth science emerged from the Greeks. So we have no solid data upon which to draw enough conclusions to even attempt predictions."
"Are there conditions on Earth that could cause the crust and poles to shift?" asked Pitt.
"Yes," Friend answered slowly. "There are natural forces that could upset Earth's balance."
"Such as?"
"The most likely scenario would be an ice shift at one of the poles."
"Is that possible?"
"Earth is like a giant child's top or gyroscope rotating on its axis, as it spins every year around the sun.
And, like a top, it is not in perfect balance, because the landmasses and poles are not ideally placed for perfect stabilization. So Earth wobbles as it rotates. Now, if one of Earth's poles grows until it becomes oversize, it affects the wobble, like an unbalanced wheel on your car. Then it could cause a crust displacement or polar shift. I know respected scientists who believe this happens on a regular basis."
"How often?"
"Approximately every six to eight thousand years."
"When was the last shift?"
"By analyzing cores pulled from deep beneath the seas, oceanographers have dated the last shift at nine thousand years ago, the approximate age your comet struck Earth."
"So you might say we're due," said Pitt.
"Actually, overdue." Friend made a helpless gesture with his hands. "We can't say with any confidence.
All we know is that when the day comes, the shift will be very sudden. There will be no warning."
Loren stared at Friend uneasily. "What will be the cause?"
"The ice formation that accumulates on top of Antarctica is not distributed equally. One side of the continent receives much more than the other. Every year, over fifty billion tons of ice are added to the Ross Ice Shelf alone, a growing mass which increases Earth's wobble. In time, as the weight shifts, so will the poles, causing, as Einstein himself predicted, trillions of tons of water and ice thousands of feet high to race from both poles toward the equator. The North Pole will sweep south and the South Pole will sweep north. All the forces that were unleashed by a comet strike will be repeated. The major difference is that instead of a world population of about a million people nine thousand years ago, now we're looking at a world populated by seven billion people who will be swept to their deaths. New York, Tokyo, Sydney, Los Angeles will be completely inundated, while cities far inland will be leveled to the ground and disappear. Hardly a slab of concrete would be left where millions walked only a few days earlier."
"And if the Ross Ice Shelf were suddenly to detach itself from the rest of the continent and drift out to sea?" Pitt put to Friend, leaving the question hang.
Friend's face turned grim. "It's an event we've already considered. A simulation shows that a drastic movement by the Shelf would cause an imbalance broad enough to trigger a sudden shift of Earth's crust."
"What do you mean by drastic movement?"
"Our simulation demonstrated that should the entire ice shelf break away and drift sixty miles to sea, its relocated mass would increase Earth's wobble enough to trigger a pole shift."
"How long do you estimate it would take to drift sixty miles?"
Friend thought a moment, then said, "Taking into account the sweep of the currents in that part of the Antarctic, I should say no more than thirty-six hours."
"Is there no way to stop the drift?" asked Loren.
"I don't see how" Friend shook his head. "No, I doubt if a thousand nuclear bombs could melt enough of the ice shelf to make a difference. But, look, this is all theoretical. What else could possibly cause the Shelf to go drifting out to sea?"
Pitt looked at Sandecker, who returned the stare. Both men were envisioning the same nightmare, and both read each other's mind. Pitt's stare moved to Loren.
"The Wolfs' nanotech facility that processes minerals from seawater, how far is it from the Ross Ice Shelf?" he asked her.
Loren's eyes widened. "Surely, you don't think--"
"How far?" Pitt gently pressured.
Finally, she drew a deep breath. "The plant sits right on the edge."
Pitt turned his attention to Friend. "Do you have an estimate of the Ross Ice Shelf's size, Doctor?"
"It's immense," said Friend, stretching out his hands for effect. "I can't give you exact dimensions. All I know is that it's the world's largest body of floating ice."
"Give me a few minutes," said Yaeger, as he opened his laptop computer and began typing on the keyboard. They all sat quietly and watched while Yaeger linked up with his computer network at NUMA headquarters. Within a few minutes, he was reading off the data on his monitor. "Estimates of its mass range as high as two hundred and ten thousand square miles, making it approximately the size of Texas.
The circumference, not counting the perimeter facing the sea, is nearly fourteen hundred miles. Thickness runs from eleven hundred to twenty-three hundred feet. Ice scientists liken it to a gigantic floating raft"
Yaeger looked up at the faces absorbed in his report. "There is, of course, a mountain of additional information on the ice shelf, but those are the essentials."
"How is it possible," asked Pat, "for man to force two hundred and ten thousand square miles of ice to crack and move apart?"
"I haven't the foggiest clue," said Pitt. "But I'll bet the farm the Wolf family has planned and worked for three generations
to do just that."
"Good Lord!" muttered Friend. "It's unthinkable."
"The pieces," said Giordino darkly, "are coming together."
"By whatever means, they intend to break the ice shelf away from land and move it out to sea, upsetting Earth's rotation and causing an increase in its wobble. Once the imbalance is in the critical stage, a polar shift and a crust displacement will occur. Then the Wolfs' megaships, after surviving the resulting tidal waves, will be swept out to sea, where they'll drift before cruising around the altered Earth for several rears until the upheaval abates. When they are satisfied that Earth is livable again, they'll come ashore and establish a new order, the Fourth Empire, on the bodies of seven billion people, along with the mass destruction of animal and sea life."
Everyone seated in the truck looked stricken, faces locked in abhorrence and despair. No one could conceive of such a horror. No mind could grasp the total inhumanity of such an act.
"God help us all," Loren murmured softly.
Pitt looked at Sandecker. "You must inform the President."
"I've kept his science board and chief of staff, Joe Flynn, up to date on our investigation, but until now no one has taken the threat seriously."
"They'd better reconsider damned quick," said Giordino.
"We'd better rethink our options," said Pitt, "and come up with a plan of action. With only three days to go, we haven't got much time. Not if we want to stop the Wolfs from launching an apocalypse."
>
The pilot lined up the Destiny Enterprises company jet for Ids approach and settled down on the long ice runway without the slightest hint of a bump. The plane, the last one of the fleet that had been sold off, was a custom-built Japanese Dragonfire twin-engine jet with no markings or identification numbers on its fuselage, wings, or tail. It was painted white and blended in with the snowy landscape, as it taxied toward what looked like a steep cliff against a high mountain covered with ice.
When the aircraft was less than two hundred yards from smashing into the mountain, the ice cliff miraculously parted, revealing a vast grottolike interior. The pilot slowly pulled back on the throttles, bringing the jet to a stop in the middle of the hangar, which slave labor had carved out of the mountain nearly sixty years earlier. The jet engines whined briefly, before their turbines decreased their rotation and slowly came to a quiet rest. Behind, the ponderous ice doors closed on a series of solid rubber wheels.
There were two other aircraft parked in the hangar, both Airbus Industrie military versions of the A340-300. One was capable of carrying 295 passengers and twenty tons of freight. The other had been built purely as a cargo carrier. Both had maintenance men checking over the engines and filling the fuel tanks for the coming evacuation of Wolf personnel to the safety of the big superships waiting within the safety of the Chilean fjord.
The great hangar was a beehive of quiet activity. Workers in the various Wolf colored uniforms moved silently, conversing softly, as they packed the hundred or more wooden crates with the artifacts and wealth of Amenes, along with the looted art treasures from World War II and the sacred Nazi relics, all being readied for transportation to the Ulrich Wolf.
Fifty men in the standard Destiny Enterprises black security uniform stood at attention as Karl Wolf, along with his sister Elsie, exited the aircraft. He was wearing Alpine ski pants and a big suede jacket fined with alpaca wool. Elsie was dressed in a one-piece ski suit under a knee-length fur coat.
The man who directed the transportation project waited at the bottom of the boarding steps as they stepped to the ground.
"Cousin Karl, cousin Elsie, you do us an honor by coming."
"Cousin Horst," Karl greeted him. "I felt it my duty to observe the doomsday system in its final stages."
"An hour that is near at hand," Elsie added proudly.
"How goes the evacuation?" asked Karl.
"Cargo and passengers are scheduled to arrive on the Ulrich Wolf ten hours before the cataclysm,"
Horst assured him.
Then their brother, Hugo, and sister, Blondi, stepped forward to greet them. They took turns embracing.
"Welcome back to Valhalla," Blondi greeted Karl.
"Other business has kept me away too long," said Karl.
Hugo, who was the chief of the family security force, gestured toward a small electric automobile, one of a fleet of utility and heavy equipment vehicles that ran on batteries, to prevent a buildup of carbon monoxide inside the caverns. "We'll take you to the control center, where you can see for yourself how we begin the end of the old world."
"After I inspect your guards," said Karl. Trailed by Elsie, he walked down the line of security guards in their black uniforms, who stood ramrod straight, with their P-10 automatics strapped to their hips and Bushmaster M17S rifles slung over their shoulders. He stopped occasionally and asked a guard his nationality and military history. When he reached the end of the line, he nodded in satisfaction.
"An intrepid company of men. You've done well, Hugo. They look like they can handle any intrusion."
"Their orders are to shoot to kill any unidentified intruder that enters our perimeter."
"I hope they perform with greater efficiency than Erich's men at the shipyard."
"There will be no failure at this end," Hugo said firmly. "I promise you, brother."
"Any sign of encroachment?"
"None," answered Blondi. "Our detection-control unit has seen no activity within a hundred and fifty miles of the facility."
Elsie looked at her. "One hundred and fifty miles does not seem far."
"It's the distance to Little America Number Six, the Yankee Antarctic research station. Since the station was built, they've shown no interest in our operations. Our aerial surveillance has yet to detect any attempt to trespass onto our mining facility."
"All is quiet with the Americans," added Hugo. "They'll give us no problems."
"I'm not so sure," said Karl. "Keep a tight eye on any activity. I fear their intelligence may be on the verge of discovering our secret."
"Any attempt to stop us," Hugo said confidently, "will come too late. The Fourth Empire is inevitable."
"I sincerely pray that will be the case," said Karl, as he entered the auto ahead of the women. Usually gallant around the ladies, Karl came from the old German school where men never yielded to women.
The driver of the electric car left the aircraft hangar area and entered a tunnel. After a quarter of a mile, they entered a vast ice cavern that enclosed a small harbor with long floating docks that rose and fell with the tide from the Ross Sea. The high-roofed channel that ran from the inner harbor to the sea curved gently, allowing large ships to navigate the passage while the ice cliffs blocked all view from the outside.
Light throughout the complex came from overhead fixtures containing dozens of halogen bulbs. Four submarines and a small cargo ship were moored beside the docks. The entire harbor complex was deserted. The cargo cranes stood abandoned, along with a small fleet of trucks and equipment. There wasn't a soul to be seen on the docks or the vessels. It was as if their crews had walked off and never returned.
"A pity the U-boats that served our venture so efficiently all these years will be lost," said Elsie wistfully.
"Perhaps they will survive," Blondi consoled her.
Hugo smiled. "When the time comes, I will personally return to Valhalla to see how they fared. They deserve to be enshrined for their service to the Fourth Empire."
The old tunnel that ran nine miles through the ice between the hidden dock terminal, the aircraft hangar, and then to the sea-mining extraction facility had also been excavated by slaves from the old Soviet Union, their preserved bodies now frozen in a mass grave on the ice shelf. Since 1985, the tunnel had been expanded and constantly realigned because of the shifting ice.
In the beginning, the efforts to extract valuable minerals from the sea had proved a dismal failure, but with the nanotechnology revolution pioneered by Eric Drexle
r in California, along with his wife Chris Peterson, Destiny Enterprises had thrown its immense wealth and resources into a project to control the structure of matter. By rearranging atoms and creating incredibly tiny engines, they had totally reinvented manufacturing processes. Molecular machines could even produce a tree from scratch. The Wolfs, however, threw their efforts into extracting valuable minerals such as gold from seawater, a process they'd achieved and gone on to refine until they were producing a thousand troy ounces of gold a day from the Ross Sea, along with platinum, silver, and many other rare elements. Unlike ore pulled from the ground and then expensively processed by crushers and chemicals, the minerals extracted from the sea came in a nearly pure form.
The engineering center of the Destiny Enterprises sea-mining facility was a great domed structure whose interior looked similar to the vast control room at the NASA space center. Electronic consoles were manned by thirty scientists and engineers who monitored the computerized electronics of the nanotech mining operation. But this day, all operations for the extraction of rare metals from the sea had come to a halt, and all Wolf personnel were concentrating their efforts on the coming split of the ice shelf.
Karl Wolf entered the expansive room and stopped in front of a spacious electronic board that hung from the center of the domed ceiling. In the center, a large map of the Ross Ice Shelf was displayed.
Around the edges, a series of neonlike tubing distinguished the ice from the surrounding land. The tubing, which stretched from the mining company around the ice shelf and ended three hundred miles from the opposite end, was green. The section from where the green ended was continued in red to the edge of the sea.
"The area in red is yet to be programmed?" Karl asked the chief engineer, Jurgen Holtz, who walked up to the Wolf party and gave a sharp nod of his head in greeting.
"Yes, that is correct." Holtz raised a hand and gestured at the board. "We are in the process of setting the molecular triggering devices. We have about another four hundred miles to program to the end of the tunnel at the sea."