Located above the Eighty-second Parallel on the northernmost coast of Ellesmere Island in the high Arctic, the Milne Ice Shelf is four miles wide and reaches thicknesses of over three hundred feet.
Now, as Rachel climbed into the Plexiglas enclosure atop the ice tractor, she was grateful for the extra parka and gloves waiting for her on her seat, as well as the heat pouring out of the tractor's vents. Outside, on the ice runway, the F-14's engines roared, and the plane began taxiing away.
Rachel looked up in alarm. "He's leaving?"
Her new host climbed into the tractor, nodding. "Only science personnel and immediate NASA support team members are allowed on-site."
As the F-14 tore off into the sunless sky, Rachel felt suddenly marooned.
"We'll be taking the IceRover from here," the man said. "The administrator is waiting."
Rachel gazed out at the silvery path of ice before them and tried to imagine what the hell the administrator of NASA was doing up here.
"Hold on," the NASA man shouted, working some levers. With a grinding growl, the machine rotated ninety degrees in place like a treaded army tank. It was now facing the high wall of a snow berm.
Rachel looked at the steep incline and felt a ripple of fear. Surely he doesn't intend to-
"Rock and roll!" The driver popped the clutch, and the craft accelerated directly toward the slope. Rachel let out a muffled cry and held on. As they hit the incline, the spiked treads tore into the snow, and the contraption began to climb. Rachel was certain they would tip over backward, but the cabin remained surprisingly horizontal as the treads clawed up the slope. When the huge machine heaved up onto the crest of the berm, the driver brought it to a stop and beamed at his white-knuckled passenger. "Try that in an SUV! We took the shock-system design from the Mars Pathfinder and popped it on this baby! Worked like a charm."
Rachel gave a wan nod. "Neat."
Sitting now atop the snow berm, Rachel looked out at the inconceivable view. One more large berm stood before them, and then the undulations stopped abruptly. Beyond, the ice smoothed into a glistening expanse that was inclined ever so slightly. The moonlit sheet of ice stretched out into the distance, where it eventually narrowed and snaked up into the mountains.
"That's the Milne Glacier," the driver said, pointing up into the mountains. "Starts up there and flows down into this wide delta that we're sitting on now."
The driver gunned the engine again, and Rachel held on as the craft accelerated down the steep face. At the bottom, they clawed across another ice river and rocketed up the next berm. Mounting the crest and quickly skimming down the far side, they slid out onto a smooth sheet of ice and started crunching across the glacier.
"How far?" Rachel saw nothing but ice in front of them.
"About two miles ahead."
Rachel thought it seemed far. The wind outside pounded the IceRover in relentless gusts, rattling the Plexiglas as if trying to hurl them back toward the sea.
"That's the katabatic wind," the driver yelled. "Get used to it!" He explained that this area had a permanent offshore gale called the katabatic-Greek for flowing downhill. The relentless wind was apparently the product of heavy, cold air "flowing" down the glacial face like a raging river downhill. "This is the only place on earth," the driver added, laughing, "where hell actually freezes over!"
Several minutes later, Rachel began to see a hazy shape in the distance in front of them-the silhouette of an enormous white dome emerging from the ice. Rachel rubbed her eyes. What in the world…?
"Big Eskimos up here, eh?" the man joked.
Rachel tried to make sense of the structure. It looked like a scaled-down Houston Astrodome.
"NASA put it up a week and a half ago," he said. "Multistage inflatable plexipolysorbate. Inflate the pieces, affix them to one another, connect the whole thing to the ice with pitons and wires. Looks like an enclosed big top tent, but it's actually the NASA prototype for the portable habitat we hope to use on Mars someday. We call it a 'habisphere.'"
"Habisphere?"
"Yeah, get it? Because it's not a whole sphere, it's only habi-sphere."
Rachel smiled and stared out at the bizarre building now looming closer on the glacial plain. "And because NASA hasn't gone to Mars yet, you guys decided to have a big sleepover out here instead?"
The man laughed. "Actually, I would have preferred Tahiti, but fate pretty much decided the location."
Rachel gazed uncertainly up at the edifice. The off-white shell was a ghostly contour against a dark sky. As the IceRover neared the structure, it ground to a stop at a small door on the side of the dome, which was now opening. Light from inside spilled out onto the snow. A figure stepped out. He was a bulky giant wearing a black fleece pullover that amplified his size and made him look like a bear. He moved toward the IceRover.
Rachel had no doubt who the huge man was: Lawrence Ekstrom, administrator of NASA.
The driver gave a solacing grin. "Don't let his size fool you. The guy's a pussycat."
More like a tiger, Rachel thought, well acquainted with Ekstrom's reputation for biting the heads off those who stood in the way of his dreams.
When Rachel climbed down from the IceRover, the wind almost blew her over. She wrapped the coat around herself and moved toward the dome.
The NASA administrator met her halfway, extending a huge gloved paw. "Ms. Sexton. Thank you for coming."
Rachel nodded uncertainly and shouted over the howling wind. "Frankly, sir, I'm not sure I had much choice."
A thousand meters farther up the glacier, Delta-One gazed through infrared binoculars and watched as the administrator of NASA ushered Rachel Sexton into the dome.
19
NASA administrator Lawrence Ekstrom was a giant of a man, ruddy and gruff, like an angry Norse god. His prickly blond hair was cropped military short above a furrowed brow, and his bulbous nose was spidered with veins. At the moment, his stony eyes drooped with the weight of countless sleepless nights. An influential aerospace strategist and operations adviser at the Pentagon before his appointment to NASA, Ekstrom had a reputation for surliness matched only by his incontestable dedication to whatever mission was at hand.
As Rachel Sexton followed Lawrence Ekstrom into the habisphere, she found herself walking through an eerie, translucent maze of hallways. The labyrinthine network appeared to have been fashioned by hanging sheets of opaque plastic across tautly strung wires. The floor of the maze was nonexistent-a sheet of solid ice, carpeted with strips of rubber matting for traction. They passed a rudimentary living area lined with cots and chemical toilets.
Thankfully, the air in the habisphere was warm, albeit heavy with the mingled potpourri of indistinguishable smells that accompany humans in tight quarters. Somewhere a generator droned, apparently the source of the electricity that powered the bare bulbs hanging from draped extension cords in the hallway.
"Ms. Sexton," Ekstrom grunted, guiding her briskly toward some unknown destination. "Let me be candid with you right from the start." His tone conveyed anything but pleasure to have Rachel as his guest. "You are here because the President wants you here. Zach Herney is a personal friend of mine and a faithful NASA supporter. I respect him. I owe him. And I trust him. I do not question his direct orders, even when I resent them. Just so there is no confusion, be aware that I do not share the President's enthusiasm for involving you in this matter."
Rachel could only stare. I traveled three thousand miles for this kind of hospitality? This guy was no Martha Stewart. "With all due respect," she fired back, "I am also under presidential orders. I have not been told my purpose here. I made this trip on good faith."
"Fine," Ekstrom said. "Then I will speak bluntly."
"You've made a damn good start."
Rachel's tough response seemed to jolt the administrator. His stride slowed a moment, his eyes clearing as he studied her. Then, like a snake uncoiling, he heaved a long sigh and picked up the pace.
"Understand," Ekstrom
began, "that you are here on a classified NASA project against my better judgment. Not only are you a representative of the NRO, whose director enjoys dishonoring NASA personnel as loose-lipped children, but you are the daughter of the man who has made it his personal mission to destroy my agency. This should be NASA's hour in the sun; my men and women have endured a lot of criticism lately and deserve this moment of glory. However, due to a torrent of skepticism spearheaded by your father, NASA finds itself in a political situation where my hardworking personnel are forced to share the spotlight with a handful of random civilian scientists and the daughter of the man who is trying to destroy us."
I am not my father, Rachel wanted to shout, but this was hardly the moment to debate politics with the head of NASA. "I did not come here for the spotlight, sir."
Ekstrom glared. "You may find you have no alternative."
The comment took her by surprise. Although President Herney had said nothing specific about her assisting him in any sort of "public" way, William Pickering had certainly aired his suspicions that Rachel might become a political pawn. "I'd like to know what I'm doing here," Rachel demanded.
"You and me both. I do not have that information."
"I'm sorry?"
"The President asked me to brief you fully on our discovery the moment you arrived. Whatever role he wants you to play in this circus is between you and him."
"He told me your Earth Observation System had made a discovery."
Ekstrom glanced sidelong at her. "How familiar are you with the EOS project?"
"EOS is a constellation of five NASA satellites which scrutinize the earth in different ways-ocean mapping, geologic fault analyses, polar ice-melt observation, location of fossil fuel reserves-"
"Fine," Ekstrom said, sounding unimpressed. "So you're aware of the newest addition to the EOS constellation? It's called PODS."
Rachel nodded. The Polar Orbiting Density Scanner (PODS) was designed to help measure the effects of global warming. "As I understand it, PODS measures the thickness and hardness of the polar ice cap?"
"In effect, yes. It uses spectral band technology to take composite density scans of large regions and find softness anomalies in the ice-slush spots, internal melting, large fissures-indicators of global warming."
Rachel was familiar with composite density scanning. It was like a subterranean ultrasound. NRO satellites had used similar technology to search for subsurface density variants in Eastern Europe and locate mass burial sites, which confirmed for the President that ethnic cleansing was indeed going on.
"Two weeks ago," Ekstrom said, "PODS passed over this ice shelf and spotted a density anomaly that looked nothing like anything we'd expected to see. Two hundred feet beneath the surface, perfectly embedded in a matrix of solid ice, PODS saw what looked like an amorphous globule about ten feet in diameter."
"A water pocket?" Rachel asked.
"No. Not liquid. Strangely, this anomaly was harder than the ice surrounding it."
Rachel paused. "So… it's a boulder or something?"
Ekstrom nodded. "Essentially."
Rachel waited for the punch line. It never came. I'm here because NASA found a big rock in the ice?
"Not until PODS calculated the density of this rock did we get excited. We immediately flew a team up here to analyze it. As it turns out, the rock in the ice beneath us is significantly more dense than any type of rock found here on Ellesmere Island. More dense, in fact, than any type of rock found within a four-hundred-mile radius."
Rachel gazed down at the ice beneath her feet, picturing the huge rock down there somewhere. "You're saying someone moved it here?"
Ekstrom looked vaguely amused. "The stone weighs more than eight tons. It is embedded under two hundred feet of solid ice, meaning it has been there untouched for over three hundred years."
Rachel felt tired as she followed the administrator into the mouth of a long, narrow corridor, passing between two armed NASA workers who stood guard. Rachel glanced at Ekstrom. "I assume there's a logical explanation for the stone's presence here… and for all this secrecy?"
"There most certainly is," Ekstrom said, deadpan. "The rock PODS found is a meteorite."
Rachel stopped dead in the passageway and stared at the administrator. "A meteorite?" A surge of disappointment washed over her. A meteorite seemed utterly anti-climactic after the President's big buildup. This discovery will single-handedly justify all of NASA's past expenditures and blunders? What was Herney thinking? Meteorites were admittedly one of the rarest rocks on earth, but NASA discovered meteorites all the time.
"This meteorite is one of the largest ever found," Ekstrom said, standing rigid before her. "We believe it is a fragment of a larger meteorite documented to have hit the Arctic Ocean in the seventeen hundreds. Most likely, this rock was thrown as ejecta from that ocean impact, landed on the Milne Glacier, and was slowly buried by snow over the past three hundred years."
Rachel scowled. This discovery changed nothing. She felt a growing suspicion that she was witnessing an overblown publicity stunt by a desperate NASA and White House-two struggling entities attempting to elevate a propitious find to the level of earth-shattering NASA victory.
"You don't look too impressed," Ekstrom said.
"I guess I was just expecting something… else."
Ekstrom's eyes narrowed. "A meteorite of this size is a very rare find, Ms. Sexton. There are only a few larger in the world."
"I realize-"
"But the size of the meteorite is not what excites us."
Rachel glanced up.
"If you would permit me to finish," Ekstrom said, "you will learn that this meteorite displays some rather astonishing characteristics never before seen in any meteorite. Large or small." He motioned down the passageway. "Now, if you would follow me, I'll introduce you to someone more qualified than I am to discuss this find."
Rachel was confused. "Someone more qualified than the administrator of NASA?"
Ekstrom's Nordic eyes locked in on hers. "More qualified, Ms. Sexton, insofar as he is a civilian. I had assumed because you are a professional data analyst that you would prefer to get your data from an unbiased source."
Touche. Rachel backed off.
She followed the administrator down the narrow corridor, where they dead-ended at a heavy, black drapery. Beyond the drape, Rachel could hear the reverberant murmur of a crowd of voices rumbling on the other side, echoing as if in a giant open space.
Without a word, the administrator reached up and pulled aside the curtain. Rachel was blinded by a dazzling brightness. Hesitant, she stepped forward, squinting into the glistening space. As her eyes adjusted, she gazed out at the massive room before her and drew an awestruck breath.
"My God," she whispered. What is this place?
20
The CNN production facility outside of Washington, D.C., is one of 212 studios worldwide that link via satellite to the global headquarters of Turner Broadcasting System in Atlanta.
It was 1:45 P.M. when Senator Sedgewick Sexton's limousine pulled into the parking lot. Sexton was feeling smug as he got out and strode toward the entrance. He and Gabrielle were greeted inside by a pot-bellied CNN producer who wore an effusive smile.
"Senator Sexton," the producer said. "Welcome. Great news. We just found out who the White House sent as a sparring partner for you." The producer gave a foreboding grin. "I hope you brought your game face." He motioned through the production glass out into the studio.
Sexton looked through the glass and almost fell over. Staring back at him, through the smoky haze of her cigarette, was the ugliest face in politics.
"Marjorie Tench?" Gabrielle blurted. "What the hell is she doing here?"
Sexton had no idea, but whatever the reason, her presence here was fantastic news-a clear sign that the President was in desperation mode. Why else would he send his senior adviser to the front lines? President Zach Herney was rolling out the big guns, and Sexton welcomed the opportunity.
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The bigger the foe, the harder they fall.
The senator had no doubt that Tench would be a sly opponent, but gazing now at the woman, Sexton could not help but think that the President had made a serious error in judgment. Marjorie Tench was hideous looking. At the moment, she sat slouched in her chair, smoking a cigarette, her right arm moving in languid rhythm back and forth to her thin lips like a giant praying mantis feeding.
Jesus, Sexton thought, if there was ever a face that should stick to radio.
The few times Sedgewick Sexton had seen the White House senior adviser's jaundiced mug in a magazine, he could not believe he was looking at one of the most powerful faces in Washington.
"I don't like this," Gabrielle whispered.
Sexton barely heard her. The more he considered the opportunity, the more he liked it. Even more fortuitous than Tench's media-unfriendly face was Tench's reputation on one key issue: Marjorie Tench was extremely vocal that America's leadership role in the future could only be secured through technological superiority. She was an avid supporter of high-tech government R D programs, and, most important-NASA. Many believed it was Tench's behind-the-scenes pressure that kept the President positioned so staunchly behind the failing space agency.
Sexton wondered if perhaps the President was now punishing Tench for all the bad advice about supporting NASA. Is he throwing his senior adviser to the wolves?
Gabrielle Ashe gazed through the glass at Marjorie Tench and felt a growing uneasiness. This woman was smart as hell and she was an unexpected twist. Those two facts had her instincts tingling. Considering the woman's stance on NASA, the President sending her to face-off against Senator Sexton seemed ill-advised. But the President was certainly no fool. Something told Gabrielle this interview was bad news.
Gabrielle already sensed the senator salivating over his odds, which did little to curb her concern. Sexton had a habit of going overboard when he got cocky. The NASA issue had been a welcome boost in the polls, but Sexton had been pushing very hard lately, she thought. Plenty of campaigns had been lost by candidates who went for the knockout when all they needed was to finish the round.
The producer looked eager for the impending blood match. "Let's get you set up, senator."
As Sexton headed for the studio, Gabrielle caught his sleeve. "I know what you're thinking," she whispered. "But just be smart. Don't go overboard."
"Overboard? Me?" Sexton grinned.
"Remember this woman is very good at what she does."
Sexton gave her a suggestive smirk. "So am I."
21
The cavernous main chamber of NASA's habisphere would have been a strange sight anywhere on earth, but the fact that it existed on an Arctic ice shelf made it that much more difficult for Rachel Sexton to assimilate.
Staring upward into a futuristic dome crafted of white interlocking triangular pads, Rachel felt like she had entered a colossal sanatorium. The walls sloped downward to a floor of solid ice, where an army of halogen lamps stood like sentinels around the perimeter, casting stark light skyward and giving the whole chamber an ephemeral luminosity.
Snaking across the ice floor, black foam carpetrunners wound like boardwalks through a maze of portable scientific work stations. Amid the electronics, thirty or forty white-clad NASA personnel were hard at work, conferring happily and talking in excited tones. Rachel immediately recognized the electricity in the room.
It was the thrill of new discovery.
As Rachel and the administrator circled the outer edge of the dome, she noted the surprised looks of displeasure from those who recognized her. Their whispers carried clearly in the reverberant space.
Isn't that Senator Sexton's daughter?
What the hell is SHE doing here?
I can't believe the administrator is even speaking to her!
Rachel half expected to see voodoo dolls of her father dangling everywhere. The animosity around her, though, was not the only emotion in the air; Rachel