Discovery Plus Twenty-Four Days, Sixteen Hours
U.S.S.Constellation, Southern Ocean
“Damn Yeats,”cursed Admiral Hank Warren.
The short, powerfully built Warren scanned the blacked-out silhouettes of his carrier group’s battle formation with his binoculars from the bridge of the aircraft carrier U.S.S.Constellation. They were twenty miles off the coast of East Antarctica, and Warren’s mission was to keep his battle group undetected until further orders.
To that end, all radars and satellite sets were turned off. Only line-of-sight radios capable of millisecond-burst transmissions were allowed. Extra lookouts with binoculars were posted on deck to sweep the dawn’s horizon for enemy surface ship silhouettes and submarine periscope feathers.
The idea was to get the battle force in close to the coast without betraying their position and then strike at the enemy without warning. A nuclear-powered carrier was good at that. But who the hell was the enemy down here? He and his battle force were freezing their asses trying to avoid detection, and the only enemy they were intimidating was the penguins.
Meanwhile, an unidentified aircraft using a U.S. Navy military frequency had placed a distress call before disappearing from radar. And if the crew of theConstellation heard it, then others had heard it too.
All he knew was that this had something to do with that crazy bastard Griffin Yeats, and that made him even more uneasy.
Way back when, Warren had done some time with the U.S. Naval Support Task Force, Antarctica. It was his rescue team that found Yeats wandering in a stupor back in ’69 after forty-three days in the snow deserts, the sole survivor of a training mission for a Mars launch that never happened. The nut insisted on dragging three NASA supply containers with him even though the navy had its own. Not a care about the three bodies he left behind. Only later did Warren’s team learn that the containers Yeats dragged out with him were radioactive. But that’s the kind of man Yeats was, unconcerned with the havoc he wreaked in other people’s lives if they got in the way of his own agenda. When Warren filed a complaint, all he got was the “classified” and “need to know” bullshit.
Now, more than thirty-five years later and bearing the rank of admiral, Warren was still in the dark when it came to Yeats. And it frustrated him to no end. His crew had just picked up a short-burst distress call from what appeared to be some black ops flight calling itself 696, which apparently crashed on approach to some phantom landing strip. Yeats’s fingerprints were all over this debacle, and Warren was personally going to see to it that the man got the early retirement he deserved.
“Conn, Sonar,” shouted the sonar chief from his console.
“Conn, aye.” Warren had the conn for the morning watch. It was important for the crew to see him in command and even more important for him to feel in command.
“Lookouts report unknown surface vessel inbound at two-zero-six,” the sonar chief reported. “Range is under a thousand yards.”
“What!” the admiral blurted. “How the hell did we miss it?”
Warren lifted his binoculars and turned to the southwest. There. A ship. The letters across the bow said MVArctic Sunrise. It was a Greenpeace ship, and on board was a guy pointing a video camera with a zoom lens at theConstellation.
“Helmsman, get us out of here!”
“Too late, sir,” said a signalman. “They’ve marked us.”
The signalman pointed to a TV monitor.
“This is CNN, live from theArctic Sunrise.” The reporter was broadcasting from the bow of the Greenpeace ship. “As you can see behind me, the U.S.S.Constellation, one of the mightiest warships ever made, is cruising off the coast of Antarctica, its mission shrouded in secrecy. But first, CNN has captured on video large cracks in this Antarctic ice shelf, which suggest that the collapse of the shelf is imminent.”
A scruffy college type, the kind who wouldn’t last a week at Annapolis, came on-screen to say, “Scientists consider the rapid disintegration of this and other ice shelves around Antarctica a sign that dangerous warming is continuing.”
Footage appeared of an iceberg that had split off the coast a few weeks ago. The reporter’s voice-over noted that the towering ice cube covered two thousand square miles, with sheer walls rising almost two hundred feet above the waterline and had an estimated depth of one thousand feet.
“And now a bizarre new twist to the global warming phenomenon has surfaced regarding accusations of unauthorized nuclear tests by the United States in the interior snow deserts of Antarctica.”
The CNN report concluded with a long shot of theConstellation ’s ominous profile on the ocean horizon at dawn.
“Aw, hell,” said Warren. MSNBC and the other network news shows would soon give out the same information. It couldn’t get any worse. “Damn you, Griffin Yeats.”