Dream Thing

“Chiun!” It was Remo, shouting through the sluicing water. “Think like a boulder!”

Chiun had been about to suggest the same thing. He did. He allowed his mind to think as if he, Chiun, were a heavy thing of solid stone that had no business in the ocean. The power of the Sinanju-trained mind made thinking about such a thing into a kind of reality. Real enough for the squid.

Instead of a buoyant, hundred-pound Korean gentlemen, the squid were suddenly trying to hold on to a rock that weighed as much as each of them. The weight ripped through the muscles and the tentacles. The squid tried squeezing tighter, but that only crushed to death more of the inner squid, and loosened up the passage of the boulder. Chiun’s body tore through the squid bodies, and Remo emerged beside him.

They faced an angry school of giant squid that made a wall in the ocean, and Chiun and Remo could do nothing except swim away—the other way.

Away from the Faithful of Saraswati.

Chapter 46

“Holy mother of God, look at that thing.” The pilot was flying by eye. His radar was going berserk. His compass was spewing nonsense. His GPS signal was inoperative, with one of the satellite feeds continually blocked by the massive cone.

They were joking back home about the “ice cone.” It sounded too much like ice-cream cone, and how could an ice-cream cone hurt anybody?

They didn’t understand the problem. Even the pilot didn’t understand the problem until he laid eyes on the thing.

It was more than a mountain and it was still growing fast. It spewed steam at twenty thousand feet and sent tons of water down to the Antarctic surface every second. Far beyond it was a second cone, just as huge.

“Jockey, you think this’ll work?” the pilot radioed.

“Don’t know, Jay,” his buddy called from the second fighter jet. “I didn’t expect it to be so big.”

Jockey was amazingly calm. He always got calm when the stress was high, and right now he sounded like he might nod off.

“Let’s intercourse those cold bitches,” Captain Jerome “Jay” White said, and he headed for Cone Alpha.

“Affirmative.” Jockey zeroed in on Cone Beta.

They were armed with something new—nuclear bunker busters, which made all previous bunker busters look like firecrackers. These babies were designed to create a narrow percussive shock like nothing ever witnessed before. Theoretically, it would turn carbon into consommé.

That was the idea anyway. They had only been monkey-rigged into existence within the past forty- eight hours and nobody knew what they would actually do.

White leveled off at thirty thousand feet and approached the cone. Luckily the gap at the top was open like a funnel, a mile across. It wouldn’t be a tough target. The steam pressure—Jay had been told—would slow the bomb during its descent, so it shouldn’t impact hard enough to disable it. The fins would shear off at a certain pressure level and allow it to penetrate even deeper through the steam until it reached the correct altitude for detonation. The correct altitude was three or four miles below the visible surface, where a vent of rock allowed the release of all that superheated water.

It would blow, collapse the vent and the cone, and that hole would be corked. For how long, nobody knew.

“I’m dropping my package,” White announced, and hit the button sequence that sent the bomb down into the billowing steam shaft.

“Mine’s going now,” Jockey replied a moment later.

Jay sped away and banked steeply, and witnessed the collapse of the cone. It was too big to be real. It was like watching the Rocky Mountains collapse into rubble.

“Christ, the tremor is unbelievable,” announced the commander at base, thousands of miles away.

“You seeing this?” Jay asked.

“On video it looks like the steam is stopped,” the base commander said.

“Yeah, it’s stopped. Jockey?”

A hundred miles away, at the remains of Cone Beta, Jockey whooped. “She’s plugged up tight!”

“Keep an eye on those bitches,” the commander ordered.

Jay and Jockey traded jokes for a half an hour as they each made wide, lazy circles over the fields of crumbled ice where the cones had been. Jay descended to two thousand feet, eyes on the alert for traces of steam.

At the geographic South Pole, the seismic team had been watching the needles. They had jumped all over the paper when the cones crumbled, and then there were just a few shivers.

Twenty-two minutes after the bombs, the shivers became substantial tremors.

“Just more settling,” the seismologist said dismissively.

“Not pressure?” asked the Department of Defense liaison on the open radio channel.

“Too big, too soon. It’ll take a while for pressure to start building.”

Another series of shakes sent the needles flying. The seismologist eyed the black marks suspiciously. “Man, that’s steady.”

“For settling?” his liaison demanded.

“It has to be settling.”

“Why?”

“Because pressure can’t build up that fast. I’ve crunched the numbers. The pressure coming out of those vents was something we could estimate and account for.”