Goliath

—its crew too focused on the Goliath to notice the occasional orcalike clicks coming from the seafloor.

Goliath’s minisub allows the Virginia to pass overhead before accelerating after it. Hovering alongside, it pinpoints its target—a set of steel plates located just forward of the American attack sub’s retractable bow diving planes.

Chief Petty Officer Justin Bowman is stationed in the Virginia’s tactical missile room, a chamber that contains an arsenal of Tomahawk cruise missiles. He looks up, startled by the sudden sound of scraping.

Clunk.

The Chief Petty Officer’s heart thuds. Instinctively, he turns to flee—

Wa-boom!

—his existence instantly caught between a brilliant flash of light and the suffocating, thunderous embrace that impales him from behind, extinguishing his life, as the lethal detonation vents the Virginia’s forward compartments to the frigid Antarctic sea.

Captain Parker is tossed to the deck, his crippled ship twisting beneath him. Screams, explosions, and darkness blanket the chaos, and then an icy wall lifts him up and carries him away.

Aboard the Goliath

The Goliath slows, allowing its minisub to redock. Instead of continuing north, the devil ray descends to the seafloor, Sorceress shutting down the ship’s engines.

Scanning the ocean depths, the biochemical computer listens … and waits.

Antarctic Ocean 12 nautical miles due north of the Goliath

The 4-million-ton barge of ice, a tabular berg half the size of the island of Manhattan, is trapped, locked in place along the ocean’s frozen surface. Three years have passed since this glacierlike monster first separated from the Ross Ice Shelf to begin its journey north. Too large to clear the inlets surrounding Antarctica, it had taken several summers before the process of melting could shave enough mass from the berg’s imposing keel to again release it to open waters.

Currents had taken the frozen mountain halfway around the continent before releasing it to the open sea. From there, it had drifted another forty-eight miles before Antarctica’s wintry fingers again reached out to seal it in place.

A four-story-high plateau of ice marks the visible tip of this frozen monster. Flattopped and steep-sided, it is as barren as a moonscape, and just as devoid of life.

The harsh katabatic wind howls along the plateau’s northern rise and down its exposed cliff face to the seven-foot-thick pack ice. Below the frozen surface, held within the Southern Ocean’s frigid embrace lies the rest of this glacierlike mountain. At 590 feet thick, with a keel stretching 1,145 feet deep, the iceberg could easily provide every person on the planet with two glasses of fresh water per day … for the next two thousand years.

Within this ebony realm, the berg’s luminescent alabaster glow reveals an ominous presence hovering in silence along its vast northern face.

Positioned close to the prodigious ice island, its engines shut down, is the Los Angeles-class attack sub USS Scranton.

Four long hours have passed since the American attack sub went quiet. Now, tensions rise once more as a series of man-made acoustics violates the tranquil waters of the Antarctic.

Tom Cubit hovers over Michael Flynn’s right shoulder. The sonarman’s hands are trembling noticeably.

Flynn shakes his head in disbelief. “She’s gone, Skipper, Virginia’s gone.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Explosion was too big to be a torpedo.”

Cubit squeezes his eyes closed. “And the Goliath?”

“She went silent right after the explosion. I mark her last position approximately nine miles to the southeast.”

Cubit nods. She knows we’re close, but she’s not sure where. “Find her, Michael-Jack. If one of Covah’s crew so much as farts, I want to know about it.”

“Aye, sir.”

“To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

“Don’t go to sleep, ’cause I’m going to kill you.”

— Ricky Briscoe, before tossing kerosene on his girlfriend and burning her to death

CHAPTER 33

Aboard the Boeing 747-400 YAL-IA 40,000 feet over the Southern Indian Ocean Antarctic Circle

General Jackson stares at the image of the president of the United States and his Security Advisors, all of whom are listening, ashen-faced, as Nick Nunziata reads NORAD’s latest report.