“We’ve been lucky so far,” the captain said. “We’ve had a high-pressure area over us—meaning low seas and good visibility—and we’ve been able to make good progress toward Point Adélie.”
But Michael could hear the hesitation in his voice, and so could the others. Charlotte was holding a zucchini strip on the end of her fork.
“But?” she asked.
“But it looks like it’s dissipating,” he said. “On the cape, the weather can change very quickly.”
“We’re gradually moving across what’s called the Antarctic Convergence,” Lieutenant Healey put in. “That’s where the cold bottom water from the pole sinks beneath the warmer water coming up from the Indian and Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. We’re traveling into much more unpredictable seas, and less temperate weather.”
“Today was temperate?” Charlotte said, before snapping the zucchini strip off her fork. “My braids froze so hard, they felt like jerky.” She said it with a laugh, but everyone knew that it wasn’t really a joke.
“Today will feel like a heat wave before we’re done,” the captain said as he held out the big bowl of pasta primavera. “Anyone for seconds?”
Darryl, who’d passed on the appetizer—shrimp cocktails—immediately reached out. Despite his size, they had discovered that he could eat them all under the table.
“I’m only trying to prepare you,” the captain went on, “for what’s coming.”
His warning came true even sooner than he might have expected. The winds had been picking up steadily, and the ice, drifting their way in chunks the size of train cars, was lumbering past in even-more-massive blocks; when some became impassable, the ship did what it was designed to do and plowed right through them. With dinner done, and the sun still hanging motionless above the horizon, Michael went out to the bow to watch the grudge match unfold between the oncoming bergs and the pride of the Coast Guard’s cutters.
Darryl Hirsch was already out there, bundled up with only his eyeglasses poking through the red woolen ski mask that covered his entire head and face.
“You’ve got to watch this,” Hirsch said, as Michael joined him at the rail. “It’s positively hypnotic.”
Just ahead lay a tabular slab of ice the size of a football field, and Michael felt the Constellation pick up speed as it rammed directly into the center of the snow-covered pack. The ice at first didn’t give an inch, and Michael wondered just how thick it was. The engines groaned and roared, and the hull of the ship, rounded for just this purpose, rode up onto the surface of the glacier, and let its own weight—thirteen thousand tons—press down. A crooked fissure opened in the ice, then another, shooting off in the opposite direction. The cutter pressed forward, bearing down the whole time, and suddenly there was a great splintering and cracking of the ice. Massive shards reared up on either side of the prow, rising almost as high as the deck Michael and Darryl were standing on. Instinctively they stepped away from the railing, then suddenly had to lunge for it again to keep from tumbling all the way back to the stern.
When the shards subsided, Michael looked down over the rail and saw the pieces slipping away to the sides, before being sucked under the ship, on their way toward the giant screw propellers—three of them, sixteen feet in diameter—at the other end; there, they’d be chewed and chopped into manageable size, before drifting off in the ship’s wake.
But what probably surprised Michael the most was the under-side of the ice. What looked white and pristine on top did not look at all that way when broken and upended. The underbelly of the ice was a disheartening sight to see—a pale, sickly yellow that reminded Michael of snow a dog had peed on.
“It’s algae,” Darryl said, intuiting his thoughts. “That discoloration on the bottom.” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the crunching of the ice and the rising winds. “Those bergs aren’t solid ice—they’re honeycombed with brine channels, and the channels are filled with algae and diatoms and bacteria.”
“So they live under the ice?” Michael shouted.
“No—they live in it,” Darryl shouted back, looking vaguely proud of them for their resourcefulness. The ship plunged forward again, then dipped, and even in this strange light, Michael could see that Darryl was starting to look a little green at the gills.
After Darryl hurriedly excused himself to go below, Michael got tired of trying to keep his own footing and headed down to the wardroom, which was usually a hive of activity at night, with card games going and some DVD blaring on the TV. (The choices ranged from Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan to professional wrestling and the Rock.) But there was nothing going on; the crew, he assumed, must have been called to various duties. He ducked his head into the gym—a cramped exercise room tucked into the bow, separated from the icy ocean only by the bulkheads. Petty Officer Kazinski was on the treadmill in a pair of shorts and a tight T-shirt that read “KISS ME—I’M COAST GUARD!”