Polar Melt: A Novel Read online

  "Lieutenant Strange, did you find the ship's log?" asked Gates.

  The entire team sat around the meeting table, except for Chee, who stood watch as bridge lookout.

  "The finished log is missing, sir," Strange said. "I found the rough log stuck between the chart table and a filing cabinet. It looks like it fell there."

  Aboard ship, the events of each day are hastily recorded as they occur in a rough log. Later, that log is rewritten for clarity in what is known as the finished log.

  "Anything of interest?"

  "Not that we don't already know, sir," Strange said, adjusting his horn-rims.

  Strange had boyish good looks, a face that to many looked too young for a Coast Guard officer. Still, the heavy black horn-rimmed glasses made him look very professorial, which, in fact, he was.

  "It recorded the Franklin launched its DSV at 0900 hours seven days ago with an operator and two scientists,” Strange continued. "After several hours of diving, the Franklin experienced severe interference on their Gertrude—"

  The lieutenant looked up and explained, "That's the device they use to communicate with the DSV."

  "Yes, sir," Chief Stalk said, a faint southern drawl in her voice. She was in her late thirties, with a stockiness that came from muscle not fat. She wore no makeup, but her large, green eyes and their naturally long lashes made it appear as though she did. The eyes could scare a man or make him fall in love with her. It didn't matter to Stalk. After a bad divorce, her only current love was the service and the opportunity it afforded her to play with some of the most advanced electronic technology. "Gertrude is a nickname for the UQC, AN/WQC-2 underwater telephone used for underwater comms since 1945."

  "Right," said Strange, stretching out the word. "Anyway, after the interference on Gertrude, Franklin lost contact with the sub. This particular DSV is of a very advanced design, capable of generating its own oxygen. The Franklin was not too worried at first. They just remained on station, trying to reestablish comms with it and notified Anchorage of the missing DSV. On the second day, the DSV surfaced, missing its crew. That was the last entry."

  Gates nodded.

  "That's what their last radio message was to Coast Guard Sector Anchorage," he said. "Then radio comms with Franklin was lost, along with its AIS signal."

  Gates thought for a moment.

  "So, whatever happened to the Franklin to make it disappear and the crew to abandon it had to happen shortly after they found the DSV," he said. "A short enough time so nothing else of note occurred that would have been recorded in the logbook."

  "Or they were unable to write anything more in the log, sir," said Hopper. "Perhaps they were incapacitated someway."

  Gates nodded.

  "I find the symmetry of this situation quite interesting," the lieutenant said.

  "Symmetry?" Gates raised his eyebrows.

  "Yes, sir." Strange steepled his fingers in front of his face. "A ship disappearing at sea is not unusual. After all, it's a big ocean. It happens all the time. Perhaps at some point, that ship is discovered wrecked ashore or sunk or maybe even still afloat. What happened to it is a singular mystery. But here we have a mystery within a mystery. First, the DSV disappears, then reappears without its crew. Then the Franklin itself disappears and turns up without its crew. The two disappearances and reappearances are too similar to be natural or accidental."

  "You're saying not only the disappearances are related, there was an external causal factor involved," Gates said.

  "Yes, sir," said Strange.

  Senior Chief Hopper grunted. In his forties, he had a half-ring of dwindling, gray hair sheared so tight to the scalp he appeared to be totally bald. By contrast, his regulation mustache looked bushy. He had dark, sardonic eyes. Somewhere he had found an empty soda can, which he used as a spittoon for the tobacco chaw bulging in his cheek.

  "With all due respect, lieutenant, but are you suggesting the crew was beamed off the ship by a flying saucer or something?"

  Strange stiffened.

  "Now, senior chief, you have some respect for our new L-T," said Stalk.

  It is naval tradition for chief petty officers to break in young officers, to guide them in their development as leaders. But in Lieutenant Strange's case, Chief Stalk took it to an extreme. Despite her all-business attitude, the childless electronics expert took what could not be described as anything but a motherly concern toward the young officer, providing a source of embarrassment for Strange and of good-natured mirth for the rest of the team.

  "Ignore the nasty senior chief, lieutenant. Go on with what you were saying."

  "I didn't mean that way," Strange said. "But now that you mention it, senior chief, can you explain how the DSV crew left the submarine while it was submerged?"

  Hopper opened his mouth, then closed it, and shook his head.

  "No, sir," he said.

  "If it were easily explained,” said Gates, "we wouldn't be here.”

  "In some ways, this whole thing reminds me of the Baychimo," said Brown.

  At six-foot-three, the gunner's mate and explosives expert was the team's tallest member. Despite his lanky appearance, he was also the most muscular. Like Hopper, his thinning hair was cut close to the scalp. His light skin was creased and sun reddened. Brown, cautious eyes hid beneath a dark brow.

  The lieutenant raised his eyebrows. "Baychimo?"

  Brown looked at Gates.

  "You brought it up, petty officer," Gates said. "You tell the story."

  "Yes, sir," Brown said. He cleared his throat. "The merchant ship Baychimo was a cargo steamer built in the early 1900s. In 1931, she was plying her trade between American and Canadian waters when she became stuck in the ice not far from Barrow, Alaska. They expected the ice would crush the ship, abandoned her, and hiked to Barrow. They went back a couple days later to see if she was still afloat, and she was. They boarded her and got her underway, but she got stuck again. Half the crew gave up and left. The rest built a base camp near the ship to wait out the winter. A storm came up, and the Baychimo disappeared."

  "Disappeared?" said Strange. "You mean she vanished?"

  Brown held up his hand.

  "Well, the crew believed she finally sank," he said. "But a few days later, native Inuits reported seeing the Baychimo nearly 50 miles away. The remaining crew found her and rowed out to board her, but a fog bank rolled in . . . and she disappeared again. Ever since, every few years the Baychimo reappeared. Not an image, sir. Not a spectral manifestation. But the real ship. There are actual photos of her, sir. The last reported sighting was in 1969, thirty-eight years after her first disappearance. For all we know, she's still afloat somewhere out here."

  Strange looked at the senior chief, then at Gates.

  "Is he pulling my leg, commander?"

  "Nope," Gates said, shaking his head. "True story. It's not all that unknown in these waters. In 1775, the schooner Octavius was found in ice near Greenland. She was in good shape, but her crew was dead and their bodies frozen. Her log said the captain entered the Arctic from the Pacific seeking the Northwest Passage. The last log entry positioned them a couple hundred miles from Barrow and was dated 1761. With a dead crew, the Octavius somehow found her way through the frozen Arctic, something that wouldn't happen again until the USS Nautilus crossed the Arctic submerged."

  Strange pondered the story, then nodded.

  "I was thinking this was similar to the Mary Celeste," he said, referring to the legendary merchant sailing ship discovered abandoned in the Atlantic Ocean in 1872, the ship's boat gone, and food still on the dining table.

  "Did you notice as we flew in that the Franklin's lifeboat is missing from the davits?" Gates asked.

  Strange nodded. "Like the Mary Celeste," he said.

  "Well, the Mary Celeste was probably abandoned because she carried a volatile cargo of grain alcohol that leaked and filled the cargo spaces with explosive fumes," Gates said. "At least that's what the board of inquiry determined. What we need
to do is determine what made the Franklin's crew abandon her."

  "But the Franklin isn't carrying any cargo," the lieutenant said.

  "Exactly," Gates said. "So, I want a stem-to-stern search of this ship—every compartment, the bilges, even shaft alley. I used the sat phone to give the admiral a SITREP. He said the Navy is sending out a CIVMAR crew—civilian mariners—to salvage this ship. They should arrive first thing tomorrow. Before they arrive, I want to know if there is something aboard this ship so dangerous that maybe we shouldn't stay on board."

  Gates stood and the rest followed. The commander held up two fingers and twisted them in the air.

  "So, turn to," he said.

  Chapter 4

  THE SUMMER SUN NEVER sets above the Arctic Circle. Even at midnight, it sits just above the horizon, casting the frigid sea, land, and ice fields into a semi-gloom usually seen during an early morning sunrise rather than the middle of the night. Gates paced the bridge deck of the Franklin, blaming the midnight sun on his sleepless night. But the midnight sun was not the reason for his being awake at this hour.

  He had the dream again.

  No, not a dream. A nightmarish memory of another night years before when, sleepless, he paced another deck at this hour. That night, however, was the complete opposite of this one—pitch black with no moon, and clouds covering the stars. And hot.

  He was a lieutenant then, senior grade, one step up from young Leland Strange. It was shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Gates was in charge of a Coast Guard port security detachment protecting an Iraqi gas and oil platform. Called a GOPLAT, it served as a collection and distribution center for Iraqi ocean oil drilling operations. Earlier in the war, Navy SEALs and Coalition special forces captured the platforms before Saddam Hussein could order them destroyed. Afterward, Coast Guard port security units, or PSUs, took responsibility for protecting them from insurgent attacks.

  It was god-awful duty. The GOPLATs were filthy and overrun with rats, forcing the Coasties to jury-rig hammocks between pipes to avoid waking up covered by the vermin. The stench of raw crude permeated everything, including the MRE ration packets. There were too few PSUs for the maritime security needs of the war, so they were broken up into detachments, undermanned and under-gunned. Each detachment had two 25-foot Boston Whaler gunboats, vessels too small to function effectively—or safely—in the open ocean. Called Guardians, the small boats carried one M2 .50 caliber machine gun forward and two M240 SAWs mounted port and starboard, and nothing else. On the platform itself were two sand-bagged heavy weapons emplacements, one for an M2 and the other for a Mark 19 grenade launcher. Gates wished he had a couple of heavy riverine command boats used by the Navy and armed with more modern grenade launchers and multiple machine guns, including a mini-gun with a devastating rate of fire. Hell, the Coast Guard ran the Riverine Warfare school at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Gates always wondered why the Coast Guard could never get those boats?

  Nor was GOPLAT safe duty. Insurgents targeted the platforms with suicide boats, high-speed dhows laden with explosives. One Coastie had already been killed along with a Navy sailor during an insurgent attack on a similar platform. Gates had no intention of letting that happen to any of his men.

  That night in the Persian Gulf, Gates had been staring into the dark when a flicker of light caught his attention. It was there, then gone. Then it was there again. He watched it for several minutes as it grew in intensity, then fade again. He climbed a ladder to one of the heavy-weapons emplacements and borrowed a set of night-vision goggles from the man on watch. Retracing his steps, he focused the NVGs on the mysterious light. It was brighter, even without the light-enhancing NVGs, but it still grew and faded. Gates assumed it was a vessel, but it appeared to zigzag as if avoiding submarines. Or maybe it was tacking with the wind. A sailing ship?

  As the vessel drew closer, Gates realized it was a sailing vessel, but unlike any he had ever seen. Instead of running lights, the light he had first noticed was from the glow of the ship itself. To the naked eye, it was a soft bluish-white luminescence that engulfed the entire vessel. The ship was ancient, reminiscent of those tourist pirate ships plying the inshore waters of harbors back in the States. Ragged, torn sails billowed from three square-rigged masts, even though there was no wind that night.

  The name of the ship struck him like a blow. The Flying Dutchman.

  There had been a Gates or a Munro in the Coast Guard since the 19th century when it was still two separate entities, the U.S. Lifesaving Service and the Revenue Cutter Service. He grew up on sea lore and its mysteries. It was the love of those stories that drove Gates to earn a graduate degree in maritime archeology. He knew the myth of the Flying Dutchman, the ancient sea captain who cursed God and was condemned to sail the seas for eternity, never making landfall. According to the legend, sighting the Dutchman was a harbinger of disaster.

  As a scientist, Gates understood the Flying Dutchman was simply a fable. As a mariner and descendant of mariners, he knew many right-minded men of the sea who claimed they saw the specter themselves. Lighthouse keepers at the Cape Point Lighthouse in South Africa claimed to have seen the Dutchman many times, always during deadly storms. German Admiral Karl Doenitz once said many of his U-boat crews reported seeing the Dutchman while on patrols during WWII, often before torpedoing a ship. Even British King George V saw the Dutchman, along with a dozen shipmates, when he was a Royal Navy midshipman on the HMS Bacchante. The sighting was duly recorded in the ship's log. Within hours a sailor on the Bacchante fell from a mast to his death. Sightings and disaster.

  Gates clambered up the ladders to the where the GOPLAT's control center stood. He sounded the platform's fire alarm, to which he had trained his men to respond to as a battle klaxon. He picked the microphone to the public-address system.

  "General quarters. General quarters," he said, his voice booming across the platform. "All hands man your battle stations. Boat crews man your boats. This is not a drill."

  Confused voices and the hollow ring of heavy boots on steel deck plates and stairs shattered the stillness of the night. The double slap of the Ma-Deuce machine gun bolts being rammed home echoed across the platform, joined by the lighter sound of the SAW bolts being worked. From below came the whine and roar of the twin 200-horse power outboard motors coming to life on the Guardians.

  "What is it, sir?" asked the detachment's chief, as he snapped the chinstrap to his Kevlar helmet.

  Gates was putting on his own kit.

  "Don't know, chief," he said. "But there's something out there."

  Gates picked up a hand-held radio and thumbed the push-to-talk button.

  "Boat crews, stand out one hundred yards," he said.

  The growl of the outboards responded as the boats veered away from the GOPLAT at high speed, their phosphorescent wakes gleaming against the dark plain of the sea.

  A radio operator stepped from the platform's control room.

  "L-T, Old Kentucky reports three inbounds from the east. High speed. Three hundred yards."

  Old Kentucky was the call sign for a Navy mobile inshore undersea warfare unit on shore. Equipped with a variety of sensors, including radar and sonar, it acted as the eyes for the Coast Guard detachments guarding Iraqi offshore oil platforms.

  "Jesus, they just pick them up now?"

  "Yes, sir," the radioman said. "Kentucky said those dhows can get lost in sea clutter until they go to high speed. They're inbound now, sir."

  Gates raised the hand-held and directed his small boats onto an intercept course.

  The men on the platform could see the gunfire before they could hear it. Muzzle flashes and tracer rounds stabbed through the night, followed seconds later with the slow, steady hammering of the .50 calibers and the sharper staccato of the lighter SAWs. They also heard the distinctive clatter of the Kalashnikovs, the Russian-designed AK-47 assault rifles used by insurgents and terrorists around the world. There was another, heavier firing that Gates knew meant at leas
t one of the enemy boats had something larger than an AK.

  After only a minute they could see the boats, the muzzle flashes offering a choppy view of the firefight like an early black-and-white motion picture. One of the insurgent boats abruptly went dead in the water, its engine disabled by gunfire or its helmsman killed. Automatic fire still flashed from the boat until silenced by a Guardian's Ma-Deuce.

  The remaining two insurgents continued their run for the platform, chased by the two Coast Guard boats. One Guardian gained on the enemy boats, its bow-mounted .50 caliber hammering at the nearest insurgent. Gates saw the Guardian was getting too close to the enemy vessel, a boat no doubt filled with explosives. Before he could radio a warning, a blast shattered the dark and lit up the surrounding water.

  "No!"

  Gates' heart sank at the thought of his own men caught up in that explosion. Then the pursuing Guardian plowed through the geyser of water and both Coast Guard boats charged after the last insurgent.

  "Thank god," Gates muttered.

  Two down but there was still the last insurgent boat, and it was getting close enough to threaten the platform. Gates ordered every man on the platform to open fire on it. A thunderous cacophony of heavy and light gun fire erupted from the GOPLAT. Fifty-caliber bullets raked the dhow. NATO 5.56mm rounds from the SAWs and M16 rifles showered it, but still the insurgent sped toward the platform. Grenades from the Mark 19 straddled the boat, raising geysers of spray, until one slammed into it amidships.

  A volcanic geyser of water rose from the ocean's surface, carrying splinters of wood and metal, and pieces of human grist. It fell across the platform, the metal decks, and ladders; pipes pinged from the debris. Then the geyser subsided, and the night fell quiet except for the growl of the returning Guardians, and the sound of ringing in everyone's ears.

  Chapter 5

  "COMMANDER?"