Fade to Black

1. Ross Sea: Antarctica

1 Ross Sea: Antarctica Longitude/Latitude: 80° 30' 17'' S, 175°00' W July 1981 Surfacing less than a kilometer from the disintegrating edge of the Ross Ice Shelf was insane in the best of conditions. Today, in conditions such as these when the wind howled across the gray-green sea like a pack of frothing wolves and the seasonal landmass was sheering apart beneath the onslaught of nearly four months of perpetual daylight, it was fucking suicide. A fool’s errand. Monoliths of ice as big as the Politburo building in Moscow crashed into the churning abyss as the shelf contracted toward the southern pole laying waste to the mighty ramparts and battlements the perpetual darkness of Antarctic winter had built over the previous months. The largest of these—many weighing in excess of 1,000 tons—broke free with screeching thunderclaps that seemed to herald the end of the world. Only a lunatic would not have been terrified. But there was no chance of that—no chance that Senior Lieutenant Rodya Keldysh was choknútyy despite what his wife, Akilina, told him each time he shipped out. He was trembling too badly, his heart filled with too much dread he would admit shamelessly the next time he held Aki’s soft, warm body in his arms. What he would give to be at home in bed with her now, her worried eyes prying at his impenetrable wall of reassurance, desperately wanting to understand him, though she knew better for he was too practiced at it, even as she carried a living piece of him inside her. They had talked about names, but nothing had been decided. A boy—he wanted a boy. Keldysh had been above deck scarcely over a minute and already the pencil-thin cabletetheringhimtotheconningtowerhadsproutedjaggedteethoficethatgnawed at his gloves. It was -45 degrees Celsius, a glorious summer day. One wrong twist, a move too sudden and the frozen umbilical would snap, severing his only tie to life but for the dream of it. Metal fatigue, the chief engineer had warned him—in temperatures so far below freezing the very physics of things was altered. The world was not the world we knew. A gust of Antarctic wind could instantly char the skin black 2 ~ Fade to Black as if by fire. Each time a swell smashed into the Vaslav Annenkov’s hull, Keldysh was peppered with frozen pellets of spray that peppered him like buckshot. Poor little crab clinging to a rock in a raging sea. Hold on for dear life, little crab, or go swimming . Straight to the bottom, little limbs knitting uselessly against the oncoming deep. The cumbersome dry-suit promised to protect him from the glacial waters was a luxurious lie, a tuxedo on a dead man. If the cold of the sea didn’t kill him almost instantly, Keldysh would be pulverized in the collapsed ruins of the White Kingdom crumbling into oblivion all around him. It was taking them too fucking long. A coordinated rendezvous in this place, here and now—Christ Himself couldn’t work miracles in cold like this. But neither did Christ take orders from the KGB. Given the choice of being tethered to the Vaslav in this mess or remaining nailed to the Cross for all eternity, Keldysh was sure that the Son of God would have chosen the Cross. At least it was not a cold death. A chance encounter with one of the 1,000-ton rogues bobbing in the sea about them could gut the Vaslav from stem to stern and render it a frozen tomb. No more apparent than the dull buzz of an insect, came the labored growl of an outboard motor guiding a small craft through the shifting labyrinth of ice. The puny vessel, an ancient whale-boat, pierced the clinging mist, its high painted bow flaking and splintered to reveal patches of bare wood. Three men in dry-suits similar to his own—the helmsman wrestling with the outboard, another braced in the prow with an old wooden mooring pole he used to deflect the oncoming blocks of ice, and a third hunkered deep in the belly—comprised the miserable crew. Keldysh, officer that he was, suddenly found his own safety to be of secondary concern. How these three fools had made it this far was anyone’s guess? Each heaving swell presented the whale-boat with a treacherous mountain to climb, each trough a frozen pit out of which to...