Chapter 38

38

May 14, 11:32 A . M . ANAT

Aboard the Polar King , East Siberian Sea

Huddled in a bright-red coat and woolen sweater, Gray stood at the bow of the icebreaker. A heavy fog smothered the ship, slowing their speed to a crawl. It was so thick that wisps hung in the air like cloudy veils. He waved his fingers through one.

"Never seen anything like it," Jason said next to him.

Gray lowered his arm. "Wish we weren't seeing it now. This fog will make our search nearly impossible." He stared at the wan glow of the morning sun through the mist. "And now that it's daylight, we don't have the borealis guiding us any longer."

Gray pictured the swirling, brilliant cauldron of light that had led them to these waters. That had been more than seven hours ago. It had been their beacon through most of the night. Anna had posited that if the lightshow was indeed the whirlpool described in the old texts, that perhaps the four rivers said to lead into it might represent the cardinal points of a compass—east, west, north, and south—all merging into one at the North Pole.

Still, by morning, they had pushed into this fogbank sitting atop the ice, and the mystery vanished away. Though they had lost sight of the whirlpool in the sky, Byron had gotten a relative fix on its location during the night.

The ship continued to ply painstakingly toward those coordinates. But it wasn't just the lack of visibility that confounded them.

Gray braced himself as the bow lifted, ramming high over the ice below, driven by the force of its twin nuclear-powered engines. A thunderous cracking erupted as the ballasted weight of the Polar King crushed two stories of ice under it. The entire ship quaked as it fell. Air-bubbling bow thrusters to either side pushed the displaced ice away from the hull, allowing the ship to slide forward.

They had entered this heavy ice three hours ago, riding through it like a thirty-thousand-ton porpoise across frozen seas. Captain Kelly had expressed his doubts about how much farther they could travel if the ice grew any thicker, especially when it was this stubborn, compacted over a span of two centuries.

"We must be close," Gray muttered.

The radio in his hand crackled with static. He lifted it to his ear. Even this close, transmissions remained garbled. Still, he made out Seichan's voice. "Get back... the bridge. You're... to want to see this."

He pressed the transmitter. "What is it?"

"Just get your asses... here."

Gray frowned and lowered the radio. "They want us back at the bridge," he told Jason.

"Good. I can barely feel my toes and fingers any longer."

The two of them crossed into the towering superstructure and took an elevator to its tenth level. Men and a few women bustled along the hallways, part of the hundred-and-twenty-person crew aboard the King .

Gray and Jason reached the bridge. Seichan noted their arrival and waved them to the navigation station. They had to push through a group gathered around it, including Sister Anna, who had changed into a borrowed set of crew coveralls.

"What's got everyone stirred up?" Gray asked.

Anna pointed. "What do you make of that?"

Gray stared down at the face of the ship's compass. Its needle jittered right and left, then swung full around several times before returning to its dancing pattern, as if confused where to point.

"Definitely picking up some strong magnetic interference," Byron reported as he leaned on his fists atop his station.

Gray pictured the churning lights in the sky. "Could the compass be reacting to the solar storm? Like the borealis had?"

Byron shook his head. "Not likely. Something more localized is fouling the reading."

With his words, the needle spun once more, shivered a moment, then settled into a fixed position. No one spoke for a few breaths, waiting to confirm that the strangeness had passed.

Jason turned to Byron. "Did we sail out of range of whatever was causing the aberration?"

The navigator shifted and checked a glowing chart. "That magnetic compass is mostly decorative, a nod to our sailing past. We now rely on gyrocompasses, which fix our position by the rotation of the Earth." He tapped at his colored screen. "This ECDIS system calibrates the gyro, along with speed logs, NAVTEX, GPS, and other nav-equipment, to plot our nautical position."

"What does all that show?" Gray asked.

"While the storm is wreaking havoc with some systems, we're still getting decent data. Enough to display both the geographical North Pole and the last charting of the Earth's magnetic pole."

Gray stared back at the old compass. "Let me guess. That's not where the needle is pointing."

"Not even close." Byron looked at him. "Commander Pierce, I owe you an apology."

"What for?"

"For not believing you. Something bloody strange is out here."

" Do not be deceived by its false pull, " Anna whispered, quoting from Nicolas of Lynn's Inventio Fortunata .

"Can we follow that needle's course?" Gray asked Byron, glancing over to Captain Kelly, who still manned the helm, consulting with a pair of crewmen.

"We're roughly doing that already," the navigator answered. "It lies in the same direction as the coordinates I determined from the borealis's spinning."

Kelly broke away and crossed toward them, his lips thin and drawn with worry. He had clearly heard enough of the conversation to offer his own opinion. "The crew reported on the depth soundings and ice thickness ahead. The waters grow very shallow, less than twenty meters deep, and the King drafts eleven of those. We'll be scraping our keel before long. Even worse, the ice is steadily thickening."

"How much farther can we go?" Gray asked.

"Maybe another two miles. But I'd prefer to err on the side of caution and go no more than half that." The captain responded to the dismay on Gray's face. "You can always take the helicopter and search ahead. That's if there's anything to see through the fog. Or go overland, using our snowmobiles."

A firm voice called from across the bridge. "That won't be necessary."

They all turned and watched Omryn Akkay back away from the bank of windows. His manner looked dismayed, almost fearful. Past the Chukchi native, the view outside had partially cleared, the fog shredding in front of the bow.

Through the haze, the midday sun reflected brightly off open ice. Scraps of dense mists still hung in places, mostly near spires of black rock rising out of the ice, as if snagged by those sharp points. The bluffs rose four or five stories high, climbing in sheer faces. The outcroppings formed a rough circle, like a jagged crown poking out of the ice.

In the center, though, a lone peak climbed higher, easily ten to fifteen stories high. Fog draped its rocky heights, which fell away in steep cliffs. Lower down, a massive sheet of ice rode up its eastern flank, as if a wave had struck long ago and frozen in place.

Gray noted that the compass needle pointed straight toward that spire.

"We found it," he said, his voice hushed with awe.

Anna spoke its name, one lost in time and myth. "Hyperborea."

1:08 P . M .

As the exploratory team set off over the ice, Jason glanced back at the mountainous crimson bulwark of the Polar King . The icebreaker had come to a stop a mile from the peaks. The ship had dared come no closer. The waters were too shallow, and likely frozen solid nearer the buried shoreline.

Jason rode at the back of a four-person Arctic Snowcat. It trundled on double tracks across the ice. Another Cat followed, exiting a hold near the King 's stern and driving across a ramp that extended to the frozen sea.

It carried Omryn, whom Gray had convinced to join them, as the Chukchi crewman might have some insight concerning this home of his peoples' sea gods. The burly red-haired driver, Ryan Marr, was from Boston, a former Coast Guard officer who had served on cutters in the Arctic. He was accompanied by his Aussie wife, Harper, the King 's medical doctor, a blonde spitfire with a no-nonsense attitude.

Jason hoped no one would need her services today.

He turned his attention forward. Anna sat up front with the icebreaker's captain, who aimed them toward the black peaks. It seemed Kelly hadn't wanted to miss out on this opportunity. Jason couldn't blame the guy. After traveling thousands of miles across featureless ice, to make landfall and explore such a strange site had to be irresistible.

Ahead of them, the final two members of the team sped across the ice on Polaris snowmobiles. Gray and Seichan switched back and forth across each other's path, clearly enjoying the freedom after the cramped days of travel. Still, they kept their speed tame enough for the others to follow.

Not that anyone could be easily lost.

All the vehicles were painted in red and black, to match the Polar King , and for another important reason. The bright colors made them easy to spot on the ice in case of emergency.

Let's hope we don't run into any of those.

Especially because they were all on their own.

The solar storm continued to wreak havoc on long-range communications. The short reach of their radios had some degree of reception, but even that was spotty. The only positive news was that Byron believed the geomagnetic interference should start to wane in the next four or five hours. The navigator had stayed behind to try to shorten that time frame.

Jason hoped he was successful. He was anxious to reach Kat, to reconnect to the world. They needed to share this discovery, start spreading the word before the Russians learned of this place. And if there was a threat to the world hidden here, it needed to be identified and secured.

Anna spoke up front, glancing back at him, perhaps sensing his anxiety. "Do you think that central peak could truly be a mountain of pure lodestone, as Nicolas of Lynn claimed in his book?"

From his lap, Jason lifted a small compass given to him. The needle pointed at the spire of black rock. "I doubt it's solid magnetite. More likely the outcropping has rich veins of the magnetic stone running through it." He waved to encompass all the peaks. "This whole grouping might be the same. All part of a huge massif, a sea ridge with only these topmost tips cresting through the ice."

Anna looked forward. "I wonder..."

Jason scooted closer. "What?"

"You could be right. According to the annotations that Mercator included with his map, the Rupus Nigra et Altissima —this magnetic mountain—was thirty-three miles around. A measurement he likely gleaned from Nicolas's Inventio Fortunata ."

Support came from an unusual source. "Byron performed some preliminary measurements," Kelly stated as they approached the outer ring of cliffs. "The circumference of the exposed outcroppings is roughly fifty kilometers—thirty-one miles."

Anna sat straighter, looking back at Jason, her eyes shining as blue as the skies. She was clearly thrilled, but there was an edge of melancholy in her expression, the way her gaze seemed to stretch far beyond their vehicle's confines.

She deflated with a sigh. "How I wish Igor were here to see this, to see history—what was inscribed in the ancient texts we both studied—come alive."

Her words sobered Jason, reminding him that this discovery had come with a steep price. Not just her brother, but all the others who had fallen.

And more might, too, before this is over .

He took a deep breath as the Snowcat swept between two of the mist-shrouded peaks of the outer ring. As they entered the heart of this mysterious landscape, he swore he could feel the powerful energies buried here, the magnetic pull of this place.

Kelly cursed and jerked the vehicle hard, throwing Jason to the side. The Snowcat lifted off one tread before crashing back down.

As it did, Jason caught a glimpse of the obstacle that Kelly had sideswiped. It stuck out of the ice, but it wasn't a rocky outcropping—it was a tall spar of wood, tangled by frosted ropes. Other oaken slabs, peppered with nails of black iron, lay embedded or buried around the pole.

"What was that?" Anna asked.

Jason answered. "I... I think it was the top of an old ship's mast. Maybe the remains of a weathered crow's nest."

"There are others," Kelly said, nodding ahead.

Across the ice, other poles of wood poked crookedly. Some had shattered. One still had an intact crossbar, as if it had been turned into a grave marker—which was surely the case.

Jason pictured the old sailing ships locked in ice under them.

"They must mark the remains of Catherine's ships," Anna said.

Jason stared across the frozen graveyard. "Clearly not all of them made it back."

He swallowed hard, wondering if they'd suffer the same fate.

He looked toward the bulk of the Polar King , a crimson rampart in the distance. A chill of misgiving swept through him, as if he had stepped on his own grave.

Maybe Omryn was right.

No one should come looking for this place.