Thorpe's Candle

ENTOMBED

“Looks like a mess of collard greens, don't it?” Billy Manners said as he sat beside Skyler and scrutinized the color radar.

A high-resolution monitor showed the images originating from twenty-two miles overhead. Using low frequency, earth-penetrating technology, the signals from the Cirrus had probed the Greenland ice cap to a depth of six hundred feet surveying thousands of square miles in a matter of minutes. Then, with the threat of sunrise on its heels, the ultra-secret spy plane shot back across the outer fringes of the atmosphere to the protection of its hidden base in the remote Nevada desert.

Skyler smiled at Manners, knowing his friend loved to play the “good ol' country boy” routine. Manners' square poker face was only slightly betrayed by mischievous blue eyes. His simpleminded Georgia-bumpkin façade hid the razor-edged mind of an imaging analyst who left his senior-level post at the CIA's Digital Imagining Division to join “Skyler's Navy” and “see the world” as he jokingly told everyone.

“Collard greens? That's certainly one way of looking at it, Billy.” Skyler chuckled. “But I know there's a slightly more technical version deep inside that analytical mind of yours.”

“Yeah, you crazy hillbilly,” Mickey Gates said, “don't make us beg.” Gates stood behind the two, looking over their shoulders as he sipped a Tecate.

“Well, boys, it's like this,” Manners said. “What the glacier gives us is a detailed record of the last hundred thousand years or so of this planet’s history — it’s sort of like a time machine. You see, over the millennia, each snowfall carries compounds from the air to the ground. The snow piles up in layers and traps the compounds. The tremendous pressure from accumulating snow creates ice that traps bubbles containing minute samples of the atmosphere. Core specimens have pinpointed major events in history like the earliest large-scale pollution started about twenty-five hundred years ago when the Greeks and Romans began mining and smelting lead and silver. And relatively near the surface, there’s dust particles from Chernobyl — a tenth of the way down are samples of acid rain caused by volcanic activity when Vesuvius erupted.”

“Could we get to the point, Mr. Wizard?” Gates said.

“Keep your britches on, son.” Manners took a deep breath before continuing. “Because the ice cap is made up of water, it's relatively easy for radio waves to penetrate. These pictures from your buddies up in that spy bird show us three different kinds of anomalies.” He rubbed his four-day growth of beard as he leaned back in the chair. “First, there's the changes in the characteristics of the ice at different depths such as the seventy-foot firn line where granular snow turns into solid glacier ice. We can also see the different layers left by each year's snowfalls. These are a lot like tree rings and are easy to spot because they appear as horizontal lines on the radar's profiles.” He pointed at a series of dark green lines spaced fairly evenly across the monitor.

“Second, there are the anomalies within the ice structure itself. These include pockets of solid ice within the granular snow above the firn line and water pockets in the solid glacier ice below the firn line.” Manners tapped the screen in a few places to emphasize his geology lesson.

“Finally, there are metal and foreign objects. The profile of a large object like an aircraft below the surface will be elongated like a distinctive rolling hill as opposed to the steep peaks caused by metal fragments and debris closer to the surface.”

Like a storyteller around a campfire, he leaned in close to the monitor, slowly extending his finger to a small, dark shape near the bottom. “I'll stake my season tickets to every Georgia Bulldogs home game this year that what you have right there is your missing DC-4, better known as Arctic Air Cargo 101. So, boys, that’s the good news.”

“And the bad?” Skyler asked.

“She’s entombed in solid ice eighty meters down.”