Thorpe's Candle

RECON

Gates banked the OceanQuest helicopter over the mouth of Scoresby Sund, a fjord that ran some 110 kilometers inland from Greenland’s central east coast. At 150 meters above the rocky shore, Skyler sat in the copilot’s seat and gazed down at the numerous icebergs still locked in the fast-retreating pack ice. The low angle of the sun reflected a turquoise sheen but their long shadows bore no relation to true size. These were mere babies, he thought, having been in the same region mapping thermal currents a few years before. Then it was early winter and the icebergs were already enormous.

“There’s high pressure over all of Greenland,” Gates said. “Weather should be perfect for the next few days at least.”

Skyler nodded as he looked back at the receding heli-pad on the aft deck of the Phoenix. Their trip up from Woods Hole had been uneventful giving him and his retrieval team plenty of time to plan the excavation and recovery of the korium.

Skyler’s first pick for director of the project was his old friend and classmate from the Academy, former naval captain, Jim Hurst. Hurst had worked with OceanQuest on numerous projects including locating the F-117A Stealth Fighter that disappeared on a routine training mission over Montana in 2007. After the Air Force gave up, OceanQuest was called in and located the plane at the bottom of Gold Dust Lake in the remote mountains of Utah. But Hurst was killed in a freak car accident only a day before the Phoenix was to sail from Cape Cod.

By coincidence, Rainer Knebel, the managing director of Cape Town Expedition Outfitters of South Africa was visiting Woods Hole and heard about Skyler’s search for a project director. After meeting with Skyler and Gates, and presenting his credentials, Knebel was contracted to take Jim Hurst’s place.

Rainer Knebel would be responsible for acquiring all the on-site help from the local Inuit population — he had extensive experience on prior expeditions. In addition, all supplies and equipment would be his responsibility.

The rest of the team consisted of experts in arctic geophysics, drilling, and aircraft search and retrieval technology.

As Skyler mulled over details of the operation, he watched a small village pass beneath the helicopter. It resembled a collection of colorful boxes scattered along the shore. He recalled details of the search records given to him by Walter Smyth in London. The last distress call from Arctic Air Cargo mentioned passing over what the pilot thought to be the lights of a small town. Maybe this village was the same one.

At this altitude the air was pristine and Skyler could see miles inland — an expanse of endless white. A thin coastal area separated the frozen wasteland from the sea with shards of greenery and cliffs of ancient rock. Maybe the oldest rocks on the planet, Skyler thought.

It only took twenty minutes before Gates nodded toward the satellite downlink display. “Home sweet home.” He banked the helicopter into a low sweeping circle. The flat white glacier swooped up and Gates sat the machine down gently on the ice creating a cloud of swirling powdered snow. The landscape was barren and desolate, broken only by a few low mountain peaks dotting the horizon. The sky was topaz blue.

As the blades of the helicopter slowed and the sound of the turbines wound down, Skyler and Gates opened their side doors, their feet hitting the ice with a crunch.

“Well?” Gates stood with his hands on his hips. He used the toe of his boot to chip away at the crusty frost.

“A deep subject,” Skyler said. He slipped on a pair of Serengeti Drivers to protect his eyes from the painful glare. Not a breath of wind stirred in the silence. He paused for a moment absorbing the dramatic vista that lay before him. Then he paced a slow circumference around the helicopter, surveying the area in all directions. It was unusually warm, the temperature hovering in the mid-50s. Skyler’s sweater and thermal underwear were almost too much.

Walking all the way around the machine, he stood beside Gates and gazed at a point on the horizon between a pair of distant mountains — a spot Skyler calculated to be about thirty kilometers away.

“Who do you think our friends are?” He watched as a tiny spark of sunlight glinted off the metallic skin of a small airplane passing between the peaks.

“No idea,” Gates said, “but they’ve been shadowing us since we left the coast.”

Dr. Peter Bjoernsson planted his feet firmly on the hard surface of the ice cap as he looked out over the great expanse. Lean and weathered, the fifty-year-old was a glaciologist and arctic expert from the University of Iceland. Behind him lay the OceanQuest base camp — a collection of bright orange dome tents, portable Quonset huts, communications antennae and satellite dishes, snowmobiles, and supply tents. Dark sunglasses protected his eyes from the fierce glare as he glanced down and confirmed the readout on the hand-held GPS. The wind had picked up over the last few minutes and his thinning gray hair swirled haphazardly. “We’ll start the grid here,” he said to Helen Bermannsson.

The twenty-four-year-old native of Denmark, Bermannsson was Dr. Bjoernsson’s understudy. The energetic, petite blond nodded and slipped into the seat of the gleaming red snowmobile. She turned the ignition key producing an instant high-pitched whine as the motor spun to life. A puff of gray smoke shot out its exhaust toward the sled attached to a tether 20 meters to the rear of the vehicle. The sled was about the size of a large Igloo cooler and housed a sub-topographical radar system and a transmitter. It sent radar waves down into the ice as Helen towed it over the surface. When the waves struck an anomaly, they bounced back to the radar’s receiver. The former CIA imaging expert, Billy Manners, sitting in the command Quonset hut, could then analyze the signals and create a three-dimensional picture of what lay below.

A second snowmobile sputtered to life — this one driven by a young Icelander named Jon Svensson. Svensson was also a student of Dr. Bjoernsson’s. Svensson’s radiant white-toothed smile broadcast his excitement at being on his first field expedition. Pulling an identical radar sled, he crisscrossed the grid pattern with Bermannsson, narrowing down the location of the plane.

As the two snowmobiles pulled their sleds into a parallel pattern, Skyler and Rainer Knebel approached Dr. Bjoernsson. “How’s it going, Peter?” Skyler asked.

“We did a preliminary run earlier, Sky, just a quick zigzag. She’s down there all right.” He turned to watch his two assistants’ progress. “I’ll have an outline of the plane staked out within a couple of hours. As soon as the tractor gets here and we fire up the boiler, we can start dropping the steam probe. By this time tomorrow, I’ll have touched your plane with the probe at least a dozen times.”

“Excellent,” said Skyler. He turned to Knebel. “How long before the tractors arrive?”

“Late tomorrow,” the South African said with a slight accent. He was just over six feet with fair skin and thick blond hair. A scar ran across his cheek — a love tap from a leopard, he had told Skyler when the two men first met. During the trip up from Woods Hole and over the two weeks setting up the camp on the ice, Knebel said little, kept to himself and seemed absorbed in the recovery of the ore and the supervision of the Inuits.

They watched the two snowmobiles create a checkerboard pattern across the snow. Then Knebel said, “I’ve got a dozen Inuit workers coming up with the coring rig and the boiler. They’ve all had drilling experience on the cap. There’s a second tractor with two sixty-five-hundred-watt meltdown diesel generators and enough fuel to run them continuously for a week. Should be more than adequate.”

“You’ll use Peter’s probe holes for guides?” Skyler asked.

Knebel scratched his close-cropped beard. “We’ll follow his primary hole with the Vulcan melting a ten-foot-wide shaft straight down. Next, we’ll assemble the electric hoist. It’s a steel cage large enough to hold five or six men or a nice sized container of ore. It runs up and down on a chain drive inside a metal support frame. Once the hoist is functioning, we’ll use steam jet hoses to melt out from the bottom until we’ve created a cavern exposing the cargo plane.”

“You make it sound so easy,” Skyler said.

“Only fair to warn you, Sky,” Peter Bjoernsson said. “When we get down there, we may find that the millions of tons of ice that have accumulated over so much time have crushed the plane into a sheet of metal no thicker than the Sunday edition of the New York Times.”

“Let’s hope we don’t,” Skyler said as he felt an icy chill from a blast of Arctic wind.