Read Ebook: Murder Beneath the Polar Ice by Howard Hayden Gaughan Jack Illustrator

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Ebook has 218 lines and 30578 words, and 5 pages

The Murderer's breathing stopped as he made out something quivering up there. "What is it?"

Swaying up there on the underside of the ice in a gelatinous mass at least twenty feet across, it resembled a mass of gigantic frog's eggs.

But the Murderer decided there was too great a variation in size for them to be eggs. Those nearest the outside of the mass seemed clearer, more transparent, than the surrounding gelatinous substance. The Murderer's excitement began to fade.

"They're not eggs," he said disappointedly. "I think they're only bubbles encased in some sort of soft plastic."

"Mineral," Barney said with some relief in his voice. "Now I see that dark part in the middle has the shape of a can. The bubbles must be to float a mine or secret mechanism," his voice ended excitedly. Barney wanted nothing to do with live things; he liked mechanical devices that clicked and buzzed and could be taken apart and then put back together.

He eased the minisub up toward the gelatinous mass.

"Don't bring the minisub too close," the Murderer gasped, imagining a mechanical click as the impersonal gadgetry within the can detected their approach and cocked the lifeless steel prongs of a detonator.

Barney laughed in excited contrast. "Even our air tanks are non-magnetic. Or if it's hydrophonic, the noise level to set it off would have to be plenty high, because of all the crunching sounds every day in the ice. I'm going to find out what it is."

Barney rose from his cockpit, trailing his green-stained canvas bag of non-magnetic tools.

"You're not going to cut into it, are you?" the Murderer cried.

"That's what the taxpayers pay me for--to protect them from--you name it. Murderer, you sail the minisub off until all my telephone cable is out. Just like when we practiced disarming our picket buoys, I'll tell you every move I make."

"If it's a mine," the Murderer said, "I'll be as flattened as you."

"Take notes on your navigational pad. I'll start with a little experimental cut into the jello. We can't go off and leave this thing; we'd never find it again. And it wouldn't be exactly smart to tow it to our submarine until we know what its insides are supposed to do."

Barney's black rubber arm was sawing vigorously up and down. "This jello's tougher than it looks. Very ingenious. I'll bet this was a compact little bundle when a submarine ejected it into the water. Probably sea water makes it swell--and chemicals fizz inside so that the bubbles appear and float the can up to the underside of the ice.

"This is important," Barney's voice croaked on. "I've come to some thin shiny wires. They seem to be all through the jello and to curve back in toward the can."

The Murderer clenched his hand. He could feel the tendons and imagine the wonderfully intricate nerves of his living hand. He'd been frightened many times under the sea. Occasionally divers talked about which way they'd rather go. Nitrogen narcosis was popular among the heavy drinkers. Barney's choice--a nice close mine explosion because it would be so quick. They thought the Murderer was crazy when he said he'd rather be eaten by a Great White Shark than smashed by some miserable explosive gadget.

"Now I'm spreading two wires apart," Barney said calmly, "but I've left a layer of gelatin around each of them. I will not cut the wires and I'll try not to let them touch each other."

Gradually his head and shoulders disappeared up into the gelatinous mass.

"Don't snag your tanks or regulator on a wire," the Murderer breathed.

"Now I'm cutting within a few inches of the base of the can." Only Barney's kicking legs showed. "My air is filling the cut--and I'm going--to open a--chimney." Bubbles emerged from the side of the swaying mass.

"Suppose this thing is atomic," the Murderer said. "It would crush our ballistic missile sub from here."

"This is peacetime, boy. Nobody's fool enough to let an atomic mine go drifting around with the ice."

"The bottom of this can is as blank," Barney said, "as a sailor in one of those modern art museums. I'm going to cut my way along the side of the can and see what I can see."

A little fish, perhaps lost from its school, peered into the Murderer's glass face-plate. Its wondrous eye grew inquisitively larger, and he thought of the millions of cooperating cells that made up its eye and optic nerve and receiving brain and the marvel that the individually drifting cells of two billion years ago could have achieved this.

There was a contradiction, he thought. He was amazed by life and yet he speared fish. Did he enjoy feeling life wriggle on the end of his spear?

"I've reached the top," Barney's voice croaked. "There's a rod here--get this, a vertical rod. It extends up into the ice like with the aerials of our picket buoys. I knew it wasn't a mine. This is how they plan to detect our atomic submarines. This will make a very interesting present for Admiral Rickover--"

At this instant there was a darkening slap against the Murderer's mask. His eardrums burst inward. His intestines squeezed up into his chest from the force of the underwater explosion. He blacked out.

Ice water seared his face. He was drowning. Convulsively, his hand groped for his mask. The glass was intact. His hand dragged the mask back to a proper fit upon his face, and compressed air forced out the sea water. He could feel the telephone cord pulling at his mask.

Everything was blinding white, and he realized he was belly up beneath the ice. "Barney?"

The telephone wire began to drag him down head first, and he went down it hand over hand toward the slowly sinking minisub. "Barney?"

Further down, he saw Barney's black rubber suit spread-eagled and sinking, and he swam clumsily down past the minisub. He clutched Barney's black rubber arm and dragged it toward the minisub. The black rubber suit seemed to have no bones. Everything drooped and swayed as he tried to fit Barney into the stern cockpit. When he wrapped Barney's wires to tie him in, they came face to face. There was no glass in Barney's mask. The glass had burst where the face had been.

Murderer's eyes narrowed in helpless rage at Barney's death.

Dragging himself into Barney's forward cockpit, he valved air into the minisub's forward flotation tank, raising the torpedo-like nose. It was then that he saw them up there, silhouetted small and frog-like against the blinding white ice, two divers.

The two silhouettes were looking down at him, and he knew they had been attracted by the explosion of their gelatinous picket buoy. He looked all around for the dim gray outline of their submarine, but there was no sign of their "home," and his gaze concentrated with wide-eyed intensity on their black paddling shapes as his minisub rose from the depths.

He saw them exchange hurried hand signals. They began to swim away, side by side, their fins fluttering rapidly now. They were swimming a definite course, and still there was no sign of their submarine as his minisub inexorably gained on them.

Now that he had reached their altitude, he noticed they were already tiring. One diver looked back, then swam frantically to catch up with the other. Like a slow fighter plane, the minisub came in on them from behind, and one diver pushed at the other. They again exchanged hand signals, losing yards to the minisub, and one began to swim hard while the other turned back, facing the minisub, raising his hand in what appeared to be a courteous military salute. The minisub kept coming straight at him.

Then the diver spread his arms in a gesture of peace. The minisub's torpedo-shaped nose rammed his belly. Unsheathing his long blade, the Murderer struck.

As the diver wriggled, the Murderer withdrew the blade and struck again. Air bubbles streamed from the diver's chest with each exhalation of breath as he backwatered. His expression seemed mild surprise as the Murderer struck a third time, driving the blade down between the man's neck and collar bone, pushing him deeper. The next blow smashed the mask. Belatedly, the man's hand flurried, seeming to clutch at his bubbles as he sank.

The Murderer looked up. Far off under the ice, the other diver had stopped, was looking down, watching, and the Murderer held up his blade as a signal and turned the minisub upward, after him. This diver took evasive action among the downward bulges of old Siberian ice and suddenly vanished.

Although there was no sky glare in the water, the Murderer supposed the diver had found an open lead in the ice and would rather freeze to death, or at least put up a fight from the edge of the ice, than die in the water.

Valving more air into the minisub's flotation tanks, the Murderer steered it rapidly up into the oddly round, oddly dim lead in the ice pack. At the edge of his mask-vision he glimpsed a longish tubular shape suspended in the water, but the minisub was rising too fast for him to get a good look. The overbuoyant minisub bloomed above the surface and sloshed back, rolling unsteadily while the film of water slid off his mask without freezing and he saw.

The white blur became the biggest twin-rotored copter he had ever seen, squatting there on the ice, white except for its glass. Then his eyes were attracted by motion, by the parka-clad men hauling the surviving diver up on the ice. Other darkish figures were simply standing there, some of them beginning to point.

Behind them was a smaller helicopter with the loop-shaped aerial of a radio location finder mounted atop its plastic dome. There was something wrong with the sky, and the Murderer realized it was not the sky. It was a vast white canvas dome, dimpling in the polar wind. The unnatural circle in the ice and the equipment grouped around it all were hidden from aerial observation.

Pointing at him from the fuselage of the huge helicopter, and so close that his eyes had avoided it, was a metal boom with a hoist cable taut into the water, tethering something below the surface. Some of the men were running toward the huge helicopter now. In front of them at the edge of the ice lay shapeless bundles of what appeared to be black rubberized canvas, and he wondered fleetingly if these contained more of the soon-to-be gelatinous picket buoys. One of the figures was aiming something at him. As the Murderer let air out of the flotation tanks and swiftly sank, he realized it had not been a gun; it had been a camera with a telephoto lens.

He passed the tubular shape on the end of the cable. It was an anti-submarine torpedo. When he sank deeper, he passed a cylinder dangling from two black rubber-insulated cables.

He valved compressed air back into the flotation tanks and came up under the ice, so hazardously close he had to duck his head as he steered a weaving course among the downward bulges of old Siberian ice. Even though he had been deafened, he felt the sonar pulsing against the ice, searching for him. Then he felt it knocking against the minisub, pinging against his air tanks, thudding accusingly against his bones. It followed him wherever he steered.

Abruptly the sonar left him. They must have decided he was not going to lead them back to his submarine. Now they were hurriedly ranging for it.

He cruised on and on with his dead cargo.

Then he felt the echo of sonar from the submarine's hull. He must be close. The helicopter, with its sonar system lowered into the water like a fisherman's hook, had caught the Fleet Ballistic Missile submarine.

He could feel the submarine's sonar searching frantically. They would be sounding for another submarine. He could imagine horror on the sonar men's faces as they realized they couldn't detect anything at the apparent source of the unidentified sonar that had caught them.

The submarine's sonar caught something--him.

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