The other expedition members, however, couldn’t be as certain of their safety as Gunvald was of his own. In addition to creating pressure ridges and chasms, a hot tsunami was likely to snap off sections of the ice at the edge of the winter field. Harry and the others might find the cap falling out from under them while the sea rushed up dark, cold, and deadly.
At nine o’clock last night, five hours after the first tremor, the second quake–5.8 on the Richter scale–had hit the fault chain. The seabed had shifted violently one hundred five miles north-northeast of Raufarhöfn. The epicenter had been thirty-five miles nearer Edgeway than that of the initial shaker.
Gunvald took no comfort from the fact that the second quake had been less powerful than the first. The diminution in force was not absolute proof that the more recent temblor had been an aftershock to the first. Both might have been foreshocks, with the main event still to come.
During the Cold War, the United States had planted a series of extremely sensitive sonic monitors on the floor of the Greenland Sea, as well as in many other strategic areas of the world’s oceans, to detect the nearly silent passage of nuclear-armed enemy submarines. Subsequent to the collapse of the Soviet Union, some of those sophisticated devices had begun doing double duty both monitoring submarines and providing data for scientific purposes. Since the second quake, most of the deep-ocean listening stations in the Greenland Sea had been transmitting a faint but almost continuous low-frequency grumble: the ominous sound of growing elastic stress in the crust of the earth.
A slow-motion domino reaction might have begun. And the dominoes might be falling toward Edgeway Station.
During the past sixteen hours, Gunvald had spent less time smoking his pipe than chewing nervously on the stem of it.
At nine-thirty the previous night, when the radio confirmed the location and force of the second shock, Gunvald had put through a call to the temporary camp six miles to the southwest. He told Harry about the quakes and explained the risks that they were taking by remaining on the perimeter of the polar ice.
“We’ve got a job to do,” Harry had said. “Forty-six packages are in place, armed, and ticking. Getting them out of the ice again before they all detonate would be harder than getting a politician’s hand out of your pocket. And if we don’t place the other fourteen tomorrow, without all sixty synchronized charges, we likely won’t break off the size berg we need. In effect, we’ll be aborting the mission, which is out of the question.”
“I think we should consider it.”
“No, no. The project’s too damned expensive to chuck it all just because there might be a seismic risk. Money’s tight. We might not get another chance if we screw up this one.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Gunvald acknowledged, “but I don’t like it.”
The open frequency crackled with static as Harry said, “Can’t say I’m doing cartwheels, either. Do you have any projection about how long it might take major slippage to pass through an entire fault chain like this one?”
“You know that’s anybody’s guess, Harry. Days, maybe weeks, even months.”
“You see? We have more than enough time. Hell, it can even take longer.”
“Or it can happen much faster. In hours.”
“Not this time. The second tremor was less violent than the first, wasn’t it?” Harry asked.
“And you know perfectly well that doesn’t mean the reaction will just play itself out. The third might be smaller or larger than the first two.”
“At any rate,” Harry said, “the ice is seven hundred feet thick where we are. It won’t just splinter apart like the first coat on a winter pond.”
“Nevertheless, I strongly suggest you wrap things up quickly tomorrow.”
“No need to worry about that. Living out here in these damned inflatable igloos makes any lousy shack at Edgeway seem like a suite at the Ritz-Carlton.”
After the conversation, Gunvald Larsson had gone to bed. He hadn’t slept well. In his nightmares, the world crumbled apart, dropped away from him in enormous chunks, and he fell into a cold, bottomless void.