His warning came true even sooner than he might have expected. The winds had been picking up steadily, and the ice, drifting their way in chunks the size of train cars, was lumbering past in even-more-ma.s.sive blocks; when some became impa.s.sable, the ship did what it was designed to do and plowed right through them. With dinner done, and the sun still hanging motionless above the horizon, Michael went out to the bow to watch the grudge match unfold between the oncoming bergs and the pride of the Coast Guard's cutters.

Darryl Hirsch was already out there, bundled up with only his eyegla.s.ses poking through the red woolen ski mask that covered his entire head and face.

"You've got to watch this," Hirsch said, as Michael joined him at the rail. "It's positively hypnotic."

Just ahead lay a tabular slab of ice the size of a football field, and Michael felt the Constellation pick up speed as it rammed directly into the center of the snow-covered pack. The ice at first didn't give an inch, and Michael wondered just how thick it was. The engines groaned and roared, and the hull of the ship, rounded for just this purpose, rode up onto the surface of the glacier, and let its own weight-thirteen thousand tons-press down. A crooked fissure opened in the ice, then another, shooting off in the opposite direction. The cutter pressed forward, bearing down the whole time, and suddenly there was a great splintering and cracking of the ice. Ma.s.sive shards reared up on either side of the prow, rising almost as high as the deck Michael and Darryl were standing on. Instinctively they stepped away from the railing, then suddenly had to lunge for it again to keep from tumbling all the way back to the stern.

When the shards subsided, Michael looked down over the rail and saw the pieces slipping away to the sides, before being sucked under the ship, on their way toward the giant screw propellers- three of them, sixteen feet in diameter-at the other end; there, they'd be chewed and chopped into manageable size, before drifting off in the ship's wake.

But what probably surprised Michael the most was the underside of the ice. What looked white and pristine on top did not look at all that way when broken and upended. The underbelly of the ice was a disheartening sight to see-a pale, sickly yellow that reminded Michael of snow a dog had peed on.

"It's algae," Darryl said, intuiting his thoughts. "That discoloration on the bottom." He had to raise his voice to be heard over the crunching of the ice and the rising winds. "Those bergs aren't solid ice-they're honeycombed with brine channels, and the channels are filled with algae and diatoms and bacteria."

"So they live under the ice?" Michael shouted.

"No-they live in it," Darryl shouted back, looking vaguely proud of them for their resourcefulness. The ship plunged forward again, then dipped, and even in this strange light, Michael could see that Darryl was starting to look a little green at the gills.

After Darryl hurriedly excused himself to go below, Michael got tired of trying to keep his own footing and headed down to the wardroom, which was usually a hive of activity at night, with card games going and some DVD blaring on the TV (The choices ranged from Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan to professional wrestling and the Rock.) But there was nothing going on; the crew, he a.s.sumed, must have been called to various duties. He ducked his head into the gym-a cramped exercise room tucked into the bow, separated from the icy ocean only by the bulkheads. Petty Officer Kazin-ski was on the treadmill in a pair of shorts and a tight T-shirt that read KISS ME-I M COAST GUARD!

"How can you stay on that thing?" Michael asked, as the ship rolled again.

"No better time!" Kazinski said, clutching the handrails and keeping up a brutal pace. "It's like ridin' a bronco!"

A small TV monitor overhead carried a live feed from the bow. Between the drops of water and foam that spattered the outside lens, Michael could see a grainy, black-and-white picture of the heaving sea, bobbing with slabs of ice.

"It's getting rough out there," Michael said.

Kazinski glanced up at the monitor without breaking stride. "Gonna get a lot worse before this one blows over-that's for sure."

Michael was glad Darryl wasn't there to hear that. But personally, he was pleased. To have pa.s.sed through the deadliest stretch of sea on the planet without encountering a storm would have been like going to Paris and missing the Eiffel Tower.

With his hands outstretched toward the walls of the corridor, he stumbled back toward his own cabin and opened the door. Darryl wasn't in his bunk, but the door to the head was closed and Michael could hear him in there, throwing up everything he'd eaten.

Michael slumped onto his own bunk and lay back. Fasten your seat belts, he thought, it's going to be a b.u.mpy night. Kristin had often used that old Bette Davis line when they'd found themselves stranded somewhere precarious as the sun went down. What he would have given to have her there with him now, and to hear her say it just one more time.

The plywood door unstuck itself and Darryl, bent over double, staggered out and sprawled on his bunk. When he noticed Michael, he mumbled, "You don't want to go in there. I missed."

Michael would have been surprised if he hadn't. "Did you really have to have seconds tonight?" he said, and Darryl, wearing only his long johns, gave him a wan smile.

"It seemed like a good idea at the time."

"You gonna be okay?"

The ship suddenly lurched again, so violently that Michael had to grab the bed frame bolted to the floor.

Darryl turned a deeper shade of green and closed his eyes.

Michael leaned back against the interior wall, still gripping the frame. Yes, it undoubtedly was going to be a rough night, but he wondered how long a storm like this could blow. Would it last for days? And how much worse would it get? How much worse, for that matter, could it get?

He picked up one of his Audubon books, but the boat was pitching and rolling far too much to read; just trying to focus made him nauseous. He stowed the book under the mattress. And the roar of the engine and propellers, there in the aft quarters of the ship, was louder than it had ever been. Darryl was lying as still as a mummy, but huffing and puffing.

"What'd you take?" Michael asked him. "Scopolamine?"

Darryl grunted yes.

"Anything else?"

He held up one limp wrist. It had an elastic strap, thicker than a rubber band, wrapped around it.

"What's that?"

"Acupressure band. Supposed to help."

Michael had never heard of that one, but it didn't look like Darryl would swear by it, either.

"Want me to see if Charlotte's got something stronger?" Michael asked.

"Don't go out there," Darryl whispered. "You'll die."

"I'm just going up the corridor. I'll be right back."

Michael waited for a momentary lull, then got to his feet and out the door. The long corridor, tilting to one side and then the other, looked like something out of a carnival fun house. The fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed. Charlotte's cabin was about at midships, maybe a hundred feet away, but it was slow going, and Michael had to keep his feet broadly s.p.a.ced.

He could see a telltale ribbon of light under her door, so he knew she was awake when he knocked.

"It's Michael," he called out. "I think Darryl could use some help."

Charlotte opened the door in a quilted robe with a Chinese motif-green and gold dragons, breathing fire-and woolly slippers on her feet. Her braided hair was knotted in a ball atop her head. "Don't tell me," she said, already reaching for her black bag, "he's seasick."

By the time they got back to the cabin, Darryl had curled himself into a ball. He was so small-maybe five-foot-four, and skinny as a rail-that he looked like a kid with a tummy ache, waiting for his mom.

Charlotte sat down on the edge of the bed and asked him what he'd already taken. When he also showed her the acupressure band, she said, "No telling what some people will believe."

She bustled in her bag and pulled out a syringe and bottle. "You ever heard of Phenytoin?"

"Same as Dilantin."

"Ooh, you do know your drugs. Ever taken it?"

"Once, before a dive."

"I hope not too soon before a dive." She readied the syringe. "Any bad reaction?"

Darryl started to shake his head no, then thought better of shaking anything unnecessarily. "No," he mumbled.

"What's it do?" Michael asked, as she rolled up one of Darryl's sleeves.

"Slows down the nervous activities in the gut. It's a seizure med, and, technically speaking, it's never been approved for seasickness." She swabbed a spot with alcohol. "But divers like it." She readied the syringe, then had to wait again as the ship took what felt like a series of body blows. "Hold real still," she said to Darryl, then plunged the needle into the freckled skin of his upper arm.

"Give it about ten minutes," she said, "and you ought to start feeling the effect."

She slipped the used needle into an orange plastic sleeve and the bottle back into the bottom of her bag. For the first time, she looked around and seemed to take in the cabin. "Man, it looks like I did get the best room on board. I didn't believe it when the Ops told me that, but now I do." She wrinkled her nose at a sudden gust from the head. "You boys ever heard of Lysol?"

Michael laughed, and even Darryl faintly smiled. But when she'd gone, Michael started pulling on his parka, boots, and gloves. The cabin was foul and stifling, and the action outdoors was too tempting to resist.

Darryl rolled his head to one side and fixed him with a baleful glare. "Where," he croaked, "do you think you're going now?"

"To do my job," Michael said, slipping a small digital camera deep inside his parka; the batteries could die quickly in the cold. "Anything I can do for you first?"

Darryl said no. "Just call my wife and tell her I loved her, and the kids."

Michael had never really asked him about his family. "How many have you got?"

"Not now," Darryl said, waving him away. "I can't remember."

Maybe the drug was working faster than expected.

Michael left the light on in the cabin and made his way carefully down the corridor, then up through the hatchway, and he was just about to continue on to the bridge-he thought he could probably get some decent shots by leaning out a porthole or doorway- when he saw, through the sliding door, an apparently seamless picture of gray sea and gray sky, a panorama in which the horizon was unrecognizable and the world was reduced to a scene of flat, inarguable desolation.

He could visualize the finished shot already.

Putting up his hood, he fumbled for his camera with his gloved hands, and let it hang just below his neck. He had to use both hands to pull back on the door handle, and when it slid open even a few inches, the wind reached in and grabbed him by the collar. This was probably, he realized, a very bad idea, but then sometimes his best shots had come from his worst ideas. He pulled harder, then slipped through the crack, the door sliding shut again the second he let go.

He was on the deck, just below the bridge, with ice water sluicing down around his feet, and the wind pummeling him so hard that tears were whipped out of his eyes and his forehead burned. He wrapped one arm around a metal stanchion and pulled off one glove with his teeth, but the ship was heaving too much to frame a shot. And each time he tried, some part of the boat got into the picture. He didn't want that. He didn't want anything identifiable, anything concrete, to intrude on the image. He wanted a pure, almost abstract picture of empty, disinterested, all-powerful nature.

He waited for the ship to roll on the coming swell, then lunged for the next handhold, a steel armature that housed one of the lifeboat rigs. From there, looking out over the rail, he'd have nothing to worry about-except for the freezing salt spray that dashed into his face and doused the camera. He snagged one arm through the rail, as he had before, and raised the camera. But just then, the ship was canted at a forty-five-degree angle, and all he could get was the turbulent sky. He slipped a foot or two forward, waiting for the roll to correct itself, raising the camera. His fingers were already freezing, and he found that he couldn't open his mouth to breathe without the wind taking his breath away. He tried one shot-still at too much of an angle-and was about to try another when a bullhorn directly overhead blared, "Mr. Wilde! Get off the deck! Now!"

Even in the roaring wind, he could make out the voice of the Ops, Lieutenant Healey "Right now! And report to the captain!"

Before Michael could even turn around, he saw the sliding door opening and Kazinski, in a waterproof jacket over his running shorts, reaching out to him with a yellow life preserver. "Just grab it!" Kazinski shouted, and Michael, slipping the camera back into the top of his parka, fell back to the stanchion, then put his gloved hand out toward the preserver; his other hand was almost completely numb.

Once Michael had hold of it, Kazinski reeled him in like a fish, slammed the sliding door latch back, then stood there, brushing off the ice-cold water and shaking his head in dismay. "All due respect, sir, but that was truly a n.u.m.b.n.u.t.s thing to do."

Michael did see his point.

"The captain's up on the bridge. If I were you, I'd be prepared to have him tear me a new one."

At the moment, Michael just wanted the feeling back in his fingers. He wiped the hand briskly back and forth on his pant leg, but the cloth was so wet it didn't help much. He unzipped his parka, and shoved his hand inside, into his armpit.

Kazinski gestured at the stairs leading up to the bridge, as if it were the way to the gallows. Maybe, Michael thought, it was.

He went up them slowly, and as soon as he entered the brightly lighted bridge, Captain Purcell swiveled in his chair and said, "What the h.e.l.l do you think you were doing out there? Are you out of your f.u.c.king mind?"

Michael shrugged and finished unzipping his coat, letting the flaps fall open. "Probably not the best idea," he offered, knowing how feeble it sounded, "but I thought I might get some great shots for the magazine."

The other two officers seated in front of the navigation consoles stifled their amus.e.m.e.nt.

"I'm used to some pretty harebrained stunts from the scientists I have to ferry around down here," Purcell said, "but I figure they're so smart, they're ent.i.tled to act stupid sometimes. You, I can't figure out at all. You're no scientist, and you're sure as h.e.l.l no sailor."

Ensign Gallo, who was standing at a silver wheel mounted on a freestanding console, said, "Barometric's falling again, sir."

"What to?" Purcell barked, swiveling back in his chair and adjusting the headset that had slipped askew while he was chewing out Michael.

"Nine eighty-five, sir."

"Jesus, we're in for it tonight." His eyes scanned the glowing screens and dials, the sonar, the radar, the GPS, the fathometer, all of which showed a constantly changing and multicolored stream of data.

A spattering of hail clattered against the square windows on the westward side, and the ship heaved like a great hand had just slapped it. Michael s.n.a.t.c.hed at one of the leather straps that dangled from the ceiling and hung on tight; he'd already heard tales of seamen who had been flung from one end of the bridge to the other and broken arms and legs in the process. He wondered if his public flogging was over, or if he was supposed to wait around for more.

Despite the roar of the sea outside, the slashing of the rain and the howling of the winds that seemed to be coming from all directions at once, the atmosphere in the bridge quickly returned to the tranquillity of an operating room. The flat white light panels in the ceiling cast a cold even glow around the blue walls of the room, and the officers all spoke to each other in low, deliberate tones, their eyes fixed on the instrument arrays before them.

"Port engine, full forward," the captain said, and Lieutenant Commander Ramsey, whom Michael had met a couple of times, reached for a short red-handed throttle. He repeated the captain's words as he executed the order.

Then, Ramsey nodded discreetly toward Michael-who was still standing around like a kid who'd been haled into the princ.i.p.al's office-and said offhandedly to Purcell, "If Mr. Wilde is no longer needed here, sir, perhaps he should join the Ops in the aloft con? It's impossible to fall overboard from there, and he might like to see how the ship is steered."

Purcell blew out a breath of disgust, and without turning around, said, "If he does fall out, tell him he can float all the way back to Chile before I turn this ship around."

Michael didn't doubt it, and he took it as his cue to step toward the spiral stair that Ramsey gestured at, and swiftly start climbing.

"How'd you like some company, Kathleen?" he heard Ramsey say into his headset, but he didn't slow up to find out if he wasn't welcome. He went straight up until he was well out of the bridge, and found himself standing on a platform in a virtually black funnel, with only a steel ladder leading higher. The ship juddered, and his shoulders crashed against the rounded wall; he felt like he was in the chimney of the house in The Wizard of Oz, the one that got picked up by the tornado and spun all around. Up above, at least twenty or thirty feet, he could see a blue glow, a lot like you'd get off a TV screen, and he could hear the beeping and hum of machinery.

He put his boot on the bottom rung of the ladder and slowly started to climb. When the prow of the ship came up, he was slung backwards off the ladder, and when the ship righted itself, he was flung forward again; once, he narrowly missed knocking out his front teeth, and he had a sudden terrible flash of having his dental clearance revoked. The rungs were cold and clammy, and he had to grip each one firmly before reaching for the next. As he went up the last few, he saw first a pair of black, rubber-soled shoes, then a pair of blue trousers. He hauled himself up the rest of the way, and when the ship seemed level for a second or two, clambered to his feet.

The Ops was holding steady to a smaller version of the wheel down below, her stern expression illuminated by a GPS screen and a couple of other scopes that Michael couldn't identify. Her eyes were set straight ahead and her jaw was locked; a headset clung to her short brown hair. The aloft con itself-the modern-day equivalent of the crow's nest-was barely big enough for the two of them, and Michael tried not to breathe down Kathleen's neck.

"Going out on deck was a very bad idea," she said, reminding Michael that she was the one who'd busted him. "We're clocking winds of over a hundred miles per hour."

"Got it," he said. "The captain happened to mention it, too." Then, hoping to change the subject, he said, "So you're up here, all alone in the driver's seat?" On all sides, there were reinforced windows, equipped with Kent screens-whirling discs powered by centrifugal force to throw off water like windshield wipers-that provided an un.o.bstructed, 360-degree view of the boiling ocean all around. Behind him, on the aft deck, one side of the helicopter tarp had ripped loose and was flapping like an enormous, dark green bat's wing.

If only he'd been able to get some decent shots of all this ...

"When visibility is as limited as it is now-with such high seas," she said, "control of the vessel is often pa.s.sed to the aloft con."

Michael could see why. Everywhere he looked, the vista was in violent motion, the gray sea heaving and churning for miles, with great blocks of jagged ice bobbing and sinking and slamming into each other. Waves higher than any he had ever imagined rushed at the prow of the ship, crashing down on the bow deck and sending a freezing spume into the air. The spray flew as high as the windows of their aerie.

And all of it-the mad, seething sea and the roiling sky above it, the black specks of birds driven like leaves before the screaming wind-were bathed in the unnatural light of the austral sun, a dull copper orb stubbornly fixed on the northern horizon. It was as if the whole tumultuous picture were lighted from below by a giant lantern that was burning its last few drops of oil.

"Welcome to the Screaming Fifties," the Ops added, in a slightly more congenial tone. "Once you get below fifty degrees lat.i.tude south, that's when you hit the real weather."

The cutter's prow went up, as easily as if it had been lifted from below, until it was pointing nearly straight up at the shredded storm clouds racing across the southern sky. Kathleen clung to the wheel, her feet braced far apart, and Michael tried to steady himself on the handrail. He knew what was coming ... because what went up must come down.

Moments later, the crest pa.s.sed under them-he could feel the swell of it tingling in his feet-and once gone, the ship teetered, then dropped like a stone skittering down the side of a steep hill. Through the front of the conning tower, Michael could look straight down into a ma.s.sive trough, a dark cleft as wide as a ravine, but with nothing in it but a watery bottom that seemed to recede even as the ship raced headlong into it.

Kathleen said, "Aye, aye, sir," into the headset and notched the wheel to the right. Michael could taste the pasta he'd had for dinner. "Depth, one thousand five hundred meters," she confirmed to the captain below.

The ship plunged down, down, then stopped, then spun-with water rising up in sheer walls all around it-before turning to starboard. Even there, easily ninety feet above the deck and twice as far from the diesel turbines, Michael could hear the engines revving and roaring, the propellers turning-sometimes in nothing but air-as the ship tried to forge its own course through the ice-strewn minefield that engulfed it.

"If you're a praying man," the Ops said, sparing her first glance directly at Michael, "do it now." She twisted the wheel again to the right. "You're pa.s.sing over the wrecks of no less than eight hundred ships and ten thousand sailors."