The Ice Limit
by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child
8 / 10 17K ratings
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2000
- Publisher
- Warner Books
- Pages
- 449
- ISBN
- 9780446525879
On a desolate island off the coast of Cape Horn, an object of unimaginable proportions lies buried in the frozen earth. It is the largest meteorite ever discovered, a scientific treasure beyond measure. A visionary billionaire is determined to claim it as the centerpiece for his new museum, no matter the cost. He assembles a team of the world's best engineers and scientists aboard a state-of-the-art ship, equipped for the most audacious retrieval operation in history, a flawless plan to move an object that seems impossible to move.
But as the crew begins their work in the brutal, unforgiving landscape, the mission starts to unravel. The object itself defies explanation, its properties unlike anything known to science, and from the first attempt to approach it, people begin to die. Faced with mounting technical disasters, a hostile military presence, and the crushing power of the Antarctic seas, the team soon realizes their greatest threat may be the very thing they came to collect. They are not taking this ancient, enigmatic object anywhere. It is taking them.
But as the crew begins their work in the brutal, unforgiving landscape, the mission starts to unravel. The object itself defies explanation, its properties unlike anything known to science, and from the first attempt to approach it, people begin to die. Faced with mounting technical disasters, a hostile military presence, and the crushing power of the Antarctic seas, the team soon realizes their greatest threat may be the very thing they came to collect. They are not taking this ancient, enigmatic object anywhere. It is taking them.
Other editions (15)
In a nameless valley at the bleak southern tip of the world, a lone prospector named Nestor Masangkay unearths the prize of a lifetime. Following ancient legends and faint satellite anomalies to the desolate shores of Isla Desolacion, his instruments detect a buried metallic mass of impossible size. As he digs, feverish with excitement, he lays his hands upon a hard surface deep within the earth. At that moment, a shock wave of brilliant light bursts from the hole, and a prodigious boom rolls across the valley. When his body is found months later, naked and carbonized beside the scattered remains of his camp, the only clues to his discovery are a rusted-out tomographic sounder and a bag of strange, worthless rocks.
The data recovered from Masangkay's machine finds its way to Palmer Lloyd, a billionaire collector of unparalleled ambition and ego. For the centerpiece of his monumental new museum, he desires not just any artifact, but the largest meteorite ever found. He recruits Sam McFarlane, a brilliant but disgraced meteorite hunter who was once Masangkay's partner. Haunted by a past betrayal that shattered their friendship, McFarlane is drawn from his self-imposed exile in the Kalahari Desert by the irresistible pull of the mystery and an offer of half a million dollars. To solve the staggering engineering challenge of retrieving the meteorite, Lloyd hires Eli Glinn, the inscrutable head of a secretive firm called Effective Engineering Solutions, a man who specializes in achieving the impossible and who has never, ever failed.
Glinn's plan is a masterpiece of logistics, expense, and deception. A state-of-the-art supertanker, the *Rolvaag*, is purchased and disguised as a rust-bucket ore carrier. A disgraced but highly skilled master, Captain Sally Britton, is given command. A massive, intricate cradle of steel and laminated timber is constructed deep within the ship's central tank to hold the prize. As the *Rolvaag* sails south, a tense society forms on board: McFarlane, the cynical scientist; Rachel Amira, Glinn's sharp-tongued mathematician; Britton, a captain of iron will and quiet vulnerability; and Glinn himself, a man who seems to anticipate every possibility, his quiet presence a constant source of both reassurance and unease.
Upon arriving in the frigid waters of Cape Horn, their carefully laid plans are immediately threatened. A tense encounter with customs officials in the dismal port of Puerto Williams introduces Comandante Vallenar, a fiercely incorruptible and hostile naval officer. “You Americans think you can buy everything,” he says, his voice laced with contempt. “You cannot.” Though they escape the port with their mining permits - and a shanghaied local guide named John Puppup - they are shadowed by Vallenar's aging destroyer, the *Almirante Ramirez*. A near-collision in the fog serves as a clear warning: they are not welcome, and they are being watched.
On Isla Desolacion, under the shadow of the twin volcanic peaks known as the Jaws of Hanuxa, the excavation begins. When the surface of the meteorite is finally exposed, the crew is stunned into silence. It is not the pitted, brownish-black of a typical iron meteorite. Instead, it is a deep, pure, velvety scarlet, the color of a fine Bordeaux wine, with a silky, metallic surface that seems to glow with an internal light. As a stunned Lloyd leaps into the pit to touch it, the team soon makes another discovery: the rock is far denser than anything known to man, its weight estimated not at four thousand, but at twenty-five thousand tons. The attempt to lift it ends in catastrophe when the hydraulic jacks fail, crushing two of Glinn's engineers and revealing the meteorite's terrifying, incalculable mass.
Despite the deaths, Glinn presses on, his resolve unshaken. “In terms of casualties,” he says with chilling detachment, “we're actually on schedule.” In a daring nighttime operation shrouded by fog, the meteorite is dragged to a seaside bluff and loaded onto the *Rolvaag* by collapsing a specially constructed tower. Just as it is secured, Vallenar's destroyer attacks. In a brilliant tactical move, Glinn's hidden team uses shaped underwater charges to disable the warship's propellers, and the *Rolvaag* escapes into the teeth of a gathering mega-storm, a legendary panteonero, or cemetery wind.
Their victory is short-lived. Deep in the hold, as the ship is tossed by hundred-foot waves, a welding crew is killed in a massive electrical explosion. McFarlane and Amira discover the horrifying truth: the meteorite reacts violently to salt water. A single drop of seawater, dripping from a leak in the tank's mechanical door, triggered the blast. Even as they struggle to shield the rock, its immense weight, shifting with each roll of the ship, begins to tear the cradle from its moorings. The groaning of the ship's hull becomes a constant, terrifying shriek. The *Rolvaag* is breaking apart.
Captain Britton, recognizing the death agony of her ship, orders the meteorite jettisoned. But Glinn, in a shocking crisis of faith, refuses. “We can't fail,” he insists, his voice serene. “I've planned far too carefully for that.” As he blocks access to the dead man's switch, the impossible happens: the *Almirante Ramirez*, having made miraculous repairs, reappears, closing in for the kill. The pursuit becomes a desperate chase southward into the Antarctic ice, a region sailors call the Screaming Sixties. Glinn, recovering his nerve, executes a final, audacious plan, using planted explosives to calve a massive section of an ice island onto the destroyer, sinking it instantly.
But the *Rolvaag* has been fatally damaged in the firefight. Powerless and dead in the water, the ship is at the mercy of the storm. As the crew abandons ship into the raging seas, Glinn remains behind, making a last, futile attempt to secure the meteorite, unable to accept his failure. The great rock breaks free from its cradle, rips through the hull, and plunges into the two-mile-deep abyss, taking the ship and all who remained with it in a flash of intense, otherworldly blue light.
Days later, in the infirmary of a British scientific station, the few survivors recover from their ordeal. McFarlane, holding the only surviving data from their tests, approaches a broken Palmer Lloyd. He explains that shallow seaquakes have been detected, all originating from the exact spot where the *Rolvaag* went down. He tells Lloyd that the object they found was not a random rock. Its layered, symmetrical structure was not natural; it was a seed, waiting for millions of years for the touch of salt water to awaken it. “That thing we just planted at the bottom of the sea?” McFarlane says, his voice tight with a new kind of terror. “It's sprouting.”
The data recovered from Masangkay's machine finds its way to Palmer Lloyd, a billionaire collector of unparalleled ambition and ego. For the centerpiece of his monumental new museum, he desires not just any artifact, but the largest meteorite ever found. He recruits Sam McFarlane, a brilliant but disgraced meteorite hunter who was once Masangkay's partner. Haunted by a past betrayal that shattered their friendship, McFarlane is drawn from his self-imposed exile in the Kalahari Desert by the irresistible pull of the mystery and an offer of half a million dollars. To solve the staggering engineering challenge of retrieving the meteorite, Lloyd hires Eli Glinn, the inscrutable head of a secretive firm called Effective Engineering Solutions, a man who specializes in achieving the impossible and who has never, ever failed.
Glinn's plan is a masterpiece of logistics, expense, and deception. A state-of-the-art supertanker, the *Rolvaag*, is purchased and disguised as a rust-bucket ore carrier. A disgraced but highly skilled master, Captain Sally Britton, is given command. A massive, intricate cradle of steel and laminated timber is constructed deep within the ship's central tank to hold the prize. As the *Rolvaag* sails south, a tense society forms on board: McFarlane, the cynical scientist; Rachel Amira, Glinn's sharp-tongued mathematician; Britton, a captain of iron will and quiet vulnerability; and Glinn himself, a man who seems to anticipate every possibility, his quiet presence a constant source of both reassurance and unease.
Upon arriving in the frigid waters of Cape Horn, their carefully laid plans are immediately threatened. A tense encounter with customs officials in the dismal port of Puerto Williams introduces Comandante Vallenar, a fiercely incorruptible and hostile naval officer. “You Americans think you can buy everything,” he says, his voice laced with contempt. “You cannot.” Though they escape the port with their mining permits - and a shanghaied local guide named John Puppup - they are shadowed by Vallenar's aging destroyer, the *Almirante Ramirez*. A near-collision in the fog serves as a clear warning: they are not welcome, and they are being watched.
On Isla Desolacion, under the shadow of the twin volcanic peaks known as the Jaws of Hanuxa, the excavation begins. When the surface of the meteorite is finally exposed, the crew is stunned into silence. It is not the pitted, brownish-black of a typical iron meteorite. Instead, it is a deep, pure, velvety scarlet, the color of a fine Bordeaux wine, with a silky, metallic surface that seems to glow with an internal light. As a stunned Lloyd leaps into the pit to touch it, the team soon makes another discovery: the rock is far denser than anything known to man, its weight estimated not at four thousand, but at twenty-five thousand tons. The attempt to lift it ends in catastrophe when the hydraulic jacks fail, crushing two of Glinn's engineers and revealing the meteorite's terrifying, incalculable mass.
Despite the deaths, Glinn presses on, his resolve unshaken. “In terms of casualties,” he says with chilling detachment, “we're actually on schedule.” In a daring nighttime operation shrouded by fog, the meteorite is dragged to a seaside bluff and loaded onto the *Rolvaag* by collapsing a specially constructed tower. Just as it is secured, Vallenar's destroyer attacks. In a brilliant tactical move, Glinn's hidden team uses shaped underwater charges to disable the warship's propellers, and the *Rolvaag* escapes into the teeth of a gathering mega-storm, a legendary panteonero, or cemetery wind.
Their victory is short-lived. Deep in the hold, as the ship is tossed by hundred-foot waves, a welding crew is killed in a massive electrical explosion. McFarlane and Amira discover the horrifying truth: the meteorite reacts violently to salt water. A single drop of seawater, dripping from a leak in the tank's mechanical door, triggered the blast. Even as they struggle to shield the rock, its immense weight, shifting with each roll of the ship, begins to tear the cradle from its moorings. The groaning of the ship's hull becomes a constant, terrifying shriek. The *Rolvaag* is breaking apart.
Captain Britton, recognizing the death agony of her ship, orders the meteorite jettisoned. But Glinn, in a shocking crisis of faith, refuses. “We can't fail,” he insists, his voice serene. “I've planned far too carefully for that.” As he blocks access to the dead man's switch, the impossible happens: the *Almirante Ramirez*, having made miraculous repairs, reappears, closing in for the kill. The pursuit becomes a desperate chase southward into the Antarctic ice, a region sailors call the Screaming Sixties. Glinn, recovering his nerve, executes a final, audacious plan, using planted explosives to calve a massive section of an ice island onto the destroyer, sinking it instantly.
But the *Rolvaag* has been fatally damaged in the firefight. Powerless and dead in the water, the ship is at the mercy of the storm. As the crew abandons ship into the raging seas, Glinn remains behind, making a last, futile attempt to secure the meteorite, unable to accept his failure. The great rock breaks free from its cradle, rips through the hull, and plunges into the two-mile-deep abyss, taking the ship and all who remained with it in a flash of intense, otherworldly blue light.
Days later, in the infirmary of a British scientific station, the few survivors recover from their ordeal. McFarlane, holding the only surviving data from their tests, approaches a broken Palmer Lloyd. He explains that shallow seaquakes have been detected, all originating from the exact spot where the *Rolvaag* went down. He tells Lloyd that the object they found was not a random rock. Its layered, symmetrical structure was not natural; it was a seed, waiting for millions of years for the touch of salt water to awaken it. “That thing we just planted at the bottom of the sea?” McFarlane says, his voice tight with a new kind of terror. “It's sprouting.”
No reviews yet. Be the first.