Jack cleared the access tunnel and came out onto deck five. He immediately spied Ryan and Mendenhall with more than forty crewmen as they splashed their way toward the spiral staircase ascending to deck four. Just then the submarine became a horror ride of shaking and dipping.

Suddenly a man rolled down the staircase and landed with a thud on the deck. Carl Everett looked up at the stunned faces around him.

Everett grabbed Jack's leg and held on as the flooded companionway rocked, sending a torrent of water that went far over their heads.

"Come on, swabby, it's time to get control here before those assholes blow up a bunch of cities," Collins said, splashing toward Ryan and Will to organize the assault on Leviathan's operations center.

The giant pressure wave from the nuclear detonation--which was low in yield but multiplied a thousandfold because of the dense sea--ran toward the center of the Ross Ice Shelf. The heated water hit the underside of the shelf and actually lifted it by one and half feet. The fault line running the entire length of the world's largest sheet of thick ice separated completely. The giant walls of the crevice started crumbling, and the two halves moved--minutely at first, then picking up speed with the change in currents.

The Ross Ice Shelf started to come apart from the continent of Antarctica.

ICE PALACE

The syms realized something was wrong long before the human defenders. The attack stopped as suddenly as it started, and the syms started retreating from the walls.

"Bastards are quitting," Henri screamed in triumph, as blood poured from the open stitches at his hip. He was leaning on the boat hook for support just as the first tremor struck the area of the shelf where the ancient ice bubble had created Ice Palace.

Dr. Robbins and Niles Compton were the first to realize what must have happened. They turned and saw several of the slower-moving, older syms as large chunks of falling ice fell and crushed them. The ceiling was collapsing; they heard ice the size of small houses strike the second floor of the man-made shelter.

Suddenly everyone fell to the rubberized flooring as the shelf separated. The curious sensation of floating hit them all at the same moment--but it was Robbins who voiced it first.

"The shelf has broken away!"

"Look!" Alice said, hanging on to Senator Lee for dear life.

The bright sun was showing through the massive crack above them. It penetrated the darkness like a magical laser beam, obviously caused by the ice particles in the air. The Ross Sea heaved and crashed in toward the ancient cave, and then smashed into the carved-out buildings of Ice Palace.

A loud and deafening explosion sounded as the Ross Ice Shelf separated from the continent.

USS MISSOURI (SSN-780)

The nuclear shock wave struck the Missouriin a bow-down attitude, flipping her over onto her back and sending her crewmen wheeling and grabbing for anything they could hold on to. The lights went dead, and red emergency lighting took their place. Alarms started sounding throughout the boat as seals broke loose. Her outer torpedo doors, still in the open position after firing her spread of torpedoes, could not absorb the pressure that was slammed back into her. One inner door in the forward weapons room bent, curled, and then opened to the sea. Missouritook on ten tons of water in her forward torpedo room.

"Blow ballast, blow everything! All back full, full rise on the planes!"

"We're going to lose her, skipper!"

"Do we still have fish in the tubes?"

"Aye, but we are flooding in all the forward spaces."

"Weapons release, now!"

As the reactor on Missouriwent to full power, the crew could hear her one screw bite the water, but they all knew it might be too late--they were getting too heavy, too fast. Still, they listened to the new girl fire off her last punch.

Jefferson knew he was about to lose his command as the new Virginia class submarine slowly started heading for the bottom of the Ross Sea.

LEVIATHAN

"All sections report damage," came Alvera's voice over the loudspeaker. "All hands, USS Missouriis on her way to the bottom. Commence preparations for weapons launch in five minutes."

"Damn efficient little bitch, isn't she?" Everett said to Jack as they headed down the main companionway.

They met Ryan coming around the corner from the armory, where he had been sent two minutes before.

"Report, Mr. Ryan," Jack said.

"Too well guarded; we would have been shot to hell before we got within twenty feet. There are at least twenty of Tyler's men there. But we did manage to get ten of these," he said, holding up one of the strange automatic weapons. "All we can figure is that they were left by the cutting crew when they went to work on the hatches."

"Well, they will have to do," Collins said.

Everett handed out the automatic rifles to the oldest of the crewmen.

"What is it, Jack, a full-out frontal assault?" asked an angry Everett as he thought about those boys on the Missouri.

"Right now it looks like we have little choice. Hit them from both ends of the control companionway, and hope we don't run into Sergeant Wonderful before we get there."

Everett suddenly swung the rifle up, and all fifty-six men and women and the three children turned as one as one of the floor hatches popped up. A slim hand came out holding a thick coil of insulated wire, then Virginia popped her head through and tossed the wire onto the deck. She reached back down into the hatch, brought out a large rolled schematic, and laid it beside the wiring. Then she leaned back into the hatch, struggling with something else.

"Don't just stand there--help me. She's damn heavy!"

Several Leviathancrew ran forward, relieved Virginia of Alexandria's weight, and pulled her the rest of the way up through the hatch.

"It was a close-run thing, Colonel," Virginia said, out of breath. "Tyler and his men broke through only moments after Alex lost control of her command suite. I swear I never saw so much firepower concentrated in one small area. I'll never know how your guys can deal with crap like that--I thought we had had it."

"Her condition?" Jack asked, leaning over the captain.

"Exhausted, hemorrhaging, and her systems may be starting to shut down." Virginia held her hand on Heirthall's still features. "She did real good, Colonel."

"Try and bring her around. We have two helmsmen here. We were lucky there, but we lost the entire complement of chiefs in their staterooms. We need her awake."

"You're going to try and take the command bridge?" Virginia asked, looking from face to face.

Mendenhall and Ryan answered by slamming home magazines into their weapons.

"No other choice."

"Look, Jack, Tyler has both ends of that sealed passageway covered. You'll be fighting in a blind alley, and he has reinforcements he can call up; you don't."

"We will have to--"

"Jack, Alex had a plan. She made me strip this wiring from auxiliary control before we evacuated. I just don't know what it was."