"I sincerely pray that will be the case," said Karl, as he entered the auto ahead of the women. Usually gallant around the ladies, Karl came from the old German school where men never yielded to women.

The driver of the electric car left the aircraft hangar area and entered a tunnel. After a quarter of a mile, they entered a vast ice cavern that enclosed a small harbor with long floating docks that rose and fell with the tide from the Ross Sea. The high-roofed channel that ran from the inner harbor to the sea curved gently, allowing large ships to navigate the pa.s.sage while the ice cliffs blocked all view from the outside. Light throughout the complex came from overhead fixtures containing dozens of halogen bulbs. Four submarines and a small cargo ship were moored beside the docks. The entire harbor complex was deserted. The cargo cranes stood abandoned, along with a small fleet of trucks and equipment. There wasn't a soul to be seen on the docks or the vessels. It was as if their crews had walked off and never returned.

"A pity the U-boats that served our venture so efficiently all these years will be lost," said Elsie wistfully.

"Perhaps they will survive," Blondi consoled her.

Hugo smiled. "When the time comes, I will personally return to Valhalla to see how they fared. They deserve to be enshrined for their service to the Fourth Empire."

The old tunnel that ran nine miles through the ice between the hidden dock terminal, the aircraft hangar, and then to the sea-mining extraction facility had also been excavated by slaves from the old Soviet Union, their preserved bodies now frozen in a ma.s.s grave on the ice shelf. Since 1985, the tunnel had been expanded and constantly realigned because of the shifting ice.

In the beginning, the efforts to extract valuable minerals from the sea had proved a dismal failure, but with the nanotechnology revolution pioneered by Eric Drexler in California, along with his wife Chris Peterson, Destiny Enterprises had thrown its immense wealth and resources into a project to control the structure of matter. By rearranging atoms and creating incredibly tiny engines, they had totally reinvented manufacturing processes. Molecular machines could even produce a tree from scratch. The Wolfs, however, threw their efforts into extracting valuable minerals such as gold from seawater, a process they'd achieved and gone on to refine until they were producing a thousand troy ounces of gold a day from the Ross Sea, along with platinum, silver, and many other rare elements. Unlike ore pulled from the ground and then expensively processed by crushers and chemicals, the minerals extracted from the sea came in a nearly pure form.

The engineering center of the Destiny Enterprises sea-mining facility was a great domed structure whose interior looked similar to the vast control room at the NASA s.p.a.ce center. Electronic consoles were manned by thirty scientists and engineers who monitored the computerized electronics of the nanotech mining operation. But this day, all operations for the extraction of rare metals from the sea had come to a halt, and all Wolf personnel were concentrating their efforts on the coming split of the ice shelf.

Karl Wolf entered the expansive room and stopped in front of a s.p.a.cious electronic board that hung from the center of the domed ceiling. In the center, a large map of the Ross Ice Shelf was displayed. Around the edges, a series of neonlike tubing distinguished the ice from the surrounding land. The tubing, which stretched from the mining company around the ice shelf and ended three hundred miles from the opposite end, was green. The section from where the green ended was continued in red to the edge of the sea.

"The area in red is yet to be programmed?" Karl asked the chief engineer, Jurgen Holtz, who walked up to the Wolf party and gave a sharp nod of his head in greeting.

"Yes, that is correct." Holtz raised a hand and gestured at the board. "We are in the process of setting the molecular triggering devices. We have about another four hundred miles to program to the end of the tunnel at the sea."

Karl studied the constantly changing red letters and numbers on the digital displays s.p.a.ced around the map. "When is the critical moment?"

"The final process for splitting off the ice shelf is timed for six hours ..." Holtz paused to stare up at a series of numbers showing the time left until doomsday. "Twenty-two minutes and forty seconds from now."

"Any problems that might cause a delay?"

"None we're aware of. All computerized procedures and their backup systems have been inspected and scrutinized dozens of times. We have yet to find the slightest hint of a possible malfunction."

"An amazing feat of engineering," Karl said quietly, while gazing at the colored tubing surrounding the ice shelf. "A pity the world will never know of its existence."

"An amazing feat indeed," echoed Holtz, "boring a ten-foot-diameter tunnel fourteen hundred miles through the ice in two months."

"The credit goes to you and your engineers who designed and built the molecular tunneling machine," said Elsie, pointing at a large photo on one wall. The picture showed a hundred-foot-long circular boring machine with a thrust ram, a debris conveyor, and a strange-looking unit on the front that pulled apart selected molecular bonds within the ice, producing powder-snow-size chunks small enough to be transported to the rear of the conveyors to the open sea. A secondary unit rebonded the tiny chunks into near-perfect crystalline solid ice that was used to line the tunnel. When in full operation, the tunneler could bore through fifty miles of ice in twenty-four hours. Having accomplished its purpose, the great machine now sat under a growing sheet of ice outside the mining facility.

"Perhaps after the ice melts, we'll have an opportunity to use the tunneler again on subterranean rock," Karl said thoughtfully.

"You think the ice will melt away?" asked Elsie, puzzled.

"If our calculations are ninety-five percent correct, this section of the Antarctic will end up eighteen hundred miles north of here two months after the cataclysm."

"I've never quite understood how all this is going to break off the entire ice shelf and send it out to sea," said Elsie.

Karl smiled. "I'd forgotten that you were the family intelligence collector in Washington for the past three years and were not provided with details of the Valhalla Project."

Holtz held up one hand and pointed to the giant display board. "As simply as I can explain it, Miss Wolf, our nanocomputerized machine constructed a vast number of molecular replicating a.s.semblers, which in turn constructed over many millions of tiny molecular ice-dissolving machines."

Elsie looked pensive. "In other words, the replicated a.s.semblers, through molecular engineering, can create machines that can produce almost anything."

"That's the beauty of nanotechnology," replied Holtz. "The replicating a.s.sembler can copy itself in a few minutes. In less than twenty-four hours, tons of replicated machines, moving trillions of atoms around, drilled holes into the ice every six inches above and below the tunnel. Once the ice tubes were drilled to a predetermined depth, the nanocomputer closed down all further instructions to the machines. In sixteen hours, the moment our meteorologists have predicted a strong offsh.o.r.e wind in combination with a favorable current, a signal will be sent to reactivate the machines. They will then finish the job of dissolving the ice and separating the shelf from the continent, allowing it to drift out to sea."

"How long will that take?" asked Elsie.

"Less than two hours," answered Holtz.

"Then ten hours after the final break," Karl explained, "the displaced weight of the Ross Ice Shelf will have moved far enough away from the Antarctic continent to throw off Earth's delicately balanced rotation just enough to cause a polar shift in unison with a crust displacement, sending the world into a devastating upheaval."

"A world which we then can reshape into our image," said Elsie vaingloriously.

A man in the black uniform of a security guard came rushing out of an office and approached the group. "Sir," he said to Karl, handing him a sheet of paper.

Karl's face darkened for a brief instant, before turning reflective.

"What is it?" Elsie asked.

"A report from Hugo," Karl answered slowly. "It seems an unidentified aircraft is approaching from across the Amundsen Sea, and refuses to answer our signals."

"Probably the supply plane for the ice station at Little America," said Holtz. "Nothing to be concerned about. It flies in and out every ten days."

"Does it always pa.s.s over Valhalla?" asked Karl.

"Not directly, but it comes within a few miles as it makes its descent toward the ice station."

Karl turned to the security guard who had carried the message. "Please tell my brother to observe the approaching aircraft closely. If it deviates from its normal flight path to Little America, have him notify me immediately."

"Are you troubled, brother?" asked Elsie.

Karl looked at her, his face showing traces of concern. "Not troubled, my sister, merely cautious. I do not trust the Americans."

"The United States is a long way away," said Elsie. "It would take an American a.s.sault force more than twenty-four hours to a.s.semble and fly over ten thousand miles to Ok.u.ma Bay."

"Still," Karl said patiently, "it pays to be vigilant." He looked at Holtz. "Should a distraction arise, can the signal to split the ice be sent early?"

"Not if we want absolute success," Holtz replied firmly. "Timing is critical. We must wait until just before the peak of the flood tide to activate the molecular ice-dissolving machines. Then the ebb tide will carry the great ma.s.s of the ice shelf out to sea."

"Then it appears we have nothing to fear," said Elsie optimistically.

Karl dropped his voice, speaking slowly, softly. "I hope you're right, dear sister."

At that moment, another security guard approached and pa.s.sed Karl a message from Hugo. He read it, looked up, and smiled faintly. "Hugo says that the American supply plane is on its normal course ten miles beyond our perimeter and is flying at an alt.i.tude of thirty-five thousand feet."

"Hardly the height to drop an a.s.sault team," said Holtz.

"No nation on Earth would dare fire missiles into our facility without their intelligence agencies penetrating our operation. And none have. Hugo's security force has diverted and blocked all outside probes into Valhalla."

"Diverted and blocked," Karl repeated. But his mind was not so sure. He recalled one man who had already defied too many of the Wolf family's aims, and Karl could not but wonder where he might be.