WITH NO LANDMASS TO BREAK ITS CYCLE, WINDS CIRCLED the earth at the lower latitudes in endless loops that built and built. Below the fortieth parallel, they were called the Roaring Forties. Then came the Furious Fifties and the Screaming Sixties. A constant wind of eighty miles per hour wasn’t unusual, and gusts of a hundred were an everyday event. The effect this had on the sea was ferocious. Waves built to forty and fifty feet, huge rolling masses of water that tossed aside everything in their path. Even the great icebergs that calved off the mainland glaciers were no match for the ocean when the winds came up. Only the superbergs, as large as cities and sometimes small states, were immune.

It was into this hell that Juan Cabrillo drove his ship and crew. Everything that could be tied down had been, and all activity except essential services was suspended. Although the ship had crossed southward only a week earlier, the weather then had been downright tranquil compared to what was hitting them now.

Any other ship would have turned back or faced being torn apart by the waves. But Juan had so overengineered his beloved Oregon that she was in no real danger. Her hull could take the stresses, and there wasn’t a seam topside that the wind could exploit to start peeling back sheet metal. The davits holding her two lifeboats would not fail even in a category five hurricane. Though, right now, she only carried one of them. The other had been set adrift with a ping locator activated so they could recover it later.

But there was a real danger. Not from the ocean but from the prowling Chinese fast-attack submarine. She was somewhere between the tip of South America and the Antarctic Peninsula. This was a choke point much like the GIUK Gap that NATO used to box in Soviet submarines at the height of the Cold War. They had set up pickets of subs, like fishermen, between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom, and waited for their catch to come to them.

Juan had laid a course toward Antarctica by staying close to the South American coastline, as if the Oregon were making for the Drake Passage around Cape Horn, and then heading dead south into the Bellinghausen Sea, the area the Argentines and Chinese had said was now forbidden to shipping.