When Nilsson saw the woman, his first thought was that he had mistakenly crossed the wrong airfield and wandered over to Zhongshan Station. She was Chinese and quite stunning. A ten—not an Antarctic ten, which was really a five anywhere else in the world—but a legitimate ten. She was in her late twenties, perhaps her early thirties, her long hair brown and wavy, her skin more tan than pale from having spent the summer months “bronzing” out on the ice.

“Dr. Liao?”

“Ming Liao, yes. Are you the marine biologist?”

“Yes. Thomas Nilsson. What’s the emergency? You find the Abominable Snowman or something?”

“Sorry. What is Abominable… ?”

“The Yeti. It was a joke… Never mind.”

“Ah, very funny. No, not the Yeti. Tell me, Dr. Nilsson, what do you study in Antarctica?”

“Emperor penguins.”

“I see. No big predators?”

“You mean like killer whales? Sorry. Just the penguins.”

“What about Loose Tooth? Are you familiar with it?”

“Your killer whale has a loose tooth?”

Her expression soured. “What?” She shook her head as if to erase the conversation from her brain. “Loose Tooth is an ice rift. We have a chopper waiting. I will explain on the way.”

Thomas Nilsson held on to the seat in front of him as the AS-350BA Squirrel flew with its nose down against the wind, the single-engine five-passenger helicopter soaring over Prydz Bay en route to the Amery Ice Shelf.

Seated in back next to Nilsson, Liao had to use her headset to be heard over the thunderous rotors. “For the record, doctor, I am a geophysicist assigned to Zhongshan Station. China is working with Australia and the United States on this discovery.”

“But not the Russians?”

“The Russians control Vostok. There may be a conflict of interest.”

“What does Vostok have to do with the Amery Ice Shelf? The lake’s a good eight hundred miles away.”

“True, but beneath the ice are interconnecting rivers and lakes. You did not know this?”

“Sorry. I’m not well-versed on the geology of the freezer, just the penguins. Where are we headed?”

She removed a folder from a mesh pocket behind the pilot’s seat in front of her and opened it, handing him a satellite photo.

“This is the Amery Ice Shelf. It is over four hundred kilometers long, or about two hundred and fifty miles. We’ve been studying this highlighted area—a twenty-nine-kilometer-long rift nicknamed ‘Loose Tooth’ that first appeared seventeen years ago. It consists of two longitudinal-to-flow crevasses. Two transverse-to-flow rifts formed years later. The fissures had been opening at a rate of three to four meters a day, but the rift has recently accelerated. We anticipate Loose Tooth will calve into Prydz Bay within the next five to seven years.”

“I’ll alert the Tooth Fairy. Again, why am I—”