against the soft dawn light. He glanced around instinctively, as he’d done many times before, but it was pointless, as it had been each time before. He was alone up there. There was no one around. Not a soul, human or animal. Nothing at all, as far as the eye could see.
Despite the early morning chill, sweat droplets sprouted across his baldpate. He swallowed hard, and concentrated again.
And then it came, again.
The voice, the whisper, coming from inside his own head.
“The time of our Lord will soon be upon you. Are you prepared to serve?”
Hesitantly, with a tremor in his voice, Father Jerome opened his mouth and stammered, “Yes, of course. Whatever you ask of me. I am your servant.”
There was no reply at first. The old priest could feel the individual droplets of sweat sliding down the rugged skin on his forehead, one after the other, skating across the ridge of his brow before dropping onto his cheek. He could almost hear them trickling down, a slow, tortuous progress across his tightened, weather-beaten face.
Then the voice inside his head came back.
“Are you ready to lead your people to salvation? Are you prepared to fight for them? To show them the errors of their ways, even though they may not want to listen?”
“Yes,” Father Jerome cried out, his voice cracking with equal doses of passion and fear. “Yes, of course. But how? When?”
A suffocating silence gripped the mountain, then the voice returned, and simply told him, “Soon.”
Chapter 1
Amundsen Sea , Antarctica—Present day
The static that hissed through the tiny, noise-isolating earpiece disappeared, replaced by the authoritative-yet-soothing voice of the show’s anchorman.
“Talk us through why this is happening, Grace?”
Just then, another wall of ice crumbled behind her and collapsed on itself, crackling like distant thunder. Grace Logan—Gracie, to her friends—turned away from the camera and watched as the entire cliff plummeted into the gray-blue water and disappeared in an angry eruption of spray.
Perfect timing, she thought with a glimmer of satisfaction, a brief respite from the solemnity she’d been feeling since she’d arrived on the ship the day before.
Under normal circumstances, this could well have been a pleasant, sunny, late-December day, December being the height of summer in the Southern Hemisphere.
Today was different.
Today, nature was in turmoil.
It felt as if the very fabric of the earth was being ripped apart. Which it was. The slab of ice that was tearing itself off the rest of the continent was the size of Texas.
Not exactly the kind of Christmas present the planet needed.
The breakup of the ice shelf was now in its third day, and it was only getting started. The cataclysm had kicked up a ghostly mist that thinned out the sun’s warming rays, and the cold was starting to get to Gracie, even with the adrenaline coursing through her. She could see that the rest of her team—Dalton Kwan, the young, breezy Hawaiian cameraman she’d worked with regularly over the past three years, and Howard “Finch” Fincher, their older, über-fastidious and annoyingly stoic veteran producer—were also far from comfortable, but the footage they were airing was well worth it, especially since, as far as she could tell, they were the only news crew around.
She’d been out there for over an hour, standing on the starboard observation deck of the RRS James Clark Ross, and despite the thermals and the gloves, her fingers and toes were shivering. The royal research ship, a beefy three-hundred-foot floating oceanographic and geophysical laboratory operated by the British Antarctic Survey project, was currently less than half a mile off the coast of Western Antarctica, its distinctive deep-red hull the only blip of color in an otherwise bleak palette of whites, blues, and grays. Gracie, Dalton, and Finch had been on the continent for a couple of weeks, shooting footage in the Terra Firma Islands for her big global warming documentary. They had been ready to pack up and head home for Christmas, which was only days away, when the call from the news desk back in D.C. had come in, informing them that the shelf’s breakup had started. The news hadn’t been widely circulated at that point; a contact of the network inside the NSIDC—the National Snow and Ice Data Center, whose scientists used satellite data to track changes in the spread and thickness of the polar ice caps—had given them the heads-up on the sly. With the competition snoozing and the James Clark Ross a day’s sail away from the action and already heading toward it, Gracie