Chapter 1

"Who are you?" his voice was weak but, for the first time since returning, his eyes were clear.

The young redhead was startled by the voice but quickly recovered, "Sir, I am Heather." The man in the bed stared at her trying to place the face and the name. Heather saw the frustration and said, "Sir, we have never met. I have been helping Page and Willow take care of you." At the mention of Page, Lord Blackmon closed his eyes and slipped back to sleep. He knew he had made it back home.

Heather made sure he was just sleeping again, and then went to tell Page that he had spoken. She knew Page would want to know right away.

The self-made billionaire Lord Blackmon had nearly died many times in the past six months. Out of grief he had planned and sponsored an expedition to Antarctica to place weather monitors in the frigid waters there. He thought he could leave his personal demons behind and do something adventurous. He left his house and his slaves in the care of a man named Carl and headed south.

The expedition did not make a very good start of it. There had been issues with the ship and equipment from the beginning, a fact that frustrated the perfectionist engineer no end. He had been told when he hired the ship that it was reinforced for work in icy conditions. He had been told the ship's equipment was in good working order. None of that was true, only new paint hiding a weak hull and deferred maintenance. As bad as the material situation was, he was even more concerned about the personnel. Trust was what Lord Blackmon valued most and he was learning that he could not trust the Captain or his crew. His trepidation was proven sound.

Lord Blackmon's innovation had been to create a scientific weather monitoring buoy that could be placed in waters that were freezing over without the equipment being crushed by the moving ice. They were placing the monitor buoys near areas of the ice sheet that was calving icebergs. It was hoped the units could provide scientists climate data on a more reliable basis. But placing the buoys was the hazardous part. He had made promises to three universities that he could get them the data. Despite the reservations regarding the ship and crew he decided to continue. They had started behind the set schedule when he ordered the hull of the ship reinforced. But other equipment failures continued to cause them to fall further behind.

The ship had run very close to the continental size ice sheet when the crane on the ship had broken again. This delayed the placement of the fifth monitoring unit for days. While they waited, the ice field around the ship began closing in. The First Mate, a man Lord Blackmon had learned to respect, pleaded with the Captain to leave the area and come back when it was safer. The captain assured Lord Blackmon that it would be ok, but soon the ship was locked in place surrounded by the shifting ice.

The ancient ice sheet two miles away was almost a thousand feet high and hundreds of miles long. They were never sure why it happened but on the third night a wedge shaped piece of the ice sheet, almost a quarter of a mile across, broke off about a hundred feet above the sea. The equivalent of twenty Empire State buildings in weight hit the icy water at over one hundred miles an hour. The result was a two hundred foot tsunami studded with chunks of ice, some as big as a house, came roaring at the ship. It caught the two hundred foot steel vessel on the port beam. When the massive wave hit it rolled the ship four times and drove it onto a ridge of ice with the stern twelve feet out of the water. Both engines were destroyed along with both generator sets, the ship's bridge and radio equipment. Nine of the crew died in those first few moments including the Captain. Because the ship was partially stranded on the ice, the flooding from the rips in the hull did not sink the ship right away. The eleven surviving members of the crew, including Lord Blackmon, had been tossed around like ping-pong balls. Everyone was hurt to some extent including the First Mate. The injuries included a broken hip, two broken legs, four broken arms, and one skull fracture. The survivors that could move managed to close the water tight doors and keep the flooding from sinking the ship. However their problems were just starting.

There was no power to move the ship and there was no electricity. If something was not done, they would all freeze in a matter of hours. Lord Blackmon knew that there was a fuel sight tube in a passage that was only partially flooded. By the dim glow of a flashlight he cobbled together a simple oil heater from a coffee pot and vented it through a port hole. He then waded into the knee deep frigid waters to recover a pitcher full of heavy bunker oil. Five hours later one of the staterooms was edging up above fifty degrees. They at least would not freeze to death.

In the meantime, land based crew members in New Zealand were becoming concerned that they had lost touch with the expedition ship. It would take three days before the authorities could be convinced to start searching for the missing vessel. It would take almost two weeks before the crippled ship was found partly obscured by the ice. In that time, Lord Blackmon made four more trips to retrieve fuel to keep the stranded crew from succumbing to the killing temperatures. He had also located first aid kits and food. But each trip away from the heated space and into the partially flooded compartments did more damage to his feet and hands. By the time the rescuers arrived, he had frostbite on his hands, feet, and ears and was running a fever. The surviving First Mate said that Lord Blackmon's ingenuity and courage had saved them all from an icy death.