Ice Hunt

New York: Avon Books [An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers], 2004. First Avon Books Paperback printing. Mass market paperback. Good. xiv, [2], 521, [5] pages. Map. Illustrations. Excerpt from the novel Sandstorm at pages 511-521. Cover has some wear and soiling. Somewhat cocked. James Rollins is a pen name of James Paul Czajkowski (born August 20, 1961 in Chicago, IL), an American veterinarian and writer of action-adventure/thriller, mystery, and techno-thriller novels who gave up his veterinary practice in Sacramento, California to be a full-time author. Rollins' experiences and expertise as an amateur spelunker and a certified scuba diver have provided content for some of his novels, which are often set in underground or underwater locations. Under the pen name James Clemens, he has also published fantasy novels, such as Wit'ch Fire, Wit'ch Storm, Wit'ch War, Wit'ch Gate, Wit'ch Star, Shadowfall (2005) and Hinterland (2006). Ice Hunt summary: After an Alaskan game warden rescues a man from a crashed plane and saves him from subsequent attack by foreign soldiers, his ex-wife's piloting skills take them all to the man's intended destination, a US research base on the Arctic ice, set up following the discovery by advanced ice-penetrating sonar of a derelict Russian scientific base buried within a massive iceberg, Ice Station Grendel, where the personnel all died decades earlier. A Russian submarine carrying the son of the station's former commander also approaches, ostensibly to retrieve the bodies found by the Americans. Both sides know the station contains vastly important scientific secrets, worth fighting for, but neither side knows quite how the other will fight, or how Grendel itself will complicate matters. In an atmosphere of mistrust and fear, the Alaskans and the scientist overseeing the sonar project have unexpected roles to play, while in the midst of terror, unexpected allies, and betrayals, neither side can afford to lose. Buried deep in the earth's polar ice cap -- carved into a moving island of ice twice the size of the United States -- is a secret place, the site of a remarkable abandoned experiment that could have frightening ramifications for the planet. The brain trust of the former Soviet Union who created the seventy-year-old Ice Station Grendel would like it simply to melt from human memory. But that becomes impossible when an American undersea research vessel, the Polar Sentinel, inadvertently pulls too close to the hollowed-out iceberg... and one of the crew sees something alive inside. Something that never should have survived. It is a discovery that sends shock waves through the intelligence communities of two powerful nations, as American and Russian scientists, soldiers, and unsuspecting civilians are pulled into Grendel's lethal vortex of secrets, violence, and betrayal. To preserve the silence -- to prevent others from uncovering the terrible mysteries locked behind submerged walls of ice and steel -- no measures will be too extreme. For within the station, experiments have blurred the line between life and death. It was a place never meant to be found. One man already knows too much: Matthew Pike, a former American Special Forces operative, living in seclusion in Alaska on the edge of the Arctic Circle. On the run after rescuing the survivor of a plane crash no one was meant to observe, Pike is relentlessly drawn into the eye of the gathering storm -- even as a Russian nuclear attack submarine draws silently nearer to the men and women on the Polar Sentinel. The covert battle over Grendel is spinning out of control, and the future of all human life on Earth will be altered -- or destroyed -- once its nightmarish truths are revealed. A masterful blending of science and adventure, suspense and explosive page-turning excitement, James Rollins's Ice Hunt is a novel that will chill readers to the bone.