THE MOST DESTRUCTIVE NATURAL DISASTER IN HISTORY ISN'T NATURAL.... THE PLACEAntarctica. The Ross Ice Shelf. A floating slab of solid ice the size of France, more than 3,000 feet thick. THE EVENT On Thanksgiving weekend, six precisely placed nuclear warheads buried 2,000 feet beneath the ice detonate in sequence, shearing the Ross Shelf from the underwater rises that anchor it. In just three hours, huge fractures rip through the Shelf, freeing the ice from the grip of the land more than a half mile beneath it. Then a seventh warhead explodes eighteen miles above the Shelf's center, generating an electromagnetic pulse that blinds every spy and weather satellite over the southern hemisphere. Now there can be no warning for what happens next. The nuclear shock wave drives the Shelf into the Pacific of 500 miles per hour, creating an initial wall of water 1,400 feel high. Unseen, unsuspected, unstoppable, the displacement wave formed by the wall's collapse radiates northward. In thirty-five hours, it will lay waste to Hawaii. In thirty-eight hours, the southeastern regions of Japan will become little more than swampland. And in forty hours, the entire Los Angeles Basin will be flooded to a depth of twenty feet. By then, the death toll will be measured in the millions, and it will take more than fifty years for the Pacific Rim nations to recover from the economic devastation. At least, that's the plan. But what those responsible for this outrageous act of global destruction did not anticipate was one man and one woman, thrown together in the most remote continent on Earth, who become the only survivors who can outrace the wave of destruction, expose the terrorists who set it in motion, and uncover the staggering secret that can stop it. Set against a split-second race to prevent global devastation, and based on the astounding cutting-edge technologies that will take the U.S. military into the next century, Icefire is the story of Navy SEAL Captain Mitch Webber and oceanographer Cory Rey. Once lovers, now enemies, they're plunged into a maelstrom of international intrigue and betrayal reaching from Beijing to the highest levels of the Pentagon. Critically acclaimed for their earlier works of speculative fiction and suspense, with Icefire Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens have become an exciting new voice in contemporary thrillers.
Industry Reviews
Absorbing disaster novel that offers everything but asteroid impact and superblooming viruses, by the Canadian authors of Nighteyes (1989) and - the publisher tells us - William Shatner's Star Trek novels (sorry, Bill). As in earlier Reeves-Stevens fiction, Clancyitis causes the characters to petrify under hardware description that amplifies oscillations until seismic fault lines fissure with ambient stress the solid-strata prose, while paragraphs burst like rock assaulted by shock-waves of subsonic horror. In other words, when some Chinese army generals decide to overthrow the current government and revert to even more hardline ways, they choose to plant a half-dozen nuclear bombs under the Antarctic permafrost - and then explode them to raise a gigantic wave that will roll up the Pacific at 500 miles an hour, knocking out New Zealand, Hawaii, Japan, and the American West Coast (as well as other places), while during the global turmoil, the generals take over China. Among those who might save some of the world in this scenario are Navy SEAL Captain Mitch Weber and his former lover, oceanographer Corry Rey - except that they're now at each other's throats (a plot device similar to James Cameron's in Abyss, which featured snarling ex-marrieds battling several gigantic tsunamis). The authors have a ripping good time measuring the hydraulics of ocean water being sucked up into the monstrous wave, the cyclonic, tree-popping wind, extraordinary airborne debris, and Hawaii dissolving into one large volcanic soup, while the wave also scoops up oilfields that sparks set afire. . . turning the San Diego - bound wave into ICEFIRE! Can it be stopped? Weber and Rey come up with an idea for dropping the ocean floor, but various world intrigues work against them. The Reeves-Stevenses feel duty-bound to present every thrilling ergometric fraction of their maelstrom - and that's okay for folks who can hack such projectile detail. Meanwhile, the publisher, arming its publicity missiles, says the movie is due in 1998 or 1999, with its basic plastic humans fighting a gale-force soundtrack. (Kirkus Reviews)
