The Secret of Cape Lisburne: An Arctic Adventure

By Ron Monette

The Antonov 225, the largest plane in the world in 1988 is heading to Cape Lisburne, Alaska with scientists and cargo to find out why something like the red tide is happening at and around the Cape which is a U.S. Long Range Radar Station. The 2 pilots and 2 crew are ex F-14 combat aces from that flew off a carrier during Desert Storm. The plane is sabotaged to do a controlled crash short of Cape Lisburne. Everybody survives with some injuries. A medical officer, Kelly is on board and she assists. There are a couple of confrontations with a surprise person on board who eventually dies. The whole group are rescued by the Cape Station by moving inland off the ice pack. The scientists eventually find what is causing the red tide effect with the help of a special coast guard sonar ship. Iron sulphate has been dumped in the coastal waters causing Domoic Acid poisoning. The base pilots and personnel get sick from eating the shell fish and fish and can't fly. The 4 F-14 (old dogs) has to fly and put on a real show. Kelly and Jim, a second seat radar man on the F-14s fall in love. Kelly lost pilot years earlier and hasnt let herself get close to anyone since.

The culprit of the iron dumping is a communist country. When it is found out they are taken to a world court. They deny and blame others. There is no antidote to the poison so it has to work its way out of the sick and the water. At the end the four old dogs have a confrontation with a N. Korean ship that has entered restricted waters and what they do is surprising. It prevents a possible war. The last chapter is, "Is it the end or is it the Beginning as everybody is summed up.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514424582

Ron Monette

He has, for some decades, been keenly interested in what has been happening to our earth and its environment. His care for animals and sea life has prompted him to write this book. We have done so many things to harm and even destroy so many beautiful creatures and even the literal earth. He has witnessed the shoreline of beaches with dead fish and smelled the pungent odor that makes you feel like you have the flu from the "red tide." It brings him to tears to see sea birds covered in oil and dying. So he has written this book, though fiction, based on iron dumping in the oceans to make us aware of the devastation that can come from iron being put in coastal waters.

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by Ron Monette.

Cover design by Deborah Pielak

Cover Photo of Antonov-225 by Bjoern Thomsen

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015918678

ISBN:                  Hardcover                  978-1-5144-2460-5

                            Softcover                    978-1-5144-2459-9

                            eBook                         978-1-5144-2458-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 11/07/2015

Xlibris

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Contents

Preface Bjoern Thomsen

Acknowledgement

Chapter 1 What Happened

Chapter 2 The Crash

Chapter 3 The Shock

Chapter 4 Something Is Wrong

Chapter 5 The Search

Chapter 6 The Warning

Chapter 7 Some Answers

Chapter 8 The Puzzle And Rescue

Chapter 9 The Wait And Help

Chapter 10 Aggressive Rescue

Chapter 11 The Scare And The Dash

Chapter 12 The Injured

Chapter 13 The Attack And The Problem

Chapter 14 The Run For Safety

Chapter 15 Surprises

Chapter 16 Coming Home

Chapter 17 Cape Lisburne’s Secret

Chapter 18 The Findings

Chapter 19 Kelly, Jim, And Exciting News

Chapter 20 Healy Finds The Secret

Chapter 21 The Big Lift And Id

Chapter 22 The Charges And Enforcement

Chapter 23 More Trouble At The Cape

Chapter 24 The Old Dogs Fly

Chapter 25 Sadness Of It All

Chapter 26 What About Peter

Chapter 27 Is It The End Or Just The Beginning?

Cast Of Characters

Appendix

Reference Material And Credits

Preface

Bjoern Thomsen

T his book is a fictional story. It is about real places in Alaska, United States, and the Arctic. Though used in a fictional situation, all the planes and ships are real.

It deals with a possible real ocean problem recognized by scientists in all countries in coastal areas. Incidents regarding iron sulfate being put into our oceans are really taking place but are fictional in the story. Red tide is really happening in our oceans, but it is fiction in the story.

The Russian Antonov An-225, the biggest plane in the world in 1988, is very real, but its use in the story is fictional. The 420-foot coast guard ship Healy is real and used by the United States Coast Guard in the North Pacific and in the Arctic for ice-breaking, research, and rescue.

What has happened to the Arctic ice pack in May is indeed real but fictional in the story.

At this time, the dumping of iron in the deep oceans is controversial. There are both pros and cons. The technical data and statistics mentioned in the story are real, and the source of the data is in References.

These organizations used in this fictional story are real (see References):

1. International Container Bureau

2. ISO 6346—Coding and Identification

3. US Federal Maritime Commission

4. International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea

5. International Seabed Authority

Planes, ships, maps, etc., are pictured in the appendix.

Acknowledgement

W ords will never be able to express my loving thanks and gratitude to my daughter Debbie. Without her, this book would never have been published. Her time, effort, expertise and patience with me went beyond what any father should expect. Thanks Deb. I would also like to express my thanks to my son-in-law Pete, for allowing Debbie to spend so much time away from their own business to help me with the book.

Finally, I have to acknowledge Xlibris, the publisher of the book, their professionalism, assistance and patience with me as a new author, with no experience went beyond what I could expect. They were just the best. Thank you, Xlibris.

Chapter 1

What Happened

"B race, brace, brace—words bouncing around in my mind over and over, but why? Brace, brace, brace. Why am I saying it? What does it mean? Then the pain, an explosion, takes place in my head. I’ve had pain like this before, but it was the morning after an all-night bender. Then the silence, an unnatural, grave-like silence. Am I dead? Have I died and don’t know it? Yet Brace, brace, brace keeps repeating, repeating, along with the pain. I open my eyes, except everything is a blur. Then it’s Brace, brace, brace again, only this time I’m screaming it as loud as I can. Then the pain in my head, the blood in my eyes from my head. It hurts, but I wipe the blood out of my eyes and realize Brace, brace, brace" were the last words I shouted as this monster I’m sitting in was about to fall out of the sky. Then a huge bright light.

I look out the port window, which, for some reason, is still intact, and see what looks like the blazing sun, and I’m only two hundred feet from it. But as things start to come into focus, I realize it’s what has caused the blaze of light. It’s the two outboard port engines that have broken away from the third one on the wing and are engulfed in a ball of flames as big as a house. As my mind starts to settle into reality, everything starts to come together.

My name is Ron Shepherd. I started flying when I was twelve years old on Dad’s one-thousand-acre farm in Iowa. Dad decided to buy a surplus World War II Fairchild PT-19 training plane and converted it into a crop duster. The only problem was that Dad wouldn’t get in a plane. I, on the other hand, as any kid would, couldn’t wait for the plane to arrive. After three short lessons, she was all mine. I bounced her up and down a few times in the field, learning how to take off and land, and eventually experimented with everything I could think of that she could do. I had good reflexes for flying. I learned how to do rolls, dive her, and pull up to feel weightlessness. All the while with Dad screaming at me.

So I was a natural for the navy and an F-14 Tomcat. It was a supersonic, twin-engine, variable-sweep wing with two seats. The second man was an electronics warfare specialist. He handled radar, navigation, communication, etc. I was carrier based and flew my limit in combat. Then I was transferred to a cargo group and flew the huge Boeing C-17 cargo plane. After Afghanistan and Desert Storm, I hired out to anyone that needed a pilot.

So here I am, sitting in this monster of a Russian Antonov An-225. When it was built by the Soviet Union in 1988, it was the largest plane in the world. It cost around $250 million. The wings span 290 feet; that’s as long as a football field. It is 275 feet long and 59 feet high, as tall as a six-story building. It has six huge turbofan engines, each with 12,500 hp, two of which have broken away with the wing and are burning. The wings have thirteen fuel tanks in them, but they should be low on fuel at this time since we have flown from San Diego almost to Cape Lisburne Air Force Station.

When the Soviet Union broke up, they had neither the fuel nor the pilots to fly these things. They mothballed them, and some went up for sale for just about nothing. A lot of mercenaries bought them for illegal purposes.

This one has been bought for a scientific expedition to the Arctic Circle because of its load capacity of five hundred tons at takeoff. We have a crew of four, all combat buddies I flew with, and two cargo loaders, whom I don’t know, four scientists, and Kelly Parks, who is a naval medical officer. She served on a carrier as a surgical assistant and is hitching a ride for a six-month tour at Cape Lisburne Air Force Station, Alaska. The team of scientists works for Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which is a nonprofit oceanographic research institute. James Cotton and William Taber are marine biologists. Don Swift is an oceanographer, and Scott Dunn is a meteorologist. Kelly Parks is not part of the group. Their research is to find out why something called the red tide is turning up in the Arctic Circle just above Cape Lisburne, killing fish and playing havoc with the ice pack.

Cape Lisburne is a United States long-range radar site and air force station. It is between the Arctic Ocean and the Chukchi Sea, 276 miles west-southwest of Point Barrow, Alaska, and about 50 miles north of Point Hope. There is one air force runway that is 4,805 feet long. I’ve mentioned the length of the runway because this Antonov -225 takes a mile or more to stop once it touches down, so reverse thrust on these six big engines is going to be critical. We’re told they will have snow plowed for another one thousand feet. When they noticed the red tide situation, they were immediately concerned, thus this expedition.

The red tide is primarily a warm-climate phenomenon and should not be showing up in the Arctic. A study on the Arctic in World Affairs gave a dialogue about this, and in part, I was told it said, In the case of potential Arctic fisheries, the book provides a scientific examination of factors and conditions relevant to the migration of various species into the central Arctic Ocean and the prospects for future commercial fisheries there.

I was hired just to fly the 225 since I had flown it before. Few pilots are qualified to fly it. I didn’t know all the details about the mission, but that was part of what I was told in a briefing about what was happening above the Arctic Circle. Also the fact that this could not be a natural thing. It was suspected that someone was up to something that might be causing this. I just note here that little things started to happen during loading that made me feel uncomfortable. Nothing I could put my finger on, but just something. It’s the end of May and good weather.

Chapter 2

The Crash

W hen I was first contacted by Woods Hole, I was reluctant to hire on when they said I would be flying the Antonov -225. The Russians