Polar Quest

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The Ice Queen — a sexy Nordic blonde with pouty lips and ice blue eyes — gazed down at Kuhn. Her lusty smile and the mink bikini that barely contained her physical charms were warm reminders of his past. Like a Vargas pinup girl, she sat atop a globe that displayed her frozen domain: Antarctica.

Kuhn ran his hand over the aircraft’s smooth aluminum skin, paying his respects. The patches on Kuhn’s weathered aviator jacket matched those on the aircraft: US NAVY VXE-6 SQUADRON. Beneath the side cockpit window, just above the rendered image of the Ice Queen, stenciled letters read:

For almost a quarter century, Kuhn had piloted XD-10, the Ice Queen. She was a Lockheed LC-130R, a variant of the venerable C-130 Hercules transport equipped with skis mounted to her fuselage so she could land on ice.

As ungainly as she looked, the Hercules could actually fly and was designed to do one thing: lift heavy loads. Except for the cockpit, the fuselage of the Ice Queen was a cavern of empty space big enough to accommodate several large trucks. Ninety-eight feet in length, she sat low to the ground, like a cylindrical railroad car with a ramp in her tapered tail that folded down like a drawbridge. Her wings spanned 132 feet, and the Ice Queen used every inch of her lifting surface and every ounce of power from the four Allison T56 prop engines to propel her into the sky.

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