THE PLACE: Antarctica. 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.