Icebound (14 page)
Harry smiled. “What else would I mean?”
A strong gust of wind caught them from behind, an avalanche of air that would have knocked them flat if they had not been prepared for it. For a minute they bent with the gale, unable to talk, concerned only about keeping their balance.
When the gust passed and the wind settled down to perhaps forty miles per hour, Pete finished cleaning his goggles and began to rub his hands together to get the snow and ice off his gloves. “I know why you didn’t go with the others. You can’t deceive me. It’s your hero complex.”
“Sure. I’m a regular Indiana Jones.”
“You’ve always got to be where the danger is.”
“Yeah, me and Madonna.” Harry shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry, but you’ve got it all wrong, Dr. Freud. I’d much prefer to be where the danger isn’t. But it did occur to me the bomb might explode in your face.”
“And you’d give me first aid?”
“Something like that.”
“Listen, if it does explode in my face but doesn’t kill me…no first aid, for God’s sake. Just finish me off.”
Harry winced and started to protest.
“All I’m asking for is mercy,” Pete said bluntly.
During the past few months, Harry had come to like and respect this big, broad-faced man. Beneath Pete Johnson’s fierce-looking exterior, under the layers of education and training, under the cool competence, there was a kid with a love for science and technology and adventure. Harry recognized much of himself in Pete. “There’s really not a great chance of an explosion, is there?”
“Almost none,” Pete assured him.
“The casing
did
take a beating coming out of the shaft.”
“Relax, Harry. The last one went well, didn’t it?”
They knelt beside the steel cylinder. Harry held the flashlight while Pete opened a small plastic box of precision tools.
“Disarming these sonsofbitches is easy enough,” Pete said. “That isn’t our problem. Our problem is getting eight more of them out of the ice before the clock strikes midnight and the carriage turns back into a pumpkin.”
“We’re recovering them at the rate of one an hour.”
“But we’ll slow down,” Johnson said. With a small screwdriver he began to remove the end of the cylinder that featured the eye loop. “We needed forty-five minutes to dig out the first one. Then fifty-five for the second. Already we’re getting tired, slowing down. It’s this wind.”
It was a killing wind, pressing and pounding against Harry’s back with such force that he felt as though he were standing in the middle of a swollen, turbulent river; the currents in the air were almost as tangible as currents in deep water. The base wind velocity was now forty or forty-five miles an hour, with gusts to sixty-five, steadily and rapidly climbing toward gale force. Later, it would be deadly.
“You’re right,” Harry said. His throat was slightly sore from the effort required to be heard above the storm, even though they were nearly head-to-head over the package of explosives. “It doesn’t do much good to sit ten minutes in a warm snowmobile cabin and then spend the next hour in weather as bad as this.”
Pete extracted the last screw and removed a six-inch end piece from the cylinder. “How far has the real temperature fallen? Like to guess?”
“Five degrees above zero. Fahrenheit.”
“With the wind-chill factor?”
“Twenty below zero.”
“Thirty.”
“Maybe.” Even his heavy thermal suit could not protect him. The wind’s cold blade stabbed continuously at his back, pierced his storm suit, pricked his spine. “I never thought we had much of a chance of getting ten out. I knew we’d slow down. But if we can disarm just five or six, we might have enough room to survive the blowup at midnight.”
Pete tipped the six-inch section of casing, and a timer slid out into his gloved hand. It was connected to the rest of the cylinder by four springy coils of wire: red, yellow, green, and white. “I guess it’s better to freeze to death tomorrow than be blown to bits tonight.”
“Don’t you dare do that to me,” Harry said.
“What?”
“Turn into another Franz Fischer.”
Pete laughed. “Or another George Lin.”
“Those two. The Whiner brothers.”
“You chose them,” Pete said.
“And I take the blame. But, hell, they’re good men. It’s just that under this much pressure…”
“They’re assholes.”
“Precisely.”
“Time for you to get out of here,” Pete said, reaching into the tool kit again.
“I’ll hold the flashlight.”
“The hell you will. Put it down so it shines on this, then go. I don’t
need
you to hold the light. What I need you for is to deal out the mercy if it comes to that.”
Reluctantly, Harry returned to the snowmobile. He bent down behind the machine, out of the wind. Huddled there, he sensed that all their work and risk-taking was for nothing. Their situation would deteriorate further before it improved. If it ever improved.
4:00
The
Ilya Pogodin
rolled sickeningly on the surface of the North Atlantic. The turbulent sea smashed against the rounded bows and geysered into the darkness, an endless series of waves that sounded like window-rattling peals of summer thunder. Because the boat rode so low in the water, it shuddered only slightly from the impact, but it could not withstand that punishment indefinitely. Gray water churned across the main deck, and foam as thick as pudding sloshed around the base of the huge steel sail. The boat hadn’t been designed or built for extended surface runs in stormy weather. Nevertheless, in spite of her tendency to yaw, she could hold her own long enough for Timoshenko to exchange messages with the war room at the Naval Ministry in Moscow.
Captain Gorov was on the bridge with two other men. They were all wearing fleece-lined pea jackets, hooded black rain slickers over the jackets, and gloves. The two young lookouts stood back to back, one facing port and the other starboard. All three men had field glasses and were surveying the horizon.
It’s a damned close horizon, Gorov thought as he studied it. And an ugly one.
That far north, the polar twilight had not yet faded entirely from the sky. An eerie greenish glow seeped through the heavy storm clouds and saturated the Atlantic vistas, so Gorov seemed to be peering through a thin film of green liquid. It barely illuminated the raging sea and imparted a soft yellow cast to the foamy crests of the waves. A mixture of fine snow and sleet hissed in from the northwest; the sail, the bridge railing, Gorov’s black rain slicker, the laser package, and the radio masts were encrusted with white ice. Scattered formations of fog further obscured the forbidding panorama, and due north the churning waves were hidden by a gray-brown mist so dense that it seemed to be a curtain drawn across the world beyond it. Visibility varied from one half to three quarters of a mile and would have been considerably worse if they had not been using night-service binoculars.
Behind Gorov, atop the steel sail, the satellite tracking dish moved slowly from east to west. Its continuous change of attitude was imperceptible at a glance, but it was locked on to a Soviet telecommunications satellite that was in a tight subpolar orbit high above the masses of slate-colored clouds. Gorov’s message had been transmitted by laser four minutes ago. The tracking dish waited to receive Moscow’s reply.
The captain had already imagined the worst possible response. He would be ordered to relinquish command to First Officer Zhukov, who would be directed to put him under twenty-four-hour armed guard and continue the mission as scheduled. His court-martial would proceed in his absence, and he would be informed of the decision upon his return to Moscow.
But he expected a more reasoned response than that from Moscow. Certainly the Ministry was always unpredictable. Even under the postcommunist regime, with its greater respect for justice, officers were occasionally court-martialed without being present to defend themselves. But he believed what he had told Zhukov in the control room: They were not
all
fools at the Ministry. They would most likely see the opportunity for propaganda and strategic advantage in this situation, and they would reach the proper conclusion.
He scanned the fog-shrouded horizon.
The flow of time seemed to have slowed almost to a stop. Although he knew that it was an illusion, he saw the sea raging in slow motion, the waves building like ripples in an ocean of cold molasses. Each minute was an hour.
Bang!
Sparks shot out of the vents in the steel-alloy casing of the auxiliary drill. It chugged, sputtered, and cut out.
Roger Breskin had been operating it. “What the hell?” he thumbed the power switch.
When the drill wouldn’t start, Pete Johnson stepped in and dropped to his knees to have a look at it.
Everyone crowded around, expecting the worst. They were, Harry thought, like people gathered at an automobile accident—except that the corpses in this wreckage might be their own.
“What’s wrong with it?” George Lin asked.
“You’ll have to take apart the casing to find the trouble,” Fischer told Pete.
“Yeah, but I don’t have to take the sucker apart to know I can’t repair it.”
Brian said, “What do you mean?”
Pointing to the snow and frozen slush around the partially reopened third shaft, Pete said, “See those black specks?”
Harry crouched and studied the bits of metal scattered on the ice. “Gear teeth.”
Everyone was silent.
“I could probably repair a fault in the wiring,” Pete said at last. “But we don’t have a set of spare gears for it.”
“What now?” Brian asked.
With Teutonic pessimism, Fischer said, “Back to the cave and wait for midnight.”
“That’s giving up,” Brian said.
Getting to his feet, Harry said, “But I’m afraid that’s all we can do at the moment, Brian. We lost the other drill when my sled went into that crevasse.”
Dougherty shook his head, refusing to accept that they were powerless to proceed. “Earlier, Claude said we could use the ice ax and the power saw to cut some steps in the winter field, angle down to each package—”
The Frenchman interrupted him. “That would only work if we had a week. We’d need six more hours, perhaps longer, to retrieve this one bomb by the step method. It’s not worth expending all that energy to gain only forty-five more feet of safety.”
“Okay, let’s go, let’s pack up,” Harry said, clapping his hands for emphasis. “No point standing here, losing body heat. We can talk about it back at the cave, out of this wind. We might think of something yet.”
But he had no hope.
At 4:02 the communications center reported that a message was coming in from the Naval Ministry. Five minutes later the decoding sheet was passed up to the bridge, where Nikita Gorov began to read it with some trepidation.
MESSAGE
NAVAL MINISTRY
TIME:
1900
MOSCOW
FROM: DUTY OFFICER
TO: CAPTAIN N. GOROV
SUBJECT: YOUR LAST TRANSMISSION
#34-
D
MESSAGE BEGINS:
YOUR REQUEST UNDER STUDY BY ADMIRALTY STOP IMMEDIATE DECISION CANNOT BE MADE STOP SUBMERGE AND CONTINUE SCHEDULED MISSION FOR ONE HOUR STOP A CONTINUATION OR NEW ORDERS WILL BE TRANSMITTED TO YOU AT
1700
HOURS YOUR TIME STOP
Gorov was disappointed. The Ministry’s indecision cranked up the level of his tension. The next hour would be more difficult for him than the hour that had just passed.
He turned to the other two men. “Clear the bridge.”
They prepared to dive. The lookouts scrambled down through the conning tower and took up stations at the diving wheels. The captain sounded the routine alarm—two short blasts on the electric horns that blared from speakers in the bulkheads of every room on the boat—and then left the bridge, pulling the hatch shut with a lanyard.
The quartermaster of the watch spun the hand-wheel and said, “Hatch secure.”
Gorov hurried to the command pad in the control room. On the second blast of the diving klaxon, the air vents in the ballast tanks had been opened, and the sea had roared into the space between the ship’s two hulls. Now, to Gorov’s right, a petty officer was watching a board that contained one red and several green lights. The green represented hatches, vents, exhausts, and equipment extruders that were closed to the sea. The red light was labeled
LASER TRANSMISSION PACKAGE
. When the laser equipment settled into a niche atop the sail and an airtight hatch slid over it, the red light blinked off and the safety bulb beneath it lit up.