Icebound (17 page)

Franz Fischer and Pete Johnson were in the ice cave. Harry could see them clearly, for his machine’s headlamps shone through the entrance and provided the only light in there. The two men were pacing, waiting for their turn at warm cabins and Thermos bottles full of hot soup. Franz moved briskly, agitatedly, almost as if marching back and forth. In perfect contrast, Pete ambled from one end of the cave to the other, loose-jointed, fluid.

Rita knocked and opened the cabin door, startling Harry.

Swallowing a mouthful of soup, he said, “What’s wrong?”

She leaned inside, using her body to block out the wind and its gibberous voice. “He wants to talk to you.”

“Brian?”

“Yes.”

“He’s still improving?”

“Oh, yes. Nicely.”

“Does he remember what happened?”

“Let him tell you,” she said.

In the fifth snowmobile, the one parked farthest from the cave, Brian was slowly recuperating. Rita had been in the cabin with him for the past twenty minutes, massaging his chilled fingers, feeding him soup, and making sure that he didn’t lapse into a dangerous sleep. He had regained consciousness during the ride back from the third demolition shaft, but he had been in too much agony to talk. When he first woke, he’d been racked with pain as his numbed nerve endings belatedly responded to the severe cold that had nearly killed him. The kid would not feel half normal for at least another hour.

Harry capped his Thermos bottle. Before he pulled his goggles in place, he kissed Rita.

“Mmmmm,” she said. “More.”

This time her tongue moved between his lips. Snowflakes swept past her head and danced across his face, but her breath was hot on his greased skin. He was flushed with a poignant concern for her. He wanted to protect her from all harm.

When they drew apart she said, “I love you.”

“We
will
go back to Paris. Somehow. When we get out of this.”

“Well, if we don’t get out of it,” she said, “we haven’t been short-changed. We’ve had eight good years together. We’ve had more fun and love than most people get in a lifetime.”

He felt powerless, up against impossible odds. All his life he had been a man who took charge in a crisis. He had always been able to find solutions to even the most difficult problems. This new sense of impotency enraged him.

She kissed him lightly on one corner of his mouth. “Hurry now. Brian’s waiting for you.”

The snowmobile cabin was uncomfortably cramped. Harry sat backward on the narrow passenger bench, facing the rear of the machine, where Brian Dougherty was facing forward. The handlebars pressed into his back. His knees were jammed against Brian’s knees. Only a vague, amber radiance from the headlamps filtered through the Plexiglas, and the darkness made the tiny enclosure seem even tinier than it was.

Harry said, “How do you feel?”

“Like hell.”

“You will for a while yet.”

“My hands and feet sting. And I don’t mean they’re just numb. It’s like someone’s jabbing lots of long needles into them.” His voice was shaded with pain.

“Frostbite?”

“We haven’t looked at my feet yet. But they feel about the same as my hands. And there doesn’t seem to be any frostbite on my hands. I think I’m safe. But—” He gasped in pain, and his face contorted. “Oh, Jesus, that’s bad.”

Opening his Thermos, Harry said, “Soup?”

“No, thanks. Rita pumped a quart of it into me. One more drop, and I’ll float away.” He rubbed his hands together, apparently to ease another especially sharp prickle of pain. “By the way, I’m head over heels in love with your wife.”

“Who isn’t?”

“And I want to thank you for coming after me. You saved my life, Harry.”

“Another day, another act of heroism,” Harry said. He took a mouthful of soup. “What happened to you out there?”

“Didn’t Rita tell you?”

“She said I should hear it from you.”

Brian hesitated. His eyes glittered in the shadows. At last he said, “Someone clubbed me.”

Harry almost choked on his soup. “Knocked you out?”

“Hit me on the back of the head.”

“That can’t be right.”

“I’ve got the lumps to prove it.”

“Let me see.”

Brian leaned forward, lowered his head.

Harry stripped off his gloves and felt the boy’s head. The two lumps were prominent and easy to find, one larger than the other, both on the back of the skull and one slightly higher and to the left of the other. “Concussion?”

“None of the symptoms.”

“Headache?”

“Oh, yeah. A real bastard of a headache.”

“Double vision?”

“No.”

“Any slurred speech?”

“No.”

“You’re certain you didn’t faint?”

“Positive,” Brian said, sitting up straight again.

“You could have taken a nasty bump on the head if you’d fainted. You might have fallen against a projection of ice.”

“I distinctly remember being struck from behind.” His voice was hard with conviction. “Twice. The first time he didn’t put enough force into it. My hood cushioned the blow. I stumbled, kept my balance, started to turn around—and he hit me a lot harder the next time. The lights went out but good.”

“And then he dragged you out of sight?”

“Before any of you saw what was happening, evidently.”

“Not very damned likely.”

“The wind was gusting. The snow was so thick I couldn’t see more than two yards. He had excellent cover.”

“You’re saying someone tried to murder you.”

“That’s right.”

“But if that’s the case, why did he drag you behind a windbreak? You would have frozen to death in fifteen minutes if he’d left you in the open.”

“Maybe he thought the blow killed me. Anyway, he did leave me in the open. But I came to after you’d all left. I was dizzy, nauseated, cold. I managed to drag myself out of the wind before I passed out again.”

“Murder…”

“Yes.”

Harry didn’t want to believe it. He had too much on his mind as it was. He didn’t have the capacity to deal with yet another worry.

“It happened as we were getting ready to leave the third site.” Brian paused, hissed in pain. “My feet. God, like hot needles, hot needles dipped in acid.” His knees pressed more forcefully against Harry’s knees, but after half a minute or so, he gradually relaxed. He was tough; he continued as if there had been no interruption. “I was loading some equipment into the last of the cargo trailers. Everyone was busy. The wind was gusting especially hard, the snow was falling so heavily I’d lost sight of the rest of you, then he hit me.”

“But who?”

“I didn’t see him.”

“Not even from the corner of your eye?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Did he speak to you?”

“No.”

“If he wanted you dead, why wouldn’t he wait for midnight? The way it looks now, you’ll die then with the rest of us. Why would he feel he had to hurry you along? Why not wait for midnight?”

“Well, maybe…”

“What?”

“This sounds crazy…but, well, I
am
a Dougherty.”

Harry understood at once. “To a certain breed of maniac, yes, that would make you an appealing victim. Killing a Dougherty, any Dougherty—there’s a sense of history involved. I suppose I can see a psychopath getting a real thrill out of that.”

They were silent.

Then Brian said, “But who among us is psychotic?”

“Seems impossible, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. But you do believe me?”

“Of course. I can’t make myself believe you knocked yourself unconscious with two blows to the back of the head, then dragged yourself out of sight.”

Brian sighed with relief.

Harry said, “This pressure we’re under…If one of us was a borderline case, potentially unstable but functional, maybe the stress was all that was needed to push him over the edge. Like to take a guess?”

“Guess who it was? No.”

“I expected you to say George Lin.”

“For whatever reasons, George doesn’t care for me or my family. He’s sure made that abundantly clear. But whatever’s wrong with him, whatever bee he’s got up his ass, I still can’t believe he’s a killer.”

“You can’t be sure. You don’t know what’s going on inside his head any more than I do. There’re few people in this life we can ever really know. With me…Rita’s the only person I’d ever vouch for and have no doubts.”

“Yes, but I saved his life today.”

“If he’s psychotic, why would that matter to him? In fact, in his twisted logic, for some reason we’d never be able to grasp, that might even be why he wants to kill you.”

The wind rocked the snowmobile. Beads of snow ticked and hissed across the cabin roof.

For the first time all day, Harry was on the verge of despair. He was exhausted both physically and mentally.

Brian said, “Will he try again?”

“If he’s nuts, obsessed with you and your family, then he’s not going to give up easily. What does he have to lose? I mean, he’s going to die at midnight anyway.”

Looking out the side window into the churning night, Brian said, “I’m afraid, Harry.”

“If you weren’t afraid right now, kid, then
you’d
be psychotic.”

“You’re afraid too?”

“Scared out of my wits.”

“You don’t show it.”

“I never do. I just pee my pants and hope nobody’ll notice.”

Brian laughed, then winced at another spasm of stinging pain in his extremities. When he recovered, he said, “Whoever he is, at least I’ll be prepared for him now.”

“You won’t be left alone,” Harry said. “Either Rita or I will stay with you at all times.”

Rubbing his hands together, massaging his still cold fingers, Brian said, “Are you going to tell the others?”

“No. We’ll say you don’t remember what happened, that you must have fallen and hit your head on an outcropping of ice. Better that your would-be killer thinks we don’t know about him.”

“I had the same thought. He’ll be especially cautious if he knows we’re waiting for his next move.”

“But if he thinks we don’t know about him, he might get careless the next time he tries for you.”

“If he’s a lunatic because he wants to murder me even though I’ll probably die at midnight anyway…then I guess I must be nuts too. Here I am worrying about being murdered even though midnight’s only seven hours away.”

“No. You’ve got a strong survival instinct, that’s all. It’s a sign of sanity.”

“Unless the survival instinct is so strong that it keeps me from recognizing a hopeless situation. Then maybe it’s a sign of lunacy.”

“It isn’t hopeless,” Harry said. “We’ve got seven hours. Anything could happen in seven hours.”

“Like what?”

“Anything.”

5:00

Like a whale breaching in the night sea, the
Ilya Pogodin
surfaced for the second time in an hour. Glistening cascades of water slid from the boat’s dark flanks as it rolled in the storm waves. Captain Nikita Gorov and two seamen scrambled out of the conning-tower hatch and took up watch positions on the bridge.

In the past thirty minutes, cruising at its maximum submerged speed of thirty-one knots, the submarine had moved seventeen miles north-northeast of its assigned surveillance position. Timoshenko had taken a bearing on the Edgeway group’s radio beacon, and Gorov had plotted a perfectly straight course that intersected with the estimated path of the drifting iceberg. On the surface, the
Pogodin
was capable of twenty-six knots; but because of the bad seas, it was only making three quarters of that speed. Gorov was anxious to take the boat down again, to three hundred feet this time, where it would glide like any other fish, where the turbulence of the storm could not affect it.

The satellite tracking gear rose from the sail behind the bridge and opened like spring’s first blossom. The five petal-form radar plates, which quickly joined together to become a dish, were already beginning to gleam and sparkle with ice as the snow and sleet froze to them; nevertheless, they diligently searched the sky.

At three minutes past the hour, a note from Timoshenko was sent up to the bridge. The communications officer wished to inform the captain that a coded message had begun to come in from the Ministry in Moscow.

The moment of truth had arrived.

Gorov folded the slip of paper, put it in a coat pocket, then kept his eyes to the night glasses. He scanned ninety degrees of the storm-swept horizon, but it was not waves and clouds and snow that he saw. Instead, two visions plagued him, each more vivid than reality. In the first, he was sitting at a table in a conference room with a gilt-trimmed ceiling and a chandelier that cast rainbows on the walls; he was listening to the state’s testimony at his own court-martial, and he was forbidden to speak in his own defense. In the second vision, he stared down at a young boy who lay in a hospital bed, a dead boy rank with sweat and urine. The night glasses seemed to be a conduit to both the past and the future.

At 5:07 the decoded message was passed through the conning-tower hatch and into the captain’s hands. Gorov skipped the eight lines of introductory material and got straight to the body of the comminiqué.

YOUR REQUEST GRANTED STOP MAKE ALL SPEED TO RESCUE MEMBERS EDGEWAY EXPEDITION STOP WHEN FOREIGN NATIONALS ABOARD TAKE ALL PRECAUTIONS AGAINST COMPROMISE OF CLASSIFIED MATERIAL STOP SECURE ALL SENSITIVE AREAS OF YOUR COMMAND STOP EMBASSY OFFICIALS IN WASHINGTON HAVE INFORMED AMERICAN GOVERNMENT OF INTENT TO RESCUE EDGEWAY GROUP STOP