Icebound (18 page)

At the bottom of the decoding sheet, Timoshenko had written two words in pencil:
RECEIPT ACKNOWLEDGED
. There was nothing to do now but act upon their new orders—which they had been doing anyway for the past half an hour.

Although he was not at all sure that sufficient time remained in which to get those people off the iceberg, Gorov was happier than he had been in a long time. At least he was
doing
something. At least he had a chance, however slim, of reaching the Edgeway scientists before they were all dead.

He stuffed the decoded message into a coat pocket and sounded two brief blasts on the electric diving horns.

By 5:30 Brian had been in the snowmobile nearly an hour. He was suffering from claustrophobia. “I’d like to go out and walk.”

“Don’t rush yourself.” Rita switched on a flashlight, and the sudden brightness made her eyes water. She studied his hands. “Numb? Tingling?”

“No.”

“A burning sensation?”

“Not much any more. And my feet feel a lot better.” He saw that Rita still had her doubts. “My legs are cramped. I really need to exercise them. Besides, it’s too warm in here.”

She hesitated. “Your face
does
have some color now. I mean, other than the attractive blue it was. And your hands don’t look translucent any more. Well…all right. But when you’ve stretched your muscles, if you still feel any tingling, any numbness, you’ve got to come back here right away.”

“Good enough.”

She pulled on her felt boots and then worked her feet into her outer boots. She picked up her coat from the bench between them. Afraid of working up a sweat in the warm air, she hadn’t been wearing all of her gear. If she perspired in her suit, the moisture against her skin would leach away her body heat, which would be an invitation to death.

For the same reason, Brian wasn’t wearing his coat, gloves, or either pair of boots. “I’m not as limber as you are. But if you’ll step outside and give me more room, I think I’ll manage.”

“You must be too stiff and sore to do it yourself. I’ll help.”

“You’re making me feel like a child.”

“Rubbish.” She patted her lap. “Put your feet up here, one at a time.”

He smiled. “You’d make a wonderful mother for someone.”

“I already am a wonderful mother for someone. Harry.”

She worked the outer boot onto his somewhat swollen foot. Brian grunted with pain when he straightened his leg; his joints felt as if they were popping apart like a string of decorative plastic beads.

While Rita threaded the laces through the eyelets and drew them tight, she said, “Well, if nothing else, you’ve a wealth of material for those magazine pieces.”

He was surprised to hear himself say, “I’ve decided not to write them. I’m going to do a book instead.” Until that moment his obsession had been a private matter. Now that he had revealed it to someone he respected, he had forced himself to regard it less as an obsession and more as a commitment.

“A book? You’d better think twice about that.”

“I’ve thought about it a thousand times the last few weeks.”

“Writing a book is an ordeal. I’ve done three, you know. You may have to write thirty magazine articles to get the same word count as a book, but if I were you, I’d write articles and forget about being an ‘author.’ There isn’t half so much agony in the shorter work as there is in the writing of a book.”

“But I’ve been swept along by the idea.”

“Oh, I know how it is. Writing the first third of the book, you’re almost having a sexual experience. But you lose that feeling. Believe me, you do. In the second third, you’re just trying to prove something to yourself. And when you get to the last third, it’s simply a matter of survival.”

“But I’ve figured out how to make everything hang together in the narrative. I’ve got my theme.”

Rita winced and shook her head sadly. “So you’re too far gone to respond to reason.” She helped him get his right foot into the sealskin boot. “What
is
your theme?”

“Heroism.”

“Heroism?” She grimaced as she worked with the laces. “What in the name of God does heroism have to do with the Edgeway Project?”

“I think maybe it has everything to do with it.”

“You’re daft.”

“Seriously.”

“I never noticed any heroes here.”

Brian was surprised by her apparently genuine astonishment. “Have you looked in a mirror?”

“Me? A hero? Dear boy, I’m the furthest thing from it.”

“Not in my view.”

“I’m scared sick half the time.”

“Heroes can be scared and still be heroes. That’s what makes them heroes—acting in spite of fear. This is heroic work, this project.”

“It’s work, that’s all. Dangerous, yes. Foolish, perhaps. But heroic? You’re romanticizing it.”

He was silent as she finished lacing his boots. “Well, it’s not politics.”

“What isn’t?”

“What you’re doing here. You’re not in it for power, privilege, or money. You’re not out here because you want to control people.”

Rita raised her head and met his gaze. Her eyes were beautiful—and as deep as the clear Arctic sea. He knew that she understood him, in that moment, better than anyone ever had, perhaps even better than he knew himself. “The world thinks your family is full of heroes.”

“Well.”

“But you don’t.”

“I know them better.”

“They’ve made sacrifices, Brian. Your uncle was killed. Your father took a bullet of his own.”

“This will sound meanspirited, but it wouldn’t if you knew them. Rita, neither of them
expected
to have to make a sacrifice like that—or any sacrifice at all. Getting shot or killed isn’t an act of bravery—any more than it is for some poor bastard who gets gunned down unexpectedly while he’s withdrawing money from an automatic teller machine. He’s a victim, not a hero.”

“Some people get into politics to make a better world.”

“Not anyone I’ve known. It’s dirty, Rita. It’s all about envy and power. But out here, everything’s so clean. The work is hard, the environment is hostile—but
clean.
”

She had never taken her eyes from his. He couldn’t recall anyone ever having met his gaze as unwaveringly as she did. After a thoughtful silence, she said, “So you’re not just a troubled rich boy out for thrills, the way the media would have it.”

He broke eye contact first, taking his foot off the bench and contorting himself in the small space in order to slip his arms into the sleeves of his coat. “Is that what you thought I was like?”

“No. I don’t let the media do my thinking for me.”

“Of course, maybe I’m deluding myself. Maybe that’s just what I am, everything they write in the papers.”

“There’s precious little truth in the papers,” she said. “In fact, you’ll only find it one place.”

“Where’s that?”

“You know.”

He nodded. “In myself.”

She smiled. Putting on her coat, she said, “You’ll be fine.”

“When?”

“Oh, in twenty years maybe.”

He laughed. “Good God, I hope I’m not going to be screwed up that long.”

“Maybe longer. Hey, that’s what life’s all about: little by little, day by day, with excruciating stubbornness, each of us learning how to be less screwed up.”

“You should be a psychiatrist.”

“Witch doctors are more effective.”

“I’ve sometimes thought I’ve needed one.”

“A psychiatrist? Better save your money. Dear boy, all you need is time.”

When he followed Rita out of the snowmobile, Brian was surprised by the bitter power of the storm wind. It took his breath away and almost drove him to his knees. He gripped the open cabin door until he was certain of his balance.

The wind was a reminder that his unknown assailant, the man who had struck him on the head, was not the only threat to his survival. For a few minutes he’d forgotten that they were adrift, had forgotten about the time bombs ticking toward midnight. The fear came back to him like guilt to a priest’s breast. Now that he had committed himself to writing the book, he wanted
very
much to live.

The headlamps on one of the snowmobiles shone through the mouth of the cave. In places, the fractured ice deconstructed the beams into glimmering prisms of light in all the primary colors, and those geometric shapes shimmered jewellike in the walls of the otherwise white chamber. The eight distorted shadows of the expedition members rippled and slid across that dazzling backdrop, swelled and shrank, mysterious but perhaps no more so than the people who cast them—five of whom were suspects and one of whom was a potential murderer.

Harry watched Roger Breskin, Franz Fischer, George Lin, Claude, and Pete as they argued about the options open to them, about how they should spend the six hours and twenty minutes remaining before midnight. He ought to have been leading the discussion or at the very least contributing to it, but he couldn’t keep his mind on what the others were saying. For one thing, no matter how they spent their time, they could not escape from the iceberg or retrieve the explosives, so their discussion could resolve nothing. Furthermore, although trying to be discreet, he couldn’t prevent himself from studying them intensely, as though psychotic tendencies ought to be evident in the way a man walked, talked, and gestured.

His train of thought was interrupted by a call from Edgeway Station. Gunvald Larsson’s voice, shot through with static, rattled off the ice walls.

The other men stopped talking.

When Harry went to the radio and responded to the call, Gunvald said, “Harry, the trawlers have turned back. The
Melville
and the
Liberty.
Both of them. Some time ago. I’ve known, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell you.” He was unaccountably buoyant, excited, as if that bad news should have brought smiles to their faces. “But now it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, Harry!”

Pete, Claude, and the others had crowded around the radio, baffled by the Swede’s excitement.

Harry said, “Gunvald, what in the hell are you talking about? What do you mean, it doesn’t matter?”

Static shredded the airwaves, but then the frequency cleared as Larsson said, “…just got word from Thule. Relayed from Washington. There’s a submarine in your neighborhood, Harry. Do you read me? A Russian submarine.”

FOUR

NIGHT

8:20
DETONATION IN THREE HOURS FORTY MINUTES

Gorov, Zhukov, and Seaman Semichastny clambered onto the bridge and faced the port side. The sea was neither calm nor as tumultuous as it had been when they had surfaced earlier to receive the message from the Naval Ministry. The iceberg lay off to port, sheltering them from some of the power of the storm waves and the wind.

They couldn’t see the berg, even though the radar and sonar images had indicated that it was massive both above and below the water line. They were only fifty to sixty yards from the target, but the darkness was impenetrable. Instinct alone told Gorov that something enormous loomed over them, and the awareness of being in the shadow of an invisible colossus was one of the eeriest and most disconcerting feelings that he had ever known.

They were warmly dressed and wore goggles. Riding in the lee of the iceberg, however, made it possible to go without snow masks, and conversation was not as difficult as when they’d been running on the surface a few hours previously.

“It’s like a windowless dungeon out there,” Zhukov said.

No stars. No moon. No phosphorescence on the waves. Gorov had never seen such a perfectly lightless night.

Above and behind them on the sail, the hundred-watt bridge lamp illuminated the immediate steel-work and allowed the three men to see one another. Clotted with scattered small chunks of ice, choppy waves broke against the curved hull, reflecting just enough of that red light to give the impression that the
Pogodin
was sailing not on water but on an ocean of wine-dark blood. Beyond that tiny illumined circle lay an unrelieved blackness so flawless and deep that Gorov’s eyes began to ache when he stared at it too long.

Most of the bridge rail was sheathed in ice. Gorov gripped it to steady himself as the boat yawed, but he happened to take hold of a section of bare metal. His glove froze to the steel. He ripped it free and examined the palm: The outer layer of leather was torn, and the lining was exposed. If he had been wearing sealskin gloves, he would not have stuck fast, and he should have remembered to get that particular item of arctic gear out of the storage locker. If he hadn’t been wearing gloves at all, his hand would have been welded instantly to the railing, and when he pulled loose, he would have lost a substantial patch of flesh.

Staring in amazement at the captain’s shredded glove, Seaman Semichastny exclaimed: “Incredible!”

Zhukov said, “What a miserable place.”

“Indeed.”

The snow that swept across the bridge was not in the form of flakes. The subzero temperatures and the fierce wind conspired to produce hard beads of snow—what a meteorologist would call “gravel,” like millions of granules of white buckshot, the next worst thing to a storm of ice spicules.

Tapping the bridge anemometer, the first officer said, “We’ve got wind velocity of thirty miles an hour, even leeward of the iceberg. It must be blowing twice to three times that hard on top of the ice or on the open sea.”

With the wind factored in, Gorov suspected that the subjective temperature atop the iceberg had to be at least minus sixty or minus seventy degrees. Rescuing the Edgeway scientists under those hideous conditions was a greater challenge than any he had ever faced in his entire naval career. No part of it would be easy. It might even be impossible. And he began to worry that, once again, he had arrived too late.

“Let’s have some light,” Gorov ordered.

Semichastny immediately swung the floodlight to port and closed the switch.

The two-foot-diameter beam pierced the darkness as if a furnace door had been thrown open in an unlighted basement. Canted down on its gimbal ring, the big floodlight illuminated a circular swatch of sea only ten yards from the submarine: churning waves filigreed with icy foam, a seething maelstrom but one that was not too difficult to ride. Sheets of spray exploded into the bitter air as the waves met the boat, froze instantly into intricate and glittering laces of ice, hung suspended for a timeless time, and then fell back into the water, their strange beauty as ephemeral as that of any moment in a perfect sunset.

The ocean temperature was a few degrees above freezing, but the water retained sufficient heat and was in such turmoil—and was sufficiently salty, of course—that the only ice it contained was that which had broken off from the polar cap, fifteen miles to the north. Mostly small chunks, none larger than a car, which rode the waves and crashed into one another.

Grasping the pair of handles on the back of the floodlight, Semichastny tilted it up, swung it more directly toward port. The piercing beam bore through the polar blackness and the seething snow—and blazed against a towering palisade of ice, so enormous and so close that the sight of it made all three men gasp.

Fifty yards away, the berg drifted slowly east-southeast in a mild winter current. Even with the storm wind pretty much behind it, the massive island of ice was able to make no more than two or three knots; most of it lay under the water, and it was driven not by the surface tempest but by deeper influences.

Semichastny moved the floodlight slowly to the right, then back to the left.

The cliff was so long and high that Gorov could not get an idea of the overall appearance of it. Each brilliantly lighted circle of ice, although visible in considerable detail from their front-row seat, seemed disassociated from the one that had come before it. Comprehending the whole of the palisade was like trying to envision the finished image of a jigsaw puzzle merely by glancing at five hundred jumbled, disconnected pieces.

“Lieutenant Zhukov, put up a flare.”

“Yes, sir.”

Zhukov was carrying the signal gun. He raised it—a stubby pistol with a fat, extralong barrel and a two-inch muzzle—held it at arm’s length, and fired up into the port-side gloom.

The rocket climbed swiftly through the falling snow. It was visible for a moment as it trailed red sparks and smoke, but then it vanished into the blizzard as though it had passed through a veil into another dimension.

Three hundred feet…four hundred feet…five hundred…

High above, the rocket burst into a brilliant incandescent moon. It didn’t immediately begin to lose altitude, but drifted southward on the wind.

Beneath the flare, three hundred yards in every direction, the ocean was painted with cold light that revealed its green-gray hue. The arrhythmic ranks of choppy waves cast jagged, razor-edged shadows that fluttered like uncountable flocks of frantic dark birds feeding on little fishes in the shallow troughs.

The iceberg loomed: a daunting presence, at least one hundred feet high, disappearing into the darkness to the right and left, a huge rampart more formidable than the fortifications of any castle in the world. During their radar- and sonar-guided approach to the site, they had discovered that the berg was four fifths of a mile long. Rising dramatically from the mottled green-gray-black sea, it was curiously like a totem, a man-made monolith with mysterious religious significance. It soared, glass-smooth, gleaming, marred by neither major outcroppings nor indentations: vertical, harsh, forbidding.

Gorov had hoped to find a ragged cliff, one that shelved into the water in easy steps. The sea was not discouragingly rough there in the leeward shadow, and a few men might be able to get across to the ice. But he saw no place for them to land.

Among the submarine’s equipment stores were three inflatable, motorized rubber rafts and a large selection of the highest-quality climbing gear. On fifteen separate occasions in the past seven years, the
Ilya Pogodin
had carried top-secret passengers—mostly special-forces operatives from the army’s Spetsnaz division, highly trained saboteurs, assassins, reconnaissance teams—and had put them ashore at night on rugged coastlines in seven Western countries. Furthermore, in the event of war, the boat could carry a nine-member commando team in addition to her full crew and could put them safely ashore in less than five minutes, even in bad weather.

But they had to find a place to land the rafts. A small shelf. A tiny cove. A niche above the water line.
Something.

As if reading the captain’s mind, Zhukov said, “Even if we could land men over there, it would be one hell of a climb.”

“We could do it.”

“It’s as straight and smooth as a hundred-foot sheet of window glass.”

“We could chop footholds out of the ice,” Gorov said. “We have the climbing picks. Axes. Ropes and pitons. We’ve got the climbing boots and the grappling hooks. Everything we need.”

“But these men are submariners, sir. Not mountain climbers.”

The flare was high over the
Ilya Pogodin
now, still drifting southward. The light was no longer either fierce or white; it had taken on a yellowish tint and was dwindling. Smoke streamed around the flare and threw bizarre shadows that curled and writhed across the face of the iceberg.

“The right men could make it,” Gorov insisted.

“Yes, sir,” Zhukov said. “I know they could. I could even make it myself if I had to, and
I’m
afraid of heights. But neither I nor the men are very experienced at this sort of thing. We don’t have a single man aboard who could make that climb in even half the time it would take a trained mountaineer. We’d need hours, maybe three or four, maybe even five hours, to get to the top and to rig a system for bringing the Edgeway scientists down to the rafts. And by the time—”

“—by the time we’ve worked out a way to land them on the ice, they’ll be lucky to have even an hour left,” Gorov said, finishing the first officer’s argument for him.

Midnight was fast approaching.

The flare winked out.

Semichastny still trained the floodlight on the iceberg, moving it slowly from left to right, focusing at the water line, hopefully searching for a shelf, a fissure, a flaw, anything that they had missed.

“Let’s have a look at the windward flank,” Gorov said. “Maybe it’ll have something better to offer.”

In the cave, waiting for more news from Gunvald, they were exhilarated by the prospect of rescue—but sobered by the thought that the submarine might not arrive quickly enough to take them off the iceberg before midnight. At times, they were all silent, but at other times, they all seemed to be talking at once.

After waiting until the chamber was filled with excited chatter and the others were particularly distracted, Harry quietly excused himself to go to the latrine. Passing Pete Johnson, he whispered, “I want to talk to you alone.”

Pete blinked in surprise.

Not even breaking stride as he spoke, barely glancing at the engineer, Harry put his goggles in place and pulled up his snow mask and walked out of the cave. He bent into the wind, switched on his flashlight, and trudged past the rumbling snowmobiles.

He doubted that much fuel remained in their tanks. The engines would conk out soon. No more light. No more heat.

Past the snowmobiles, the area that they had used for the temporary-camp lavatory lay on the far side of a U-shaped, ten-foot-high ridge of broken ice and drifted snow, twenty yards beyond the inflatable igloos that now lay in ruins. Harry actually had no need to relieve himself, but the call of nature provided the most convenient and least suspicious excuse for getting out of the cave and away from the others. He reached the opening in the crescent ridge that formed the windbreak, shuffled through drifted snow to the rear of that pocket of relative calm, and stood with his back to the ridge wall.

He supposed he might be making a big mistake with Pete Johnson. As he’d told Brian, no one could ever be entirely sure what might lie within the mind of another human being. Even a friend or loved one, well known and trusted, might harbor some unspeakable dark urge and despicable desire. Everyone was a mystery within a mystery, wrapped in an enigma. In his lifelong quest for adventure, Harry had settled by chance into a line of work that brought him into contact with fewer people on a daily basis than he would have met in virtually any other profession, and each time he took on a new challenge, the adversary was never another person but always Mother Nature herself. Nature could be hard but never treacherous, powerful and uncaring but never consciously cruel; in any contest with her, he didn’t have to worry about losing because of deceit or betrayal. Nevertheless, he had decided to risk confronting Pete Johnson alone.