Icebound (23 page)

The submarine was submerged again, holding steady just below the surface, at its highest periscope depth. It was lying in wait along the iceberg’s projected course.

On the conning-tower platform in the control room, Nikita Gorov stood at the periscope, his arms draped over the horizontal “ears” at the base of it. Even though the top of the scope was eight or nine feet above sea level, the storm waves exploded against it and washed over it, obscuring his view from time to time. When the upper window was out of the water, however, the night sea was revealed, dimly lighted by four drifting, dying flares.

The iceberg had already begun to cross their bow, three hundred yards north of their position. That gleaming white mountain was starkly silhouetted against the black night and sea.

Zhukov stood next to the captain. He was wearing headphones and listening on an open line that connected him to the petty officer in the forward torpedo room. He said, “Number one tube ready.”

To Gorov’s right, a young seaman was monitoring a backup safety board full of green and red lights that represented equipment and hatches in the torpedo room. When Zhukov, relaying the torpedo-room report, said that the breach door was secure, the seaman at the backup board confirmed: “Green and check.”

“Tube flooded.”

From the backup board: “Flood indicated.”

“Muzzle door open.”

“Red and check.”

“Tube shutters open.”

“Red and check.”

The
Ilya Pogodin
was not primarily a warship, but an information gatherer. It didn’t carry nuclear missiles. However, the Russian Naval Ministry had planned. that every submarine should be prepared to bring the battle to the enemy in the event of a non-nuclear war. Therefore, the boat was carrying twelve electric torpedoes. Weighing over a ton and a half, packed with seven hundred pounds of high explosives, each of those steel sharks had huge destructive potential. The
Ilya Pogodin
was not primarily a warship, but if so ordered, it could have sunk a considerable tonnage of enemy ordnance.

“Number one tube ready,” Zhukov said again as the officer in the torpedo room repeated that announcement over the headset.

“Number one tube ready,” said the enunciator.

Nikita Gorov realized for the first time that the process of readying and launching a torpedo had a ritualistic quality that was oddly similar to a religious service. Perhaps because worship and war both dealt in different ways with the subject of death.

At the penultimate moment of the litany, the control room behind him fell into silence, except for the soft hum of machinery and the electronic muttering of computers.

After a protracted and almost reverent silence, Nikita Gorov said, “Match bearings…and…
shoot
!”

“Fire one!” Zhukov said.

The young seaman glanced at his fire-control panel as the torpedo was let go. “One gone.”

Gorov squinted through the eyepiece of the periscope, tense and expectant.

The torpedo had been programmed to seek a depth of fifteen feet. It would strike the cliff exactly that far below the water line. With luck, the configuration of the ice after the explosion would be more amenable than it was now to the landing of a couple of rafts and the establishment of a base platform for the climbers.

The torpedo hit its mark.

Gorov said, “Strike!”

The black ocean swelled and leaped at the base of the cliff, and for an instant the water was full of fiery yellow light, as if sea serpents with radiant eyes were surfacing.

Echoes of the concussion vibrated through the submarine’s outer hull. Gorov felt the deck plates
thrum.

The bottom of the white cliff began to dissolve. A house-size chunk of the brittle palisade tumbled into the water and was followed by an avalanche of broken ice.

Gorov winced. He knew that the explosives were not powerful enough to do major damage to the iceberg, let alone blast it to pieces. In fact, the target was so enormous that the torpedo could do little more than take a chip out of it. But for a few seconds, there was an illusion of utter destruction.

The petty officer in the forward torpedo room told Zhukov that the breach door was shut, and the first officer passed the word to the technicians.

“Green and check,” one of them confirmed.

Lifting the headset from one ear, Zhukov said, “How’s it look out there, sir?”

Keeping his eye to the periscope, Gorov said, “Not much better than it did.”

“No landing shelf?”

“Not really. But the ice is still falling.”

Zhukov paused, listening to the petty officer at the other end of the line. “Muzzle door shut.”

“Green and check.”

“Blowing number one tube.”

Gorov wasn’t listening closely to the series of safety checks, because his full attention was riveted on the iceberg, Something was wrong. The floating mountain had begun to act strangely. Or was it his imagination? He squinted, trying to get a better view of the ice behemoth between the high waves, which still continued to wash rhythmically over the upper window of the periscope. The target seemed not to be advancing eastward any longer. Indeed, he thought the “bow” of it was even beginning to swing around to the south. Ever so slightly toward the south. No. Absurd. Couldn’t happen. He closed his eyes and told himself that he was seeing things. But when he looked again, he was even more certain that—

The radar technician said, “Target’s changing course!”

“It can’t be,” Zhukov said, startled. “Not all that quickly. It doesn’t have any power of its own.”

“Nevertheless, it’s changing,” Gorov said.

“Not because of the torpedo. Just one torpedo—even
all
our torpedoes—couldn’t have such a profound effect on an object that large.”

“No. Something else is at work here,” Gorov said worriedly. The captain turned away from the periscope. From the ceiling, he pulled down a microphone on a steel-spring neck and spoke both to the control room around him and to the sonar room, which was the next compartment forward in the boat. “I want an all-systems analysis of the lower fathoms to a depth of seven hundred feet.”

The voice that issued from the overhead squawk box was crisp and efficient. “Commencing full scan, sir.”

Gorov put his eye to the periscope again.

The purpose of the scan was to look for a major ocean current that was strong enough to affect an object as large as the iceberg. Through the use of limited-range sonar, thermal-analysis sensors, sophisticated listening devices, and other marine-survey equipment, the
Ilya Pogodin’
s technicians were able to plot the movements of both warm- and cold-blooded forms of sea life beneath and to all sides of the boat. Schools of small fish and millions upon millions of krill, shrimplike creatures upon which many of the larger fish fed, were swept along by the more powerful currents or lived in them by choice, especially if those oceanic highways were warmer than the surrounding water. If masses of fish and krill—as well as thick strata of plankton—were found to be moving in the same direction, and if several other factors could be correlated with the movement, they could identify a major current, lower a current meter, and get a reasonable indication of the water’s velocity.

Two minutes after Gorov had ordered the scan, the squawk box crackled again. “Strong current detected, traveling due south, beginning at a depth of three hundred forty feet.”

Gorov looked away from the scope and pulled down the overhead microphone again. “How deep does it run below three forty?”

“Can’t tell, sir. It’s choked with sea life. Probing it is like trying to see through a wall. We
have
gotten readings as deep as six hundred sixty feet, but that’s not the bottom of it.”

“How fast is it moving?”

“Approximately nine knots, sir"

Gorov blanched. “Repeat.”

“Nine knots.”

“Impossible!”

“Have mercy,” Zhukov said.

Gorov released the microphone, which sprang up out of the way, and with a new sense of urgency, he returned to the periscope. They were in the path of a juggernaut. The massive island of ice had been swinging slowly, ponderously into the new current, but now the full force of the fast-moving water was squarely behind it. The berg was still turning, bringing its “bow” around, but it was mostly sideways to the submarine and would remain like that for several minutes yet.

“Target closing,” the radar operator said. “Five hundred yards!” He read off the bearing that he had taken.

Before Gorov could reply, the boat was suddenly shaken as if a giant hand had taken hold of it. Zhukov fell. Papers slid off the chart table. The event lasted only two or three seconds, but everyone was rattled.

“What the hell?” Zhukov asked, scrambling to his feet.

“Collision.”

“With what?”

The berg was still five hundred yards away.

“Probably a small floe of ice,” Gorov said. He ordered damage reports from every part of the boat.

He knew that they hadn’t collided with a large object, for if they had done so, they would already be sinking. The submarine’s hull wasn’t tempered, because it required a degree of flexibility to descend and ascend rapidly through realms of varying temperatures and pressures. Consequently, even a single ton of ice, if moving with sufficient velocity to have substantial impact energy, would cave in the hull as if crashing into a cardboard vessel. Whatever they had encountered was clearly of limited size; nevertheless, it must have caused at least minor damage.

The sonar operator called out the position of the iceberg: “Four hundred fifty yards and closing!”

Gorov was in a bind. If he didn’t take the boat down, they would collide with that mountain of ice. But if he dived before he knew what damage had been sustained, they might never be able to surface again. There simply wasn’t enough time to bring the big boat around and flee either to the east or to the west; because the iceberg was rushing at them sideways, it stretched nearly two fifths of a mile both to port and starboard. The nine-knot, deepwater current, which began at a depth of three hundred forty feet, would not manage to turn the narrow profile of the berg toward them for another few minutes, and Gorov could not escape the full width of it before it reached them.

He snapped up the horizontal bar on the periscope and sent it into its hydraulic sleeve.

“Four hundred twenty yards and closing!” called the sonar operator.

“Dive!” Gorov said, even as the first damage reports were being made.
“Dive!”

The diving klaxons blasted throughout the boat. Simultaneously the collision alarm wailed.

“We’re going under the ice before it hits us,” Gorov said.

Zhukov paled. “It must ride six hundred feet below the damn water line!”

Heart racing, mouth dry, Nikita Gorov said, “I know. I’m not certain we’ll make it.”

A fierce gale relentlessly hammered the Nissen huts. The rivets in the metal walls creaked. At the two small, triple-pane windows, ice spicules tapped like the fingernails of ten thousand dead men wanting in, and great rivers of subzero air moaned and keened as they rushed over the Quonset-shaped structures.

In the supply shed, Gunvald had discovered nothing of interest, though he had pored through the lockers belonging to Franz Fischer and George Lin. If either man had murderous tendencies or was in any way less than entirely stable and normal, nothing in his personal effects gave him away.

Gunvald moved on to Pete Johnson’s locker.

Gorov knew that, among men of other nations, Russians were often perceived as dour, somber, determinedly gloomy people. Of course, in spite of a dismaying historical tendency to afflict themselves with brutal rulers and with tragically flawed ideologies, that stereotype was as empty of truth as any other. Russians laughed and partied and made love and got drunk and made fools of themselves, as did people everywhere. Most university students in the West had read Feodor Dostoyevsky and had tried to read Tolstoy, and it was from those few pieces of literature that they had formed their opinions of modern-day Russians. Yet, if there had been any foreigners in the control room of the
Ilya Pogodin
at that moment, they would have seen precisely the Russians that the stereotype described: somber-faced men, all frowning, all with deeply beetled brows, all weighed down with a profound respect for fate.