Icebound (26 page)

“I don’t know about that, sir. But it went up at least to sea level.”

The surface Fathometer, of course, couldn’t take readings farther up than the surface of the sea.

“A hole,” Gorov said thoughtfully. “How in the name of God did it get there?”

No one had an answer.

Gorov shrugged. “Perhaps one of the Edgeway people will know. They’ve been studying the ice. The important thing is that it’s
there,
however it came to be.”

“Why is this hole so important?” Zhukov asked.

Gorov had a seed of an idea, the germ of an outrageously daring plan to rescue the Edgeway scientists. If the hole was—

“Clear water,” the technician announced. “No ice overhead.”

Emil Zhukov pressed a few keys on the command-pad console. He looked up at the computer screen to his right. “It checks. Taking into account the southward current and our forward speed, we should be entirely out from under. This time the berg’s really gone.”

“Clear water,” the technician repeated.

Gorov glanced at his watch: 10:02. Less than two hours remained until the sixty explosive charges would shatter the iceberg. In that length of time, the crew of the
Pogodin
could not possibly mount a conventional rescue attempt with any hope of success. The unorthodox scheme that the captain had in mind might seem to some to border on outright lunacy, but it had the advantage of being a plan that could work within the limited time they had left.

Zhukov cleared his throat. No doubt with a vivid mental image of that sweating bulkhead in the torpedo room, the first officer was waiting for orders to take the boat up to a less dangerous depth.

Pulling down the steel-spring microphone, Gorov said, “Captain to torpedo room. How’s it look there?”

From the overhead speaker: “Still sweating, sir. It’s not any better, but it’s not any worse, either.”

“Keep watching. And stay calm.” Gorov released the microphone and returned to the command pad. “Engines at half speed. Left full rudder.”

Astonishment made Emil Zhukov’s long face appear even longer. He opened his mouth to speak, but he couldn’t make a sound. He swallowed hard. His second attempt was successful: “You mean we aren’t going up?”

“Not this minute,” Gorov said. “We’ve got to make another run under that behemoth. I want to have another look at the hole in the middle of it.”

The volume on the shortwave radio was at its maximum setting, so the Russian communications officer aboard the
Pogodin
could be heard over the roar of the storm beast that prowled at the entrance to the cave and above the roof of interlocking slabs of ice. Hard shatters of static and electronic squeals of interference echoed off the ice walls, rather like the enormously amplified sound of fingernails being dragged across a blackboard.

The others had joined Harry and Pete in the ice cave to hear the astounding news firsthand. They were crowded together near the back wall.

When Lieutenant Timoshenko had described the hole and the large area of dramatically scalloped ice on the bottom of their floating prison, Harry had explained the probable cause of it. The iceberg had been broken off the cap by a tsunami, and the tsunami had been generated by a seabed earthquake almost directly beneath them. In this part of the world, in association with this chain of fractures, volcanic activity was
de rigueur,
as witness the violent Icelandic eruptions a few decades ago. And if ocean-floor volcanic activity had been associated with the recent event, enormous quantities of lava could have been discharged into the sea, flung upward with tremendous force. Spouts of white-hot lava could have bored that hole, and the millions of gallons of boiling water that it produced could easily have sculpted the troughs and peaks that marked the bottom of the iceberg just past the hole.

Although it originated from a surfaced submarine only a fraction of a mile away, Timoshenko’s voice was peppered with static, but the transmission didn’t break up. “As Captain Gorov sees it, there are three possibilities. First, the hole in the bottom of your berg might end in solid ice above the water line. Or second, it might lead into a cavern or to the bottom of a shallow crevasse. Or third, it might even continue for another hundred feet above sea level and open at the top of the iceberg. Does that analysis seem sound to you, Dr. Carpenter?”

“Yes,” Harry said, impressed by the captain’s reasoning. “And I think I know which of the three it is.” He told Timoshenko about the crevasse that had opened midway in the iceberg’s length when the gigantic seismic waves had passed under the edge of the winter field. “It didn’t exist when we went out to position the explosives, but there it was, waiting for us, on our way back to the temporary camp. I nearly drove straight into it, lost my snowmobile.”

“And the bottom of this crevasse is open all the way down to the sea?” Timoshenko asked.

“I don’t know, but now I suspect it is. As near as I’m able to calculate, it must lie directly above the hole you’ve found on the underside. Even if the lava spout didn’t punch through the entire hundred feet of ice above the water line, the heat needed to bore upward through all that underwater mass would at least have
cracked
the ice above the surface. And those cracks are sure to lead all the way down to the open water that your Fathometer operator detected.”

“If the hole is at the bottom of the crevasse—I suppose we should call it a shaft or tunnel, rather than a hole—would you be willing to try to reach it by climbing down
into
the crevasse?” Timoshenko inquired.

The question seemed bizarre to Harry. He could not see the point of going down into that chasm where his snowmobile had vanished. “If we had to do it, I suppose we could improvise some climbing equipment. But what would be the point? I don’t understand where you’re going with this.”

“That’s how we’re going to try to take you off the ice. Through that tunnel and out from underneath the berg.”

In the cave behind Harry, the seven others responded to that suggestion with noisy disbelief.

He gestured at them to be quiet. To the Russian radioman, he said, “Down through this hole, this tunnel, and somehow into the submarine? But how?”

Timoshenko said, “In diving gear.”

“We haven’t any.”

“Yes, but
we
have.” Timoshenko explained now the gear would be gotten to them.

Harry was more impressed than ever with the Russians’ ingenuity but still doubtful. “I’ve done some diving in the past. I’m not an expert at it, but I know a man can’t dive that deep unless he’s trained and has special equipment.”

“We’ve got the special equipment,” Timoshenko said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to do without the special training.” He spent the next five minutes outlining Captain Gorov’s plan in some detail.

The scheme was brilliant, imaginative, daring, and well thought out. Harry wanted to meet this Captain Nikita Gorov, to see what kind of man could come up with such a stunningly clever idea. “It might work, but it’s risky. And there’s no guarantee that the tunnel from your end actually opens into the bottom of the crevasse at our end. Maybe we won’t be able to find it.”

“Perhaps,” Timoshenko agreed. “But it’s your best chance. In fact, it’s your only chance. There’s just an hour and a half until those explosives detonate. We can’t get rafts across to the iceberg, climb up there, and bring you down as we’d planned. Not in ninety minutes. The wind is coming from the stern of the iceberg now, blowing hard along
both
flanks. We’d have to land the rafts at the bow, and that’s impossible with the whole mountain of ice rushing down on us at nine knots.”

Harry knew that was true. He had said as much to Pete just half an hour ago. “Lieutenant Timoshenko, I need to discuss this with my colleagues. Give me a minute, please.” Still hunkering before the radio, he turned slightly to face the others and said, “Well?”

Rita would have to control her phobia as never before, because she would have to go down
inside
the ice, be entirely surrounded by it. Yet she was the first to speak in favor of the plan: “Let’s not waste time. Of course we’ll do it. We can’t just sit here and wait to die.”

Claude Jobert nodded. “We haven’t much choice.”

“We’ve got one chance in ten thousand of getting through alive,” Franz estimated. “But it’s not altogether hopeless.”

“Teutonic gloom,” Rita said, grinning.

In spite of himself, Fischer managed a smile. “That’s what you said when I was worried that an earthquake might strike before we got back to base camp.”

“Count me in,” Brian said.

Roger Breskin nodded. “And me.”

Pete Johnson said, “I joined up for the adventure. Now I’m sure as hell getting more of it than I bargained for. If we ever get out of this mess, I swear I’ll be content to spend my evenings at home with a good book.”

Turning to Lin, Harry said, “Well, George?”

With his goggles up and his snow mask pulled down, Lin revealed his distress in every line and aspect of his face. “If we stayed here, if we didn’t leave before midnight, isn’t there a chance we’d come through the explosions on a piece of ice large enough to sustain us? I was under the impression that we were counting on that before this submarine showed up.”

Harry put it bluntly: “If we’ve only one chance in ten thousand of living through the escape Captain Gorov has planned for us, then we’ve no better than one chance in a million of living through the explosions at midnight.”

Lin was biting his lower lip so hard that Harry would not have been surprised to see blood trickle down his chin.

“George? Are you with us or not?”

Finally Lin nodded.

Harry picked up the microphone again. “Lieutenant Timoshenko?”

“I read you, Dr. Carpenter.”

“We’ve decided that your captain’s plan makes sense if only because it’s a necessity. We’ll do it—if it can be done.”

“It can be done, Doctor. We’re convinced of it.”

“We’ll have to move quickly,” Harry said. “There isn’t any hope in hell of our reaching the crevasse much before eleven o’clock. That leaves just one hour for the rest of it.”

Timoshenko said, “If we all keep in mind a vivid image of what’s going to happen at midnight, we should be able to hustle through what needs to be done in the time we have. Good luck to all of you.”

“And to you,” Harry said.

When they were ready to leave the cave a few minutes later, Harry had still not heard from Gunvald regarding the contents of those five lockers. When he tried to raise Edgeway Station on the radio, he could get no response except squalls of static and the hollow hiss of dead air.

Apparently, they were going to have to descend into that deep crevasse and go down the tunnel beneath it without knowing which of them was likely to make another attempt on Brian Dougherty’s life if the opportunity arose.

Even the most sophisticated telecommunications equipment was unable to cope with the interference that accompanied a storm in polar latitudes in the bitter heart of winter. Gunvald could no longer pick up the powerful transmissions emanating from the U.S. base at Thule. He tried every frequency band, but across all of them, the storm reigned. The only scraps of man-made sound that he detected were fragments of a program of bigband music that faded in and out on a five-second cycle. The speakers were choked with static: a wailing, screaming, screeching, hissing, crackling concert of chaos unaccompanied by even a single human voice.

He returned to the frequency where Harry was supposed to be awaiting his call, leaned toward the set, and held the microphone against his lips, as if he could
will
the connection to happen. “Harry, can you read me?”

Static.

For perhaps the fiftieth time, he read off his call numbers and their call numbers, raising his voice as if trying to shout above the interference.

No response. It wasn’t a matter of hearing them or being heard through the static. They simply weren’t receiving him at all.

He knew that he ought to give up.

He glanced at the spiral-bound notebook that lay open on the table beside him. Although he had looked at the same page a dozen times already, he shuddered.