Icebound (3 page)

Turning away from the inflatable shelter, she faced not into the wind but crosswise to it, studying the narrow plain that lay between the plateau and the pressure ridge. Eternal winter. Without warmth, solace, or hope.

It was a land to be respected, yes, all right. But it was not a beast, possessed no awareness, had no conscious intention to do her harm.

She breathed deeply, rhythmically, through her knitted mask.

To help quell her irrational fear of the icecap, she told herself that she had a greater problem waiting in the igloo beside her. Franz Fischer.

She had met Fischer eleven years ago, shortly after she earned her doctorate and took her first research position with a division of International Telephone and Telegraph. Franz, who had also worked for ITT, was attractive and not without charm when he chose to reveal it, and they’d been together for nearly two years. It hadn’t been an altogether calm, relaxed, and loving relationship. But at least she had never been bored by it. They’d separated nine years ago, as the publication of her first book approached, when it became clear that Franz would never be entirely comfortable with a woman who was his professional and intellectual equal. He expected to dominate, and she would not be dominated. She had walked out on him, met Harry, gotten married a year later, and never looked back.

Because he had come into Rita’s life after Franz, Harry felt, in his unfailingly sweet and reasonable way, that their history was none of his concern. He was secure in his marriage and sure of himself. Even knowing of that relationship, therefore, he had recruited Franz to be the chief meteorologist at Edgeway Station, because the German was the best man for the job.

In this one instance, unreasonable jealousy would have served Harry—and all of them—better than rationality. Second best would have been preferable.

Nine years after their separation, Franz still insisted on playing the lover scorned, complete with stiff upper lip and soulful eyes. He was neither cold nor rude; to the contrary, he strove to create the impression that at night he nursed a badly broken heart in the lonely privacy of his sleeping bag. He never mentioned the past, showed any improper interest in Rita, or conducted himself in less than a gentlemanly fashion. In the confines of a polar outpost, however, the care with which he displayed his wounded pride was as disruptive, in its way, as shouted insults would have been.

The wind groaned, the snow churned around her, and the ice stretched out of sight as it had since time immemorial—but gradually her racing heartbeat subsided to a normal rate. She stopped shaking. The terror passed.

She’d won again.

When at last Rita entered the igloo, Franz was on his knees, packing instruments into a carton. He had taken off his outer boots, coat, and gloves. He dared not work up a sweat, because it would chill his skin, even inside his thermal suit, and leach precious heat from him when he went outdoors. He glanced up at her, nodded, and continued packing.

He possessed a certain animal magnetism, and Rita could see why she had been drawn to him when she was younger. Thick blond hair, deep-set dark eyes, Nordic features. He was only five nine, just an inch taller than she, but at forty-five he was as muscular and as trim as a boy.

“Wind is up to twenty-four miles,” she said, pushing back her hood and removing her goggles. “Air temp’s down to ten degrees Fahrenheit and falling.”

“With the wind-chill factor, it’ll be minus twenty or worse by the time we break camp.” He didn’t look up. He seemed to be talking to himself.

“We’ll make it back all right.”

“In zero visibility?”

“It won’t get that bad so fast.”

“You don’t know polar weather like I do, no matter how much of it you’ve seen. Take another look outside, Rita. This front’s pushing in a lot faster than predicted. We could find ourselves in a total whiteout.”

“Honestly, Franz, your gloomy Teutonic nature—”

A thunderlike sound rolled beneath them, and a tremor passed through the icecap. The rumble was augmented by a high-pitched, nearly inaudible squeal as dozens of ice strata moved against one another.

Rita stumbled but kept her balance, as though lurching down the aisle of a moving train.

The rumble quickly faded away.

Blessed stillness returned.

Franz finally met her eyes. He cleared his throat. “Larsson’s much-heralded big quake?”

“No. Too small. Major movement on this fault chain would be much larger than that, much bigger all down the line. That little shake would hardly have registered on the Richter scale.”

“A preliminary tremor?”

“Maybe,” she said.

“When can we expect the main event?”

She shrugged. “Maybe never. Maybe tonight. Maybe a minute from now.”

Grimacing, he continued packing instruments into the waterproof carton. “And you were talking about
my
gloomy nature…”

12:45

Pinned by cones of light from two snowmobiles, Roger Breskin and George Lin finished anchoring the radio transmitter to the ice with four two-foot-long belaying pins, and then ran a systems check on the equipment. Their long shadows were as strange and distorted as those of savages hunched over an idol, and the eerie song of the wind might have been the voice of the violent god to whom they prayed.

Even the murky glow of the winter twilight had now been frozen out of the sky. Without the snowmobile headlamps, visibility would drop to ten yards.

The wind had been brisk and refreshing that morning, but as it gathered speed, it had become an increasingly deadly enemy. A strong gale in those latitudes could press a chill through layer upon layer of thermal clothing. Already the fine snow was being driven so hard that it appeared to be sheeting past them on a course parallel to the icecap, as if falling horizontally out of the west rather than out of the sky, destined never to touch ground. Every few minutes they were forced to scrape their goggles and break the crust of snow off the knitted masks that covered the lower half of their faces.

Standing behind the amber headlights, Brian Dougherty averted his face from the wind. Flexing his fingers and toes to ward off the cold, he wondered why he had come to this godforsaken terminus. He didn’t belong here.
No one
belonged here. He had never before seen a place so barren; even great deserts were not as lifeless as the icecap. Every aspect of the landscape was a blunt reminder that all of life was nothing but a prelude to inevitable and eternal death, and sometimes the Arctic so sensitized him that in the faces of the other members of the expedition he could see the skulls beneath the skin.

Of course that was precisely why he had come to the icecap: adventure, danger, the possibility of death. He knew at least that much about himself, though he had never dwelt on it and though he had only a shadowy notion of
why
he was obsessed with taking extreme risks.

He had compelling reasons for staying alive, after all. He was young. He was not wildly handsome, but he wasn’t the Hunchback of Notre Dame, either, and he was in love with life. Not least of all, his family was enormously wealthy, and in fourteen months, when he turned twenty-five, he would gain control of a thirty-million-dollar trust fund. He didn’t have a clue in hell as to what he’d
do
with all that money, if anything, but it surely was a comfort to know that it would be his.

Furthermore, the family’s fame and the sympathy accorded to the whole Dougherty clan would open any doors that couldn’t be battered down with money. Brian’s uncle, once President of the United States, had been assassinated by a sniper. And his father, a United States Senator from California, had been shot and crippled during a primary campaign nine years ago. The tragedies of the Doughertys were the stuff of endless magazine covers from
People
to
Good Housekeeping
to
Playboy
to
Vanity Fair,
a national obsession that sometimes seemed destined to evolve into a formidable political mythology in which the Doughertys were not merely ordinary men or women but demigods and demigoddesses, embodiments of virtue, goodwill, and sacrifice.

In time, Brian could have a political career of his own if he wished. But he was still too young to face the responsibilities of his family name and tradition. In fact, he was fleeing from those responsibilities, from the thought of ever meeting them. Four years ago, he’d dropped out of Harvard after only eighteen months of law studies. Since then he had traveled the world, “bumming” on American Express and Carte Blanche. His escapist adventures had put him on the front pages of newspapers on every continent. He had confronted a bull in one of Madrid’s rings. He’d broken an arm on an African photographic safari when a rhinoceros attacked the jeep in which he was riding, and while shooting the rapids on the Colorado River, he had capsized and nearly drowned. Now he was passing the long, merciless winter on the polar ice.

His name and the quality of several magazine articles that he had written were not sufficient credentials to obtain a position as the official chronicler of the expedition. But the Dougherty Family Foundation had made an $850,000 grant to the Edgeway project, which had virtually guaranteed that Brian would be accepted as a member of the team.

For the most part, he had been made to feel welcome. The only antagonism had come from George Lin, and even that had amounted to little more than a brief loss of temper. The Chinese scientist had apologized for his outburst. Brian was genuinely interested in their project, and his sincerity won friends.

He supposed his interest arose from the fact that he was unable to imagine himself making an equal commitment to any lifelong work that was even half as arduous as theirs. Although a political career was part of his legacy, Brian loathed that vile game: Politics was an illusion of service that cloaked the corruption of power. It was lies, deceptions, self-interest, and self-aggrandizement: suitable work only for the mad and the venal and the naïve. Politics was a jeweled mask under which hid the true disfigured face of the Phantom. Even as a young boy, he’d seen too much of the inside of Washington, enough to dissuade him from ever seeking a destiny in that corrupt city. Unfortunately, politics had infected him with a cynicism that made him question the value of
any
attainment or achievement, either inside or outside the political arena.

He
did
take pleasure in the act of writing, and he intended to produce three or four articles about life in the far, far north. Already, in fact, he had enough material for a book, which he felt increasingly compelled to write.

Such an ambitious undertaking daunted him. A book—whether or not he had the talent and maturity to write well at such length—was a major commitment, which was precisely what he had been avoiding for years.

His family thought that he had been attracted to the Edgeway Project because of its humanitarian potential, that he was getting serious about his future. He hadn’t wanted to disillusion them, but they were wrong. Initially he’d been drawn to the expedition merely because it was another adventure, more exciting than those upon which he’d embarked before but no more meaningful.

And it still
was
only an adventure, he assured himself, as he watched Lin and Breskin checking out the transmitter. It was a way to avoid, for a while longer, thinking about the past and the future. But then…why this compulsion to write a book? He couldn’t convince himself that he had anything to say that would be worth anyone’s reading time.

The other two men got to their feet and wiped snow from their goggles.

Brian approached them, shouting over the wind, “Are you done?”

“At last!” Breskin said.

The two-foot-square transmitter would be sheathed in snow and ice within hours, but that wouldn’t affect its signal. It was designed to operate in arctic conditions, with a multiple-battery power supply inside layers of insulation originally developed for NASA. It would put out a strong signal—two seconds in duration, ten times every minute—for eight to twelve days.

When that segment of ice was blasted loose from the winter field with almost surgical precision, the transmitter would drift with it into those channels known as Iceberg Alley and from there into the North Atlantic. Two trawlers, part of the United Nations Geophysical Year Fleet, were standing at the ready two hundred thirty miles to the south to monitor the continual radio signal. With the aid of geosynchronous polar satellites, they would fix the position of the berg by triangulation and home in on it until it could be identified visually by the waterproof, self-expanding red dye that had been spread across wide areas of its surface.

The purpose of the experiment was to gain a basic understanding of how the winter sea currents affected drift ice. Before any plans could be made to tow ice south to drought-stricken coastal areas, scientists must learn how the sea would work against the ships and how it might be made to work for them.

It wasn’t practical to send trawlers to the very edge of the polar cap to grapple with the giant berg. The Arctic Ocean and the Greenland Sea were choked with ice floes and difficult to navigate at that time of year. Depending on what the project experiments revealed, however, they might find that it was not necessary for the tow ships to connect with the ice even immediately south of Iceberg Alley. Instead, the bergs might be allowed to ride the natural currents for a hundred or two hundred miles before effort was expended to haul them farther south and coastward.

“Could I get a few pictures?” Brian asked.

“No time for that,” George Lin said shortly. He brushed his hands together, briskly knocking thin plates of ice from his heavy gloves.

“Take just a minute.”

“Got to get back to Edgeway,” Lin said. “Storm could cut us off. By morning we’d be part of the landscape, frozen solid.”

“We can spare a minute,” Roger Breskin said. He wasn’t half shouting as they were, but his bass voice carried over the wind, which had escalated from an unearthly groan to a soft ululant howl.