Icebound (32 page)

Brian gripped Breskin’s left wrist with both hands and tried to wrench the big man’s steely hand from his face, but he wasn’t able to resist. The diving mask was torn loose.

The sea was colder than the freezing point of ordinary water, but it still had not turned to ice because of its salt content. When it gushed across his face, the shock was nearly as painful as having a blazing torch shoved against his skin.

Nevertheless, Brian reacted so calmly that he surprised himself. He squeezed his eyelids shut before the water could flash-freeze the surface tissues of his eyeballs, clenched his teeth, and managed not to breathe either through his mouth or nose.

He couldn’t hold out long. A minute. A minute and a half. Then he would breathe involuntarily, spasmodically—

Breskin clamped his legs tighter around Brian’s midsection, pushed his rubber-sheathed fingers between Brian’s compressed lips, and tried to force his mouth open.

Rita swam in behind and above Roger Breskin, into the sour light from George’s hand-held lamp. She glided onto Breskin’s back and wrapped her long legs around his waist as he had wrapped his legs around Brian.

With reflexes sharpened rather than dulled by maniacal frenzy, Breskin let go of Brian and seized Rita by the ankles.

She felt as though she was riding a wild horse. He twisted and bucked, a powerful beast, but she gripped him with her thighs and grabbed for his mask.

Sensing her intent, insane but not stupid, Breskin released her ankles and seized her wrists just as her hands touched the rim of his faceplate. He bent forward, kicked his flippers, did a somersault. Rolling through the water, he tore her hands from his face, and using the dynamics of the sea to achieve a leverage that she couldn’t hope to match, he pitched her away from him. She kicked furiously as she went, hoping to connect with the crazy bastard, but none of her kicks landed.

When she oriented herself again, she saw that Pete and Franz had descended on Breskin. Franz struggled to maintain a wristlock while Pete tried to pin at least one of the madman’s arms.

Breskin was a trained diver, however, and they were not. They were slow, clumsy, confused by the physics of the gravity-free realm in which they battled, while Breskin writhed as if he were an eel, supple and quick and fearfully strong, at home in deep water. He broke their hold on him, rammed an elbow into Pete’s face, ripped Pete’s mask over his head, and shoved him into Franz.

Brian was at the wire, fifteen feet below George Lin. Claude was with him. The Frenchman held Pete’s lamp in one hand and was using his free hand to steady Brian while the kid got the water out of his mask.

Kicking away from Pete and Franz as they tumbled in disarray, Breskin streaked toward Brian again.

Rita glimpsed movement out of the corner of her eye, turned her head, and saw Harry shoot up from the darkness below.

Harry knew that Breskin didn’t see him coming. Certain that he had temporarily disabled all opposition, the big man spun away from Pete and Franz, kicked with all the power of his muscular legs, and went directly for his preferred prey. He was no doubt sure that he could deal swiftly with a man of Claude’s age and then finish Brian before the kid was able to clear his fouled mask and draw a restorative breath.

Rising under Breskin, Harry could have collided with him and hoped to deflect him from Brian. Instead, he kicked to one side, shot past the madman, and grabbed the air hose that connected his face mask to the pressurized tank on his back. Harry flutter-kicked again, soaring up, jerking the hose out of the clamp that held it to the feed valve at the top of the tank. Because he and Breskin were moving in different directions, the hose also uncoupled from the diving mask.

The icy water didn’t pour in through Roger’s mask coupling when the hose was torn loose. There must be a safety feature, a shutoff valve.

He fumbled for the hose, but he realized that it had been ripped away not merely from the mask but from the tank on his back. It was gone and couldn’t be reconnected.

Alarmed, he scissored his legs and went up toward the mouth of the tunnel as fast as he could. His only hope was to reach the surface.

Then he remembered that the pool in the domed ice cavern was more than a hundred fifty feet above him, too far to reach with the weight belt pulling him down, so he fumbled at his waist, trying to free himself of the burdensome lead. The release wasn’t where it ought to be, because the damn belt was made by the Russians, and he had never before used Russian equipment.

Roger stopped kicking so he could concentrate on the search for the belt release. At once he began to sink slowly back into the tunnel. He patted-tugged-wrenched at the belt, but he
still
could not find the release, Jesus, dear Jesus God Almighty, still couldn’t find it, and finally he knew that he had wasted too much time, didn’t dare waste another second, would have to get to the surface even with the hampering belt. Arms straight down at his sides, trying to be as sleek as an arrow, creating as little resistance to the water as possible, kicking smoothly, rhythmically, he struggled up, up. His chest ached, and his heart was hammering as if it would burst, and he couldn’t any longer resist the urge to breathe. He opened his mouth, exhaled explosively, desperately inhaled, but there was nothing to breathe except the meager breath that he had just expelled, which was even thinner the next time he exhaled. His lungs were
ablaze,
and he knew that the darkness around him was no longer that of the tunnel but a darkness
behind
his eyes. He would lose consciousness if he didn’t breathe, and if he passed out he would die. So he ripped off his mask and sucked a deep breath of the air in the domed cavern, except he was nowhere
near
the domed cavern, of course—why had he imagined that he’d reached the surface, how could he have been so stupid?—and he inhaled water so bitterly cold that pain shot through his teeth. He closed his mouth, choking violently, but at once he tried to breathe again. There was only more water, water, nothing but water. He clawed at the water with both hands, as if it were a thin curtain that he could tear apart to get to the blessed air just beyond it. Then he realized that he wasn’t kicking any longer, was sinking under the influence of the diving weights. He wasn’t clawing at the water any more either, just drifting down and down, gasping, and it felt as though he had more lead weights inside his chest than around his waist….

He saw that Death had neither a face of raw bone nor the face of a man. It was a woman. A pale, strong-jawed woman. She was not without some beauty. Her eyes were a lovely, translucent gray. Roger studied her face as it rose out of the water before him, and he realized that she was his mother, from whom he had learned so much, in whose arms he had first heard that the world was a hostile place and that people of exceptional evil secretly ruled ordinary men and women through interlocking conspiracies, with no intention but to crush the free spirit of everyone who defied them. And now, though Roger had made himself strong to resist those conspirators if they ever came for him, although he had applied himself to his studies and had earned two degrees in order to have the knowledge to outwit them, they had crushed him anyway. They had won, just as his mother had told him they would, just as they always won. But losing wasn’t so terrible. There was a peace in losing. Gray-haired, gray-eyed death smiling at him, and he wanted to kiss her, and she took him into her motherly embrace.

Harry watched as the corpse, lungs full of water and burdened with lead weights, drifted past them on its journey to the bottom of the sea. Air bubbles gushed from the tank on its back.

11:37
DETONATION IN TWENTY-THREE MINUTES

The tension had sharpened Nikita Gorov’s mind and had forced him to confront an unpleasant but undeniable truth. Fools and heroes, he saw now, were separated by a line so thin that it was the next thing to invisible. He had been so intent on being a hero. And for what? For whom? For a dead son? Heroism could not change the past. Nikki was dead and in the grave. Dead! And the crew of the
Ilya Pogodin
—the seventy-nine men under his command—were still very much alive. They were his responsibility. It was inexcusable to have risked their lives merely because, in some strange way, he wanted to fulfill an obligation to his dead son. He’d been playing hero, but he’d been only a fool.

Regardless of the danger, regardless of what he
should
have done, the submarine was committed to the rescue mission now. They couldn’t abandon it this close to success. Not unless those two sweating bulkheads began to show signs of structural deterioration. He had gotten his men into this, and it was up to him to get them out in a way that would save their hide without humiliating them. Men of their courage didn’t deserve to be humbled by his failure, but they surely would be worse than humbled in their own eyes if they turned tail now and ran without good reason. He’d been playing hero, but now he wanted nothing more than to make heroes of
them
in the eyes of the world, and get them home safely.

“Any change?” he asked the young technician reading the surface Fathometer.

“No, sir. The divers are stationary. They haven’t descended a foot in the last few minutes.”

The captain stared at the ceiling, as if he could see through the double hull and all the way up the long tunnel. What were they doing up there? What had gone wrong?

“Don’t they realize there’s no time left?” Zhukov said. “When those explosives split the iceberg at midnight, we’ve got to be out from under. We’ve
got
to be.”

Gorov checked the video displays. He looked at the clock. He pulled on his beard and said, “If they don’t start moving down again in five minutes, we’ll have to get out of here. One minute later than that, and they can’t make it aboard before midnight anyway.”