Icebound (35 page)

11:52.

The air-lock hatch on the forward escape trunk was unlocked by someone at a control panel in the submarine. Harry gazed down into a tiny, brightly lighted, water-filled compartment. As Lieutenant Timoshenko had warned them, it was large enough to accommodate only four divers at a time—and even at that size, it was twice as large as the escape trunks on many submarines.

One by one, Brian, Claude, Rita, and George went down into the round room and sat on the floor with their backs pressed to the walls.

From outside, Harry closed the hatch, which was faster than waiting for someone inside to use a lanyard to pull it down and then spin the sealing wheel.

He looked at his luminous watch.

11:53.

Gorov anxiously watched the bank of VDTs.

“Escape trunk ready,” Zhukov said, repeating the message that he received on his headset, and simultaneously the same information appeared on one of the VDTs.

“Process the divers,” Gorov said.

11:54.

In the air lock, Rita held on to wall grips as powerful pumps extracted the water from the chamber in thirty seconds. She didn’t remove her mask, but continued to breathe the mixture of gases in her scuba tank, as they had been instructed to do.

A hatch opened in the center of the floor. A young Russian seaman appeared, smiled almost shyly, and beckoned with one finger.

They moved quickly from the air lock, down a ladder into the escape-chamber control room. The seaman climbed the ladder again behind them, pulled the inner hatch shut, sealed it, and descended quickly to the control panel. With a roar, water flooded into the upper chamber again.

Acutely aware that a huge island of ice, mined with explosives, loomed directly above the boat, Rita went with the others into an adjoining decompression chamber.

11:56.

Harry tried the hatch again, and it swung open.

He waited until Franz and Pete had entered, and then he followed them and dogged down the hatch from inside.

They sat with their backs to the walls.

He didn’t even have to look at his watch. An internal crisis clock told him that they were about four minutes from detonation.

The drains dilated, and the pumps drained the escape trunk.

11:57.

A mountain of ice on the verge of violent disintegration loomed over them, and if it went to pieces when they were under it, the boat would most likely be battered to junk. Death would be so swift that many of them might not even have a chance to scream.

Gorov pulled down an overhead microphone, called the maneuvering room, and ordered the boat into immediate full reverse.

The maneuvering room confirmed the order, and a moment later the ship shuddered in response to the abrupt change of engine thrust.

Gorov was thrown against the command-pad railing, and Zhukov almost fell.

From the overhead speaker: “Maneuvering room to captain. Engines full reverse.”

“Rudder amidships.”

“Rudder amidships.”

The iceberg was moving southward at nine knots. The submarine was reversing
northward
at ten…twelve…now fifteen knots against a nine-knot current, resulting in an effective separation speed of fifteen knots.

Gorov didn’t know if that was sufficient speed to save them, but it was the best that they could do at the moment, because to build to greater speed, they needed more time than remained until detonation.

“Ice overhead,” the surface-Fathometer operator announced. They were out from under the funnel-shaped concavity in the center of the berg. “Sixty feet. Ice overhead at sixty feet.”

11:58.

Harry entered the decompression chamber and sat beside Rita. They held hands and stared at his watch.

11:59.

The center of attention in the control room was the six-figure digital clock aft of the command pad. Nikita Gorov imagined that he could detect a twitch in his crewmen with the passage of each second:

11:59:10.

11:59:11.

“Whichever way it goes,” Emil Zhukov said, “I’m glad that I named my son Nikita.”

“You may have named him after a fool.”

“But an interesting fool.”

Gorov smiled.

11:59:30.

11:59:31.

The technician at the surface-Fathometer said, “Clear water. No ice overhead.”

“We’re out from under,” someone said.

“But we’re not yet out of the way,” Gorov cautioned, aware that they were well within the fallout pattern of blast-hurled ice.

11:59:46.

11:59:47.

“Clear water. No ice overhead.”

11:59:49.

For the second time in ten minutes, a warning siren sounded, and
EMERGENCY
flashed in red on one of the overhead screens.

Gorov keyed up a display and found that another torpedo tube in the damaged area of the hull had partially succumbed:
MUZZLE DOOR COLLAPSED ON FORWARD TORPEDO TUBE NUMBER FOUR. TUBE FILLED WITH WATER TO BREECH DOOR.

Pulling down a microphone, Gorov shouted, “Captain to torpedo room! Abandon your position and seal all watertight doors.”

“Oh, dear God,” said Emil Zhukov, the atheist.

“The breech doors will hold,” Gorov said with conviction, and he prayed that he was right.

11:59:59.

12:00:00.

“Brace yourselves!”

“Clear water.”

12:00:03.

“What’s wrong?”

“Where is it?”

12:00:07.

The concussion hit them. Transmitted through the shattering iceberg to the water and through the water to the hull, it was a surprisingly mild and distant rumble. Gorov waited for the power of the shock waves to escalate, but it never did.

The sonar operator reported massive fragmentation of the iceberg.

By 12:02, however, when sonar had not located a substantial fragment of ice anywhere near the
Ilya Pogodin,
Gorov knew they were safe. “Take her up.”

The control-room crew let out a cheer.

AFTER…

[1]
JANUARY 18
DUNDEE, SCOTLAND

Shortly before noon, two and a half days after escaping from their prison of ice, the survivors arrived in Scotland.

Ever since he had escaped on a small boat with his father from mainland China so many years ago, George Lin had not cared much for travel by sea, whether above or below the waves, and he was relieved to be on land once more.

The weather was neither severe nor mild for winter in Dundee. The flat-gray sky was low and threatening. The temperature was twenty degrees Fahrenheit. A cold wind swept in from the North Sea, making the water leap and curl across the entire length of the Firth of Tay.

More than one hundred newsmen from all over the world had flown to Dundee to report on the conclusion of the Edgeway story. With friendly sarcasm, a man from
The New York Times
had dubbed the place “Dandy Dundee” more than twenty-four hours ago, and the name had stuck. Among themselves, reporters apparently had gotten more conversational mileage from the bone-chilling weather than from the news event that they were there to cover.

Even after debarking from the
Pogodin
at 12:30 and standing in the brisk breeze for nearly an hour, George still enjoyed the feel of the wind on his face. It smelled clean and so much better than the canned air of the submarine. And it was neither so cold nor so fierce that he needed to fear frostbite, which was a vast improvement over the weather with which he had lived for the past few months.

Pacing energetically back and forth at the edge of the wharf, followed by a covey of reporters, he said, “This boat—isn’t she a beautiful sight?”

Anchored in a deepwater berth behind him, the submarine was flying an enormous Russian flag and, for courtesy, a Scottish flag of somewhat smaller dimensions. Sixty-eight crewmen were in two facing lines on the main deck, all in dress blues and navy pea coats, standing at attention for a ceremonial inspection. Nikita Gorov, Emil Zhukov, and the other officers looked splendid in their uniforms and gray winter parade coats with brass buttons. A number of dignitaries were also on the bridge and on the railed gangplank that connected the submarine to the dock: a representative of Her Majesty’s government, the Russian ambassador to Britain, two of the ambassador’s aides, the mayor of Dundee, two representatives of the United Nations, and a handful of functionaries from the Russian trade embassy in Glasgow.

One of the photographers asked George to pose beside a weathered concrete piling with the
Ilya Pogodin
as a backdrop. Smiling broadly, he obliged.

A reporter asked him what it felt like to be a hero on the front pages of newspapers worldwide.

“I’m no hero,” George said at once. He turned to point at the officers and crew of the boat behind him.
“They
are the heroes here.”

[2]
JANUARY 20
EDGEWAY STATION

During the night, the wind velocity began to fall for the first time in five days. By morning, ice spicules stopped ticking against the roof and walls of the communications shack, and soft snowflakes filled the air again. The violent storms in the extreme North Atlantic had begun to break up.

Shortly after two o’clock that afternoon, Gunvald Larsson finally established contact with the United States military base at Thule, Greenland. The American radio operator immediately reported that the Edgeway Project had been suspended for the remainder of the winter. “We’ve been asked to bring you off the icecap. If we get the good weather they’re predicting, we should be able to come for you the day after tomorrow. Will that be enough time to close down your buildings and machinery?”

“Yes, plenty of time,” Gunvald said, “but for God’s sake, never mind about that! What’s happened to the others? Are they alive?”

The American was embarrassed. “Oh, I’m sorry. Of course, you couldn’t know, isolated as you’ve been.” He read two of the newspaper stories and then added what else he knew.

After five days of continuous tension, Gunvald decided that a celebration was in order. He lit his pipe and broke out the vodka.

[3]
JANUARY 25
E-MAIL MESSAGE TRANSMITTED FROM MONTEGO BAY, JAMAICA, TO PARIS, FRANCE

Claude, Franz, and I got here January 23. Within an hour of arrival, both the taxi driver who brought us from the airport and the hotel clerk referred to us as “an unlikely group.” Man, they don’t know the half of it.

Can’t get enough sun. Even I’m acquiring a tan.

I think I’ve met the woman of my dreams. Her name is Majean. Franz got picked up in the bar by a modern woman who doesn’t believe in standard gender roles, and he’s trying to learn to let her open doors for herself if she wants. He’s piss-poor at it, and sometimes they
fight
over a door, but he’s learning. Meanwhile, Claude seems to be constantly in the company of a twenty-eight-year-old blonde who thinks he’s indescribably cute and swoons at his French accent.

We’re talking about maybe changing careers and opening a bar in some tropical resort. Maybe you and Rita want to think about going into business with us. We could sit around all day, swilling down rum drinks with funny little paper umbrellas in them. It sure beats frostbite, high explosives, and underwater life-or-death battles with psychopaths. The most serious problem we face here is humidity.

As ever, Pete.

[4]
JANUARY 26
PARIS, FRANCE

In their suite at the Hotel George V, a bottle of Dom Perignon stood in an ice bucket beside the bed.

They were in each other’s arms, as close as two people could get without actually melting together and becoming a single entity, generating enough heat to keep an entire Arctic outpost warm for a long winter, when they were startled by a clatter beside the bed. They had been rescued by the
Pogodin
more than a week ago, but their nerves were still wound too tight. He sat up, and she fell off him, and they both turned toward the sound, but they were alone in the room.

“Ice,” she said.

“Ice?”

“Yes, ice. Shifting in the champagne bucket.”

He glanced at the bucket on its silver-plated stand, and the ice shifted again.

“Ice,” she repeated.

He looked at her. She smiled. He grinned. She giggled as if she were a schoolgirl, and he roared with laughter.