Icebound (4 page)

Brian smiled thankfully.

“You crazy?” Lin asked. “See this snow? If we delay—”

“George, you’ve already wasted a minute carping.” Breskin’s tone was not accusatory, merely that of a scientist stating an observable fact.

Although Roger Breskin had emigrated to Canada from the United States only eight years ago, he was every bit as quiet and calm as the stereotypical Canadian. Self-contained, reclusive, he did not easily make friends
or
enemies.

Behind his goggles, Lin’s eyes narrowed. Grudgingly he said, “Take your pictures. I guess Roger wants to see himself in all the fancy magazines. But hurry.”

Brian had no choice but to be quick. Weather conditions allowed no time for setting up shots and focusing to perfection.

“This okay?” Roger Breskin asked, standing to the right of the transmitter.

“Great.”

Roger dominated the frame in the viewfinder. He was five eleven, one hundred ninety pounds, shorter and lighter than Pete Johnson but no less muscular than the former football star. He had been a weight lifter for twenty of his thirty-six years. His biceps were enormous, webbed with veins that resembled steel tubes. In arctic gear, he was an impressively bearish figure who seemed to belong in these vast frozen wastes as none of the others did.

Standing to the left of the transmitter, George Lin was as unlike Breskin as a hummingbird is unlike an eagle. He was shorter and slimmer than Roger, but the differences were not merely physical. While Roger stood as silent and still as a pinnacle of ice, Lin swayed from side to side as if he might explode with nervous energy. He had none of the patience that was reputed to be a trait of the Asian mind. Unlike Breskin, he didn’t belong in these frozen wastes, and he knew it.

George Lin had been born Lin Shen-yang, in Canton, mainland China, in 1946, shortly before Mao Tse-tung’s revolution had ousted the Kuomintang government and established a totalitarian state. His family had not managed to flee to Taiwan until George was seven. In those early years, something monstrous had happened to him in Canton that had forever traumatized and shaped him. Occasionally he alluded to it, but he refused ever to speak of it directly, either because he was not capable of dealing with the horror of those memories—or because Brian’s skills as a journalist were insufficient to extract the story.

“Just hurry,” Lin urged. His breath billowed in skeins of crystalline yarn that unraveled in the wind.

Brian focused and pressed the shutter release.

The electronic flash was reflected by the snowscape, and figures of light leaped and danced with figures of shadow. Then the deep darkness swarmed back to crouch at the edges of the headlamps.

Brian said, “One more for—”

The icecap rose abruptly, precipitously, like the motorized floor in a carnival fun house. It tilted left, right, then dropped out from under him.

He fell, slammed so hard into the ice that even the heavy padding of his insulated clothing did not adequately cushion him, and the painful impact knocked his bones against one another as if they were
I Ching
sticks clattering in a metal cup. The ice heaved up again, shuddered and bucked, as though striving mightily to fling him off the top of the earth and out into space.

One of the idling snowmobiles crashed onto its side, inches from his head, and sharp shards of ice exploded in his face, glittery needles, stinging his skin, barely sparing his eyes. The skis on the machine rattled softly and quivered as if they were insectile appendages, and the engine choked off.

Dizzy, shocked, heart stuttering, Brian cautiously raised his head and saw that the transmitter was still firmly anchored. Breskin and Lin were sprawled in the snow, having been pitched about as though they were dolls, as he himself had been. Brian started to get up—but he fell again as the wasteland leaped more violently than it had the first time.

Gunvald’s suboceanic earthquake had come at last.

Brian tried to brace himself within a shallow depression in the ice, wedging between the natural contours to avoid being thrown into the snowmobiles or the transmitter. Evidently a massive tsunami was passing directly under them, hundreds of millions of cubic yards of water rising with all the vengeful fury and force of an angry god awakening.

Inevitably, additional waves of still great but diminishing power would follow before the icecap stabilized.

The overturned snowmobile revolved on its side. The headlights swept across Brian twice, harrying shadows like wind-whipped leaves that had blown in from warmer latitudes, and then stopped as they illuminated the other men.

Behind Roger Breskin and George Lin, the ice suddenly cracked open with a deafening
boom!
and gaped like a ragged, demonic mouth. Their world was coming apart.

Brian shouted a warning.

Roger grasped one of the large steel anchor pins that fixed the transmitter in place, and he held on with both hands.

The ice heaved a third time. The white field tilted toward the new, yawning crevasse.

Although he tried desperately to brace himself, Brian slid out of the depression in which he had sought shelter, as though there were no inhibiting friction whatsoever between him and the ice. He shot toward the chasm, grabbed the transmitter as he sailed past it, crashed hard against Roger Breskin, and held on with fierce determination.

Roger shouted something about George Lin, but the wailing of the wind and the rumble of fracturing ice masked the meaning of his words.

Squinting through snow-filmed goggles, unwilling to risk his precarious hold to wipe them clean, Brian looked over his shoulder.

Screaming, George Lin slid toward the brink of the new crevasse. He flailed at the slick ice. As the last surge of the tsunami passed beneath them and as the winter cap settled down, Lin fell out of sight into the chasm.

Franz had suggested that Rita finish packing the gear and that he handle the heavy work of loading it into the cargo trailers. He was so unconsciously condescending toward “the weaker sex” that Rita rejected his suggestion. She pulled up her hood, slipped the goggles over her eyes once more, and lifted one of the filled cartons before he could argue with her.

Outside, as she loaded the waterproof box into one of the low-slung cargo trailers, the first tremor jolted the ice. She was pitched forward onto the cartons. A blunt cardboard corner gouged her cheek. She rolled off the trailer and fell into the snow that had drifted around the machine during the past hour.

Dazed and frightened, she scrambled to her feet as the primary crest of the tsunami arrived. The snowmobile engines were running, warming up for the ride back to Edgeway, and their headlamps pierced the falling snow, providing enough light for her to see the first broad crack appear in the nearly vertical wall of the fifty-foot-high pressure ridge that had sheltered—and now threatened—the temporary camp. A second crack split off the first, then a third, a fourth, ten, a hundred, like the intricate web of fissures in an automobile windshield that has been hit by a stone. The entire facade was going to collapse.

She shouted to Fischer, who was still in the igloo at the west end of the camp. “Run! Franz!
Get out!”

Then she took her own advice, not daring to look back.

The sixtieth package of explosives was no different from the fifty-nine that had been placed in the ice before it: two and a half inches in diameter, sixty inches long, with smooth, rounded ends. A sophisticated timing device and detonator occupied the bottom of the cylinder and was synchronized to the timers in the other fifty-nine packages. Most of the tube was filled with plastic explosives. The upper end of the cylinder terminated in a steel loop, and a gated carabiner connected a tempered-steel chain to the loop.

Harry Carpenter wound the chain off the drum of a small hand winch, lowering the package—thirty pounds of casing and one hundred pounds of plastic explosives—into the narrow hole, working carefully because the charge was equivalent to three thousand pounds of TNT. He let down seventy-eight feet of chain before he felt the cylinder touch bottom in the eighty-seven-foot shaft. He connected another carabiner to the free end of the chain, pulled the links snug against the shaft wall, and secured the carabiner to a peg that was embedded in the ice beside the hole.

Pete Johnson was hunkered beside Harry. He looked over his shoulder at the Frenchman and called out above the keening wind: “Ready here, Claude.”

A barrel, which they had filled with snow, stood on electric heating coils in one of the cargo trailers. It brimmed with boiling water. Steam roiled off the surface of the water, froze instantly into clouds of glittering crystals, and was dispersed into the whirling snow, so it seemed as if an endless procession of ghosts was arising from a magical cauldron and fleeing to the far reaches of the earth.

Claude Jobert fixed a metal-ring hose to a valve on the barrel. He opened the valve and handed the nozzle to Carpenter.

Loosening the petcock, Harry let hot water pour out of the hose into the deep shaft. In three minutes the hole was sealed: The bomb was suspended in new ice.

If he left the shaft open, the explosion would vent upward to no purpose. The charge had been shaped to blow downward and expend its energy to all sides, and the hole must be tightly sealed to achieve the desired effect. At midnight, when that charge detonated with all the others, the new ice in the shaft might pop out like a cork from a bottle, but the greater force of the blast would not be dissipated.

Pete Johnson rapped his gloved knuckles against the newly formed plug. “Now we can get back to Edge—”

The icecap jolted up, lurched forward, tilted sharply in front of them, squealed like a great monster, and then groaned before collapsing back into its original plane.

Harry was thrown on his face. His goggles jammed hard against his cheeks and eyebrows. Tears streamed as pain swelled across his cheekbones. He felt warm blood trickling from his nostrils, and the taste of blood was in his mouth.

Pete and Claude had fallen and were holding each other. Harry caught a brief glimpse of them, grotesquely locked in each other’s embrace as though they were a pair of wrestlers.

The ice shook again.

Harry rolled against one of the snowmobiles. The machine was bouncing up and down. He clung to it with both hands and hoped that it would not roll over on him.

His first thought had been that the plastic explosives had blown up in his face and that he was dead or dying. But as the ice swelled once more, he realized that tidal waves must be surging beneath the polar cap, no doubt spawned by a seabed quake.

As the third wave struck, the white world around Harry cracked and canted, as if a prehistoric creature were rising from a long sleep beneath him, and he found himself suspended at the top of an ice ramp. Only inertia kept him high in the air, at the top of the incline. At any moment he might slide to the bottom along with the snowmobile, and perhaps be crushed beneath the machine.

In the distance, the sound of shattering, grinding ice pierced the night and the wind: the ominous protests of a brittle world cracking asunder. The roar grew nearer by the second, and Harry steeled himself for the worst.

Then, as suddenly as the terror had begun—no more than a minute ago—it ended. The ice plain dropped, became a level floor, and was still.