Icebound (5 page)

Having sprinted far enough to be safely out of any icefall from the looming pressure ridge, Rita stopped running and spun around to look back at the temporary camp. She was alone. Franz had not emerged from the igloo.

A truck-size piece of the ridge wall cracked off and fell with eerie grace, smashing into the uninhabited igloo at the east end of the crescent-shaped encampment. The inflatable dome popped as if it were a child’s balloon.

“Franz!”

A much larger section of the ridge collapsed. Sheets, spires, boulders, slabs of ice crashed into the camp, fragmenting into cold shrapnel, flattening the center igloo, overturning a snowmobile, ripping open the igloo at the west end of the camp, from which Franz had still not escaped, casting up thousands of splinters of ice that glinted like showers of sparks.

She was six years old again, screaming until her throat seized up—and suddenly she wasn’t sure if she had called out for Franz or for her mother, for her father.

Whether she had called a warning to him or not, Franz crawled out of the ruined nylon dome even as the deluge was tumbling around him, and he scrambled toward her. Mortar shells of ice exploded to the left and right of him, but he had the grace of a broken-field runner and the speed born of terror. He raced beyond the avalanche to safety.

As the ridge stabilized and ice stopped falling, Rita was shaken by a vivid vision of Harry crushed beneath a shining white monolith elsewhere in the cruel black-and-white polar night. She staggered, not because of the movement of the icefield, but because the thought of losing Harry rocked her. She ceased trying to keep her balance, sat on the ice, and began to shake uncontrollably.

Only the snowflakes moved, cascading out of the darkness in the west and into the darkness in the east. The sole sound was the dour-voiced wind singing a dirge.

Harry held on to the snowmobile and pulled himself erect. His heart thudded so hard that it seemed to knock against his ribs. He tried to work up some saliva to lubricate his parched throat. Fear had dried him out as thoroughly as a blast of Sahara heat could have done. When he regained his breath, he wiped his goggles and looked around.

Pete Johnson helped Claude to his feet. The Frenchman was rubber-legged but evidently uninjured. Pete didn’t even have weak knees; perhaps he was every bit as indestructible as he appeared to be.

Both snowmobiles were upright and undamaged. The headlights blazed into the vast polar night but revealed little in the seething sea of windblown snow.

High on adrenaline, Harry briefly felt like a boy again, flushed with excitement, pumped up by the danger, exhilarated by the very fact of having survived.

Then he thought of Rita, and his blood ran colder than it would have if he’d been naked in the merciless polar wind. The temporary camp had been established in the lee of a large pressure ridge, shadowed by a high wall of ice. Ordinarily, that was the best place for it. But with all the shaking that they had just been through, the ridge might have broken apart….

The lost boy faded into the past, where he belonged, became just a memory among other memories of Indiana fields and tattered issues of
National Geographic
and summer nights spent staring at the stars and at far horizons.

Get moving,
he thought, awash in a fear far greater than that which he had felt for himself only moments ago. Get packed, get moving, get to her.

He hurried to the other men. “Anyone hurt?”

“Just a little rattled,” Claude said. He was a man who not only refused to surrender to adversity but was actually buoyed by it. With a brighter smile than he’d managed all day, he said, “Quite a ride!”

Pete glanced at Harry. “What about you?”

“Fine.”

“You’re bleeding.”

When Harry touched his upper lip, bright chips of frozen blood like fragments of rubies adhered to his glove. “Nosebleed. It’s already stopped.”

“Always a sure cure for nosebleed,” Pete said.

“What’s that?”

“Ice on the back of the neck.”

“You should be abandoned here for that one.”

“Let’s get packed and moving.”

“They may be in serious trouble at camp,” Harry said, and he felt his stomach turn over again when he considered the possibility that he might have lost Rita.

“My thought exactly.”

The wind pummeled them as they worked. The falling snow was fine and thick. The blizzard was racing in on them with surprising speed, and in unspoken recognition of the growing danger, they moved with a quiet urgency.

As Harry was strapping down the last of the instruments in the second snowmobile’s cargo trailer, Pete called to him. He wiped his goggles and went to the other machine.

Even in the uncertain light, Harry could see the worry in Pete’s eyes. “What is it?”

“During that shaking, I guess…did the snowmobiles do a lot of moving around?”

“Hell, yes, they bounced up and down as if the ice was a damn trampoline.”

“Just up and down?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Not sideways at all?”

“What?”

“Well, I mean, is it possible they slid around, sort of swiveled around?”

Harry turned his back on the wind and leaned closer to Pete. “I was holding tight to one of them. It didn’t turn. But what’s that have to do with anything?”

“Bear with me. What direction were the snowmobiles facing before the tsunami?”

“East.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“Me too. I remember east.”

“Toward the temporary camp.”

Their breath collected in the sheltered space between them, and Pete waved a hand through the crystals to disperse them. He bit his lower lip. “Then am I losing my mind or what?”

“Why?”

“Well, for one thing…” He tapped the Plexiglas face of the snowmobile’s compass, which was fixed to the hood in front of the windshield.

Harry read the compass. According to the needle, the snowmobile was facing due south, a ninety-degree change from where it had stood before the ice was shaken by the seismic waves.

“That’s not all,” Johnson said. “When we parked here, I know damned well the wind was hitting this snowmobile from behind and maybe even slightly to my left. I remember how it was hammering the back of the sled.”

“I remember too.”

“Now it’s blowing across the flank, from my right side when I’m behind the handlebars. That’s a damned big difference. But blizzard winds are steady. They don’t change ninety degrees in a few minutes. They just don’t, Harry. They just don’t ever.”

“But if the wind didn’t change and the snowmobiles didn’t move, that means the ice we’re on…”

His voice trailed away.

They were both silent.

Neither of them wanted to put his fear into words.

At last Pete finished the thought:“…so the ice must have revolved one full quarter of the compass.”

“But how’s that possible?”

“I have one good idea.”

Harry nodded reluctantly. “Yeah, so do I.”

“Only one explanation makes sense.”

“We better have a look at the compass on my machine.”

“We’re in deep shit, Harry.”

“It’s not a field of daisies,” Harry agreed.

They hurried to the second vehicle, and the fresh snow crunched and squeaked under their boots.

Pete tapped the Plexiglas face of the compass. “This one’s facing south too.”

Harry brushed at his goggles but said nothing. Their situation was so dire that he didn’t want to have to put it into words, as if the worst wouldn’t actually have happened until they spoke of it.

Pete surveyed the inhospitable wasteland that surrounded them. “If the damn wind picks up and the temperature keeps dropping…and it
will
keep dropping…then how long could we survive out here?”

“With our current supplies, not even one day.”

“The nearest help…”

“Would be those UNGY trawlers.”

“But they’re two hundred miles away.”

“Two hundred and thirty.”

“And they’re not going to head north into a major storm, not with so many ice floes to negotiate.”

Neither of them spoke. The banshee shriek of the wind filled their silence. Furies of hard-driven snow stung the exposed portions of Harry’s face, even though his skin was protected by a layer of Vaseline.

Finally, Pete said, “So now what?”

Harry shook his head. “Only one thing’s certain. We won’t be driving back to Edgeway Station this afternoon.”

Claude Jobert joined them in time to hear that last exchange. Even though the lower part of his face was covered by a snow mask and though his eyes were only half visible behind his goggles, his alarm was unmistakable. He put one hand on Harry’s arm. “What’s wrong?”

Harry glanced at Pete.

To Claude, Pete said, “Those waves…they broke up the edge of the icefield.”

The Frenchman tightened his grip on Harry’s arm.

Clearly not wanting to believe his own words, Pete said, “We’re adrift on an iceberg.”

“That can’t be,” Claude said.

“Outrageous, but it’s true,” Harry said. “We’re moving farther away from Edgeway Station with every passing minute…and deeper into this storm.”

Claude was a reluctant convert to the truth. He looked from Harry to Pete, then around at the forbidding landscape, as if he expected to see something that would refute what they had told him. “You can’t be sure.”

“All but certain,” Pete disagreed.

Claude said, “But under us…”

“Yes.”

“…those bombs…”

“Exactly,” Harry said. “Those bombs.”

TWO

SHIP

1:00
DETONATION IN ELEVEN HOURS

One of the snowmobiles was on its side. The safety cutout had switched off the engine when the machine overturned, so there had been no fire. The other snowmobile was canted against a low hummock of ice. The four headlamps parted the curtains of snow, illuminating nothing, pointing away from the precipice over which George Lin had disappeared.

Although Brian Dougherty was convinced that any search for the Chinese was a waste of time, he scrambled to the edge of the new crevasse and sprawled facedown on the ice at the jagged brink. Roger Breskin joined him, and they lay side by side, peering into a terrible darkness.

Queasiness coiled and slithered in Brian’s gut. He tried to dig the metal toes of his boots into the iron-hard ice, and he clutched at the flat surface. If another tsunami set the world adance, he might be tipped or flung into the abyss.

Roger directed his flashlight outward, toward the distant wall of the crevasse. Except for falling snow, nothing was revealed within the reach of the yellow beam. The light dwindled away into perfect blackness.

“Isn’t a crevasse,” Brian said. “It’s a damned canyon!”

“Not that either.”

The beam moved slowly back and forth: Nothing lay out there. Nothing whatsoever. Less than astronauts could see when they peered from a porthole into deep space.

Brian was baffled. “I don’t understand.”

“We’ve broken off from the main icefield,” Roger explained with characteristic yet nonetheless remarkable equanimity.

Brian needed a moment to absorb that news and grasp the full horror of it. “Broken off…You mean we’re adrift?”

“A ship of ice.”

The wind gusted so violently that for half a minute Brian could not have been heard above it even if he’d shouted at the top of his voice. The snowflakes were as busy and furious as thousands of angry bees, stinging the exposed portions of his face, and he pulled up his snow mask to cover his mouth and nose.

When the gust died out at last, Brian leaned toward Roger Breskin. “What about the others?”

“Could be on this berg too. But let’s hope they’re still on safe ice.”

“Dear God.”

Roger directed the flashlight away from the darkness where they had expected to find the far wall of a crevasse. The tight beam speared down and out into the humbling void.

They wouldn’t be able to see the face of the cliff that dropped away just in front of them unless they eased forward and hung partly over the precipice. Neither of them was eager to expose himself to that extreme risk.

The pale light angled to the left and right, then touched upon the choppy, black, unfrozen sea that raged eighty or ninety feet below them. Flat tables of ice, irregular chunks of ice, gnarled rafts of ice, and delicate ever-changing laces of ice bobbled and swirled in the deep troughs of frigid dark water, crashed together on the crests of the waves; touched by the light, they glittered as if they were diamonds spread on black velvet.

Mesmerized by the chaos that the flashlight revealed, swallowing hard, Brian said, “George fell into the sea. He’s gone.”

“Maybe not.”

Brian didn’t see how there could be a hopeful alternative. His queasiness had slid into full-blown nausea.

Pushing with his elbows against the ice, Roger inched forward until he was able to peer over the brink and straight down the face of the precipice.

In spite of his nausea—and though he was still concerned that another tsunami might sweep under them and cast him into George Lin’s grave—Brian moved up beside Roger.

The flashlight beam found the place where their ice island met the sea. The cliff did not plunge cleanly into the water. At its base, it was shattered into three ragged shelves, each six or eight yards wide and six to eight feet below the one above it. The shelves were as fissured and sharp-edged and jumbled as the base of any rocky bluff on dry land. Because another six hundred feet or more of the berg lay below sea level, the towering storm waves could not pass entirely under it; they crashed across the three shelves and broke against the glistening palisades, exploding into fat gouts of foam and icy spray.

Caught by that maelstrom, Lin would have been dashed to pieces. It might have been a more merciful death if he had plunged suddenly into those hideously cold waters and suffered a fatal heart attack before the waves had a chance to hammer and grind him against the jagged ice.

The light moved slowly backward and upward, revealing more of the cliff. From the three shelves at the bottom, for a distance of fifty feet, the ice sloped up at approximately a sixty-degree angle—not sheer by any measure, but much too steep to be negotiated by anyone other than a well-equipped and experienced mountain climber. Just twenty feet below them, another shelf crossed the face of the berg. This one was only a few feet wide. It angled back into the cliff. Above that shelf, the ice was sheer all the way to the brink where they lay.

After he had paused to scrape the crusted snow from his goggles, Roger Breskin used the flashlight to explore that shallow shelf below them.

Eight feet to the right of them, twenty feet down, previously cloaked in darkness, George Lin lay where he had fallen onto the narrow ledge. He was on his left side, his back against the cliff, facing out toward the open sea. His left arm was wedged under him, and his right arm was across his chest. He had assumed the foetal position, with his knees drawn up as far as his bulky arctic clothing would allow and his head tucked down.

Roger cupped his free hand to his mouth and shouted: “George! You hear me? George!”

Lin didn’t move or respond.

“You think he’s alive?” Brian asked.

“Must be. Didn’t fall far. Clothes are quilted, insulated—absorbed some impact.”

Brian cupped both hands around his mouth and shouted at Lin.

The only answer came from the steadily increasing wind, and it was easy to believe that its shriek was full of gleeful malevolence, that this wind was somehow alive and daring them to remain at the brink just a moment longer.

“Have to go down and get him,” Roger Said.

Brian studied the slick, vertical wall of ice that dropped twenty feet to the ledge. “How?”

“We’ve got rope, tools.”

“Not climbing gear.”

“Improvise.”

“Improvise?” Brian said with astonishment. “You ever done any climbing?”

“No.”

“This is nuts.”

“No choice.”

“Got to be another way.”

“Like what?’

Brian was silent.

“Let’s look at the tools,” Roger said.

“We could die trying to rescue him.”

“Can’t just walk away.”

Brian stared down at the crumpled figure on the ledge. In a Spanish bullring, on the African veldt, on the Colorado River, skin-diving in a shark run off Bimini…In far-flung places and in so many imaginative ways, he had tempted death without much fear. He wondered why he was hesitating now. Virtually every risk he’d ever taken had been pointless, a childish game. This time he had a good reason for risking everything: A human life was at stake. Was that the problem? Was it that he didn’t want to be a hero? Too damned many heroes in the Dougherty family, power-thirsty politicians who had become heroes for the history books.

“Let’s get working,” Brian said at last. “George’ll freeze if he lies there much longer.”

1:05

Harry Carpenter leaned into the handlebars and squinted through the curve of Plexiglas at the white landscape. Hard sprays of snow and spicules of sleet slanted through the headlights. The windshield wiper thumped monotonously, crusted with ice but still doing its job reasonably well. Visibility had decreased to ten or twelve yards.

Although the machine was responsive and could be stopped in a short distance, Harry kept it throttled back. He worried that unwittingly he might drive off a cliff, because he had no way of knowing where the iceberg ended.

The only vehicles in use by the Edgeway expedition were custom-stretched snowmobiles with rotary-combustion engines and specially engineered twenty-one-wheel, three-track bogie suspensions. Each machine could carry two adults in bulky thermal clothing on a thirty-six-inch padded bench. The driver and passenger rode in tandem, one behind the other.

Of course the machines had been adapted further for operations in the rugged polar winter, in which conditions were dramatically more severe than those encountered by snowmobile enthusiasts back in the States. Aside from the dual starter system and the pair of special heavy-duty arctic batteries, the major modification on each vehicle was the addition of a cabin that extended from the hood to the end of the stretched passenger bench. That enclosure was fabricated of riveted aluminum sheets and thick Plexiglas. An efficient little heater had been mounted over the engine, and two small fans conducted the warm air to the driver and passenger.

Perhaps the heater was a luxury, but the enclosed cabin was an absolute necessity. Without it, the continuous pounding of the wind would have chilled any driver to the bone and might have killed him on a trip longer than four or five miles.

A few of the sleds had been further modified in unique ways. Harry’s was one of those, for he was transporting the power drill. Most tools were carried in the shallow storage compartment that was hidden under the hinged top of the passenger bench, or in a small open-bed trailer towed behind. But the drill was too large for the storage compartment and too important to the expedition to be exposed to the shocks that rattled the bed of a cargo trailer; therefore, the last half of the bench was fitted with locking braces, and the drill was now dogged down tightly behind Harry, occupying the space where a passenger ordinarily would have been.

With those few modifications, the sled was well suited for work on the Greenland ice. At thirty miles per hour, it could be stopped within eighty feet. The twenty-inch-wide track provided excellent stability on moderately rough terrain. And although it weighed six hundred pounds in its adapted form, it had a top speed of forty-five miles per hour.

At the moment, that was considerably more power than Harry could use. He was holding the snowmobile to a crawl. If the brink of the iceberg abruptly loomed out of the storm, he’d have at most thirty or thirty-five feet in which to comprehend the danger and stop the machine. If he were going at all fast, he would not be able to stop in time. Hitting the brakes at the penultimate moment, he would pitch out into the night, down into the sea. Haunted by that mental image, he kept the engine throttled back to just five miles per hour.

Though caution and prudence were necessary, he had to make the best possible time. Every minute spent in transit increased the likelihood that they would become disoriented and hopelessly lost.

They had struck out due south from the sixtieth blasting shaft, maintaining that heading as well as they could, on the assumption that what had been east prior to the tsunami was now south. In the first fifteen or twenty minutes after the tidal wave, the iceberg would probably have drifted around on the compass as much as it was going to, finding its natural bow and stern; logically, it should now be sailing straight on course. If their assumption was wrong and if the berg was still turning, the temporary camp would no longer lay due south, either, and they would pass the igloos at a considerable distance, stumbling upon them only by accident, if at all.

Harry wished he could find the way back by visual references, but the night and the storm cloaked all landmarks. Besides, on the icecap, one monotonous landscape looked pretty much like another, and even in broad daylight it was possible to get lost without a functioning compass.

He glanced at the side-mounted mirror beyond the ice-speckled Plexiglas. The headlamps of the second sled—carrying Pete and Claude—sparkled in the frigorific darkness behind him.

Although distracted for only a second, he quickly returned to his scrutiny of the ice ahead, half expecting to see a yawning gulf just beyond the black tips of the snowmobile skis. The calcimined land still rolled away unbroken into the long night.

He also expected to see a glimmer of light from the temporary camp. Rita and Franz would realize that without a marker the camp would be difficult if not impossible to find in such weather. They would switch on the snowmobile lights and focus on the ridge of ice behind the camp: The glow, reflected and intensified, would be an unmistakable beacon.

But he was unable to see even a vague, shimmering luminescence ahead. The darkness worried him, for he took it to mean that the camp was gone, buried under tons of ice.

Although he was ordinarily optimistic, Harry sometimes was overcome by a morbid fear of losing his wife. Deep down, he didn’t believe that he really deserved her. She had brought more joy into his life than he had ever expected to know. She was precious to him, and fate had a way of taking from a man that which he held closest to his heart.

Of all the adventures that had enlivened Harry’s life since he’d left that Indiana farm, his relationship with Rita was by far the most exciting and rewarding. She was more exotic, more mysterious, more capable of surprising and charming and delighting him, than all the wonders of the world combined.