Icebound (6 page)

He told himself that the lack of signal lights ahead was most likely a positive sign. The odds were good that the igloos still stood on the solid winter field and not on the berg. And if the temporary camp was still back there on the icecap, then Rita would be secure at Edgeway Station within a couple of hours.

But no matter whether Rita was on the berg or the cap, the pressure ridge that loomed behind the camp might have collapsed, crushing her.

Hunching farther over the handlebars, he squinted through the falling snow: nothing.

If he found Rita alive, even if she was trapped with him, he would thank God every minute of the rest of his life—which might total precious few. How could they get off this ship of ice? How would they survive the night? A quick end might be preferable to the special misery of a slow death by freezing.

Just thirty feet ahead, in the headlights, a narrow black line appeared on the snow-swept plain: a crack in the ice, barely visible from his perspective.

He hit the brakes hard. The machine slid around thirty degrees on its axis, skis clattering loudly. He turned the handlebars into the slide until he felt the track gripping again, and then he steered back to the right.

Still moving, gliding like a hockey puck, Jesus, twenty feet from the looming pit and
still
sliding…

The dimensions of the black line grew clearer. Ice was visible beyond it. So it must be a crevasse. Not the ultimate brink with only night on the far side and only the cold sea at the base of it. Just a crevasse.

…sliding, sliding…

On the way out from camp, the ice had been flawless. Apparently the subsea activity had also opened this chasm.

…fifteen feet…

The skis rattled. Something knocked against the undercarriage. The snow cover was thin. Ice offered poor traction. Snow billowed from the skis, from the churning polyurethane track, like clouds of smoke.

…ten feet…

The sled stopped smoothly, rocking imperceptibly on its bogie suspension, so near the crevasse that Harry was not able to see the edge of the ice over the sloped front of the machine. The tips of the skis must have been protruding into empty air beyond the brink. A few more inches, and he would have been balanced like a teeter-totter, rocking between death and survival.

He slipped the machine into reverse and backed up two or three feet, until he could see the precipice.

He wondered if he were clinically mad for wanting to work in this deadly wasteland.

Shivering, but not because of the cold, he pulled his goggles from his forehead, fitted them over his eyes, opened the cabin door, and got out. The wind had the force of a blow from a sledgehammer, but he didn’t mind it. The chill that passed through him was proof that he was alive.

The headlights revealed that the crevasse was only about four yards wide at the center and narrowed drastically toward both ends. It was no more than fifteen yards long, not large but certainly big enough to have swallowed him. Gazing down into the blackness under the headlights, he suspected that the depth of the chasm could be measured in hundreds of feet.

He shuddered and turned his back to it. Under his many layers of clothing, he felt a bead of sweat, the pure distillate of fear, trickle down the hollow of his back.

Twenty feet behind his sled, the second snowmobile was stopped with its engine running, lights blazing. Pete Johnson squeezed out through the cabin door.

Harry waved and started toward him.

The ice rumbled.

Surprised, Harry halted.

The ice moved.

For an instant he thought that another seismic wave was passing beneath them. But they were adrift now and wouldn’t be affected by a tsunami in the same way as they had been when on the fixed icecap. The berg would only wallow like a ship in rough seas and ride out the turbulence without damage; it wouldn’t groan, crack, heave, and tremble.

The disturbance was entirely local—in fact, it was directly under his feet. Suddenly the ice opened in front of him, a zigzagging crack about an inch wide, wider, wider, now as wide as his hand, then even wider. He was standing with his back to the brink, and the badly fractured wall of the newly formed crevasse was disintegrating beneath him.

He staggered, flung himself forward, jumped across the jagged fissure, aware that it was widening under him even as he was in mid-leap. He fell on the far side and rolled away from that treacherous patch of ice.

Behind him, the wall of the crevasse calved off thick slabs that crashed into the depths, and thunder rose from below. The plain shivered.

Harry pushed up onto his knees, not sure if he was safe yet. Hell, no. The edge of the chasm continued to disintegrate into the pit, the crevasse widened toward him, and he scrambled frantically away from it.

Gasping, he glanced back in time to see his snowmobile, its rotary engine humming, as it slid into the chasm. It slammed against the far wall of the crevasse and was pinned there for an instant by a truck-size slab of ice. The fuel in the main and auxiliary tanks exploded. Flames gushed high into the wind but quickly subsided as the burning wreckage sought the depths. Around and under him, red-orange phantoms shimmered briefly in the milky ice; then the fire puffed out, and darkness took command.

1:07

Cryophobia. The fear of ice.

Their circumstances made it far harder than usual for Rita Carpenter to repress that persistent, debilitating terror.

Portions of the pressure ridge had partially collapsed while other sections had been radically recontoured by the tsunami. Now a shallow cave—approximately forty feet deep and thirty feet wide—pocked those white ramparts. The ceiling was as high as twenty feet in some places and as low as ten in others: one half smooth and slanted, the other half composed of countless boulders and partitions of ice jammed together in a tight, mutually supportive, white-on-white mosaic that had a malevolent beauty and reminded Rita of the surreal stage sets in
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,
a very old movie.

She hesitated in the entrance to that cold haven, reluctant to follow Franz Fischer across the threshold, plagued by the irrational feeling that she would be moving not merely forward a few feet but simultaneously backward in time to that winter day when she was six, to the rumble and the roar and the living death of the white tomb….

Clenching her teeth, struggling to repress a sense of almost paralyzing dread, she went inside. The storm raged behind her, but she found comparative quiet within those white walls, as well as relief from the biting wind and snow.

With her flashlight, Rita studied the ceiling and the walls, searching for indications that the structure was in imminent danger of collapsing. The cave appeared to be stable enough at the moment, although another powerful tsunami, passing under the ice, might bring down the ceiling.

“Risky,” she said, unable to prevent her voice from breaking nervously.

Franz agreed. “But we don’t have any choice.”

All three inflatable shelters had been destroyed beyond repair. To remain outside in the increasingly fierce wind for an extended period of time would be courting hypothermia, in spite of their insulated storm suits. Their desperate need for shelter outweighed the danger of the cave.

They went outside again and carried the shortwave radio—which appeared to have survived the destruction of the camp—into the ice cave and set it on the floor against the rear wall. Franz ran wires in from the backup battery of the undamaged snowmobile, and they hooked up the transceiver. Rita switched it on, and the selection band glowed sea green. The crackle of static and an eerie whistling shivered along the walls of ice.

“It works,” she said, relieved.

Adjusting his hood to make it tighter at the throat, Franz said, “I’ll see what else I can salvage.” Leaving the flashlight with her, he went out into the storm, shoulders hunched and head tucked down in anticipation of the wind.

Franz had no sooner stepped outside than an urgent transmission came through from Gunvald at Edgeway Station.

Rita crouched at the radio and quickly acknowledged the call.

“What a relief to hear your voice,” Gunvald said. “Is everyone all right?”

“The camp was destroyed, but Franz and I are okay. We’ve taken shelter in an ice cave.”

“Harry and the others?”

“We don’t know what’s happened to them,” she said, and her chest tightened with anxiety as she spoke. “They’re out on work details. We’ll give them fifteen minutes to show up before we go looking.” She hesitated and cleared her throat. “The thing is…we’re adrift.”

For a moment, Gunvald was too stunned to speak. Then: “Are you certain?”

“A change in wind direction alerted us. Then the compasses.”

“Give me a moment,” Larsson said with audible distress. “Let me think.”

In spite of the storm and the strong magnetic disturbances that accompanied bad weather in those latitudes, Larsson’s voice was clear and easy to follow. But then he was only four air miles away. As the storm accelerated, and as the iceberg drifted farther south, they were certain to have severe communications problems. Both understood that they would soon lose contact, but neither mentioned it.

Larsson said, “What’s the size of this iceberg of yours? Do you have any idea?”

“None at all. We haven’t had an opportunity to reconnoiter. Right now, we’re just searching for whatever’s salvageable in the wreckage of the camp.”

“If the iceberg isn’t very large…” Gunvald’s voice faded into static.

“I can’t read you.”

Shatters of static.

“Gunvald, are you still there?”

His voice returned: “…if the berg isn’t large…Harry and the others might not be adrift with you.”

Rita closed her eyes. “I hope that’s true.”

“Whether they are or aren’t, the situation is far from hopeless. The weather’s still good enough for me to get a message by satellite relay to the United States Air Force base at Thule. Once I’ve alerted them, they can contact those UNGY trawlers standing south of you.”

“But what then? No sensible captain would bring a trawler north into a bad winter storm. He’d lose his ship and his crew trying to save us.”

“They’ve got the most modern rescue aircraft at Thule, some damn rugged helicopters capable of maneuvering in almost any conditions.”

“There isn’t a plane yet invented that can fly safely in this kind of storm—let alone set down on an iceberg in gale-force winds.”

The radio produced only crackling static and warbling electronic squeals, but she sensed that Gunvald was still there.

Yes, she thought. It leaves me speechless too.

She glanced up at the angled slabs that had jammed together to form the ceiling. Snow and shavings of ice sifted down through a few of the cracks.

Finally the Swede said, “Okay, you’re right about the aircraft. But we can’t give up hope of rescue.”

“Agreed.”

“Because…well…listen, Rita, this storm could last three or four days.”

“Or longer,” she acknowledged.

“You haven’t got enough food for that.”

“Hardly any. But food isn’t so terribly important,” Rita said. “We can last longer than four days without food.”

They both knew that starvation was not the danger. Nothing mattered as much as the bone-freezing, unrelenting cold.

Gunvald said, “Take turns getting warm in the snowmobiles. Do you have a good supply of fuel?”

“Enough to get back to Edgeway—if that were possible. Not a hell of a lot more than that. Enough to run the engines for a few hours, not a few days.”

“Well, then…”

Silence. Static.

He came back after several seconds. “…put through that call to Thule all the same. They have to know about this. They might see an answer that we’ve overlooked, have a less emotional perspective.”

She said, “Edgeway came through unscathed?”

“Fine here.”

“And you?”

“Not a bruise.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“I’ll live. And so will you, Rita.”

“I’ll try,” she said. “I’ll sure as hell try.”

1:10

Brian Dougherty siphoned gasoline from the tank of the upright snowmobile and poured it onto a two-foot section of ice at the brink of the cliff.

Roger Breskin twisted open a chemical match and tossed it into the gasoline. Flames erupted, flapped like bright tattered flags in the wind, but burned out within seconds.

Kneeling where the fire had been, Brian examined the edge of the precipice. The ice had been jagged; now it was smooth and slick. A climber’s rope would slide over it without fraying.

“Good enough?” Roger asked.

Brian nodded.

Roger stooped and snatched up the free end of a thirty-five-foot rope that he had tied to the frame of the snowmobile and had also anchored to a long, threaded piton identical to those used to secure the radio transmitter. He quickly looped it around Brian’s chest and shoulders, fashioning a harness of sorts. He tied three sturdy knots at the center of the younger man’s chest and said, “It’ll hold. It’s nylon, thousand-pound test. Just remember to grip the rope above your head with both hands so you’ll keep at least some of the pressure off your shoulders.”

Because he did not trust himself to speak without a nervous stammer, Brian nodded.

Roger returned to the snowmobile, which was facing toward the precipice and which he had disconnected from its cargo trailer. He climbed into the cabin and closed the door. He held the brakes and revved the engine.

Trembling, Brian stretched out on his stomach, flat on the ice. He took a deep breath through his knitted ski mask, hesitated only briefly, and pushed himself feet-first over the edge of the cliff. Although he didn’t drop far, his stomach lurched, and a thrill of terror like an electrical current sizzled through him. The rope pulled tight, checking his descent when the crown of his head was only inches below the top of the iceberg.

As yet, too little of the line hung past the brink to enable him to reach overhead and get a firm grip on it. He was forced to take the strain entirely with his shoulders. Immediately a dull ache arose in his joints, across his back, and up the nape of his neck. The ache would rapidly escalate into a sharp pain.