Icebound

by Dean Koontz

  The son of a Swedish father and a Danish mother, he had been on the Swedish ski teams at two winter Olympics, had earned one silver medal, and was proud of his heritage; he cultivated the image of an imperturbable Scandinavian and usually possessed an inner calm that matched his cool exterior. His wife said that, like precision calipers, his quick blue eyes continuously measured the world. When he wasn’t working outdoors, he usually wore slacks and colorful ski sweaters; at the moment, in fact, he was dressed as though lolling in a mountain lodge after a pleasant day on the slopes rather than sitting in an isolated hut on the winter icecap, waiting for calamity to strike.

  During the past several hours, however, he had lost a large measure of his characteristic composure. Chewing on the pipestem, he turned away from the frost-fringed windowpane and scowled at the computers and the data-gathering equipment that lined three walls of the telecommunications shack.

  Early the previous afternoon, when Harry and the others had gone south toward the edge of the ice, Gunvald had stayed behind to monitor incoming calls on the radio and to keep a watch over the station. This was not the first time that all but one of the expedition members had left Edgeway to conduct an experiment in the field, but on previous occasions, someone other than Gunvald had remained behind. After weeks of living in a tiny community with eight too-close neighbors, he had been eager for his session of solitude.

  By four o’clock the previous day, however, when Edgeway’s seismographs registered the first quake, Gunvald had begun to wish that the other members of the team had not ventured so near to the edge of the ice, where the polar cap met the sea. At 4:14, the jolt was confirmed by radio reports from Reykjavik, Iceland, and from Hammerfest, Norway. Severe slippage had occurred in the seabed sixty miles northeast of Raufarhöfn, Iceland. The shock was on the same chain of interlinked faults that had triggered destructive volcanic eruptions on Iceland more than three decades ago. This time there had been no damage on any land bordering the Greenland Sea, although the tremor had registered a solid 6.5 on the Richter scale.

  Gunvald’s concern arose from the suspicion that the quake had been neither an isolated incident nor the main event. He had good reason to believe that it was a foreshock, precursor to an event of far greater magnitude.

  From the outset the team had intended to study, among other things, ocean-bed temblors in the Greenland Sea to learn more about local suboceanic fault lines. They were working in a geologically active part of the earth that could never be trusted until it was better known. If dozens of ships were to be towing colossal icebergs in those waters, they would need to know how often the sea was disturbed by major submarine quakes and by resultant high waves. A tsunami—a titanic wave radiating from the epicenter of a powerful quake—could endanger even a fairly large ship, although less in the open sea than if the vessel was near a shoreline.

  He should have been pleased with the opportunity to observe, at such close quarters, the characteristics and patterns of major temblors on the Greenland Sea fault network. But he wasn’t pleased at all.

  Using a microwave uplink to orbiting communications satellites, Gunvald was able to go on-line and access any computers tied into the worldwide Infonet. Though he was geographically isolated, he had at his disposal virtually all the research databases and software that would have been available in any city.

  Yesterday, he had tapped those impressive resources to analyze the seismographic data on the recent quake. What he discovered had made him uneasy.

  The enormous energy of the temblor had been released less by lateral seabed movement than by violent upward thrust. That was precisely the type of ground movement that would put the greatest amount of strain on the interlinked faults lying to the east of the one on which the first event had transpired.

  Edgeway Station itself was in no imminent danger. If major seabed slippage occurred nearby, a tsunami might roll beneath the icecap and precipitate some changes: Primarily, new chasms and pressure ridges would form. If the quake were related to submarine volcanic activity, in which millions of cubic tons of molten lava gushed out of the ocean floor, perhaps even temporary holes of warm water would open in the icecap. But most of the polar terrain would be unchanged, and the likelihood was slim that the base camp would be either damaged or destroyed.

  The other expedition members, however, couldn’t be as certain of their safety as Gunvald was of his own. In addition to creating pressure ridges and chasms, a hot tsunami was likely to snap off sections of the ice at the edge of the winter field. Harry and the others might find the cap falling out from under them while the sea rushed up dark, cold, and deadly.

  At nine o’clock last night, five hours after the first tremor, the second quake—5.8 on the Richter scale—had hit the fault chain. The seabed had shifted violently one hundred five miles north-northeast of Raufarhöfn. The epicenter had been thirty-five miles nearer Edgeway than that of the initial shaker.

  Gunvald took no comfort from the fact that the second quake had been less powerful than the first. The diminution in force was not absolute proof that the more recent temblor had been an aftershock to the first. Both might have been foreshocks, with the main event still to come.

  During the Cold War, the United States had planted a series of extremely sensitive sonic monitors on the floor of the Greenland Sea, as well as in many other strategic areas of the world’s oceans, to detect the nearly silent passage of nuclear-armed enemy submarines. Subsequent to the collapse of the Soviet Union, some of those sophisticated devices had begun doing double duty, both monitoring submarines and providing data for scientific purposes. Since the second quake, most of the deep-ocean listening stations in the Greenland Sea had been transmitting a faint but almost continuous low-frequency grumble: the ominous sound of growing elastic stress in the crust of the earth.

  A slow-motion domino reaction might have begun. And the dominoes might be falling toward Edgeway Station.

  During the past sixteen hours, Gunvald had spent less time smoking his pipe than chewing nervously on the stem of it.

  At nine-thirty the previous night, when the radio confirmed the location and force of the second shock, Gunvald had put through a call to the temporary camp six miles to the southwest. He told Harry about the quakes and explained the risks that they were taking by remaining on the perimeter of the polar ice.

  “We’ve got a job to do,” Harry had said. “Forty-six packages are in place, armed, and ticking. Getting them out of the ice again before they all detonate would be harder than getting a politician’s hand out of your pocket. And if we don’t place the other fourteen tomorrow, without all sixty synchronized charges, we likely won’t break off the size berg we need. In effect, we’ll be aborting the mission, which is out of the question.”

  “I think we should consider it.”

  “No, no. The project’s too damned expensive to chuck it all just because there might be a seismic risk. Money’s tight. We might not get another chance if we screw up this one.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Gunvald acknowledged, “but I don’t like it.”

  The open frequency crackled with static as Harry said, “Can’t say I’m doing cartwheels, either. Do you have any projection about how long it might take major slippage to pass through an entire fault chain like this one?”

  “You know that’s anybody’s guess, Harry. Days, maybe weeks, even months.”

  “You see? We have more than enough time. Hell, it can even take longer.”

  “Or it can happen much faster. In hours.”

  “Not this time. The second tremor was less violent than the first, wasn’t it?” Harry asked.

  “And you know perfectly well that doesn’t mean the reaction will just play itself out. The third might be smaller or larger than the first two.”

  “At any rate,” Harry said, “the ice is seven hundred feet thick where we are. It won’t just splinter apart like the first coat on a winter pond.”

  “Nevertheless, I strongly suggest
you wrap things up quickly tomorrow.”

  “No need to worry about that. Living out here in these damned inflatable igloos makes any lousy shack at Edgeway seem like a suite at the Ritz-Carlton.”

  After that conversation, Gunvald Larsson had gone to bed. He hadn’t slept well. In his nightmares, the world crumbled apart, dropped away from him in enormous chunks, and he fell into a cold, bottomless void.

  At seven-thirty in the morning, while Gunvald had been shaving, with the bad dreams still fresh in his mind, the seismograph had recorded a third tremor: Richter 5.2.

  His breakfast had consisted of a single cup of black coffee. No appetite.

  At eleven o’clock the fourth quake had struck only two hundred miles due south: 4.4 on the Richter scale.

  He had not been cheered to see that each event was less powerful than the one that preceded it. Perhaps the earth was conserving its energy for a single gigantic blow.

  The fifth tremor had hit at 11:50. The epicenter was approximately one hundred ten miles due south. Much closer than any previous tremor, essentially on their doorstep. Richter 4.2.

  He’d called the temporary camp, and Rita Carpenter had assured him that the expedition would leave the edge of the icecap by two o’clock.

  “The weather will be a problem,” Gunvald worried.

  “It’s snowing here, but we thought is was a local squall.”

  “I’m afraid not. The storm is shifting course and picking up speed. We’ll have heavy snow this afternoon.”

  “We’ll surely be back at Edgeway by four o’clock,” she’d said. “Maybe sooner.”

  At twelve minutes past noon another slippage had occurred in the subsea crust, one hundred miles south: 4.5 on the Richter scale.

  Now, at twelve-thirty, when Harry and the others were probably planting the final package of explosives, Gunvald Larsson was biting so hard on his pipe that, with only the slightest additional pressure, he could have snapped the stem in two.

  12:30

  Almost six miles from Edgeway Station, the temporary camp stood on a flat section of ice in the lee of a pressure ridge, sheltered from the pressing wind.

  Three inflatable, quilted, rubberized nylon igloos were arranged in a semicircle approximately five yards from that fifty-foot-high ridge of ice. Two snowmobiles were parked in front of the structures. Each igloo was twelve feet in diameter and eight feet high at the center point. They were firmly anchored with long-shanked, threaded pitons and had cushiony floors of lightweight, foilclad insulation blankets. Small space heaters powered by diesel fuel kept the interior air at fifty degrees Fahrenheit. The accommodations weren’t either spacious or cozy, but they were temporary, to be used only while the team planted the sixty packages of explosives.

  A hundred yards to the south, on a plateau that was five or six feet above the camp, a six-foot steel pipe rose from the ice. Fixed to it were a thermometer, a barometer, and an anemometer.

  With one gloved hand, Rita Carpenter brushed snow from the goggles that protected her eyes and then from the faces of the three instruments on the pole. Forced to use a flashlight in the steadily deepening gloom, she read the temperature, the atmospheric pressure, and the wind velocity. She didn’t like what she saw. The storm had not been expected to reach them until at least six o’clock that night, but it was bearing down hard and was liable to be on them in full force before they had finished their work and completed the return journey to Edgeway Station.

  Awkwardly negotiating the forty-five-degree slope between the plateau and the lower plain, Rita started back toward the temporary camp. She could move only awkwardly because she was wearing full survival gear: knitted thermal underwear, two pairs of socks, felt boots, fleece-lined outer boots, thin woolen trousers and shirt, quilted thermal nylon suit, a fur-lined coat, a knitted mask that covered her face from chin to goggles, a fur-lined hood that laced under her chin, and gloves. In this cruel weather, body heat had to be maintained at the cost of easy mobility; awkwardness, clumsiness, and discomfort were the burdens of survival.

  Though Rita was warm enough, the bitter-cold wind and the barren landscape chilled her emotionally. By choice, both she and Harry had spent a large portion of their professional lives in the Arctic and Antarctic; however, she did not share Harry’s love of the vast open spaces, the monochromatic vistas, the immense curve of sky, and the primal storms. In fact, she’d driven herself to return repeatedly to those polar regions primarily because she was afraid of them.

  Since the winter when she was six years old, Rita had stubbornly refused to surrender to any fear, ever again, no matter how justified surrender might be….

  Now, as she approached the igloo on the west end of camp, with the wind hammering her back, she suddenly suffered a phobic reaction so intense that it nearly brought her to her knees. Cryophobia: the fear of ice and frost. Frigophobia: the fear of cold. Chionophobia: the fear of snow. Rita knew those terms because she suffered from mild forms of all three phobias. Frequent confrontation with the sources of her anxieties, like inoculations against influenza, had ensured that she usually suffered only minor discomfort, uneasiness, seldom flat-out terror. Sometimes, however, she was overwhelmed by memories against which no number of inoculations was sufficient protection. Like now. The tumultuous white sky seemed to descend at the speed of a falling rock, to press relentlessly upon her as though the air and the clouds and the sheeting snow had magically metamorphosed into a massive slab of marble that would crush her into the unyielding, frozen plain. Her heart pounded hard and fast, then much harder and faster than before, then faster still, until its frantic cadence drummed, drummed, drummed so loudly in her ears that it drowned out the quarrelsome moaning of the wind.

  Outside the igloo entrance, she halted and held her ground, refusing to run from that which terrified her. She required herself to endure the isolation of that bleak and gloom-shrouded realm, as someone who had an irrational fear of dogs might force himself to pet one until the panic passed.

  That isolation, in fact, was the aspect of the Arctic that most troubled Rita. In her mind, since she was six years old, winter had been inextricably associated with the fearful solitude of the dying, with the gray and distorted faces of corpses, with the frost-glazed stares of dead and sightless eyes, with graveyards and graves and suffocating despair.

  She was trembling so violently that the beam of her flashlight jittered across the snow at her feet.

  Turning away from the inflatable shelter, she faced not into the wind but crosswise to it, studying the narrow plain that lay between the plateau and the pressure ridge. Eternal winter. Without warmth, solace, or hope.

  It was a land to be respected, yes, all right. But it was not a beast, possessed no awareness, had no conscious intention to do her harm.

  She breathed deeply, rhythmically, through her knitted mask.

  To help quell her irrational fear of the icecap, she told herself that she had a greater problem waiting in the igloo beside her. Franz Fischer.

  She had met Fischer eleven years ago, shortly after she earned her doctorate and took her first research position with a division of International Telephone and Telegraph. Franz, who had also worked for ITT, was attractive and not without charm when he chose to reveal it, and they’d been together for nearly two years. It hadn’t been an altogether calm, relaxed, and loving relationship. But at least she had never been bored by it. They’d separated nine years ago, as the publication of her first book approached, when it became clear that Franz would never be entirely comfortable with a woman who was his professional and intellectual equal. He expected to dominate, and she would not be dominated. She had walked out on him, met Harry, gotten married a year later, and never looked back.

  Because he had come into Rita’s life after Franz, Harry felt, in his unfailingly sweet and reasonable way, that their history was none of his concern. He was secure in his marriage and sure of himself. Even knowing of that relationship, therefore, he had recruited Franz to be the chief mete
orologist at Edgeway Station, because the German was the best man for the job.

  In this one instance, unreasonable jealousy would have served Harry—and all of them—better than rationality. Second best would have been preferable.

  Nine years after their separation, Franz still insisted on playing the lover scorned, complete with stiff upper lip and soulful eyes. He was neither cold nor rude; to the contrary, he strove to create the impression that at night he nursed a badly broken heart in the lonely privacy of his sleeping bag. He never mentioned the past, showed any improper interest in Rita, or conducted himself in less than a gentlemanly fashion. In the confines of a polar outpost, however, the care with which he displayed his wounded pride was as disruptive, in its way, as shouted insults would have been.

  The wind groaned, the snow churned around her, and the ice stretched out of sight as it had since time immemorial—but gradually her racing heartbeat subsided to a normal rate. She stopped shaking. The terror passed.

  She’d won again.

  When at last Rita entered the igloo, Franz was on his knees, packing instruments into a carton. He had taken off his outer boots, coat, and gloves. He dared not work up a sweat, because it would chill his skin, even inside his thermal suit, and leach precious heat from him when he went outdoors. He glanced up at her, nodded, and continued packing.

  He possessed a certain animal magnetism, and Rita could see why she had been drawn to him when she was younger. Thick blond hair, deep-set dark eyes, Nordic features. He was only five nine, just an inch taller than she, but at forty-five he was as muscular and as trim as a boy.

  “Wind is up to twenty-four miles,” she said, pushing back her hood and removing her goggles. “Air temp’s down to ten degrees Fahrenheit and falling.”

  “With the wind-chill factor, it’ll be minus twenty or worse by the time we break camp.” He didn’t look up. He seemed to be talking to himself.