Icebound

by Dean Koontz

  “It’s very late in the twentieth century, you know.”

  Mocking himself, he said, “Yes, well, actually, I’ve noticed women sometimes wear pants these days.”

  “Are you offended?”

  “By women in pants?”

  “By me trying to get you out of yours.”

  “Good heavens, no.”

  “If I’ve been too bold…”

  “Not at all.”

  “Actually, I’ve never done anything like this before. I mean, going to bed on a first date.”

  “Neither have I.”

  “Or on a second or a third, for that matter.”

  “Neither have I.”

  “But it feels right, doesn’t it?”

  He eased the bottle into the ice and pulled her into his arms. Her lips were the texture of a dream, and her body against his felt like destiny.

  They skipped the rest of the convention and stayed in bed. They had their meals sent up. They talked, made love, and slept as if they were drugged.

  Someone was shouting his name.

  Stiff with cold, crusted with snow, Harry raised himself from the bed of the cargo trailer and from the delicious memories. He looked over his shoulder.

  Claude Jobert was staring at him through the rear window of the snowmobile cabin. “Harry! Hey, Harry!” He was barely audible above the wind and the engine noise. “Lights! Ahead! Look!”

  At first he didn’t understand what Claude meant. He was stiff, chilled, and still half in that Paris hotel room. Then he lifted his gaze and saw that they were driving directly toward a hazy yellow light that sparkled in the snowflakes and shimmered languidly across the ice. He pushed up on his hands and knees, ready to jump from the trailer the instant that it stopped.

  Pete Johnson drove the snowmobile along the familiar ice plateau and down into the basin where the igloos had been. The domes were deflated, crushed by enormous slabs of ice. But one snowmobile was running, headlights ablaze, and two people in arctic gear stood beside it, waving.

  One of them was Rita.

  Harry launched himself out of the trailer while the snowmobile was still in motion. He fell into the snow, rolled, stumbled onto his feet, and ran to her.

  “Harry!”

  He grabbed her, nearly lifted her above his head, then put her down and lowered his snow mask and tried to speak and couldn’t speak and hugged her instead.

  Eventually, voice quivering, she said, “Are you hurt?”

  “Nosebleed.”

  “That’s all?”

  “And it’s stopped. You?”

  “Just frightened.”

  He knew that she struggled always against her fear of snow, ice, and cold, and he never ceased to admire her unwavering determination to confront her phobias and to work in the very climate that most tested her. “You’ve good reason this time,” he said. “Listen, you know what we’ll do if we get off this damned berg?”

  She shook her head and shoved up her misted goggles, so he could see her lovely green eyes. They were wide with curiosity and delight.

  “We’ll go to Paris,” he told her.

  Grinning, she said, “To the Crazy Horse Saloon.”

  “George V.”

  “A room overlooking the gardens.”

  “Moët.”

  He pulled up his own goggles, and she kissed him.

  Clapping one hand on Harry’s shoulder, Pete Johnson said, “Have some consideration for those whose wives don’t like frostbite. And didn’t you hear what I said? I said, ‘The gang’s all here.’” He pointed to a pair of snowmobiles racing toward them through the snow.

  “Roger, Brian, and George,” Rita said with obvious relief.

  “Must be,” Johnson said. “Not likely to run across a bunch of strangers out here.”

  “The gang’s all here,” Harry agreed. “But where in the name of God does it go next?”

  1:32

  On the fourteenth day of a hundred-day electronic-espionage mission, the Russian nuclear submarine Ilya Pogodin reached its first monitoring station on schedule. The captain, Nikita Gorov, ordered the maneuvering room to hold the boat steady in the moderate southeasterly currents northwest of Jan Mayen Island, forty miles from the coast of Greenland and one hundred feet beneath the stormy surface of the North Atlantic.

  The Ilya Pogodin had been named after an official Hero of the Soviet People, in the days before the corrupt bureaucracy had failed and the totalitarian state had crumbled under the weight of its own inefficiency and venality. The boat’s name had not been changed: in part because the navy was tradition bound; in part because the new quasi-democracy was fragile, and care still had to be taken not to offend the bitter and potentially murderous old-guard Party members who had been driven from power but who might one day come storming back to reopen the extermination camps and the institutions of “reeducation” and in part because Russia was now so fearfully poor, so totally bankrupted by Marxism and by legions of pocket-lining politicians, that the country could spare no funds for the repainting of boat names or for the alteration of records to reflect those changes.

  Gorov was unable to obtain even adequate maintenance for his vessel. In these trying days after the fall of empire, he was too worried about the integrity of the pressure hull, the nuclear power plant, and the engines to spare any concern for the fact that the Ilya Pogodin was named after a despicable thief and murderer who had been nothing more noble than a dutiful defender of the late, unlamented regime.

  Although the Pogodin was an aging fleet submarine that had never carried nuclear missiles, only some nuclear-tipped torpedoes, it was nonetheless a substantial boat, measuring three hundred sixty feet from bow to stern, with a forty-two-foot beam and a draft of thirty-two feet six inches. It displaced over eight thousand tons when fully submerged.

  The southeasterly currents had a negligible influence on the boat. It would never drift more than one hundred yards from where Gorov had ordered it held steady.

  Peter Timoshenko, the young communications officer, was in the control center at Gorov’s side. Around them, the windows and gauges of the electronic equipment pulsed and glowed and blinked in the half-light: red, amber, green, blue. Even the ceiling was lined with scopes, graphs, display screens, and control panels. When the maneuvering room acknowledged Gorov’s order to hold the boat steady, and when the engine room and reactor room had been made aware of it, Timoshenko said, “Request permission to run up the aerial, Captain.”

  “That’s what we’re here for.”

  Timoshenko stepped into the main companionway and walked thirty feet to the communications shack, a surprisingly small space packed full of radio equipment capable of receiving and sending encrypted messages in ultrahigh frequency (UHF), high frequency (HF), very low frequency (VLF), and extremely low frequency (ELF). He sat at the primary console and studied the display screens and scopes on his own extensive array of transceivers and computers. He smiled and began to hum as he worked.

  In the company of most men, Peter Timoshenko felt awkward, but he was always comfortable with the companionship of machines. He had been at ease in the control room, but this place, with its even heavier concentration of electronics, was his true home.

  “Are we ready?” another technician asked.

  “Yes.” Timoshenko flicked a yellow switch.

  Topside, on the outer hull of the Ilya Pogodin, a small helium balloon was ejected from a pressurized tube on the sail. It rose rapidly through the dark sea, expanding as it went, trailing the multicommunications wire behind it. When the balloon broke the surface, the technicians in the Pogodin were able to monitor every message sent to, from, and within the eastern coast of Greenland via virtually every communications medium except note-passing and underground telephone lines. Because it was the same dull gray-blue as the winter sea, the balloon—and the short, complicated antenna attached to it—couldn’t have been seen from the deck of a ship even ten yards away.

  On land and in civilian society,
Timoshenko was frequently self-conscious. He was tall, lanky, rawboned, awkward, and often clumsy. In restaurants and nightclubs, on city streets, he suspected that people were watching him and were quietly amused by his lack of grace. In the Pogodin, however, secure in his deep domain, he felt blessedly invisible, as though the sea were not a part of the world above the surface but a parallel dimension to it, and as though he were a spirit slipping through those cold depths, able to hear the inhabitants in the world above without being heard, to see without being seen, safe from their stares, not an object of amusement any longer. A ghost.

  After giving Timoshenko a while to deploy the aerial and scan a wide spectrum of frequencies, Captain Gorov stepped into the doorway of the communications shack. He nodded at the assistant technician. To Timoshenko, he said, “Anything?”

  The communications officer was smiling and holding a single earphone to his left ear. “Full input.”

  “Of interest?”

  “Not much as yet. There’s a group of American Marines winter-testing some equipment near the coast.”

  Although they were living in the long shadow of the Cold War’s passage, in a world where old enemies were supposed to have become neutral toward one another or were even said to have become fine friends, the greater part of the former Soviet intelligence apparatus remained intact, both at home and abroad. The Russian Navy continued to conduct extensive information-gathering along the coastlines of every major Western nation, as well as at most points of strategic military importance in the Third World. Change, after all, was the only constant. If enemies could become friends virtually overnight, they could become enemies again with equivalent alacrity.

  “Keep me informed,” Gorov said. Then he went to the officer’s mess and ate lunch.

  1:40

  Crouched at the shortwave radio, in contact with Edgeway Station, Harry said, “Have you gotten through to Thule?”

  Although Gunvald Larsson’s voice was filtered through a sieve of static, it was intelligible. “I’ve been in continuous contact with them and with Norwegian officials at a meteorological station on Spitsbergen for the past twenty-five minutes.”

  “Can either of them reach us?”

  “The Norwegians are pretty much locked in by ice. The Americans have several Kaman Huskies at Thule. That’s their standard rescue helicopter. The Huskies have auxiliary fuel tanks and long-range capability. But conditions at ground level aren’t really good enough to allow them to lift off. Terrific winds. And by the time they got to you—if they could get to you—the weather would have deteriorated so much they probably wouldn’t be able to put down on your iceberg.”

  “There doesn’t just happen to be an icebreaker or a battleship in our neighborhood?”

  “The Americans say not.”

  “So much for miracles.”

  “Do you think you can ride it out?”

  Harry said, “We haven’t taken an inventory of our remaining supplies, but I’m sure we don’t have enough fuel to keep us warm any longer than another twenty-four hours.”

  A loud burst of static echoed like submachine-gun fire in the ice cave.

  Gunvald hesitated. Then: “According to the latest forecasts, this is bigger than any other major weather pattern we’ve had all winter. We’re in for a week of bitter storms. One atop the other. Not even a brief respite between them.”

  A week. Harry closed his eyes against the sight of the ice wall beyond the radio, for in that prismatic surface, he saw their fate too clearly. Even in thermal clothing, even sheltered from the wind, they could not survive for a week with no heat. They were virtually without food; hunger would weaken their resistance to the subzero temperatures.

  “Harry, did you read me?”

  He opened his eyes. “I read you. It doesn’t look good, does it? Then again, we’re drifting south, out of the bad weather.”

  “I’ve been studying the charts here. Do you have any idea how many miles per day that berg of yours will travel?”

  “At a guess…thirty, maybe forty.”

  “That’s approximately the same figure I’ve arrived at with the charts. And do you know how much of that represents real southward movement?”

  Harry thought about it. “Twenty miles per day?”

  “At best. Perhaps as little as ten.”

  “Ten. You’re sure? Strike that. Stupid of me. Of course, you’re sure. Just how large is this storm pattern?”

  “Harry, it ranges one hundred and twenty miles south of your last known position. You’d need eight or ten days or even longer to get out of the blizzard to a place where those helicopters could reach you.”

  “What about the UNGY trawlers?”

  “The Americans have relayed the news to them. Both ships are making for you at their best possible speed. But according to Thule, seas are extremely rough even beyond the storm area. And those trawlers are two hundred and thirty miles away. Under the current conditions, their best speed won’t amount to much.”

  They had to know precisely where they stood, no matter how tenuous their position might be. Harry said, “Can a ship that size push a hundred miles or more into a storm as bad as this one without being torn to pieces?”

  “I think those two captains are courageous—but not suicidal,” Gunvald said flatly.

  Harry agreed with that assessment.

  “They’ll be forced to turn back,” Gunvald said.

  Harry sighed. “Yeah. They won’t have any choice. Okay, Gunvald, I’ll call you again in fifteen minutes. We’ve got to have a conference here. There’s a chance we’ll think of something.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  Harry put the microphone on top of the radio. He stood and regarded the others. “You heard.”

  Everyone in the ice cave was staring either at Harry or at the now silent radio. Pete, Roger, and Franz stood near the entrance; their goggles were in place, and they were ready to go outside and pick through the ruins of the temporary camp. Brian Dougherty had been studying a chart of the Greenland Sea and the North Atlantic; but listening to Gunvald, he had realized that pinpointing the location of the trawlers was useless, and he had folded the chart. Before Harry had called Edgeway Station, George Lin had been pacing from one end of the cave to the other, exercising his bruised muscles to prevent stiffness. Now he stood motionless, not even blinking, as if frozen alive. Rita and Claude knelt on the floor of the cave, where they’d been taking an inventory of the contents of a carton of foodstuffs that had been severely damaged by the collapsing pressure ridge. To Harry, for a moment, they seemed to be not real people but lifeless mannequins in a strange tableau—perhaps because, without some great stroke of luck, they were already as good as dead.

  Rita said what they were all thinking but what no one else cared to mention: “Even if the trawlers can reach us, they won’t be here until tomorrow at the earliest. They can’t possibly make it in time to take us aboard before midnight. And at midnight all sixty bombs go off.”

  “We don’t know the size or the shape of the iceberg,” Fischer said. “Most of the charges may be in the ice shafts that are still part of the main winter field.”

  Pete Johnson disagreed. “Claude, Harry, and I were at the end of the bomb line when the first tsunami passed under us. I think we followed a fairly direct course back to camp, the same route we took going out. So we must have driven right by or across all sixty charges. And I’d bet my right arm this berg isn’t anywhere near large enough to withstand all those concussions.”

  After a short silence Brian cleared his throat. “You mean the iceberg’s going to be blown into a thousand pieces?”

  No one responded.

  “So we’re all going to be killed? Or dumped into the sea?”

  “Same thing,” Roger Breskin said matter-of-factly. His bass voice rebounded hollowly from the ice walls. “The sea’s freezing. You wouldn’t last five minutes in it.”

  “Isn’t there anything we can do to save ourselves?” Brian asked as his
gaze traveled from one member of the team to another. “Surely there’s something we could do.”

  Throughout the conversation, George Lin had been as motionless and quiet as a statue, but suddenly he turned and took three quick steps toward Dougherty. “Are you scared, boy? You should be scared. Your almighty family can’t bail you out of this one!”

  Startled, Brian backed away from the angry man.

  Lin’s hands were fisted at his sides. “How do you like being helpless?” He was shouting. “How do you like it? Your big, rich, politically powerful family doesn’t mean a goddamned thing out here. Now you know what it’s like for the rest of us, for all us little people. Now you have to scramble to save yourself. Just exactly like the rest of us.”

  “That’s enough,” Harry said.

  Lin turned on him. His face had been transformed by hatred. “His family sits back with all its money and privileges, isolated from reality but so damned sure of its moral superiority, yammering about how the rest of us should live, about how we should sacrifice for this or that noble cause. It was people like them who started the trouble in China, brought in Mao, lost us our homeland, tens of millions of people butchered. You let them get a foot in the door, and the communists come right after them. The barbarians and the cossacks, the killers and the human animals storm right in after them. The—”

  “Brian didn’t put us on this berg,” Harry said sharply. “And neither did his family. For God’s sake, George, he saved your life less than an hour ago.”

  When Lin realized that he’d been ranting, the flush of anger drained from his cheeks. He seemed confused, then embarrassed. He shook his head as if to clear it. “I…I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Harry said. “Tell Brian.”

  Lin turned to Dougherty but didn’t look him in the face. “I’m sorry. I really am.”

  “It’s all right,” Brian assured him.

  “I don’t…I don’t know what came over me. You did save my life. Harry’s right.”

  “Forget it, George.”

  After a brief hesitation, Lin nodded and went to the far end of the cave. He walked back and forth, exercising his aching muscles, staring at the ice over which he trod.