Icebound

by Dean Koontz

  At the hospital, the elevators were out of order. Boris Okudzhava led Gorov to the service stairs, which were dirty and poorly lighted. Flies buzzed at the small, dust opaqued windows at each landing.

  Gorov climbed to the seventh floor. He paused twice when it seemed that his knees might buckle, then each time hurried upward again after only a brief hesitation.

  Nikki was in an eight-patient ward with four other dying children, in a small bed under stained and tattered sheets. No EKG monitor or other equipment surrounded him. Deemed incurable, he had been brought to a terminal ward to suffer through the last of his time in this world. The government was still in charge of the medical system, and its resources were stretched to the limit, which meant that doctors triaged the ill and injured according to a ruthless standard of treatability. No heroic effort was made to save the patient if there was less than a fifty percent chance that he would recover.

  The boy was fearfully pale. Waxy skin. A gray tint to his lips. Eyes closed. His golden hair was lank, damp with sweat.

  Trembling as though he were an elderly man with palsy, finding it increasingly difficult to maintain a submariner’s traditional calm, Gorov stood beside the bed, gazing down at his son, his only child.

  “Nikki,” he said, and his voice was unsteady, weak.

  The boy didn’t answer or even open his eyes.

  Gorov sat on the edge of the bed. He put one hand over his son’s hand. There was so little warmth in the boy’s flesh.

  “Nikki, I’m here.”

  Someone touched Gorov’s shoulder, and he looked up.

  A white-coated physician stood beside the bed. He indicated a woman at the end of the room. “She’s the one who needs you now.”

  It was Anya. Gorov had been so focused on Nikki that he hadn’t noticed her. She was standing at a window, pretending to watch the people down on the old Kalinin Prospekt.

  Gradually Gorov became aware of the defeat in the slope of his wife’s shoulders and the subtle hint of grief in the tilt of her head, and he began to apprehend the full meaning of the doctor’s words. Nikki was already dead. Too late to say “I love you” one last time. Too late for one last kiss. Too late to look into his child’s eyes and say, “I was always so proud of you,” too late to say good-bye.

  Although Anya needed him, he couldn’t bear to get up from the edge of the bed—as though to do so would ensure that Nikki’s death was permanent, while sheer stubborn denial might eventually cause a miraculous resurrection.

  He spoke her name, and though it was only a whisper, she turned to him.

  Her eyes shimmered with tears. She was biting her lip to keep from sobbing. She said, “I wish you’d been here.”

  “They didn’t tell me until yesterday.”

  “I’ve been so alone.”

  “I know.”

  “Frightened.”

  “I know.”

  “I would have gone in his place if I could,” she said. “But there was nothing…nothing I could do for him.”

  At last he found the strength to leave the bed. He went to his wife and held her, and she held him so tightly. So tightly.

  All but one of the other four dying children in the ward were comatose, sedated, or otherwise unaware of Gorov and Anya. The sole observer among them was a girl, perhaps eight or nine years old, with chestnut hair and huge solemn eyes. She lay in a bed nearby, propped up on pillows, as frail as an elderly woman who had seen a hundred years of life. “It’s okay,” she told Gorov. Her voice was musical and sweet in spite of how badly disease had ravaged and weakened her body. “You’ll see him again. He’s in heaven now. He’s waiting for you there.”

  Nikita Gorov, the product of a strictly materialistic society that had for the better part of a century denied the existence of God, wished that he could find strength in a faith as simple and strong as that revealed by the child’s words. He was no atheist. He had seen what monstrous acts the leaders of society would condone when they believed there was no God; he knew that there was no hope for justice in a world where the concepts of divine retribution and life after death had been abandoned. God must exist, for otherwise humankind couldn’t be prevented from destroying itself. Nevertheless, he lacked a tradition of belief in which to find the degree of hope and reassurance that comforted the dying girl.

  Anya wept against his shoulder. He held her and stroked her golden hair.

  The bruised sky suddenly ruptured, releasing torrents of rain. Fat droplets snapped against the window and streamed down the pane, blurring the traffic below.

  During the remainder of that summer, they tried to find things to smile about. They went to the Taganka Theater, the ballet, the music hall, and the circus. They danced more than once at the big pavilion in Gorki Park and exhausted themselves as children might with the amusements at Sokolniki Park. Once a week they ate dinner at Aragvi, perhaps the best restaurant in the city, where Anya learned to smile again when eating the ice cream and jam, where Nikita developed a taste for the spicy chicken zatsivi smothered in walnut sauce, and where they both drank too much vodka with their caviar, too much wine with their sulguni and bread. They made love every night, urgent and explosive love, as though their passion were a refutation of suffering, cancer, and death.

  Although no longer as light-hearted as she had always been, Anya appeared to recover from the loss more quickly and more completely than did Nikita. For one thing, she was thirty-four, ten years younger than he. Her spirit was more resilient than his. Furthermore, she was not burdened with the guilt that he bore like a leaden yoke. He knew that Nikki had asked for him repeatedly during the last weeks of life and especially during the final few hours. Although aware that he was being foolish and irrational, Gorov felt as if he had deserted the boy, as if he had failed his only son. In spite of uncharacteristic long, thoughtful silences and a new solemnity in her eyes, Anya gradually regained a healthy glow and at least a measure of her former spirit. But Nikita only feigned recovery.

  By the first week of September, Anya was back at her job full time. She was a research botanist at a large field laboratory in the deep pine forests twenty miles outside Moscow. Her work soon became one more avenue to forgetfulness; she traveled farther along it every day, arriving early and staying late at the laboratory.

  Although they continued to spend the nights and weekends together, Gorov was alone too much now. The apartment was full of memories that had grown painful, as was the dacha they leased in the country. He went for long walks, and almost every time, he ended up at the zoo or the museum, or at some other landmark where he and Nikki had often gone together.

  He dreamed ceaselessly of his son and usually woke in the middle of the night with a sick, hollow feeling. In the dreams, Nikki was forever asking why his father had abandoned him.

  On the eighth of October, Gorov went to his superiors at the Naval Ministry and requested reassignment to the Ilya Pogodin. The boat was in the yards at Kaliningrad for scheduled maintenance and to take on some new state-of-the-art electronic-monitoring gear. He returned to duty, supervised the installation of the surveillance equipment, and took the submarine on a two-week shakedown cruise in the Baltic during the middle of December.

  He was in Moscow with Anya on New Year’s Day, but they did not go out into the city. In Russia this was a holiday for the children. Young boys and girls were everywhere: at the lively puppet shows, the ballet, the movies, at the street shows and in the parks. Even the Kremlin grounds were thrown open to them. And at every corner those small ones would be chattering happily about the presents and the gingerbread men that Ded Moroz—Grandfather Frost—had given to them. Although Nikita and Anya were together, each supporting the other, that was one sight they chose not to face. They spent the entire day in their three-room apartment. They made love twice. Anya cooked chebureki, Armenian meat pies fried in deep fat, and they washed the food down with a great deal of sweet Algeshat.

  He slept on the night train to Kaliningrad. The rocking motion and
the rhythmic clatter of the wheels on the rails did not bring him the pure, dreamless sleep that he had expected. He woke twice with his son’s name on his lips, his hands fisted, and a chill of sweat on his face.

  Nothing is more terrible for a parent to endure than to outlive his child. The natural order seems demolished.

  On the second of January, he took the Ilya Pogodin to sea on a hundred-day espionage mission. He looked forward to the fourteen weeks beneath the North Atlantic, because that seemed like a good time and place to shrive himself of his remaining grief and of his unshakable guilt.

  But at night Nikki continued to visit him, came down through the fathoms, through the dark sea and into the deeper darkness of Gorov’s troubled mind, asking the familiar and unanswerable questions: Why did you abandon me, Father? Why didn’t you come to me when I needed you, when I was afraid and calling for you? Didn’t you care, Father, didn’t you care about me? Why didn’t you help me? Why didn’t you save me, Father? Why? Why?

  Someone rapped discreetly on the cabin door. Like a faint note reverberating in the bronze hollow of a bell, the knock echoed softly in the small room.

  Gorov returned from the past and looked up from the silver-framed photograph. “Yes?”

  “Timoshenko, sir.”

  The captain put down the picture and turned away from the desk. “Come in, Lieutenant.”

  The door opened, and Timoshenko peered in at him. “We’ve been intercepting a series of messages you ought to read.”

  “About what?”

  “That United Nations study group. They call their base Edgeway Station. Remember it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, they’re in trouble.”

  2:46

  Harry Carpenter fixed the steel chain to a carabiner and the carabiner to the frame-mounted tow ring on the back of the snowmobile. “Now we just need a little luck.”

  “It’ll hold,” Claude said, patting the chain. He was kneeling on the ice beside Harry with his back to the wind.

  “I’m not worried about it breaking,” Harry said, getting wearily to his feet and stretching.

  The chain looked delicate, almost as if it had been fashioned by a jeweler. But it was four-thousand-pound test, after all. It should be more than strong enough for the task at hand.

  The snowmobile was parked virtually on top of the reopened blasting shaft. Inside, behind the slightly misted Plexiglas, Roger Breskin was at the controls, watching the rearview mirror for the go-ahead sign from Harry.

  Once he had pulled his snow mask over his mouth and nose, Harry signaled Breskin to begin. Then he turned into the wind and stared at the small, perfectly round hole in the ice.

  Pete Johnson knelt to one side of the shaft, waiting for the snowmobile to get out of his way so he could monitor the progress of the bomb when it began to move. Brian, Fischer, and Lin had returned to the other snowmobiles to get warm.

  After he revved the engine several times, Roger slipped the sled into gear. The machine moved less than a yard before the chain held it. The engine noise changed pitch, and gradually its shriek became louder than the wailing wind.

  The chain was stretched so tight that Harry imagined it might produce, if plucked, a high note worthy of any operatic soprano.

  But the bomb did not move. Not an inch.

  The chain appeared to vibrate. Breskin accelerated.

  Despite what he had said to Claude, Harry began to think that the chain would snap.

  The sled was at peak power, screaming.

  With a crack like a rifle shot, the links of the chain broke out of the side of the new shaft in which they had been frozen, and the cylinder tore free of its icy bed. The snowmobile surged forward, the chain remained taut, and in the shaft, the bomb scraped and clattered upward.

  Pete Johnson got to his feet and straddled the hole as Harry and Jobert joined him. Directing a flashlight into the narrow black well, he peered down for a moment and then signaled Breskin to stop. Grasping the chain with both hands, he hoisted the tubular pack of explosives halfway out of the shaft and, with Harry’s help, extracted it completely. They laid it on the ice.

  One down. Nine to go.

  2:58

  Gunvald Larsson was adding canned milk to his mug of coffee when the call came through from the United States military base at Thule, Greenland. He put down the milk and hurried to the shortwave set.

  “This is Larsson at Edgeway. Reading you clearly. Go ahead, please.”

  The communications officer at Thule had a strong, mellifluous voice that seemed impervious to static. “Have you heard anything more from your lost sheep?”

  “No. They’re busy. Mrs. Carpenter has left the radio in the ice cave while she salvages whatever she can from the ruins of their temporary camp. I don’t expect her to call unless there’s a drastic change in their situation.”

  “How’s the weather at Edgeway?”

  “Terrible.”

  “Here too. And going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Wind speeds and wave heights are setting storm records on the North Atlantic.”

  Gunvald frowned at the radio. “Are you trying to tell me the UNGY trawlers are turning back?”

  “One has.”

  “But they headed north only two hours ago!”

  “The Melville is ten or twelve years older than the Liberty. She could probably ride out a storm like this easily enough, but she doesn’t have the power or bow construction to plow into it head-on, under power and against the wind. Her captain’s afraid she’ll break apart if he doesn’t turn back now.”

  “But he’s still on the fringe of the storm.”

  “Even there the seas are bad.”

  Gunvald wiped one hand across his suddenly damp face and blotted his palm on his pants. “The Liberty is continuing?”

  “Yes.” The American paused. The radio hissed with static, as if it were filled with snakes. “Look, if I were you, I wouldn’t pin my hopes on her.”

  “I’ve nothing else to pin them on.”

  “Maybe not. But her skipper really isn’t much more confident than the captain of the Melville.”

  “I suppose you still can’t get a chopper in the air,” Gunvald said.

  “Everything’s grounded. Will be for days. We’re not happy about it, but there’s nothing we can do.”

  Static crackled from the speaker.

  Gunvald said nothing.

  Finally, sounding embarrassed, the officer at Thule said, “The Liberty might just make it, you know.”

  Gunvald sighed. “I’m not going to tell the others about the Melville. Not yet.”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “If the Liberty turns back too, then I’ll have to tell them. But there’s no sense depressing them with this news while there’s still some hope.”

  The man at Thule said, “We’re pulling for them. The story already hit the news in the States. Millions of people are pulling for them.”

  3:05

  The communications center of the Ilya Pogodin was full of light and motion as seven radiant video display terminals flickered with decoded messages that had been intercepted by the main surveillance aerial one hundred feet above. The programming consoles were aglow with all the primary colors. Two technicians worked at one end of the cramped chamber, and Timoshenko stood near the entrance with Nikita Gorov.

  Among the hundreds of communications being continuously sorted and stored by the Ilya Pogodin’s computers, a steady stream of data pertained to the Edgeway crisis. The computer had been instructed to create a special file for any intercepted messages that contained one or more of five key words: Carpenter, Larsson, Edgeway, Melville, Liberty.

  “Is this complete?” Gorov asked when he finished reading the Edgeway material.

  Timoshenko nodded. “The computer produces an updated printout every fifteen minutes. This one is only ten minutes old. There may have been a few minor developments. But you have the basics, sir.”

  “If the weather
on the surface is half as bad as they’re saying, the Liberty will turn back too.”

  Timoshenko agreed.

  Gorov stared at the printout, no longer reading it, not even seeing it. Behind his night-black eyes was the image of a fresh-faced, golden-haired little boy with arms open wide. The son he had been unable to save.

  At last he said, “I’ll be in the control room until further notice. Let me know at once if there’s any important news about this.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Because the Pogodin was not actually under way but was hanging motionless in the sea, the control-room watch consisted of only five men in addition to First Officer Zhukov. Three were sitting in the black command chairs, facing the wall of scopes, gauges, graphs, dials, and controls opposite the diving stations. Zhukov was perched on a metal stool in the center of the chamber, reading a novel that he had propped on the big electronic chart table.

  Emil Zhukov was the sole potential opposition with which Gorov would have to contend if he were to carry out the plan that he had begun to formulate. Zhukov was the only man aboard the submarine with the authority to relieve the captain of his command if, in Zhukov’s opinion, Gorov had lost his senses or had disobeyed a direct order of the Naval Ministry. The first officer would use his power only in an extreme emergency, for he would have to justify his assumption of command when he got back to Russia; nevertheless, he posed a real threat.

  Emil Zhukov, at forty-two, was not a great deal younger than his captain, but their relationship had a subtle child-and-mentor quality, primarily because Zhukov placed such a high value on social order and discipline that his respect for authority bordered on an unhealthy reverence. He would have regarded any captain as a mentor and a source of wisdom. Tall, lean, with a long narrow face, intense hazel eyes, and thick dark hair, the first officer reminded Gorov of a wolf; he had a lupine grace when he moved, and his direct stare sometimes seemed predatory. In fact, he was neither as impressive nor as dangerous as he appeared to be; he was merely a good man and a reliable though not brilliant officer. Ordinarily, his deference to his captain would ensure his faithful cooperation—but under extreme circumstances, his obedience could not be taken for granted. Emil Zhukov would never lose sight of the fact that there were many men of higher authority than Gorov—and that he owed them greater respect and allegiance than he owed his captain.