Icebound

by Dean Koontz

  “You don’t actually have Ministry permission. A forgery won’t stand up to—”

  “Does one need permission to save lives?”

  “Please, sir. You know what I mean.”

  “Once we’re under way, I’ll give you the forged communiqué that you just read. It will be yours to keep, your protection if there’s ever an inquiry.”

  “But I saw the real message.”

  “Deny it.”

  “That might not be easy.”

  Gorov said, “I am the only one aboard this ship who knows that you saw it. I will tell any court-martial magistrate that I showed you the forgery and nothing else.”

  “If I’m ever interrogated, there’s a chance drugs would be used. Besides, I just don’t like going against orders when—”

  “One way or another, you’ll be going against orders. Mine or theirs. Now, listen to me, Emil. This is right. This is the thing we should do. And I will protect you. You do feel I’m a man of my word, I hope?”

  “I have no doubt,” Zhukov said immediately and finally broke eye contact, as though embarrassed by the thought that he should ever doubt his captain in any way.

  “Then? Emil?” When the first officer remained silent, Gorov said quietly but forcefully, “Time is wasting, Lieutenant. If we’re going after them, then for God’s sake let’s not wait until they’re dead.”

  Zhukov took off his glasses. He closed his eyes and pressed his fingertips to them. “I’ve served with you how long?”

  “Seven years.”

  “There have been tense moments,” Zhukov said.

  Like this one, Gorov thought.

  Zhukov lowered his hands from his face but didn’t open his eyes. “That time the Norwegian corvette dropped depth charges on us when it caught us in Oslo Fjord.”

  “Tense indeed.”

  “Or that cat-and-mouse game with the American submarine off the coast of Massachusetts.”

  “We made fools of them, didn’t we?” Gorov said. “We’ve been a good team.”

  “Never once have I seen you panic or issue orders that I thought were inappropriate.”

  “Thank you, Emil.”

  “Until now.”

  “Not now either.”

  Zhukov opened his eyes. “With all due respect, this isn’t like you, sir. It’s reckless.”

  “I disagree. It’s not reckless. Not at all. As I told you earlier, I’m quite certain the Admiralty will approve of the rescue mission.”

  “Then why not wait for the transmission at 1700 hours?”

  “We can’t waste time. The bureaucratic pace of the Ministry just isn’t good enough in this case. We’ve got to reach that iceberg before too many more hours have passed. Once we’ve located it, we’ll need a lot of time just to get those people off the ice and aboard with us.”

  Zhukov consulted his watch. “It’s twenty minutes past four. We’ve only got to wait another forty minutes to hear the Admiralty’s decision.”

  “But on a rescue mission like this, forty minutes could be the difference between success and failure.”

  “You’re adamant?”

  “Yes.”

  Zhukov sighed.

  “You could relieve me of my command,” Gorov said. “Right now. You have reason. I wouldn’t hold it against you, Emil.”

  Staring at his hands, which were trembling slightly, Zhukov said, “If they deny you the permission you want, will you turn back and continue the surveillance run?”

  “I would have no choice.”

  “You would turn back?”

  “Yes.”

  “You wouldn’t disobey them?”

  “No.”

  “Your word?”

  “My word.”

  Zhukov thought about it.

  Gorov rose from the stool. “Well?”

  “I must be crazy.”

  “You’ll agree to this?”

  “As you know, I named my second son after you. Nikita Zhukov.”

  The captain nodded. “I was honored.”

  “Well, if I’ve been wrong about you, if I shouldn’t have named him Nikita, I won’t be able to forget it now. He’ll be around as a reminder of how wrong I was. I don’t need that thorn in my side. So I’ll have to give you one more chance to prove I’ve been right all along.”

  Smiling, Gorov said, “Let’s get a new bearing on that iceberg and plot a course, Lieutenant.”

  After returning to the third blasting shaft, Pete and Roger left the two snowmobiles in park, with engines running and headlights blazing. Exhaust fumes plumed in brilliant crystalline columns. They set out in different directions, and Harry set out in a third to search for Brian Dougherty in the drifts, waist-high pressure ridges, and low ice hummocks around the site.

  Cautious, aware that he could be swallowed by the storm as quickly and completely as Brian had been, Harry probed the black-and-white landscape before he committed himself to it. He used his flashlight as if it were a machete, sweeping it from side to side. The insubstantial yellowish beam slashed through the falling snow, but the white jungle was undisturbed by it. Every ten steps, he looked over his shoulder to see if he was straying too far from the snowmobiles. He was already well out of the section of the icefield that was illuminated by the headlights, but he knew that he must not lose sight of the sleds altogether. If he got lost, no one would hear his cries for help above the screeching, hooting wind. Although it was diffused and dimmed by the incredibly heavy snowfall, the glow from the snowmobiles was his only signpost to safety.

  Even as he searched assiduously behind every drift and canted slab of ice, he nurtured only a slim hope that he would ever locate Dougherty. The wind was fierce. The snow was mounting at the rate of two inches an hour or faster. In those brief moments when he stopped to take a closer look into especially long, deep shadows, drifts began to form against his boots. If Brian had lain on the ice, unconscious or somehow stricken and unable to move, for the past fifteen minutes, maybe longer…Well, by this time the kid would be covered over, a smooth white lump like any hummock or drift, frozen fast to the winter field.

  It’s hopeless, Harry thought.

  Then, not forty feet from the blasting shaft, he stepped around a monolith of ice as large as a sixteen-wheel Mack truck and found Brian on the other side. The kid was on his back, laid out flat, one arm at his side and the other across his chest. He still wore his goggles and snow mask. At a glance he appeared to be lolling there, merely taking a nap, in no trouble whatsoever. Because the upturned slab of ice acted as a windbreak, the snow had not drifted over him. For the same reason, he’d been spared the worst of the bitter cold. Nevertheless, he didn’t move and was most likely dead.

  Harry knelt beside the body and pulled the snow mask from the face. Thin, irregularly spaced puffs of vapor rose from between the parted lips. Alive. But for how long? Brian’s lips were thin and bloodless. His skin was no less white than the snow around him. When pinched, he didn’t stir. His eyelids didn’t flutter. After lying motionless on the ice for at least a quarter of an hour, even if he had been out of the wind for the entire time and even though he was wearing full survival gear, he would already be suffering from exposure. Harry adjusted the snow mask to re-cover the pale face.

  He was deciding how best to get Brian out of there when he saw someone approaching through the turbulent gloom. A shaft of light appeared in the darkness, hazy at first, getting sharper and brighter as it drew nearer.

  Roger Breskin staggered through a thick curtain of snow, holding his flashlight before him as a blind man held a cane. Apparently he had become disoriented and wandered out of his assigned search area. He hesitated when he saw Brian.

  Harry gestured impatiently.

  Pulling down his snow mask, Breskin hurried to them. “Is he alive?”

  “Not by much.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s get him into one of the snowmobile cabins and let the warm air work on him. You take his feet and
I’ll—”

  “I can handle him myself.”

  “But—”

  “It’ll be easier and quicker that way.”

  Harry accepted the flashlight that Roger passed to him.

  The big man bent down and lifted Brian as if the kid weighed no more than ten pounds.

  Harry led the way back through the drifts and hummocks to the snowmobiles.

  At 4:50 the Americans at Thule radioed Gunvald Larsson with more bad news. Like the Melville before her, the trawler Liberty had found the storm to be an irresistible force against which only big warships and fools tried to stand. She simply could not head straightaway into the massive, powerful waves that surged across nearly all of the North Atlantic and the unfrozen portions of the Greenland Sea. She had turned back five minutes ago when a seaman discovered minor buckling of the starboard bow plates. The American radioman repeatedly assured Gunvald that everyone stationed at Thule was praying for those poor bastards on the iceberg. Indeed, prayers were no doubt being said for them all over the world.

  No number of prayers would make Gunvald feel better. The cold, hard fact was that the captain of the Liberty, although certainly of necessity and only with great remorse, had made a decision which virtually sentenced eight people to death.

  Gunvald couldn’t bring himself to pass on the news to Rita. Not right away, not that minute. Maybe on the hour—or at a quarter past. He wanted time to get in control of himself. These were his friends, and he cared about them. He didn’t want to be the one who delivered their death notice. He was trembling. He had to have time to think about how he would tell them.

  He needed a drink. Although he was not a man who usually sought to relieve tension with liquor, and in spite of being known for his steely nerves, he poured himself a shot of vodka from the three-bottle store in the communications-hut pantry. When he had finished the vodka, he was still unable to call Rita. He poured another shot, hesitated, then made it a double, before putting the bottle away.

  Although the snowmobiles were stationary, the five small engines rumbled steadily. On the icecap, in the middle of a fierce storm, the machines must never be switched off, because the batteries would go dead and the lubricants in the engines would freeze up within two or three minutes. The unrelenting wind was growing colder as the day wore on; it could kill men and machines with ease.

  Harry came out of the ice cave and hurried to the nearest snowmobile. When he was settled in the warm cabin, he screwed off the top of the Thermos bottle that he’d brought with him. He took several quick sips of the thick, fragrant vegetable soup. It had been brewed from freeze-dried mix and brought to the boiling point on the hot plate that they had used earlier to melt snow at the open blasting shafts. For the first time all day, he was able to relax, though he knew this was a temporary state of peace.

  In the three snowmobiles to his left, George Lin, Claude, and Roger were eating dinner in equal privacy. He could barely see them: dim shapes inside the unlighted cabins.

  Everyone had been given three cups of soup. At this rate, they had enough supplies for only two more meals. Harry had decided against rationing the remaining food, for if they were not well fed, the cold would kill them that much sooner.

  Franz Fischer and Pete Johnson were in the ice cave. Harry could see them clearly, for his machine’s headlamps shone through the entrance and provided the only light in there. The two men were pacing, waiting for their turn at warm cabins and Thermos bottles full of hot soup. Franz moved briskly, agitatedly, almost as if marching back and forth. In perfect contrast, Pete ambled from one end of the cave to the other, loose-jointed, fluid.

  Rita knocked and opened the cabin door, startling Harry.

  Swallowing a mouthful of soup, he said, “What’s wrong?”

  She leaned inside, using her body to block out the wind and its gibberous voice. “He wants to talk to you.”

  “Brian?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s still improving?”

  “Oh, yes. Nicely.”

  “Does he remember what happened?”

  “Let him tell you,” she said.

  In the fifth snowmobile, the one parked farthest from the cave, Brian was slowly recuperating. Rita had been in the cabin with him for the past twenty minutes, massaging his chilled fingers, feeding him soup, and making sure that he didn’t lapse into a dangerous sleep. He had regained consciousness during the ride back from the third demolition shaft, but he had been in too much agony to talk. When he first woke, he’d been racked with pain as his numbed nerve endings belatedly responded to the severe cold that had nearly killed him. The kid would not feel half normal for at least another hour.

  Harry capped his Thermos bottle. Before he pulled his goggles in place, he kissed Rita.

  “Mmmmm,” she said. “More.”

  This time her tongue moved between his lips. Snowflakes swept past her head and danced across his face, but her breath was hot on his greased skin. He was flushed with a poignant concern for her. He wanted to protect her from all harm.

  When they drew apart she said, “I love you.”

  “We will go back to Paris. Somehow. When we get out of this.”

  “Well, if we don’t get out of it,” she said, “we haven’t been short-changed. We’ve had eight good years together. We’ve had more fun and love than most people get in a lifetime.”

  He felt powerless, up against impossible odds. All his life he had been a man who took charge in a crisis. He had always been able to find solutions to even the most difficult problems. This new sense of impotency enraged him.

  She kissed him lightly on one corner of his mouth. “Hurry now. Brian’s waiting for you.”

  The snowmobile cabin was uncomfortably cramped. Harry sat backward on the narrow passenger bench, facing the rear of the machine, where Brian Dougherty was facing forward. The handlebars pressed into his back. His knees were jammed against Brian’s knees. Only a vague, amber radiance from the headlamps filtered through the Plexiglas, and the darkness made the tiny enclosure seem even tinier than it was.

  Harry said, “How do you feel?”

  “Like hell.”

  “You will for a while yet.”

  “My hands and feet sting. And I don’t mean they’re just numb. It’s like someone’s jabbing lots of long needles into them.” His voice was shaded with pain.

  “Frostbite?”

  “We haven’t looked at my feet yet. But they feel about the same as my hands. And there doesn’t seem to be any frostbite on my hands. I think I’m safe. But—” He gasped in pain, and his face contorted. “Oh, Jesus, that’s bad.”

  Opening his Thermos, Harry said, “Soup?”

  “No, thanks. Rita pumped a quart of it into me. One more drop, and I’ll float away.” He rubbed his hands together, apparently to ease another especially sharp prickle of pain. “By the way, I’m head over heels in love with your wife.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  “And I want to thank you for coming after me. You saved my life, Harry.”

  “Another day, another act of heroism,” Harry said. He took a mouthful of soup. “What happened to you out there?”

  “Didn’t Rita tell you?”

  “She said I should hear it from you.”

  Brian hesitated. His eyes glittered in the shadows. At last he said, “Someone clubbed me.”

  Harry almost choked on his soup. “Knocked you out?”

  “Hit me on the back of the head.”

  “That can’t be right.”

  “I’ve got the lumps to prove it.”

  “Let me see.”

  Brian leaned forward, lowered his head.

  Harry stripped off his gloves and felt the boy’s head. The two lumps were prominent and easy to find, one larger than the other, both on the back of the skull and one slightly higher and to the left of the other. “Concussion?”

  “None of the symptoms.”

  “Headache?”

  “Oh, yeah. A real bastard of
a headache.”

  “Double vision?”

  “No.”

  “Any slurred speech?”

  “No.”

  “You’re certain you didn’t faint?”

  “Positive,” Brian said, sitting up straight again.

  “You could have taken a nasty bump on the head if you’d fainted. You might have fallen against a projection of ice.”

  “I distinctly remember being struck from behind.” His voice was hard with conviction. “Twice. The first time he didn’t put enough force into it. My hood cushioned the blow. I stumbled, kept my balance, started to turn around—and he hit me a lot harder the next time. The lights went out but good.”

  “And then he dragged you out of sight?”

  “Before any of you saw what was happening, evidently.”

  “Not very damned likely.”

  “The wind was gusting. The snow was so thick I couldn’t see more than two yards. He had excellent cover.”

  “You’re saying someone tried to murder you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But if that’s the case, why did he drag you behind a windbreak? You would have frozen to death in fifteen minutes if he’d left you in the open.”

  “Maybe he thought the blow killed me. Anyway, he did leave me in the open. But I came to after you’d all left. I was dizzy, nauseated, cold. I managed to drag myself out of the wind before I passed out again.”

  “Murder…”

  “Yes.”

  Harry didn’t want to believe it. He had too much on his mind as it was. He didn’t have the capacity to deal with yet another worry.

  “It happened as we were getting ready to leave the third site.” Brian paused, hissed in pain. “My feet. God, like hot needles, hot needles dipped in acid.” His knees pressed more forcefully against Harry’s knees, but after half a minute or so, he gradually relaxed. He was tough; he continued as if there had been no interruption. “I was loading some equipment into the last of the cargo trailers. Everyone was busy. The wind was gusting especially hard, the snow was falling so heavily I’d lost sight of the rest of you, then he hit me.”