Icebound

by Dean Koontz

  “And the pressure we’ve been under these past nine hours might have snapped him.”

  “I suppose it’s possible.”

  “But it doesn’t feel right.”

  “Not quite.”

  They thought about it.

  Pete Johnson started walking in place to keep his feet from getting chilled. Harry followed suit, stepping smartly up and down, going nowhere.

  After a minute or so, still exercising, Pete said, “What about Franz Fischer?”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s cool toward you. And toward Rita. Not cool toward her exactly…but there’s sure something odd in the way he looks at her.”

  “You’re observant.”

  “Maybe it’s professional jealousy because of all these science awards the two of you have piled up the last few years.”

  “He’s not that petty.”

  “What then?” When Harry hesitated, Pete said, “None of my business?”

  “He knew her when.”

  “Before she married you?”

  “Yes. They were lovers.”

  “So he is jealous, but not because of the awards.”

  “Apparently, yeah.”

  “She’s a terrific lady,” Pete said. “Anybody who lost her to you would not be likely to think you’re such a great guy. You ever think maybe that should have been a reason not to bring Franz onto this team?”

  “If Rita and I could put that part of the past behind us, why couldn’t he?”

  “Because he’s not you and Rita, man. He’s a self-involved science nerd, for one thing. He may be good-looking and smart and sophisticated in some ways, but he’s basically insecure. Probably accepted the invitation to join the expedition just so Rita would have a chance to compare him and you under extreme conditions. He probably thought you’d stumble around like a dweeb here on the ice, while he’d be Nanook of the North, larger than life, a macho man by comparison. From day one, of course, he must have realized it wasn’t going to work out that way, which explains why he’s been so bitchy.”

  “Doesn’t make sense.”

  “Does to me.”

  Harry stopped exercising, afraid of working up a chilling sweat. “Franz might hate me and perhaps even Rita, but how do his feelings toward us translate into an attack on Brian?”

  After a dozen more steps, Pete also quit walking in place. “Who knows how a psychopath’s mind works?”

  Harry shook his head. “It might be Franz. But not because he’s jealous of me.”

  “Breskin?”

  “He’s a cipher.”

  “He strikes me as too self-contained.”

  “We always tend to suspect the loner,” Harry said, “the quiet man who keeps to himself. But that’s no more logical than suspecting Franz merely because he had a relationship with Rita years ago.”

  “Why did Breskin emigrate to Canada from the U.S.?”

  “I don’t recall. Maybe he never said.”

  “Could have been for political reasons,” Pete suggested.

  “Yeah, maybe. But Canada and the U.S. have basically similar politics. I mean, if a man leaves his homeland and takes citizenship in a new country, you’d expect him to go somewhere that was radically different, a whole other system of government, economics.” Harry sniffed as he felt his nose beginning to run. “Besides, Roger had a chance to kill the kid early this afternoon. When Brian was dangling over the cliff, trying to reach George, Roger could have cut the rope. Who would have been the wiser?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to kill anyone but Brian. Maybe that’s his only obsession. If he had cut the rope, he wouldn’t have been able to save Lin all by himself.”

  “He could have cut it after Lin was brought up.”

  “But then George would have been a witness.”

  “What psychopath has that degree of self-control? Besides, I’m not sure that George was in any condition to be a witness, little more than half conscious at that point.”

  “But like you said, Roger’s a cipher.”

  “We’re going in circles.”

  As they breathed, the vapor they expelled crystallized between them. The cloud had become so thick that they could not see each other clearly, though they were no more than two feet apart.

  Waving the fog out of their way and far enough from the sheltering ridge wall for a draft to catch it, Pete said, “We’re left with Claude.”

  “He seems the least likely of the lot.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “Fifteen years. Sixteen. Thereabouts.”

  “You’ve been on the ice with him before?”

  “Several times,” Harry said. “He’s a wonderful man.”

  “He often talks about his late wife. Colette. He still gets teary about it, shaky. When did she die?”

  “Three years ago this month. Claude was on the ice, his first expedition in two and a half years, when she was murdered.”

  “Murdered?”

  “She’d flown from Paris to London on a holiday. She was in England just three days. The IRA had planted a bomb in a restaurant where she went for lunch. She was one of the eight killed in the blast.”

  “Good God!”

  “They caught one of the men involved. He’s still in prison.”

  Pete said, “And Claude took it very hard.”

  “Oh, yes. Colette was great. You’d have liked her. She and Claude were as close as Rita and I.”

  For a moment neither of them spoke.

  At the top of the ridge, the wind moaned like a revenant trapped between this world and the next. Again, the ice reminded Harry of a graveyard. He shuddered.

  Pete said, “If a man is deeply in love with a woman, and she’s taken from him, blown to pieces by a bomb—he might be twisted by the loss.”

  “Not Claude. Broken, yes. Depressed, yes. But not twisted. He’s the kindest—”

  “His wife was killed by Irishmen.”

  “So?”

  “Dougherty is Irish.”

  “That’s a stretch, Pete. Irish-American, actually. And third generation.”

  “You said one of these bombers was apprehended?”

  “Yeah. They never nailed any of the others.”

  “Do you remember his name?”

  “No.”

  “Was it Dougherty, anything like Dougherty?”

  Harry grimaced and waved one hand dismissively. “Come on now, Pete. You’ve stretched it to the breaking point.”

  The big man began to walk in place once more. “I guess I have. But you know…both Brian’s uncle and his father have been accused of playing favorites with their Irish-American constituencies at the expense of other groups. And some people say they sympathized with the IRA’s leftward tilt to the extent that for years they secretly funneled donations to them.”

  “I’ve heard it all too. But it was never proved. Political slander, as far as we know. The actual fact is…we have four suspects, and none of them looks like a sure bet.”

  “Correction.”

  “What?”

  “Six suspects.”

  “Franz, George, Roger, Claude…”

  “And me.”

  “I’ve ruled you out.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Now pull the other leg.”

  “I’m serious,” Pete said.

  “After the conversation we’ve just had, I know you can’t—”

  “Is there a law that says a psychopathic killer can’t be a good actor?”

  Harry stared at him, trying to read his expression. Suddenly the malevolence in Johnson’s face didn’t seem to be entirely a trick played by the peculiar backwash of light. “You’re making me edgy, Pete.”

  “Good.”

  “I know you told me the truth, you’re not the guy. But what you’re saying is that I mustn’t trust anyone, not even for a moment, not even if I think I know him like a brother.”

  “Precisely. And it goes for both of us. That’s why the sixth name o
n the list of suspects is yours.”

  “What? Me?”

  “You were at the third blasting shaft with the rest of us.”

  “But I’m the one who found him when we went back.”

  “And you were the one who assigned search areas. You could have given yourself the right one, so you’d make sure he was dead before you ‘found’ him. Then Breskin stumbled on you before you had a chance to deal Brian the coup de grâce.”

  Harry gaped at him.

  “And if you’re twisted enough,” Pete said, “you might not even realize there’s a killer inside you.”

  “You don’t really think I’m capable of murder?”

  “It’s a chance in a million. But I’ve seen people win on much longer odds.”

  Although he knew that Pete was giving him a taste of his own medicine, letting him know what it was like to be treated as a suspect, Harry felt a tension ache return to his neck and shoulders. “You know what’s wrong with you Californians?”

  “Yeah. We make you Bostonians feel inferior, because we’re so self-aware and mellow, but you’re so repressed and uptight.”

  “Actually, I’d been thinking that all the earthquakes and fires and mudslides and riots and serial killers out there have made you paranoid.”

  They smiled at each other.

  Harry said, “We’d better be getting back.”

  Two flares floated five hundred feet apart in the night sky, and the floodlight swept back and forth along the base of the gleaming ice cliffs.

  The windward flank of the iceberg was not as forbidding as the featureless, vertical leeward wall had been. Three rugged shelves stepped back and up from the water line. Each appeared to be between eight and ten yards deep, and together they jutted twenty or twenty-five feet above the sea. Beyond the shelves, the cliff rose at an angle for fifty feet or more and then broke at a narrow ledge. Above the ledge was a sheer face of about twenty feet of vertical ice, and then the brink.

  “Rafts could land on those shelves,” Zhukov said, examining the ice through his binoculars. “And even untrained men could climb that cliff. But not in this weather.”

  Gorov could barely hear him above the raucous voice of the storm and the boat’s rhythmic collisions with the high waves.

  The sea was remarkably more violent on the windward flank than it had been on the protected leeward side. Huge waves crashed across the steps at the base of the iceberg. They would overturn a medium-size lifeboat and tear one of the Pogodin’s motorized rubber rafts to pieces. Even the submarine, with its forty-thousand-horsepower turbines and sixty-five-hundred-ton surface displacement, was having some difficulty making way properly. Frequently the bow was underwater, and when it did manage to nose up, it resembled an animal fighting quicksand. Waves slammed into the superstructure deck with shocking fury, sent protracted shudders through the hull, exploded against the sail, washed onto the bridge, cast spray higher than Gorov’s head. All three men were wearing suits of ice: ice-covered boots, ice-rimed trousers, ice-plated coattails.

  The brutal wind registered seventy-two miles per hour on the bridge anemometer, with gusts half again as strong. The pellets of snow were like swarming bees; they stung Gorov’s face and brought tears to his eyes.

  “We’ll go around to leeward again,” the captain shouted, though standing virtually shoulder-to-shoulder with his subordinates on the small bridge.

  He remembered too vividly the smooth hundred-foot cliff that awaited them on the other side, but he had no choice. The windward flank offered them no hope at all.

  “And on the other side—what then?” Zhukov asked.

  Gorov hesitated, thinking about it. “We’ll shoot a line across. Get a man over there. Rig a breeches buoy.”

  “Shoot a line?” Zhukov was doubtful. He leaned closer, face-to-face with his captain, and shouted out his concern: “Even if that works, even if it holds in the ice, can it be done from one moving object to another?”

  “In desperation, perhaps. I don’t know. Got to try it. It’s a place to start.”

  If a few men with enough equipment could be gotten from the sub to the leeward face of the iceberg by means of a breeches buoy, they could blast out a landing shelf to allow the rafts to follow them. Then they might be able to shoot a line to the top. With that, they could ascend the cliff as easily as flies walking on walls.

  Zhukov glanced at his watch. “Three and a half hours!” he shouted above the Armageddon wind. “We better begin.”

  “Clear the bridge!” Gorov ordered. He sounded the diving alarm.

  When he reached the control room half a minute later, he heard the petty officer say, “Green board!”

  Zhukov and Semichastny had already gone to their quarters to get into dry clothes.

  As Gorov stepped off the conning-tower ladder, shedding brittle jackets of ice as he moved, the diving officer turned to him and said, “Captain?”

  “I’m going to change clothes. Take us down to seventy-five feet and get back into the leeward shadow of the iceberg.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll take over in ten minutes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  In his quarters, after he had changed out of his sodden and frozen gear into a dry uniform, Gorov sat at the corner desk and picked up the photograph of his dead son. Everyone in the picture was smiling: the piano-accordion player, Gorov, and Nikki. The boy’s smile was the broadest of the three—genuine, not assumed for the camera. He was gripping his father’s hand. In his other hand, he held a large, two-scoop cone of vanilla ice cream that was dripping onto his fingers. Ice cream frosted his upper lip. His thick, windblown golden hair fell across his right eye. Even on the flat, two-dimensional surface of the photo, one could sense the aura of delight, love, and pleasure that the could had always radiated in life.

  “I swear I came as quickly as I could, “Gorov murmured to the photograph.

  The boy stared, smiling.

  “I’m going to get those people off the iceberg before midnight.” Gorov hardly recognized his own voice. “No more putting assassins and saboteurs ashore. Saving lives now, Nikki. I know I can do it. I’m not going to let them die. That’s a promise.”

  He was squeezing the photograph so tightly that his fingers were pale, bloodless.

  The silence in the cabin was oppressive, for it was the silence of the other world to which Nikki had gone, the silence of lost love, of a future that would never happen, of stillborn dreams.

  Someone walked by Gorov’s door, whistling.

  As if the whistle were a slap in the face, the captain twitched and sat up straight, suddenly aware of how maudlin he had become. He was privately humiliated. Sentimentalism would not help him adjust to his loss; sentimentality was a corruption of the legacy of good memories and laughter that this honest and good-hearted boy had left behind.

  Annoyed with himself, Gorov put down the photograph. He got to his feet and left the cabin.

  Lieutenant Timoshenko had been off duty for the past four hours. He had eaten dinner and napped for two hours. Now, at eight-forty-five, fifteen minutes ahead of schedule, he had returned to the communications center once more, preparing to take the last watch of the day, which would end at one o’clock in the morning. One of his subordinates manned the equipment while Timoshenko sat at a corner work desk, reading a magazine and drinking hot tea from an aluminum mug.

  Captain Gorov stepped in from the companionway. “Lieutenant, I believe it’s time to make direct radio contact with those people on the iceberg.”

  Timoshenko put down his tea and got up. “Will we be surfacing again, sir?”

  “In a few minutes.”

  “Do you want to talk to them?”

  “I’ll leave that to you,” Gorov said.

  “And what should I tell them?”

  Gorov quickly explained what they had found on their trip around the huge island of ice—the hopelessly stormy seas on the windward side, the sheer wall on the leeward side—and outlined
his plans for the breeches buoy. “And tell them that from here on out, we’ll keep them informed of our progress, or lack of it, every step of the way.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Gorov turned to go.

  “Sir? They’re certain to ask—do you think we’ve a good chance of saving them?”

  “Not good, no. Only fair.”

  “Should I be honest with them?”

  “I think that’s best.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But also tell them that if it’s at all humanly possible, we’ll do it, one way or the other. No matter what the odds against, by God, we’ll try our damnedest to get them off. I’m more determined about this than I’ve been about anything else in my life. Tell them that, Lieutenant. Make sure you tell them that.”

  8:57

  Harry was surprised to hear his mother tongue spoken so fluently by a Russian radio operator. The man sounded as though he had taken a degree at a good middle-level university in Britain. English was the official language of the Edgeway expedition, as it was of nearly every multinational scientific study group. But somehow it seemed wrong for a Russian submariner to speak it so flawlessly. Gradually, however, as Timoshenko explained why the leeward flank was the only avenue of approach to the iceberg worth investigating, Harry became accustomed to the man’s fluency and to his decidedly English accent.

  “But if the berg is five hundred yards wide,” Harry said, “why couldn’t your men come on from one end or the other?”

  “Unfortunately, the sea is as stormy at either end as it is on the windward side.”

  “But a breeches buoy,” Harry said doubtfully. “It can’t be easy to rig one of those between two moving points, and in this weather.”

  “We can match speeds with the ice pretty much dead on, which makes it almost like rigging between two stationary points. Besides, a breeches buoy is only one of our options. If we’re unable to make it work, we’ll get to you some other way. You needn’t worry about that.”

  “Wouldn’t it be simpler to send divers across to the ice? You must have scuba equipment aboard.”

  “And we’ve a number of well-trained frogmen,” Timoshenko said. “But even the leeward sea is much too rough for them. These waves and currents would carry them away as quickly as if they leaped into a waterfall.”