Icebound

by Dean Koontz

  Two minutes after Gorov had ordered the scan, the squawk box crackled again. “Strong current detected, traveling due south, beginning at a depth of three hundred forty feet.”

  Gorov looked away from the scope and pulled down the overhead microphone again. “How deep does it run below three forty?”

  “Can’t tell, sir. It’s choked with sea life. Probing it is like trying to see through a wall. We have gotten readings as deep as six hundred sixty feet, but that’s not the bottom of it.”

  “How fast is it moving?”

  “Approximately nine knots, sir"

  Gorov blanched. “Repeat.”

  “Nine knots.”

  “Impossible!”

  “Have mercy,” Zhukov said.

  Gorov released the microphone, which sprang up out of the way, and with a new sense of urgency, he returned to the periscope. They were in the path of a juggernaut. The massive island of ice had been swinging slowly, ponderously into the new current, but now the full force of the fast-moving water was squarely behind it. The berg was still turning, bringing its “bow” around, but it was mostly sideways to the submarine and would remain like that for several minutes yet.

  “Target closing,” the radar operator said. “Five hundred yards!” He read off the bearing that he had taken.

  Before Gorov could reply, the boat was suddenly shaken as if a giant hand had taken hold of it. Zhukov fell. Papers slid off the chart table. The event lasted only two or three seconds, but everyone was rattled.

  “What the hell?” Zhukov asked, scrambling to his feet.

  “Collision.”

  “With what?”

  The berg was still five hundred yards away.

  “Probably a small floe of ice,” Gorov said. He ordered damage reports from every part of the boat.

  He knew that they hadn’t collided with a large object, for if they had done so, they would already be sinking. The submarine’s hull wasn’t tempered, because it required a degree of flexibility to descend and ascend rapidly through realms of varying temperatures and pressures. Consequently, even a single ton of ice, if moving with sufficient velocity to have substantial impact energy, would cave in the hull as if crashing into a cardboard vessel. Whatever they had encountered was clearly of limited size; nevertheless, it must have caused at least minor damage.

  The sonar operator called out the position of the iceberg: “Four hundred fifty yards and closing!”

  Gorov was in a bind. If he didn’t take the boat down, they would collide with that mountain of ice. But if he dived before he knew what damage had been sustained, they might never be able to surface again. There simply wasn’t enough time to bring the big boat around and flee either to the east or to the west; because the iceberg was rushing at them sideways, it stretched nearly two fifths of a mile both to port and starboard. The nine-knot, deepwater current, which began at a depth of three hundred forty feet, would not manage to turn the narrow profile of the berg toward them for another few minutes, and Gorov could not escape the full width of it before it reached them.

  He snapped up the horizontal bar on the periscope and sent it into its hydraulic sleeve.

  “Four hundred twenty yards and closing!” called the sonar operator.

  “Dive!” Gorov said, even as the first damage reports were being made. “Dive!”

  The diving klaxons blasted throughout the boat. Simultaneously the collision alarm wailed.

  “We’re going under the ice before it hits us,” Gorov said.

  Zhukov paled. “It must ride six hundred feet below the damn water line!”

  Heart racing, mouth dry, Nikita Gorov said, “I know. I’m not certain we’ll make it.”

  A fierce gale relentlessly hammered the Nissen huts. The rivets in the metal walls creaked. At the two small, triple-pane windows, ice spicules tapped like the fingernails of ten thousand dead men wanting in, and great rivers of subzero air moaned and keened as they rushed over the Quonset-shaped structures.

  In the supply shed, Gunvald had discovered nothing of interest, though he had pored through the lockers belonging to Franz Fischer and George Lin. If either man had murderous tendencies or was in any way less than entirely stable and normal, nothing in his personal effects gave him away.

  Gunvald moved on to Pete Johnson’s locker.

  Gorov knew that, among men of other nations, Russians were often perceived as dour, somber, determinedly gloomy people. Of course, in spite of a dismaying historical tendency to afflict themselves with brutal rulers and with tragically flawed ideologies, that stereotype was as empty of truth as any other. Russians laughed and partied and made love and got drunk and made fools of themselves, as did people everywhere. Most university students in the West had read Feodor Dostoyevsky and had tried to read Tolstoy, and it was from those few pieces of literature that they had formed their opinions of modern-day Russians. Yet, if there had been any foreigners in the control room of the Ilya Pogodin at that moment, they would have seen precisely the Russians that the stereotype described: somber-faced men, all frowning, all with deeply beetled brows, all weighed down with a profound respect for fate.

  The damage reports had been made: No bulkheads had buckled; no water was entering the boat. The shock had been worse in the forward quarters than anywhere else, and it had been especially unsettling to the men in the torpedo room, two decks below the control room. Though the safety-light boards registered no immediate danger, the boat had apparently sustained some degree of exterior hull damage immediately aft and starboard of the bow, just past the diving planes, which did not themselves seem to have been affected.

  If the outer skin had only been scraped, or if it had suffered only a minor dent, the boat would survive. However, if the hull had sustained even moderate compaction at any point—and worst of all, distortion that lay across welded seams—they might not live through a deep dive. The pressure on the submarine would not be uniformly resisted by the damaged areas, which could cause severe strain, and the boat might fail them, implode, and sink straight to the ocean floor.

  The young diving officer’s voice was loud but, in spite of the circumstances, not shaky. “Two hundred feet and descending.”

  The sonar operator reported: “The profile of the target is narrowing. She’s continuing to come bow-around in the current.”

  “Two hundred fifty feet,” said the diving officer.

  They had to get down at least six hundred feet. Approximately a hundred feet of ice had been visible above the water line, and only one seventh of an iceberg’s mass rode above the surface. To be safe, Gorov preferred to descend to seven hundred feet, though the speed of the target’s approach reduced their chances of attaining even six hundred in time to avoid it.

  The sonar operator called the distance: “Three hundred eighty yards and closing.”

  “If I weren’t an atheist,” Zhukov said, “I’d start praying.”

  No one laughed. At that moment none of them was an atheist—not even Emil Zhukov, in spite of what he’d said.

  Even though everyone appeared cool and confident, Gorov could smell the fear in the control room. That was neither an exaggeration nor a theatrical conceit. Fear did have a pungent odor of its own: the tang of an unusually acrid sweat. Cold sweat. Virtually every man in the control chamber was perspiring. The place was redolent of fear.

  “Three hundred twenty feet,” the diving officer announced.

  The sonar operator reported on the iceberg as well: “Three hundred fifty yards and closing fast.”

  “Three hundred sixty feet.”

  They were in a crash dive. Going down fast. A lot of strain on the hull.

  Even as each man monitored the equipment at his station, he found time to glance repeatedly at the diving stand, which suddenly seemed to have become the very center of the room. The needle on the depth gauge was falling rapidly, far faster than they had ever seen it drop before.

  Three hundred eighty feet.

  Four hundred.


  Four hundred twenty feet.

  Everyone aboard knew that the boat had been designed for sudden and radical maneuvers, but that knowledge did not relieve anyone’s tension. In recent years, as the country had struggled to rise out of the impoverishment in which decades of totalitarianism had left it, defense budgets had been trimmed—except in the nuclear-weapons development program—and systems maintenance had been scaled back, delayed, and in some instances postponed indefinitely. The Pogodin was not in the best shape of its life, an aging fleet submarine that might have years of faithful service in it—or that might be running with a stress crack serious enough to spell doom at any moment.

  “Four hundred sixty feet,” said the diving officer.

  “Target at three hundred yards.”

  “Depth at four hundred eighty feet.”

  With both hands, Gorov gripped the command-pad railing tightly and resisted the pull of the inclined deck until his arms ached. His knuckles were as sharp and white as bare bones.

  “Target at two hundred yards!”

  Zhukov said, “It’s picking up speed like it’s going downhill.”

  “Five hundred twenty feet.”

  Their descent was accelerating, but not fast enough to please Gorov. They would need to get down at least another hundred and eighty feet until they were without a doubt safely under the iceberg—and perhaps, a great deal more than that.

  “Five hundred forty feet.”

  “I’ve only been this deep twice before in ten years of service,” Zhukov said.

  “Something to write home about,” Gorov said.

  “Target at one hundred sixty yards. Closing fast!” called the sonar operator.

  “Five hundred sixty feet,” the diving officer said, although he must have known that everyone was watching the platter-size depth gauge.

  One thousand feet was the official maximum operating depth for the Ilya Pogodin, because she wasn’t one of the very-deep-running nuclear-war boats. Of course, if its outer skin had suffered a loss of integrity in the earlier collision, the thousand-foot figure was meaningless, and all bets were off. The starboard-bow damage might have rendered the boat vulnerable to implosion at considerably less depth than that stated in the official manual.

  “Target at one hundred twenty yards and closing.”

  Gorov was contributing his share to the stench within the small chamber. His shirt was sweat-stained down the middle of the back and under the arms.

  The diving officer’s voice had softened almost to a whisper, yet it carried clearly through the control room. “Six hundred feet and descending.”

  Emil Zhukov’s face was as gaunt as a death mask.

  Still bracing himself against the railing, Gorov said, “We’ve got to risk another eighty feet or a hundred, anyway. We’ve got to be well under the ice.”

  Zhukov nodded.

  “Six hundred twenty feet.”

  The sonar operator struggled to control his voice. Nevertheless, a faint note of distress colored his next report: “Target at sixty yards and closing fast. Dead ahead of the bow. It’s going to hit us!”

  “None of that!” Gorov said sharply. “We’ll make it.”

  “Depth at six hundred seventy feet.”

  “Target at thirty yards.”

  “Six hundred eighty feet.”

  “Twenty yards.”

  “Six hundred ninety.”

  “Target lost,” the sonar operator said, his voice rising half an octave on the last word.

  They froze, waiting for the grinding impact that would smash the hull.

  I’ve been a fool to jeopardize my own and seventy-nine other lives just to save one tenth that number, Gorov thought.

  The technician who was monitoring the surface fathometer cried, “Ice overhead!”

  They were under the berg.

  “What’s our clearance?” Gorov asked.

  “Fifty feet.”

  No one cheered. They were still too tense for that. But they indulged in a modest, collective sigh of relief.

  “We’re under it,” Zhukov said, amazed.

  “Seven hundred feet and descending,” the diving officer said worriedly.

  “Blow negative to the mark,” Gorov said. “Stabilize at seven hundred forty.”

  “We’re safe,” Zhukov said.

  Gorov pulled on his neatly trimmed beard and found it wet with perspiration. “No. Not entirely safe. Not yet. No iceberg will have a flat bottom. There’ll be scattered protrusions below six hundred feet, and we might even encounter one that drops all the way down to our running depth. Not safe until we’re completely out from under.”

  A few minutes after the concussion from the torpedo had rumbled through the ice, Harry and Pete cautiously returned to the cave from the snowmobiles, in which the others were still taking shelter. They proceeded only as far as the entrance, where they stood with their backs to the furious wind.

  They needed to take the radio, which Harry was carrying, to the deepest and quietest part of the cave in order to contact Lieutenant Timoshenko aboard the Pogodin and find out what would happen next. Outside, the wind was a beast of a thousand voices, all deafeningly loud, and even in the cabins of the sleds, the roaring-shrieking-whistling gale made it impossible to hear one’s own voice, let alone comprehend what was being said by anyone on the radio.

  With his flashlight beam, Pete worriedly probed the jumbled slabs in the ceiling.

  “Looks okay!” Harry shouted, though his mouth was no more than an inch from the other man’s head.

  Pete looked at him, not sure what he’d said.

  “Okay!” Harry bellowed, and he made a thumbs-up sign.

  Pete nodded agreement.

  They hesitated, however, because they didn’t know if the Russian submarine was going to launch another torpedo.

  If they reentered the cave with the radio and then the Russians fired on the ice again, the concussion might bring the ceiling down this time. They would be crushed or buried alive.

  The malevolent wind at their backs was so powerful and fearfully cold, however, that Harry felt as though someone had dropped several ice cubes down his back, under his storm suit. He knew they dared not stand there much longer, paralyzed by indecision, so at last he stepped inside. Pete followed with the flashlight, and together they hurried toward the rear of the chamber.

  The cacophony of the storm diminished drastically as they went deeper into the cave, though even against the back wall there was so much noise that they would need to turn the receiver volume all the way to its maximum setting.

  The orange utility cord still trailed inside from one of the snowmobile batteries. Harry plugged in the radio. He preferred to power it from the sled as long as possible and save the batteries in the set, in case they were needed later.

  As they worked, Pete said, “You’ve noticed the wind direction?”

  They still had to raise their voices to hear each other, but it wasn’t necessary to shout. Harry said, “Fifteen minutes ago it was blowing from another quarter of the compass.”

  “The iceberg changed direction again.”

  “What do you make of that?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “You’re the demolitions expert. Could the torpedo have been powerful enough to push the whole berg temporarily off its previous course?”

  Shaking his head emphatically, Pete said, “No way.”

  “I don’t think so, either.”

  Suddenly Harry was desperately weary and oppressed by a sense of utter helplessness. It seemed as if Mother Nature herself had set out to get them. The odds against their survival were growing by the minute and would soon be insurmountable—if they weren’t already. In spite of the Vaseline that coated his face and the knitted snow mask that was usually so effective, in spite of layers of Gore-Tex and Thermolite insulation, in spite of having been able to shelter in the cave for part of the night and periodically in the comparative warmth of the heated snowmobile cabins, he was succumbing
to the unyielding, merciless, thermometer-bursting cold. His joints ached. Even in gloves, his hands felt as cold as if he had been arranging things in a refrigerator for half an hour. And an unnerving numbness was gradually creeping into his feet. If the fuel tanks on the sleds ran dry, denying them periodic sessions in the fifty-degree air of the cabins, frostbite of the face was a real danger, and what little energy they still possessed would be sapped quickly, leaving them too exhausted to stay either on their feet or awake, unable to meet the Russians halfway.

  But no matter how heavily weariness and depression weighed on him, he could not buckle, for he had Rita to think about. She was his responsibility, because she was not as comfortable on the ice as he was; she was frightened of it even in the best of times. Come what may, he was determined to be there when she needed him, till the last minute of her life. And because of her, he had something to live for: the reward of more years together, more laughter and love, which ought to be enough to sustain him no matter how fierce the storm became.

  “The only other explanation,” Harry said as he switched on the radio and turned up the volume, “is that maybe the iceberg was picked up by a new current, something a whole lot stronger that pulled it out of its previous course and got it moving due south.”