Icebound

by Dean Koontz

  “Is that going to make it easier or harder for the Russians to climb up here and get us?”

  “Harder, I think. If the ice is heading south, and if the wind is coming pretty much from the north, then the only leeward area is at the bow. They can’t put men onto the ice as it’s rushing straight at them.”

  “And it’s nearly ten o’clock.”

  “Exactly,” Harry said.

  “If they can’t get us off in time…if we have to stay here through midnight, will we come out of this alive? Don’t bullshit me now. What’s your honest opinion?”

  “I should ask you. You’re the man who designed those bombs. You know better than I what damage they’ll do.”

  Pete looked grim. “What I think is…the shock waves are going to smash up most of the ice we’re standing on. There’s a chance that five or six hundred feet of the berg will hold together, but not the entire length from the bow of it to the first bomb. And if only five or six hundred feet are left, do you know what’s going to happen?”

  Harry knew too well. “The iceberg will be five hundred feet long and seven hundred feet from top to bottom.”

  “And it can’t float that way.”

  “Not for a minute. The center of gravity will be all wrong. It’ll roil over, seek a new attitude.”

  They stared at each other as the open radio frequency produced squeals and hisses that competed with the wind beyond the cave entrance.

  At last Pete said, “If only we’d been able to dig out ten of the bombs.”

  “But we weren’t.” Harry picked up the microphone. “Let’s see if the Russians have any good news.”

  Gunvald found nothing incriminating in the lockers that belonged to Pete Johnson and Claude Jobert.

  Five suspects. No sinister discoveries. No clues.

  He got up from the wooden crate and went to the far end of the room. At that distance from the violated lockers—although distance itself didn’t make him any less guilty—he felt that he could fill and light his pipe. He needed the pipe to calm him and to help him think. Soon the air was filled with the rich aroma of cherry-flavored tobacco.

  He closed his eyes and leaned against the wall and thought about the numerous items that he had taken from the lockers. At a glance he had seen nothing outré in those personal effects. But it was possible that the clues, if any existed, would be subtle. He might discover them only on reflection. Therefore, he carefully recalled each of the things that he had found in the lockers, and he held it before his mind’s eye, searching for some anomaly that he might have overlooked when he’d had the real object in his hand.

  Roger Breskin.

  Franz Fischer.

  George Lin.

  Claude Jobert.

  Pete Johnson.

  Nothing.

  If one of those men was mentally unbalanced, a potential killer, then he was damned clever. He had hidden his madness so well that no sign of it could be found even in his most personal, private effects.

  Frustrated, Gunvald emptied his pipe into a sand-filled waste can, put the pipe in his vest pocket, and returned to the lockers. The floor was littered with the precious detritus of five lives. As he gathered up the articles and put them back where he had found them, his guilt gave way to shame at the violation of privacy that he had committed, even though it had been necessitated by the events of the day.

  And then he saw the envelope. Ten by twelve inches. About one inch thick. At the very bottom of the locker, against the back wall.

  In his haste, he had overlooked it, largely because it was a shade of gray similar to that of the metal against which it stood and because it was in the lowest part of the locker, at foot level, tucked back at the rear of the twelve-inch-high space under the lowest shelf. Indeed, he was surprised that he’d noticed it even now. The instant he spotted the envelope, he was overcome by a vivid premonition that it contained the damaging evidence for which he had been searching.

  It was stuck firmly to the locker wall. When he tore it free, he saw that six loops of electrician’s tape had held it fast, so it had been placed there with considerable deliberation, in hope of keeping it a secret even if the locker was violated.

  The flap was held shut only by a metal clasp, and Gunvald opened it. The envelope contained only a spiral-bound notebook with what appeared to be newspaper and magazine clippings interlarded among the pages.

  Reluctantly but without hesitation, Gunvald opened the notebook and began to page through it. The contents hit him with tremendous force, shocked him as he had never imagined that he could be shocked. Hideous stuff. Page after page of it. He knew at once that the man who had compiled this collection, if not a raving maniac, was at least a seriously disturbed and dangerous individual.

  He closed the book, yanked the chain to turn out the light at the back of the room, and hurriedly pulled on his coat and outer boots. Kicking through snowdrifts, head tucked down to protect his face from a savage wind filled with flaying specks of ice, he ran back to the telecommunications hut, frantic to let Harry know what he had found.

  “Ice overhead. One hundred feet.”

  Gorov left the command pad and stood behind the technician who was reading the surface Fathometer.

  “Ice overhead. One hundred twenty feet.”

  “How can it be receding?” Gorov frowned, reluctant to believe the proof provided by the very technology that he had always before trusted. “By now the iceberg’s turned its narrow profile to us, so we can’t have passed under even half its length. There’s still a huge, long mountain hanging over us.”

  The technician frowned too. “I don’t understand it, sir. But now it’s up to a hundred and forty feet and still rising.”

  “A hundred and forty feet of clear water between us and the bottom of the iceberg?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The surface Fathometer was a sophisticated version of the echo sounder that had been used for decades to find the floor of the ocean beneath a submarine. It broadcast high-frequency sound waves upward in a tightly controlled spread, bounced an echo off the underside of the ice—if any actually lay overhead—and determined the distance between the top of the sail and the frozen ceiling of the sea. It was standard equipment on every ship that might possibly be called upon—on rare occasions, if ever—to pass under the icecap in order to fulfill its duties or to escape an enemy vessel.

  “One hundred sixty feet, sir.”

  The stylus on the surface Fathometer wiggled back and forth on a continuous drum of graph paper. The black band that it drew was steadily growing wider.

  “Ice overhead. One hundred eighty feet.”

  The ice continued to recede above them.

  It made no sense.

  The squawk box above the command pad hissed and crackled. The voice that issued from it was gruff by nature and metallic, as all voices were that passed through the intercom. The torpedo officer reported news that Nikita Gorov had hoped never to hear at any depth, let alone at seven hundred forty feet: “Captain, our forward bulkhead is sweating.”

  Everyone in the control room stiffened. Their attention had been riveted on the ice reports and on the sonar readings, because the greatest danger had seemed to be that they would ram into a long stalactite of ice hanging from the bottom of the berg. The torpedo officer’s warning was an unnerving reminder that they had collided with an unknown mass of drift ice before initiating a crash dive and that they were more than seven hundred feet beneath the surface, where every square inch of the hull was under brutal pressure. Millions upon millions of tons of seawater lay between them and the world of sky and sun and open air that was their true home.

  Pulling down an overhead microphone, Gorov said, “Captain to torpedo room. There’s dry insulation behind that bulkhead.”

  The squawk box was now the center of interest, as the diving gauge had been a moment ago. “Yes, sir. But it’s sweating just the same. The insulation behind it must be wet now.”

  Evidently they had sustaine
d a dangerous amount of damage when they had collided with that floe ice. “Is there much water?”

  “Just a sweat, sir. Just a film.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  The torpedo officer said, “Along the weld between number four tube and number five tube.”

  “Any buckling?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Watch it closely,” Gorov said.

  “I’ve got eyes for nothing else, sir.”

  Gorov let go of the microphone, and it sprang back up out of the way.

  Zhukov was at the command pad. “We could change course, sir.”

  “No.”

  Gorov knew what his first officer was thinking. They were passing under the length of the iceberg, with half of it—at least two fifths of a mile—still ahead of them. To port and starboard, however, open water could be found in two or three hundred yards, for the width of the berg was substantially less than its length. Changing course seemed reasonable, but it would be a waste of effort.

  Gorov said, “By the time we could bring the boat around and to port or starboard, we’d have passed under the iceberg’s stern and would be in open water anyway. Hold tight, Lieutenant.”

  “All right, sir.”

  “Rudder amidships, and keep it that way unless this current begins to push us around.”

  The operator seated at the surface Fathometer announced, “Ice overhead. Two hundred fifty feet.”

  The mystery of the receding ice again.

  They were not descending. And Gorov knew damned well that the iceberg above them was not magically levitating out of the sea. So why was the distance between them steadily widening?

  “Should we take her up, sir?” Zhukov suggested. “A little closer to the ice. If we ascend even to just six hundred feet, that torpedo-room bulkhead might stop sweating. The pressure would be considerably less.”

  “Steady at seven hundred forty,” Gorov said shortly.

  He was more worried about his sweating crew than he was about the sweating bulkhead. They were good men, and he’d had many reasons to be proud of them during the time that they had served under him. They’d been in numerous tight spots before, and without exception they had remained calm and professional. On every previous occasion, however, they had needed nothing but nerve and skill to see them through. This time a big measure of good luck was needed as well. No amount of nerve and skill could save them if the hull cracked under the titanic pressure to which it was currently being subjected. Unable to rely solely on themselves, they were forced to trust also in the faceless engineers who had designed the boat and the shipyard workers who had built it. Perhaps that would not have been too much to ask if they had not been acutely aware that the country’s troubled economy had led to a reduction in the frequency and extent of dry-dock maintenance of the vessel. That was enough to make them a bit crazy—and perhaps careless.

  “We can’t go up,” Gorov insisted. “There’s still all that ice above us. I don’t know what’s happening here, how the ice can be receding like this, but we’ll be cautious until I understand the situation.”

  “Ice overhead. Two hundred eighty feet.”

  Gorov looked again at the surface-Fathometer graph.

  “Three hundred feet, sir.”

  Abruptly the stylus stopped jiggling. It produced a straight, thin, black line down the center of the drum.

  “Clear water!” the technician said with obvious astonishment. “No ice overhead.”

  “We’re out from under?” Zhukov asked.

  Gorov said, “Impossible. That’s a monster berg, at least four fifths of a mile long. No more than half of it has passed over us. We can’t—”

  “Ice overhead again!” the surface-Fathometer operator called out. “Three hundred feet. Ice at three hundred feet and falling now.”

  Gorov watched the stylus closely. The channel of open water between the top of the Pogodin’s sail and the bottom of the iceberg narrowed steadily, rapidly.

  Two hundred sixty feet. Two hundred twenty.

  One hundred eighty. One forty. One hundred.

  Eighty. Sixty.

  Separation held at fifty feet for a few seconds but then began to fluctuate wildly: fifty feet, a hundred and fifty feet, fifty feet again, a hundred feet, eighty, fifty feet, two hundred feet, up and down, up and down, in utterly unpredictable peaks and troughs. Then it reached fifty feet of clearance once more, and at last the stylus began to wiggle less erratically.

  “Holding steady,” the surface-fathometer technician reported. “Fifty to sixty feet. Minor variations. Holding steady…still holding…holding…”

  “Could the Fathometer have been malfunctioning back there?” Gorov asked.

  The technician shook his head. “No, sir. I don’t think so, sir. It seems fine now.”

  “Then do I understand what just happened? Did we pass under a hole in the middle of the iceberg?”

  The technician kept a close watch on the graph drum, ready to call out if the ceiling of ice above them began to drop lower than the fifty-foot mark. “Yes. I think so. From every indication, a hole. Approximately in the middle.”

  “A funnel-shaped hole.”

  “Yes, sir. It began to register as an inverted dish. But when we were directly under, the upper two thirds of the cavity narrowed drastically.”

  With growing excitement, Gorov said, “And it went all the way to the top of the iceberg?”

  “I don’t know about that, sir. But it went up at least to sea level.”

  The surface Fathometer, of course, couldn’t take readings farther up than the surface of the sea.

  “A hole,” Gorov said thoughtfully. “How in the name of God did it get there?”

  No one had an answer.

  Gorov shrugged. “Perhaps one of the Edgeway people will know. They’ve been studying the ice. The important thing is that it’s there, however it came to be.”

  “Why is this hole so important?” Zhukov asked.

  Gorov had a seed of an idea, the germ of an outrageously daring plan to rescue the Edgeway scientists. If the hole was—

  “Clear water,” the technician announced. “No ice overhead.”

  Emil Zhukov pressed a few keys on the command-pad console. He looked up at the computer screen to his right. “It checks. Taking into account the southward current and our forward speed, we should be entirely out from under. This time the berg’s really gone.”

  “Clear water,” the technician repeated.

  Gorov glanced at his watch: 10:02. Less than two hours remained until the sixty explosive charges would shatter the iceberg. In that length of time, the crew of the Pogodin could not possibly mount a conventional rescue attempt with any hope of success. The unorthodox scheme that the captain had in mind might seem to some to border on outright lunacy, but it had the advantage of being a plan that could work within the limited time they had left.

  Zhukov cleared his throat. No doubt with a vivid mental image of that sweating bulkhead in the torpedo room, the first officer was waiting for orders to take the boat up to a less dangerous depth.

  Pulling down the steel-spring microphone, Gorov said, “Captain to torpedo room. How’s it look there?”

  From the overhead speaker: “Still sweating, sir. It’s not any better, but it’s not any worse, either.”

  “Keep watching. And stay calm.” Gorov released the microphone and returned to the command pad. “Engines at half speed. Left full rudder.”

  Astonishment made Emil Zhukov’s long face appear even longer. He opened his mouth to speak, but he couldn’t make a sound. He swallowed hard. His second attempt was successful: “You mean we aren’t going up?”

  “Not this minute,” Gorov said. “We’ve got to make another run under that behemoth. I want to have another look at the hole in the middle of it.”

  The volume on the shortwave radio was at its maximum setting, so the Russian communications officer aboard the Pogodin could be heard over the roar of the storm beast tha
t prowled at the entrance to the cave and above the roof of interlocking slabs of ice. Hard shatters of static and electronic squeals of interference echoed off the ice walls, rather like the enormously amplified sound of fingernails being dragged across a blackboard.

  The others had joined Harry and Pete in the ice cave to hear the astounding news firsthand. They were crowded together near the back wall.

  When Lieutenant Timoshenko had described the hole and the large area of dramatically scalloped ice on the bottom of their floating prison, Harry had explained the probable cause of it. The iceberg had been broken off the cap by a tsunami, and the tsunami had been generated by a seabed earthquake almost directly beneath them. In this part of the world, in association with this chain of fractures, volcanic activity was de rigueur, as witness the violent Icelandic eruptions a few decades ago. And if ocean-floor volcanic activity had been associated with the recent event, enormous quantities of lava could have been discharged into the sea, flung upward with tremendous force. Spouts of white-hot lava could have bored that hole, and the millions of gallons of boiling water that it produced could easily have sculpted the troughs and peaks that marked the bottom of the iceberg just past the hole.

  Although it originated from a surfaced submarine only a fraction of a mile away, Timoshenko’s voice was peppered with static, but the transmission didn’t break up. “As Captain Gorov sees it, there are three possibilities. First, the hole in the bottom of your berg might end in solid ice above the water line. Or second, it might lead into a cavern or to the bottom of a shallow crevasse. Or third, it might even continue for another hundred feet above sea level and open at the top of the iceberg. Does that analysis seem sound to you, Dr. Carpenter?”

  “Yes,” Harry said, impressed by the captain’s reasoning. “And I think I know which of the three it is.” He told Timoshenko about the crevasse that had opened midway in the iceberg’s length when the gigantic seismic waves had passed under the edge of the winter field. “It didn’t exist when we went out to position the explosives, but there it was, waiting for us, on our way back to the temporary camp. I nearly drove straight into it, lost my snowmobile.”