Icebound

by Dean Koontz

  “And the bottom of this crevasse is open all the way down to the sea?” Timoshenko asked.

  “I don’t know, but now I suspect it is. As near as I’m able to calculate, it must lie directly above the hole you’ve found on the underside. Even if the lava spout didn’t punch through the entire hundred feet of ice above the water line, the heat needed to bore upward through all that underwater mass would at least have cracked the ice above the surface. And those cracks are sure to lead all the way down to the open water that your Fathometer operator detected.”

  “If the hole is at the bottom of the crevasse—I suppose we should call it a shaft or tunnel, rather than a hole—would you be willing to try to reach it by climbing down into the crevasse?” Timoshenko inquired.

  The question seemed bizarre to Harry. He could not see the point of going down into that chasm where his snowmobile had vanished. “If we had to do it, I suppose we could improvise some climbing equipment. But what would be the point? I don’t understand where you’re going with this.”

  “That’s how we’re going to try to take you off the ice. Through that tunnel and out from underneath the berg.”

  In the cave behind Harry, the seven others responded to that suggestion with noisy disbelief.

  He gestured at them to be quiet. To the Russian radioman, he said, “Down through this hole, this tunnel, and somehow into the submarine? But how?”

  Timoshenko said, “In diving gear.”

  “We haven’t any.”

  “Yes, but we have.” Timoshenko explained now the gear would be gotten to them.

  Harry was more impressed than ever with the Russians’ ingenuity but still doubtful. “I’ve done some diving in the past. I’m not an expert at it, but I know a man can’t dive that deep unless he’s trained and has special equipment.”

  “We’ve got the special equipment,” Timoshenko said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to do without the special training.” He spent the next five minutes outlining Captain Gorov’s plan in some detail.

  The scheme was brilliant, imaginative, daring, and well thought out. Harry wanted to meet this Captain Nikita Gorov, to see what kind of man could come up with such a stunningly clever idea. “It might work, but it’s risky. And there’s no guarantee that the tunnel from your end actually opens into the bottom of the crevasse at our end. Maybe we won’t be able to find it.”

  “Perhaps,” Timoshenko agreed. “But it’s your best chance. In fact, it’s your only chance. There’s just an hour and a half until those explosives detonate. We can’t get rafts across to the iceberg, climb up there, and bring you down as we’d planned. Not in ninety minutes. The wind is coming from the stern of the iceberg now, blowing hard along both flanks. We’d have to land the rafts at the bow, and that’s impossible with the whole mountain of ice rushing down on us at nine knots.”

  Harry knew that was true. He had said as much to Pete just half an hour ago. “Lieutenant Timoshenko, I need to discuss this with my colleagues. Give me a minute, please.” Still hunkering before the radio, he turned slightly to face the others and said, “Well?”

  Rita would have to control her phobia as never before, because she would have to go down inside the ice, be entirely surrounded by it. Yet she was the first to speak in favor of the plan: “Let’s not waste time. Of course we’ll do it. We can’t just sit here and wait to die.”

  Claude Jobert nodded. “We haven’t much choice.”

  “We’ve got one chance in ten thousand of getting through alive,” Franz estimated. “But it’s not altogether hopeless.”

  “Teutonic gloom,” Rita said, grinning.

  In spite of himself, Fischer managed a smile. “That’s what you said when I was worried that an earthquake might strike before we got back to base camp.”

  “Count me in,” Brian said.

  Roger Breskin nodded. “And me.”

  Pete Johnson said, “I joined up for the adventure. Now I’m sure as hell getting more of it than I bargained for. If we ever get out of this mess, I swear I’ll be content to spend my evenings at home with a good book.”

  Turning to Lin, Harry said, “Well, George?”

  With his goggles up and his snow mask pulled down, Lin revealed his distress in every line and aspect of his face. “If we stayed here, if we didn’t leave before midnight, isn’t there a chance we’d come through the explosions on a piece of ice large enough to sustain us? I was under the impression that we were counting on that before this submarine showed up.”

  Harry put it bluntly: “If we’ve only one chance in ten thousand of living through the escape Captain Gorov has planned for us, then we’ve no better than one chance in a million of living through the explosions at midnight.”

  Lin was biting his lower lip so hard that Harry would not have been surprised to see blood trickle down his chin.

  “George? Are you with us or not?”

  Finally Lin nodded.

  Harry picked up the microphone again. “Lieutenant Timoshenko?”

  “I read you, Dr. Carpenter.”

  “We’ve decided that your captain’s plan makes sense if only because it’s a necessity. We’ll do it—if it can be done.”

  “It can be done, Doctor. We’re convinced of it.”

  “We’ll have to move quickly,” Harry said. “There isn’t any hope in hell of our reaching the crevasse much before eleven o’clock. That leaves just one hour for the rest of it.”

  Timoshenko said, “If we all keep in mind a vivid image of what’s going to happen at midnight, we should be able to hustle through what needs to be done in the time we have. Good luck to all of you.”

  “And to you,” Harry said.

  When they were ready to leave the cave a few minutes later, Harry had still not heard from Gunvald regarding the contents of those five lockers. When he tried to raise Edgeway Station on the radio, he could get no response except squalls of static and the hollow hiss of dead air.

  Apparently, they were going to have to descend into that deep crevasse and go down the tunnel beneath it without knowing which of them was likely to make another attempt on Brian Dougherty’s life if the opportunity arose.

  Even the most sophisticated telecommunications equipment was unable to cope with the interference that accompanied a storm in polar latitudes in the bitter heart of winter. Gunvald could no longer pick up the powerful transmissions emanating from the U.S. base at Thule. He tried every frequency band, but across all of them, the storm reigned. The only scraps of man-made sound that he detected were fragments of a program of bigband music that faded in and out on a five-second cycle. The speakers were choked with static: a wailing, screaming, screeching, hissing, crackling concert of chaos unaccompanied by even a single human voice.

  He returned to the frequency where Harry was supposed to be awaiting his call, leaned toward the set, and held the microphone against his lips, as if he could will the connection to happen. “Harry, can you read me?”

  Static.

  For perhaps the fiftieth time, he read off his call numbers and their call numbers, raising his voice as if trying to shout above the interference.

  No response. It wasn’t a matter of hearing them or being heard through the static. They simply weren’t receiving him at all.

  He knew that he ought to give up.

  He glanced at the spiral-bound notebook that lay open on the table beside him. Although he had looked at the same page a dozen times already, he shuddered.

  He couldn’t give up. They had to know the nature of the beast in their midst.

  He called them again.

  Static.

  FIVE

  TUNNEL

  10:45

  DETONATION IN ONE HOUR FIFTEEN MINUTES

  Dressed in heavy winter gear and standing on the bridge of the Pogodin, Nikita Gorov methodically searched one third of the horizon with his night glasses, alert for drift ice other than the iceberg that was carrying the Edgeway group. That formidable white mountain lay directly ah
ead of the submarine, still driven by the deep current that originated three hundred forty feet below the surface and extended to about seven hundred eighty feet.

  The storm-tossed sea, which churned on all sides of the boat, exhibited none of its familiar, rhythmic motion. It affected the ship in an unpredictable fashion, so Gorov couldn’t prepare for its next attack. Without warning, the boat rolled to port so violently that everyone on the bridge was thrown sideways; the captain collided with Emil Zhukov and Semichastny. He disentangled himself from, them and gripped an ice-sheathed section of the railing just as a wall of water burst across the sail and flooded the bridge.

  As the ship righted itself, Zhukov shouted, “I’d rather be down at seven hundred feet!”

  “Ah! You see?” Gorov shouted. “You didn’t know when you were well off!”

  “I’ll never complain again.”

  The iceberg no longer provided a leeward flank in which the Ilya Pogodin could take shelter. The full force of the storm assaulted the berg from behind, and both of its long flanks were vulnerable to the pitiless wind. The boat was forced to endure on the open surface, pitching and heaving, rocking and falling and rising and wallowing as though it were a living creature in its death throes. Another of the monumental waves battered the starboard hull, roared up the side of the sail, and cast Niagaras of spray down the other side, repeatedly drenching everyone on the bridge. Most of the time, the submarine listed heavily to port on the back of a monstrous black swell that was simultaneously monotonous and terrifying. All the men on the bridge were jacketed in thick ice, as was the metalwork around them.

  Where it was not covered by goggles or protected by his hood, Gorov’s face was heavily smeared with lanolin. Although his post did not require him to confront the fiendish wind directly, his nose and cheeks had been cruelly bitten by the viciously cold air.

  Emil Zhukov had been wearing a scarf over the bottom half of his face, and it had come undone. At his assigned post, he had to stare directly into the storm, and he could not be without some protection, because his skin would be peeled from his face by the spicules of ice that were like millions of needles on the hundred-mile-an-hour wind. He quickly twisted and squeezed the scarf in both hands, cracking the layer of ice that encrusted it, then hastily retied it over his mouth and nose. He resumed his watch on one third of the murky horizon, miserable but stoical.

  Gorov lowered his night glasses and turned to look back and up at the two men who were working on top of the sail just aft of the bridge. They were illuminated by the red bridge bulb to some extent and by a portable arc light. Both cast eerie, twisted shadows like those of demons toiling diligently over the bleak machinery of Hell.

  One of those crewmen was standing atop the sail, wedged between the two periscopes and the radar mast, which must have been either immeasurably more terrifying or more exhilarating than riding a wild horse in a Texas rodeo, depending on the man’s tolerance for danger, even though a safety line encircled his waist and secured him to the telecommunications mast. He presented one of the strangest sights that Captain Gorov had ever seen. He was swathed in so many layers of waterproof clothes that he had difficulty moving freely, but in his dangerously exposed position, he needed every layer of protection to avoid freezing to death where he stood. Like a human lightning rod at the pinnacle of the submarine superstructure, he was a target for the hurricane-force winds, the ceaseless barrage of sleet, and the cold sea spray. His suit of ice was extremely thick and virtually without chink or rent. At his neck, shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, and knees, the encasing ice was marred by well-delineated cracks and creases, but even at those joints, the cloth under the glistening storm coat was not visible. Otherwise, from head to foot, the poor devil glittered, sparkled, gleamed. He reminded Gorov of the cookie men, coated with sweet white icing, that were sometimes among the treats given to children in Moscow on New Year’s Day.

  The second seaman was standing on the short ladder that led from the bridge to the top of the sail. Tied fast to one of the rungs in order to free his hands for work, he was locking several watertight aluminum cargo boxes to a length of titanium-alloy chain.

  Satisfied that the job was nearly completed, Gorov returned to his post and raised the night glasses to his eyes.

  10:56

  DETONATION IN ONE HOUR FOUR MINUTES

  Because the rampaging wind was behind them, they were able to proceed to the crevasse in their snowmobiles. If they had been advancing into the teeth of the storm, they would have had to cope with near zero visibility, and in that case they would have done as well or better on foot, though they would have to have been tied together to prevent one of them from being bowled over by the wind and carried away. Driving with the wind, however, they could often see ten to fifteen yards ahead, although visibility was decreasing by the minute. Soon they would be in a full-fledged whiteout.

  When they were in the vicinity of the chasm, Harry brought his sled to a full stop and, with a measure of reluctance, climbed out. Though he held tightly to the door handle, a hundred-mile-per-hour gust immediately knocked him to his knees. When the murderous velocity declined enough, he got up, though not without considerable effort, and hung on to the door, cursing the storm.

  The other snowmobiles pulled up behind him. The last vehicle in the train was only thirty yards from him, but he could see nothing more than vague yellow aureoles where the headlights should have been. They were so dim that they might have been merely a trick of his bleary vision.

  Daring to let go of the handle on the cabin door, hunching low to present the smallest possible profile to the wind, he hurried forward with his flashlight, scouting the ice, until he ascertained that the next hundred feet were safe. The air was bone-freezing, so cold that breathing it even through his snow mask hurt his throat and made his lungs ache. He scrambled back to the comparative warmth of his snowmobile and cautiously drove thirty yards before getting out to conduct further reconnaissance.

  Again he had found the crevasse, although this time he had avoided nearly driving over the brink. The declivity was ten or twelve feet wide, narrowing toward the bottom, filled with more darkness than his flashlight could dispel.

  As far as he could see through his frosted goggles—which were speckled with new ice the instant that he wiped them—the wall along which he would have to descend was pretty much a flat, unchallenging surface. He couldn’t be entirely sure of what he was seeing: The angle at which he was able to look into the chasm, the curious way in which the deep ice refracted and reflected the light, the shadows that cavorted like demon dancers at the slightest movement of his flashlight, the windblown snow that spumed over the brink and then spiraled into the depths—all conspired to prevent him from getting a clear view of what lay below. Less than a hundred feet down was what appeared to be a floor or a wide ledge, which he thought he could reach without killing himself.

  Harry turned his sled around and gingerly backed it to the edge of the chasm, a move that might reasonably have been judged suicidal; however, considering that barely sixty precious minutes remained to them, a certain degree of recklessness seemed not only justifiable but essential. Except for professional mannequins and British Prime Ministers, no one ever accomplished anything by standing still. That was a favorite maxim of Rita’s, herself a British citizen, and Harry usually smiled when he thought of it. He wasn’t smiling now. He was taking a calculated risk, with a greater likelihood of failure than success. The ice might collapse under him and tumble into the pit, as it had done earlier in the day.

  Nevertheless, he was prepared to trust to luck and put his life in the hands of the gods. If there was justice in the universe, he was about to benefit from a change of fortune—or at least he was overdue for one.

  By the time the others parked their snowmobiles, got out, and joined him near the brink of the crevasse, Harry had fixed two one-thousand-pound-test, ninety-strand nylon lines to the tow hitch of his sled. The first rope was an eighty-foot safety line th
at would bring him up short of the crevasse floor if he fell. He knotted it around his waist. The second line, the one that he would use to attempt a measured descent, was a hundred feet long, and he tossed the free end into the ravine.

  Pete Johnson arrived at the brink and gave Harry his flashlight.

  Harry had already snapped his own flashlight to the tool belt at his waist. It hung at his right hip, butt up and lens down. Now he clipped Pete’s torch at his left hip. Twin beams of yellow light shone down his quilted pants legs.

  Neither he nor Pete attempted to speak. The wind was shrieking like something that had crawled out of the bowels of Hell on Judgment Day. It was so loud that it was stupefying, louder than it had been earlier. They couldn’t have heard each other even if they had screamed at the top of their lungs.

  Harry stretched out on the ice, flat on his stomach, and took the climbing line in both hands.

  Bending down, Pete patted him reassuringly on the shoulder. Then he slowly pushed Harry backward, over the ledge, into the crevasse.

  Harry thought he had a firm grip on the line and was certain that he could control his descent, but he was mistaken. As though greased, the line slipped through his hands, and he dropped unchecked into the gap. Maybe it was the crust of ice on his gloves, maybe the fact that the leather was soft with Vaseline from all the times in recent days when he had unconsciously touched his grease-protected face. Whatever the reason, the rope was like a live eel in his hands, and he plunged into the abyss.

  A wall of ice flashed past him, two or three inches from his face, flickering with the reflections of the two flashlight beams that preceded him. He clenched the rope as tightly as he could and also tried to pin it between his knees, but he was in what amounted to freefall.

  In the whirl of blown snow and the peculiar prismatic refraction of the light in the deep ice, Harry had thought that the wall was a flat and relatively smooth surface, but he hadn’t been entirely sure. Now the shorter safety line wouldn’t save him if he encountered a sharp spike of ice that projected from the wall of the crevasse. If he dropped at high speed onto a jagged outcropping, it could rip even his heavy storm suit, tear him open from crotch to throat, impale him—