Icebound

by Dean Koontz

  He marveled at that wink. He could guess at the agonizing fear that must be afflicting her. She wasn’t just on the ice any more. She was now in the ice. Entombed. Her terror must already be acute. Before they traveled down the tunnel to the submarine and safety—if, in fact, they were able to make that journey without perishing—she would no doubt relive the death of her parents more than once and recall every hideous detail of the ordeal that she had endured when she was six years old.

  Pete was having trouble squeezing into his gear. He said, “Are all these Russians pygmies?”

  Everyone laughed.

  The joke hadn’t been that funny. Such easy laughter was an indication of how tense they were. Harry sensed that panic was near the surface in all of them.

  11:15

  DETONATION IN FORTY-FIVE MINUTES

  The overhead speaker brought the bad news that everyone in the control room had been expecting from the torpedo officer: “That bulkhead is sweating again, Captain.”

  Gorov turned away from the bank of video displays and pulled down a microphone. “Captain to torpedo room. Is it just a thin film, the same as last time?”

  “Yes, sir. About the same.”

  “Keep an eye on it.”

  Emil Zhukov said, “Now that we know the lay of the ice above us, we could take her up to six hundred feet, up into the bowl of the funnel.”

  Gorov shook his head. “Right now we have only one thing to worry about—the sweat on that torpedo-room bulkhead. If we ascend to six hundred feet, we might still have that problem, and we’d also have to worry that the iceberg might suddenly enter a new current and be turned out of this one.”

  If they cautiously ascended a hundred feet or more into the concavity to relieve some of the tremendous pressure on the hull, the Pogodin would essentially be tucked into the berg as if it were an unborn baby nestled in the belly of its mother. Then if the berg began to move faster or slower than it was traveling at the moment, they might not realize what was happening until it was too late. They would collide with the deeper ice lying beyond their bow or with that to their stern.

  “Steady as she goes,” Gorov said.

  The notebook had an evil power that Gunvald found horribly compelling. The contents shocked, disgusted, and sickened him, yet he couldn’t resist looking at one more page, then one more, then another. He was like a wild animal that had come upon the guts and half-eaten flesh of one of its own kind that had fallen victim to a predator: He poked his nose into the ruins and sniffed eagerly, frightened but curious, ashamed of himself, but utterly and morbidly fascinated by the dreadful fate that could befall one of his own kind.

  In a sense, the notebook was a diary of dementia, a week-by-week chronicle of a mind traveling from the borderlands of sanity into the nations of madness—although that was obviously not how its owner thought of it. To that deranged man, it might seem like a research project, a record from public sources of an imagined conspiracy against the United States and against democracy everywhere. Newspaper and magazine clippings had been arranged according to their dates of publication and affixed to the pages of the notebook with cellophane tape. In the margin alongside each clipping, the compiler had written his comments.

  The earliest entries seemed to have been snipped from various amateurishly produced political magazines of limited circulation, published in the U.S. by both extreme left- and right-wing groups. This man found fuel for his burning paranoia at both ends of the spectrum. They were wildly overwritten scare stories of the most mindless sort, simple-minded and scandalous: The President was a dedicated hard-line communist—yet, in another clipping, he was a dedicated hard-line fascist; the President was a closet homosexual with a taste for underage boys—or perhaps an insatiable satyr for whom ten bimbos a week were smuggled into the White House; the Pope was alternately a despicable right-wing zealot who was secretly supporting Third World dictators and a left-wing maniac intent on funding the destruction of democracy and confiscating all the wealth of the world for the benefit of the Jesuits. Here it was reported that the Rockefellers and the Mellons were the descendants of conspiratorially minded families who had been trying to rule the world since the fourteenth century or maybe the twelfth century or maybe even since the dinosaurs had given up the turf. One clipping claimed that in China girls were raised from infancy on government-funded “prostitute farms” and given at the age of ten to sexually demented politicians in the West in return for national-security secrets. Greedy businessmen were said to be polluting the planet, so money-crazed that they didn’t give a damn if they killed every baby seal in existence, made patio furniture out of the last of the mighty redwoods, poisoned children, and destroyed the earth in pursuit of the almighty dollar; their evil conspiracies were so complex and so extensive that no one could be sure that even his own mother wasn’t in their employ. Space aliens from another galaxy were trying to take over the world, too, with the nefarious, clandestine cooperation of (pick one) the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the Libertarian Party, Jews, blacks, born-again Christians, liberals, conservatives, middle-aged white trucking-industry executives. The tenor of the clippings was such that Gunvald wouldn’t have been surprised to find one about Elvis faking death in order to secretly control the international banking establishment from an underground mansion in Switzerland.

  With the newspaper clipping on page twenty-four, the notebook became uglier and more disturbing. It was a photograph of the late President Dougherty, Above the photograph was a headline: DOUGHTERY ASSASSINATION—TEN YEARS AGO TODAY. In the margin, in cramped but carefully hand-printed red letters, was a psychotic rant: His brain has rotted away. His mind no longer exists. His tongue can’t produce any more lies. He has gone to the worms, and we’re spared any more children he might have had. I saw a poster today that said, “I cannot convince a man of my truth simply by silencing him when he tries to speak his own.” But that is a lie. Death does convince a man. And I believe it helps to convince his followers. I wish that I had killed him.

  From that point forward, more and more space in the notebook was devoted to the Dougherty family. By page one hundred, a third of the way through the book, they had become his sole obsession. Every clipping in the subsequent two hundred pages dealt with them. He had saved important and trivial stories: a report of a campaign speech that Brian’s father had made two years ago, a piece about a surprise birthday party given for the late President’s widow, a UPI dispatch concerning Brian’s adventures in one of Madrid’s bullrings….

  On page two hundred ten was a Dougherty family portrait taken at the wedding of Brian’s sister and reprinted in People magazine. Beneath it was a two-word, handwritten notice in red: The enemy.

  On page two hundred thirty, the last lingering veils of sanity were cast off, and the screaming face of purest madness was revealed. The compiler had pasted up a page from a magazine, a color photograph of Brian’s oldest sister, Emily. A pretty young woman. Button nose. Large green eyes. A splash of freckles. Auburn hair to her shoulders. She was facing sideways and laughing at something that someone had said or done out of camera range. Neat printing spiraled around her face, hundreds of repetitions of three words that filled the rest of the page to every border: pig, whore, maggot, pig, whore, maggot, pig, whore, maggot….

  The pages that followed were hair-raising.

  Gunvald tried calling Harry once more. No response. He could communicate with no one. The storm was his only companion.

  What in the name of God was happening on that iceberg?

  Brian Dougherty and Roger Breskin were the only members of the group who had extensive diving experience. Because Brian was not an official member of the expedition, merely an observer, Harry didn’t think the kid should have to assume the front position in the descent through the tunnel, which might prove to be dangerous in ways that they had not yet imagined. Therefore, Roger Breskin would lead.

  They would follow Roger in an orderly procession: Harry second, then Brian, Rita,
George, Claude, Franz, and Pete. A lot of thought had gone into that arrangement. Brian would be between Harry and Rita, the only two people that he could fully trust. George Lin was behind Rita and might be a threat to her and Brian. Because of his age and convivial temperament, Claude Jobert seemed the least likely of all suspects other than Pete, so he would be behind Lin, where he would surely notice and attempt to prevent any foul play. If Franz was the guilty party, his freedom to strike out at Brian would be severely limited by the fact that Pete would be keeping a watch on him from behind. And in the unlikely event that Pete Johnson was the would-be murderer, he wouldn’t find it easy to get past Franz, Claude, Lin, and Rita to reach Brian.

  If they had been descending through the water-filled tunnel in darkness, their order on the line wouldn’t have mattered, because in darkness anything could have happened. Fortunately, the aluminum cargo boxes had contained three powerful halogen lamps designed for use underwater at levels of considerable pressure. Roger would carry one at the front of the procession; in the middle, George Lin would have one; and Pete would be in charge of the third. If each member of the group maintained ten feet between himself and the person he was following on the way down, the distance from the first to the third light would be approximately forty yards. They wouldn’t be swimming through bright light, but Harry figured the illumination would be sufficient to discourage murder.

  Each of the heated wet suits came with a waterproof watch that featured a large, luminescent digital readout. Harry looked at his when he finished suiting up. Eighteen minutes past eleven.

  Detonation in forty-two minutes.

  He said, “Ready to go?”

  Everyone was suited up, masks in place. Even George Lin.

  Harry said, “Good luck, my friends.” He slipped on his own mask, reached over his left shoulder to activate the air feed on his tank, and took a few deep breaths to be sure that the equipment was working properly. He turned to Roger Breskin and gave him the thumbs-up sign.

  Roger picked up his halogen lamp, sloshed through the shallow edge of the pool, hesitated for only a second—and jumped feet-first into the forty-foot-wide mouth of the tunnel.

  Harry followed, cutting the water with less of a splash than Roger had made. Although he knew better, he expected the ice-cold embrace of the sea to snatch his breath away and make his heart stutter, and he gasped involuntarily as the water closed around him. But his battery pack and the heated lining of his wet suit functioned extremely well, and he felt no temperature change from the cavern to the tunnel.

  The water was murky. Millions of particles of dirt, clouds of tiny diatoms in sufficient quantity to feed a pack of whales, and beads of ice drifted in the diffused, yellowish beam of the waterproof lamp. Behind the halogen glow, Roger was a half-seen shape, perfectly black and mysterious in his rubber suit, like a shadow that had escaped from the person who had cast it, or like Death himself without his customary scythe.

  As instructed, Brian plunged into the water without delay, to thwart a possible attempt on his life after Harry and Roger had departed the cavern.

  Roger had already begun to pull himself downward on the multicommunications wire that led back to the Ilya Pogodin.

  Harry brought his left wrist close to his face mask to look at the luminous digital readout on his watch: 11:20.

  Detonation in forty minutes.

  He followed Roger Breskin down into the unknown.

  11:22

  DETONATION IN THIRTY-EIGHT MINUTES

  “Officer’s mess to captain.”

  In the control room, Nikita Gorov reached for the microphone. “Report.”

  The words came out of the squawk box so fast that they ran together and were nearly indecipherable. “We’ve got sweat on the bulkhead here.”

  “Which bulkhead?” Gorov asked with businesslike calm, though his stomach fluttered with dread.

  “Starboard, sir.”

  “How serious?”

  “Not very serious, sir. Not at this point. It’s a thin dew, two yards long, a couple of inches wide, just below the ceiling.”

  “Any indications of buckling?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Keep me informed,” he said, without revealing the depth of his concern, and he let go of the microphone.

  The technician seated at the surface Fathometer said, “I’m picking up a partial blockage of the hole again.”

  “Divers?”

  The technician studied the graph for a moment. “Yes. That could be the interpretation. Divers. I’ve got downward movement on all the blips.”

  The good news affected everyone. The men were no less tense than they had been a minute ago. For the first time in several hours, however, their tension was qualified by guarded optimism.

  “Torpedo room to captain.”

  Gorov surreptitiously blotted his damp hands on his slacks and pulled down the microphone once more. “Go ahead.”

  The voice was controlled, though an underlying note of distress was apparent. “The sweat on the bulkhead between number four tube and number five tube is getting worse, Captain. I don’t like the looks of it.”

  “Worse to what extent?”

  “Water’s trickling down to the deck now.”

  “How much water?” Gorov asked.

  The overhead speaker hissed as the torpedo officer assessed the situation. Then: “An ounce or two.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Any buckling?”

  “Nothing visible.”

  “The rivets?”

  “No distortion of the rivet line.”

  “Any sounds of metal fatigue?”

  “We’ve been going over it with a stethoscope, sir. No alarming noise, no fatigue signatures, just the usual.”

  “Then why do you sound so concerned?” Gorov demanded, getting directly to the heart of the issue.

  The torpedo officer didn’t respond immediately, but finally he said, “Well, sir, when you lay your hand against the steel…there’s a strange vibration.”

  “Engine vibrations.”

  From the squawk box, the torpedo room officer said, “No, sir. It’s something else. I don’t know just what. But something I’ve never felt before. I think…”

  “What?”

  “Sir?”

  “What do you think,” Gorov demanded. “Spit it out. What do you think you feel when you put your hand to the steel?”

  “Pressure.”

  Gorov was aware that the control-room crew had already lost its guarded optimism. To the torpedo officer, he said, “Pressure? You can’t feel pressure through the steel. I suggest you control your imagination. There’s no reason to panic. Just keep a close watch on it.”

  The torpedo officer evidently had expected more of a reaction. Morosely, he said, “Yes, sir.”

  Zhukov’s lupine face was distorted by fear but also by doubt and anger, a mosaic of emotions that were all dismayingly distinct and readable. A first officer needed to have better control of his expressions if he hoped to become a captain. He spoke so softly that Gorov had to strain to hear: “One pinhole, one hairline crack in the pressure hull, and the boat will be smashed flat.”

  True enough. And it could all happen in a fraction of a second. It would be over before they even realized that it had begun. At least death would be mercifully swift.

  “We’ll be all right,” Gorov insisted.

  He saw the confusion of loyalties in the first officer’s eyes, and he wondered if he was wrong. He wondered if he should take the Pogodin up a few hundred feet to lessen the crushing pressure on it, and abandon the Edgeway scientists.

  He thought of Nikki.

  He was a stern enough judge of himself to face the possibility that saving the Edgeway expedition might have become an obsession with him, an act of personal atonement, which was not in the best interest of his crew. If that was the case, he had lost control of himself and was no longer fit to command.

  Are we all g
oing to die because of me? he wondered.

  11:27

  DETONATION IN THIRTY-THREE MINUTES

  The descent along the communications wire proved to be far more difficult and exhausting than Harry Carpenter had anticipated. He was not a fraction as experienced in the water as were Brian and Roger, although he had used scuba gear on several occasions over the years and had thought that he knew what to expect. He had failed to take into account that a diver ordinarily spent the larger part of his time swimming more or less parallel to the ocean floor; their headfirst descent on that seven-hundred-foot line was perpendicular to the seabed, which he found to be tiring. Inexplicably tiring, in fact, because there was no physical reason why it should have been markedly more difficult than any other diving he’d ever done. At any angle, he was essentially weightless when he was underwater, and the flippers were as useful as they would have been had he been swimming parallel to the seabed. He suspected that his special weariness was largely psychological, but he could not shake it. In spite of the suit’s lead weights, he constantly seemed to be fighting his natural buoyancy. His arms ached. Blood pounded at his temples and behind his eyes. He soon realized that he would have to pause periodically, reverse his position, and get his head up to regain equilibrium; otherwise, although his weariness and growing disorientation were no doubt entirely psychological, he would black out.

  In the lead, Roger Breskin appeared to progress effortlessly. He slid his left hand along the communications wire as he descended, held the lamp in his other hand, and relied entirely on his legs to propel him, kicking smoothly. His technique wasn’t substantially different from Harry’s, but he had the advantage of muscles built through regular, diligent workouts with heavy weights.

  As he felt his shoulders crack, as the back of his neck began to ache, and as sharp new currents of pain shot down his arms, Harry wished that he had spent as much time in gyms as Roger had put in over the past twenty years.