Icebound (20 page)

“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.”

“We certainly don’t want anyone put at too great a risk on our behalf. It wouldn’t make sense to lose some people to save others. From what you said, your captain sounds confident. So I guess we’re better off leaving all the worrying to you. Have you anything else to tell me?”

“That’s all for the moment,” Timoshenko said. “Stay by your radio. We’ll keep you informed of developments.”

Everyone except Harry and George had something to say about the call from the
Ilya Pogodin’
s communications officer—suggestions about preparations to be made for the rescue party, ideas about how they might be able to help the Russians scale the leeward wall—and everyone seemed determined to say it first, now, instantly. Their voices, echoes of their voices, and echoes of the echoes filled the ice cave.

Harry acted as a moderator and tried to keep them from jabbering on to no point.

When George Lin saw that their excitement had begun to abate and that they were growing quieter, he finally joined the group and faced Harry. He had something to say after all, and he had only been waiting until he was certain he would be heard. “What was a Russian submarine doing in this part of the world?”

“This part of the world?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m afraid I don’t, George,”

“It doesn’t belong here.”

“But these are international waters.”

“They’re a long way from Russia.”

“Not all that far, actually.”

Lin’s face was distorted by anger, and his voice was strained. “But how did they learn about us?”

“From monitoring radio reports, I suppose.”

“Exactly. Precisely,” Lin said, as if he had proved a point. He looked at Fischer and then at Claude, searching for a supporter. “Radio reports.
Monitoring
.” He turned to Roger Breskin. “And why would the Russians be monitoring communications in this part of the world?” When Breskin shrugged, Lin said, “I’ll tell you why. For the same reason this Lieutenant Timoshenko speaks English so well: The
Pogodin
is on a surveillance mission. It’s a goddamned spy ship, that’s what it is.”

“Most likely,” Claude agreed, “but that’s hardly a startling revelation, George. We may not like it much, but we all know how the world works.”

“Of course it’s a spy ship,” Fischer said. “If it had been a nuclear-missile sub, one of their doomsday boats, they wouldn’t even let us know they were in the area. They wouldn’t allow one of those to break security. We’re
lucky
it’s a spy ship, actually, something they’re willing to compromise.”

Lin was clearly baffled by their lack of outrage, but he was determined to make them see the situation with the same degree of alarm that he himself obviously felt. “Listen to me, think about this: It isn’t
just
a spy ship.” His voice rose on the last few words. His hands were at his sides, opening and closing repeatedly, almost spastically. “It’s carrying motorized rafts, for God’s sake, and the equipment to rig a breeches buoy to a point on land. That means it puts spies ashore in other countries, saboteurs and maybe even assassins, probably puts them ashore in our own countries.”

“Assassins and saboteurs may be stretching it,” Fischer said.

“Not stretching it at all!” Lin responded ardently. His face was flushed, and his sense of urgency grew visibly by the moment, as if the greatest threat were not the deadly cold or the sixty time bombs buried in the ice, but the Russians who proposed to rescue them. “Assassins and saboteurs. I’m sure of it, positive. These communist bastards—”