Icebound (30 page)

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 going 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.

He glanced over his shoulder to see if Brian and Rita were all right. The kid was trailing him by about twelve feet, features barely visible in the full-face diving mask. Eruptions of bubbles streamed out of Brian’s scuba vent, were briefly tinted gold by the backwash from Roger’s lamp, and quickly vanished into the gloom above. In spite of all that he’d endured in the past few hours, he seemed to be having no trouble keeping up.

Behind Brian, Rita was barely visible, only fitfully backlighted by the lamp that George Lin carried in her wake. The yellowish beams were defeated by the murky water; against that eerily luminous but pale haze, she was but a rippling shadow, at times so indistinct and strange that she might have been not human but an unknown denizen of the polar seas. Harry couldn’t get a glimpse of her face, but he knew that her psychological suffering, at least, must be great.

Cryophobia: fear of ice.

The frigid water in the tunnel was as dark as if it had been tainted with clouds of squid ink, for it was thick with diatoms and specks of ice and inorganic particulates. Rita wasn’t able to see the ice that lay only twenty feet from her in every direction, but she remained acutely aware of it. At times her fear was so overwhelming that her chest swelled and her throat tightened and she was unable to breathe. Each time, however, on the shuddering edge of blind panic, she finally exhaled explosively, inhaled the metallic-tasting mixture of gases from the scuba tank, and staved off hysteria.

Frigophobia: fear of cold. She suffered no chill whatsoever in the Russian wet suit. Indeed, she was warmer than she had been at any time during the past few months, since they had come onto the icecap and established Edgeway Station. Nevertheless, she was unavoidably
aware
of the deadly cold of the water, conscious of being separated from it by only a thin sheath of rubber and electrically heated layers of insulation. The Russian technology was impressive, but if the battery pack at her hip was drained before she reached the submarine far below, her body heat would be quickly leached away. The insistent cold of the sea would insinuate itself deep into her muscles, into her marrow, torturing her body and swiftly numbing her mind….

Down, ever down. Embraced by a coldness that she couldn’t feel. Surrounded by ice that she couldn’t see. Curved white walls out of sight to the left of her, to the right, above and below, ahead and behind. Surrounding and entrapping her. Tunnel of ice. Prison of ice. Flooded with darkness and bitter cold. Silent but for the susurrant rush of her breathing and the
thud-thud-thudding
of her heart. Inescapable. Deeper than a grave.

As she swam down into depths unknown, Rita was sometimes more aware of the light ahead of her than she was at other times, because she was repeatedly flashing back to the winter when she was only six years old.

Happy. Excited. On her way to her first skiing holiday with her mother and father, who are experienced on the slopes and eager to teach her. The car is an Audi. Her mother and father sit up front, and she sits alone in the back. Ascending into increasingly white and fantastic realms. A winding road in the French Alps. An alabaster wonderland all around them, below them, great vistas of evergreen forests shrouded with snow, rocky crags looming high above like the old-men faces of watching gods, bearded with ice. Fat white flakes suddenly begin to spiral out of the iron-gray afternoon sky. She’s a child of the Italian Mediterranean, of sun and olive groves and sun-spangled ocean, and she’s never before been to the mountains. Now her young heart races with adventure. It’s so beautiful: the snow, the steeply rising land, the valleys crowded with trees and purple shadows, sprinkled with small villages. And even when Death suddenly comes, it has a terrible beauty, all dressed resplendently in white. Her mother sees the avalanche first, to the right of the roadway and high above, and she cries out in alarm. Rita looks through the side window, sees the wall of white farther up the mountain, sliding down, growing as rapidly as a storm wave sweeping across the ocean toward shore, casting up clouds of snow like sea spray, silent at first, so white and silent and beautiful that she can hardly believe it can hurt them. Her father says, “We can outrun it,” and he sounds scared as he jams his foot on the accelerator, and her mother says, “Hurry, for God’s sake, hurry,” and it comes onward, silent and white and huge and dazzling and bigger by the second…silent…then a barely audible rumble like distant thunder….

Rita heard strange sounds. Hollow, faraway voices. Shouting or lamenting. Like the voices of the damned faintly wailing for surcease from suffering, issuing from the ether above a séance table.

Then she realized that it was only a single voice. Her own. She was making hard, panicky sounds into her face mask, but since her ears weren’t in the mask, she heard her own cries only as they vibrated through the bones of her face. If they sounded like the wails of a damned soul, that was because, at the moment, Hell was a place within her, a dark corner in her own heart.

She squinted past Brian and desperately concentrated on the shadowy shape farther along the line: Harry. He was dimly visible in the murk, kicking down into the black void, so near and yet so far away. Twelve or fifteen feet separated Rita from Brian; count six feet for the kid, and maybe twelve feet between him and Harry: thirty or thirty-five feet altogether, separating her from her husband. It seemed like a mile. As long as she thought about Harry and kept in mind the good times that they would have together when this ordeal ended, she was able to stop screaming into her face mask and continue swimming. Paris. The Hotel George V. A bottle of fine champagne. His kiss. His touch. They would share it all again if she just didn’t let her fears overwhelm her.