Brian needed a moment to absorb that news and grasp the full horror of it. “Broken off…You mean we're adrift?”
“A ship of ice.”
The wind gusted so violently that for half a minute Brian could not have been heard above it even if he'd shouted at the top of his voice. The snowflakes were as busy and furious as thousands of angry bees, stinging the exposed portions of his face, and he pulled up his snow mask to cover his mouth and nose.
When the gust died out at last, Brian leaned toward Roger Breskin. “What about the others?”
“Could be on this berg too. But let's hope they're still on safe ice.”
“Dear God.”
Roger directed the flashlight away from the darkness where they had expected to find the far wall of a crevasse. The tight beam speared down and out into the humbling void.
They wouldn't be able to see the face of the cliff that dropped away just in front of them unless they eased forward and hung partly over the precipice. Neither of them was eager to expose himself to that extreme risk.
The pale light angled to the left and right, then touched upon the choppy, black, unfrozen sea that raged eighty or ninety feet below them. Flat tables of ice, irregular chunks of ice, gnarled rafts of ice, and delicate ever- changing laces of ice bobbled and swirled in the deep troughs of frigid dark water, crashed together on the crests of the waves; touched by the light, they glittered as if they were diamonds spread on black velvet.
Mesmerized by the chaos that the flashlight revealed, swallowing hard, Brian said, “George fell into the sea. He's gone.”
“Maybe not.”
Brian didn't see how there could be a hopeful alternative. His queasiness had slid into full-blown nausea.
Pushing with his elbows against the ice, Roger inched forward until he was able to peer over the brink and straight down the face of the precipice.
In spite of his nausea — and though he was still concerned that another tsunami might sweep under them and cast them into George Lin's grave — Brian moved up beside Roger.
The flashlight beam found the place where their ice island met the sea. The cliff did not plunge cleanly into the water. At its base, it was shattered into three ragged shelves, each six or eight yards wide and six to eight feet below the one above it. The shelves were as fissured and sharp-edged and jumbled as the base of any rocky bluff on dry land. Because another six hundred feet or more of the berg lay below sea level, the towering storm waves could not pass entirely under it; they crashed across the three shelves and broke against the glistening palisades, exploding into fat gouts of foam and icy spray.
Caught by the maelstrom, Lin would have been dashed to pieces. It might have been a more merciful death if he had plunged suddenly into those hideously cold waters and suffered a fatal heart attack before the waves had a chance to hammer and grind him against the jagged ice.
The light moved slowly backward and upward, revealing more of the cliff. From the three shelves at the bottom, for a distance of fifty feet, the ice sloped up at approximately a sixty-degree angle — not sheer by any measure, but much too steep to be negotiated by anyone other than a well-equipped and experienced mountain climber. Just twenty feet below them, another shelf crossed the face of the berg. This one was only a few feet wide. It angled back into the cliff. Above that shelf, the ice was sheer all the way to the brink where they lay.
After he had paused to scrape the crusted snow from his goggles, Roger Breskin used the flashlight to explore that shallow shelf below them.
Eight feet to the right of them, twenty feet down, previously cloaked in darkness, George Lin lay where he had fallen onto the narrow ledge. He was on his left side, his back against the cliff, facing out toward the open sea. His left arm was wedged under him, and his right arm was across his chest. He had assumed the fetal position, with his knees drawn up as far as his bulky arctic clothing would allow and his head tucked down.
Roger cupped his free hand to his mouth and shouted: “George! You hear me? George!”
Lin didn't move or respond.
“You think he's alive?” Brian asked.
“Must be. Didn't fall far. Clothes are quilted, insulated — absorbed some impact.”
Brian cupped both hands around his mouth and shouted at Lin.
The only answer came from the steadily increasing wind, and it was easy to believe that its shriek was full of gleeful malevolence, that this wind was somehow alive and daring them to remain at the brink just a moment longer.
“Have to go down and get him,” Roger said.
Brian studied the slick, vertical wall of ice that dropped twenty feet to the ledge. “How?”
“We've got rope, tools.”
“Not climbing gear.”
“Improvise.”
“Improvise?” Brian said with astonishment. “You ever done any climbing?”
“No.”
“This is nuts.”
“No choice.”
“Got to be another way.”
“Like what?”
Brian was silent.
“Let's look at the tools,” Roger said.
“We could die trying to rescue him.”
“Can't just walk away.”
Brian stared down at the crumpled figure on the ledge. In a Spanish bullring, on the African veldt, on the Colorado River, skin-diving in a shark run off Bimini… In far-flung places and in so many imaginative ways, he had tempted death without much fear. He wondered why he was hesitating now. Virtually every risk he'd ever taken had been pointless, a childish game. This time he had a good reason for risking everything: A human life was at stake. Was that the problem? Was it that he didn't want to be a hero? Too damned many heroes in the Dougherty family, power-thirsty politicians who had become heroes for the history books.
“Let's get working,” Brian said at last. “George'll freeze if he lies there much longer.”
1:05
Harry Carpenter leaned into the handlebars and squinted through the curve of Plexiglas at the white landscape. Hard sprays of snow and spicules of sleet slanted through the headlights. The windshield wiper thumbed monotonously, crusted with ice but still doing its job reasonably well. Visibility had decreased to ten or twelve yards.
Although the machine was responsive and could be stopped in a short distance, Harry kept it throttled back. He worried that unwittingly he might drive off a cliff, because he had no way of knowing where the iceberg ended.
The only vehicles in use by the Edgeway expedition were custom-stretched snowmobiles with rotary- combustion engines and specially engineered twenty-one-wheel, three-track bogie suspensions. Each machine could carry two adults in bulky thermal clothing on a thirty-six-inch padded bench. The driver and passenger rode in tandem, one behind the other.
Of course the machines had been adapted further for operations in the rugged polar winter, in which conditions were dramatically more severe than those encountered by snowmobile enthusiasts back in the States. Aside from the dual starter system and the pair of special heavy-duty arctic batteries, the major modification on each vehicle was the addition of a cabin that extended from the hood to the end of the stretched passenger bench. That enclosure was fabricated of riveted aluminum sheets and thick Plexiglas. An efficient little heater had been mounted over the engine, and two small fans conducted the warm air to the driver and passenger.
Perhaps the heater was a luxury, but the enclosed cabin was an absolute necessity. Without it, the
