Silence. Static.
He came back after several seconds. “… put through that call to Thule all the same. They have to know about this. They might see an answer that we've overlooked, have a less emotional perspective.”
She said, “Edgeway came through unscathed?”
“Fine here.”
“And you?”
“Not a bruise.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“I'll live. And so will you, Rita.”
“I'll try,” she said. “I'll sure as hell try.”
1:10
Brian Dougherty siphoned gasoline from the tank of the upright snowmobile and poured it onto a two-foot section of ice at the brink of the cliff.
Roger Breskin twisted open a chemical match and tossed it into the gasoline. Flames erupted, flapped like bright tattered flags in the wind, but burned out within seconds.
Kneeling where the fire had been, Brian examined the edge of the precipice. The ice had been jagged; now it was smooth and slick. A climber's rope would slide over it without fraying.
“Good enough?” Roger asked.
Brian nodded.
Roger stooped and snatched up the free end of a thirty-five-foot rope that he had tied to the frame of the snowmobile and had also anchored to a long, threaded piton identical to those used to secure the radio transmitter. He quickly looped it around Brian's chest and shoulders, fashioning a harness of sorts. He tied three sturdy knots at the center of the young man's chest and said, “It'll hold. It's nylon, thousand-pound test. Just remember to grip the rope above your head with both hands so you'll keep at least some of the pressure off your shoulders.”
Because he did not trust himself to speak without a nervous stammer, Brian nodded.
Roger returned to the snowmobile, which was facing toward the precipice and which he had disconnected from its cargo trailer. He climbed into the cabin and closed the door. He held the brakes and revved the engine.
Trembling, Brian stretched out on his stomach, flat on the ice. He took a deep breath through his knitted ski mask, hesitated only briefly, and pushed himself feet-first over the edge of the cliff. Although he didn't drop far, his stomach lurched, and a thrill of terror like an electrical current sizzled through him. The rope pulled tight, checking his descent when the crown of his head was only inches below the top of the iceberg.
As yet, too little of the line hung past the brink to enable him to reach overhead and get a firm grip on it. He was forced to take the strain entirely with his shoulders. Immediately a dull ache arose in his joints, across his back, and up the nape of his neck. The ache would rapidly escalate into a sharp pain.
“Come on, come on, Roger,” he muttered. “Be quick.”
Brian was facing the ice wall. He brushed and bumped against it as the punishing wind pummeled him.
He dared to turn his head to the side and peer down, expecting to be able to see nothing but a yawning black gulf. Away from the glare of the snowmobile lights, however, his eyes adjusted swiftly to the gloom, and the vague natural phosphorescence of the ice allowed him to make out the sheer palisade against which he hung, as well as the broken shelves of jagged blocks at the bottom. Sixty or seventy feet below, the whitecaps on the churning sea exhibited a ghostly luminescence of their own as they rose in serried ranks from out of the night and crashed with spumous fury against the iceberg.
Roger Breskin throttled the snowmobile down so far that it almost stalled.
He considered the problem one last time. Dougherty was six feet tall, and the ledge was twenty feet below; therefore, he had to lower Dougherty about twenty feet in order to put him on the ledge
Furthermore, the snowmobile was only forty feet from the precipice; if the machine slid forward too fast, Roger might not be able to stop in time to save himself, let alone Dougherty and Lin. He was worried that the sled's lowest speed would prove dangerously fast for this job, and he hesitated now that he was ready to begin.
A violent gust of wind hammered Brian from behind and to the right, pressing him against the face of the cliff but also pushing him leftward, so he hung at a slight angle. When the wind relented after a moment, declining to about thirty miles an hour, he rocked back to the right, then began to swing gently like a pendulum, in a two- or three-foot arc.
He squinted up at the point where the rope met the edge of the cliff. Even though he had carefully smoothed the ice with burning gasoline, any friction whatsoever was bound to wear on the nylon line.
He closed his eyes and slumped in the harness, waiting to be lowered onto the ledge. His mouth was as dry as that of any desert wanderer, and his heart was beating so fast and hard that it seemed capable of cracking his ribs.
Because Roger was highly experienced with the snowmobile, it had seemed logical and reasonable that Brian should be the one to go down to retrieve George Lin. Now he wished that he himself had been the snowmobile expert. What the hell was taking so long?
His impatience evaporated when he suddenly dropped as if the rope had been cut. He landed on the ledge with such force that pain shot up his legs to the top of his spine. His knees crumbled as though they were sodden cardboard. He fell against the face of the cliff, bounced off, and toppled off the narrow ledge, out into the wind- shattered night.
He was too terrified to scream.
The snowmobile lurched and rushed forward too fast.
Roger hit the brakes immediately after he released them. The red cloth vanished over the brink, but the machine was still moving. Because the ice had been swept free of snow and polished by the incessant wind, it provided little traction. As smoothly as a shuffleboard puck gliding along polished pine, the snowmobile slid another ten feet, headlights spearing out into an eternal blackness, before it finally stopped less than ten feet from the edge of the cliff.
The harness jerked tight across Brian's chest and under his arms. Compared to the throbbing pain in his legs and the ache in his back, however, the new agony was endurable.
He was surprised that he was still conscious — and alive.
Unclipping his flashlight from the tool belt that encircled his waist, he cut open the perfect blackness around him with a blade of light, and torrents of snowflakes gushed over him.
Trying not to think about the icy sea below, he peered up at the ledge that he had overshot. It was four feet above his head. A yard to his left, the gloved fingers of George Lin's inert right hand trailed over the shelf.
Brian was swinging in a small arc again. His lifeline was scraping back and forth along the ledge, which had
A flashlight beam stabbed down from above.
Brian raised his eyes and saw Roger Breskin peering at him from the top of the cliff.
Lying on the ice, his head over the precipice and his right arm extended with a flashlight, Roger cupped his free hand to his mouth and shouted something. The wind tore his words into a meaningless confetti of sound.
Brian raised one hand and waved weakly.
Roger shouted louder than before: “You all right?” His voice sounded as if it came from the far end of a five-mile-long railroad tunnel.
Brian nodded as best he could. Yes, I'm all right. There was no way to convey, with only a nod, the degree of his fear and the worry that was caused by the lingering pain in his legs.
