Icebound

Breskin shouted, but only a few of his words reached Brian: “Going… snowmobile… reverse… draw you… up.”

Again, Brian nodded.

“… slowly… a chance… too fast again… battered… the ice.”

Roger disappeared, obviously hurrying back to the snowmobile.

Leaving his flashlight on, Brian clipped it to his tool belt, with the beam shining down on his right foot. He reached overhead and gripped the taut line with both hands, hoisting himself slightly to take a measure of the strain off his upper arms, which were on the verge of dislocating from his shoulder sockets.

The snowmobile drew up some of the line. The movement was smooth compared to the style of his descent, and he was not thrown against the cliff.

From the knees down, his legs were still below the ledge. He swung them up and over, planted both feet on the narrow shelf of ice, crouching there. He let go of the rope and stood up.

His ankles ached, his knees felt as if they were made of jelly, and pain laced his thighs. But his legs held him.

He took a large piton — a five-inch shaft tapered to a sharp point, topped by a one-inch diameter eye loop — from a zippered pocket of his coat. He freed a small hammer from his tool belt and pounded the pin into a tight crack in the face of the cliff.

Again, Roger's flashlight shone down from the top.

When the anchoring pin was secure, Brian unhooked an eight-foot-long coil of nylon rope from this belt. Before descending, he had knotted one end of it to a carabiner; now he linked the carabiner to the piton and screwed shut its safety gate. He tied the other end of the line around his waist. The resultant tether would bring him up short of death if he slipped and fell off the ledge, yet he was free enough to attend to George Lin. Thus belayed, he untied the knots that held the harness together across his chest and under his arms. When he was free from the main line, he coiled it and hung it around his neck.

To avoid some of the wind's vicious force, he got on his hands and knees and crawled to Lin. Roger Breskin's light followed him. He took his own flashlight from his belt and placed it on the ledge, against the cliff face, with the beam shining on the unconscious man.

Unconscious — or dead?

Before he could know that answer to that question, he had to get a look at Lin's face. Turning the man onto his back was not an easy chore, because Brian had to be careful that the scientist did not roll off into the abyss. By the time Lin was on his back, he'd regained consciousness. His amber skin — at least those few square inches of his face that were exposed — was shockingly pale. Against the slit in his mask, his mouth worked without making an audible sound. Behind his frost-spotted goggles, his eyes were open; they expressed some confusion but didn't appear to be the eyes of a man in severe pain or delirium.

“How do you feel?” Brian shouted above the shrill wind.

Lin stared at him uncomprehending and tried to sit up.

Brian pressed him down. “Be careful! You don't want to fall.”

Lin turned his head and stared at the darkness from which the snow streamed ever faster. When he looked at Brian again, his pallor had deepened.

“Are you badly hurt?” Brian asked. Because of the thermal clothing Lin wore, Brian couldn't determine if the man had any broken bones.

“Some chest pain,” Lin said barely loudly enough to be heard above the storm.

“Heart?”

“No. When I went over the edge… the ice was still rocking… from the wave… the cliff face was slanted. I slid down… and landed here hard on my side. That's all I remember.”

“Broken ribs?”

Lin took a deep breath and winced. “No. Probably not. Only bruised, I think. Damn sore. But nothing's fractured.”

Brian removed the coil of rope from around his neck. “I'll have to make a harness under you arms, across you chest. Can you tolerate that?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No.”

“So I'll tolerate it.”

“You'll have to sit up.”

Groaning, Lin eased cautiously into a sitting position, with his back toward the cliff and his legs dangling in the void.

Brian quickly fashioned a harness, tied a tight double knot over Lin's breastbone, and got to his feet. He reached down and helped the injured man to stand. They turned in place to put the sea and the murderous wind at their backs. Dry, almost granular snow snapped against the wall of ice, bounced from it, and spun against their faces.

“Ready?” Roger called from twenty feet above.

“Yeah. But take it easy!”

Lin clapped his hands rapidly, loudly. Platelets of ice fell from his gloves. He flexed his fingers. “Feel numb… all over. I can move my fingers… but hardly feel them.”

“You'll be okay.”

“Can't feel… toes at all. Sleepy. Not good.”

He was right about that. When the body became so cold that it encouraged sleep to maintain precious heat, death could not be far away.

“As soon as you're topside, get into the sled,” Brian said. “Fifteen minutes, you'll be as warm as toast.”

“You got me just in time. Why?”

“Why what?”

“You risked your life.”

“Not really.”

“Yes, you did.”

“Well, wouldn't you have done the same?”

The taut line was pulled upward, taking George Lin with it. The ascent was smooth. At the top of the precipice, however, Lin got stuck, with his shoulders past the brink and the rest of him dangling in the wind. He was too weak to pull himself to safety.

Roger Breskin's years of training as a weight lifter served him well. He left the snowmobile and easily manhandled George Lin the last few feet onto the top of the iceberg. He untied the harness from the man's shoulders and threw the main line down to Brian.

“Check with you… soon as… George settled!” he shouted. Even though his voice was wind-tattered, the anxiety in it was evident.

Only an hour ago, Brian couldn't have conceived that Roger — rock solid as he was, with his bull's neck and his massive biceps and his powerful hands and his air of total self-reliance — might ever be afraid of anything whatsoever. Now that the other man's fear was evident, Brian was less ashamed of the terror that knotted his own guts. If a tough sonofabitch like Roger was susceptible to fear, then even one of the stoical Doughertys might be permitted that emotion a few times in his life.

He picked up the main line and harnessed himself to it. Then he untied the safety tether at his waist, loosened the other end from the piton, coiled it, and hooked it to his tool belt. He plucked the flashlight from the ledge and also fastened it to the belt. He would have salvaged the piton, too, if he'd had the means and the strength to pry it out of the ice. Their supplies, the fuel, and the tools were priceless. They dared waste or discard nothing. No one could predict what scrap, now insignificant, might eventually be essential to their survival.

He was thinking in terms of their survival rather than his own, for he knew that he was the least likely member of the expedition to come through the forthcoming ordeal with his life. Although he had taken four weeks of training at the U.S. Army Arctic Institute, he was not as familiar with the icecap or as well conditioned to it as were the others. Furthermore, he stood six one and weighed a hundred seventy pounds. Emily, his oldest sister, had called him String Bean since he was sixteen. But he was broad at the shoulders, and his lea arms were muscular: a string bean, then, but not a weakling. A weakling could never have ridden the Colorado