Icebound

them.”

A week, Harry closed his eyes against the sight of the ice wall beyond the radio, for in that prismatic surface, he saw their fate too clearly. Even in thermal clothing, even sheltered from the wind, they could not survive for a week with no heat. They were virtually without food; hunger would weaken their resistance to the subzero temperatures.

“Harry, did you read me?”

He opened his eyes. “I read you. It doesn't look good, does it? Then again, we're drifting south, out of the bad weather.”

“I've been studying the charts here. Do you have any idea how many miles per day that berg of yours will travel?”

“At a guess… thirty, maybe forty.”

“That's approximately the same figure I've arrived at with the charts. And do you know how much of that represents real southward movement?”

Harry thought about it. “Twenty miles per day?”

“At best. Perhaps as little as ten.”

“Ten. You're sure? Strike that. Stupid of me. Of course, you're sure. Just how large is this storm pattern?”

“Harry, it ranges one hundred and twenty miles south of your last known position. You'd need eight or ten days or even longer to get out of the blizzard to a place where those helicopters could reach you.”

“What about the UNGY trawlers?”

“The Americans have relayed the news to them. Both ships are making for you at their best possible speed. But according to Thule, seas are extremely rough even beyond the storm area. And those trawlers are two hundred and thirty miles away. Under the current conditions, their best speed won't amount to much.”

They had to know precisely where they stood, no matter how tenuous their position might be. Harry said, “Can a ship that size push a hundred miles or more into a storm as bad as this one without being torn to pieces?”

“I think those two captains are courageous — but not suicidal,” Gunvald said flatly.

Harry agreed with that assessment.

“They'll be forced to turn back,” Gunvald said.

Harry sighed, “Yeah, They won't have any choice. Okay, Gunvald, I'll call you again in fifteen minutes. We've got to have a conference here. There's a chance we'll think of something.”

“I'll be waiting.”

Harry put the microphone on top of the radio. He stood and regarded the others. “You heard.”

Everyone in the ice cave was staring either at Harry or at the now silent radio. Pete, Roger, and Franz stood near the entrance; their goggles were in place, and they were ready to go outside and pick through the ruins of the temporary camp. Brian Dougherty had been studying a chart of the Greenland Sea and the North Atlantic; but listening to Gunvald, he had realized that pinpointing the location of the trawlers was useless, and he had folded the chart. Before Harry had called Edgeway Station, George Lin had been pacing from one end of the cave to the other, exercising his bruised muscles to prevent stiffness. Now he stood motionless, not even blinking, as if frozen alive. Rita and Claude knelt on the floor of the cave, where they'd been taking an inventory of the contents of a carton of foodstuffs that had been severely damaged by the collapsing pressure ridge. To Harry, for a moment, they seemed to be not real people but lifeless, mannequins in a strange tableau — perhaps because, without some great stroke of luck, they were already as good as dead.

Rita said what they were all thinking but what no one else cared to mention: “Even if the trawlers can reach us, they won't be here until tomorrow at the earliest. They can't possibly make it in time to take us aboard before midnight. And at midnight all sixty bombs go off.”

“We don't know the size or the shape of the iceberg,” Fischer said. “Most of the charges may be in the ice shafts that are still part of the main winter field.”

Pete Johnson disagreed. “Claude, Harry, and I were at the end of the bomb line when the first tsunami passed under us. I think we followed a fairly direct course back to camp, the same route we took going out. So we must have driven right by or across all sixty charges. And I'd bet my right arm this berg isn't anywhere near large enough to withstand all those concussions.”

After a short silence Brian cleared his throat. “You mean the iceberg's going to be blown into a thousand pieces?”

No one responded.

“So we're all going to be killed? Or dumped into the sea?”

“Same thing,” Roger Breskin said matter-of-factly. His bass voice rebounded hollowly from the ice walls. “The sea's freezing. You wouldn't last five minutes in it.”

“Isn't there anything we can do to save ourselves?” Brian asked as his gaze traveled from one member of the team to another. “Surely there's something we could do.”

Throughout the conversation, George Lin had been as motionless and quiet as a statue, but suddenly he turned and took three quick steps toward Dougherty. “Are you scared, boy? You should be scared. Your almighty family can't bail you out of this one!”

Startled, Brian backed away from the angry man.

Lin's hands were fisted at his sides. “How do you like being helpless?” He was shouting. “How do you like it? Your big, rich, politically powerful family doesn't mean a goddamned thing out here. Now you know what it's like for the rest of us, for all us little people. Now you have to scramble to save yourself. Just exactly like the rest of us.”

“That's enough,” Harry said.

Lin turned on him. His face had been transformed by hatred. “His family sits back with all its money and privileges, isolated from reality but so damned sure of its moral superiority, yammering about how the rest of us should live, about how we should sacrifice for this or that noble cause. It was people like them who started the trouble in China, brought in Mao, lost us our homeland, tens of millions of people butchered. You let them get a foot in the door, and the communists come right after them. The barbarians and the Cossacks, the killers and the human animals storm right in after them. The—”

“Brian didn't put us on this berg,” Harry said sharply. “And neither did his family. For God's sake, George, he saved your life less than an hour ago.”

When Lin realized that he'd been ranting, the flush of anger drained from his cheeks. He seemed confused, then embarrassed. He shook his head as if to clear it. “I… I'm sorry.”

“Don't tell me,” Harry said. “Tell Brian.”

Lin turned to Dougherty but didn't look him in the face. “I'm sorry. I really am.”

“It's all right,” Brian assured him.

“I don't… I don't know what came over me. You did save my life. Harry's right.”

“Forget it, George.”

After a brief hesitation, Lin nodded and went to the far end of the cave. He walked back and forth, exercising his aching muscles, staring at the ice over which he trod.

Harry wondered what experiences in the little man's past had prepared him to regard Brian Dougherty as an antagonist, which he had done since the day they'd met.

“Is there anything at all we can do to save ourselves?” Brian asked again, graciously dismissing the incident with Lin.

“Maybe,” Harry said. “First we've got to get some of those bombs out of the ice and defuse them.”

Fischer was amazed. “Impossible!”

“Most likely.”

“How could they ever be retrieved?” Fischer asked scornfully.

Claude rose to his feet beside the carton of half-ruined food. “It isn't impossible. We've got an auxiliary drill, ice axes, and the power saw. If we had a lot of time and patience, we might be able to angle down toward each bomb, more or less dig steps in the ice. But, Harry, we needed a day and a half just to bury them. Digging them out will be hugely more difficult. We would need at least a week to retrieve them, maybe two.”

“We only have ten hours,” Fischer reminded them unnecessarily.