Gorov felt as if hundreds of painful knots were coming untied inside him. He had won. “Go to it, then.”
Zhukov left the control room.
Walking to the circular, railed command pad at the end of the control room, Gorov thought about little Nikki and knew that he was doing the right thing. In the name of his dead son, in honor of his lost boy, not for the advantage of Russia, he would save the lives of those stranded people. They must not die on the ice. This time he had to power to thwart death, and he was determined not to fail.
3:46
As soon as the second package of explosives had been hauled out of the ice, Roger, Brian, Claude, Lin, and Fischer moved on to the site of the third sealed shaft.
Harry remained behind with Pete Johnson, who had yet to disarm the second device. They stood together, their backs to the shrieking wind. The demolitions cylinder lay at their feet, an evil-looking package: sixty inches long and two and a half inches in diameter, black with yellow letters that spelled DANGER. It was encased in a thin, transparent coat of ice.
“You don't have to keep me company,” Pete said as he carefully cleaned the snow from his goggles. His vision must be unobstructed when he set to work on the trigger mechanism.
“I thought your people were afraid of being alone in the dark,” Harry said.
“My people? You better mean electronic engineers, honky.”
Harry smiled, “What else would I mean?”
A strong gust of wind caught them from behind, an avalanche of air that would have knocked them flat if they had not been prepared for it. For a minute they bent with the gale, unable to talk, concerned only about keeping their balance.
When the gust passed and the wind settled down to perhaps forty miles per hour, Pete finished cleaning his goggles and began to rub his hands together to get the snow and ice off his gloves. “I know why you didn't go with the others. You can't deceive me. It's your hero complex.”
“Sure. I'm a regular Indiana Jones.”
“You've always got to be where the danger is.”
“Yeah, me and Madonna.” Harry shook his head sadly. “I'm sorry, but you've got it all wrong, Dr. Freud. I'd much prefer to be where the danger isn't. But it did occur to me the bomb might explode in your face.”
“And you'd give me first aid?”
“Something like that.”
“Listen, if it does explode in my face but doesn't kill me… no first aid, for God's sake. Just finish me off.”
Harry winced and started to protest.
“All I'm asking for is mercy.” Pete said bluntly.
During the past few months, Harry had come to like and respect this big, broad-faced man. Beneath Pete Johnson's fierce-looking exterior, under the layers of education and training, under the cool competence, there was a kid with a love for science and technology and adventure. Harry recognized much of himself in Pete. “There's really not a great change of an explosion, is there?”
“Almost none,” Pete assured him.
“The casing
“Relax, Harry. The last one went well, didn't it?”
They knelt beside the steel cylinder. Harry held the flashlight while Pete opened a small plastic box of precision tools.
“Disarming these sonsofbitches is easy enough,” Pete said. “That isn't our problem. Our problem is getting eight more of them out of the ice before the clock strikes midnight and the carriage turns back into a pumpkin.”
“We're recovering them at the rate of one an hour.”
“But we'll slow down,” Johnson said. With a small screwdriver he began to remove the end of the cylinder that featured the eye loop. “We needed forty-five minutes to dig out the first one. Then fifty-five for the second. Already we're getting tired, slowing down. It's this wind.”
It was a killing wind, pressing and pounding against Harry's back with such force that he felt as though he were standing in the middle of a swollen, turbulent river; the currents in the air were almost as tangible as currents in deep water. The base wind velocity was now forty or forty-five miles an hour, with gusts to sixty-five, steadily and rapidly climbing toward gale force. Later, it would be deadly.
“You're right,” Harry said. His throat was slightly sore from the effort required to be heard above the storm, even though they were nearly head-to-head over the package of explosives. “It doesn't do much good to sit ten minutes in a warm snowmobile cabin and then spend the next hour in weather as bad as this.”
Pete extracted the last screw and removed a six-inch end piece from the cylinder. “How far has the real temperature fallen? Like to guess?”
“Five degrees above zero. Fahrenheit.”
“With the wind-chill factor?”
“Twenty below zero.”
“Thirty.”
“Maybe.” Even his heavy thermal suit could not protect him. The wind's cold blade stabbed continuously at his back, pierced his storm suit, pricked his spine. “I never thought we had much of a chance of getting ten out. I knew we'd slow down. But if we can disarm just five or six, we might have enough room to survive the blowup at midnight.”
Pete tipped the six-inch section of casing, and a timer slid out into his gloved hand. It was connected to the rest of the cylinder by four springy coils of wire: red, yellow, green, and white. “I guess it's better to freeze to death tomorrow than be blown to bits tonight.”
“Don't you dare do that to me,” Harry said.
“What?”
“Turn into another Franz Fischer.”
Pete laughed. “Or another George Lin.”
“Those two. The Whiner brothers.”
“You chose them,” Pete said.
“And I take the blame. But, hell, they're good men. It's just that under this much pressure…”
“They're assholes.”
“Precisely.”
“Time for you to get out of here,” Pete said, reaching into the tool kit again.
“I'll hold the flashlight.”
“The hell you will. Put it down so it shines on this, then go. I don't
Reluctantly, Harry returned to the snowmobile. He bent down behind the machine, out of the wind. Huddled there, he sensed that all their work and risk-taking was for nothing. Their situation would deteriorate further before it improved. If it ever improved.
4:00
The
