main deck, and foam as thick as pudding sloshed around the base of the huge steel sail. The boat hadn't been designed or built for extended surface runs in stormy weather. Nevertheless, in spite of her tendency to yaw, she could hold her own long enough for Timoshenko to exchange messages with the war room at the Naval Ministry in Moscow.
Captain Gorov was on the bridge with two other men. They were all wearing fleece-lined pea jackets, hooded black rain slickers over the jackets, and gloves. The two young lookouts stood back to back, one facing port and the other starboard. All three men had field glasses and were surveying the horizon.
It's a damned close horizon, Gorov thought as he studied it. And an ugly one.
That far north, the polar twilight had not yet faded entirely from the sky. An eerie greenish glow seeped through the heavy storm clouds and saturated the Atlantic vistas, so Gorov seemed to be peering through a thin film of green liquid. It barely illuminated the raging sea and imparted a soft yellow cast to the foamy crests of the waves. A mixture of fine snow and sleet hissed in from the northwest; the sail, the bridge railing, Gorov's black rain slicker, the laser package, and the radio masts were encrusted with white ice. Scattered formations of fog further obscured the forbidding panorama, and due north the churning waves were hidden by a gray-brown mist so dense that it seemed to be a curtain drawn across the world beyond it. Visibility varied from one half to three quarters of a mile and would have been considerably worse if they had not been using night-service binoculars.
Behind Gorov, atop the steel sail, the satellite tracking dish moved slowly from east to west. Its continuous change of attitude was imperceptible at a glance, but it was locked on to a Soviet telecommunications satellite that was in a tight subpolar orbit high above the masses of slate-colored clouds. Gorov's message had been transmitted by laser four minutes ago. The tracking dish waited to receive Moscow's reply.
The captain had already imagined the worst possible response. He would be ordered to relinquish command to First Officer Zhukov, who would be directed to put him under twenty-four-hour armed guard and continue the mission as scheduled. His court-martial would proceed in his absence, and he would be informed of the decision upon his return to Moscow.
But he expected a more reasoned response than that from Moscow. Certainly the Ministry was always unpredictable. Even under the postcommunist regime, with its greater respect for justice, officers were occasionally court-martialed without being present to defend themselves. But he believed what he had told Zhukov in the control room: They were not
He scanned the fog-shrouded horizon.
The flow of time seemed to have slowed almost to a stop. Although he knew that it was an illusion, he saw the sea raging in slow motion, the waves building like ripples in an ocean of cold molasses. Each minute was an hour.
Sparks shot out of the vents in the steel-alloy casing of the auxiliary drill. It chugged, sputtered, and cut out.
Roger Breskin had been operating it. “What the hell?” he thumbed the power switch.
When the drill wouldn't start, Pete Johnson stepped in and dropped to his knees to have a look at it.
Everyone crowded around, expecting the worst. They were, Harry thought, like people gathered at an automobile accident — except that the corpses in this wreckage might be their own.
“What's wrong with it?” George Lin asked.
“You'll have to take apart the casing to find the trouble,” Fischer told Pete.
“Yeah, but I don't have to take the sucker apart to know I can't repair it.”
Brian said, “What do you mean?”
Pointing to the snow and frozen slush around the partially reopened third shaft, Pete said, “See those black specks?”
Harry crouched and studied the bits of metal scattered on the ice. “Gear teeth.”
Everyone was silent.
“I could probably repair a fault in the wiring,” Pete said at last. “But we don't have a set of spare gears for it.”
“What now?” Brian asked.
With Teutonic pessimism, Fischer said, “Back to the cave and wait for midnight.”
“That's giving up,” Brian said.
Getting to his feet, Harry said, “But I'm afraid that's all we can do at the moment, Brian. We lost the other drill when my sled went into the crevasse.”
Dougherty shook his head, refusing to accept that they were powerless to proceed. “Earlier, Claude said we could use the ice ax and the power saw to cut some steps in the winter field, angle down to each package—”
The Frenchman interrupted him. “That would only work if we had a week. We'd need six more hours, perhaps longer, to retrieve this one bomb by the step method. It's not worth expending all that energy to gain only forty-five feet of safety.”
“Okay, let's go, let's pack up,” Harry said, clapping his hands for emphasis. “No point standing here, losing body heat. We can talk about it back at the cave, out of this wind. We might think of something yet.”
But he had no hope.
At 4:02 the communications center reported that a message was coming in from the Naval Ministry. Five minutes later the decoding sheet was passed up to the bridge, where Nikita Gorov began to read it with some trepidation.
MESSAGE
NAVAL MINISTRY
TIME: 1900 MOSCOW
FROM: DUTY OFFICER
TO: CAPTAIN N. GOROV
SUBJECT: YOUR LAST TRANSMISSION #34-D
MESSAGE BEGINS:
YOUR REQUEST UNDER STUDY BY ADMIRALTY STOP IMMEDIATE DECISION CANNOT BE MADE STOP SUBMERGE AND CONTINUE SCHEDULED MISSION FOR ONE HOUR STOP A CONTINUATION OR NEW ORDERS WILL BE TRANSMITTED TO YOU AT 1700 HOURS YOUR TIME STOP
Gorov was disappointed. The Ministry's indecision cranked up the level of his tension. The next hour would be more difficult for him than the hour that had just passed.
He turned to the other two men. “Clear the bridge.”
They prepared to dive. The lookouts scrambled down through the conning tower and took up stations at the diving wheels. The captain sounded the routine alarm — two short blasts on the electric horns that blared from speakers in the bulkheads of every room on the boat — and then left the bridge, pulling the hatch shut with a lanyard.
The quartermaster of the watch spun the hand-wheel and said, “Hatch secure.”
Gorov hurried to the command pad in the control room. On the second blast of the diving klaxon, the air vents in the ballasts tanks had been opened, and the sea had roared into the space between the ship's two hulls. Now, to Gorov's right, a petty officer was watching a board that contained one red and several green lights. The green represented hatches, vents, exhausts, and equipment extruders that were closed to the sea. The red light was labeled LASER TRANSMISSION PACKAGE. When the laser equipment settled into a niche atop the sail and an airtight hatch slid over it, the red light blinked off and the safety bulb beneath it lit up.
“Green board!” the petty officer called.
Gorov ordered compressed air released into the submarine, and when the pressure indicator didn't register a fall, he knew the boat was sealed.
“Pressure in the boat,” the diving officer called.
In less than a minute they had completed the preparations. The deck acquired an incline, the top of the sail
