“Thank you, Emil.”
“Until now.”
“Not now either.”
Zhukov opened his eyes. “With all due respect, this isn't like you, sir. It's reckless.”
“I disagree. It's not reckless. Not at all. As I told you earlier, I'm quite certain the Admiralty will approve the rescue mission.”
“Then why not wait for the transmission at 1700 hours?”
“We can't waste time. The bureaucratic pace of the Ministry just isn't good enough in this case. We've got to reach that iceberg before too many more hours have passed. Once we've located it, we'll need a lot of time just to get those people off the ice and aboard with us.”
Zhukov consulted his watch. “It's twenty minutes past four. We've only go to wait another forty minutes to hear the Admiralty's decision.”
“But on a rescue mission like this, forty minutes could be the difference between success and failure.”
“You're adamant?”
“Yes.”
Zhukov sighed.
“You could relieve me of my command,” Gorov said. “Right now. You have reason. I wouldn't hold it against you, Emil.”
Staring at his hands, which were trembling slightly, Zhukov said, “If they deny you the permission you want, will you turn back and continue the surveillance run?”
“I would have no choice.”
“You would turn back?”
“Yes.”
“You wouldn't disobey them?”
“No.”
“Your word?”
“My word.”
Zhukov thought about it.
Gorov rose from the stool. “Well?”
“I must be crazy.”
“You'll agree to this?”
“As you know, I named my second son after you. Nikita Zhukov.”
The captain nodded. “I was honored.”
“Well, if I've been wrong about you, if I shouldn't have named him Nikita, I won't be able to forget it now. He'll be around as a reminder of how wrong I was. I don't need that thorn in my side. So I'll have to give you one more chance to prove I've been right all along.”
Smiling, Gorov said, “Let's get a new bearing on that iceberg and plot a course, Lieutenant.”
After returning to the third blasting shaft, Pete and Roger left the two snowmobiles in park, with engines running and headlights blazing. Exhaust fumes plumed in brilliant crystalline columns. They set out in different directions, and Harry set out in a third to search for Brian Dougherty in the drifts, waist-high pressure ridges, and low ice hummocks around the site.
Cautious, aware that he could be swallowed by the storm as quickly and completely as Brian had been, Harry probed the black-and-white landscape before he committed himself to it. He used his flashlight as if it were a machete, sweeping if from side to side. The insubstantial yellowish beam slashed through the falling snow, but the white jungle was undisturbed by it. Every ten steps, he looked over his shoulder to see if he was straying too far from the snowmobiles. He was already well out of the section of the icefield that was illuminated by the headlights, but he knew that he must not lose sight of the sleds altogether. If he got lost, no one would hear his cries for help above the screeching, hooting wind. Although it was diffused and dimmed by the incredibly heavy snowfall, the glow from the snowmobiles was his only signpost to safety.
Even as he searched assiduously behind every drift and canted slab of ice, he nurtured only a slim hope that he would ever locate Dougherty. The wind was fierce. The snow was mounting at the rate of two inches an hour or faster. In those brief moments when he stopped to take a closer look into especially long, deep shadows, drifts began to form against his boots. If Brian had lain on the ice, unconscious or somehow stricken and unable to move, for the past fifteen minutes, maybe longer… Well, by this time the kid would be covered over, a smooth white lump like any hummock or drift, frozen fast to the winter field.
It's hopeless, Harry thought.
Then, not forty feet from the blasting shaft, he stepped around a monolith of ice as large as a sixteen-wheel Mack truck and found Brian on the other side. The kid was on his back, laid out flat, one arm at his side and the other across his chest. He still wore his goggles and snow mask. At a glance he appeared to be lolling there, merely taking a nap, in no trouble whatsoever. Because the upturned slap of ice acted as a windbreak, the snow had not drifted over him. For the same reason, he'd been spared the worst of the bitter cold. Nevertheless, he didn't move and was most likely dead.
Harry knelt beside the body and pulled the snow mask from the face. Thin, irregularly spaced puffs of vapor rose from between the parted lips. Alive. But for how long? Brian's lips were thin and bloodless. His skin was no less white than the snow around him. When pinched, he didn't stir. His eyelids didn't flutter. After lying motionless on the ice for at least a quarter of an hour, even if he had been out of the wind for the entire time and even though he was wearing full survival gear, he would already be suffering from exposure. Harry adjusted the snow mask to re-cover the pale face.
He was deciding how best to get Brian out of there when he saw someone approaching through the turbulent gloom. A shaft of light appeared in the darkness, hazy at first, getting sharper and brighter as it drew nearer.
Roger Breskin staggered through a thick curtain of snow, holding his flashlight before him as a blind man held a cane. Apparently he had become disoriented and wandered out of his assigned search area. He hesitated when he saw Brian.
Harry gestured impatiently.
Pulling down his snow mask, Breskin hurried to them. “Is he alive?”
“Not by much.”
“What happened?”
“I don't know. Let's get him into one of the snowmobile cabins and let the warm air work on him. You take his feet and I'll—”
“I can handle him myself.”
“But—”
“It'll be easier and quicker that way.”
Harry accepted the flashlight that Roger passed to him.
The big man bent down and lifted Brian as if the kid weighed no more than ten pounds.
Harry led the way back through the drifts and hummocks to the snowmobiles.
At 4:50 the Americans at Thule radioed Gunvald Larsson with more bad news. Like the
No number of prayers would make Gunvald feel better. The cold, hard fact was that the captain of the
