palm: the outer layer of leather was torn, and the lining was exposed. If he had been wearing sealskin gloves, he would not have stuck fast, and he should have remembered to get that particular item of arctic gear out of the storage locker. If he hadn't been wearing gloves at all, his hand would have welded instantly to the railing, and when he pulled loose, he would have lost a substantial patch of flesh.
Staring in amazement at the captain's shredded glove, Seaman Semichastny exclaimed: “Incredible!”
Zhukov said, “What a miserable place.”
“Indeed.”
The snow that swept across the bridge was not in the form of flakes. The subzero temperatures and the fierce wind conspired to produce hard beads of snow — what a meteorologist would call “gravel,” like millions of granules of white buckshot, the next worst thing to a storm of ice spicules.
Tapping the bridge anemometer, the first officer said, “We've got wind velocity of thirty miles an hour, even leeward of the iceberg. It must be blowing twice to three times that hard on top of the ice or on the open sea.”
With the wind factored in, Gorov suspected that the subjective temperature atop the iceberg had to be at least minus sixty or minus seventy degrees. Rescuing the Edgeway scientists under those hideous conditions was a greater challenge than any he had ever faced in his entire naval career. No part of it would be easy. It might even be impossible. And he began to worry that, once again, he had arrived too late.
“Let's have some light,” Gorov ordered.
Semichastny immediately swung the floodlight to port and closed the switch.
The two-foot-diameter beam pierced the darkness as if a furnace door had been thrown open in an unlighted basement. Canted down on its gimbal ring, the big floodlight illuminated a circular swatch of sea only ten yards from the submarine: churning waves filigreed with icy foam, a seething maelstrom but one that was not too difficult to ride. Sheets of spray exploded into the bitter air as the waves met the boat, froze instantly into intricate and glittering laces of ice, hung suspended for a timeless time, and then fell back into the water, their strange beauty as ephemeral as that of any moment in a perfect sunset.
The ocean temperature was a few degrees above freezing, but the water retained sufficient heat and was in such turmoil — and was sufficiently salty, of course — that the only ice it contained was that which had broken off from the polar cap, fifteen miles to the north. Mostly small chunks, none larger than a car, which rode the waves and crashed into one another.
Grasping the pair of handles on the back of the floodlight, Semichastny tilted it up, swung it more directly toward port. The piercing beam bore through the polar blackness and the seething snow — and blazed against a towering palisade of ice, so enormous and so close that the sight of it made all three men gasp.
Fifty yards away, the berg drifted slowly east-southeast in a mild winter current. Even with the storm win pretty much behind it, the massive island of ice was able to make no more than two or three knots; most of it lay under the water, and it was driven not by the surface tempest but by deeper influences.
Semichastny moved the floodlight slowly to the right, then back to the left.
The cliff was so long and high that Gorov could not get an idea of the overall appearance of it. Each brilliantly lighted circle of ice, although visible in considerable detail from their front-row seat, seemed disassociated from the one that had come before it. Comprehending the whole of the palisade was like trying to envision the finished image of a jigsaw puzzle merely by glancing at five hundred jumbled, disconnected pieces.
“Lieutenant Zhukov, put up a flare.”
“Yes, sir.”
Zhukov was carrying the signal gun. He raised it — a stubbly pistol with a fat, extra long barrel and a two- inch muzzle — held it at arm's length, and fired up into the port-side gloom.
The rocket climbed swiftly through the falling snow. It was visible for a moment as it trailed red sparks and smoke, but then it vanished into the blizzard as though it had passed through a veil into another dimension.
Three hundred feet… four hundred feet… five hundred…
High above, the rocket burst into a brilliant incandescent moon. It didn't immediately begin to lose altitude, but drifted southward on the wind.
Beneath the flare, three hundred yards in every direction, the ocean was painted with cold light that revealed its green-gray hue. The arrhythmic ranks of choppy waves cast jagged, razor-edged shadows that fluttered like uncountable flocks of frantic dark birds feeding on little fishes in the shallow troughs.
The iceberg loomed: a daunting presence, at least one hundred feet high, disappearing into the darkness to the right and left, a huge rampart more formidable than the fortifications of any castle in the world. During their radar- and sonar-guided approach to the site, they had discovered that the berg was four fifths of a mile long. Rising dramatically from the mottled green-gray-black sea, it was curiously like a totem, a man-made monolith with mysterious religious significance. It soared, glass-smooth, gleaming, marred by neither major outcroppings nor indentations: vertical, harsh, forbidding.
Gorov had hoped to find a ragged cliff, one that shelved into the water in easy steps. The sea was not discouragingly rough there in the leeward shadow, and a few men might be able to get across to the ice. But he saw no place for them to land.
Among the submarine's equipment stores were three inflatable, motorized rubber rafts and a large selection of the highest-quality climbing gear. On fifteen separate occasions in the past seven years, the
But they had to find a place to land the rafts. A small shelf, a tiny cove. A niche above the water line.
As if reading the captain's mind, Zhukov said, “Even if we could land men over there, it would be one hell of a climb.”
“We could do it.”
“It's as straight and smooth as a hundred-foot sheet of window glass.”
“We could chop footholds out of the ice,” Gorov said. “We have the climbing picks. Axes. Ropes and pitons. We've got the climbing boots and the grappling hooks. Everything we need.”
“But these men are submariners, sir. Not mountain climbers.”
The flare was high over the
“The right men could make it,” Gorov insisted.
“Yes, sir,” Zhukov said. “I know they could. I could even make it myself if I had to, and I'm afraid of heights. But neither I nor the men are very experienced at this sort of thing. We don't have a single man aboard who could make that climb in even half the time it would take trained mountaineer. We'd need hours, maybe three or four, maybe even five hours, to get to the top and to rig a system for bringing the Edgeway scientists down to the rafts. And by the time—”
“—by the time we've worked out a way to land them on the ice, they'll be lucky to have even an hour left,” Gorov said, finishing the first officer's argument for him.
Midnight was fast approaching.
The flare winked out.
Semichastny still trained the floodlight on the iceberg, moving it slowly from left to right, focusing at the water line, hopefully searching for a shelf, a fissure, a flaw, anything that they had missed.
“Let's have a look at the windward flank,” Gorov said, “Maybe it'll have something better to offer.”
In the cave, waiting for more news from Gunvald, they were exhilarated by the prospect of rescue — but sobered by the thought that the submarine might not arrive quickly enough to take them off the iceberg before midnight. At times, they were all silent, but at other times, they all seemed to be talking at once.
After waiting until the chamber was filled with excited chatter and the others were particularly distracted, Harry quietly excused himself to go to the latrine. Passing Pete Johnson, he whispered, “I want to talk to you
