Icebound

“Assassins and saboteurs may be stretching it,” Fischer said.

“Not stretching it at all!” Lin responded ardently. His face was flushed, and his sense of urgency grew visibly by the moment, as if the greatest threat were not the deadly cold or the sixty time bombs buried in the ice, but the Russian who proposed to rescue them. “Assassins and saboteurs. I'm sure of it, positive. These communist bastards—”

“They aren't communists any more,” Roger noted.

“Their new government's riddled with the old criminals, the same old criminals, and when the moment's right, they'll be back. You'd better believe it. And they're barbarians, they're capable of anything. Anything.”

Pete Johnson rolled his eyes for Harry's benefit. “Listen, George, I'm sure the U.S. does some of the same things. It's a fact of life, standard international relations. The Russians aren't the only people who spy on their neighbors.”

Trembling, visibly, Lin said, “It's more than spying. Anyway, goddammit, that's no reason for us to legitimize the Ilya Pogodin!” He slammed his left fist into the open palm of his right hand.

Brian winced at the gesture and glanced at Harry.

Harry wondered if that might be the same hand — and the same violent temper — that had turned against Brian out on the ice.

Gently putting one hand on Lin's shoulder, Rita said, “George, calm down. What do you mean, 'legitimize' it? You aren't making a great deal of sense.”

Whipping around to face her as though she had threatened him, Lin said, “Don't you realize why these Russians want to rescue us? They aren't acting out of any humanitarian principles. It's strictly the propaganda value of the situation that interests them. They're going to use us. At best, we're pawns to them. They're going to use us to generate pro-Russian sentiment in the world press.”

“That's certainly true,” Harry said.

Lin turned to him again, hopeful of making a convert. “Of course it's true.”

“At least in part.”

“No, Harry. Not partly true. It's entirely true. Entirely. And we can't let them get away with it!”

“We're in no position to reject them,” Harry said.

“Unless we stay here and die,” Roger Breskin said. His deep voice, although devoid of emotion, gave his simple statement the quality of an ominous prophecy.

Pete's patience with Lin had been exhausted. “Is that what you want, George? Have you taken leave of your senses altogether? Do you want to stay here and die?”

Lin was flustered. He shook his head: no. “But you've got to see—”

“No.”

“Don't you understand…?”

“What?”

“What they are, what they want?” the Chinese said with such misery that Harry felt sorry for him. “They're… they're…”

Pete pressed his point. “Do you want to stay here and die? That's the only question that matters. That's the bottom line. Do you want to die?”

Lin fidgeted, searched their faces for a sign of support, and then looked down at the floor. “No. Of course not. Nobody wants to die. I'm just… just… Sorry. Excuse me.” He walked to the far end of the cave and began to pace as he had done earlier, when he had been embarrassed about the way he had treated Brian.

Leaning close to Rita, Harry whispered, “Why don't you go talk to him?”

“Sure,” she said with a big, theatrical smile. “We can discuss the international communist conspiracy.”

“Ho ho.”

“He's such a charming conversationalist.”

“You know what I'm asking,” Harry murmured conspiratorially. “Lift his spirits.”

“I don't think I'm strong enough.”

“If you aren't, then nobody it. Go on, tell him about your own fear, how you deal with it every single day. None of them know how difficult it is for you to be here, what a challenge it is for you every day. Hearing about that might give George the courage to face up to what he fears.”

“If he's the one who clubbed Brian, I don't care what he fears.”

“We don't know it was George.”

“He's a better bet than the Loch Ness monster.”

“Please, Rita.”

She sighed, relented, and went to have a word with George Lin at the back of the ice cave.

Harry joined the others, nearer the entrance.

Roger Breskin had taken hi watch from a zippered pocket in his parka. “Five after nine.”

“Less than three hours,” Claude said.

“Can it be done in three hours?” Brian wondered. “Can they get to us and take us off the ice in just three hours?”

“If they can't,” Harry said, trying to lighten the moment, “I'm going to be really pissed.”

9:10

Emil Zhukov climbed onto the bridge with a Thermos of hot tea and three aluminum mugs. “Have they assembled the gun?”

“A few minutes yet,” Gorov said. He held one of the mugs while the first officer poured the tea.

Suddenly the night smelled of herbs and lemons and honey, and Nikita Gorov's mouth watered. Then the wind caught the fragrant steam rising from the mug, crystallized it, and carried it away from him. He sipped the brew and smiled. Already the tea was growing cool, but sufficient heat remained to put an end to the chills that had been racing along his spine.

Below the bridge, on the forward section of the main deck, framed by four emergency lights, three crewmen were busy assembling the special gun that would be used to shoot a messenger line to the iceberg. All three wore black, insulated wet suits, with heat packs at their waists, and their faces were covered by rubber hoods and large diving masks. Each man was secured by a steel-link tether that was fixed to the forward escape hatch; the tethers were long enough to allow them to work freely, but not long enough to let them fall overboard.

Although it was not a weapon, the gun looked so wicked that an uninformed observer might have expected it to fire nuclear mortar rounds. Nearly as tall as any of the men assembling it, weighing three hundred fifty pounds, it consisted of just three primary components that were now pretty much locked together. The square base contained the motor that operated the pulleys for the breeches buoy, and it was fastened to four small steel rings recessed in the deck. The rings had been a feature of the boat ever since the Pogodin had begun putting special-forces agents ashore in foreign lands. The blocklike middle component of the gun fitted into a swivel mount on the base and contained the firing mechanism, the gunman's handgrips, and a large drum of messenger line. The final piece was a four-foot-long barrel with a five-inch-diameter bore, which the three-man team had just inserted in its socket; an any-light scope was mounted at the base of the barrel. The device appeared capable of blowing a hole through a tank; on a battlefield, however, it would have been every bit as ineffective as a child's peashooter.

At times the runneled deck was nearly dry, but that wasn't the typical condition, and it lasted only briefly. Every time the bow dipped and a wave broke against the hull, the forward end of the boat was awash. Brightened by chunks of ice and cottony collars of frozen foam, the frigid dark sea rushed onto the deck, sloshed between the crewmen's legs, battered their thighs, and surged to their waists before gushing away. If the Ilya Pogodin had been on the windward side of the iceberg, the towering waves of the storm would have overwhelmed the men and knocked them about mercilessly. In the sheltered lee, however, as long as they