Icebound

it.

He reached to a zippered vest pocket for his pipe, but decided against it. He touched the bowl, but his fingers twitched, and he withdrew his hand. The pipe relaxed him. It had pleasant associations. And this search definitely was not a high point of pleasure in his life. If he used the pipe, if he puffed away on it while he poked through the contents of his friends' lockers, then… Well, he had a hunch that he would never be able to enjoy a good smoke again.

All right then. Where should be start?

Roger Breskin.

Franz Fischer.

George Lin.

Claude Jobert.

Pete Johnson.

Those were the five suspects. All were good men, as far as Gunvald was aware, although some were friendlier and easier to get to know than others. They were smarter and more well-balanced than the average person on the street; they had to be so, in order to have successful research careers in the Arctic or Antarctic, where the arduousness of the job and the unusual pressures quickly eliminated those who weren't self-reliant and exceptionally stable. None was a likely candidate for the tag “psychopathic killer,” not even George Lin, who had revealed aberrant behavior only on this expedition and only recently, after having participated in many other projects on the ice during a long and admirable career.

He decided to begin with Roger Breskin because Roger's locker was the first in line. All the shelves were bare except the top one, on which was a cardboard box. Gunvald lifted the box out and put it between his feet.

As he had expected, the Canadian traveled light. The box contained only four items. A laminated eight-by- ten color photograph of Roger's mother: a strong-jawed woman with a winning smile, curly gray hair, and black- rimmed glasses. One silver brush-and-comb set: tarnished. A rosary. And a scrapbook filled with photographs and newspaper clippings, all concerned with Breskin's career as an amateur weight lifter.

Gunvald left everything on the floor and moved the wooden crate two feet to the left. He sat in front of Fischer's locker.

* * *

The submarine was submerged again, holding steady just below the surface, at its highest periscope depth. It was lying in wait along the iceberg's projected course.

On the conning-tower platform in the control room, Nikita Gorov stood at the periscope, his arms draped over the horizontal “ears” at the base of it. Even though the top of the scope was eight or nine feet above the sea level, the storm waves exploded against it and washed over it, obscuring his view from time to time. When the upper window was out of the water, however, the night sea was revealed, dimly lighted by four drifting, dying flares.

The iceberg had already begun to cross their bow, three hundred yards north of their position. That gleaming white mountain was starkly silhouetted against the black night and sea.

Zhukov stood next to the captain. He was wearing headphones and listening on an open line that connected him to the petty officer in the forward torpedo room. He said, “Number one tube ready.”

To Gorov's right, a young seaman was monitoring a backup safety board full of green and red lights that represented equipment and hatches in the torpedo room. When Zhukov, relaying the torpedo-room report, said that the breach door was secure, the seaman at the backup board confirmed: “Green and check.”

“Tube flooded.”

From the backup board: “Flood indicated.”

“Muzzle door open.”

“Red and check.”

“Tube shutters open.”

“Red and check.”

The Ilya Pogodin was not primarily a warship but an information gatherer. It didn't carry nuclear missiles. However, the Russian Naval Ministry had planned that every submarine should be prepared to bring the battle to the enemy in the event of a non-nuclear war. Therefore, the boat was carrying twelve electric torpedoes. Weighing over a ton and a half, packed with seven hundred pounds of high explosives, each of these steel sharks had huge destructive potential. The Ilya Pogodin was not primarily a warship, but if so ordered, it could have sunk a considerable tonnage of enemy ordnance.

“Number one tube ready,” Zhukov said again as the officer in the torpedo room repeated that announcement over the headset.

“Number one tube ready,” said the enunciator.

Nikita Gorov realized for the first time that the process of readying and launching a torpedo had a ritualistic quality that was oddly similar to a religious service. Perhaps because worship and war both dealt in different ways with the subject of death.

At the penultimate moment of the litany, the control room behind him fell into silence, except for the soft hum of machinery and the electronic muttering of computers.

After a protracted and almost reverent silence, Nikita Gorov said, “March bearings… and… shoot!”

“Fire one!” Zhukov said.

The young seaman glanced at his fire-control panel as the torpedo was let go. “One gone.”

Gorov squinted through the eyepiece of the periscope, tense and expectant.

The torpedo had been programmed to seek a depth of fifteen feet. It would strike the cliff exactly that far below the water line. With luck, the configuration of the ice after the explosion would be more amenable than it was now to the landing of a couple of rafts and the establishment of a base platform for the climbers.

The torpedo hit its mark.

Gorov said, “Strike!”

The black ocean swelled and leaped at the base of the cliff, and for an instant the water was full of fiery yellow light, as if sea serpents with radiant eyes were surfacing.

Echoes of the concussion vibrated through the submarine's outer hull. Gorov felt the deck plates thrum.

The bottom of the white cliff began to dissolve. A house-size chunk of the brittle palisade tumbled into the water and was followed by an avalanche of broken ice.

Gorov winced. He knew that the explosives were not powerful enough to do major damage to the iceberg, let alone blast it to pieces. In fact, the target was so enormous that the torpedo could do little more than take a chip out of it. But for a few seconds, there was an illusion of utter destruction.

The petty officer in the forward torpedo room told Zhukov that the breach door was shut, and the first officer passed the word to the technicians.

“Green and check,” one of them confirmed.

Lifting the headset from one ear, Zhukov said, “How's it look out there, sir?”

Keeping his eye to the periscope, Gorov said, “Not much better than it did.”

“No landing shelf?”

“Not really. But the ice is still falling.”

Zhukov paused, listening to the petty officer at the other end of the line. “Muzzle door shut.”

“Green and check.”

“Blowing number one tube.”

Gorov wasn't listening closely to the series of safety checks, because his full attention was riveted on the iceberg. Something was wrong. The floating mountain had begun to act strangely. Or was it his imagination? He squinted, trying to get a better view of the ice behemoth between the high waves, which still continued to wash rhythmically over the upper window of the periscope. The target seemed not to be advancing eastward any longer. Indeed, he thought the “bow” of it was even beginning to swing around to the south. Ever so slightly toward the south. No. absurd. Couldn't happen. He closed his eyes and told himself that he was seeing things. But when he looked again, he was even more certain that—”

The radar technician said, “Target's changing course!”