Icebound

“It can't be,” Zhukov said, startled. “Not all that quickly. It doesn't have any power of its own.

“Nevertheless, it's changing,” Gorov said.

“Not because of the torpedo. Just one torpedo — even all our torpedoes — couldn't have such a profound effect on an object that large.”

“No. Something else is at work here,” Gorov said worriedly. The captain turned away from the periscope. From the ceiling, he pulled down a microphone on a steel-spring neck and spoke both to the control room around him and to the sonar room, which was the next compartment forward in the boat. “I want an all-systems analysis of the lower fathoms to a depth of seven hundred feet.”

The voice that issued from the overhead squawk box was crisp and efficient. “Commencing full scan, sir.”

Gorov put his eye to the periscope again.

The purpose of the scan was to look for a major ocean current that was strong enough to affect an object as large as the iceberg. Through the use of limited-range sonar, thermal-analysis sensors, sophisticated listening devices, and other marine-survey equipment, the Ilya Pogodin's technicians were able to plot the movements of both warm- and cold-blooded forms of sea life beneath and to all sides of the boat. Schools of small fish and millions upon millions of krill, shrimplike creatures upon which many of the larger fish fed, were swept along by the more powerful currents or lived in them by choice, especially if those oceanic highways were warmer than the surrounding water. If masses of fish and krill — as well as thick strata of plankton — were found to be moving in the same direction, and if several other factors could be correlated with the movement, they could identify a major current, lower a current meter, and get a reasonable indication of the water's velocity.

Two minutes after Gorov had ordered the scan, the squawk box crackled again. “Strong current detected. Traveling due south, beginning at a depth of three hundred forty feet.”

Gorov looked away from the scope and pulled down the overhead microphone again. “How deep does it run below three forty?”

“Can't tell, sir. It's choked with sea life. Probing it is like trying to see through a wall. We have gotten readings as deep as six hundred sixty feet but that's not the bottom of it.”

“How fast is it moving?”

“Approximately nine knots, sir.”

Gorov blanched. “Repeat.”

“Nine knots.”

“Impossible!”

“Have mercy,” Zhukov said.

Gorov released the microphone, which sprang up out of the way, and with a new sense of urgency, he returned to the periscope. They were in the path of a juggernaut. The massive island of ice had been swinging slowly, ponderously into the new current, but now the full force of the fast-moving water was squarely behind it. The berg was still turning, bringing its “bow” around, but it was mostly sideways to the submarine and would remain like that for several minutes yet.

“Target closing,” the radar operator said. “Five hundred yards!” He read off the bearing that he had taken.

Before Gorov could reply, the boat was suddenly shaken as if a giant hand had taken hold of it. Zhukov fell. Papers slid off the chart table. The event lasted only two or three seconds, but everyone was rattled.

“What the hell?” Zhukov asked, scrambling to his feet.

“Collision.”

“With what?”

The berg was still five hundred yards away.

“Probably a small floe of ice,” Gorov said. He ordered damage reports from every part of the boat.

He knew that they hadn't collided with a large object, for if they had done so, they would already be sinking. The submarine's hull wasn't tempered, because it required a degree of flexibility to descend and ascend rapidly through realms of varying temperatures and pressures. Consequently, even a single ton of ice, if moving with sufficient velocity to have substantial impact energy, would cave in the hull as if crashing into a cardboard vessel. Whatever they had encountered was clearly of limited size; nevertheless, it must have caused at least minor damage.

The sonar operator called out the position of the iceberg: “Four hundred fifty yards and closing!”

Gorov was in a bind. If he didn't take the boat down, they would collide with that mountain of ice. But if he dived before he knew what damage had been sustained, they might never be able to surface again. There simply wasn't enough time to bring the big boat around and flee either to the east or to the west; because the iceberg was rushing at them sideways, it stretched nearly two-fifths of a mile both to port and starboard. The nine-knot, deepwater current, which began at a depth of three hundred forty feet, would not manage to turn the narrow profile of the berg toward them for another few minutes, and Gorov could not escape the full width of it before it reached them.

He snapped up the horizontal bar on the periscope and sent it into its hydraulic sleeve.

“Four hundred twenty years and closing!” called the sonar operator.

“Dive!” Gorov said, even as the first damage reports were being made. “Dive!”

The diving klaxons blasted throughout the boat. Simultaneously the collision alarm wailed.

“We're going under the ice before it hits us,” Gorov said.

Zhukov paled. “It must ride six hundred feet below the damn water line!”

Heart racing, mouth dry, Nikita Gorov said, “I know. I'm not certain we'll make it.”

* * *

A fierce gale relentlessly hammered the Nissen huts. The rivets in the metal walls creaked. At the two small, triple-pane windows, ice spicules tapped like the fingernails of ten thousand dead men wanting in, and great rivers of subzero air moaned and keened as they rushed over the Quonset-shaped structures.

In the supply shed, Gunvald had discovered nothing of interest, though he had pored through the lockers belonging to Franz Fischer and George Lin. If either man had murderous tendencies or was in any way less than entirely stable and normal, nothing in his personal effects gave him away.

Gunvald moved on to Pete Johnson's locker.

* * *

Gorov knew that, among men of other nations, Russians were often perceived as dour, somber, determinedly gloomy people. Of course, in spite of a dismaying historical tendency to afflict themselves with brutal rulers and with tragically flawed ideologies, that stereotype was as empty of truth as any other. Russians laughed and partied and made love and got drunk and made fools of themselves, as did people everywhere. Most university students in the West had read Feodor Dostoyevsky and had tried to read Tolstoy, and it was from those few pieces of literature that they had formed their opinions of modern-day Russians. Yet, if there had been any foreigners in the control room of the Ilya Pogodin at that moment, they would have seen precisely the Russians that the sterotype described: somber-faced men, all frowning, all with deeply beetled brows, all weighed down with a profound respect for fate.

The damage reports had been made: No bulkheads had buckled; no water was entering the boat. The shock had been worse in the forward quarters than anywhere else, and it had been especially unsettling to the men in the torpedo room, two decks below the control room. Though the safety-light boards registered no immediate danger, the boat had apparently sustained some degree of exterior hull damage immediately aft and starboard of the bow, just past the diving planes, which did not themselves seem to have been affected.

If the outer skin had only been scraped, or if it had suffered only a minor dent, the boat would survive. However, if the hull had sustained even moderate compaction at any point — and worst of all, distortion that lay across welded seams — they might not live through a deep dive. The pressure on the submarine would not be uniformly resisted by the damaged areas, which could cause severe strain, and the boat might fail them, implode, and sink straight to the ocean floor.

The young diving officer's voice was loud but, in spite of the circumstances, not shaky. “Two hundred feet and descending.”

The sonar operator reported: “The profile of the target is narrowing. She's continuing to come bow-around in