Icebound

“Ice overhead again!” the surface-Fathometer operator called out. “Three hundred feet. Ice at three hundred feet and falling now.”

Gorov watched the stylus closely. The channel of open water between the top of the Pogodin's sail and the bottom of the iceberg narrowed steadily, rapidly.

Two hundred sixty feet. Two hundred twenty.

One hundred eighty. One forty. One hundred.

Eighty. Sixty.

Separation held at fifty feet for a few seconds but then began to fluctuate wildly: fifty feet, a hundred and fifty feet, fifty feet again, a hundred feet, eighty, fifty feet, two hundred feet, up and down, up and down, in utterly unpredictable peaks and troughs. Then it reached fifty feet of clearance once more, and at last the stylus began to wiggle less erratically.

“Holding steady,” the surface-fathometer technician reported. “Fifty to sixty feet. Minor variations. Holding steady… still holding… holding…”

“Could the Fathometer have been malfunctioning back there?” Gorov asked.

The technician shook his head. “No, sir. I don't think so, sir. It seems fine now.”

“Then do I understand what just happened? Did we pass under a hole in the middle of the iceberg?”

The technician kept a close watch on the graph drum, ready to call out if the ceiling of ice above them began to drop lower than the fifty-foot mark. “Yes. I think so. From every indication, a hole. Approximately in the middle.”

“A funnel-shaped hole.”

“Yes, sir. It began to register as an inverted dish. But when we were directly under, the upper two thirds of the cavity narrowed drastically.”

With growing excitement, Gorov said. “And it went all the way to the top of the iceberg?”

“I don't know about that, sir. But it went up at least to sea level.”

The surface Fathometer, of course, couldn't take readings farther up than the surface of the sea.

“A hole,” Gorov said thoughtfully. “How in the name of God did it get there?”

No one had an answer.

Gorov shrugged. “Perhaps one of the Edgeway people will know. They've been studying the ice. The important thing is that it's there, however it came to be.”

“Why is this hole so important?” Zhukov asked.

Gorov had a seed of an idea, the germ of an outrageously daring plan to rescue the Edgeway scientists. If the hole was- 'Clear water,” the technician announced. “No ice overhead.”

Emil Zhukov pressed a few keys on the command-pad console. He looked up at the computer screen to his right. “It checks. Taking into account the southward current and our forward speed, we should be entirely out from under. This time the berg's really gone.”

“Clear water,” the technician repeated.

Gorov glanced at his watch: 10:02. Less than two hours remaining until the sixty explosive charges would shatter the iceberg. In that length of time, the crew of the Pogodin could not possibly mount a conventional rescue attempt with any hope of success. The unorthodox scheme that the captain had in mind might seem to some to border on outright lunacy, but it had the advantage of being a plan that could work within the limited time they had left.

Zhukov cleared his throat. No doubt with a vivid mental image of that sweating bulkhead in the torpedo room, the first officer was waiting for orders to take the boat up to a less dangerous depth.

Pulling down the steel-spring microphone, Gorov said, “Captain to torpedo room. How's it look there?”

From the overhead speaker: “Still sweating, sir. It's not any better, but it's not any worse, either.”

“Keep watching. And stay calm.” Gorov released the microphone and returned to the command pad. “Engines at half speed. Left full rudder.”

Astonishment made Emil Zhukov's long face appear even longer. He opened his mouth to speak, but he couldn't make a sound. He swallowed hard. His second attempt was successful: “You mean we aren't going up?”

“Not this minute,” Gorov said. “We've got to make another run under that behemoth. I want to have another look at the hole in the middle of it.”

* * *

The volume on the shortwave radio was it its maximum setting, so the Russian communications officer aboard the Pogodin could be heard over the roar of the storm beast that prowled at the entrance to the cave and above the roof of interlocking slabs of ice. Hard shatters of static and electronic squeals of interference echoed off the ice walls, rather like the enormously amplified sound of fingernails being dragged across a blackboard.

The others had joined Harry and Pete in the ice cave to hear the astounding news firsthand. They were crowded together near the back wall.

When Lieutenant Timoshenko had described the hole and the large area of dramatically scalloped ice on the bottom of their floating prison, Harry had explained the probable cause of it. The iceberg had been broken off the cap by a tsunami, and the tsunami had been generated by a seabed earthquake almost directly beneath them. In this part of the world, in association with this chain of fractures, volcanic activity was de rigueur, as witness the violent Icelandic eruptions a few decades ago. And if ocean-floor volcanic activity had been associated with the recent event, enormous quantities of lava could have been discharged into the sea, flung upward with tremendous force. Spouts of white-hot lava could have bored that hole, and the millions of gallons of boiling water that it produced could easily have sculpted the troughs and peaks that marked the bottom of the iceberg just past the hole.

Although it originated from a surfaced submarine only a fraction of a mile away, Timoshenko's voice was peppered with static, but the transmission didn't break up. “As Captain Gorov sees it, there are three possibilities. First, the hole in the bottom of your berg might end in solid ice above the water line. Or second, it might lead into a cavern or to the bottom of a shallow crevasse. Or third, it might even continue for another hundred feet above the sea level and open at the top of the iceberg. Does that analysis seem sound to you, Dr. Carpenter?”

“Yes,” Harry said, impressed by the captain's reasoning. “And I think I know which of the three it is.” He told Timoshenko about the crevasse that had opened midway in the iceberg's length when the gigantic seismic waves had passed under the edge of the winter field. “It didn't exist when we went out to position the explosives, but there it was, waiting for us, on our way back to the temporary camp. I nearly drove straight into it, lost my snowmobile.”

“And the bottom of this crevasse is open all the way down to the sea?” Timoshenko asked.

“I don't know, but now I suspect it is. As near as I'm able to calculate, it must lie directly above the hole you've found on the underside. Even if the lava spout didn't punch through the entire hundred feet of ice above the water line, the heat needed to bore upward through all that underwater mass would at least have cracked the ice above the surface. And those cracks are sure to lead all the way down to the open water that your Fathometer operator detected.”

“If the hole is at the bottom of the crevasse — I suppose we should call it a shaft or tunnel, rather than a hole — would you be willing to try to reach it by climbing down into the crevasse? Timoshenko inquired.

The question seemed bizarre to Harry. He could not see the point of going down into that chasm where his snowmobile had vanished. “If we had to do it, I suppose we could improvise some climbing equipment. But what would be the point? I don't understand where you're going with this.”

“That's how we're going to try to take you off the ice. Through the tunnel and out from underneath the berg.”

In the cave behind Harry, the seven others responded to that suggestion with noisy disbelief.

He gestured at them to be quiet. To the Russian radioman, he said, “Down through this hole, this tunnel, and somehow into the submarine? But how?”

Timoshenko said, “In diving gear.”

“We haven't any.”