Icebound

It affected the ship in an unpredictable fashion, so Gorov couldn't prepare for its next attack. Without warning, the boat rolled to port so violently that everyone on the bridge was thrown sideways; the captain collided with Emil Zhukov and Semichastny. He disentangled himself from them and gripped an ice-sheathed section of the railing just as a wall of water burst across the sail and flooded the bridge.

As the ship righted itself, Zhukov shouted, “I'd rather be down at seven hundred feet!”

“Ah! You see?” Gorov shouted. “You didn't know when you were well off!”

“I'll never complain again.”

The iceberg no longer provided a leeward flank in which the Ilya Pogodin could take shelter. The full force of the storm assaulted the berg from behind, and both of its long flanks were vulnerable to the pitiless wind. The boat was forced to endure on the open surface, pitching and heaving, rocking and falling and rising and wallowing as though it were a living creature in its death throes. Another of the monumental waves battered the starboard hull, roared up the side of the sail, and cast Niagaras of spray down the other side, repeatedly drenching everyone on the bridge. Most of the time, the submarine listed heavily to port on the back of a monstrous black swell that was simultaneously monotonous and terrifying. All the men on the bridge were jacketed in thick ice, as was the metalwork around them.

Where it was not covered by goggles or protected by his hood, Gorov's face was heavily smeared with lanolin. Although his post did not require him to confront the fiendish wind directly, his nose and cheeks had been cruelly bitten by the viciously cold air.

Emil Zhukov had been wearing a scarf over the bottom half of his face, and it had come undone. At his assigned post, he had to stare directly into the storm, and he could not be without some protection, because his skin would be peeled from his face by the spicules of ice that were like millions of needles on the hundred-mile-an- hour wind. He quickly twisted and squeezed the scarf in both hands, cracking the layer of ice that encrusted it, then hastily retied it over his mouth and nose. He resumed his watch on one third of the murky horizon, miserable but stoical.

Gorov lowered his night glasses and turned to look back and up at the two men who were working on top of the sail just aft of the bridge. They were illuminated by the red bridge bulb to some extent and by a portable arc light. Both cast eerie, twisted shadows like those of demons toiling diligently over the bleak machinery of Hell.

One of those crewmen was standing atop the sail, wedged between the two periscopes and the radar mast, which must have been either immeasurably more terrifying or more exhilarating then riding a wild horse in a Texas rodeo, depending on the man's tolerance for danger, even though a safety line encircled his waist and secured him to the telecommunications mast. He presented one of the strangest sights that Captain Gorov had ever seen. He was swathed in so many layers of water-proof clothes that he had difficulty moving freely, but in his dangerously exposed position, he needed every layer of protection to avoid freezing to death where he stood. Like a human lightening rod at the pinnacle of the submarine superstructure, he was a target for the hurricane-force winds, the ceaseless barrage of sleet, and the cold sea spray. His suit of ice was extremely thick and virtually without chink or rent. At his neck, shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, and knees, the encasing ice was marred by well-delineated cracks and creases, but even at those joints, the cloth under the glistening storm coat was not visible. Otherwise, from head to foot, the poor devil glittered, sparkled, gleamed. He reminded Gorov of the cookie men, coated with sweet white icing, that were sometimes among the treats given to children in Moscow on New Year's Day.

The second seaman was standing on the short ladder that led from the bridge to the top of the sail. Tied fast to one of the rungs in order to free his hands for work, he was locking several watertight aluminum cargo boxes to a length of titanium-alloy chain.

Satisfied that the job was nearly completed, Gorov returned to his post and raised the night glasses to his eyes.

10:56 DETONATION IN ONE HOUR FOUR MINUTES

Because the rampaging wind was behind them, they were able to proceed to the crevasse in their snowmobiles. If they had been advancing into the teeth of the storm, they would have had to cope with near zero visibility, and in that case they would have done as well or better on foot, though they would have to have been tied together to prevent one of them from being bowled over by the wind and carried away. Driving with the wind, however, they could often see ten to fifteen yards ahead, although visibility was decreasing by the minute. Soon they would be in a full-fledged whiteout.

When they were in the vicinity of the chasm, Harry brought his sled to a full stop and, with a measure of reluctance, climbed out. Though he held tightly to the door handle, a hundred-mile-per-hour gust immediately knocked him to his knees. When the murderous velocity declined enough, he got up, though not without considerable effort, and hung on to the door, cursing the storm.

The other snowmobiles pulled up behind him. The last vehicle in the train was only thirty yards from him, but he could see nothing more than vague yellow aureoles where the headlights should have been. They were so dim that they might have been merely a trick of his bleary vision.

Daring to let go of the handle on the cabin door, hunching low to present the smallest possible profile to the wind, he hurried forward with his flashlight, scouting the ice, until he ascertained that the next hundred feet were safe. The air was bone-freezing, so cold that breathing it even through his snow mask hurt his throat and made his lungs ache. He scrambled back to the comparative warmth of his snowmobile and cautiously drove thirty yards before getting out to conduct further reconnaissance.

Again he found the crevasse, although this time he avoided nearly driving over the brink. The declivity was ten or twelve feet wide, narrowing toward the bottom, filled with more darkness than his flashlight could dispel.

As far as he could see through his frosted goggles — which were speckled with new ice the instant that he wiped them — the wall along which he would have to descent was pretty much a flat, unchallenging surface. He couldn't be entirely sure of what he was seeing: The angle at which he was able to look into the chasm, the curious way in which the deep ice refracted and reflected the light, the shadows that cavorted like demon dancers at the slightest movement of his flashlight, the windblown snow that spumed over the brink and then spiraled into the depths — all conspired to prevent him from getting a clear view of what lay below. Less than a hundred feet down was what appeared to be a floor or a wide ledge, which he thought he could reach without killing himself.

Harry turned his sled around and gingerly backed it to the edge of the chasm, a move that might reasonably have been judged suicidal; however, considering that barely sixty precious minutes remained to them, a certain degree of recklessness seemed not only justifiable but essential. Except for professional mannequins and British Prime Ministers, no one ever accomplished anything by standing still. That was a favorite maxim of Rita's, herself a British citizen, and Harry usually smiled when he thought of it. He wasn't smiling now. He was taking a calculated risk, with a greater likelihood of failure than success. The ice might collapse under him and tumble into the pit, as it had done earlier in the day.

Nevertheless, he was prepared to trust to luck and put his life in the hands of the gods. If there was justice in the universe, he was about to benefit from a change of fortune — or at least he was overdue for one.

By the time the others parked their snowmobiles, got out, and joined him near the brink of the crevasse, Harry had fixed two one-thousand-pound-test, ninety-strand nylon lines to the low hitch of his sled. The first rope was an eighty-foot safety line that would bring him up short of the crevasse floor if he fell. He knotted it around his waist. The second line, the one that he would use to attempt a measured descent, was a hundred feet long, and he tossed the free end into the ravine.

Pete Johnson arrived at the brink and gave Harry his flashlight.

Harry had already snapped his own flashlight to the tool belt at his waist. It hung at his right hip, butt up and lens down. Now he clipped Pete's torch at his left hip. Twin beams of yellow light shone down his quilted pants leg.

Neither he nor Pete attempted to speak. The wind was shrieking like something that had crawled out of the bowels of Hell on Judgment Day. It was so loud that it was stupefying, louder than it had been earlier. They couldn't