Icebound

Rita…

Escape was possible. Just barely.

Harry clipped one of the flashlights to his belt. Holding the other light in front of him, he wriggled back through the crawl space between the domed cavern and the bottom of the open crevasse, eager to signal the others to descend and begin their tortuous escape from that prison of ice.

11:06 DETONATION IN FIFTY-FOUR MINUTES

At the command pad, Nikita Gorov monitored the series of five video display terminals arrayed on the ceiling. With little strain, he was simultaneously tracking the computations — some expressed in dimensional diagrams — provided by five different programs that were constantly collecting data regarding the boat's and the iceberg's positions, relative altitudes, and speeds.

“Clear water,” said the technician who was operating the surface Fathometer. “No ice overhead.”

Gorov had jockeyed the Ilya Pogodin under the quarter-mile-long, disc-shaped concavity in the bottom of the iceberg. The sail of the submarine was directly below the forty-foot-wide tunnel in the center of that concavity. Essentially, they were holding steady under an inverted funnel of ice and had to remain there for the duration of the operation.

“Speed matched to target,” Zhukov said, repeating the report that had come over his headset form the maneuvering room.

One of the technicians along the left-hand wall said, “Speed matched and checked.”

“Rudder amidships,” Gorov said.

“Rudder amidships, sir.”

Unwilling to look away, Gorov scowled a the VDTs as though speaking to them rather than to the control- room team. “And keep a damned close watch on the drift compass.”

“Clear water. No ice overhead.”

An enormous structure of ice was overhead, of course, a huge island, but not directly above the surface Fathometer package on the sail. They were sounding straight up into the forty-foot wide funnel at the top of the cavity, and the return signal showed clearance all the way to the surface, six hundred feet above, where the tunnel terminated in the bottom of the crevasse that Dr. Carpenter had described to Timoshenko.

The captain hesitated, reluctant to act until he was absolutely certain that they were properly positioned. He studied the five screens for another half minute. When he was satisfied that the speed of the boat was as closely coordinated with the iceberg's progress as was humanly possible, he pulled down a microphone and said, “Captain to communications center. Release the aerial at will, Lieutenant.”

Timoshenko's voice grated from the overhead speaker. “Aerial deployed.”

Topside, eight watertight, aluminum cargo boxes nestled among the masts and periscopes and snorkels on the Pogodin's sail. They were held in place by multiple lengths of nylon cord, some of which had no doubt snapped, as expected, during the submarine's second descent to seven hundred feet.

When Timoshenko released the aerial, a helium balloon had been ejected in a swarm of bubbles from a pressurized tube on top of the sail. If it was functioning properly — as it always had before — the balloon was now rising rapidly in the dark sea, trailing the multicommunications wire behind it. As an intelligence-gathering boat, the Ilya Pogodin had deployed that aerial in the same fashion on thousands of occasions over the years.

The eight watertight boxes fastened atop the sail, however, were not a standard feature. They were secured to the communications wire with a fine-link titanium alloy chain and spring locks. When the rising helium balloon was twenty feet above the sail, it should jerk the chain tight and draw the boxes upward, pulling hard enough against the remaining nylon restraining lines to cause them to slip their knots. Because the aluminum boxes were buoyant, they would then rise instantly from the sail and would not be a drag on the balloon.

In seconds, that helium-filled sphere was up to six hundred feet, then five hundred fifty feet, and then five hundred — well into the bowl of the inverted funnel above the boat. Four hundred feet and rising. The cargo boxes should be soaring upward in its wake. Three hundred fifty feet. The air bubbles from the pressure tube would fall behind the aerial and the boxes almost from the start, because the helium in the balloon expanded and rose much faster than did the oxygen in the bubbles. At approximately four hundred feet, the balloon would slide smoothly into the entrance to the long tunnel and continue to rise effortlessly, towing the boxes higher, higher, faster, faster…

Bending over the graph of the surface Fathometer, the operator said, “I'm registering a fragmented obstruction in the tunnel.”

“Not ice?” Gorov asked.

“No. The obstruction is rising.”

“The boxes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It's working,” Zhukov said.

“Seems to be,” the captain agreed.

“Now if the Edgeway people have located the other end of the tunnel—”

“We can get on with the hard part,” Gorov finished for him.

Numbers and images blinked, blinked, blinked across the video display terminals.

At last the squawk box rattled, and Lieutenant Timoshenko said, “Aerial's up. Balloon's surfaced, Captain.”

Gorov pulled down a microphone, cleared his throat, and said, “Override the automatic system, Lieutenant. Reel out an additional sixty feet of wire.”

A moment later Timoshenko said, “Sixty additional feet of wire deployed, Captain.”

Emil Zhukov wiped one hand down his saturnine face. “Now the long wait.”

Gorov nodded. “Now the long wait.”

11:10 DETONATION IN FIFTY MINUTES

The helium balloon broke through at the upper end of the tunnel and bobbled merrily on the swell. Although it was a flat blue-gray color, it looked, at least to Harry, like a bright and cheerful party balloon.

One by one, as Timoshenko reeled out additional wire at the far end, the eight watertight aluminum boxes burst through the surface. They bumped against one another with dull, almost inaudible thumps.

Harry was no longer alone in the dome-ceilinged cavern. Rita, Brian, Franz, Claude, and Roger had joined him. By now George Lin would have set foot on the bottom of the crevasse, and Pete Johnson would have started down the rope from the storm-lashed top of the iceberg.

Picking up the grappling hook that they had jerry-rigged from lengths of copper pipe and twenty feet of heavy-gauge wire, Harry said, “Come on. Let's get that stuff out of the water.”

With Franz's and Roger's assistance, he managed to snare the chain and drag the boxes out of the pool. All three men got wet to the knees in the process, and within seconds the storm suits had frozen solid around their calves. Although their boots and clothing were waterproof, even the partial submersion sucked body heat from them. Cold, shuddering, they hurriedly popped open the aluminum cargo boxes and extracted the gear that had been sent up from the Ilya Pogodin.

Each box held a self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. But this was not ordinary scuba gear. It had been designed for use in especially deep and/or extremely cold water. Each suit came with a battery pack that was attached to a belt and worn at the waist. When this was plugged into both the skintight pants and the jacket, the