Icebound

lining provided heat in much the same fashion as did any standard electric blanket.

Harry laid out his own equipment on the ice shore, well back from the highest tide line of the constantly surging and ebbing water in the pool. A compressed-air tank came with each suit. The diving mask was large enough to cover most of the face from chin to forehead, eliminating the need for a separate mouthpiece; air was fed directly into the mask, so the diver could breathe through his nose.

Strictly speaking, they would not be breathing air: The tank contained, instead, an oxygen-helium mixture with several special additives prescribed to allow the user to tolerate great depths. On the radio earlier, explaining the equipment, Timoshenko has assured them that the mixture of gases in the tank would allow a deep dive with only “a reasonable degree of danger” to the respiratory and circulatory system. Harry hadn't found the lieutenant's choice of words particularly reassuring. The though of fifty-eight massive charges of plastic explosives, however, was sufficient inducement.

The suits were different in other, less important ways from standard scuba gear. The pants had feet in them, as if they were the bottoms of a pair of Dr. Denton pajamas; and the sleeves of the jacket ended in gloves. The hood covered all of the head and face that was not protected by the oversize mask, as if leaving one centimeter of skin exposed would result in instant, extremely violent death. The wet suits almost seemed to be snug versions of the loose and bulky pressure suits worn by astronauts in space.

George Lin had entered the cavern while they were unpacking the aluminum boxes. He studied the equipment with unconcealed suspicion. “Harry, there must be something else, some other way. There's got to be —”

“No,” Harry said, without his usual diplomacy and patience. “This is it. This or nothing. There's no time for discussion any more, George. Just shut up and suit up.”

Lin looked glum.

But he didn't look like a killer.

Harry glanced at the others, who were busy unpacking their own boxes of gear. None of them looked like a killer, yet one of the them had clubbed Brian and, for whatever mad reason, might give them a lot of trouble when they were underwater and moving down through the long tunnel of ice.

Bringing up the rear, Pete Johnson squirmed laboriously out of the crawl space from the crevasse into the cavern, cursing the ice around him. He had been a tighter fit than any of the others. His broad shoulders had probably made it difficult for him to squeeze through the narrowest part of that passageway.

“Let's get dressed,” Harry said. His voice had an odd, hollow quality as it resonated through that domed amphitheater of ice. “No time to waste.”

They changed from their arctic gear into the scuba suits with an efficient haste born of acute discomfort and desperation. Harry, Franz, and Roger were already in pain for their knee-deep immersion in the pool: Their feet had been half numb, not a good sign, but the shock had temporarily restored too much feeling, and now their flesh from calves to toes prickled, ached, burned. The others had been spared that additional suffering, but they cursed and complained bitterly during their brief nakedness. No wind circulated through the cavern, but the air temperature was perhaps twenty or more degrees below zero. Therefore, they changed lower- and upper-body garments in stages to avoid being entirely unclothed at any one time and vulnerable to the killing cold: Outer boots, felt boots, socks, pants, and long underwear were removed first and were quickly replaced by the skintight, insulation-lined scuba pants; then they changed from coats, vests, sweaters, shirts, and undershirts into lined rubber jackets with snug rubber hoods.

Modesty was potentially as deadly as sloth. When Harry looked up after tucking himself into his scuba pants, he saw Rita's bare breasts as she struggled into her scuba jacket. Her flesh was blue-white and textured with enormous goose pimples. Then she zipped up her jacket, caught Harry's eye, and winked.

He marveled at that wink. He could guess at the agonizing fear that must be afflicting her. She wasn't just on the ice any more. She was now in the ice. Entombed. Her terror must already be acute. Before they traveled down the tunnel to the submarine and safety — if, in fact, they were able to make that journey without perishing — she would no doubt relive the death of her parents more than once and recall every hideous detail of the ordeal that she had endured when she was six years old.

Pete was having trouble squeezing into his gear. He said, “Are all these Russians pygmies?”

Everyone laughed.

The joke hadn't been that funny. Such easy laughter was an indication of how tense they were. Harry sensed that panic was near the surface in all of them.

11:15 DETONATION IN FORTY-FIVE MINUTES

The overhead speaker brought the bad news that everyone in the control room had been expecting from the torpedo officer: “That bulkhead is sweating again, Captain.”

Gorov turned away from the bank of video displays and pulled down a microphone. “Captain to torpedo room. Is it just a thin film, the same as last time?”

“Yes, sir. About the same.”

“Keep an eye on it.”

Emil Zhukov said, “Now that we know the lay of the ice above us, we could take her up to six hundred feet, up into the bowl of the funnel.”

Gorov shook his head. “Right now we have only one thing to worry about — the sweat on that torpedo-room bulkhead. If we ascent to six hundred feet, we might still have that problem, and we'd also have to worry that the iceberg might suddenly enter a new current and be turned out of this one.”

If they cautiously ascended a hundred feet or more into the concavity to relieve some of the tremendous pressure on the hull, the Pogodin would essentially be tucked into the berg as if it were an unborn baby nestled in the belly of its mother. Then if the berg began to move faster or slower than it was traveling at the moment, they might not realize what was happening until it was too late. They would collide with the deeper ice lying beyond their bow or with that to their stern.

“Steady as she goes,” Gorov said.

* * *

The notebook had an evil power that Gunvald found horribly compelling. The contents shocked, disgusted, and sickened him, yet he couldn't resist looking at one more page, then one more, then another. He was like a wild animal that had come upon the guts and half-eaten flesh of one of its own kind that had fallen victim to a predator: He poked his nose into the ruins and sniffed eagerly, frightened but curious, ashamed of himself, but utterly and morbidly fascinated by the dreadful fate that could befall one of his own kind.

In a sense, the notebook was a diary of dementia, a week-by-week chronicle of a mind traveling from the borderlands of sanity into the nations of madness — although that was obviously not how its owner thought of it. To that deranged man, it might seem like a research project, a record from public sources of an imagined conspiracy against the United States and against democracy everywhere. Newspaper and magazine clippings had been arranged according to their dates of publication and affixed to the pages of the notebook with cellophane tape. In the margin alongside each clipping, the compiler had written his comments.

The earliest entries seemed to have been snipped from various amateurishly produced political magazines of limited circulation, published in the U.S. by both extreme left- and right-wing groups. This man found fuel for his burning paranoia at both ends of the spectrum. They were wildly overwritten scare stories of the most mindless sort, simpleminded and scandalous. The President was a dedicated hard-line communist — yet, in another clipping, he was a dedicated hard-line fascist, the President was a closet homosexual with a taste for underage boys — or perhaps an insatiable satyr for whom ten bimbos a week were smuggled into the White House; the Pope was alternately a despicable right-wing zealot who was secretly supporting Third World dictators and a left-wing maniac intent on funding the destruction of democracy and confiscating all the wealth of the world for the benefit of the Jesuits. Here it was reported that the Rockefellers and the Mellons were the descendants of conspiratorially minded families who had been trying to rule the world since the fourteenth