Icebound

of blind panic, she finally exhaled explosively, inhaled the metallic-tasting mixture of gases from the scuba tank, and starved off hysteria.

Frigophobia: fear of cold. She suffered no chill whatsoever in the Russian wetsuit. Indeed, she was warmer than she had been at any time during the past few months, since they had come onto the icecap and established Edgeway Station. Nevertheless, she was unavoidably aware of the deadly cold of the water, conscious of being separated from it by only thin sheath of rubber and electrically heated layers of insulation. The Russian technology was impressive, but if the battery pack at her hip was drained before she reached the submarine far below, her body heat would be quickly leached away. The insistent cold of the sea would insinuate itself deep into her muscles, into her marrow, torturing her body and swiftly numbing her mind…

Down, ever down. Embraced by a coldness that she couldn't feel. Surrounded by ice that she couldn't see. Curved white walls out of sight to the left of her, to the right, above and below, ahead and behind. Surrounding and entrapping her. Tunnel of ice. Prison of ice. Flooded with darkness and bitter cold. Silent but for the susurrant rush of her breathing and the thud-thud-thudding of her heart. Inescapable. Deeper than a grave.

As she swam down into depths unknown. Rita was sometimes more aware of the light ahead of her than she was at other times, because she was repeatedly flashing back to the winter when she was only six years old.

Happy. Excited. On her way to her first skiing holiday with her mother and father, who are experienced on the sloped and eager to teach her. The car is an Audi. Her mother and father sit up front, and she sits alone in the back. Ascending into increasingly white and fantastic realms. A winding road in the French Alps. An alabaster wonderland all around them, below them, great vistas of evergreen forests shrouded with snow, rocky crags looming high above like the old-men faces of watching gods, bearded with ice. Fat white flakes suddenly began to spiral out of the iron-gray afternoon sky. She's a child of the Italian Mediterranean, of sun and olive groves and sun-spangled ocean, and she's never before been to the mountains. Now her young heart races with adventure. It's so beautiful: the snow, the steeply rising land, the valleys crowded with trees and purple shadows, sprinkled with small villages. And even when Death suddenly comes, it has a terrible beauty, all dressed resplendently in white. Her mother sees the avalanche first, to the right of the roadway and high above, and she cries out in alarm. Rita looks through the side window, sees the wall of white farther up the mountain, sliding down, growing as rapidly as a storm wave sweeping across the ocean toward shore, casting up clouds of snow sea spray, silent at first, so white and silent and beautiful that she can hardly believe it can hurt them. Her father says, “We can outrun it,” and he sounds scared as he jams his foot on the accelerator, and her mother says, “Hurry, for God's sake, hurry,” and it comes onward, silent and white and huge and dazzling and bigger by the second…silent.. then a barely audible rumble like distant thunder.

Rita heard strange sounds. Hollow, faraway voices. Shouting or lamenting. Like the voices of the damned faintly wailing for surcease from suffering, issuing from the ether above a seance table.

Then she realized that it was only a single voice. Her own. She was making hard, panicky sounds into her face mask, but since her ears weren't in the mask, she heard her own cries only as they vibrated through the bones of her face. If they sounded like the wails of a damned soul, that was because, at the moment, Hell was a place within her, a dark corner in her own heart.

She squinted past Brian and desperately concentrated on the shadowy shape farther along the line: Harry. He was dimly visible in the murk, kicking down into the black void, so near and yet so far away. Twelve or fifteen feet separated Rita from Brian; count six feet for the kid, and maybe twelve feet between him and Harry: thirty or thirty-five feet altogether, separating her from her husband. It seemed like a mile. As long as she thought about Harry and kept in mind the good times that they would have together when this ordeal ended, she was able to stop screaming into her face mask and continue swimming. Paris. The Hotel George V. A bottle of fine champagne. His kiss. His touch. They would share it all again if she just didn't let her fears overwhelm her.

* * *

Harry glanced back toward Rita. She was still where she should be, following Brian along the communications line.

Looking ahead again, he told himself that he was excessively worried about her. In general, women were supposed to have greater endurance than men. If that was true, it was especially true of this woman.

He smiled to himself and said, “Hang in there,” as though she could hear him.

Ahead of Harry, when they were perhaps a hundred fifty feet down the dark tunnel, Roger Breskin finally paused for a rest. He performed a somersault as though engaged in a water ballet and turned around on the line until he faced Harry in a more natural position: head up and feet down.

Five yards behind Roger, Harry also paused and was about to do a somersault of his own when Roger's halogen lamp winked out. Two lights still glowed behind Harry, but the beams were diffused by the cloudy water and didn't reach him or Roger. He was enveloped in darkness.

An instant later Breskin collided with him. Harry couldn't hold on to the communications wire. They tumbled down and away into the blackness, at a descending angle toward the tunnel wall, and for an instant Harry didn't understand what was happening. Then he felt a hand clawing at his throat, and he knew that he was in trouble. He flailed at Breskin, putting all his strength into the blows, but the water absorbed the energy of his punches and transformed them into playful pats.

Breskin's hand closed tightly around Harry's throat. Harry tried to wrench his head away, pull back, but he couldn't escape. The weight lifter had an iron grip.

Breskin drove a knee into Harry's stomach, but the water worked against him, slowing and cushioning the blow.

Harder and sooner than he had expected, Harry's back thumped against the tunnel wall, and pain coruscated along his spine. The bigger man pinned him against the ice.

The two remaining halogen lamps — one held by George and one by Pete — were far above and about twenty feet farther toward the center of the tunnel, vaguely luminous ghost lights haunting the cloudy water. Harry was essentially blind. Even at close range, he could not see his assailant.

The hand at this throat slipped higher, pawed at his chin. His face mask was torn off.

With that strategic stroke, Harry was denied his breath and what little vision he'd had, and he was exposed to the killing cold of the water. Helpless, disoriented, he was no longer a threat to Breskin, and the big man let him go.

The cold was like a fistful of nails rammed hard into his face, and his body heat seemed to pout out as though it were a hot liquid streaming through the resultant punctures.

Terrified, on the verge of panic but aware that panic might be the death of him, Harry rolled away into the darkness, grappling behind himself for the precious mask that floated at the end of his air hose.

* * *

A second after the lamp went out at the head of the procession, Rita realized what was wrong: Breskin was the would-be killer of Brian Dougherty. And a second after that, she knew what she had to do.

She let go of the line and swam out of the amber light from George Lin's lamp, which glowed behind her and silhouetted her for Breskin. Praying that George wouldn't follow her and blow her cover, she soon came up against the wall of the tunnel, the smooth curve of… ice.

The rumble swells into a roar, and again her father says, “We'll outrun it,” but his words are now more of a prayer than a promise. The great white wall comes down down down down, and her mother screams…

Rita shook off the past and strove to repress her fear of the ice against which she pressed. The wall wasn't going to collapse on her. It was solid, hundreds of feet thick, and until the packages of plastique were detonated at midnight, it was under no pressure great enough to cause it to implode.

Swinging around, putting her back to the wall she looked out toward the commotion along the communications wire. She resisted the steady downward pull of her weight belt by treading water and pressing one hand tightly against the ice at her side.

The ice wasn't a living thing, not a conscious entity. She knew better than that. Yet she felt as though it wanted her. She could sense its yearning, its hunger, its