Icebound

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Harry's alive.”

* * *

11:39

As he followed Claude Jobert down the wire once more, Franz thought about what he would say to Rita if they reached the other side of midnight.

You handled yourself well. You're amazing. You know, I once loved you. Hell, I still do. I never got over you. And I learned a lot from you, whether it was ever apparent or not. Oh, I'm still an asshole, yes, I admit it, but I'm slowly growing up. Old attitudes die hard. I've been acting like a total idiot these past months, quarrelsome with Harry and distant with you. But that's finished. We can never be lovers again. I see what you and Harry have together, and it's unique, more than you and I ever had or ever could have. But I'd like to be friends.

He hoped to God he lived to say all that.

* * *

11:40

Brian swam down along the wire.

He wasn't worried much about the ticking bombs overhead. He was increasingly convinced that he and the others would reach the submarine and survive the explosions. In the throes of the obsession about which Rita had warned him, he was worried instead about the book that he intended to write.

The theme would definitely be heroism. He had come to see that there were two basic forms of it. Heroism that was sought, as when a man climbed a mountain or challenged an angry bull in one of Madrid's rings — because a man had to know his limits, heroism sought was important. It was far less valuable, however, than heroism unsought. Harry, Rita, and the others had put their lives on the line in their jobs because they believed that what they were doing would contribute to the betterment of the human condition, not because they wanted to test themselves. Yet, although they would deny it, they were heroes every day of the week. They were heroes in the way that cops and firemen were heroes, in the way that millions of mothers and fathers were quiet heroes for taking on the ominous responsibilities of supporting families and raising children to be good citizens, the way ministers were heroes to dare talk of God in a world that had come to doubt His existence and to mock those who still believed, the way many teachers were heroes when they went into schools racked by violence and nevertheless tried to teach kids what they would need to know to survive in a world that had no mercy for the uneducated. The first brand of heroism — heroism sought — had a distinct quality of selfishness, but heroism unsought was selfless. Brian understood now that it was this unsought heroism, not the tinsel glory of either politics or bullrings, that was the truest courage and the deepest virtue. When he had finished writing the book, when he had worked out all his thoughts on the subject, he would be ready to begin his adult life at last. And he was determined that quiet heroism would be the theme.

* * *

11:41

The technician looked up from the surface-fathometer graph. “They're moving again.”

“Coming down?” Gorov asked.

“Yes, sir.”

The squawk box brought them the voice of the petty officer in the forward torpedo room. It contained a new note of urgency.

Taking the neck of the overhead microphone as gingerly as if he were handling a snake, Gorov said, “Go ahead.”

“We've got a lot more than a couple ounces of water on the deck now, Captain. Looks like a liter or two. The forward bulkhead is sweating all the way from overhead to deck.”

“Distortion of the rivet line?”

“No, sir.”

“Hear anything unusual with the stethoscope?”

“No, sir.”

“We'll be on our way in ten minutes,” Gorov said.

* * *

11:42

In places, the tunnel narrowed just enough for the halogen light to reflect off the ice, and then the face of their imprisonment could not be as easily put out of mind as when darkness lay to all sides.

Rita was pulled continually between the past and the present, between death and life, courage and cowardice. Minute by minute, she expected her inner turmoil to subside, but it grew worse.

A stand of widely scattered trees spot the steep hillside above the alpine road. It's not a dense forest, but maybe it's enough of a barrier to break the force of the avalanche and dam the roaring flow: tall evergreens with thick trunks, ancient and strong. Then the white tide hits the trees, and they snap as though they're breadsticks. Her mother screams, her father cries out, and Rita can't look away from the onrushing wave of snow, a hundred feet high, growing, disappearing into the winter sky, huge, like the face of God. The juggernaut hits the Audi, tumbles the car, shoves it across the roadway, sweeps under and over it, casting it across the guardrail and into a ravine. An enwrapping whiteness all around. The car turns over, over again, the sleds sideways, down, down, rebounds from a tree, turns into the slide, races down once more in a great river of snow, with another impact, yet another. The windshield implodes, followed by a sudden stillness and a silence deeper than the silence in a deserted church.

Rita wrenched herself from the memory, making meaningless, pathetic sounds of terror.

George Lin was urging her on from behind.

She had stopped swimming.

Cursing herself, she kicked her feet and started down again.

* * *

11:43

At three hundred fifty feet or thereabouts, having covered little more than half the distance to the Ilya Pogodin, Harry began to doubt that they could make it all the way down. He was aware of the incredible pressure, primarily because his eardrums kept popping. The roar of his own blood rushing through his veins and arteries were thunderous. He imagined he could hear faraway voices, fairy voices, but the words made no sense, and he figured that he'd really be in trouble when he understood what they were saying. He wondered if, like a submarine, he could collapse under extreme pressure and he squashed into a flat mess of blood and bones.

Earlier, on the shortwave radio, Lieutenant Timoshenko had offered several proofs that the descent could be made successfully, and Harry kept repeating a couple of them to himself: In Lake Maggiore, in 1961, Swiss and American divers reached seven hundred and thirty feet in scuba gear. Lake Maggiore. Seven hundred and thirty feet. 1961. Swiss and American divers. In 1990, Russian divers in more modern gear had been as deep as… he forgot. But deeper than Lake Maggiore, Swiss, Americans, Russians… It could be done. By well-equipped, professional divers anyway.

Four hundred feet.

* * *

11:44

Following the wire farther into the shaft, George Lin told himself that the Russians weren't communists any more. At least the communists weren't in charge. Not yet. Maybe one day in the future, they would be back in power; evil never really died. But the men in the submarine were risking their lives, and they had no sinister motives. He tried to convince himself, but it was a hard sell, because he had lived too many years in fear of the red tide.

Canton. Autumn 1949. three weeks before Chiang Kia-shek was driven from the mainland. George's father had been away, making arrangements to spirit the family and its dwindling assets to the island nation of Taiwan. There were four other people in the house: his grandmother; his grandfather; his mother; his eleven-year old sister, Yun-ti. At dawn, a contingent of Maoist guerrillas, seeking his father, invaded the house. Nine heavily armed men. His mother managed to hide him inside a fireplace, behind a heavy iron screen. Yun-ti was hidden elsewhere, but