Icebound

woman who doesn't believe in standard gender roles, and he's trying to learn to let her open doors for herself If she wants. He's piss poor at it, and sometimes they fight over a door, but he's learning. Meanwhile, Claude seems to be constantly in the company of a twenty-eight-year-old blonde who thinks he's indescribably cute and swoons at his French accent.

We're talking about maybe changing careers and opening a bar in some tropical resort. Maybe you and Rita want to think about going into business with us. We could sit around all day, swilling down rum drinks with funny little paper umbrellas in them. It sure beats frostbite, high explosives, and underwater life-or-death battles with psychopaths. The most serious problem we face here is humidity.

As ever, Pete.

[4]

JANUARY 26

PARIS, FRANCE

In their suite at the Hotel George V, a bottle of Dom Perignon stood in an ice bucket beside the bed.

They were in each other's arms, as close as two people can get without actually melting together and becoming a single entity, generating enough heat to keep an entire Arctic outpost warm for a long winter, when they were startled by a clatter beside the bed. They had been rescued by the Pogodin more than a week ago, but their nerves were still wound too tight. He sat up, and she fell off him, and they both turned toward the sound, but they were alone in the room.

“Ice,” she said.

“Ice?”

“Yes, ice. Shifting in the champagne bucket.”

He glanced at the bucket on its silver-plated stand, and the ice shifted again.

“Ice,” she repeated.

He looked at her. She smiled. He grinned. She giggled as if she were a schoolgirl, and he roared with laughter.

A NOTE TO THE READER

I receive over ten thousand letters a year from readers, and a significant number urge me to reissue more of my early books that have been out of print for some time. Many do more than urge. They make ominous references to voodoo curses and hit contracts placed with guys named Slash. They suggest that it would be a good idea to reissue those books before my face gets rearranged— although I might welcome some rearrangement, especially if it involved more hair. They threaten to kidnap me and force me to watch reruns of The Partridge Family twenty-four hours a day until I go stark, raving mad.

I'm charmed that readers care so much about my books that they want to read everything. I have already allowed a number of out-of-print books to come back into circulation, including Shadowfires, The Servants of Twilight, and The Voice of the Night, which were originally all published under pen names.

Icebound was originally published as Prison of Ice, under the name “David Axton,” in a much rougher form. I have revised it and updated the technological and cultural references while trying not to get carried away and alter the entire storyline and feel of it.

This book was meant to be something of a homage to Alistair MacLean, that master of the adventure- suspense novel, whose books include The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, and Ice Station Zebra. As a reader, I loved those books, and I wrote the original version of Icebound to see if I could pull one off.

In adventure-suspense of this type, the elements that count above all others are tension, pace, and plot — preferably a plot with a series of surprises and escalating physical challenges for the characters. The characters themselves generally have to be straightforward, and certainly less complex than those who appear in most of my books.

As always, I try to get the technical and background details correct — though when writing about submarines, for instance, it isn't my intent to layer on the technological detail as heavily and brilliantly as Tom Clancy. In the MacLean-style adventure, a degree of authenticity must be sacrificed to speed.

I hope you liked Icebound, though I sort of hope you like the new books more. After all, this is the only book of its type I've written, and if readers wanted another, I'd have nothing to offer to protect myself from being subjected to those reruns of The Partridge Family.

— Dean Koontz, May 1994