blow downward and expend its energy to all sides, and the hole must be tightly sealed to achieve the desired effect. At midnight, when that charge detonated with all the others, the new ice in the shaft might pop out like a cork from a bottle, but the greater force of the blast would not be dissipated.
Pete Johnson rapped his gloved knuckles against the newly formed plug. “Now we can get back to Edge —”
The icecap jolted up, lurched forward, tilted sharply in front of them, squealed like a great monster, and then groaned before collapsing back into its original plane.
Harry was thrown on his face. His goggles jammed hard against his cheeks and eyebrows. Tears streamed as pain swelled across his cheekbones. He felt warm blood trickling from his nostrils, and the taste of blood was in his mouth.
Pete and Claude had fallen and were holding each other. Harry caught a brief glimpse of them, grotesquely locked in each other's embrace as through they were a pair of wrestlers.
The ice shook again.
Harry rolled against one of the snowmobiles. The machine was bouncing up and down. He clung to it with both hands and hoped that it would not roll over on him.
His first thought had been that the plastic explosives had blown up in his face and that he was dead or dying. But as the ice swelled once more, he realized that tidal waves must be surging beneath the polar cap, no doubt spawned by a seabed quake.
As the third wave struck, the white world around Harry cracked and canted, as if a prehistoric creature were rising from a long sleep beneath him, and he found himself suspended at the top of an ice ramp. Only inertia kept him high the air, at the top of the incline. At any moment he might slide to the bottom along with the snowmobile, and perhaps be crushed beneath the machine.
In the distance, the sound of shattering, grinding ice pierced the night and the wind: the ominous protests of a brittle world cracking asunder. The roar grew nearer by the second, and Harry steeled himself for the worst.
Then, as suddenly as the terror had begun — no more than a minute ago — it ended. The ice plain dropped, became a level floor, and was still.
Having sprinted far enough to be safely out of any icefall from the looming pressure ridge, Rita stopped running and spun around to look back at the temporary camp. She was alone. Franz had not emerged from the igloo.
A truck-size piece of the ridge wall cracked off and fell with eerie grace, smashing into the uninhabited igloo at the east end of the crescent-shaped encampment. The inflatable dome popped as if it were a child's balloon.
“Franz!”
A much larger section of the ridge collapsed. Sheets, spires, boulders, slabs of ice crashed into the camp, fragmenting into cold shrapnel, flattening the center igloo, overturning a snowmobile, ripping open the igloo at the west end of the camp, from which Franz had still not escaped, casting up thousands of splinters of ice that glinted like showers of sparks.
She was six years old again, screaming until her throat seized up — and suddenly she wasn't sure if she had called out for Franz or for her mother, for her father.
Whether she had called a warning to him or not, Franz crawled out of the ruined nylon dome even as the deluge was tumbling around him, and he scrambled toward her. Mortar shells of ice exploded to the left and right of him, but he had the grace of a broken-field runner and the speed born of terror. He raced beyond the avalanche to safety.
As the ridge stabilized and ice stopped falling, Rita was shaken by a vivid vision of Harry crushed beneath a shining white monolith elsewhere in the cruel black-and-white polar night. She staggered, not because of the movement of the icefield, but because the thought of losing Harry rocked her. She ceased trying to keep her balance, sat on the ice, and began to shake uncontrollably.
Only the snowflakes moved, cascading out of the darkness in the west and into the darkness in the east. The sole sound was the dour-voiced wind singing a dirge.
Harry held on to the snowmobile and pulled himself erect. His heart thudded so hard that it seemed to know against his ribs. He tried to work up some saliva to lubricate his parched throat. Fear had dried him out as thoroughly as a blast of Sahara heat could have done. When he regained his breath, he wiped his goggles and looked around.
Pete Johnson helped Claude to his feet. The Frenchman was rubber-legged but evidently uninjured. Pete didn't even have weak knees; perhaps he was every bit as indestructible as he appeared to be.
Both snowmobiles were upright and undamaged. The headlights blazed into the vast polar night but revealed little in the seething sea of windblown snow.
High on adrenaline, Harry briefly felt like a boy again, flushed with excitement, pumped up by the danger, exhilarated by the very fact of having survived.
Then he thought of Rita, and his blood ran colder than it would have if he'd been naked in the merciless polar wind. The temporary camp had been established in the lee of a large pressure ridge, shadowed by a high wall of ice. Ordinarily, that was the best place for it. But with all the shaking that they had just been through, the ridge might have broken apart…
The lost boy faded into the past, where he belonged, became just a memory among other memories of Indiana fields and tattered issues of
He hurried to the other men. “Anyone hurt?”
“Just a little rattled,” Claude said. He was a man who not only refused to surrender to adversity but was actually buoyed by it. With a brighter smile than he'd managed all day, he said, “Quite a ride!”
Pete glanced at Harry. “What about you?”
“Fine.”
“You're bleeding.”
When Harry touched his upper lip, bright chips of frozen blood like fragments of rubies adhered to his glove. “Nosebleed. It's already stopped.”
“Always a sure cure for nosebleed,” Pete said.
“What's that?”
“Ice on the back of the neck.”
“You should be abandoned here for that one.”
“Let's get packed and moving.”
“They may be in serious trouble at camp,” Harry said, and he felt his stomach turn over again when he considered the possibility that he might have lost Rita.
“My thoughts exactly.”
The wind pummeled them as they worked. The falling snow was fine and thick. The blizzard was racing in on them with surprising speed, and in unspoken recognition of the growing danger, they moved with a quiet urgency.
As Harry was strapping down the last of the instruments in the second snowmobile's cargo trailer, Pete called to him. He wiped his goggles and went to the other machine.
Even in the uncertain light, Harry could see the worry in Pete's eyes. “What is it?”
“During that shaking, I guess…did the snowmobiles do a lot of moving around?”
“Hell, yes, they bounced up and down as if the ice was a damn trampoline.”
“Just up and down?”
“What's wrong?”
“Not sideways at all?”
“What?”
“Well, I mean, is it possible they slid around, sort of swiveled around?”
