“Here’s where you cross your fingers, ma’am.”
They crept forward onto the ice at little more than ten miles per hour. Barbour tensed as she felt the shaking and pounding of the permafrost give way to the far more unsettling sensation of ice flexing beneath them. Carradine frowned with concentration, one hand on the wheel, the other grasping the gearshift. The engine whined as they moved forward. “Gotta keep the RPMs high,” he muttered. “Helps prevent spinning out.”
As they ventured farther onto the ice, Barbour could hear a new sound-a faint crackling that seemed to come from all around her, like the sound of cellophane being torn from a Christmas toy. She swallowed painfully. She knew what that sound was: the ice, protesting under the massive weight of the big-rig truck.
“How far across?” she asked a little hoarsely.
“Four miles,” Carradine replied, not taking his eyes from the ice.
They kept on at what seemed a snail’s pace, the crackling growing louder. Snow skittered along the ice, forming eddies and cyclones and odd phantasmal shapes in the headlights. Now and then Barbour heard sharp pops and booms from beneath. She bit her lip, mentally counting the minutes. Suddenly, the truck yawed sideways, sliding to the right. She looked quickly at the trucker.
“Gust of wind,” he said, turning the wheel very gently to compensate. “No traction out here.”
The CB radio chirped. Barbour reached for the handset. “Fortnum?”
“Yes. What’s all that noise outside? People back here are getting a little worried.”
She thought a moment before replying. “We’re going over an icy patch. Should just be a couple of minutes more.”
“Understood. I’ll pass the word.”
She replaced the handset, exchanged glances with Carradine.
Five minutes crawled by, then ten. Barbour realized her right hand had gone numb from gripping the stabilizer bar. The faint give of the ice, the constant crackling and snapping sounds, made her so tense she feared she’d go mad. The wind moaned and cried. Now and then a stronger gust would shove the truck sideways, forcing Carradine to compensate with the greatest of care.
She peered ahead through the murk. Was that the far shore in the distance? But no-it was just a dark wall of icy pellets that hung in the air, shifting and throbbing in the wind like a rippling curtain.
“Ice fog,” Carradine explained. “The air can’t hold any more moisture.”
The strange mist began to envelope the truck like a cloud of black cotton. The visibility, poor to begin with, abruptly dropped to near zero.
“Can’t see a bloody thing,” Barbour said. “Slow down.”
“Can’t,” the trucker replied. “Can’t lose momentum.”
This new blindness, combined with the awful flexing and crackling of the ice beneath them, was simply too much for Barbour. She felt herself hyperventilating, drowning in anxiety. Hold on, luv, she told herself. Just hold on. Only a minute or two more.
And then they were through the cloud of ice-and now she could see the rocks of the far shore, at the very limit of the headlight beams. Relief flooded through her. Thank God.
Carradine took his eyes from the ice long enough to glance at her. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
Suddenly the truck gave a sharp lurch downward. At the same time there was a loud crack, like the report of a gun, just behind them. “Soft spot,” said Carradine, stepping heavily on the accelerator. “Weak ice.”
They pushed forward faster now, the big diesel whining. Another crack, louder, this one from directly below. Barbour saw that a split had formed in the ice and was now shooting out ahead of them with increasing speed, the two sections pulling apart. Carradine immediately compensated, maneuvering the truck so the crack stayed between the front wheels. But ahead the crack forked, once, twice, spreading across the ice at crazy angles like summer lightning. Carradine turned the wheel sharply, moving laterally over the webbing of cracks. The popping and snapping spiked abruptly in volume. Just then a brutal gust of wind caught the side of the truck. Barbour cried out as she felt the rear of the truck twist, then tilt alarmingly, threatening to jackknife and overturn on the collapsing ice.
“Spinout!” Carradine shouted. “Hold on!”
Barbour clung desperately to the stabilizer bar as the trucker fought to keep the big vehicle from rolling. Slowly, forward momentum brought them level to the ice. The far shore was just ahead now, less than fifty yards away. But the truck was still in a barely controlled spin. It collided with one of the shoreline rocks in a shuddering crash, lurched away, then stabilized. Carradine goosed the throttle again and the truck roared off the ice and back onto the washboard surface of the permafrost.
Barbour exhaled a long, shivering breath. Then she reached for the CB handset. “Fortnum, it’s Penny Barbour. Everyone all right back there?”
After a moment, Fortnum’s crackly voice replied. “A little shaken up but otherwise okay. What happened?”
“A gust of air caught us. But we’re off the ice now, and it should be clear sailing the rest of the way.”
As she replaced the handset, she happened to glance at Carradine. He was peering into his rearview mirror. Seeing the expression on his face, her anxiety returned.
“What is it?” she asked.
“That rock we hit,” he replied. “Looks like it holed our left tank.”
“Petrol tank? But don’t you have two?”
“The left tank was full. The right one isn’t. It’s only a third full.”
The feeling of anxiety spiked sharply. “But we’ve got enough to get to Arctic Village -don’t we?”
Carradine didn’t look at her. “No, ma’am. I don’t believe we do.”
43
They had worked quickly, in as little light as possible. Precisely how much the beast relied on sight, Gonzalez didn’t know-but there was no point making it any easier for the goddamned thing.
He tapped Phillips on the shoulder, then gestured toward the dimly lit intersection ahead. “Cover that corner,” he whispered. “I’ll make the final connections.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Signal the minute you hear anything.”
“Sir.”
He watched Phillips move down the hallway-a shadow among shadows-and take position near the intersection. Then he glanced at the hastily constructed setup immediately before him: half a dozen thick copper wires, hanging from the ceiling and suspended a foot over a shallow pool of water. Crude, but lethal enough once he’d finished. Then he slipped back through the doorway marked
MOTIVIC POWER STATION.
He stopped just inside, looking around at the complex arrays of cogs, couplings, shafts, rotors, and hydraulics. The substation housed the giant machinery once used to turn the radar dishes. He had chosen this particular room for three reasons: it was nearby, it had sufficient power, and it lay along the lone hallway that led out of this section of B Level. Sooner or later, the creature would have to come this way.
His eyes drifted to a far corner of the room, where Corporal Marcelin stood, weapon at his feet, trembling, eyes downcast. Then, picking up the loose ends of the copper wires-he and Phillips had run them over the pipes of the hallway ceiling and through the transom above the door-he headed toward the main electrical panel. Though the radar dishes hadn’t been spun up in almost half a century, the electrical connections that fed them were still operational. He’d just tested them himself: the fuses were a little powdery, the connections rusted, but they were still capable of plenty of current. Besides, he didn’t need to use the radar dishes-he just needed to run power to them.
How and why Sully and the others in the life-sciences lab thought electricity was the beast’s particular weakness, Gonzalez didn’t know and didn’t care. He was simply relieved-relieved as hell-to know it had one. Coming up with a plan, putting it into action, had taken fifteen minutes. And during that fifteen minutes he’d been too mercifully busy to think.
