by Dean Koontz
Shatters of static.
“Gunvald, are you still there?”
His voice returned: “…if the berg isn’t large…Harry and the others might not be adrift with you.”
Rita closed her eyes. “I hope that’s true.”
“Whether they are or aren’t, the situation is far from hopeless. The weather’s still good enough for me to get a message by satellite relay to the United States Air Force base at Thule. Once I’ve alerted them, they can contact those UNGY trawlers standing south of you.”
“But what then? No sensible captain would bring a trawler north into a bad winter storm. He’d lose his ship and his crew trying to save us.”
“They’ve got the most modern rescue aircraft at Thule, some damn rugged helicopters capable of maneuvering in almost any conditions.”
“There isn’t a plane yet invented that can fly safely in this kind of storm—let alone set down on an iceberg in gale-force winds.”
The radio produced only crackling static and warbling electronic squeals, but she sensed that Gunvald was still there.
Yes, she thought. It leaves me speechless too.
She glanced up at the angled slabs that had jammed together to form the ceiling. Snow and shavings of ice sifted down through a few of the cracks.
Finally the Swede said, “Okay, you’re right about the aircraft. But we can’t give up hope of rescue.”
“Agreed.”
“Because…well…listen, Rita, this storm could last three or four days.”
“Or longer,” she acknowledged.
“You haven’t got enough food for that.”
“Hardly any. But food isn’t so terribly important,” Rita said. “We can last longer than four days without food.”
They both knew that starvation was not the danger. Nothing mattered as much as the bone-freezing, unrelenting cold.
Gunvald said, “Take turns getting warm in the snowmobiles. Do you have a good supply of fuel?”
“Enough to get back to Edgeway—if that were possible. Not a hell of a lot more than that. Enough to run the engines for a few hours, not a few days.”
“Well, then…”
Silence. Static.
He came back after several seconds. “…put through that call to Thule all the same. They have to know about this. They might see an answer that we’ve overlooked, have a less emotional perspective.”
She said, “Edgeway came through unscathed?”
“Fine here.”
“And you?”
“Not a bruise.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“I’ll live. And so will you, Rita.”
“I’ll try,” she said. “I’ll sure as hell try.”
1:10
Brian Dougherty siphoned gasoline from the tank of the upright snowmobile and poured it onto a two-foot section of ice at the brink of the cliff.
Roger Breskin twisted open a chemical match and tossed it into the gasoline. Flames erupted, flapped like bright tattered flags in the wind, but burned out within seconds.
Kneeling where the fire had been, Brian examined the edge of the precipice. The ice had been jagged; now it was smooth and slick. A climber’s rope would slide over it without fraying.
“Good enough?” Roger asked.
Brian nodded.
Roger stooped and snatched up the free end of a thirty-five-foot rope that he had tied to the frame of the snowmobile and had also anchored to a long, threaded piton identical to those used to secure the radio transmitter. He quickly looped it around Brian’s chest and shoulders, fashioning a harness of sorts. He tied three sturdy knots at the center of the younger man’s chest and said, “It’ll hold. It’s nylon, thousand-pound test. Just remember to grip the rope above your head with both hands so you’ll keep at least some of the pressure off your shoulders.”
Because he did not trust himself to speak without a nervous stammer, Brian nodded.
Roger returned to the snowmobile, which was facing toward the precipice and which he had disconnected from its cargo trailer. He climbed into the cabin and closed the door. He held the brakes and revved the engine.
Trembling, Brian stretched out on his stomach, flat on the ice. He took a deep breath through his knitted ski mask, hesitated only briefly, and pushed himself feet-first over the edge of the cliff. Although he didn’t drop far, his stomach lurched, and a thrill of terror like an electrical current sizzled through him. The rope pulled tight, checking his descent when the crown of his head was only inches below the top of the iceberg.
As yet, too little of the line hung past the brink to enable him to reach overhead and get a firm grip on it. He was forced to take the strain entirely with his shoulders. Immediately a dull ache arose in his joints, across his back, and up the nape of his neck. The ache would rapidly escalate into a sharp pain.
“Come on, come on, Roger,” he muttered. “Be quick.”
Brian was facing the ice wall. He brushed and bumped against it as the punishing wind pummeled him.
He dared to turn his head to the side and peer down, expecting to be able to see nothing but a yawning black gulf. Away from the glare of the snowmobile lights, however, his eyes adjusted swiftly to the gloom, and the vague natural phosphorescence of the ice allowed him to make out the sheer palisade against which he hung, as well as the broken shelves of jagged blocks at the bottom. Sixty or seventy feet below, the whitecaps on the churning sea exhibited a ghostly luminescence of their own as they rose in serried ranks from out of the night and crashed with spumous fury against the iceberg.
Roger Breskin throttled the snowmobile down so far that it almost stalled.
He considered the problem one last time: Dougherty was six feet tall, and the ledge was twenty feet below; therefore, he had to lower Dougherty about twenty feet in order to put him on the ledge and allow him six feet of line to ensure him sufficient mobility to deal with George Lin. They had marked off twenty feet of the line with a swatch of bright red cloth, so when that marker disappeared over the brink, Dougherty would be in position. But the rope had to be let down as slowly as possible, or the kid might be knocked unconscious against the side of the iceberg.
Furthermore, the snowmobile was only forty feet from the precipice; if the machine slid forward too fast, Roger might not be able to stop in time to save himself, let alone Dougherty and Lin. He was worried that the sled’s lowest speed would prove dangerously fast for this job, and he hesitated now that he was ready to begin.
A violent gust of wind hammered Brian from behind and to the right, pressing him against the face of the cliff but also pushing him leftward, so he hung at a slight angle. When the wind relented after a moment, declining to about thirty miles an hour, he rocked back to the right, then began to swing gently like a pendulum, in a two-or three-foot arc.
He squinted up at the point where the rope met the edge of the cliff. Even though he had carefully smoothed the ice with burning gasoline, any friction whatsoever was bound to wear on the nylon line.
He closed his eyes and slumped in the harness, waiting to be lowered onto the ledge. His mouth was as dry as that of any desert wanderer, and his heart was beating so fast and hard that it seemed capable of cracking his ribs.
Because Roger was highly experienced with the snowmobile, it had seemed logical and reasonable that Brian should be the one to go down to retrieve George Lin. Now he wished that he himself had been the snowmobile expert. What the hell was taking so long?
His impatience evaporated when he suddenly dropped as if the rope had been cut. He landed on the ledge with such force that pain shot up his legs to the top of his spine. His knees crumpled as though they were sodden cardboard. He fell against the face of the cliff, bounced off, and toppled off the narrow ledge, out into the wind-shattered night.
He was too terrified to scream.
The snowmobile lurched and rushed forward too fast.
Roger hit the brakes immediately after he released them. The red cloth vanished over the brink, but the machin
e was still moving. Because the ice had been swept free of snow and polished by the incessant wind, it provided little traction. As smoothly as a shuffleboard puck gliding along polished pine, the snowmobile slid another ten feet, headlights spearing out into an eternal blackness, before it finally stopped less than ten feet from the edge of the cliff.
The harness jerked tight across Brian’s chest and under his arms. Compared to the throbbing pain in his legs and the ache in his back, however, the new agony was endurable.
He was surprised that he was still conscious—and alive.
Unclipping his flashlight from the tool belt that encircled his waist, he cut open the perfect blackness around him with a blade of light, and torrents of snowflakes gushed over him.
Trying not to think about the icy sea below, he peered up at the ledge that he had overshot. It was four feet above his head. A yard to his left, the gloved fingers of George Lin’s inert right hand trailed over the shelf.
Brian was swinging in a small arc again. His lifeline was scraping back and forth along the ledge, which had not been melted by burning gasoline. It gleamed sharply. Splinters and shavings of ice sprinkled down on him as the rope carved a shallow notch in that abrasive edge.
A flashlight beam stabbed down from above.
Brian raised his eyes and saw Roger Breskin peering at him from the top of the cliff.
Lying on the ice, his head over the precipice and his right arm extended with a flashlight, Roger cupped his free hand to his mouth and shouted something. The wind tore his words into a meaningless confetti of sound.
Brian raised one hand and waved weakly.
Roger shouted louder than before: “You all right?” His voice sounded as if it came from the far end of a five-mile-long railroad tunnel.
Brian nodded as best he could: Yes, I’m all right. There was no way to convey, with only a nod, the degree of his fear and the worry that was caused by the lingering pain in his legs.
Breskin shouted, but only a few of his words reached Brian: “Going…snowmobile…reverse…draw you…up.”
Again, Brian nodded.
“…slowly…a chance…too fast again battered…the ice.”
Roger disappeared, obviously hurrying back to the snowmobile.
Leaving his flashlight on, Brian clipped it to his tool belt, with the beam shining down on his right foot. He reached overhead and gripped the taut line with both hands, hoisting himself slightly to take a measure of the strain off his upper arms, which were on the verge of dislocating from his shoulder sockets.
The snowmobile drew up some of the line. The movement was smooth compared to the style of his descent, and he was not thrown against the cliff.
From the knees down, his legs were still below the ledge. He swung them up and over, planted both feet on the narrow shelf of ice, crouching there. He let go of the rope and stood up.
His ankles ached, his knees felt as if they were made of jelly, and pain laced his thighs. But his legs held him.
He took a large piton—a five-inch shaft tapered to a sharp point, topped by a one-inch-diameter eye loop—from a zippered pocket of his coat. He freed a small hammer from his tool belt and pounded the pin into a tight crack in the face of the cliff.
Again, Roger’s flashlight shone down from the top.
When the anchoring pin was secure, Brian unhooked an eight-foot-long coil of nylon rope from his belt. Before descending, he had knotted one end of it to a carabiner; now he linked the carabiner to the piton and screwed shut its safety gate. He tied the other end of the line around his waist. The resultant tether would bring him up short of death if he slipped and fell off the ledge, yet he was free enough to attend to George Lin. Thus belayed, he untied the knots that held the harness together across his chest and under his arms. When he was free from the main line, he coiled it and hung it around his neck.
To avoid some of the wind’s vicious force, he got on his hands and knees and crawled to Lin. Roger Breskin’s light followed him. He took his own flashlight from his belt and placed it on the ledge, against the cliff face, with the beam shining on the unconscious man.
Unconscious—or dead?
Before he could know the answer to that question, he had to get a look at Lin’s face. Turning the man onto his back was not an easy chore, because Brian had to be careful that the scientist did not roll off into the abyss. By the time Lin was on his back, he’d regained consciousness. His amber skin—at least those few square inches of his face that were exposed—was shockingly pale. Against the slit in his mask, his mouth worked without making an audible sound. Behind his frost-spotted goggles, his eyes were open; they expressed some confusion but didn’t appear to be the eyes of a man in severe pain or delirium.
“How do you feel?” Brian shouted above the shrill wind.
Lin stared at him uncomprehendingly and tried to sit up.
Brian pressed him down. “Be careful! You don’t want to fall.”
Lin turned his head and stared at the darkness from which the snow streamed ever faster. When he looked at Brian again, his pallor had deepened.
“Are you badly hurt?” Brian asked. Because of the thermal clothing Lin wore, Brian couldn’t determine if the man had any broken bones.
“Some chest pain,” Lin said barely loudly enough to be heard above the storm.
“Heart?”
“No. When I went over the edge…the ice was still rocking…from the wave…the cliff face was slanted. I slid down…and landed here hard on my side. That’s all I remember.”
“Broken ribs?”
Lin took a deep breath and winced. “No. Probably not. Only bruised, I think. Damn sore. But nothing’s fractured.”
Brian removed the coil of rope from around his neck. “I’ll have to make a harness under your arms, across your chest. Can you tolerate that?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“No.”
“So I’ll tolerate it.”
“You’ll have to sit up.”
Groaning, Lin eased cautiously into a sitting position, with his back toward the cliff and his legs dangling in the void.
Brian quickly fashioned a harness, tied a tight double knot over Lin’s breastbone, and got to his feet. He reached down and helped the injured man to stand. They turned in place to put the sea and the murderous wind at their backs. Dry, almost granular snow snapped against the wall of ice, bounced from it, and spun against their faces.
“Ready?” Roger called from twenty feet above.
“Yeah. But take it easy!”
Lin clapped his hands rapidly, loudly. Platelets of ice fell from his gloves. He flexed his fingers. “Feel numb…all over. I can move my fingers…but hardly feel them.”
“You’ll be okay.”
“Can’t feel…toes at all. Sleepy. Not good.”
He was right about that. When the body became so cold that it encouraged sleep to maintain precious heat, death could not be far away.
“As soon as you’re topside, get into the sled,” Brian said. “Fifteen minutes, you’ll be as warm as toast.”
“You got me just in time. Why?”
“Why what?”
“You risked your life.”
“Not really.”
“Yes, you did.”
“Well, wouldn’t you have done the same?”
The taut line was pulled upward, taking George Lin with it. The ascent was smooth. At the top of the precipice, however, Lin got stuck, with his shoulders past the brink and the rest of him dangling in the wind. He was too weak to pull himself to safety.
Roger Breskin’s years of training as a weight lifter served him well. He left the snowmobile and easily manhandled George Lin the last few feet onto the top of the iceberg. He untied the harness from the man’s shoulders and threw the main line down to Brian.
“Check with you…soon as…George settled!” he shouted. Even though his voice was wind-tattered, the anxiety in it was evident.
Only an hour ago, Brian couldn’t have
conceived that Roger—rock solid as he was, with his bull’s neck and his massive biceps and his powerful hands and his air of total self-reliance—might ever be afraid of anything whatsoever. Now that the other man’s fear was evident, Brian was less ashamed of the terror that knotted his own guts. If a tough sonofabitch like Roger was susceptible to fear, then even one of the stoical Doughertys might be permitted that emotion a few times in his life.
He picked up the main line and harnessed himself to it. Then he untied the safety tether at his waist, loosened the other end from the piton, coiled it, and hooked it to his tool belt. He plucked the flashlight from the ledge and also fastened it to the belt. He would have salvaged the piton, too, if he’d had the means and the strength to pry it out of the ice. Their supplies, the fuel, and the tools were priceless. They dared waste or discard nothing. No one could predict what scrap, now insignificant, might eventually be essential to their survival.
He was thinking in terms of their survival rather than his own, for he knew that he was the least likely member of the expedition to come through the forthcoming ordeal with his life. Although he had taken four weeks of training at the U.S. Army Arctic Institute, he was not as familiar with the icecap or as well conditioned to it as were the others. Furthermore, he stood six one and weighed a hundred seventy pounds. Emily, his oldest sister, had called him String Bean since he was sixteen. But he was broad at the shoulders, and his lean arms were muscular: a string bean, then, but not a weakling. A weakling could never have ridden the Colorado River rapids, run with the shark hunters off Bimini, climbed mountains in Washington State. And as long as he had a warm igloo or a heated room at Edgeway Station to which he could return after a long day of exposure to the debilitating cold, he could hold up pretty well. But this was different. The igloos might no longer exist; and even if they did exist, there might not be sufficient fuel in the snowmobile tanks or life in the batteries to keep them warm for longer than another day. Survival, in this case, demanded a special strength and stamina that came only with experience. He was all but certain that he did not have the fortitude to pull through.