by Dean Koontz
Harry wondered what experiences in the little man’s past had prepared him to regard Brian Dougherty as an antagonist, which he had done since the day they’d met.
“Is there anything at all we can do to save ourselves?” Brian asked again, graciously dismissing the incident with Lin.
“Maybe,” Harry said. “First we’ve got to get some of those bombs out of the ice and defuse them.”
Fischer was amazed. “Impossible!”
“Most likely.”
“How could they ever be retrieved?” Fischer asked scornfully.
Claude rose to his feet beside the carton of half-ruined food. “It isn’t impossible. We’ve got an auxiliary drill, ice axes, and the power saw. If we had a lot of time and patience, we might be able to angle down toward each bomb, more or less dig steps in the ice. But, Harry, we needed a day and a half just to bury them. Digging them out will be hugely more difficult. We would need at least a week to retrieve them, maybe two.”
“We only have ten hours,” Fischer reminded them unnecessarily.
Leaving the niche in the wall by the cave entrance and stepping to the middle of the room, Pete Johnson said, “Wait a minute. You folks didn’t listen to the man. Harry said we had to defuse some of the bombs, not all of them. And he didn’t say we’d have to dig them out, the way Claude’s proposing.” He looked at Harry. “You want to explain yourself?”
“The nearest package of explosives is three hundred yards from our position. Nine hundred feet. If we can retrieve and disarm it, then we’ll be nine hundred and forty-five feet from the next nearest bomb. Each charge is forty-five feet from the one in front of it. So, if we take up ten of them, we’ll be over a quarter of a mile from the nearest explosion. The other fifty will detonate at midnight—but none of them will be directly under us. Our end of the iceberg might well survive the shock. With luck, it might be large enough to sustain us.”
“Might,” Fischer said sourly.
“It’s our best chance.”
“Not a good one,” the German noted.
“I didn’t say it was.”
“If we can’t dig up the explosives, which you apparently agree is out of the question, then how do we get to them?”
“With the auxiliary drill. Reopen the shafts.”
Fischer frowned. “Perhaps not so wise. What if we drill into a bomb casing?”
“It won’t explode,” Harry assured him.
Johnson said, “The plastic charge responds only to a certain voltage of electric current. Neither shock nor heat will do the job, Franz.”
“Besides,” Harry said, “the bits for the ice drill aren’t hard enough to cut through a steel casing.”
“And when we’ve opened the shaft?” the German asked with obvious skepticism. “Just reel in the bomb by its chain, as if it’s a fish on a line?”
“Something like that.”
“No good. You’ll chew the chain to pieces when you reopen the shaft with the drill.”
“Not if we use the smaller bits. The original shaft is four inches in diameter. But the bomb is only two and a half inches in diameter. If we use a three-inch bit, we might be able to slip past the chain. After all, it’s pulled flat against the side of the original shaft.”
Franz Fischer wasn’t satisfied. “Even if you can open the hole without shredding the chain, it’ll still be welded to the ice, and so will the bomb casing.”
“We’ll snap the upper end of the chain to a snowmobile and try to pop it and the cylinder out of the shaft.”
“Won’t work,” Fischer said dismissively.
Harry nodded. “Maybe you’re right.”
“There must be another way.”
“Such as?”
Brian said, “We can’t just lie down and wait for the end, Franz. That doesn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense.” He turned to Harry. “But if your plan works, if we can get the bombs out of the ice, will it be possible to uncover ten of them in ten hours?”
“We won’t know till we try,” Harry said, resolutely refusing either to play into Fischer’s stubborn pessimism or to raise false hopes.
Pete Johnson said, “If we can’t get ten, maybe eight. If not eight, surely six. Every one we get buys us more security.”
“Even so,” Fischer said, his accent thickening as he became more defensive of his negativism, “what will we have gained? We’ll still be adrift on an iceberg, for God’s sake. We’ll still have enough fuel to keep us warm only until tomorrow afternoon. We’ll still freeze to death.”
Getting to her feet, Rita said, “Franz, goddammit, stop playing devil’s advocate, or whatever it is you’re doing. You’re a good man. You can help us survive. Or for the lack of your help, we may all die. Nobody is expendable here. Nobody is dead weight. We need you on our side, pulling with us.”
“My sentiments exactly,” Harry said. He pulled his hood over his head and laced it tightly beneath his chin. “And if we can buy some time by retrieving a few of the bombs, even just three or four—well, there’s always the chance we’ll be rescued sooner than seems possible right now.”
“How?” Roger asked.
“One of those trawlers—”
Glancing at Rita, but with no less contention in his voice, as though he and Harry were somehow engaged in a competition to win her backing, Fischer said, “You and Gunvald already agreed that the trawlers can’t possibly reach us.”
Harry shook his head emphatically. “Our fate here isn’t written in stone. We’re intelligent people. We can make our own fate if we put our minds to it. If one of those captains is damned good and damned-all bullheaded, and if he has a really top-flight crew, and if he’s a bit lucky, he might get through.”
“Too many ifs,” Roger Breskin said.
Fischer was grim. “If he’s Horatio Hornblower, if he’s the fucking grandfather of all the sailors who ever lived, if he’s not a mere man but a supernatural force of the sea, then I guess we’ll have a chance.”
“Well, if he is Horatio Hornblower,” Harry said impatiently, “if he does show up here tomorrow, all flags flying and sailing like the clappers, I want to be around to say hello.”
They were silent.
Harry said, “What about the rest of you?”
No one disagreed with him.
“All right, we’ll need every man on the bomb-recovery project,” Harry said, fitting the tinted goggles over his eyes. “Rita, will you stay here and watch over the radio, put through that call to Gunvald?”
“Sure.”
Claude said, “Someone should finish searching the camp before the snow drifts over the ruins.”
“I’ll handle that too,” Rita said.
Harry went to the mouth of the cave. “Let’s get moving. I can hear those sixty clocks ticking. I don’t want to be too near them when the alarms go off.”
THREE
PRISON
2:30
DETONATION IN NINE HOURS THIRTY MINUTES
Within a minute or two of lying down, Nikita Gorov knew that he was not going to be able to get any rest. From out of the past, one small ghost materialized to haunt him and ensure that he would not find the peace of sleep. When he closed his eyes, he could see little Nikolai, his Nikki, running toward him through a soft yellow haze. The child’s arms were open wide, and he was giggling. But the distance between them could not be closed, regardless of how long or fast Nikki ran or how desperately Gorov reached out for him: They were separated by only ten or twelve feet, but each inch was an infinity. The captain wanted nothing half as much as to touch his son, but the unbreachable veil between life and death separated them.
With a soft, involuntary sigh of despair, Gorov opened his eyes and looked at the silver-framed photograph on the corner desk: Nikolai and himself standing in front of a piano-accordion player on a Moscow River cruise ship. At times, when the past lay especially heavy on him, Gorov was monstrously depressed by the photograph. But he could not remove it. He could not put it in a drawer or thr
ow it away any more than he could chop off his right hand merely because Nikolai had often held it.
Suddenly charged with nervous energy, he got up from his bunk. He wanted to pace, but his quarters were too small. In three steps he had walked the length of the narrow aisle between the bed and the closet. He couldn’t allow the crew to see how distraught he was. Otherwise, he might have paced the main companionway.
Finally he sat at the desk. He took the photograph in both hands, as if by confronting it—and his agonizing loss—he could soothe the pain in his heart and calm himself.
He spoke softly to the golden-haired boy in the picture. “I am not responsible for your death, Nikki.”
Gorov knew that was true. He believed it as well, which was more important than merely knowing it. Yet oceans of guilt washed through him in endless, corrosive tides.
“I know you never blamed me, Nikki. But I wish I could hear you tell me so.”
In mid-June, seven months ago, the Ilya Pogodin had been sixty days into an ultrasecret, ninety-day electronic-surveillance mission on the Mediterranean route. The boat had been submerged nine miles off the Egyptian coast, directly north of the city of Alexandria. The multicommunications aerial was up, and thousands of bytes of data, important and otherwise, were filing into the computer banks every minute.
At two o’clock in the morning, the fifteenth of June, a message came in from the Naval Intelligence Office at Sevastopol, relayed from the Naval Ministry in Moscow. It required a confirmation from the Ilya Pogodin, thereby shattering the radio silence that was an absolute necessity during a clandestine mission.
When the code specialist had finished translating the encrypted text, Gorov was wakened by the night communications officer. He sat in his bunk and read from the pale-yellow paper.
The message began with latitude and longitude coordinates, followed by orders to rendezvous in twenty-two hours with the Petr Vavilov, a Vostok-class research ship that was currently in the same part of the Mediterranean to which the Pogodin was assigned. That much of it pleasantly piqued Gorov’s curiosity: A midnight meeting in the middle of the sea was a more traditional and intriguing piece of cloak-and-dagger work than that to which he was accustomed in an age of electronic spying. But the rest of it brought him straight to his feet, trembling.
YOUR SON IN SERIOUS CONDITION KREMLIN HOSPITAL STOP YOUR PRESENCE REQUIRED MOSCOW SOONEST STOP ALL TRANSPORTATION HAS BEEN ARRANGED STOP FIRST OFFICER ZHUKOV TO ASSUME COMMAND YOUR SHIP STOP
CONFIRM RECEIPT
CONFIRM RECEIPT
At midnight Gorov passed control of his submarine to Zhukov and transferred to the Petr Vavilov. From the main deck of the research ship, a helicopter took him to Damascus, Syria, where he boarded a Russian diplomatic jet for a scheduled flight to Moscow. He arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport at three o’clock on the afternoon of the sixteenth.
Boris Okudzhava, a functionary from the Naval Ministry, met him at the terminal. Okudzhava had eyes as dirty gray as laundry water. A cherry-sized wart disfigured the left side of his nose. “A car is waiting, Comrade Gorov.”
“What’s wrong with Nikki? What’s wrong with my son?”
“I’m no doctor, Comrade Gorov.”
“You must know something.”
“I think we’d better not waste time here. I’ll explain in the car, comrade.”
“It’s not ‘comrade’ anymore,” Gorov said as they hurried away from the debarkation gate.
“Sorry. Just long habit.”
“Is it?”
Although the social and economic policies of the communists had been thoroughly discredited, although their thievery and mass murders had been exposed, more than a few former true believers yearned for the reestablishment of the old order. They still enjoyed considerable influence in many quarters, including the nuclear-weapons industry, where production of warheads and missiles continued unabated. For many of them, repudiation of hard-line Marxist ideology was merely a self-serving recognition of the shift of power to more democratic forces, not a genuine change of heart or mind. They labored with apparent diligence for the new Russia while waiting hopefully for a chance to resurrect the Supreme Soviet.
As they left the busy terminal and stepped outside into the mild late-spring afternoon, Okudzhava said, “The next revolution should be for more freedom, not less. If anything, we haven’t gone far enough. Too many of the old nomenklatura remain in power, calling themselves champions of democracy, praising capitalism while undermining it at every turn.”
Gorov dropped the matter. Boris Okudzhava was not a good actor. The excessive ardency with which he spoke revealed the truth: The grotesque wart alongside his nose flushed bright red, as though it were a telltale blemish bestowed by God, the unmistakable mark of the Beast.
The low sky was mottled with gray-black clouds.
The air smelled of oncoming rain.
Several peddlers had been allowed to set up business outside the terminal. A few worked from large trunks, others from pushcarts, hawking cigarettes, candy, tourist maps, souvenirs. They were doing a brisk business, and at least some must have been comparatively prosperous, but they were all shabbily dressed. In the old days, prosperity had been an offense requiring prosecution, imprisonment, and occasionally even execution. Many citizens of the new Russia still vividly recalled the former consequences of success and the savage fury of envious bureaucrats.
The Ministry car was immediately in front of the terminal, parked illegally, with the engine running. The moment Gorov and Okudzhava got in the backseat and closed the doors, the driver—a young man in a navy uniform—sped away from the curb.
“What about Nikki?” Gorov demanded.
“He entered the hospital thirty-one days ago with what was first thought to be mononucleosis or influenza. He was dizzy, sweating. So nauseous that he couldn’t even take fluids. He was hospitalized for intravenous feeding to guard against dehydration.”
In the days of the discredited regime, medical care had been tightly controlled by the state—and had been dreadful even by the standards of Third World countries. Most hospitals had functioned without adequate equipment to maintain sterilized instruments. Diagnostic machines had been in woefully short supply, and health-care budgets had been so pinched that dirty hypodermic needles were regularly reused, often spreading disease. The collapse of the old system had been a blessing; however, the disgraced regime had left the nation deep in bankruptcy, and in recent years the quality of medical care had deteriorated even further.
Gorov shivered at the thought of young Nikki entrusted to the care of physicians who had been trained in medical schools that were no more modern or better equipped than the hospitals in which they subsequently labored. Surely every parent in the world prayed that his children would enjoy good health, but in the new Russia as in the old empire that it replaced, a beloved child’s hospitalization was a cause not merely for concern but for alarm, if not quiet panic.
“You weren’t notified,” said Okudzhava, absentmindedly rubbing his facial wart with the tip of his index finger, “because you were on a highly classified mission. Besides, the situation didn’t seem all that critical.”
“But it wasn’t either mononucleosis or influenza?” Gorov asked.
“No. Then there was some thought that rheumatic fever might be to blame.”
Having lived so long with the pressure of being a commanding officer in the submarine service, having learned never to appear troubled either by the periodic mechanical difficulties of his boat or by the hostile power of the sea, Nikita Gorov managed to maintain a surface calm even as his mind churned with images of little Nikki suffering and frightened in a cockroach-ridden hospital. “But it wasn’t rheumatic fever.”
“No,” Okudzhava said, still fingering his wart, looking not at Gorov but at the back of the driver’s head. “And then there was a brief remission of the symptoms. He seemed in the best of health for four days. When the symptoms returned, new diagnostic tests were begun. And t
hen…eight days ago, they discovered he has a cancerous brain tumor.”
“Cancer,” Gorov said thickly.
“The tumor is too large to be operable, far too advanced for radiation treatments. When it became clear that Nikolai’s condition was rapidly deteriorating, we broke your radio silence and called you back. It was the humane thing to do, even if it risked compromising your mission.” He paused and finally looked at Gorov. “In the old days, of course, no such risk would have been taken, but these are better times,” Okudzhava added with such patent insincerity that he might as well have been wearing the hammer and sickle, emblem of his true allegiance, on his chest.
Gorov didn’t give a damn about Boris Okudzhava’s nostalgia for the bloody past. He didn’t give a damn about democracy, about the future, about himself—only about his Nikki. A cold sweat had sprung up along the back of his neck, as if Death had lightly touched him with icy fingers while on its way to or from the boy’s bedside.
“Can’t you drive faster?” he demanded of the young officer behind the wheel.
“We’ll be there soon,” Okudzhava assured him.
“He’s only eight years old,” Gorov said more to himself than to either of the men with whom he shared the car.
Neither replied.
Gorov saw the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror, regarding him with what might have been pity. “How long does he have to live?” he asked, though he almost preferred not to be answered.
Okudzhava hesitated. Then: “He could go at any time.”
Since he had read that decoded message in his quarters aboard the Ilya Pogodin thirty-seven hours ago, Gorov had known that Nikki must be dying. The Admiralty was not cruel, but on the other hand it would not have interrupted an important espionage mission on the Mediterranean route unless the situation was quite hopeless. He had carefully prepared himself for this news.