by Dean Koontz
At the chart table, Gorov put the printout of Edgeway material on top of the novel that Zhukov was reading. “You better take a look at this.”
When he reached the last page of the document, the first officer said, “Quite a trap they’ve gotten themselves into. But I read a little about this Edgeway Project in the papers, way back when they were still in the planning stages, and these Carpenters sounded like extremely clever people. They might scrape through this.”
“It isn’t the Carpenters who caught my eye. Another name.”
Quickly scanning the printout, Zhukov said, “You must mean Dougherty. Brian Dougherty.”
Gorov sat on the only other stool at the Plexiglas-topped, lighted chart table. “Yes. Dougherty.”
“Is he related to the assassinated American President?”
“Nephew.”
“I much admired his uncle,” said Zhukov. “But I suppose you think I’m naïve in that regard.”
Gorov’s disdain for politics and politicians was well known to his first officer, who quietly disapproved of his attitude. The captain could not convincingly pretend to have had a change of heart just to win Zhukov’s backing for the risky operation that he wanted to conduct. Shrugging, he said, “Politics is strictly about power. I admire achievement.”
“He was a man of peace,” Zhukov said.
“Yes, peace is something they all sell.”
Zhukov frowned. “You think he wasn’t a great man?”
“A scientist who discovers a cure for disease—that’s a great man or woman. But politicians…”
Zhukov was not one of those who longed for a return of the old regime, but he had little patience for the series of unstable governments that had afflicted Russia in recent years. He admired strong leaders. He was a man who needed to have someone to whom he could look for direction and purpose—and good politicians were his ultimate heroes, regardless of their nationality.
Gorov said, “No matter what I think of the late President, I’ll admit the Dougherty family handled their tragedy with grace and fortitude. Very dignified.”
Zhukov nodded solemnly. “An admirable family. Very sad.”
Gorov felt as if his first officer were a sophisticated musical instrument. He had just finished tuning Zhukov. Now he was about to attempt a complicated melody with him. “The boy’s father is a Senator, isn’t he?”
“Yes, and highly regarded,” Zhukov said.
“He was also shot, wasn’t he?”
“Another assassination attempt.”
“After all the American system has done to that family, why do you suppose the Doughertys remain such ardent supporters of it?”
“They’re great patriots,” Zhukov said.
Pulling thoughtfully at his well-trimmed beard, Gorov said, “How difficult it must be for a family to remain patriotic to a nation that kills its best sons.”
“Oh, but it wasn’t the country that killed them, sir. Blame a handful of reactionaries. Perhaps even the CIA. But not the American people.”
Gorov pretended to think about it for a minute. Then he said, “I suppose you’re right. From what I read, Americans seem to have considerable respect and sympathy for the Doughertys.”
“Of course. Patriotism in adversity is the only kind that earns respect. It’s easy to be patriotic in times of plenty, when no one is asked to make a sacrifice.”
The melody that Gorov had hoped to play with his first officer was progressing without a sour note, and the captain almost smiled. Instead, he stared at the Edgeway printout for a long beat, and then he said, “What an opportunity for Russia.”
As the captain had expected, Zhukov did not immediately follow the change of thought. “Opportunity?”
“For goodwill.”
“Oh?”
“And in a time when Mother Russia desperately needs goodwill more than at any other moment in her history. Goodwill leads to lots of foreign aid, preferential trade treatment, even military cooperation and concessions of strategic importance.”
“I don’t see the opportunity.”
“We’re only five hours from their position.”
Zhukov raised one eyebrow. “You’ve plotted it?”
“I’m estimating. But it’s a good estimate. And if we were to go to the aid of those miserable people stranded on the iceberg, we’d be heroes. Worldwide heroes. You see? And Russia would be heroic by association.”
Blinking in surprise, Zhukov said, “Rescue them?”
“After all, we’d be saving the lives of eight valued scientists from half a dozen countries, including the nephew of the assassinated President. Such an opportunity for propaganda and goodwill comes no more than once a decade.”
“But we’d need permission from Moscow.”
“Of course.”
“To get the quick answer you need, you’ll have to send your request by satellite relay. And to use that equipment, we’ll have to surface.”
“I’m aware of that.”
The laser transmission funnel and the collapsible reception dish were mounted atop the submarine’s sail, that large finlike projection on the main deck, which also supported the small bridge, radio and radar masts, periscopes, and snorkel. They had to surface before the tracking gear could fix on a series of Russian telecommunications satellites and before the laser could operate properly. But if this breach of secrecy was a disadvantage to a ship like the Pogodin, the incredible speed of laser transmission outweighed the negatives. From practically anywhere in the world, one could send a message to Moscow and immediately receive an acknowledgment of its receipt.
Emil Zhukov’s long, saturnine face was suddenly lined with anxiety, because he realized that he was going to have to choose to disobey one authority or another—either the captain himself or the captain’s superiors in Moscow. “We’re on an espionage run, sir. If we surfaced, we’d compromise the entire mission.”
With one finger, Gorov traced a painted latitude line on the lighted surface of the electronic chart table. “This far north, in the middle of a raging winter storm, who’s to see us? We should be able to go up, send, and receive in total anonymity.”
“Yes, all right, but we’re under orders to maintain strict radio silence.”
Gorov nodded solemnly, as if to say that he had thought about that issue and was conscious of his awesome responsibility. “When my son was dying, Moscow broke our radio silence.”
“That was a matter of life and death.”
“People are dying here too. Certainly we’re under orders to maintain radio silence. I know how serious a matter it is to set aside such orders. On the other hand, in an emergency, a captain is permitted to disobey the Ministry at his discretion.”
Frowning, the lines in his long face cutting so deeply that they began to look like wounds, Zhukov said, “I’m not so sure you could call this an emergency. Not the type of emergency they had in mind when they wrote the rules.”
“Well, that’s what I’m calling it,” Gorov said, issuing a quiet but not particularly subtle challenge.
“You’ll have to answer to the Naval Board of Inquiry when it’s all over,” Zhukov said. “And this is an intelligence mission, so the intelligence services will have some questions.”
“Of course.”
“And half of them are staffed by former KGB men.”
“Perhaps.”
“Definitely.”
“I’m prepared,” Gorov said.
“For an inquiry. But for what the intelligence services might do with you?”
“For both.”
“You know what they’re like.”
“I can be tough. Mother Russia and the navy have taught me endurance.” Gorov knew they were approaching the last sixteen bars of the tune. The crescendo was near.
“My head will be on the block too,” Zhukov said morosely as he slid the printout across the table to Gorov.
“No one’s head will be on the block.”
The first officer was not convin
ced. If anything, his frown deepened.
“They aren’t all fools at the Ministry,” Gorov said.
Zhukov shrugged.
“When they weigh the alternatives,” Gorov said confidently, “they’ll give the permission I want. I’m absolutely positive of it. Clearly, Russia has more to gain by sending us on this rescue mission than she does by insisting upon the continuation of what is, after all, nothing more than another routine surveillance run.”
Emil Zhukov still had his doubts.
Getting up from the stool, rolling the printout into a tight tube, Gorov said, “Lieutenant, I want the crew at battle stations in five minutes.”
“Is that necessary?”
Except for complicated or dangerous maneuvers, the regular watch could surface or dive the submarine.
“If we’re going to break a Ministry rule at our own discretion, we can at least take all precautions,” Gorov said.
For a long moment they stared at each other, each trying to read the other’s mind, trying to see the future. The first officer’s gaze was more penetrating than ever.
Finally Zhukov stood up without breaking eye contact.
He’s made his decision, Gorov thought. I hope it’s one I can live with.
Zhukov hesitated…then saluted. “Yes, sir. It will be done in five minutes.”
“We’ll surface as soon as the multicommunications aerial has been wound down and secured.”
“Yes, sir.”
Gorov felt as if hundreds of painful knots were coming untied inside him. He had won. “Go to it, then.”
Zhukov left the control room.
Walking to the circular, railed command pad at the end of the control room, Gorov thought about little Nikki and knew that he was doing the right thing. In the name of his dead son, in honor of his lost boy, not for the advantage of Russia, he would save the lives of those stranded people. They must not die on the ice. This time he had the power to thwart death, and he was determined not to fail.
3:46
As soon as the second package of explosives had been hauled out of the ice, Roger, Brian, Claude, Lin, and Fischer moved on to the site of the third sealed shaft.
Harry remained behind with Pete Johnson, who had yet to disarm the second device. They stood together, their backs to the shrieking wind. The demolitions cylinder lay at their feet, an evil-looking package: sixty inches long and two and a half inches in diameter, black with yellow letters that spelled DANGER. It was encased in a thin, transparent coat of ice.
“You don’t have to keep me company,” Pete said as he carefully cleaned the snow from his goggles. His vision must be unobstructed when he set to work on the trigger mechanism.
“I thought your people were afraid of being alone in the dark,” Harry said.
“My people? You better mean electronic engineers, honky.”
Harry smiled. “What else would I mean?”
A strong gust of wind caught them from behind, an avalanche of air that would have knocked them flat if they had not been prepared for it. For a minute they bent with the gale, unable to talk, concerned only about keeping their balance.
When the gust passed and the wind settled down to perhaps forty miles per hour, Pete finished cleaning his goggles and began to rub his hands together to get the snow and ice off his gloves. “I know why you didn’t go with the others. You can’t deceive me. It’s your hero complex.”
“Sure. I’m a regular Indiana Jones.”
“You’ve always got to be where the danger is.”
“Yeah, me and Madonna.” Harry shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry, but you’ve got it all wrong, Dr. Freud. I’d much prefer to be where the danger isn’t. But it did occur to me the bomb might explode in your face.”
“And you’d give me first aid?”
“Something like that.”
“Listen, if it does explode in my face but doesn’t kill me…no first aid, for God’s sake. Just finish me off.”
Harry winced and started to protest.
“All I’m asking for is mercy,” Pete said bluntly.
During the past few months, Harry had come to like and respect this big, broad-faced man. Beneath Pete Johnson’s fierce-looking exterior, under the layers of education and training, under the cool competence, there was a kid with a love for science and technology and adventure. Harry recognized much of himself in Pete. “There’s really not a great chance of an explosion, is there?”
“Almost none,” Pete assured him.
“The casing did take a beating coming out of the shaft.”
“Relax, Harry. The last one went well, didn’t it?”
They knelt beside the steel cylinder. Harry held the flashlight while Pete opened a small plastic box of precision tools.
“Disarming these sonsofbitches is easy enough,” Pete said. “That isn’t our problem. Our problem is getting eight more of them out of the ice before the clock strikes midnight and the carriage turns back into a pumpkin.”
“We’re recovering them at the rate of one an hour.”
“But we’ll slow down,” Johnson said. With a small screwdriver he began to remove the end of the cylinder that featured the eye loop. “We needed forty-five minutes to dig out the first one. Then fifty-five for the second. Already we’re getting tired, slowing down. It’s this wind.”
It was a killing wind, pressing and pounding against Harry’s back with such force that he felt as though he were standing in the middle of a swollen, turbulent river; the currents in the air were almost as tangible as currents in deep water. The base wind velocity was now forty or forty-five miles an hour, with gusts to sixty-five, steadily and rapidly climbing toward gale force. Later, it would be deadly.
“You’re right,” Harry said. His throat was slightly sore from the effort required to be heard above the storm, even though they were nearly head-to-head over the package of explosives. “It doesn’t do much good to sit ten minutes in a warm snowmobile cabin and then spend the next hour in weather as bad as this.”
Pete extracted the last screw and removed a six-inch end piece from the cylinder. “How far has the real temperature fallen? Like to guess?”
“Five degrees above zero. Fahrenheit.”
“With the wind-chill factor?”
“Twenty below zero.”
“Thirty.”
“Maybe.” Even his heavy thermal suit could not protect him. The wind’s cold blade stabbed continuously at his back, pierced his storm suit, pricked his spine. “I never thought we had much of a chance of getting ten out. I knew we’d slow down. But if we can disarm just five or six, we might have enough room to survive the blowup at midnight.”
Pete tipped the six-inch section of casing, and a timer slid out into his gloved hand. It was connected to the rest of the cylinder by four springy coils of wire: red, yellow, green, and white. “I guess it’s better to freeze to death tomorrow than be blown to bits tonight.”
“Don’t you dare do that to me,” Harry said.
“What?”
“Turn into another Franz Fischer.”
Pete laughed. “Or another George Lin.”
“Those two. The Whiner brothers.”
“You chose them,” Pete said.
“And I take the blame. But, hell, they’re good men. It’s just that under this much pressure…”
“They’re assholes.”
“Precisely.”
“Time for you to get out of here,” Pete said, reaching into the tool kit again.
“I’ll hold the flashlight.”
“The hell you will. Put it down so it shines on this, then go. I don’t need you to hold the light. What I need you for is to deal out the mercy if it comes to that.”
Reluctantly, Harry returned to the snowmobile. He bent down behind the machine, out of the wind. Huddled there, he sensed that all their work and risk-taking was for nothing. Their situation would deteriorate further before it improved. If it ever improved.
4:00
The Il
ya Pogodin rolled sickeningly on the surface of the North Atlantic. The turbulent sea smashed against the rounded bows and geysered into the darkness, an endless series of waves that sounded like window-rattling peals of summer thunder. Because the boat rode so low in the water, it shuddered only slightly from the impact, but it could not withstand that punishment indefinitely. Gray water churned across the main deck, and foam as thick as pudding sloshed around the base of the huge steel sail. The boat hadn’t been designed or built for extended surface runs in stormy weather. Nevertheless, in spite of her tendency to yaw, she could hold her own long enough for Timoshenko to exchange messages with the war room at the Naval Ministry in Moscow.
Captain Gorov was on the bridge with two other men. They were all wearing fleece-lined pea jackets, hooded black rain slickers over the jackets, and gloves. The two young lookouts stood back to back, one facing port and the other starboard. All three men had field glasses and were surveying the horizon.
It’s a damned close horizon, Gorov thought as he studied it. And an ugly one.
That far north, the polar twilight had not yet faded entirely from the sky. An eerie greenish glow seeped through the heavy storm clouds and saturated the Atlantic vistas, so Gorov seemed to be peering through a thin film of green liquid. It barely illuminated the raging sea and imparted a soft yellow cast to the foamy crests of the waves. A mixture of fine snow and sleet hissed in from the northwest; the sail, the bridge railing, Gorov’s black rain slicker, the laser package, and the radio masts were encrusted with white ice. Scattered formations of fog further obscured the forbidding panorama, and due north the churning waves were hidden by a gray-brown mist so dense that it seemed to be a curtain drawn across the world beyond it. Visibility varied from one half to three quarters of a mile and would have been considerably worse if they had not been using night-service binoculars.