by Dean Koontz
Behind Gorov, atop the steel sail, the satellite tracking dish moved slowly from east to west. Its continuous change of attitude was imperceptible at a glance, but it was locked on to a Soviet telecommunications satellite that was in a tight subpolar orbit high above the masses of slate-colored clouds. Gorov’s message had been transmitted by laser four minutes ago. The tracking dish waited to receive Moscow’s reply.
The captain had already imagined the worst possible response. He would be ordered to relinquish command to First Officer Zhukov, who would be directed to put him under twenty-four-hour armed guard and continue the mission as scheduled. His court-martial would proceed in his absence, and he would be informed of the decision upon his return to Moscow.
But he expected a more reasoned response than that from Moscow. Certainly the Ministry was always unpredictable. Even under the postcommunist regime, with its greater respect for justice, officers were occasionally court-martialed without being present to defend themselves. But he believed what he had told Zhukov in the control room: They were not all fools at the Ministry. They would most likely see the opportunity for propaganda and strategic advantage in this situation, and they would reach the proper conclusion.
He scanned the fog-shrouded horizon.
The flow of time seemed to have slowed almost to a stop. Although he knew that it was an illusion, he saw the sea raging in slow motion, the waves building like ripples in an ocean of cold molasses. Each minute was an hour.
Bang!
Sparks shot out of the vents in the steel-alloy casing of the auxiliary drill. It chugged, sputtered, and cut out.
Roger Breskin had been operating it. “What the hell?” he thumbed the power switch.
When the drill wouldn’t start, Pete Johnson stepped in and dropped to his knees to have a look at it.
Everyone crowded around, expecting the worst. They were, Harry thought, like people gathered at an automobile accident—except that the corpses in this wreckage might be their own.
“What’s wrong with it?” George Lin asked.
“You’ll have to take apart the casing to find the trouble,” Fischer told Pete.
“Yeah, but I don’t have to take the sucker apart to know I can’t repair it.”
Brian said, “What do you mean?”
Pointing to the snow and frozen slush around the partially reopened third shaft, Pete said, “See those black specks?”
Harry crouched and studied the bits of metal scattered on the ice. “Gear teeth.”
Everyone was silent.
“I could probably repair a fault in the wiring,” Pete said at last. “But we don’t have a set of spare gears for it.”
“What now?” Brian asked.
With Teutonic pessimism, Fischer said, “Back to the cave and wait for midnight.”
“That’s giving up,” Brian said.
Getting to his feet, Harry said, “But I’m afraid that’s all we can do at the moment, Brian. We lost the other drill when my sled went into that crevasse.”
Dougherty shook his head, refusing to accept that they were powerless to proceed. “Earlier, Claude said we could use the ice ax and the power saw to cut some steps in the winter field, angle down to each package—”
The Frenchman interrupted him. “That would only work if we had a week. We’d need six more hours, perhaps longer, to retrieve this one bomb by the step method. It’s not worth expending all that energy to gain only forty-five more feet of safety.”
“Okay, let’s go, let’s pack up,” Harry said, clapping his hands for emphasis. “No point standing here, losing body heat. We can talk about it back at the cave, out of this wind. We might think of something yet.”
But he had no hope.
At 4:02 the communications center reported that a message was coming in from the Naval Ministry. Five minutes later the decoding sheet was passed up to the bridge, where Nikita Gorov began to read it with some trepidation.
MESSAGE
NAVAL MINISTRY
TIME: 1900 MOSCOW
FROM: DUTY OFFICER
TO: CAPTAIN N. GOROV
SUBJECT: YOUR LAST TRANSMISSION #34-D
MESSAGE BEGINS:
YOUR REQUEST UNDER STUDY BY ADMIRALTY STOP IMMEDIATE DECISION CANNOT BE MADE STOP SUBMERGE AND CONTINUE SCHEDULED MISSION FOR ONE HOUR STOP A CONTINUATION OR NEW ORDERS WILL BE TRANSMITTED TO YOU AT 1700 HOURS YOUR TIME STOP
Gorov was disappointed. The Ministry’s indecision cranked up the level of his tension. The next hour would be more difficult for him than the hour that had just passed.
He turned to the other two men. “Clear the bridge.”
They prepared to dive. The lookouts scrambled down through the conning tower and took up stations at the diving wheels. The captain sounded the routine alarm—two short blasts on the electric horns that blared from speakers in the bulkheads of every room on the boat—and then left the bridge, pulling the hatch shut with a lanyard.
The quartermaster of the watch spun the hand-wheel and said, “Hatch secure.”
Gorov hurried to the command pad in the control room. On the second blast of the diving klaxon, the air vents in the ballast tanks had been opened, and the sea had roared into the space between the ship’s two hulls. Now, to Gorov’s right, a petty officer was watching a board that contained one red and several green lights. The green represented hatches, vents, exhausts, and equipment extruders that were closed to the sea. The red light was labeled LASER TRANSMISSION PACKAGE. When the laser equipment settled into a niche atop the sail and an airtight hatch slid over it, the red light blinked off and the safety bulb beneath it lit up.
“Green board!” the petty officer called.
Gorov ordered compressed air released into the submarine, and when the pressure indicator didn’t register a fall, he knew the boat was sealed.
“Pressure in the boat,” the diving officer called.
In less than a minute they had completed the preparations. The deck acquired an incline, the top of the sail submerged, and they were out of sight of anyone in a ship or aircraft.
“Take her down to one hundred feet,” Gorov ordered.
The descent was measured by signifying beeps from the computer.
“At one hundred feet,” the diving officer announced.
“Hold her steady.”
“Steady, sir.”
As the submarine leveled off, Gorov said, “Take over for me, Lieutenant Zhukov.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You can return the control room to a skeleton watch.”
“Yes, sir.”
Gorov left the chamber and walked aft to the communications center.
Timoshenko turned toward the door just as the captain entered the room. “Request permission to run up the antenna, sir.”
“Denied.”
Blinking in surprise, Timoshenko tilted his head to one side and said, “Sir?”
“Denied,” Gorov repeated. He surveyed the telecommunications equipment that lined the bulkheads. He had been given rudimentary training in its use. For security reasons, the telecommunications computer was separate from the ship’s main computer, although the keyboards were operated in the same manner as those in the control room with which he was so familiar. “I want to use your coder and the communications computer.”
Timoshenko didn’t move. He was an excellent technician and a bright young man in some ways. But his world was composed of data banks, programming keys, input, output, and gadgets—and he was not able to deal well with people unless they behaved in a predictable, machinelike manner.
“Did you hear me?” Gorov asked impatiently.
Blushing, embarrassed, and confused, Timoshenko said, “Uh…yes. Yes, sir.” He directed Gorov to a chair before the primary terminal of the communications computer. “What did you have in mind, sir?”
“Privacy,” Gorov said bluntly as he sat down.
Timoshenko just stood there.
“You’re dismissed, Lieutenant.”
His confusion deepening, Timoshenko nodded, tried to smile, but instead looked as if he had just been jabbed with a long needle. He retired to the other end of the room, where his curious subordinates were unsuccessfully pretending that they had heard nothing.
The coder—or encrypting machine—stood beside Gorov’s chair. It was the size and shape of a two-drawer filing cabinet, housed in burnished steel. A keyboard—with all the usual keys plus fourteen with special functions—was built into the top. Gorov touched the ON switch. Crisp yellow paper automatically rolled out of the top of the coder cabinet and onto the platen.
Gorov quickly typed a message. When he was finished, he read it without touching the flimsy paper, then pressed a rectangular red key labeled PROCESS. A laser printer hummed, and the coder produced the encrypted version under the original message. It appeared to be nonsense: clumps of random numbers separated by occasional symbols.
Tearing the paper from the encrypting machine, Gorov swung around in his chair to face the video display terminal. Referring to the encoded version of the message, he carefully typed the same series of numbers and symbols into the communications computer. When that was done, he pressed a special-function key that bore the word DECODE and another labeled PRINTOUT. He did not touch the READOUT tab, because he didn’t want his work displayed on the large overhead screen for the benefit of Timoshenko and the other technicians. After dropping the flimsy yellow sheet from the encrypting machine into a paper shredder, he leaned back in his chair.
No more than a minute passed before the communiqué—now decoded and in its original state—was in his hands. He had come full circle in less than five minutes: The printout contained the same fourteen lines that he had composed on the coder, but it was now in the usual type style of the computer. It looked like any other decoded message received from the Ministry in Moscow, which was precisely what he wanted.
He instructed the computer to erase from its memory banks every detail of what he had just done. With that, the printout was the only evidence that remained of the exercise. Timoshenko would not be able to quiz the computer about any of this after Gorov left the cabin.
He got up and went to the open door. From there he said, “Oh, Lieutenant?”
Timoshenko was pretending to study a logbook. He glanced up. “Yes, sir?”
“In those dispatches you intercepted, the ones having to do with the Edgeway group, there was mention of a transmitter on that drift ice with them.”
Timoshenko nodded. “They’ve got a standard shortwave set, of course. But that isn’t what you’re talking about. There’s also a radio transmitter, a tracking beacon, that puts out a two-second signal ten times every minute.”
“Have you picked it up?”
“Twenty minutes ago.”
“Is it a strong signal?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Have you got a bearing?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, run another check on it. I’ll be back to you on the intercom in a few minutes,” Gorov said. He returned to the control room for another conversation with Emil Zhukov.
Harry had not yet finished telling Rita how the auxiliary drill had broken down, when she interrupted him. “Hey, where’s Brian?”
He turned to the men who had entered the ice cave behind him. Brian Dougherty was not among them.
Harry frowned. “Where’s Brian? Why isn’t he here?”
“He must be around somewhere. I’ll take a look outside,” Roger Breskin said.
Pete Johnson left with him.
“He probably just went behind one of the hummocks out there,” Fischer said, although he surely knew better than that. “Nothing especially dramatic, I’ll wager. Probably just had to go to the john.”
“No,” Harry disagreed.
Rita said, “He would have told someone.”
Out on the icecap, far from the security of Edgeway Station or the inflatable igloos of a temporary camp, no one could afford to be modest even about bladder and bowel habits. When going to the john, they all realized that it was necessary to inform at least one other person as to exactly which hill or pressure ridge would serve as a screen for their toilet. Acutely aware of the vagaries of the icefield and the weather, Brian would have let others know where to start looking if he didn’t make a timely return.
Roger and Pete reappeared in less than two minutes, pulling up their goggles, tugging down their ice-veined snow masks.
“He’s not at the sleds,” Roger said. “Or anywhere else we can see.” His gray eyes, usually expressionless, were troubled.
“Who rode back here with him?” Harry asked.
They looked at one another.
“Claude?”
The Frenchman shook his head. “Not me. I thought he rode with Franz.”
“I rode with Franz,” George Lin said.
Rita was exasperated. Tucking an errant strand of reddish hair back under her hood, she said, “For God’s sake, you mean he was left behind in the confusion?”
“No way. He couldn’t have been,” Harry said.
“Unless that was what he wanted,” George Lin suggested.
Harry was perplexed. “Why should he want to be left behind?”
Clearly untouched by their anxiety about Brian, Lin took time to blow his nose, fastidiously fold the handkerchief, and return it to a zippered pocket of his coat before answering the question. “You must have read some of the newspaper stories about him. Spain…Africa…all over, he’s been risking his life for a lark.”
“So?”
“Suicidal,” Lin said, as though it should have been obvious to them.
Harry was astonished and not a little angry. “You’re saying he stayed behind to die?”
Lin shrugged.
Harry didn’t even need to think about that. “Good God, George, not Brian. What’s the matter with you?”
“He might have been hurt,” Pete said. “A fall.”
Claude Jobert said, “Fell, hit his head, unable to cry out, and we were so eager to get out of there and back here, we didn’t notice.”
Harry was skeptical.
“It’s possible,” Pete insisted.
Dubious, Harry said, “Maybe. All right, we’ll go back and look. You and me, Pete. Two snowmobiles.”
Roger stepped forward. “I’m going with you.”
“Two can handle it,” Harry said, quickly fixing his goggles in place.
“I insist,” Breskin said. “Look, Brian handled himself damn well out there on the ice today. He didn’t hesitate when he had to go over that cliff to get a line around George. I’d have thought about it twice myself. But he didn’t. He just went. And if it was me in trouble now, he’d do whatever he could. I know it. So you can count me in on this whether or not you need me.”
As far as Harry could remember, that was the longest speech that Roger Breskin had made in months. He was impressed. “Okay, then. You’ll come along. You’re too damn big to argue with.”
The Ilya Pogodin’s cook was its greatest treasure. His father had been the head chef at the National Restaurant in Moscow, and from his papa he had learned to perform miracles with food that made the Bible story of loaves and fishes seem like an unremarkable exercise. The fare at his table was the best in the submarine service.
He had already begun to make fish selianka for the first course of the evening meal. White fish. Onions. Bay leaves. Egg whites. The aroma drifted from the galley past the communications center, then filled the control room.
When Gorov entered the room, Sergei Belyaev, the diving officer on duty, said, “Captain, will you help me talk sense to Leonid?” He gestured at a young seaman first class who was monitoring the alarm board.
Gorov was in a hurry, but he did not want Belyaev to sense his tension. “What’s the trouble?”
Belyaev grimaced. “Leonid’s on the first mess shift, and I’m on the fifth.”
“Ah.”
“I’ve promised if he’ll change shifts with me, I’ll fi
x him up with an absolutely gorgeous blonde in Kaliningrad. This woman is nothing short of spectacular, I swear to you. Breasts like melons. She could arouse a granite statue. But poor, dumb Leonid won’t deal with me.”
Smiling, Gorov said, “Of course he won’t. What woman could be more exciting than the dinner being prepared for us? Besides, who would be simple-minded enough to believe that an absolutely gorgeous blonde with breasts like melons would have anything to do with you, Sergei Belyaev?”
Laughter echoed in the low-ceilinged chamber.
Grinning broadly, Belyaev said, “Perhaps I should offer him a few rubles instead.”
“Much more realistic,” Gorov said. “Better yet, U.S. dollars if you have any.” He walked to the chart table, sat on one of the stools, and put a folded printout in front of Emil Zhukov. It was the message that he had run through the coder and communications computer only a few minutes ago. “Something else for you to read,” he said quietly.
Zhukov pushed aside his novel and adjusted his wire-rimmed eyeglasses, which had slid down on his long nose. He unfolded the paper.
MESSAGE
NAVAL MINISTRY
TIME: 1900 MOSCOW
FROM: DUTY OFFICER
TO: CAPTAIN N. GOROV
SUBJECT YOUR LAST TRANSMISSION #34-D
MESSAGE BEGINS:
YOUR REQUEST UNDER CONSIDERATION BY ADMIRALTY STOP CONDITIONAL PERMISSION GRANTED STOP MAKE NECESSARY COURSE CHANGES STOP CONFIRMATION OR CANCELLATION OF PERMISSION WILL BE TRANSMITTED TO YOU AT 1700 HOURS YOUR TIME STOP
After he had chewed on his lower lip for a moment, Zhukov turned his intense stare on Gorov and said, “What’s this?”
Gorov kept his voice low, but he tried not to seem secretive to any crewmen who might be watching. “What is it? I think you can see what it is, Emil. A forgery.”
The first officer didn’t know what to say.
Gorov leaned toward him. “It’s for your protection.”
“My protection?”
Gorov plucked the printout from his first officer’s hands and carefully refolded it. He put it in his shirt pocket. “We’re going to plot a course and set out at once for that iceberg.” He tapped the chart table between them. “We’re going to rescue those Edgeway scientists and Brian Dougherty.”