Icebound

by Dean Koontz

  Harry smiled. “I never had any.”

  “Just young ones, right?”

  Claude said, “Harry, I really think it’s foolish to—”

  “Don’t worry. I promise I’ll be out of here long before the shooting starts. Now the rest of you get moving. Go, go.”

  The ice cave was neither along the leeward flank of the berg nor near the midpoint of its length, where the Russian radioman had said the torpedo would strike. Nevertheless, they had unanimously decided to retreat to the snowmobiles. The concussion from the torpedo would pass through the berg from one end to the other. And the hundreds of interlocking slabs of ice that formed the ceiling of the cave might succumb to the vibrations.

  As soon as he was alone, Harry knelt in front of the radio and called Larsson.

  “I read you, Harry.” Gunvald’s voice was distant, faint, and overlaid with static.

  Harry said, “Have you been listening in to my conversations with the Russians?”

  “What I could hear of them. This storm is beginning to generate a hell of a lot of interference, and you’re drifting farther away from me by the minute.”

  “At least you’ve got a general idea of the situation here,” Harry said. “I haven’t time to chat about that. I’m calling to ask you to do something important for me. Something you may find morally repugnant.”

  As succinctly as he could, Harry told Gunvald Larsson about the attempt to kill Brian Dougherty and then quickly explained what he wanted done. Although shocked by the attack on Brian, the Swede appreciated the need for haste and didn’t waste time asking for more details. “What you want me to do isn’t especially pleasant,” he agreed. “But under the circumstances it—”

  Static blotted out the rest of the sentence.

  Harry cursed, glanced at the entrance of the cave, turned to the microphone again, and said, “Better repeat that. I didn’t read you.”

  Through crackling atmospherics: “…said under the circumstances…seems necessary.”

  “You’ll do it, will you?”

  “Yes. At once.”

  “How long will you need?”

  “If I’m to be thorough…” Gunvald faded out. Then in again: “…if I can expect that what I’m searching for will be hidden…half an hour.”

  “Good enough. But hurry. Do it.”

  As Harry put down the microphone, Pete Johnson entered the cave. “Man, are you suicidal? Maybe I was wrong about you being a natural-born hero. Maybe you’re just a natural-born masochist. Let’s get the hell out of here before the roof falls in.”

  Unplugging the microphone and handing it to Pete, Harry said, “That wouldn’t faze me. I’m a Bostonian, remember. Let the roof fall in. I couldn’t care less.”

  “Maybe you aren’t a masochist, either. Maybe you’re just flat-out crazy.”

  Picking up the radio by the thick, crisscrossing leather straps atop the case, Harry said, “Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midnight sun.”

  He didn’t mention what he had asked Gunvald to do, because he had decided to take Pete’s advice to heart. He wasn’t going to trust anyone. Except himself. And Rita. And Brian Dougherty.

  Stepping out of the cave into the wildly howling night, Harry discovered that the snow had at last given way entirely to an ice storm. The tiny spicules were harder than mere sleet, needle-sharp, glittering in the headlamps, coming along like great clouds of diamond dust, on a course nearly horizontal to the ground, hissing abrasively across every surface they encountered. They stung the exposed sections of Harry’s face and began immediately to plate his storm suit with transparent armor.

  The supply shed at Edgeway Station was a pair of joined Nissen huts, in which the expedition stored tools, spare parts, any equipment that wasn’t in use, comestibles, and the other provisions. Just inside the door, Gunvald stripped out of his heavy coat and hung it on a wooden rack near one of the electric heaters. The coat was sheathed in ice, and water began to stream from it by the time he had taken off his outer boots.

  Although the trip from the communications shack to the supply shed was a short one, he had been chilled as he’d shuffled through deep drifts of snow and prickling clouds of wind-driven ice spicules. Now he reveled in the blessed warmth.

  As he walked to the back of the long hut in his felt boots, he didn’t make a sound. He had an unpleasant but unshakable image of himself: a thief in a strange house, prowling.

  The rear half of the supply shed lay in velvety darkness. The only light was the small bulb at the door, where he had come inside. For a moment he had the eerie notion that someone was waiting for him in the shadows.

  He was alone, of course. His uneasiness arose from guilt. He didn’t like having to do what he was there to do, and he felt as if he deserved to be caught in the act.

  Reaching overhead in the blackness, he located the light chain and tugged it. A naked hundred-watt bulb blinked on, shedding cold white light. When he let go of the chain, the bulb swung back and forth on its cord, and the supply shed was filled with leaping shadows.

  Along the back wall, nine metal lockers stood like narrow, upright caskets. A name was stenciled on the gray door of each, white letters above the set of three narrow ventilation slits: H. CARPENTER, R. CARPENTER, JOHNSON, JOBERT, and so forth.

  Gunvald went to the tool rack and took down a heavy hammer and an iron crowbar. He was going to have to force open five of those lockers. He intended to breach them one after the other, as quickly as possible, before he had any second thoughts that might deter him.

  Previous expeditions onto the icecap had learned that every man needed a private space, no matter how small, even a few cubic feet, that he could regard as his and his alone, where he could keep personal belongings and where inadvertent trespass wasn’t possible. In the cramped environment of an Arctic research station, especially in one established with minimum funding in an age of tight money and especially during particularly extended tours of duty, the average person’s natural preference for privacy could rapidly degenerate into a craving for it, a debilitating obsession.

  There were no private quarters at Edgeway Station, no bedrooms where one could sleep alone. Most huts housed two, in addition to various pieces of equipment. And the vast, empty land beyond the camp offered no refuge for anyone in need of solitude. If one valued his life, he simply didn’t go out there alone, not ever.

  Often, the only way to have solitude and actually ensure it for a few minutes was to visit one of the two heated toilet stalls that were attached to the supply shed. But it wasn’t practical to cache personal effects in the toilet.

  After all, everyone had at least a handful of items that he preferred to keep private: love letters, photographs, mementos, a personal journal, whatever. Nothing shameful was likely to be hidden in the lockers, nothing that would shock Gunvald or embarrass its owner; scientists like themselves, perhaps excessively rational and all but compulsively dedicated to their work, were a bland lot, not the sort to have terrible dark secrets to conceal. The purpose of the lockers was merely to maintain a totally personal space as a way to preserve each person’s necessary sense of identity in a claustrophobic and communal environment where, in time, it was easy to feel absorbed into a group identity and thereby become psychologically disassociated and quietly depressed.

  Stashing one’s most personal belongings under the bed was an unsatisfactory solution, even if it was understood that the space beneath a mattress was sacrosanct. This was not to say that members of any expedition automatically distrusted one another. Trust had nothing to do with it. The need for a secure private space was a deep and perhaps even irrational psychological need, and only those locked metal cabinets could satisfy it.

  Gunvald used the hammer to smash combination dials from five of the lockers, one after the other. The shattered parts clattered across the floor, pinged off the walls, and the supply shed sounded like a busy foundry.

  If a psychopathic killer was a member of the Edgeway expeditio
n, if one of the apparent lambs of science was a wolf in disguise, and if evidence existed to identify that man, then the lockers were the logical—the sole—place to look. Harry had been certain of that. Reluctantly, Gunvald agreed with him. It seemed reasonable to suppose that in his personal effects, even a sociopath who could easily pass for normal might possess something revealingly different from the usual items that sane men treasured and carried with them to the top of the world. Something indicative of a bizarre fixation or obsession. Perhaps something horrifying. Something unexpected and so unusual that it would say at once, This belongs to a dangerously disturbed person.

  Wedging the hook of the crowbar into the round hole where the combination dial had been, Gunvald pulled backward with all his might and tore the lock from the first locker. The metal squealed and bent, and the door popped open. He didn’t pause to look inside but quickly proceeded to wrench open the other four: bang, bang, bang, bang! Done.

  He threw the crowbar aside.

  His hands were sweating. He wiped them on his insulated vest and then on his quilted trousers.

  After he had taken half a minute to catch his breath, he picked up a wooden crate full of freeze-dried food from the large stacks of supplies along the right-hand wall. He put the crate in front of the first locker and sat on it.

  He reached to a zippered vest pocket for his pipe, but decided against it. He touched the bowl, but his fingers twitched, and he withdrew his hand. The pipe relaxed him. It had pleasant associations. And this search definitely was not a high point of pleasure in his life. If he used the pipe, if he puffed away on it while he poked through the contents of his friends’ lockers, then…Well, he had a hunch that he would never be able to enjoy a good smoke again.

  All right then. Where should he start?

  Roger Breskin.

  Franz Fischer.

  George Lin.

  Claude Jobert.

  Pete Johnson.

  Those were the five suspects. All were good men, as far as Gunvald was aware, although some were friendlier and easier to get to know than others. They were smarter and more well-balanced than the average person on the street; they had to be so, in order to have successful research careers in the Arctic or Antarctic, where the arduousness of the job and the unusual pressures quickly eliminated those who weren’t self-reliant and exceptionally stable. None was a likely candidate for the tag “psychopathic killer,” not even George Lin, who had revealed aberrant behavior only on this expedition and only recently, after having participated in many other projects on the ice during a long and admirable career.

  He decided to begin with Roger Breskin because Roger’s locker was the first in line. All the shelves were bare except the top one, on which was a cardboard box. Gunvald lifted the box out and put it between his feet.

  As he had expected, the Canadian traveled light. The box contained only four items. A laminated eight-by-ten color photograph of Roger’s mother: a strong-jawed woman with a winning smile, curly gray hair, and black-rimmed glasses. One silver brush-and-comb set: tarnished. A rosary. And a scrapbook filled with photographs and newspaper clippings, all concerned with Breskin’s career as an amateur weight lifter.

  Gunvald left everything on the floor and moved the wooden crate two feet to the left. He sat in front of Fischer’s locker.

  The submarine was submerged again, holding steady just below the surface, at its highest periscope depth. It was lying in wait along the iceberg’s projected course.

  On the conning-tower platform in the control room, Nikita Gorov stood at the periscope, his arms draped over the horizontal “ears” at the base of it. Even though the top of the scope was eight or nine feet above sea level, the storm waves exploded against it and washed over it, obscuring his view from time to time. When the upper window was out of the water, however, the night sea was revealed, dimly lighted by four drifting, dying flares.

  The iceberg had already begun to cross their bow, three hundred yards north of their position. That gleaming white mountain was starkly silhouetted against the black night and sea.

  Zhukov stood next to the captain. He was wearing headphones and listening on an open line that connected him to the petty officer in the forward torpedo room. He said, “Number one tube ready.”

  To Gorov’s right, a young seaman was monitoring a backup safety board full of green and red lights that represented equipment and hatches in the torpedo room. When Zhukov, relaying the torpedo-room report, said that the breach door was secure, the seaman at the backup board confirmed: “Green and check.”

  “Tube flooded.”

  From the backup board: “Flood indicated.”

  “Muzzle door open.”

  “Red and check.”

  “Tube shutters open.”

  “Red and check.”

  The Ilya Pogodin was not primarily a warship, but an information gatherer. It didn’t carry nuclear missiles. However, the Russian Naval Ministry had planned. that every submarine should be prepared to bring the battle to the enemy in the event of a non-nuclear war. Therefore, the boat was carrying twelve electric torpedoes. Weighing over a ton and a half, packed with seven hundred pounds of high explosives, each of those steel sharks had huge destructive potential. The Ilya Pogodin was not primarily a warship, but if so ordered, it could have sunk a considerable tonnage of enemy ordnance.

  “Number one tube ready,” Zhukov said again as the officer in the torpedo room repeated that announcement over the headset.

  “Number one tube ready,” said the enunciator.

  Nikita Gorov realized for the first time that the process of readying and launching a torpedo had a ritualistic quality that was oddly similar to a religious service. Perhaps because worship and war both dealt in different ways with the subject of death.

  At the penultimate moment of the litany, the control room behind him fell into silence, except for the soft hum of machinery and the electronic muttering of computers.

  After a protracted and almost reverent silence, Nikita Gorov said, “Match bearings…and…shoot!”

  “Fire one!” Zhukov said.

  The young seaman glanced at his fire-control panel as the torpedo was let go. “One gone.”

  Gorov squinted through the eyepiece of the periscope, tense and expectant.

  The torpedo had been programmed to seek a depth of fifteen feet. It would strike the cliff exactly that far below the water line. With luck, the configuration of the ice after the explosion would be more amenable than it was now to the landing of a couple of rafts and the establishment of a base platform for the climbers.

  The torpedo hit its mark.

  Gorov said, “Strike!”

  The black ocean swelled and leaped at the base of the cliff, and for an instant the water was full of fiery yellow light, as if sea serpents with radiant eyes were surfacing.

  Echoes of the concussion vibrated through the submarine’s outer hull. Gorov felt the deck plates thrum.

  The bottom of the white cliff began to dissolve. A house-size chunk of the brittle palisade tumbled into the water and was followed by an avalanche of broken ice.

  Gorov winced. He knew that the explosives were not powerful enough to do major damage to the iceberg, let alone blast it to pieces. In fact, the target was so enormous that the torpedo could do little more than take a chip out of it. But for a few seconds, there was an illusion of utter destruction.

  The petty officer in the forward torpedo room told Zhukov that the breach door was shut, and the first officer passed the word to the technicians.

  “Green and check,” one of them confirmed.

  Lifting the headset from one ear, Zhukov said, “How’s it look out there, sir?”

  Keeping his eye to the periscope, Gorov said, “Not much better than it did.”

  “No landing shelf?”

  “Not really. But the ice is still falling.”

  Zhukov paused, listening to the petty officer at the other end of the line. “Muzzle door shut.”


  “Green and check.”

  “Blowing number one tube.”

  Gorov wasn’t listening closely to the series of safety checks, because his full attention was riveted on the iceberg, Something was wrong. The floating mountain had begun to act strangely. Or was it his imagination? He squinted, trying to get a better view of the ice behemoth between the high waves, which still continued to wash rhythmically over the upper window of the periscope. The target seemed not to be advancing eastward any longer. Indeed, he thought the “bow” of it was even beginning to swing around to the south. Ever so slightly toward the south. No. Absurd. Couldn’t happen. He closed his eyes and told himself that he was seeing things. But when he looked again, he was even more certain that—

  The radar technician said, “Target’s changing course!”

  “It can’t be,” Zhukov said, startled. “Not all that quickly. It doesn’t have any power of its own.”

  “Nevertheless, it’s changing,” Gorov said.

  “Not because of the torpedo. Just one torpedo—even all our torpedoes—couldn’t have such a profound effect on an object that large.”

  “No. Something else is at work here,” Gorov said worriedly. The captain turned away from the periscope. From the ceiling, he pulled down a microphone on a steel-spring neck and spoke both to the control room around him and to the sonar room, which was the next compartment forward in the boat. “I want an all-systems analysis of the lower fathoms to a depth of seven hundred feet.”

  The voice that issued from the overhead squawk box was crisp and efficient. “Commencing full scan, sir.”

  Gorov put his eye to the periscope again.

  The purpose of the scan was to look for a major ocean current that was strong enough to affect an object as large as the iceberg. Through the use of limited-range sonar, thermal-analysis sensors, sophisticated listening devices, and other marine-survey equipment, the Ilya Pogodin’s technicians were able to plot the movements of both warm- and cold-blooded forms of sea life beneath and to all sides of the boat. Schools of small fish and millions upon millions of krill, shrimplike creatures upon which many of the larger fish fed, were swept along by the more powerful currents or lived in them by choice, especially if those oceanic highways were warmer than the surrounding water. If masses of fish and krill—as well as thick strata of plankton—were found to be moving in the same direction, and if several other factors could be correlated with the movement, they could identify a major current, lower a current meter, and get a reasonable indication of the water’s velocity.