Icebound

by Dean Koontz

  The rope burned through the surface slickness of his gloves, and abruptly he was able to stop himself, perhaps seventy feet below the brink of the crevasse. His percussive heart was pounding out a score for kettledrums, and every muscle in his body was knotted tighter than the safety line around his waist. Gasping for breath, he swung back and forth on the oscillating line, banging painfully—and then more gently—against the chasm wall while shadows and frantic flares of reflected light swarmed up from below like flocks of spirits escaping from Hades.

  He dared not pause to settle his nerves. The timers on those packages of explosives were still ticking.

  After easing down the rope another fifteen or twenty feet, he reached the bottom of the crevasse. It proved to be about ninety feet deep, which was fairly close to the estimate he had made when he had studied it from above.

  He unclipped one of the flashlights from his tool belt and began to search for the entrance to the tunnel that Lieutenant Timoshenko had described. He remembered from his first encounter with the chasm earlier in the day that it was forty-five or fifty feet long, ten or twelve feet wide at the midpoint but narrower at both ends. At the moment he did not have a view of the entire floor of the crevasse. When part of one wall had collapsed under his snowmobile, it had tumbled to the bottom; now it constituted a ten-foot-high divider that partitioned the chasm into two areas of roughly equal size. The badly charred wreckage of the sled was strewn over the top of that partition.

  The section into which Harry had descended was a dead end. It contained no side passages, no deeper fissures large enough to allow him to descend farther, and no sign of a tunnel or open water.

  Slipping, sliding, afraid that the jumbled slabs of ice would shift and catch him like a bug between two bricks, he climbed out of the first chamber. At the top of that sloped mound, he picked his way through the smashed and burned ruins of the snowmobile and through more slabs of ice, which shifted treacherously under his feet, then slid down the far side.

  Beyond that partition, in the second half of the chasm, he found a way out, into deeper and more mysterious realms of ice. The right-hand wall offered no caves or fissures, but the left-hand wall didn’t come all the way to the floor. It ended four feet above the bottom of the crevasse.

  Harry dropped flat on his stomach and poked his flashlight into that low opening. The passageway was about thirty feet wide and no higher than four feet. It appeared to run straight and level for six or seven yards under the crevasse wall, sideways into the ice, before it curved sharply downward and out of sight.

  Was it worth exploring?

  He looked at his watch. 11:02.

  Detonation in fifty-eight minutes.

  Holding the light in front of him, Harry quickly wriggled into the horizontal passage. Although he was sauirming on his stomach, the ceiling of the crawl space was so low in some places that it brushed the back of his head.

  He wasn’t claustrophobic, but he had a logical and healthy fear of being confined in an extremely cramped place ninety feet beneath the ice, in the Arctic wilderness, while surrounded by fifty-eight enormous packages of explosives that were ticking rapidly toward detonation. He was funny that way.

  Nevertheless, he twisted and writhed and pulled himself forward with his elbows and his knees. When he’d gone twenty-five or thirty feet, he discovered that the passageway led into the bottom of what seemed to be a large open space, a hollow in the heart of the ice. He moved the flashlight to the left and right, but from his position, he was unable to get a clear idea of the cavern’s true size. He slid out of the crawl space, stood up, and unclipped the second flashlight from his belt.

  He was in a circular chamber one hundred feet in diameter, with dozens of fissures and culs-de-sac and passageways leading from it. Apparently the ceiling had been formed by a great upward rush of hot water and steam: a nearly perfect dome, too smooth to have been formed by any but the most exceptional phenomenon—such as freakish volcanic activity. That vault, marked only by a few small stalactites and spider-web cracks, was sixty feet high at the apex and curved to thirty feet where it met the walls. The floor descended toward the center of the room in seven progressive steps, two or three feet at a time, so the overall effect was of an amphitheater. At the nadir of the cavern, where the stage would have been, was a forty-foot-diameter pool of thrashing sea water.

  The tunnel.

  Hundreds of feet below, that wide tunnel opened into a hollow in the bottom of the iceberg, to the lightless world of the deep Arctic Ocean, where the Ilya Pogodin would be waiting for them.

  Harry was as mesmerized by the dark pool as he would have been by a gate between this dimension and the next, by a door in the back of an old wardrobe that led to the enchanted land of Narnia, by any tornado that could spin a child and a dog to Oz.

  “I’ll be damned.” His voice echoed back to him from the dome.

  He was suddenly energized by hope.

  In the back of his mind, he had harbored some doubt about the very existence of the tunnel. He had been inclined to think that the Pogodin’s surface Fathometer was malfunctioning. In those frigid seas, how could a long tunnel through solid ice remain open? Why hadn’t it frozen over and closed up again? He hadn’t asked the others if they could explain it to him. He hadn’t wanted to worry them. They would pass the last hour of their lives more easily with hope than without it. Nonetheless, it had been a riddle for which he saw no solution.

  Now he had the answer to that riddle. The water inside the tunnel continued to be affected by tremendous tidal forces in the sea far below. It was not stagnant or even calm. It welled up and fell away forcefully, rhythmically, surging as high as six or eight feet into the cavern, churning and sloshing, then draining back swiftly until it was level with the lip of the hole. Swelling and falling away, swelling and falling away…The continuous movement prevented the opening from freezing over, and it inhibited the development of ice within the tunnel itself.

  Of course, over an extended period of time, say two or three days, the tunnel would most likely grow steadily narrower. Gradually new ice would build up on the walls, regardless of the tidal motion, until the passageway became impassable or closed altogether.

  But they didn’t need the tunnel two or three days in the future. They needed it now.

  Nature had been set firmly against them for the past twelve hours. Perhaps now she was working for them and ready to show them a little mercy.

  Survival.

  Paris. The Hôtel George V.

  Moët & Chandon.

  The Crazy Horse Saloon.

  Rita…

  Escape was possible. Just barely.

  Harry clipped one of the flashlights to his belt. Holding the other light in front of him, he wriggled back through the crawl space between the domed cavern and the bottom of the open crevasse, eager to signal the others to descend and begin their tortuous escape from that prison of ice.

  11:06

  DETONATION IN FIFTY-FOUR MINUTES

  At the command pad, Nikita Gorov monitored a series of five video display terminals arrayed on the ceiling. With little strain, he was simultaneously tracking the computations—some expressed in dimensional diagrams—provided by five different programs that were constantly collecting data regarding the boat’s and the iceberg’s positions, relative attitudes, and speeds.

  “Clear water,” said the technician who was operating the surface Fathometer. “No ice overhead.”

  Gorov had jockeyed the Ilya Pogodin under the quarter-mile-long, disc-shaped concavity in the bottom of the iceberg. The sail of the submarine was directly below the forty-foot-wide tunnel in the center of that concavity. Essentially, they were holding steady under an inverted funnel of ice and had to remain there for the duration of the operation.

  “Speed matched to target,” Zhukov said, repeating the report that had come over his headset from the maneuvering room.

  One of the technicians along the left-hand wall said, “Speed matched and
check.”

  “Rudder amidships,” Gorov said.

  “Rudder amidships, sir.”

  Unwilling to look away, Gorov scowled at the VDTs as though speaking to them rather than to the control-room team. “And keep a damned close watch on the drift compass.”

  “Clear water. No ice overhead.”

  An enormous structure of ice was overhead, of course, a huge island, but not directly above the surface-Fathometer package on the sail. They were sounding straight up into the forty-foot-wide tunnel at the top of the cavity, and the return signal showed clearance all the way to the surface, six hundred feet above, where the tunnel terminated in the bottom of the crevasse that Dr. Carpenter had described to Timoshenko.

  The captain hesitated, reluctant to act until he was absolutely certain that they were properly positioned. He studied the five screens for another half minute. When he was satisfied that the speed of the boat was as closely coordinated with the iceberg’s progress as was humanly possible, he pulled down a microphone and said, “Captain to communications center. Release the aerial at will, Lieutenant.”

  Timoshenko’s voice grated from the overhead speaker. “Aerial deployed.”

  Topside, eight watertight, aluminum cargo boxes nestled among the masts and periscopes and snorkels on the Pogodin’s sail. They were held in place by multiple lengths of nylon cord, some of which had no doubt snapped, as expected, during the submarine’s second descent to seven hundred feet.

  When Timoshenko released the aerial, a helium balloon had been ejected in a swarm of bubbles from a pressurized tube on top of the sail. If it was functioning properly—as it always had before—the balloon was now rising rapidly in the dark sea, trailing the multicommunications wire behind it. As an intelligence-gathering boat, the Ilya Pogodin had deployed that aerial in the same fashion on thousands of occasions over the years.

  The eight watertight boxes fastened atop the sail, however, were not a standard feature. They were secured to the communications wire with a fine-link titanium-alloy chain and spring locks. When the rising helium balloon was twenty feet above the sail, it should jerk the chain tight and draw the boxes upward, pulling hard enough against the remaining nylon restraining lines to cause them to slip their knots. Because the aluminum boxes were buoyant, they would then rise instantly from the sail and would not be a drag on the balloon.

  In seconds, that helium-filled sphere was up to six hundred feet, then five hundred fifty feet, and then five hundred—well into the bowl of the inverted funnel above the boat. Four hundred feet and rising. The cargo boxes should be soaring upward in its wake. Three hundred fifty feet. The air bubbles from the pressure tube would fall behind the aerial and the boxes almost from the start, because the helium in the balloon expanded and rose much faster than did the oxygen in the bubbles. At approximately four hundred feet, the balloon would slide smoothly into the entrance to the long tunnel and continue to rise effortlessly, towing the boxes higher, higher, faster, faster….

  Bending over the graph of the surface Fathometer, the operator said, “I’m registering a fragmented obstruction in the tunnel.”

  “Not ice?” Gorov asked.

  “No. The obstruction is rising.”

  “The boxes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s working,” Zhukov said.

  “Seems to be,” the captain agreed.

  “Now if the Edgeway people have located the other end of the tunnel—”

  “We can get on with the hard part,” Gorov finished for him.

  Numbers and images blinked, blinked, blinked across the video display terminals.

  At last the squawk box rattled, and Lieutenant Timoshenko said, “Aerial’s up. Balloon’s surfaced, Captain.”

  Gorov pulled down a microphone, cleared his throat, and said, “Override the automatic system, Lieutenant. Reel out an additional sixty feet of wire.”

  A moment later Timoshenko said, “Sixty additional feet of wire deployed, Captain.”

  Emil Zhukov wiped one hand down his saturnine face. “Now the long wait.”

  Gorov nodded. “Now the long wait.”

  11:10

  DETONATION IN FIFTY MINUTES

  The helium balloon broke through at the upper end of the tunnel and bobbled merrily on the swell. Although it was a flat blue-gray color, it looked, at least to Harry, like a bright and cheerful party balloon.

  One by one, as Timoshenko reeled out additional wire at the far end, the eight watertight aluminum boxes burst through the surface. They bumped against one another with dull, almost inaudible thumps.

  Harry was no longer alone in the domeceilinged cavern. Rita, Brian, Franz, Claude, and Roger had joined him. By now George Lin would have set foot on the bottom of the crevasse, and Pete Johnson would have started down the rope from the storm-lashed top of the iceberg.

  Picking up the grappling hook that they had jerry-rigged from lengths of copper pipe and twenty feet of heavy-gauge wire, Harry said, “Come on. Let’s get that stuff out of the water.”

  With Franz’s and Roger’s assistance, he managed to snare the chain and drag the boxes out of the pool. All three men got wet to the knees in the process, and within seconds the storm suits had frozen solid around their calves. Although their boots and clothing were waterproof, even the partial submersion sucked body heat from them. Cold, shuddering, they hurriedly popped open the aluminum cargo boxes and extracted the gear that had been sent up from the Ilya Pogodin.

  Each box held a self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. But this was not ordinary scuba gear. It had been designed for use in especially deep and/or extremely cold water. Each suit came with a battery pack that was attached to a belt and worn at the waist. When this was plugged into both the skintight pants and the jacket, the lining provided heat in much the same fashion as did any standard electric blanket.

  Harry laid out his own equipment on the ice shore, well back from the highest tide line of the constantly surging and ebbing water in the pool. A compressed-air tank came with each suit. The diving mask was large enough to cover most of the face from chin to forehead, eliminating the need for a separate mouthpiece; air was fed directly into the mask, so the diver could breathe through his nose.

  Strictly speaking, they would not be breathing air. The tank contained, instead, an oxygen-helium mixture with several special additives prescribed to allow the user to tolerate great depths. On the radio earlier, explaining the equipment, Timoshenko had assured them that the mixture of gases in the tank would allow a deep dive with only “a reasonable degree of danger” to the respiratory and circulatory systems. Harry hadn’t found the lieutenant’s choice of words particularly reassuring. The thought of fifty-eight massive charges of plastic explosives, however, was sufficient inducement to put his full trust in Russian diving technology.

  The suits were different in other, less important ways from standard scuba gear. The pants had feet in them, as if they were the bottoms of a pair of Dr. Denton pajamas; and the sleeves of the jacket ended in gloves. The hood covered all of the head and face that was not protected by the oversize mask, as if leaving one centimeter of skin exposed would result in instant, extremely violent death. The wet suits almost seemed to be snug versions of the loose and bulky pressure suits worn by astronauts in space.

  George Lin had entered the cavern while they were unpacking the aluminum boxes. He studied the equipment with unconcealed suspicion. “Harry, there must be something else, some other way. There’s got to be—”

  “No,” Harry said, without his usual diplomacy and patience. “This is it. This or nothing. There’s no time for discussion any more, George. Just shut up and suit up.”

  Lin looked glum.

  But he didn’t look like a killer.

  Harry glanced at the others, who were busy unpacking their own boxes of gear. None of them looked like a killer, yet one of them had clubbed Brian and, for whatever mad reason, might give them a lot of trouble when they were underwater and mov
ing down through the long tunnel of ice.

  Bringing up the rear, Pete Johnson squirmed laboriously out of the crawl space from the crevasse into the cavern, cursing the ice around him. He had been a tighter fit than any of the others. His broad shoulders had probably made it difficult for him to squeeze through the narrowest part of that passageway.

  “Let’s get dressed,” Harry said. His voice had an odd, hollow quality as it resonated through that domed amphitheater of ice. “No time to waste.”

  They changed from their arctic gear into the scuba suits with an efficient haste born of acute discomfort and desperation. Harry, Franz, and Roger were already paying in pain for their knee-deep immersion in the pool: Their feet had been half numb, not a good sign, but the shock had temporarily restored too much feeling, and now their flesh from calves to toes prickled, ached, burned. The others had been spared that additional suffering, but they cursed and complained bitterly during their brief nakedness. No wind circulated through the cavern, but the air temperature was perhaps twenty or more degrees below zero. Therefore, they changed lower- and upper-body garments in stages to avoid being entirely unclothed at any one time and vulnerable to the killing cold: Outer boots, felt boots, socks, pants, and long underwear were removed first and were quickly replaced by the skintight, insulation-lined scuba pants; then they changed from coats, vests, sweaters, shirts, and undershirts into lined rubber jackets with snug rubber hoods.

  Modesty was potentially as deadly as sloth. When Harry looked up after tucking himself into his scuba pants, he saw Rita’s bare breasts as she struggled into her scuba jacket. Her flesh was blue-white and textured with enormous goose pimples. Then she zipped up her jacket, caught Harry’s eye, and winked.