by Dean Koontz
He glanced over his shoulder to see if Brian and Rita were all right. The kid was trailing him by about twelve feet, features barely visible in the full-face diving mask. Eruptions of bubbles streamed out of Brian’s scuba vent, were briefly tinted gold by the backwash from Roger’s lamp, and quickly vanished into the gloom above. In spite of all that he’d endured in the past few hours, he seemed to be having no trouble keeping up.
Behind Brian, Rita was barely visible, only fitfully backlighted by the lamp that George Lin carried in her wake. The yellowish beams were defeated by the murky water; against that eerily luminous but pale haze, she was but a rippling shadow, at times so indistinct and strange that she might have been not human but an unknown denizen of the polar seas. Harry couldn’t get a glimpse of her face, but he knew that her psychological suffering, at least, must be great.
Cryophobia: fear of ice.
The frigid water in the tunnel was as dark as if it had been tainted with clouds of squid ink, for it was thick with diatoms and specks of ice and inorganic particulates. Rita wasn’t able to see the ice that lay only twenty feet from her in every direction, but she remained acutely aware of it. At times her fear was so overwhelming that her chest swelled and her throat tightened and she was unable to breathe. Each time, however, on the shuddering edge of blind panic, she finally exhaled explosively, inhaled the metallic-tasting mixture of gases from the scuba tank, and staved off hysteria.
Frigophobia: fear of cold. She suffered no chill whatsoever in the Russian wet suit. Indeed, she was warmer than she had been at any time during the past few months, since they had come onto the icecap and established Edgeway Station. Nevertheless, she was unavoidably aware of the deadly cold of the water, conscious of being separated from it by only a thin sheath of rubber and electrically heated layers of insulation. The Russian technology was impressive, but if the battery pack at her hip was drained before she reached the submarine far below, her body heat would be quickly leached away. The insistent cold of the sea would insinuate itself deep into her muscles, into her marrow, torturing her body and swiftly numbing her mind….
Down, ever down. Embraced by a coldness that she couldn’t feel. Surrounded by ice that she couldn’t see. Curved white walls out of sight to the left of her, to the right, above and below, ahead and behind. Surrounding and entrapping her. Tunnel of ice. Prison of ice. Flooded with darkness and bitter cold. Silent but for the susurrant rush of her breathing and the thud-thud-thudding of her heart. Inescapable. Deeper than a grave.
As she swam down into depths unknown, Rita was sometimes more aware of the light ahead of her than she was at other times, because she was repeatedly flashing back to the winter when she was only six years old.
Happy. Excited. On her way to her first skiing holiday with her mother and father, who are experienced on the slopes and eager to teach her. The car is an Audi. Her mother and father sit up front, and she sits alone in the back. Ascending into increasingly white and fantastic realms. A winding road in the French Alps. An alabaster wonderland all around them, below them, great vistas of evergreen forests shrouded with snow, rocky crags looming high above like the old-men faces of watching gods, bearded with ice. Fat white flakes suddenly begin to spiral out of the iron-gray afternoon sky. She’s a child of the Italian Mediterranean, of sun and olive groves and sun-spangled ocean, and she’s never before been to the mountains. Now her young heart races with adventure. It’s so beautiful: the snow, the steeply rising land, the valleys crowded with trees and purple shadows, sprinkled with small villages. And even when Death suddenly comes, it has a terrible beauty, all dressed resplendently in white. Her mother sees the avalanche first, to the right of the roadway and high above, and she cries out in alarm. Rita looks through the side window, sees the wall of white farther up the mountain, sliding down, growing as rapidly as a storm wave sweeping across the ocean toward shore, casting up clouds of snow like sea spray, silent at first, so white and silent and beautiful that she can hardly believe it can hurt them. Her father says, “We can outrun it,” and he sounds scared as he jams his foot on the accelerator, and her mother says, “Hurry, for God’s sake, hurry,” and it comes onward, silent and white and huge and dazzling and bigger by the second…silent…then a barely audible rumble like distant thunder….
Rita heard strange sounds. Hollow, faraway voices. Shouting or lamenting. Like the voices of the damned faintly wailing for surcease from suffering, issuing from the ether above a séance table.
Then she realized that it was only a single voice. Her own. She was making hard, panicky sounds into her face mask, but since her ears weren’t in the mask, she heard her own cries only as they vibrated through the bones of her face. If they sounded like the wails of a damned soul, that was because, at the moment, Hell was a place within her, a dark corner in her own heart.
She squinted past Brian and desperately concentrated on the shadowy shape farther along the line: Harry. He was dimly visible in the murk, kicking down into the black void, so near and yet so far away. Twelve or fifteen feet separated Rita from Brian; count six feet for the kid, and maybe twelve feet between him and Harry: thirty or thirty-five feet altogether, separating her from her husband. It seemed like a mile. As long as she thought about Harry and kept in mind the good times that they would have together when this ordeal ended, she was able to stop screaming into her face mask and continue swimming. Paris. The Hotel George V. A bottle of fine champagne. His kiss. His touch. They would share it all again if she just didn’t let her fears overwhelm her.
Harry glanced back toward Rita. She was still where she should be, following Brian along the communications line.
Looking ahead again, he told himself that he was excessively worried about her. In general, women were supposed to have greater endurance than men. If that was true, it was especially true of this woman.
He smiled to himself and said, “Hang in there,” as though she could hear him.
Ahead of Harry, when they were perhaps a hundred fifty feet down the dark tunnel, Roger Breskin finally paused for a rest. He performed a somersault as though engaged in a water ballet and turned around on the line until he faced Harry in a more natural position: head up and feet down.
Five yards behind Roger, Harry also paused and was about to do a somersault of his own when Roger’s halogen lamp winked out. Two lights still glowed behind Harry, but the beams were diffused by the cloudy water and didn’t reach him or Roger. He was enveloped in darkness.
An instant later Breskin collided with him. Harry couldn’t hold on to the communications wire. They tumbled down and away into the blackness, at a descending angle toward the tunnel wall, and for an instant Harry didn’t understand what was happening. Then he felt a hand clawing at his throat, and he knew that he was in trouble. He flailed at Breskin, putting all his strength into the blows, but the water absorbed the energy of his punches and transformed them into playful pats.
Breskin’s hand closed tightly around Harry’s throat. Harry tried to wrench his head away, pull back, but he couldn’t escape. The weight lifter had an iron grip.
Breskin drove a knee into Harry’s stomach, but the water worked against him, slowing and cushioning the blow.
Harder and sooner than he had expected, Harry’s back thumped against the tunnel wall, and pain coruscated along his spine. The bigger man pinned him against the ice.
The two remaining halogen lamps—one held by George and one by Pete—were far above and about twenty feet farther toward the center of the tunnel, vaguely luminous ghost lights haunting the cloudy water. Harry was essentially blind. Even at close range, he could not see his assailant.
The hand at his throat slipped higher, pawed at his chin. His face mask was torn off.
With that strategic stroke, Harry was denied his breath and what little vision he’d had, and he was exposed to the killing cold of the water. Helpless, disoriented, he was no longer a threat to Breskin, and the big man let him go.
The cold was like a fist
ful of nails rammed hard into his face, and his body heat seemed to pour out as though it were a hot liquid streaming through the resultant punctures.
Terrified, on the verge of panic but aware that panic might be the death of him, Harry rolled away into the darkness, grappling behind himself for the precious mask that floated at the end of his air hose.
A second after the lamp went out at the head of the procession, Rita realized what was wrong: Breskin was the would-be killer of Brian Dougherty. And a second after that, she knew what she had to do.
Although she couldn’t see Harry or Breskin in the gloom below, she was certain that the two men were struggling for their lives. As tough as he was, Harry wouldn’t stand much of a chance against an experienced diver. She started to go to his aid, but that was a foolish idea, and she rejected it at once. Emotionally, she was driven toward Harry, but she dared not lose control of her emotions, or they might all die. If Harry was no match for Roger Breskin, then neither was she. The best thing that she could do was trust in Harry to survive, one way or another, and meanwhile fade into the darkness away from the communications wire, wait for her chance, and be prepared to come in behind Breskin when he went after Brian.
She let go of the line and swam out of the amber light from George Lin’s lamp, which glowed behind her and silhouetted her for Breskin. Praying that George wouldn’t follow her and blow her cover, she soon came up against the wall of the tunnel, the smooth curve of…ice.
The rumble swells into a roar, and again her father says, “We’ll outrun it,” but his words are now more of a prayer than a promise. The great white wall comes down down down down, and her mother screams….
Rita shook off the past and strove to repress her fear of the ice against which she pressed. The wall wasn’t going to collapse on her. It was solid, hundreds of feet thick, and until the packages of plastique were detonated at midnight, it was under no pressure great enough to cause it to implode.
Swinging around, putting her back to the wall, she looked out toward the commotion along the communications wire. She resisted the steady downward pull of her weight belt by treading water and pressing one hand tightly against the ice at her side.
The ice wasn’t a living thing, not a conscious entity. She knew better than that. Yet she felt as though it wanted her. She could sense its yearning, its hunger, its conviction that she belonged to it. She would not have been surprised if a mouth had opened in the wall under her hand, savagely biting it off at the wrist or opening wider still and swallowing her whole.
She tasted blood. She was struggling so hard to repress her burgeoning terror that she had bitten into her lower lip. The salty, coppery taste—and the pain—helped clear her mind and focus her on the real threat to her survival.
In the center of the tunnel, Roger Breskin soared out of the black depths and into the dim light from George Lin’s lamp.
Harry had vanished into the abyss below, which suddenly seemed to bore away not merely thousands of feet but to eternity.
Breskin went straight for Brian.
Clearly, Brian had just begun to understand what was happening. He would never be able to move fast enough to escape Breskin, even though he was also an experienced diver.
Rita pushed away from the wall and swam in behind the attacker, wishing she had a weapon, hoping that the element of surprise would be all the advantage that she needed.
As Brian saw Roger Breskin soar like a shark from the lightless depths, he recalled a conversation they’d had earlier in the day, just after they’d rescued George from the ledge on the flank of the iceberg. Brian had been hoisted back to the top of the cliff, shaking, weak with relief:
Incredible.
What are you talking about?
Didn’t expect to make it.
You didn’t trust me?
It wasn’t that. I thought the rope would snap or the cliff crack apart or something.
You’re going to die. But this wasn’t your place. It wasn’t the right time.
Brian had thought that Roger was being uncharacteristically philosophical. Now he realized that it had been a blunt threat, a heartfelt promise of violence.
Maybe Breskin hadn’t wanted George to be a witness, or maybe he hadn’t struck earlier for other, inexplicable, and insane reasons of his own. This time, he had more than one witness, but he seemed not to care.
Even as that conversation replayed in Brian’s memory, he tried to turn from Breskin and kick toward the tunnel wall, but they collided and tumbled away together into the darkness. Breskin’s powerful legs encircled Brian, clamping like a crab pincer. Then a hand at his throat. At his face mask. No!
George Lin thought that Russian divers from the submarine were attacking them.
From the moment the Russians had offered to help, George had known that they had some trick in mind. He’d been trying to figure what it might be, but he hadn’t thought of this: a murderous act of treachery deep in the tunnel. Why should they go to so much trouble to kill a group of Western scientists who were already destined to be blown to bits or dumped into a deadly cold sea at midnight? This was senseless, pointless lunacy, but on the other hand, he knew that nothing the communists had ever done made sense, not anywhere in the world, not in Russia or in China or anywhere else, not at any time during their reign of terror. Their ideology was nothing but a mad hunger for unrestrained power, politics as a cult religion divorced from morality and reason, and their bloody rampages and bottomless cruelty could never be analyzed or understood by anyone not of their mad persuasion.
He preferred to swim straight to the top of the tunnel, clamber out of the pool, return to the top of the ice, find a blasting shaft, lie down upon it, and let the midnight explosion tear him to pieces, because that would be a cleaner death than any at the hands of these people. But he couldn’t move. His left hand was curled around the communications wire so tightly that the two might have been soldered together. With his right hand, he gripped the halogen lamp so hard that his fingers ached.
He waited to die as his sister had died. As his mother had died. As his grandfather and grandmother had died. The past had surged forward to overwhelm the present.
He’d been a fool to have believed that he’d escaped the horror of his childhood. In the end, no lamb could escape the slaughter.
The air hose trailed along the side of Harry’s head, and the diving mask was attached to the end of it, floating above him. He pulled the mask down and clamped it to his face. It was full of water, and he dared not breathe immediately, even though his lungs felt as though they were on fire. When he peeled up one corner of the rubber rim, the influx of oxygen-helium mixture forced the water out from behind the Plexiglas faceplate, and when all the water had been purged, he pressed that corner down tight again and sucked in a deep breath, another, another, spluttering and choking and gasping with relief. The slightly odd smell and taste of the gas was more delicious than anything that he had ever eaten or drunk before in his entire life.
His chest was sore, his eyes burned, and his headache was so fierce that his skull seemed to be splitting apart. He wanted only to hang where he was, suspended in the tenebrous sea, recuperating from the assault. But he thought of Rita, and he swam up toward the two remaining lights and a turmoil of shadows.
Brian gripped Breskin’s left wrist with both hands and tried to wrench the big man’s steely hand from his face, but he wasn’t able to resist. The diving mask was torn loose.
The sea was colder than the freezing point of ordinary water, but it still had not turned to ice because of its salt content. When it gushed across his face, the shock was nearly as painful as having a blazing torch shoved against his skin.
Nevertheless, Brian reacted so calmly that he surprised himself. He squeezed his eyelids shut before the water could flash-freeze the surface tissues of his eyeballs, clenched his teeth, and managed not to breathe either through his mouth or nose.
He couldn’t hold out long. A minute. A minute and a half. The
n he would breathe involuntarily, spasmodically—
Breskin clamped his legs tighter around Brian’s midsection, pushed his rubber-sheathed fingers between Brian’s compressed lips, and tried to force his mouth open.
Rita swam in behind and above Roger Breskin, into the sour light from George’s hand-held lamp. She glided onto Breskin’s back and wrapped her long legs around his waist as he had wrapped his legs around Brian.
With reflexes sharpened rather than dulled by maniacal frenzy, Breskin let go of Brian and seized Rita by the ankles.
She felt as though she was riding a wild horse. He twisted and bucked, a powerful beast, but she gripped him with her thighs and grabbed for his mask.
Sensing her intent, insane but not stupid, Breskin released her ankles and seized her wrists just as her hands touched the rim of his faceplate. He bent forward, kicked his flippers, did a somersault. Rolling through the water, he tore her hands from his face, and using the dynamics of the sea to achieve a leverage that she couldn’t hope to match, he pitched her away from him. She kicked furiously as she went, hoping to connect with the crazy bastard, but none of her kicks landed.
When she oriented herself again, she saw that Pete and Franz had descended on Breskin. Franz struggled to maintain a wristlock while Pete tried to pin at least one of the madman’s arms.
Breskin was a trained diver, however, and they were not. They were slow, clumsy, confused by the physics of the gravity-free realm in which they battled, while Breskin writhed as if he were an eel, supple and quick and fearfully strong, at home in deep water. He broke their hold on him, rammed an elbow into Pete’s face, ripped Pete’s mask over his head, and shoved him into Franz.
Brian was at the wire, fifteen feet below George Lin. Claude was with him. The Frenchman held Pete’s lamp in one hand and was using his free hand to steady Brian while the kid got the water out of his mask.