by Dean Koontz
Kicking away from Pete and Franz as they tumbled in disarray, Breskin streaked toward Brian again.
Rita glimpsed movement out of the corner of her eye, turned her head, and saw Harry shoot up from the darkness below.
Harry knew that Breskin didn’t see him coming. Certain that he had temporarily disabled all opposition, the big man spun away from Pete and Franz, kicked with all the power of his muscular legs, and went directly for his preferred prey. He was no doubt sure that he could deal swiftly with a man of Claude’s age and then finish Brian before the kid was able to clear his fouled mask and draw a restorative breath.
Rising under Breskin, Harry could have collided with him and hoped to deflect him from Brian. Instead, he kicked to one side, shot past the madman, and grabbed the air hose that connected his face mask to the pressurized tank on his back. Harry flutter-kicked again, soaring up, jerking the hose out of the clamp that held it to the feed valve at the top of the tank. Because he and Breskin were moving in different directions, the hose also uncoupled from the diving mask.
The icy water didn’t pour in through Roger’s mask coupling when the hose was torn loose. There must be a safety feature, a shutoff valve.
He fumbled for the hose, but he realized that it had been ripped away not merely from the mask but from the tank on his back. It was gone and couldn’t be reconnected.
Alarmed, he scissored his legs and went up toward the mouth of the tunnel as fast as he could. His only hope was to reach the surface.
Then he remembered that the pool in the domed ice cavern was more than a hundred fifty feet above him, too far to reach with the weight belt pulling him down, so he fumbled at his waist, trying to free himself of the burdensome lead. The release wasn’t where it ought to be, because the damn belt was made by the Russians, and he had never before used Russian equipment.
Roger stopped kicking so he could concentrate on the search for the belt release. At once he began to sink slowly back into the tunnel. He patted-tugged-wrenched at the belt, but he still could not find the release, Jesus, dear Jesus God Almighty, still couldn’t find it, and finally he knew that he had wasted too much time, didn’t dare waste another second, would have to get to the surface even with the hampering belt. Arms straight down at his sides, trying to be as sleek as an arrow, creating as little resistance to the water as possible, kicking smoothly, rhythmically, he struggled up, up. His chest ached, and his heart was hammering as if it would burst, and he couldn’t any longer resist the urge to breathe. He opened his mouth, exhaled explosively, desperately inhaled, but there was nothing to breathe except the meager breath that he had just expelled, which was even thinner the next time he exhaled. His lungs were ablaze, and he knew that the darkness around him was no longer that of the tunnel but a darkness behind his eyes. He would lose consciousness if he didn’t breathe, and if he passed out he would die. So he ripped off his mask and sucked a deep breath of the air in the domed cavern, except he was nowhere near the domed cavern, of course—why had he imagined that he’d reached the surface, how could he have been so stupid?—and he inhaled water so bitterly cold that pain shot through his teeth. He closed his mouth, choking violently, but at once he tried to breathe again. There was only more water, water, nothing but water. He clawed at the water with both hands, as if it were a thin curtain that he could tear apart to get to the blessed air just beyond it. Then he realized that he wasn’t kicking any longer, was sinking under the influence of the diving weights. He wasn’t clawing at the water any more either, just drifting down and down, gasping, and it felt as though he had more lead weights inside his chest than around his waist….
He saw that Death had neither a face of raw bone nor the face of a man. It was a woman. A pale, strong-jawed woman. She was not without some beauty. Her eyes were a lovely, translucent gray. Roger studied her face as it rose out of the water before him, and he realized that she was his mother, from whom he had learned so much, in whose arms he had first heard that the world was a hostile place and that people of exceptional evil secretly ruled ordinary men and women through interlocking conspiracies, with no intention but to crush the free spirit of everyone who defied them. And now, though Roger had made himself strong to resist those conspirators if they ever came for him, although he had applied himself to his studies and had earned two degrees in order to have the knowledge to outwit them, they had crushed him anyway. They had won, just as his mother had told him they would, just as they always won. But losing wasn’t so terrible. There was a peace in losing. Gray-haired, gray-eyed death smiling at him, and he wanted to kiss her, and she took him into her motherly embrace.
Harry watched as the corpse, lungs full of water and burdened with lead weights, drifted past them on its journey to the bottom of the sea. Air bubbles gushed from the tank on its back.
11:37
DETONATION IN TWENTY-THREE MINUTES
The tension had sharpened Nikita Gorov’s mind and had forced him to confront an unpleasant but undeniable truth. Fools and heroes, he saw now, were separated by a line so thin that it was the next thing to invisible. He had been so intent on being a hero. And for what? For whom? For a dead son? Heroism could not change the past. Nikki was dead and in the grave. Dead! And the crew of the Ilya Pogodin—the seventy-nine men under his command—were still very much alive. They were his responsibility. It was inexcusable to have risked their lives merely because, in some strange way, he wanted to fulfill an obligation to his dead son. He’d been playing hero, but he’d been only a fool.
Regardless of the danger, regardless of what he should have done, the submarine was committed to the rescue mission now. They couldn’t abandon it this close to success. Not unless those two sweating bulkheads began to show signs of structural deterioration. He had gotten his men into this, and it was up to him to get them out in a way that would save their hide without humiliating them. Men of their courage didn’t deserve to be humbled by his failure, but they surely would be worse than humbled in their own eyes if they turned tail now and ran without good reason. He’d been playing hero, but now he wanted nothing more than to make heroes of them in the eyes of the world, and get them home safely.
“Any change?” he asked the young technician reading the surface Fathometer.
“No, sir. The divers are stationary. They haven’t descended a foot in the last few minutes.”
The captain stared at the ceiling, as if he could see through the double hull and all the way up the long tunnel. What were they doing up there? What had gone wrong?
“Don’t they realize there’s no time left?” Zhukov said. “When those explosives split the iceberg at midnight, we’ve got to be out from under. We’ve got to be.”
Gorov checked the video displays. He looked at the clock. He pulled on his beard and said, “If they don’t start moving down again in five minutes, we’ll have to get out of here. One minute later than that, and they can’t make it aboard before midnight anyway.”
11:38.
Rita swam up to Claude and hugged him. He returned her embrace. Her eyes glistened with tears.
They pressed the faceplates of their diving masks flat against each other. When she spoke, he could hear her as if she were in another room. The Plexiglas conducted their voices well enough.
“Brian didn’t fall earlier tonight. He was clubbed, left to die. We didn’t know who did it. Until now.”
When Rita finished, Claude said, “I wondered what the hell—? I wanted to help subdue him, but Pete shoved this lamp into my hand and pushed me out of the way. I suddenly feel as old as I am.”
“You’re not even sixty.”
“Then I feel older than I am.”
She said, “We’re going to continue the descent. I’ll take that lamp back to Pete.”
“Is he all right?”
“Yes. Just a bloody nose when the mask was pulled up over his head. He’ll make it.”
“Something’s wrong with George.”
“Shock, I think. Harry’s exp
laining to him about Roger.”
“You’ve got tears on your cheeks,” Claude said.
“I know.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Harry’s alive.”
11:39.
As he followed Claude Jobert down the wire once more, Franz thought about what he would say to Rita if they reached the other side of midnight.
You handled yourself well. You’re amazing. You know, I once loved you. Hell, I still do. I never got over you. And I learned a lot from you, whether it was ever apparent or not. Oh, I’m still an asshole, yes, I admit it, but I’m slowly growing up. Old attitudes die hard. I’ve been acting like a total idiot these past months, quarrelsome with Harry and distant with you. But that’s finished. We can never be lovers again. I see what you and Harry have together, and it’s unique, more than you and I ever had or ever could have. But I’d like to be friends.
He hoped to God he lived to say all that.
11:40.
Brian swam down along the wire.
He wasn’t worried much about the ticking bombs overhead. He was increasingly convinced that he and the others would reach the submarine and survive the explosions. In the throes of the obsession about which Rita had warned him. he was worried instead about the book that he intended to write.
The theme would definitely be heroism. He had come to see that there were two basic forms of it. Heroism that was sought, as when a man climbed a mountain or challenged an angry bull in one of Madrid’s rings—because a man had to know his limits, heroism sought was important. It was far less valuable, however, than heroism unsought. Harry, Rita, and the others had put their lives on the line in their jobs because they believed that what they were doing would contribute to the betterment of the human condition, not because they wanted to test themselves. Yet, although they would deny it, they were heroes every day of the week. They were heroes in the way that cops and firemen were heroes, in the way that millions of mothers and fathers were quiet heroes for taking on the ominous responsibilities of supporting families and raising children to be good citizens, the way ministers were heroes to dare talk of God in a world that had come to doubt His existence and to mock those who still believed, the way many teachers were heroes when they went into schools racked by violence and nevertheless tried to teach kids what they would need to know to survive in a world that had no mercy for the uneducated. The first brand of heroism—heroism sought—had a distinct quality of selfishness, but heroism unsought was selfless. Brian understood now that it was this unsought heroism, not the tinsel glory of either politics or bullrings, that was the truest courage and the deepest virtue. When he had finished writing the book, when he had worked out all his thoughts on the subject, he would be ready to begin his adult life at last. And he was determined that quiet heroism would be the theme.
11:41.
The technician looked up from the surface-Fathometer graph. “They’re moving again.”
“Coming down?” Gorov asked.
“Yes, sir.”
The squawk box brought them the voice of the petty officer in the forward torpedo room. It contained a new note of urgency.
Taking the neck of the overhead microphone as gingerly as if he were handling a snake, Gorov said, “Go ahead.”
“We’ve got a lot more than a couple ounces of water on the deck now, Captain. Looks like a liter or two. The forward bulkhead is sweating all the way from overhead to deck.”
“Distortion of the rivet line?”
“No, sir.”
“Hear anything unusual with the stethoscope?”
“No, sir.”
“We’ll be on our way in ten minutes,” Gorov said.
11:42.
In places, the tunnel narrowed just enough for the halogen light to reflect off the ice, and then the fact of their imprisonment could not be as easily put out of mind as when darkness lay to all sides.
Rita was pulled continually between the past and the present, between death and life, courage and cowardice. Minute by minute, she expected her inner turmoil to subside, but it grew worse.
A stand of widely scattered trees spot the steep hillside above the alpine road. It’s not a dense forest, but maybe it’s enough of a barrier to break the force of the avalanche and dam the roaring flow: tall evergreens with thick trunks, ancient and strong. Then the white tide hits the trees, and they snap as though they’re breadsticks. Her mother screams, her father cries out, and Rita can’t look away from the onrushing wave of snow, a hundred feet high, growing, disappearing into the winter sky, huge, like the face of God. The juggernaut hits the Audi, tumbles the car, shoves it across the roadway, sweeps under and over it, casting it across the guardrail and into a ravine. An enwrapping whiteness all around. The car turns over, over again, then sleds sideways, down, down, rebounds from a tree, turns into the slide, races down once more in a great river of snow, with another impact, yet another. The windshield implodes, followed by a sudden stillness and a silence deeper than the silence in a deserted church.
Rita wrenched herself from the memory, making meaningless, pathetic sounds of terror.
George Lin was urging her on from behind.
She had stopped swimming.
Cursing herself, she kicked her feet and started down again.
11:43.
At three hundred fifty feet or thereabouts, having covered little more than half the distance to the Ilya Pogodin, Harry began to doubt that they could make it all the way down. He was aware of the incredible pressure, primarily because his eardrums kept popping. The roar of his own blood rushing through his veins and arteries was thunderous. He imagined he could hear faraway voices, fairy voices, but the words made no sense, and he figured that he’d really be in trouble when he understood what they were saying. He wondered if, like a submarine, he could collapse under extreme pressure and be squashed into a flat mess of blood and bones.
Earlier, on the shortwave radio, Lieutenant Timoshenko had offered several proofs that the descent could be made successfully, and Harry kept repeating a couple of them to himself: In Lake Maggiore, in 1961, Swiss and American divers reached seven hundred and thirty feet in scuba gear. Lake Maggiore. Seven hundred and thirty feet. 1961. Swiss and American divers. In 1990, Russian divers in more modern gear had been as deep as…he forgot. But deeper than Lake Maggiore. Swiss, Americans, Russians…It could be done. By well-equipped, professional divers anyway.
Four hundred feet.
11:44.
Following the wire farther into the shaft, George Lin told himself that the Russians weren’t communists any more. At least the communists weren’t in charge. Not yet. Maybe one day in the future, they would be back in power; evil never really died. But the men in the submarine were risking their lives, and they had no sinister motives. He tried to convince himself, but it was a hard sell, because he had lived too many years in fear of the red tide.
Canton. Autumn 1949. Three weeks before Chiang Kai-shek was driven from the mainland. George’s father had been away, making arrangements to spirit the family and its dwindling assets to the island nation of Taiwan. There were four other people in the house: his grandmother; his grandfather; his mother; his eleven-year-old sister, Yun-ti. At dawn, a contingent of Maoist guerrillas, seeking his father, invaded the house. Nine heavily armed men. His mother managed to hide him inside a fireplace, behind a heavy iron screen. Yun-ti was hidden elsewhere, but the men found her. As George watched from within the fireplace, his grandparents were beaten to their knees and then shot in the head. Their brains splattered the wall. In that same room, his mother and sister were raped by all nine men, repeatedly. Every degradation, every humiliation was perpetrated upon them. George was a child, not even seven years old: small, terrified, powerless. The guerrillas stayed until three o’clock the next morning, waiting for George’s father, and when they finally left, they slit Yun-ti’s throat. Then his mother’s throat. So much blood. His father had come home twelve hours later—and foun
d George still hiding in the fireplace, unable to speak. He remained silent for more than three years after they escaped to Taiwan. And when at last he had broken his silence, he had first spoken the names of his mother and sister. Speaking them, he’d wept inconsolably until a physician came to their house and administered a sedative.
Nevertheless, the men in the submarine below were Russians, not Chinese, and they weren’t communists any more. Perhaps they had never been true communists. After all, soldiers and sailors sometimes fought for their country even when they believed that the men running it were thugs and fools.
The men below would not be like those who had violated his mother and sister and then killed them. These were different people in a different time. They could be trusted. He must trust them.
Nevertheless, he was infinitely more afraid of the Pogodin’s crew than of all the high explosives in the world.
11:46.
“Officer’s mess to captain.”
“I read you.”
“That starboard bulkhead is streaming, Captain.”
“Buckling?”
“No, sir.”
“How much water?”
“Half a liter, sir.”
Trouble in both the torpedo room and the officer’s mess. They would soon have to get the hell out of there.
“Stethoscope?” Gorov asked.
“Lots of noise past the bulkhead, sir, but no standard stress signatures.”
“We’ll be on our way in five minutes.”
11:47.
With the submarine almost within reach, Harry remembered more reason to be hopeful. According to Lieutenant Timoshenko, British divers at Alverstoke, Hampshire, and French divers at Marseilles had reached fifteen hundred feet with advanced scuba gear in simulated chamber dives.