Icebound

by Dean Koontz

  Of course, that one qualifying phrase prevented the data from being as reassuring as he would have liked: “simulated chamber dives.”

  This was the real thing.

  The tunnel widened out. The ice walls receded until they no longer reflected any of the light.

  He had a sense of vastly greater space around him. The water was clearer than it had been above, probably because there were fewer particles of ice in it. Within seconds, he saw colored lights below, first green and then red. Then his hand-held light revealed a great, gray shape hovering in the abyss below him.

  Even when he arrived at the sail of the Ilya Pogodin and rested against the radar mast, Harry was not sanguine about their chances of surviving the tremendous pressure. He was half convinced that his lungs would explode with the force of grenades and that his blood vessels would pop like balloons. He didn’t know much about the effects of great pressure on the body; maybe his lungs wouldn’t explode, but the mental image was convincing.

  Furthermore, Harry didn’t like the looks of the submarine. Waiting for the others to catch up with him, he had nearly a minute to study the boat. All the running lights were aglow: red on the port side, green on the starboard side, white on the sail, a yellow overtaking light…Maybe his thought processes were affected by pressure or exhaustion, but the Pogodin seemed too gaudy to be substantial. After so much darkness, the boat resembled a damned slot machine or a Christmas tree. It seemed delicate, fragile, a construction of dark cellophane.

  11:49.

  Rita expected her fear to abate when she reached the bottom of the tunnel and the ice was no longer to every side of her. But the island of ice was still overhead, as high as a seventy-story building and four fifths of a mile long, as enormous as several blocks of Manhattan skyscrapers. She knew that it was buoyant and wouldn’t sink on her or crush her into the ocean floor, but she was terrified by the thought of it hanging over her, and she dared not look up.

  It’s cold in the Audi, because the engine is dead and no heat comes from the vents. Snow and shattered tree limbs have poured into the front seat, through the shattered windshield, covering the dashboard and burying her parents to the waist. They sit silently in the snow, both dead, and as time passes, Rita knows that she can’t survive in just her own winter coat until help comes. The dashboard lights are on, as is the dome light, so the interior of the Audi isn’t dark; she can see the snow pressing at every window, on all sides of the car; she is an intelligent girl, so she is aware that the snow may be a hundred feet deep, too deep to allow her to dig her way out and escape by herself. Rescuers will be a long time reaching her. She needs her father’s heavy coat, and after delaying a dangerously long time, she steels herself for what she will see, and she crawls into the front seat. Icicles of crimson blood hang from her father’s ears and nostrils, and her mother’s throat is pierced by the jagged end of a tree branch that was driven through the windshield by the avalanche. Their faces are blue-gray. Their open eyes are entirely white, because the frost has sheathed them. Rita takes one look and no more, keeps her head down, and begins to dig the snow away from her father. She is only six years old, an active child and strong for her age, but still so small. She would find it impossible to get the coat off her father’s stiffening corpse if his arms were through the sleeves. But during the drive he had shrugged out of the coat. Now his body sits on it, leans back against it, and with a lot of prying and tugging, she works it out from under him. She scrambles with her prize into the backseat where the snow doesn’t intrude, curls up, draws the coat tightly around her, and waits for help to come. She even keeps her head under his coat, trapping not merely her body heat but her breath inside the satiny lining, because her breath is warm. After a while she begins to have trouble staying awake, and she drifts out of the cold car into colder places within her own mind. Each time she rises blearily from her dangerous sleep, she is groggier than the time before, but she remembers to listen for the sounds of rescue. After what seems a long time, she hears instead—or thinks she hears—movement in the front seat: the crackle of ice breaking as her dead father and dead mother get tired of sitting there and decide to crawl into the back with her. They want to creep under the comfort of the big heavy coat. Crackle: the sound of bloody icicles falling out of his nostrils. Again, the crackle of ice: Here they come. The terrible crackle of ice: They must be climbing into the rear of the car. The crack-crack-crackle of ice…and is that a voice whispering her name, a familiar voice whispering her name? And a cold hand reaching under the coat, envious of her warmth….

  Someone touched Rita, and she cried out in horror, but at least the scream drove the Audi and avalanche into the past where they belonged.

  Pete was on one side of her, Franz on the other. Evidently, she had stopped moving, and they were holding her by her arms and bringing her down the final few fathoms between them. The submarine was directly ahead. She saw Harry holding on to the radar mast above the sail.

  11:50.

  Harry shuddered with relief at the sight of Rita between Pete and Franz, and a thrill of hope coursed through him.

  When the other six joined him, he half crawled and half swam along the sail, climbed down the short ladder to the bridge, and pulled himself along the line of cleats on the forward superstructure deck. If he floated off the boat, he would not be able to catch up with it easily, for the nine-knot current would not affect him in precisely the same way that it did the three-hundred-foot-long boat.

  His relationship to the submarine was much like that of an astronaut to his craft during a spacewalk: There was an illusion of stillness, though they were both moving at considerable speeds.

  Cautious, but conscious of the need for haste, he continued to pull himself hand over hand along the cleat line, searching for the air-lock hatch that Timoshenko had described over the radio.

  11:51.

  A warning siren shrieked.

  The green numerals and dimensional diagrams disappeared from the central video display directly above the command pad. Red letters replaced them: EMERGENCY.

  Gorov punched a console key labeled DISPLAY. The screen cleared immediately, and the siren shut off. A new message appeared in the usual green letters: MUZZLE DOOR COLLAPSED ON FORWARD TORPEDO TUBE NUMBER FIVE. TUBE FILLED WITH WATER TO BREECH DOOR.

  “It’s happening,” Zhukov said.

  Number five tube must have torqued when they had collided with the ice floe earlier in the night. Now the muzzle door at the outer hull had given way.

  Gorov said quickly, “Only the outer door collapsed. Just the muzzle door. Not the breech door. There’s no water in the boat. Not yet—and there won’t be.”

  A seaman monitoring one of the safety boards said, “Captain, our visitors have opened the topside hatch to the air lock.”

  “We’re going to make it,” Gorov told the control-room crew. “We’re damned well going to make it.”

  11:52.

  The air-lock hatch on the forward escape trunk was unlocked by someone at a control panel in the submarine. Harry gazed down into a tiny, brightly lighted, water-filled compartment. As Lieutenant Timoshenko had warned them, it was large enough to accommodate only four divers at a time—and even at that size, it was twice as large as the escape trunks on many submarines.

  One by one, Brian, Claude, Rita, and George went down into the round room and sat on the floor with their backs pressed to the walls.

  From outside, Harry closed the hatch, which was faster than waiting for someone inside to use a lanyard to pull it down and then spin the sealing wheel.

  He looked at his luminous watch.

  11:53.

  Gorov anxiously watched the bank of VDTs.

  “Escape trunk ready,” Zhukov said, repeating the message that he received on his headset, and simultaneously the same information appeared on one of the VDTs.

  “Process the divers,” Gorov said.

  11:54.

  In the air lock, Rita held on to wall grips as powerful
pumps extracted the water from the chamber in thirty seconds. She didn’t remove her mask, but continued to breathe the mixture of gases in her scuba tank, as they had been instructed to do.

  A hatch opened in the center of the floor. A young Russian seaman appeared, smiled almost shyly, and beckoned with one finger.

  They moved quickly from the air lock, down a ladder into the escape-chamber control room. The seaman climbed the ladder again behind them, pulled the inner hatch shut, sealed it, and descended quickly to the control panel. With a roar, water flooded into the upper chamber again.

  Acutely aware that a huge island of ice, mined with explosives, loomed directly above the boat, Rita went with the others into an adjoining decompression chamber.

  11:56.

  Harry tried the hatch again, and it swung open.

  He waited until Franz and Pete had entered, and then he followed them and dogged down the hatch from inside.

  They sat with their backs to the walls.

  He didn’t even have to look at his watch. An internal crisis clock told him that they were about four minutes from detonation.

  The drains dilated, and the pumps drained the escape trunk.

  11:57.

  A mountain of ice on the verge of violent disintegration loomed over them, and if it went to pieces when they were under it, the boat would most likely be battered to junk. Death would be so swift that many of them might not even have a chance to scream.

  Gorov pulled down an overhead microphone, called the maneuvering room, and ordered the boat into immediate full reverse.

  The maneuvering room confirmed the order, and a moment later the ship shuddered in response to the abrupt change of engine thrust.

  Gorov was thrown against the command-pad railing, and Zhukov almost fell.

  From the overhead speaker: “Maneuvering room to captain. Engines full reverse.”

  “Rudder amidships.”

  “Rudder amidships.”

  The iceberg was moving southward at nine knots. The submarine was reversing northward at ten…twelve…now fifteen knots against a nine-knot current, resulting in an effective separation speed of fifteen knots.

  Gorov didn’t know if that was sufficient speed to save them, but it was the best that they could do at the moment, because to build to greater speed, they needed more time than remained until detonation.

  “Ice overhead,” the surface-Fathometer operator announced. They were out from under the funnel-shaped concavity in the center of the berg. “Sixty feet. Ice overhead at sixty feet.”

  11:58.

  Harry entered the decompression chamber and sat beside Rita. They held hands and stared at his watch.

  11:59.

  The center of attention in the control room was the six-figure digital clock aft of the command pad. Nikita Gorov imagined that he could detect a twitch in his crewmen with the passage of each second:

  11:59:10.

  11:59:11.

  “Whichever way it goes,” Emil Zhukov said, “I’m glad that I named my son Nikita.”

  “You may have named him after a fool.”

  “But an interesting fool.”

  Gorov smiled.

  11:59:30.

  11:59:31.

  The technician at the surface-Fathometer said, “Clear water. No ice overhead.”

  “We’re out from under,” someone said.

  “But we’re not yet out of the way,” Gorov cautioned, aware that they were well within the fallout pattern of blast-hurled ice.

  11:59:46.

  11:59:47.

  “Clear water. No ice overhead.”

  11:59:49.

  For the second time in ten minutes, a warning siren sounded, and EMERGENCY flashed in red on one of the overhead screens.

  Gorov keyed up a display and found that another torpedo tube in the damaged area of the hull had partially succumbed: MUZZLE DOOR COLLAPSED ON FORWARD TORPEDO TUBE NUMBER FOUR. TUBE FILLED WITH WATER TO BREECH DOOR.

  Pulling down a microphone, Gorov shouted, “Captain to torpedo room! Abandon your position and seal all watertight doors.”

  “Oh, dear God,” said Emil Zhukov, the atheist.

  “The breech doors will hold,” Gorov said with conviction, and he prayed that he was right.

  11:59:59.

  12:00:00.

  “Brace yourselves!”

  “Clear water.”

  12:00:03.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Where is it?”

  12:00:07.

  The concussion hit them. Transmitted through the shattering iceberg to the water and through the water to the hull, it was a surprisingly mild and distant rumble. Gorov waited for the power of the shock waves to escalate, but it never did.

  The sonar operator reported massive fragmentation of the iceberg.

  By 12:02, however, when sonar had not located a substantial fragment of ice anywhere near the Ilya Pogodin, Gorov knew they were safe. “Take her up.”

  The control-room crew let out a cheer.

  AFTER…

  [1]

  JANUARY 18

  DUNDEE, SCOTLAND

  Shortly before noon, two and a half days after escaping from their prison of ice, the survivors arrived in Scotland.

  Ever since he had escaped on a small boat with his father from mainland China so many years ago, George Lin had not cared much for travel by sea, whether above or below the waves, and he was relieved to be on land once more.

  The weather was neither severe nor mild for winter in Dundee. The flat-gray sky was low and threatening. The temperature was twenty degrees Fahrenheit. A cold wind swept in from the North Sea, making the water leap and curl across the entire length of the Firth of Tay.

  More than one hundred newsmen from all over the world had flown to Dundee to report on the conclusion of the Edgeway story. With friendly sarcasm, a man from The New York Times had dubbed the place “Dandy Dundee” more than twenty-four hours ago, and the name had stuck. Among themselves, reporters apparently had gotten more conversational mileage from the bone-chilling weather than from the news event that they were there to cover.

  Even after debarking from the Pogodin at 12:30 and standing in the brisk breeze for nearly an hour, George still enjoyed the feel of the wind on his face. It smelled clean and so much better than the canned air of the submarine. And it was neither so cold nor so fierce that he needed to fear frostbite, which was a vast improvement over the weather with which he had lived for the past few months.

  Pacing energetically back and forth at the edge of the wharf, followed by a covey of reporters, he said, “This boat—isn’t she a beautiful sight?”

  Anchored in a deepwater berth behind him, the submarine was flying an enormous Russian flag and, for courtesy, a Scottish flag of somewhat smaller dimensions. Sixty-eight crewmen were in two facing lines on the main deck, all in dress blues and navy pea coats, standing at attention for a ceremonial inspection. Nikita Gorov, Emil Zhukov, and the other officers looked splendid in their uniforms and gray winter parade coats with brass buttons. A number of dignitaries were also on the bridge and on the railed gangplank that connected the submarine to the dock: a representative of Her Majesty’s government, the Russian ambassador to Britain, two of the ambassador’s aides, the mayor of Dundee, two representatives of the United Nations, and a handful of functionaries from the Russian trade embassy in Glasgow.

  One of the photographers asked George to pose beside a weathered concrete piling with the Ilya Pogodin as a backdrop. Smiling broadly, he obliged.

  A reporter asked him what it felt like to be a hero on the front pages of newspapers worldwide.

  “I’m no hero,” George said at once. He turned to point at the officers and crew of the boat behind him. “They are the heroes here.”

  [2]

  JANUARY 20

  EDGEWAY STATION

  During the night, the wind velocity began to fall for the first time in five days. By morning, ice spicules stopped ticking against the r
oof and walls of the communications shack, and soft snowflakes filled the air again. The violent storms in the extreme North Atlantic had begun to break up.

  Shortly after two o’clock that afternoon, Gunvald Larsson finally established contact with the United States military base at Thule, Greenland. The American radio operator immediately reported that the Edgeway Project had been suspended for the remainder of the winter. “We’ve been asked to bring you off the icecap. If we get the good weather they’re predicting, we should be able to come for you the day after tomorrow. Will that be enough time to close down your buildings and machinery?”

  “Yes, plenty of time,” Gunvald said, “but for God’s sake, never mind about that! What’s happened to the others? Are they alive?”

  The American was embarrassed. “Oh, I’m sorry. Of course, you couldn’t know, isolated as you’ve been.” He read two of the newspaper stories and then added what else he knew.

  After five days of continuous tension, Gunvald decided that a celebration was in order. He lit his pipe and broke out the vodka.

  [3]

  JANUARY 25

  E-MAIL MESSAGE TRANSMITTED FROM MONTEGO BAY, JAMAICA, TO PARIS, FRANCE

  Claude, Franz, and I got here January 23. Within an hour of arrival, both the taxi driver who brought us from the airport and the hotel clerk referred to us as “an unlikely group.” Man, they don’t know the half of it.

  Can’t get enough sun. Even I’m acquiring a tan.

  I think I’ve met the woman of my dreams. Her name is Majean. Franz got picked up in the bar by a modern woman who doesn’t believe in standard gender roles, and he’s trying to learn to let her open doors for herself if she wants. He’s piss-poor at it, and sometimes they fight over a door, but he’s learning. Meanwhile, Claude seems to be constantly in the company of a twenty-eight-year-old blonde who thinks he’s indescribably cute and swoons at his French accent.