Under the Freeze

by George Bartram

  “I’m leaving for Cape Town at seven tonight.” He looked at Juana, who was pale but expressionless; Repin, on the other hand, seemed agitated. “The second chopper will fly me out to the Global Clipper and will stay aboard. We hope to be off the drift ice in four days. From there, I intend to have the choppers transport the Vairon to the polynya.”

  Juana said coldly, “And I am to go to Buenos Aires? On whose authority, please?”

  Laforet took another sheet of paper from his case and handed it to “Mr. Smith,” who handed it to Juana. “You will want to confirm this, of course.”

  She frowned as she read it. She looked not at Tarp, but at the former president. “I thought your government and mine were not in communication.”

  He cleared his throat. “This was kind of special,” he said. Talking to her seemed to embarrass him. She shrugged. “Well, I am going to Buenos Aires, then.”

  “And me?” Repin said. His agitation had given way to a fierce control. “What about me? What am I supposed to do — sit here with my French nursies and play patty-cake?”

  Tarp smiled grimly. “I want you to go to Moscow.”

  “Ah.” Repin grinned back. “Well, that is better than sitting in this cold house. At least in Moscow, there is vodka.” He clapped his hands together. “Of course, I will be killed as soon as I get there, but that is still better than sitting here getting French bruises on my backside. No offense, Monsieur Sous-Ministre!”

  “Naturally,” Laforet murmured.

  “You’re going in clandestinely,” Tarp said. “Once you’re in, can you get together a team of people to help you do something?”

  “What am I to do?”

  “Pope-Ginna is having an interview with some of your former colleagues in the country. I think they’ll go easy on him, and then they’ll let him go. I want you to be ready to snatch him. If they won’t let him leave the Soviet Union, I want you to grab him and bring him out. If they let him go, I want you to put somebody on the plane with him and I want you to take him the first chance you get. Can you do it?”

  Repin was quiet. The old lips came forward in that familiar expression that looked as if he were going to spit. “Naturally,” he said. He sipped the wine and savored it in his mouth with a new gusto.

  “You’ll have to cover the disappearance once you’ve got him. We don’t want to warn either Maxudov or Buenos Aires. You’ll have to take him very quickly and very quietly and then you’ll need a cover story. If it’s outside the Soviet Union, I think you can get away with a heart attack — that means buying off a doctor and a hospital. Then you’ll bring him where we can talk.”

  “Where?”

  “Maybe the ship. We’ll see.”

  Repin nodded happily. He could not hide his delight. When he looked at “Mr. Smith” he nodded again and held up a finger as if to say, Aha, you see! “How do I get in?” he said.

  Laforet was extricating a cigarette from his case. “I believe that will be my responsibility. Through Ho Chi Minh City.”

  “That is good. That is very, very good.” Repin’s little eyes were almost hidden as he grinned widely. “How soon?”

  “One hour. We could have you on your way sooner, but I assume you will wish to prepare yourself.”

  “Thank you, Monsieur Sous-Ministre.” Only Tarp knew that the two men had once been enemies, although neither had seen the other before. They had been on opposite sides until Dien Bien Phu had fallen. Laforet had lost; Repin had won. Laforet had said “Ho Chi Minh City” as if he had mentioned Paris or Chicago, not the city that had been Saigon, the Paris of Southeast Asia. Now, Repin became gracious. “Might I have one of your cigarettes?” he said.

  “They are sobranies,” Laforet answered. He held out his case. “I find that as I get older, my tastes become more Russian.”

  Repin took a cigarette and their eyes met. “We Russians have much to learn from you — wine, for example.” He accepted a light and the two men were quiet.

  Tarp stood up. “I understand there’s a packet for each of us in one of the cars. It will give contacts and codes. We’re routing through a French network for purposes of efficiency. Repin, I’m sorry, but we’ve cut Moscow out on this part because I think Maxudov’s still there and I think we have to act as if the whole Moscow system is corrupted. Now, let me say that both the French and the American involvements in this operation are very delicate and very deniable. Both countries are in it so that a bigger mess won’t result, but neither one is in it officially. Repin, if we bring this off, I’m to tell you that the Soviet leadership is to be reminded forcefully of both countries’ cooperation in pulling its ass out of the fire. Juana, the same thing goes for you in Cuba. Now, let me remind you all that the British are not in this one in any way, and any offer that seems to originate with the Brits is to be taken as a trap. They chose to stay out — I won’t speculate as to why just yet — and so they are to be treated as outsiders. Is that clear to everybody?”

  They all nodded.

  “We’ll be getting limited intelligence from Paris and less from Washington, and no tactical support from either. No wet work, that means. No hands-on help. You’re on your own.”

  He looked around the room. “All right?” Juana looked grim, Repin impatient. The former president seemed to have discovered that it was a very serious business indeed. “Let’s go,” Tarp said.

  He caught up with Repin at the door. “The French woman wants to go with you,” he said.

  “Not this time.”

  “No, not this time. But she wants to go back with you when you go for good. What are you going to tell her now?”

  “What do we ever tell them? ‘I’ll see you when I come back.’ Eh?”

  Later, he was in the upstairs room with Juana, holding her for an instant. He was ready to leave; she was waiting for the helicopter that would start her toward Buenos Aires.

  “Be careful,” she whispered into his shoulder.

  “And you,” he said. Half-jokingly he murmured, “When will I see you again?”

  “I’ll see you when I come back,” she said. In the weeks that he had been gone, her love had changed. It was mature now and it had been put into a large context — that of her own life, her own commitment. She was excited by her part in what was happening, and she would see him when she came back.

  Chapter 35

  The tanker’s bow rose with a wave and then seemed to hang there as if cantilevered over the wave, as if it might break in half; then the midsection rose, then the stem, and it was as if the entire vessel had been levitated magically, free suddenly of the water that had dragged at it like glue; and then the bow started down, ponderous as a bull’s head going down under the cape. There was an explosion of water around it, and the bow disappeared and came up again, white water streaming from it like drool from a mouth.

  “Christ,” the man with Tarp said.

  “Well?”

  “Christ, what weather.”

  The stern was starting down into the trough. The tanker looked like a football field sliding downhill.

  “It’s cold, yes.”

  “Cold! Jesus, Tarp, it’s cold!”

  The sea came on in long swells as if it were on rollers, a dirty gray-green carpet over which they lurched like something in a fun house. The wind had been blowing for a day and a night, straight into their teeth.

  “Are they going to make it?”

  They were looking at the tiny French submersible that sat a third of the way along the deck. Overhead, the two huge helicopters kept pace with the ship, one of them trailing the cable with which it would try to transport the Vairon.

  It was shaped like an egg. Isolated on the empty deck, it seemed puny, although it was in fact as big as a compact car, with room inside for two people, even for three on a trip like this one, when it had been stripped of some of its gear. There were three ports forward and a cluster of booms amidships that looked a little like a conning tower. Around its bow were powerful lights, and, retracted n
ow, a pair of jointed arms that were controlled from inside.

  The submersible’s pilot had been standing to their left on the deck. Now he moved toward them.

  “Alors,” he said sourly. “L’oeuf se crasse, eh?”

  “What’d he say?” the man with Tarp said. He was Gance, a good diver but a poor linguist.

  “He said they’re almost ready.”

  “He doesn’t sound too happy about it.”

  “He thinks they’re going to drop it.”

  The man behind them sucked in his breath as the cable tightened between the helicopter and the submersible. Something happened on the deck and men started to wave their arms, and he hissed, “Oh, la,” and began to make a sound in his throat like eh-eh-eh-eh-eh.

  “They got it aboard all right, what the hell,” Gance said. “They didn’t use the chopper.”

  “Christ, no, they used a big crane. It was doodle-zip the way they did it, like lifting a suitcase.”

  “That thing’s heavy.”

  “Christ, these big choppers haul tanks around. What the hell, it’s a piece of cake. Of course, they’re French.”

  The man behind them started to hum. It sounded like a wail. “Don’t look,” Tarp said to him in French.

  “Eh-eh-eh — that’s easy to say.”

  “Go have breakfast. They’ll be hours yet.”

  “Eh, when they drop my egg, I want to see it crack.” His face was very red from the cold. He had grizzled hair that was plastered down by a black watch cap; on his cheeks, the hairs of silver stubble gleamed like little nails. “That’s my child, that thing —” he said. He did a little dance on the steel deck because he was cold and tense.

  Gance looked sideways at Tarp. “Christ, tell him to cool it, will you?” he said.

  Tarp turned to the pilot. “My friend says it will go well.”

  “No offense, but your friend does not know shit from shoe polish. Does he speak French?”

  “No.”

  “Shit from shoe polish, I say it again.”

  “He meant well.”

  “Eh!” He jerked his head toward the helicopters. “So do those morons.”

  There was an iceberg off to their right, sitting majestically in the waves like an island; ahead there was a band of silver where the drift ice met the clouded sky. “That little egg has to travel a long way on the cable, my friend.”

  “Five hours, I know,” Tarp said.

  “Has it ever been done?”

  “They say they’ve done it with a truck. They say they can do it.”

  “Eh, of course they do. Morons.”

  Coils of plastic lay around the submersible on the deck. They formed an inflatable collar that had been jury-rigged from a boom designed to contain oil spills. If the helicopters actually got the Vairon to the open water inside the drift ice, the collar would stabilize it while Tarp and the others boarded. The pilot believed it might flip over or take on enough water to sink in rough seas. Tarp thought he was a neurotic fussbudget, but he was willing to concede that the man knew more about it than he did.

  The men on the deck hurried away from the submersible again. The helicopter’s motors got louder. One of the men waved. The helicopter seemed to grow as the noise of its engines rose to a roar, but the submersible clung to the deck.

  “Holy God,” the pilot muttered.

  “Go, go,” Gance chanted to himself. “Go, you mother, go.”

  The Vairon lifted suddenly, easily, and seemed to spring ten yards into the air. Tarp glanced at the Frenchman, who had his lower lip caught firmly between his front teeth. His cap was wadded in his fists.

  “Ooop, allez-oop!” he was saying.

  A cheer carried down the deck to them like a scrap of paper on the wind.

  “Go, you mother!”

  The white egg was moving into the sky and pulling ahead of the ship. When it was several hundred yards up, it leveled, hung there like a spider on a strand of its own web. Then the egg and the chopper began to move slowly toward the silver horizon.

  “Hey!” Gance was shouting. “Hey, man, hey, man, hey, how about that, man!” He was pounding the Frenchman on the shoulder. The pilot, still capless, was nodding his head and smiling, shrugging and pouting out his lower lip, bouncing up and down on his toes. He shook his cap in a gesture of victory.

  “Not bad for morons,” Tarp said to him.

  “If they don’t drop it now.”

  “How about a brandy all around?” He looked at Gance. “Brandy?”

  “Hey, you’re talking, man. I thought you didn’t touch it when you were diving.”

  “We’ve got hours and hours. Let’s go below.”

  Gance grinned at the Frenchman. “Brandy, Pierre? Huh? Vous comprendi, brandy?”

  “Brandy, oui, cognac.”

  “Pierre, you’re okay.”

  “Qu’est-ci qu’il a dit?”

  “He says you’re a good man.”

  “Why does he call me Pierre?”

  “He can’t pronounce your name.”

  “My name is Jean-Marie.”

  “I know, but he can’t get the sounds right.”

  Three-quarters of an hour later they climbed into the second helicopter, which had returned from flying watchdog on the first one. The tanker would keep station where it was, its captain refusing to go closer to the ice. If the weather cleared, a Russian satellite would pick it up, and Tarp wanted to move quickly.

  The chopper was as big inside as a bus. With only the three of them and their gear, it felt as big as a church. Gance began checking over the special suits he had brought. Surrounded now by the tools of his craft, he was content. He even whistled, but the sound was lost in the noise.

  Tarp looked down. The tanker was far behind. He could see a dozen icebergs; ahead, they seemed to merge into a solid mass.

  Jean-Marie was sprawled against one wall. He was doing something with a calculator.

  “What’s that?” Tarp shouted.

  “Figuring battery consumption!”

  “You’ve figured it twice before!”

  “I like to be sure!”

  Tarp moved back to Gance, who was checking the seals between a helmet and a suit. “Looks like a spaceman without the spaceman!” Tarp shouted.

  “Beautiful stuff! Beautiful! Four hundred feet in this mother! Beautiful!”

  Tarp had heard it all on the tanker. They had been four days together. If the Prinz von Homburg lay below three hundred and sixty feet, it would be beyond them; if it lay more than twenty miles from the polynya, they would not be able to reach it and return. He pinched the material of the suit that Gance was working on. It felt like very thick rubber with a nylon surface. It felt fragile. Tarp disliked the idea of deep diving in a self-contained suit; yet this was a state-of-the-art unit developed from NASA’s experience in space. There was no way to go after the Homburg in scuba gear and no way to go after it with umbilically connected equipment.

  “We won’t have much room in the sub with these suits on!”

  “I know!” Gance seemed pleased by the idea. Tarp moved to Jean-Marie and shouted, “We won’t have much room with those suits!”

  Jean-Marie looked at the suit that was spread out on the floor. “You won’t have any,” he said, and he went back to his calculator.

  But they had already been in the submersible with the suits on. There was virtually no room, it was true; Tarp had simply been venting his own concern about it. They had already found that they had to enter the Vairon in a definite order, Jean-Marie first; once inside, there was no changing places.

  Tarp watched the drift ice flow beneath them. The icebergs had given way to a vast blue-gray field that was marked with black lines like rivers and canals. There were crevices and ridges, miniature mountain ranges of ice, and cracks wide enough to take a big ship into.

  A cold desert, he thought. A very tough place to die. Yet they had seen whales that morning, and he knew there were organisms that lived in the water and even in the ic
e itself. Man is the alien here. Man is the soft one. Very fragile. He looked again at the suit, which, spread on the chopper floor, looked manlike but two-dimensional. Very fragile.

  They caught up with the other aircraft and kept pace with it for half an hour. The two pilots chatted. Tarp’s swung below the other and looked at the cable and the Vairon. Satisfied, it surged ahead. They reached the edge of the polynya and Tarp stationed himself behind the pilot. They swung west and began to drop sonar buoys.

  The chopper turned above a point of ice that jutted into open water. There were black dots on the ice.

  “Petrol!” he shouted. They had brought in fuel the day before.

  The satellite will spot that, Tarp thought. As soon as the clouds lift.

  They dropped more buoys and swung northeast. The pilot pointed. “We dropped them over there yesterday. No response.”

  He moved over the open water and placed three deep-water probes, which would sink to a predetermined depth and send back pulses from a floating antenna.

  “How thick is the ice?” Tarp shouted.

  The pilot made a face. “Near the edge, eight meters! Farther into the ice field — eighty meters, maybe.”

  “Is that from the sounders?”

  The pilot nodded. “It is like a dome. No ice in the middle, then very thin ice, then it gets thicker. Like a dome of water under the ice.”

  They dropped three more deep probes, then headed back toward the point and met the other helicopter as it approached the polynya. Below them, whitecaps flashed like lights on the dark water. Tarp moved into the cavernous midsection and found the other two still occupied with their work. He moved again restlessly to the cabin.

  “He has a chart,” the pilot said, nodding at the navigator, who sat behind him and to the right. Charts were spread on a table; electronic gear surrounded him on three sides.

  “We are here,” the navigator said. He seemed like a boy to Tarp. He touched a penciled map. “There are the probes. These lines are echo bars — they are clarified by a computer that adjusts for distance and so on. The red lines are ten-meter depths — of ice, not water. The very dark line is the edge of the ice.”