Icebound (10 page)

“Can either of them reach us?”

“The Norwegians are pretty much locked in by ice. The Americans have several Kaman Huskies at Thule. That’s their standard rescue helicopter. The Huskies have auxiliary fuel tanks and long-range capability. But conditions at ground level aren’t really good enough to allow them to lift off. Terrific winds. And by the time they got to you—if they
could
get to you—the weather would have deteriorated so much they probably wouldn’t be able to put down on your iceberg.”

“There doesn’t just happen to be an icebreaker or a battleship in our neighborhood?”

“The Americans say not.”

“So much for miracles.”

“Do you think you can ride it out?”

Harry said, “We haven’t taken an inventory of our remaining supplies, but I’m sure we don’t have enough fuel to keep us warm any longer than another twenty-four hours.”

A loud burst of static echoed like submachine-gun fire in the ice cave.

Gunvald hesitated. Then: “According to the latest forecasts, this is bigger than any other major weather pattern we’ve had all winter. We’re in for a week of bitter storms. One atop the other. Not even a brief respite between them.”

A week. Harry closed his eyes against the sight of the ice wall beyond the radio, for in that prismatic surface, he saw their fate too clearly. Even in thermal clothing, even sheltered from the wind, they could not survive for a week with no heat. They were virtually without food; hunger would weaken their resistance to the subzero temperatures.

“Harry, did you read me?”

He opened his eyes. “I read you. It doesn’t look good, does it? Then again, we’re drifting south, out of the bad weather.”

“I’ve been studying the charts here. Do you have any idea how many miles per day that berg of yours will travel?”

“At a guess…thirty, maybe forty.”

“That’s approximately the same figure I’ve arrived at with the charts. And do you know how much of that represents real southward movement?”

Harry thought about it. “Twenty miles per day?”

“At best. Perhaps as little as ten.”

“Ten. You’re sure? Strike that. Stupid of me. Of course, you’re sure. Just how large
is
this storm pattern?”

“Harry, it ranges one hundred and twenty miles south of your last known position. You’d need eight or ten days or even longer to get out of the blizzard to a place where those helicopters could reach you.”

“What about the UNGY trawlers?”

“The Americans have relayed the news to them. Both ships are making for you at their best possible speed. But according to Thule, seas are extremely rough even beyond the storm area. And those trawlers are two hundred and thirty miles away. Under the current conditions, their best speed won’t amount to much.”

They had to know precisely where they stood, no matter how tenuous their position might be. Harry said, “Can a ship that size push a hundred miles or more into a storm as bad as this one without being torn to pieces?”

“I think those two captains are courageous—but not suicidal,” Gunvald said flatly.

Harry agreed with that assessment.

“They’ll be forced to turn back,” Gunvald said.

Harry sighed. “Yeah. They won’t have any choice. Okay, Gunvald, I’ll call you again in fifteen minutes. We’ve got to have a conference here. There’s a chance we’ll think of something.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

Harry put the microphone on top of the radio. He stood and regarded the others. “You heard.”

Everyone in the ice cave was staring either at Harry or at the now silent radio. Pete, Roger, and Franz stood near the entrance; their goggles were in place, and they were ready to go outside and pick through the ruins of the temporary camp. Brian Dougherty had been studying a chart of the Greenland Sea and the North Atlantic; but listening to Gunvald, he had realized that pinpointing the location of the trawlers was useless, and he had folded the chart. Before Harry had called Edgeway Station, George Lin had been pacing from one end of the cave to the other, exercising his bruised muscles to prevent stiffness. Now he stood motionless, not even blinking, as if frozen alive. Rita and Claude knelt on the floor of the cave, where they’d been taking an inventory of the contents of a carton of foodstuffs that had been severely damaged by the collapsing pressure ridge. To Harry, for a moment, they seemed to be not real people but lifeless mannequins in a strange tableau—perhaps because, without some great stroke of luck, they were already as good as dead.

Rita said what they were all thinking but what no one else cared to mention: “Even if the trawlers can reach us, they won’t be here until tomorrow at the earliest. They can’t possibly make it in time to take us aboard before midnight. And at midnight all sixty bombs go off.”

“We don’t know the size or the shape of the iceberg,” Fischer said. “Most of the charges may be in the ice shafts that are still part of the main winter field.”

Pete Johnson disagreed. “Claude, Harry, and I were at the end of the bomb line when the first tsunami passed under us. I think we followed a fairly direct course back to camp, the same route we took going out. So we must have driven right by or across all sixty charges. And I’d bet my right arm this berg isn’t anywhere near large enough to withstand all those concussions.”

After a short silence Brian cleared his throat. “You mean the iceberg’s going to be blown into a thousand pieces?”

No one responded.

“So we’re all going to be killed? Or dumped into the sea?”

“Same thing,” Roger Breskin said matter-of-factly. His bass voice rebounded hollowly from the ice walls. “The sea’s
freezing.
You wouldn’t last five minutes in it.”

“Isn’t there anything we can do to save ourselves?” Brian asked as his gaze traveled from one member of the team to another. “Surely there’s
something
we could do.”

Throughout the conversation, George Lin had been as motionless and quiet as a statue, but suddenly he turned and took three quick steps toward Dougherty. “Are you scared, boy? You
should
be scared. Your almighty family can’t bail you out of this one!”

Startled, Brian backed away from the angry man.

Lin’s hands were fisted at his sides. “How do you like being helpless?” He was shouting. “How do you like it? Your big, rich, politically powerful family doesn’t mean a goddamned thing out here. Now you know what it’s like for the rest of us, for all us little people. Now you have to scramble to save yourself. Just exactly like the rest of us.”

“That’s enough,” Harry said.

Lin turned on him. His face had been transformed by hatred. “His family sits back with all its money and privileges, isolated from reality but so damned sure of its moral superiority, yammering about how the rest of us should live, about how we should sacrifice for this or that noble cause. It was people like them who started the trouble in China, brought in Mao, lost us our homeland, tens of millions of people butchered. You let them get a foot in the door, and the communists come right after them. The barbarians and the cossacks, the killers and the human animals storm right in after them. The—”

“Brian didn’t put us on this berg,” Harry said sharply. “And neither did his family. For God’s sake, George, he saved your life less than an hour ago.”

When Lin realized that he’d been ranting, the flush of anger drained from his cheeks. He seemed confused, then embarrassed. He shook his head as if to clear it. “I…I’m sorry.”

“Don’t tell me,” Harry said. “Tell Brian.”

Lin turned to Dougherty but didn’t look him in the face. “I’m sorry. I really am.”

“It’s all right,” Brian assured him.

“I don’t…I don’t know what came over me. You did save my life. Harry’s right.”

“Forget it, George.”

After a brief hesitation, Lin nodded and went to the far end of the cave. He walked back and forth, exercising his aching muscles, staring at the ice over which he trod.

Harry wondered what experiences in the little man’s past had prepared him to regard Brian Dougherty as an antagonist, which he had done since the day they’d met.

“Is there anything at all we can do to save ourselves?” Brian asked again, graciously dismissing the incident with Lin.

“Maybe,” Harry said. “First we’ve got to get some of those bombs out of the ice and defuse them.”

Fischer was amazed. “Impossible!”

“Most likely.”

“How could they ever be retrieved?” Fischer asked scornfully.

Claude rose to his feet beside the carton of half-ruined food. “It isn’t impossible. We’ve got an auxiliary drill, ice axes, and the power saw. If we had a lot of time and patience, we might be able to angle down toward each bomb, more or less dig steps in the ice. But, Harry, we needed a day and a half just to bury them. Digging them out will be hugely more difficult. We would need at least a week to retrieve them, maybe two.”

“We only have ten hours,” Fischer reminded them unnecessarily.

Leaving the niche in the wall by the cave entrance and stepping to the middle of the room, Pete Johnson said, “Wait a minute. You folks didn’t listen to the man. Harry said we had to defuse
some
of the bombs, not all of them. And he didn’t say we’d have to dig them out, the way Claude’s proposing.” He looked at Harry. “You want to explain yourself?”

“The nearest package of explosives is three hundred yards from our position. Nine hundred feet. If we can retrieve and disarm it, then we’ll be nine hundred and forty-five feet from the
next
nearest bomb. Each charge is forty-five feet from the one in front of it. So, if we take up ten of them, we’ll be over a quarter of a mile from the nearest explosion. The other fifty will detonate at midnight—but none of them will be directly under us. Our end of the iceberg might well survive the shock. With luck, it might be large enough to sustain us.”

“Might,” Fischer said sourly.

“It’s our best chance.”

“Not a good one,” the German noted.

“I didn’t say it was.”

“If we can’t
dig
up the explosives, which you apparently agree is out of the question, then how do we get to them?”

“With the auxiliary drill. Reopen the shafts.”

Fischer frowned. “Perhaps not so wise. What if we drill into a bomb casing?”

“It won’t explode,” Harry assured him.

Johnson said, “The plastic charge responds only to a certain voltage of electric current. Neither shock nor heat will do the job, Franz.”

“Besides,” Harry said, “the bits for the ice drill aren’t hard enough to cut through a steel casing.”

“And when we’ve opened the shaft?” the German asked with obvious skepticism. “Just reel in the bomb by its chain, as if it’s a fish on a line?”

“Something like that.”

“No good. You’ll chew the chain to pieces when you reopen the shaft with the drill.”

“Not if we use the smaller bits. The original shaft is four inches in diameter. But the bomb is only two and a half inches in diameter. If we use a three-inch bit, we might be able to slip past the chain. After all, it’s pulled flat against the side of the original shaft.”

Franz Fischer wasn’t satisfied. “Even if you can open the hole without shredding the chain, it’ll still be welded to the ice, and so will the bomb casing.”

“We’ll snap the upper end of the chain to a snowmobile and try to pop it and the cylinder out of the shaft.”

“Won’t work,” Fischer said dismissively.

Harry nodded. “Maybe you’re right.”

“There must be another way.”

“Such as?”

Brian said, “We can’t just lie down and wait for the end, Franz. That doesn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense.” He turned to Harry. “But if your plan works, if we can get the bombs out of the ice, will it be possible to uncover ten of them in ten hours?”

“We won’t know till we try,” Harry said, resolutely refusing either to play into Fischer’s stubborn pessimism or to raise false hopes.

Pete Johnson said, “If we can’t get ten, maybe eight. If not eight, surely six. Every one we get buys us more security.”

“Even so,” Fischer said, his accent thickening as he became more defensive of his negativism, “what will we have gained? We’ll still be adrift on an iceberg, for God’s sake. We’ll still have enough fuel to keep us warm only until tomorrow afternoon. We’ll still freeze to death.”

Getting to her feet, Rita said, “Franz, goddammit, stop playing devil’s advocate, or whatever it is you’re doing. You’re a good man. You can help us survive. Or for the lack of your help, we may all die. Nobody is expendable here. Nobody is dead weight. We need you on our side, pulling with us.”

“My sentiments exactly,” Harry said. He pulled his hood over his head and laced it tightly beneath his chin. “And if we can buy some time by retrieving a few of the bombs, even just three or four—well, there’s always the chance we’ll be rescued sooner than seems possible right now.”

“How?” Roger asked.

“One of those trawlers—”

Glancing at Rita, but with no less contention in his voice, as though he and Harry were somehow engaged in a competition to win her backing, Fischer said, “You and Gunvald already agreed that the trawlers can’t possibly reach us.”

Harry shook his head emphatically. “Our fate here isn’t written in stone. We’re intelligent people. We can make our own fate if we put our minds to it. If one of those captains is damned good and
damned-all
bullheaded, and if he has a really top-flight crew, and if he’s a bit lucky, he might get through.”

“Too many ifs,” Roger Breskin said.

Fischer was grim. “If he’s Horatio Hornblower, if he’s the fucking grandfather of all the sailors who ever lived, if he’s not a mere man but a supernatural force of the sea, then I guess we’ll have a chance.”

“Well, if he
is
Horatio Hornblower,” Harry said impatiently, “if he does show up here tomorrow, all flags flying and sailing like the clappers, I want to be around to say hello.”

They were silent.

Harry said, “What about the rest of you?”

No one disagreed with him.

“All right, we’ll need every man on the bomb-recovery project,” Harry said, fitting the tinted goggles over his eyes. “Rita, will you stay here and watch over the radio, put through that call to Gunvald?”