Icebound (34 page)

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.

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.”