The rumble swells into a roar, and again her father says, “We’ll outrun it,” but his words are now more of a prayer than a promise. The great white wall comes down down down down, and her mother screams…
Rita shook off the past and strove to repress her fear of the ice against which she pressed. The wall wasn’t going to collapse on her. It was solid, hundreds of feet thick, and until the packages of plastique were detonated at midnight, it was under no pressure great enough to cause it to implode.
Swinging around, putting her back to the wall she looked out toward the commotion along the communications wire. She resisted the steady downward pull of her weight belt by treading water and pressing one hand tightly against the ice at her side.
The ice wasn’t a living thing, not a conscious entity. She knew better than that. Yet she felt as though it wanted her. She could sense its yearning, its hunger, its conviction that she belonged to it. She would not have been surprised if a mouth had opened in the wall under her hand, savagely biting it off at the wrist or opening wider still and swallowing her whole.
She tasted blood. She was struggling so hard to repress her burgeoning terror that she had bitten into her lower lip. The salty, coppery taste—and the pain—helped clear her mind and focus her on the real threat to her survival.
In the center of the tunnel, Roger Breskin roared out of the black depths and into the dim light from George Lin’s lamp.
Harry had vanished into the abyss below, which suddenly seemed to bore away not merely thousands of feet but to eternity.
Breskin went straight for Brian.
Clearly, Brian had just begun to understand what was happening. He would never be able to move fast enough to escape Breskin, even though he was an experienced diver.
Rita pushed away from the wall and swam in behind the attacker, wishing she had a weapon, hoping that the element of surprise would be all the advantage that she needed.
As Brian saw Roger Breskin soar like a shark from the lightless depths, he recalled a conversation they’d had earlier in the day, just after they’d rescued George from the ledge on the flank of the iceberg. Brian had been hoisted back to the top of the cliff, shaking, weak with relief:
Incredible.
What are you talking about?
Didn’t expect to make it.
You didn’t trust me?
It wasn’t that. I thought the rope would snap or the cliff crack apart or something.
You’re going to die. But this wasn’t you place. It wasn’t the right time.
Brian had thought that Roger was being uncharacteristically philosophical. Now he realized that it had been a blunt threat, a heartfelt promise of violence.
Maybe Breskin hadn’t wanted George to be a witness, or maybe he hadn’t struck earlier for other, inexplicable, and insane reasons of his own. This time, he had more than one witness, but he seemed not to care.
Even as that conversation replayed in Brian’s memory, he tried to turn from Breskin and kick toward the tunnel wall, but they collided and tumbled away together into the darkness. Breskin’s powerful legs encircled Brian, clamping like a crab pincer. Then a hand at his throat. At his face mask. No!
George Lin thought that Russian divers from the submarine were attacking them.
From the moment the Russians had offered to help, George had known that they had some trick in mind. He’d been trying to figure what it might be, but he hadn’t thought of this: a murderous act of treachery deep in the tunnel. Why should they go to so much trouble to kill a group of Western scientists who were already destined to be blown to bits or dumped into a deadly cold sea at midnight? This was senseless, pointless lunacy, but on the other hand, he knew that nothing the communists had ever done made sense, not anywhere in the world, not in Russia or in China or anywhere else, not at any time during their reign of terror. Their ideology was nothing but a mad hunger for unrestrained power, politics as a cult religion divorced from morality and reason, and their bloody rampages and bottomless cruelty could never be analyzed or understood by anyone not of their mad persuasion.