He saw that Death had neither a face of raw bone nor the face of a man. It was a woman. A pale, strong-jawed woman. She was not without some beauty. Her eyes were a lovely, translucent gray. Roger studied her face as it rose out of the water before him, and he realized that she was his mother, from whom he had learned so much, in whose arms he had first hear that the world was a hostile place and that people of exceptional evil secretly ruled ordinary men and women through interlocking conspiracies, with no intention but to crush the free spirit of everyone who defied them. And now, through Roger had made himself strong to resist those conspirators if they ever came after him, although he had applied himself to his studies and had earned two degrees in order to have the knowledge to outwit them, they had crushed him anyway. They had won, just as his mother had told him they would, just as they always won. But losing wasn’t so terrible. There was a peace in losing. Gray-haired, gray-eyed death smiling at him, and he wanted to kiss her, and she took him into her motherly embrace.
Harry watched as the corpse, lungs full of water and burdened with lead weights, drifted past them on its journey to the bottom of the sea. Air bubbles gushed from the tank on its back.
11:37
DETONATION IN TWENTY-THREE MINUTES
The tension had sharpened Nikita Gorov’s mind and he forced him to confront an unpleasant but undeniable truth. Fools and heroes, he saw now, were separated by a line so thin that it was the next thing to invisible. He had been so intent on being a hero. And for what? For whom? For a dead son? Heroism could not change the past. Nikki was dead and in the grave. Dead! And the crew of the Ilya Pogodin—the seventy-nine men under his command—were still very much alive. They were his responsibility. It was inexcusable to have risked their lives merely because, in some strange way, he wanted to fulfill an obligation to his dead son. He’d been playing hero, but he’d been only a fool.
Regardless of the danger, regardless of what he should have done, the submarine was committed to the rescue mission now. They couldn’t abandon it this close to success. Not unless those two sweating bulkhead began to show signs of structural deterioration. He had gotten his men into this, and it was up to him to get them out in a way that would save their hide without humiliating them. Men of their courage didn’t deserve to be humbled by his failure, but they surely would be worse than humbled in their own eyes if they turned tail now and ran without good reason. He’d been playing hero, but now he wanted nothing more than to make heroes of them in the eyes of the world, and get them home safely.
“Any change?” he asked the young technician reading the surface Fathometer.
“No, sir. The divers are stationary. They haven’t descended a foot in the last few minutes.”
The captain stared at the ceiling, as if he could see through the double hull and all the way up the long tunnel. What were they doing up there. What had gone wrong?
“Don’t they realize there’s no time left?” Zhukov said. “When those explosives split the iceberg at midnight, we’ve got to be out from under. We’ve got to be.”
Gorov checked the video displays. He looked at the clock. He pulled on his beard and said, “If they don’t start moving down again in five minutes, we’ll have to get out of here. One minute later than that, and they can’t make it aboard before midnight anyway.”
11:38
Rita swam up to Claude and hugged him. He returned her embrace. Her eyes glistened with tears.
They pressed the faceplates of their diving masks flat against each other. When she spoke, he could hear her as if she were in another room. The Plexiglas conducted their voices well enough.
“Brian didn’t fall earlier tonight. He was clubbed, left to die. We didn’t know who did it. Until now.”