ICEBOUND By Dean Koontz

“Distortion of the rivet line?”

“No, sir.”

“Hear anything unusual with the stethoscope?”

“No, sir.”

“We’ll be on our way in ten minutes,” Gorov said.

11:42

In places, the tunnel narrowed just enough for the halogen light to reflect off the ice, and then the face of their imprisonment could not be as easily put out of mind as when darkness lay to all sides.

Rita was pulled continually between the past and the present, between death and life, courage and cowardice. Minute by minute, she expected her inner turmoil to subside, but it grew worse.

A stand of widely scattered trees spot the steep hillside above the alpine road. It’s not a dense forest, but maybe it’s enough of a barrier to break the force of the avalanche and dam the roaring flow: tall evergreens with thick trunks, ancient and strong. Then the white tide hits the trees, and they snap as though they’re breadsticks. Her mother screams, her father cries out, and Rita can’t look away from the onrushing wave of snow, a hundred feet high, growing, disappearing into the winter sky, huge, like the face of God. The juggernaut hits the Audi, tumbles the car, shoves it across the roadway, sweeps under and over it, casting it across the guardrail and into a ravine. An enwrapping whiteness all around. The car turns over, over again, the sleds sideways, down, down, rebounds from a tree, turns into the slide, races down once more in a great river of snow, with another impact, yet another. The windshield implodes, followed by a sudden stillness and a silence deeper than the silence in a deserted church.

Rita wrenched herself from the memory, making meaningless, pathetic sounds of terror.

George Lin was urging her on from behind.

She had stopped swimming.

Cursing herself, she kicked her feet and started down again.

11:43

At three hundred fifty feet or thereabouts, having covered little more than half the distance to the Ilya Pogodin, Harry began to doubt that they could make it all the way down. He was aware of the incredible pressure, primarily because his eardrums kept popping. The roar of his own blood rushing through his veins and arteries were thunderous. He imagined he could hear faraway voices, fairy voices, but the words made no sense, and he figured that he’d really be in trouble when he understood what they were saying. He wondered if, like a submarine, he could collapse under extreme pressure and he squashed into a flat mess of blood and bones.

Earlier, on the shortwave radio, Lieutenant Timoshenko had offered several proofs that the descent could be made successfully, and Harry kept repeating a couple of them to himself: In Lake Maggiore, in 1961, Swiss and American divers reached seven hundred and thirty feet in scuba gear. Lake Maggiore. Seven hundred and thirty feet. 1961. Swiss and American divers. In 1990, Russian divers in more modern gear had been as deep as … he forgot. But deeper than Lake Maggiore, Swiss, Americans, Russians… It could be done. By well-equipped, professional divers anyway.

Four hundred feet.

11:44

Following the wire farther into the shaft, George Lin told himself that the Russians weren’t communists any more. At least the communists weren’t in charge. Not yet. Maybe one day in the future, they would be back in power; evil never really died. But the men in the submarine were risking their lives, and they had no sinister motives. He tried to convince himself, but it was a hard sell, because he had lived too many years in fear of the red tide.

Canton. Autumn 1949. three weeks before Chiang Kia-shek was driven from the mainland. George’s father had been away, making arrangements to spirit the family and its dwindling assets to the island nation of Taiwan. There were four other people in the house: his grandmother; his grandfather; his mother; his eleven-year old sister, Yun-ti. At dawn, a contingent of Maoist guerrillas, seeking his father, invaded the house. Nine heavily armed men. His mother managed to hide him inside a fireplace, behind a heavy iron screen. Yun-ti was hidden elsewhere, but the men found her. As George watched from within the fireplace, his grandparents were beaten to their knees and then shot in the head. Their brains splattered the wall. In that same room, his mother and sister were raped by all nine men, repeatedly. Every degradation, every humiliation was perpetrated upon them. George was a child, not even seven years old: small, terrified, powerless. The guerrillas stayed until three o’clock the next morning, waiting for George’s father, and when they finally left, they slit Yun-ti’s throat. Then his mother’s throat. So much blood. His father had come home twelve hours later—and found George still hiding in the fireplace, unable to speak. He remained silent for more than three years after they escaped to Taiwan. And when at last he had broken his silence, he had first spoken the names of his mother and sister. Speaking them, he’d wept inconsolably until a physician came to their house and administered a sedative.

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