As yet, too little of the line hung past the brink to enable him to reach overhead and get a firm grip on it. He was forced to take the strain entirely with his shoulders. Immediately a dull ache arose in his joints, across his back, and up the nape of his neck. The ache would rapidly escalate into a sharp pain.
“Come on, come on, Roger,” he muttered. “Be quick.”
Brian was facing the ice wall. He brushed and bumped against it as the punishing wind pummeled him.
He dared to turn his head to the side and peer down, expecting to be able to see nothing but a yawning black gulf. Away from the glare of the snowmobile lights, however, his eyes adjusted swiftly to the gloom, and the vague natural phosphorescence of the ice allowed him to make out the sheer palisade against which he hung, as well as the broken shelves of jagged blocks at the bottom. Sixty or seventy feet below, the whitecaps on the churning sea exhibited a ghostly luminescence of their own as they rose in serried ranks from out of the night and crashed with spumous fury against the iceberg.
Roger Breskin throttled the snowmobile down so far that it almost stalled.
He considered the problem one last time. Dougherty was six feet tall, and the ledge was twenty feet below; therefore, he had to lower Dougherty about twenty feet in order to put him on the ledge and allow him six feet of line to ensure him sufficient mobility to deal with George Lin. They had marked off twenty feet of the line with a swatch of bright red cloth, so when that marker disappeared over the brink, Dougherty would be in position. But the rope had to be let down as slowly as possible, or the kid might be knocked unconscious against the side of the iceberg.
Furthermore, the snowmobile was only forty feet from the precipice; if the machine slid forward too fast, Roger might not be able to stop in time to save himself, let alone Dougherty and Lin. He was worried that the sled’s lowest speed would prove dangerously fast for this job, and he hesitated now that he was ready to begin.
A violent gust of wind hammered Brian from behind and to the right, pressing him against the face of the cliff but also pushing him leftward, so he hung at a slight angle. When the wind relented after a moment, declining to about thirty miles an hour, he rocked back to the right, then began to swing gently like a pendulum, in a two- or three-foot arc.
He squinted up at the point where the rope met the edge of the cliff. Even though he had carefully smoothed the ice with burning gasoline, any friction whatsoever was bound to wear on the nylon line.
He closed his eyes and slumped in the harness, waiting to be lowered onto the ledge. His mouth was as dry as that of any desert wanderer, and his heart was beating so fast and hard that it seemed capable of cracking his ribs.
Because Roger was highly experienced with the snowmobile, it had seemed logical and reasonable that Brian should be the one to go down to retrieve George Lin. Now he wished that he himself had been the snowmobile expert. What the hell was taking so long?
His impatience evaporated when he suddenly dropped as if the rope had been cut. He landed on the ledge with such force that pain shot up his legs to the top of his spine. His knees crumbled as though they were sodden cardboard. He fell against the face of the cliff, bounced off, and toppled off the narrow ledge, out into the wind-shattered night.
He was too terrified to scream.
The snowmobile lurched and rushed forward too fast.
Roger hit the brakes immediately after he released them. The red cloth vanished over the brink, but the machine was still moving. Because the ice had been swept free of snow and polished by the incessant wind, it provided little traction. As smoothly as a shuffleboard puck gliding along polished pine, the snowmobile slid another ten feet, headlights spearing out into an eternal blackness, before it finally stopped less than ten feet from the edge of the cliff.