A week, Harry closed his eyes against the sight of the ice wall beyond the radio, for in that prismatic surface, he saw their fate too clearly. Even in thermal clothing, even sheltered from the wind, they could not survive for a week with no heat. They were virtually without food; hunger would weaken their resistance to the subzero temperatures.
“Harry, did you read me?”
He opened his eyes. “I read you. It doesn’t look good, does it? Then again, we’re drifting south, out of the bad weather.”
“I’ve been studying the charts here. Do you have any idea how many miles per day that berg of yours will travel?”
“At a guess… thirty, maybe forty.”
“That’s approximately the same figure I’ve arrived at with the charts. And do you know how much of that represents real southward movement?”
Harry thought about it. “Twenty miles per day?”
“At best. Perhaps as little as ten.”
“Ten. You’re sure? Strike that. Stupid of me. Of course, you’re sure. Just how large is this storm pattern?”
“Harry, it ranges one hundred and twenty miles south of your last known position. You’d need eight or ten days or even longer to get out of the blizzard to a place where those helicopters could reach you.”
“What about the UNGY trawlers?”
“The Americans have relayed the news to them. Both ships are making for you at their best possible speed. But according to Thule, seas are extremely rough even beyond the storm area. And those trawlers are two hundred and thirty miles away. Under the current conditions, their best speed won’t amount to much.”
They had to know precisely where they stood, no matter how tenuous their position might be. Harry said, “Can a ship that size push a hundred miles or more into a storm as bad as this one without being torn to pieces?”
“I think those two captains are courageous—but not suicidal,” Gunvald said flatly.
Harry agreed with that assessment.
“They’ll be forced to turn back,” Gunvald said.
Harry sighed, “Yeah, They won’t have any choice. Okay, Gunvald, I’ll call you again in fifteen minutes. We’ve got to have a conference here. There’s a chance we’ll think of something.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
Harry put the microphone on top of the radio. He stood and regarded the others. “You heard.”
Everyone in the ice cave was staring either at Harry or at the now silent radio. Pete, Roger, and Franz stood near the entrance; their goggles were in place, and they were ready to go outside and pick through the ruins of the temporary camp. Brian Dougherty had been studying a chart of the Greenland Sea and the North Atlantic; but listening to Gunvald, he had realized that pinpointing the location of the trawlers was useless, and he had folded the chart. Before Harry had called Edgeway Station, George Lin had been pacing from one end of the cave to the other, exercising his bruised muscles to prevent stiffness. Now he stood motionless, not even blinking, as if frozen alive. Rita and Claude knelt on the floor of the cave, where they’d been taking an inventory of the contents of a carton of foodstuffs that had been severely damaged by the collapsing pressure ridge. To Harry, for a moment, they seemed to be not real people but lifeless, mannequins in a strange tableau—perhaps because, without some great stroke of luck, they were already as good as dead.
Rita said what they were all thinking but what no one else cared to mention: “Even if the trawlers can reach us, they won’t be here until tomorrow at the earliest. They can’t possibly make it in time to take us aboard before midnight. And at midnight all sixty bombs go off.”
“We don’t know the size or the shape of the iceberg,” Fischer said. “Most of the charges may be in the ice shafts that are still part of the main winter field.”
Pete Johnson disagreed. “Claude, Harry, and I were at the end of the bomb line when the first tsunami passed under us. I think we followed a fairly direct course back to camp, the same route we took going out. So we must have driven right by or across all sixty charges. And I’d bet my right arm this berg isn’t anywhere near large enough to withstand all those concussions.”