After a short silence Brian cleared his throat. “You mean the iceberg’s going to be blown into a thousand pieces?”
No one responded.
“So we’re all going to be killed? Or dumped into the sea?”
“Same thing,” Roger Breskin said matter-of-factly. His bass voice rebounded hollowly from the ice walls. “The sea’s freezing. You wouldn’t last five minutes in it.”
“Isn’t there anything we can do to save ourselves?” Brian asked as his gaze traveled from one member of the team to another. “Surely there’s something we could do.”
Throughout the conversation, George Lin had been as motionless and quiet as a statue, but suddenly he turned and took three quick steps toward Dougherty. “Are you scared, boy? You should be scared. Your almighty family can’t bail you out of this one!”
Startled, Brian backed away from the angry man.
Lin’s hands were fisted at his sides. “How do you like being helpless?” He was shouting. “How do you like it? Your big, rich, politically powerful family doesn’t mean a goddamned thing out here. Now you know what it’s like for the rest of us, for all us little people. Now you have to scramble to save yourself. Just exactly like the rest of us.”
“That’s enough,” Harry said.
Lin turned on him. His face had been transformed by hatred. “His family sits back with all its money and privileges, isolated from reality but so damned sure of its moral superiority, yammering about how the rest of us should live, about how we should sacrifice for this or that noble cause. It was people like them who started the trouble in China, brought in Mao, lost us our homeland, tens of millions of people butchered. You let them get a foot in the door, and the communists come right after them. The barbarians and the Cossacks, the killers and the human animals storm right in after them. The—“
“Brian didn’t put us on this berg,” Harry said sharply. “And neither did his family. For God’s sake, George, he saved your life less than an hour ago.”
When Lin realized that he’d been ranting, the flush of anger drained from his cheeks. He seemed confused, then embarrassed. He shook his head as if to clear it. “I … I’m sorry.”
“Don’t tell me,” Harry said. “Tell Brian.”
Lin turned to Dougherty but didn’t look him in the face. “I’m sorry. I really am.”
“It’s all right,” Brian assured him.
“I don’t … I don’t know what came over me. You did save my life. Harry’s right.”
“Forget it, George.”
After a brief hesitation, Lin nodded and went to the far end of the cave. He walked back and forth, exercising his aching muscles, staring at the ice over which he trod.
Harry wondered what experiences in the little man’s past had prepared him to regard Brian Dougherty as an antagonist, which he had done since the day they’d met.
“Is there anything at all we can do to save ourselves?” Brian asked again, graciously dismissing the incident with Lin.
“Maybe,” Harry said. “First we’ve got to get some of those bombs out of the ice and defuse them.”
Fischer was amazed. “Impossible!”
“Most likely.”
“How could they ever be retrieved?” Fischer asked scornfully.
Claude rose to his feet beside the carton of half-ruined food. “It isn’t impossible. We’ve got an auxiliary drill, ice axes, and the power saw. If we had a lot of time and patience, we might be able to angle down toward each bomb, more or less dig steps in the ice. But, Harry, we needed a day and a half just to bury them. Digging them out will be hugely more difficult. We would need at least a week to retrieve them, maybe two.”
“We only have ten hours,” Fischer reminded them unnecessarily.
Leaving the niche in the wall by the cave entrance and stepping to the middle of the room, Pete Johnson said, “Wait a minute. You folks don’t listen to the man. Harry said we had to defuse some of the bombs, not all of them. And he didn’t say we’d have to dig them out, the way Claude’s proposing.” He looked at Harry. “You want to explain yourself?”