Someone rapped discreetly on the cabin door. Like a faint note reverberating in the bronze hollow of a bell, the knock echoed softly in the small room.
Gorov returned from the past and looked up from the silver-framed photograph. “Yes?”
“Timoshenko, sir.”
The captain put down the picture and turned away from the desk. “Come in, Lieutenant.”
The door opened, and Timoshenko peered in at him. “We’ve been intercepting a series of messages you ought to read.”
“About what?”
“That United Nations study group. They call their base Edgeway Station. Remember it?”
“Of course.”
“Well, they’re in trouble.”
2:46
Harry Carpenter fixed the steel chain to a carabiner and the carabiner to the frame-mounted tow ring on the back of the snowmobile. “Now we just need a little luck.”
“It’ll hold,” Claude said, patting the chain. He was kneeling on the ice beside Harry with his back to the wind.
“I’m not worried about it breaking,” Harry said, getting wearily to his feet and stretching.
The chain looked delicate, almost as if it had been fashioned by a jeweler. But it was four-thousand-pound test, after all. It should be more than strong enough for the task at hand.
The snowmobile was parked virtually on top of the reopened blasting shaft. Inside, behind the slightly misted Plexiglas, Roger Breskin was at the controls, watching the rearview mirror for the go-ahead sign from Harry.
Once he had pulled his snow mask over his mouth and nose, Harry signaled Breskin to begin. Then he turned into the wind and stared at the small, perfectly round hole in the ice.
Pete Johnson knelt to one side of the shaft, waiting for the snowmobile to get out of his way so he could monitor the progress of the bomb when it began to move. Brian, Fischer, and Lin had returned to the other snowmobiles to get warm.
After he revved the engine several times, Roger slipped the sled into gear. The machine moved less than a yard before the chain held it. The engine noise changed pitch, and gradually its shriek became louder than the wailing wind.
The chain was stretched so tight that Harry imagined it might produce, if plucked, a high note worthy of any operatic soprano.
But the bomb did not move. Not an inch.
The chain appeared to vibrate. Breskin accelerated.
Despite what he had said to Claude, Harry began to think that the chain would snap.
The sled was at peak power, screaming.
With a crack like a rifle shot, the links of the chain broke out of the side of the new shaft in which they had been frozen, and the cylinder tore free of its icy bed. The snowmobile surged forward, the chain remained taut, and in the shaft, the bomb scraped and clattered upward.
Pete Johnson got to his feet and straddled the hole as Harry and Jobert joined him. Directing a flashlight into the narrow black well, he peered down for a moment and then signaled Breskin to stop. Grasping the chain with both hands, he hoisted the tubular pack of explosives halfway out of the shaft and, with Harry’s help, extracted it completely. They laid it on the ice.
One down. Nine to go.
2:58
Gunvald Larsson was adding canned milk to his mug of coffee when the call came through from the United States military base at Thule, Greenland. He put down the milk and hurried to the shortwave set.
“This is Larsson at Edgeway. Reading you clearly. Go ahead, please.”
The communications officer at Thule had a strong, mellifluous voice that seemed impervious to static. “Have you heard anything more from your lost sheep?”
“No. They’re busy. Mrs. Carpenter has left the radio in the ice cave while she salvages whatever she can from the ruins of their temporary camp. I don’t expect her to call unless there’s a drastic change in their situation.”
“How’s the weather at Edgeway?”
“Terrible.”
“Here too. And going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Wind speed and wave heights are setting storm records on the North Atlantic.”
Gunvald frowned at the radio. “Are you trying to tell me the UNGY trawlers are turning back?”
“One has.”