He’s made his decision, Gorov thought. I hope it’s one I can live with.
Zhukov hesitated…then saluted. “Yes, sir. It will be done in five minutes.”
“We’ll surface as soon as the multicommunications aerial has been wound down and secured.”
“Yes, sir.”
Gorov felt as if hundreds of painful knots were coming untied inside him. He had won. “Go to it, then.”
Zhukov left the control room.
Walking to the circular, railed command pad at the end of the control room, Gorov thought about little Nikki and knew that he was doing the right thing. In the name of his dead son, in honor of his lost boy, not for the advantage of Russia, he would save the lives of those stranded people. They must not die on the ice. This time he had to power to thwart death, and he was determined not to fail.
3:46
As soon as the second package of explosives had been hauled out of the ice, Roger, Brian, Claude, Lin, and Fischer moved on to the site of the third sealed shaft.
Harry remained behind with Pete Johnson, who had yet to disarm the second device. They stood together, their backs to the shrieking wind. The demolitions cylinder lay at their feet, an evil-looking package: sixty inches long and two and a half inches in diameter, black with yellow letters that spelled DANGER. It was encased in a thin, transparent coat of ice.
“You don’t have to keep me company,” Pete said as he carefully cleaned the snow from his goggles. His vision must be unobstructed when he set to work on the trigger mechanism.
“I thought your people were afraid of being alone in the dark,” Harry said.
“My people? You better mean electronic engineers, honky.”
Harry smiled, “What else would I mean?”
A strong gust of wind caught them from behind, an avalanche of air that would have knocked them flat if they had not been prepared for it. For a minute they bent with the gale, unable to talk, concerned only about keeping their balance.
When the gust passed and the wind settled down to perhaps forty miles per hour, Pete finished cleaning his goggles and began to rub his hands together to get the snow and ice off his gloves. “I know why you didn’t go with the others. You can’t deceive me. It’s your hero complex.”
“Sure. I’m a regular Indiana Jones.”
“You’ve always got to be where the danger is.”
“Yeah, me and Madonna.” Harry shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry, but you’ve got it all wrong, Dr. Freud. I’d much prefer to be where the danger isn’t. But it did occur to me the bomb might explode in your face.”
“And you’d give me first aid?”
“Something like that.”
“Listen, if it does explode in my face but doesn’t kill me… no first aid, for God’s sake. Just finish me off.”
Harry winced and started to protest.
“All I’m asking for is mercy.” Pete said bluntly.
During the past few months, Harry had come to like and respect this big, broad-faced man. Beneath Pete Johnson’s fierce-looking exterior, under the layers of education and training, under the cool competence, there was a kid with a love for science and technology and adventure. Harry recognized much of himself in Pete. “There’s really not a great change of an explosion, is there?”
“Almost none,” Pete assured him.
“The casing did take a beating coming out of the shaft.”
“Relax, Harry. The last one went well, didn’t it?”
They knelt beside the steel cylinder. Harry held the flashlight while Pete opened a small plastic box of precision tools.
“Disarming these sonsofbitches is easy enough,” Pete said. “That isn’t our problem. Our problem is getting eight more of them out of the ice before the clock strikes midnight and the carriage turns back into a pumpkin.”
“We’re recovering them at the rate of one an hour.”
“But we’ll slow down,” Johnson said. With a small screwdriver he began to remove the end of the cylinder that featured the eye loop. “We needed forty-five minutes to dig out the first one. Then fifty-five for the second. Already we’re getting tired, slowing down. It’s this wind.”