It was a killing wind, pressing and pounding against Harry’s back with such force that he felt as though he were standing in the middle of a swollen, turbulent river; the currents in the air were almost as tangible as currents in deep water. The base wind velocity was now forty or forty-five miles an hour, with gusts to sixty-five, steadily and rapidly climbing toward gale force. Later, it would be deadly.
“You’re right,” Harry said. His throat was slightly sore from the effort required to be heard above the storm, even though they were nearly head-to-head over the package of explosives. “It doesn’t do much good to sit ten minutes in a warm snowmobile cabin and then spend the next hour in weather as bad as this.”
Pete extracted the last screw and removed a six-inch end piece from the cylinder. “How far has the real temperature fallen? Like to guess?”
“Five degrees above zero. Fahrenheit.”
“With the wind-chill factor?”
“Twenty below zero.”
“Thirty.”
“Maybe.” Even his heavy thermal suit could not protect him. The wind’s cold blade stabbed continuously at his back, pierced his storm suit, pricked his spine. “I never thought we had much of a chance of getting ten out. I knew we’d slow down. But if we can disarm just five or six, we might have enough room to survive the blowup at midnight.”
Pete tipped the six-inch section of casing, and a timer slid out into his gloved hand. It was connected to the rest of the cylinder by four springy coils of wire: red, yellow, green, and white. “I guess it’s better to freeze to death tomorrow than be blown to bits tonight.”
“Don’t you dare do that to me,” Harry said.
“What?”
“Turn into another Franz Fischer.”
Pete laughed. “Or another George Lin.”
“Those two. The Whiner brothers.”
“You chose them,” Pete said.
“And I take the blame. But, hell, they’re good men. It’s just that under this much pressure…”
“They’re assholes.”
“Precisely.”
“Time for you to get out of here,” Pete said, reaching into the tool kit again.
“I’ll hold the flashlight.”
“The hell you will. Put it down so it shines on this, then go. I don’t need you to hold the light. What I need you for is to deal out the mercy if it comes to that.”
Reluctantly, Harry returned to the snowmobile. He bent down behind the machine, out of the wind. Huddled there, he sensed that all their work and risk-taking was for nothing. Their situation would deteriorate further before it improved. If it ever improved.
4:00
The Ilya Pogodin rolled sickeningly on the surface of the North Atlantic. The turbulent sea smashed against the rounded bows and geysered into the darkness, an endless series of waves that sounded like window-rattling peals of summer thunder. Because the boat rode so low in the wter, it shuddered only slightly from the impact, but it could not withstand that punishment indefinitely. Gray water churned across the main deck, and foam as thick as pudding sloshed around the base of the huge steel sail. The boat hadn’t been designed or built for extended surface runs in stormy weather. Nevertheless, in spite of her tendency to yaw, she could hold her own long enough for Timoshenko to exchange messages with the war room at the Naval Ministry in Moscow.
Captain Gorov was on the bridge with two other men. They were all wearing fleece-lined pea jackets, hooded black rain slickers over the jackets, and gloves. The two young lookouts stood back to back, one facing port and the other starboard. All three men had field glasses and were surveying the horizon.
It’s a damned close horizon, Gorov thought as he studied it. And an ugly one.
That far north, the polar twilight had not yet faded entirely from the sky. An eerie greenish glow seeped through the heavy storm clouds and saturated the Atlantic vistas, so Gorov seemed to be peering through a thin film of green liquid. It barely illuminated the raging sea and imparted a soft yellow cast to the foamy crests of the waves. A mixture of fine snow and sleet hissed in from the northwest; the sail, the bridge railing, Gorov’s black rain slicker, the laser package, and the radio masts were encrusted with white ice. Scattered formations of fog further obscured the forbidding panorama, and due north the churning waves were hidden by a gray-brown mist so dense that it seemed to be a curtain drawn across the world beyond it. Visibility varied from one half to three quarters of a mile and would have been considerably worse if they had not been using night-service binoculars.