Brian said, “Will he try again?”
“If he’s nuts, obsessed with you and your family, then he’s not going to give up easily. What does he have to lose? I mean, he’s going to die at midnight anyway.”
Looking out the side window into the churning night, Brian said, “I’m afraid, Harry.”
“If you weren’t afraid right now, kid, then you’d be psychotic.”
“You’re afraid too?”
“Scared out of my wits.”
“You don’t show it.”
“I never do. I just pee my pants and hope nobody’ll notice.”
Brian laughed, then winced at another spasm of stinging pain in his extremities. When he recovered, he said, “Whoever he is, at least I’ll be prepared for him now.”
“You won’t be left alone,” Harry said. “Either Rita or I will stay with you at all times.”
Rubbing his hands together, massaging his still cold fingers, Brian said, “Are you going to tell the others?”
“No. We’ll say you don’t remember what happened, that you must have fallen and hit your head on an outcropping of ice. Better that your would-be killer thinks we don’t know about him.”
“I had the same thought. He’ll be especially cautious if he knows we’re waiting for his next move.”
“But if he thinks we don’t know about him, he might get careless the next time he tries for you.”
“If he’s a lunatic because he wants to murder me even though I’ll probably die at midnight anyway… then I guess I must be nuts too. Here I am worrying about being murdered even though midnight’s only seven hours away.”
“No. You’ve got a strong survival instinct, that’s all. It’s a sign of sanity.”
“Unless the survival instinct is so strong that it keeps me from recognizing a hopeless situation. Then maybe it’s a sing of lunacy.”
“It isn’t hopeless,” Harry said. “We’ve got seven hours. Anything could happen in seven hours.”
“Like what?”
“Anything.”
5:00
Like a whale breaching in the night sea, the Ilya Pogodin surfaced for the second time in an hour. Glistening cascades of water slid from the boat’s dark flanks as it rolled in the storm waves. Captain Nikita Gorov and two seamen scrambled out of the conning-tower hatch and took up watch positions on the bridge.
In the past thirty minutes, cruising at its maximum submerged speed of thirty-one knots, the submarine had moved seventeen miles north-northeast of its assigned surveillance position. Timoshenko had taken a bearing on the Edgeway group’s radio beacon, and Gorov had plotted a perfectly straight course that intersected with the estimated path of the drifting iceberg. On the surface, the Pogodin was capable of twenty-six knots; but because of the bad seas, it was only making three quarters of that speed. Gorov was anxious to take the boat down again, to three hundred feet this time, where it would glide like any other fish, where the turbulence of the storm could not affect it.
The satellite tracking gear rose from the sail behind the bridge and opened like spring’s first blossom. The five petal-form radar plates, which quickly joined together to become a dish, were already beginning to gleam and sparkle with ice as the snow and sleet froze to them; nevertheless, they diligently searched the sky.
At three minutes past the hour, a note from Timoshenko was sent up to the bridge. The communications officer wished to inform the captain that a coded message had begun to come in from the Ministry in Moscow.
The moment of truth had arrived.
Gorov folded the slip of paper, put it in a coat pocket, then kept his eyes to the night glasses. He scanned ninety degrees of the storm-swept horizon, but it was not waves and clouds and snow that he saw. Instead, two visions plagued him, each more vivid than reality. In the first, he was sitting at a table in a conference room with a gilt-trimmed ceiling and a chandelier that cast rainbows on the walls; he was listening to the state’s testimony at his own court-martial, and he was forbidden to speak in his own defense. In the second vision, he stared down at a young boy who lay in a hospital bed, a dead boy rank with sweat and urine. The night glasses seemed to be a conduit to both the past and the future.