The headlamps on one of the snowmobiles shone through the mouth of the cave. In places, the fractured ice deconstructed the beams into glimmering prisms of light in all the primary colors, and those geometric shapes shimmered jewellike in the walls of the otherwise white chamber. The eight distorted shadows of the expedition member rippled and slid across that dazzling backdrop, swelled and shrank, mysterious but perhaps no more so than the people who cast them—five of whom were suspects and one of whom was a potential murder.
Harry watched Roger Breskin, Franz Fischer, George Lin, Claude, and Pete as they argued about the options open to them, about how they should spend the six hours and twenty minutes remaining before midnight. He ought to have been leading the discussion or at the very least contributing ot it, but he couldn’t keep his mind on what the others were saying. For one thing, no matter how they spent their time, they could not escape from the iceberg or retrieve the explosives, so their discussion could resolve nothing. Furthermore, although trying to be discreet, he couldn’t prevent himself from studying them intensely, as though psychotic tendencies ought to be evident in the way a man walked, talked, and gestured.
His train of thought was interrupted by a call from Edgeway Station. Gunvald Larsson’s voice, shot through with static, rattled off the ice walls.
The other men stopped talking.
When Harry went to the radio and responded to the call, Gunvald said, “Harry, the trawlers have turned back. The Melville and the Liberty. Both of them. Some time ago. I’ve known, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell you.” He was unaccountably buoyant, excited, as if that bad news should have brought smiles to their faces. “But now it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, Harry!”
Pete, Claude, and the others had crowded around the radio, baffled by the Swede’s excitement.
Harry said, “Gunvald, what in the hell are you talking about? What do you mean, it doesn’t matter?”
Static shredded the airwaves, but then the frequency cleared as Larsson said, “…just got word from Thule. Relayed from Washington. There’s a submarine in your neighborhood, Harry. Do you read me? A Russian submarine.”
CHAPTER FOUR: NIGHT
8:20
DETONATION IN THREE HOURS
FORTY MINUTES
Gorov, Zhukov, and Seaman Semichastny clambered onto the bridge and faced the port side. The sea was neither calm nor as tumultuous as it had been when they had surfaced earlier to receive the message from the Naval Ministry. The iceberg lay off to port, sheltering them from some of the power of the storm waves and the wind.
They couldn’t see the berg, even though the radar and sonar images had indicated that it was massive both above and below the water line. They were only fifty to sixty yards from the target, but the darkness was impenetrable. Instinct alone told Gorov that something enormous loomed over them, and the awareness of being in the shadow of an invisible colossus was one of the eeriest and most disconcerting feelings that he had ever known.
They were warmly dressed and wore goggles. Riding in the lee of the iceberg, however, made it possible to go without snow masks, and conversation was not as difficult as when they’d been running on the surface a few hours previously.
“It’s like a windowless dungeon out there,” Zhukov said.
No stars. No moon. No phosphorescence on the waves. Gorov had never seen such a perfectly lightless night.
Above and behind them on the sail, the hundred-watt bridge lamp illuminated the immediate steelwork and allowed the three men to see one another. Clotted with scattered small chunks of ice, choppy waves broke against the curved hull, reflecting just enough of that red light to give the impression that the Pogodin was sailing not on water but on an ocean of wine-dark blood. Beyond that tiny illumined circle lay an unrelieved blackness so flawless and deep that Gorov’s eyes began to ache when he stared at it too long.
Most of the bridge rail was sheathed in ice. Gorov gripped it to steady himself as the boat yawed, but he happened to take hold of a section of bare metal. His glove froze to the steel. He ripped it free and examined the palm: the outer layer of leather was torn, and the lining was exposed. If he had been wearing sealskin gloves, he would not have stuck fast, and he should have remembered to get that particular item of arctic gear out of the storage locker. If he hadn’t been wearing gloves at all, his hand would have welded instantly to the railing, and when he pulled loose, he would have lost a substantial patch of flesh.