Staring in amazement at the captain’s shredded glove, Seaman Semichastny exclaimed: “Incredible!”
Zhukov said, “What a miserable place.”
“Indeed.”
The snow that swept across the bridge was not in the form of flakes. The subzero temperatures and the fierce wind conspired to produce hard beads of snow—what a meteorologist would call “gravel,” like millions of granules of white buckshot, the next worst thing to a storm of ice spicules.
Tapping the bridge anemometer, the first officer said, “We’ve got wind velocity of thirty miles an hour, even leeward of the iceberg. It must be blowing twice to three times that hard on top of the ice or on the open sea.”
With the wind factored in, Gorov suspected that the subjective temperature atop the iceberg had to be at least minus sixty or minus seventy degrees. Rescuing the Edgeway scientists under those hideous conditions was a greater challenge than any he had ever faced in his entire naval career. No part of it would be easy. It might even be impossible. And he began to worry that, once again, he had arrived too late.
“Let’s have some light,” Gorov ordered.
Semichastny immediately swung the floodlight to port and closed the switch.
The two-foot-diameter beam pierced the darkness as if a furnace door had been thrown open in an unlighted basement. Canted down on its gimbal ring, the big floodlight illuminated a circular swatch of sea only ten yards from the submarine: churning waves filigreed with icy foam, a seething maelstrom but one that was not too difficult to ride. Sheets of spray exploded into the bitter air as the waves met the boat, froze instantly into intricate and glittering laces of ice, hung suspended for a timeless time, and then fell back into the water, their strange beauty as ephemeral as that of any moment in a perfect sunset.
The ocean temperature was a few degrees above freezing, but the water retained sufficient heat and was in such turmoil—and was sufficiently salty, of course—that the only ice it contained was that which had broken off from the polar cap, fifteen miles to the north. Mostly small chunks, none larger than a car, which rode the waves and crashed into one another.
Grasping the pair of handles on the back of the floodlight, Semichastny tilted it up, swung it more directly toward port. The piercing beam bore through the polar blackness and the seething snow—and blazed against a towering palisade of ice, so enormous and so close that the sight of it made all three men gasp.
Fifty yards away, the berg drifted slowly east-southeast in a mild winter current. Even with the storm win pretty much behind it, the massive island of ice was able to make no more than two or three knots; most of it lay under the water, and it was driven not by the surface tempest but by deeper influences.
Semichastny moved the floodlight slowly to the right, then back to the left.
The cliff was so long and high that Gorov could not get an idea of the overall appearance of it. Each brilliantly lighted circle of ice, although visible in considerable detail from their front-row seat, seemed disassociated from the one that had come before it. Comprehending the whole of the palisade was like trying to envision the finished image of a jigsaw puzzle merely by glancing at five hundred jumbled, disconnected pieces.
“Lieutenant Zhukov, put up a flare.”
“Yes, sir.”
Zhukov was carrying the signal gun. He raised it—a stubbly pistol with a fat, extra long barrel and a two-inch muzzle—held it at arm’s length, and fired up into the port-side gloom.
The rocket climbed swiftly through the falling snow. It was visible for a moment as it trailed red sparks and smoke, but then it vanished into the blizzard as though it had passed through a veil into another dimension.
Three hundred feet … four hundred feet … five hundred …
High above, the rocket burst into a brilliant incandescent moon. It didn’t immediately begin to lose altitude, but drifted southward on the wind.
Beneath the flare, three hundred yards in every direction, the ocean was painted with cold light that revealed its green-gray hue. The arrhythmic ranks of choppy waves cast jagged, razor-edged shadows that fluttered like uncountable flocks of frantic dark birds feeding on little fishes in the shallow troughs.