They smiled at each other.
Harry said, “We’d better be getting back.”
Two flares floated five hundred feet apart in the night sky, and the floodlight swept back and forth along the base of the gleaming ice cliffs.
The windward flank of the iceberg was not as forbidding as the featureless, vertical leeward wall had been. Three rugged shelves stepped back and up from the water line. Each appeared to be between eight and ten yards deep, and altogether they jutted twenty or twenty-five feet above the sea. Beyond the shelves, the cliff rose at an angle for fifty feet or more and then broke at a narrow ledge. Above the ledge was a sheer face of about twenty feet of vertical ice, and then the brink.
“Rafts could land on those shelves,” Zhukov said, examining the ice through his binoculars. “And even untrained men could climb that cliff. But not in this weather.”
Gorov could barely hear him above the raucous voice of the storm and the boat’s rhythmic collisions with the high waves.
The sea was remarkably more violent on the windward flank than it had been on the protected leeward side. Huge waves crashed across the steps at the base of the iceberg. They would overturn a medium-sized lifeboat and tear one of the Pogodin’s motorized rubber rafts to pieces. Even the submarine, with its forty-thousand-horsepower turbines and sixty-five-hundred-ton surface displacement, was having some difficulty making way properly. Frequently the bow was underwater, and when it did manage to nose up, it resembled an animal fighting quicksand. Waves slammed into the super-structure deck with shocking fury, sent protracted shudders through the hull, exploded against the sail, washed onto the bridge, cast spray higher than Gorov’s head. All three men were wearing suits of ice: ice-covered boots, ice-rimed trousers, ice-plated coattails.
The brutal wind registered seventy-two miles per hour on the bridge anemometer, with gusts half again as strong. The pellets of snow were like swarming bees; they stung Gorov’s face and brought tears to his eyes.
“We’ll go around to leeward again,” the captain shouted, though standing virtually shoulder-to-shoulder with his subordinates on the small bridge.
He remembered too vividly the smooth hundred-foot cliff that awaited them on the other side, but he had no choice. The windward flank offered them no hope at all.
“And on the other side—what then?” Zhukov asked.
Gorov hesitated, thinking about it. “We’ll shoot a line across. Get a man over there. Rig a breeches buoy.”
“Shoot a line?” Zhukov was doubtful. He leaned closer, face-to-face with his captain, and shouted out his concern: “Even if that works, even if it holds in the ice, can it be done from one moving object to another?”
“In desperation, perhaps. I don’t know. Got to try it. It’s a place to start.”
If a few men with enough equipment could be gotten from the sub to the leeward face of the iceberg by means of a breeches buoy, they could blast out a landing shelf to allow the rafts to follow them. Then they might be able to shoot a line to the top. With that, they could ascend the cliff as easily as flies walking on walls.
Zhukov glanced at his watch. “Three and a half hours!” he shouted above the Armageddon wind. “Be better begin.”
“Clear the bridge!” Gorov ordered. He sounded the diving alarm.
When he reached the control room half a minute later, he heard the petty officer say, “Green board!”
Zhukov and Semichastny had already gone to their quarters to get into dry clothes.
As Gorov stepped off the conning-tower ladder, shedding brittle jackets of ice as he moved, the diving officer turned to him and said, “Captain?”
“I’m going to change clothes. Take us down to seventy-five feet and get back into the leeward shadow of the iceberg.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll take over in ten minutes.”
“Yes, sir.”
In his quarters, after he had changed out of his sodden and frozen gear into a dry uniform, Gorov sat at the corner desk and picked up the photograph of his dead son. Everyone in the picture was smiling: the piano-accordion player, Gorov, and Nikki. The boy’s smile was the broadest of the three—genuine, and assumed for the camera. He was gripping his father’s hand. In his other hand, he held a large, two-scoop cone of vanilla ice cream that was dripping onto his fingers. Ice cream frosted his upper lip. His thick, windblown golden hair fell across his right eye. Even on the flat, two-dimensional surface of the photo, one could sense the aura of delight, love, and pleasure that the child had always radiated in life.