“I swear I came as quickly as I could,” Gorov murmured to the photograph.
The boy stared, smiling.
“I’m going to get those people off the iceberg before midnight.” Gorov hardly recognized his own voice. “No more putting assassins and saboteurs ashore. Saving lives now, Nikki. I know I can do it. I’m not going to let them die. That’s a promise.”
He was squeezing the photograph so tightly that his fingers were pale, bloodless.
The silence in the cabin was oppressive, for it was the silence of the other world to which Nikki had gone, the silence of lost love, of a future that would never happen, of stillborn dreams.
Someone walked by Gorov’s door, whistling.
As if the whistle were a slap in the face, the captain twitched and sat up straight, suddenly aware of how maudlin he had become. He was privately humiliated. Sentimentalism would not help him adjust to his loss; sentimentality was a corruption of the legacy of good memories and laughter that this honest and good-hearted boy had left behind.
Annoyed with himself, Gorov put down the photograph. He got to his feet and left the cabin.
Lieutenant Timoshenko had been off duty for the past four hours. He had eaten dinner and napped for two hours. Now, at eight-forty-five, fifteen minutes ahead of schedule, he had returned to the communications center once more, preparing to take the last watch of the day, which would end at one o’clock in the morning. One of his subordinates manned the equipment while Timoshenko sat at a corner desk, reading a magazine and drinking hot tea from an aluminum mug.
Captain Gorov stepped in from the companionway. “Lieutenant, I believe it’s time to make direct radio contact with those people on the iceberg.”
Timoshenko put down his tea and got up. “Will we be surfacing again, sir?”
“In a few minutes.”
“Do you want to talk to them?”
“I’ll leave that to you,” Gorov said.
“And what should I tell them?”
Gorov quickly explained what they had found on their trip around the huge island of ice—the hopelessly stormy seas on the windward side, the sheer wall on the leeward side—and outlined his plans for the breeches buoy. “And tell them that from here on out, we’ll keep them informed of our progress, or lack of it, every step of the way.”
“Yes, sir.”
Gorov turned to go.
“Sir? They’re certain to ask—do you think we’ve a good chance of saving them?”
“Not good, no. Only fair.”
“Should I be honest with them?”
“I think that’s best.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But also tell them that if it’s at all humanly possible, we’ll do it, one way or the other. No matter what the odds against, by God, we’ll try our damnedest to get them off. I’m more determined about that than I’ve been about anything else in my life. Tell them that, Lieutenant. Make sure you tell them that.”
8:57
Harry was surprised to hear his mother tongue spoken so fluently by a Russian radio operator. The man sounded as though he had taken a degree at a good middle-level university in Britain. English was the official language of the Edgeway expedition, as it was of nearly every multinational scientific study group. But somehow it seemed wrong for a Russian submariner to speak it so flawlessly. Gradually, however, as Timoshenko explained why the leeward flank was the only avenue of approach to the iceberg worth investigating, Harry became accustomed to the man’s fluency and to his decidedly English accent.
“But if the berg is five hundred yards wide,” Harry said, “why couldn’t your men come on from one end or the other?”
“Unfortunately, the sea is as stormy at either end as it is on the windward side.”
“But a breeches buoy,” Harry said doubtfully. “It can’t be easy to rig one of those between two moving points, and in this weather.”
“We can match speeds with the ice pretty much dead on, which makes it almost like rigging between two stationary points. Besides, a breeches buoy is only one of our options. If we’re unable to make it work, we’ll get to you some other way. You needn’t worry about that.”