Unfortunately, Gorov thought, they were not dealing with granite or limestone or hard shale. A large element of the unknown had been introduced. The anchor might not penetrate the ice properly or fuse with it as it did with most varieties of stone.
One of the crewmen took hold of the handgrips, in one of which the trigger was seated. With the help of the other two men, he got a range fix and a wind reading. The target area was thirty feet above the water line. Semichastny had marked it with the floodlight. Compensating for the wind, the shooter aimed to the left of the mark.
Zhukov put up two flares.
Gorov lifted his night glasses. He focused on the circle of light on the face of the cliff.
A heavy whump! Was audible above the wind.
Even before the sound of the shot faded, the rocket exploded against the iceberg fifty yards away.
“Direct hit!” Zhukov said.
With cannonlike volleys of sound, the cliff fractured. Cracks zigzagged outward in every direction from the tow rocket’s point of impact. The ice shifted, rippled like jelly at first, then shattered as completely as a plate glass window. A prodigious wall of ice—two hundred yards long, seventy or eighty fee high, and several feet thick—slid away from the side of the berg, collapsed violently into the sea, and sent shimmering fountains of dark water more than fifty feet into the air.
The messenger line went down with the ice.
Like a great amorphous, primordial beast, a twenty-foot-high tidal wave of displaced water surged across the fifty yards of open sea toward the port flank of the submarine, and there was no time to take evasive action. One of the three crewmen on the deck cried out as the small tsunami crashed across the main deck with enough power to rock the Pogodin to starboard. With the messenger-line gun, all three vanished under that black tide. Cold brine exploded against the sail, and drenching geysers shot high into the night air, hung for a moment in defiance of gravity, and then collapsed across the bridge. Carried on the flood, hundreds of fragments of ice, some as large as a man’s fist, rained down against the steel and pummeled Gorov, Zhukov, and Semichastny.
The water poured away through the bridge scuppers, and the boat wallowed back to port. A secondary displacement wave hit them with only a small fraction of the force of the first.
On the main deck, the three crewmen had been knocked flat. If they hadn’t been tethered, they would have been washed overboard and possibly lost.
As the crewmen struggled to their feet, Gorov turned his field glasses on the iceberg again.
“It’s still too damned sheer.”
The tremendous icefall had done little to change the vertical topography of the leeward flank of the berg. A two-hundred-yard-long indentation marked the collapse, but even that new feature was a sheer plane, uncannily smooth, unmarked by ledges or projections or wide fissures that might have been of use to a climber. The cliff dropped straight into the water, much as it had before the rocket was fired; there was still no shelf or sheltering niche where a motorized raft could put in and tie up.
Gorov lowered his night glasses. Turning again toward the three men on the forward main deck, he signaled them to dismantle the gun and get below.
Dispirited, Zhukov said, “We could edge closer, then send two men across on a raft. They could match speeds with the berg, ride close to it, somehow anchor themselves to it, and just let it tow them along. Then the raft itself might be able to serve as the platform for the climbers to—“
“No. Too unsteady,” Gorov said.
“Or they could take explosives over in the raft and blast out a landing shelf and operations platform.”
Gorov shook his head. “No. That would be an extremely risky proposition. Like riding a bicycle alongside a speeding express train and trying to grab on for a free trip. The ice isn’t moving as fast as an express train, of course. But there’s the problem of the rough seas, the wind. I’m not sending anyone out on a suicide mission. The landing shelf must already be there when the rafts reach the ice.”