Emil Zhukov pressed a few keys on the command-pad console. He looked up at the computer screen to his right. “It checks. Taking into account the southward current and our forward speed, we should be entirely out from under. This time the berg’s really gone.”
“Clear water,” the technician repeated.
Gorov glanced at his watch: 10:02. Less than two hours remaining until the sixty explosive charges would shatter the iceberg. In that length of time, the crew of the Pogodin could not possibly mount a conventional rescue attempt with any hope of success. The unorthodox scheme that the captain had in mind might seem to some to border on outright lunacy, but it had the advantage of being a plan that could work within the limited time they had left.
Zhukov cleared his throat. No doubt with a vivid mental image of that sweating bulkhead in the torpedo room, the first officer was waiting for orders to take the boat up to a less dangerous depth.
Pulling down the steel-spring microphone, Gorov said, “Captain to torpedo room. How’s it look there?”
From the overhead speaker: “Still sweating, sir. It’s not any better, but it’s not any worse, either.”
“Keep watching. And stay calm.” Gorov released the microphone and returned to the command pad. “Engines at half speed. Left full rudder.”
Astonishment made Emil Zhukov’s long face appear even longer. He opened his mouth to speak, but he couldn’t make a sound. He swallowed hard. His second attempt was successful: “You mean we aren’t going up?”
“Not this minute,” Gorov said. “We’ve got to make another run under that behemoth. I want to have another look at the hole in the middle of it.”
The volume on the shortwave radio was it its maximum setting, so the Russian communications officer aboard the Pogodin could be heard over the roar of the storm beast that prowled at the entrance to the cave and above the roof of interlocking slabs of ice. Hard shatters of static and electronic squeals of interference echoed off the ice walls, rather like the enormously amplified sound of fingernails being dragged across a blackboard.
The others had joined Harry and Pete in the ice cave to hear the astounding news firsthand. They were crowded together near the back wall.
When Lieutenant Timoshenko had described the hole and the large area of dramatically scalloped ice on the bottom of their floating prison, Harry had explained the probable cause of it. The iceberg had been broken off the cap by a tsunami, and the tsunami had been generated by a seabed earthquake almost directly beneath them. In this part of the world, in association with this chain of fractures, volcanic activity was de rigueur, as witness the violent Icelandic eruptions a few decades ago. And if ocean-floor volcanic activity had been associated with the recent event, enormous quantities of lava could have been discharged into the sea, flung upward with tremendous force. Spouts of white-hot lava could have bored that hole, and the millions of gallons of boiling water that it produced could easily have sculpted the troughs and peaks that marked the bottom of the iceberg just past the hole.
Although it originated from a surfaced submarine only a fraction of a mile away, Timoshenko’s voice was peppered with static, but the transmission didn’t break up. “As Captain Gorov sees it, there are three possibilities. First, the hole in the bottom of your berg might end in solid ice above the water line. Or second, it might lead into a cavern or to the bottom of a shallow crevasse. Or third, it might even continue for another hundred feet above the sea level and open at the top of the iceberg. Does that analysis seem sound to you, Dr. Carpenter?”
“Yes,” Harry said, impressed by the captain’s reasoning. “And I think I know which of the three it is.” He told Timoshenko about the crevasse that had opened midway in the iceberg’s length when the gigantic seismic waves had passed under the edge of the winter field. “It didn’t exist when we went out to position the explosives, but there it was, waiting for us, on our way back to the temporary camp. I nearly drove straight into it, lost my snowmobile.”