Harry stretched out on the ice, flat on his stomach, and took the climbing line in both hands.
Bending down, Pete patted him reassuringly on the shoulder. Then he slowly pushed Harry backward, over the ledge, into the crevasse.
Harry thought he had a firm grip on the line and was certain that he could control his descent, but he was mistaken. As though greased, the line slipped through his hands, and he dropped unchecked into the gap. Maybe it was the crust of ice on his gloves, maybe the fact that the leather was soft with Vaseline from all the times in recent days when he had unconsciously touched his grease-protected face. Whatever the reason, the rope was like a live eel in his hands, and he plunged into the abyss.
A wall of ice flashed past him, two or three inches from his face, flickering with the reflections of the two flashlight beams that preceded him. He clenched the rope as tightly as he could and also tried to pin it between his knees, but he was in what amounted to a freefall.
In the whirl of blown snow and the peculiar prismatic refraction of the light in the deep ice, Harry had thought that the wall was a flat and relatively smooth surface, but he hadn’t been entirely sure. Now the shorter safety line wouldn’t save him if he encountered a sharp spike of ice that projected from the wall of the crevasse. If he dropped at high speed onto a jagged outcropping, it could rip even his heavy storm suit, tear him open crotch to throat, impale him—
The rope burned through the surface slickness of his gloves, and abruptly he was able to stop himself, perhaps seventy feet below the brink of the crevasse. He percussive heart was pounding out a score for kettledrums, and every muscle in his body was knotted tighter than the safety line around his waist. Gasping for breath, he swung back and forth on the oscillating line, banging painfully—and then more gently—against the chasm wall while shadows and frantic flares of reflected light swarmed up from below like flocks of spirits escaping from Hades.
He dared not pause to settle his nerves. The timers on those packages of explosives were still ticking.
After easing down the rope another fifteen or twenty feet, he reached the bottom of the crevasse. It proved to be about ninety feet deep, which was fairly close to the estimate he had made when he had studied it from above.
He unclipped one of the flashlights from his tool belt and began to search for the entrance to the tunnel that Lieutenant Timoshenko had described. He remembered from his first encounter with the chasm earlier in the day that it was forty-five or fifty feet long, ten or twelve feet wide at the midpoint but narrower at both ends. At the moment he did not have view of the entire floor of the crevasse. When part of one wall had collapsed under his snowmobile, it had tumbled to the bottom; now it constituted a ten-foot-high divider that partitioned the chasm into two areas of roughly equal size. The badly charred wreckage of the sled was strewn over the top of that partition.
The section into which Harry had descended was a dead end. It contained no side passages, no deeper fissures large enough to allow him to descend further, and no sign of a tunnel or open water.
Slipping, sliding, afraid that the jumbled slabs of ice would shift and catch him like a bug between two bricks, he climbed out of the first chamber. At the top of that sloped mount, he picked his way through the smashed and burned ruins of the snowmobile and through more slabs of ice, which shifted treacherously under his feet, then slid down the far side.
Beyond that partition, in the second half of the chasm, he found a way out, into deeper and more mysterious realms of ice. The right-hand wall offered no caves or fissures, but the left-hand wall didn’t come all the way to the floor. It ended four feet above the bottom of the crevasse.
Harry dropped flat on his stomach and poked his flashlight into that low opening. The passageway was about thirty feet wide and no higher than four feet. It appeared to run straight and level for six or seven yards under the crevasse wall, sideways into the ice, before it curved sharply downward and out of sight.