Was it worth exploring?
He looked at his watch. 11:02
Detonation in fifty-eight minutes.
Holding the light in front of him, Harry quickly wriggled into the horizontal passage. Although he was squirming on his stomach, the ceiling of the crawl space was so low in some places that it brushed the back of his head.
He wasn’t claustrophobic, but he had a logical and healthy fear of being confined in an extremely cramped place ninety feet beneath the ice, in the Arctic wilderness, while surrounded by fifty-eight enormous packages of explosives that were ticking rapidly toward detonation. He was funny that way.
Nevertheless, he twisted and writhed and pulled himself forward with his elbows and his knees. When he’d gone twenty-five or thirty feet, he discovered that the passageway led into the bottom of what seemed to be a large open space, a hollow in the heart of the ice. He moved his flashlight to the left and right, but from his position, he was unable to get a clear idea of the cavern’s true size. He slid out of the crawl space, stood up, and unclipped the second flashlight from his belt.
He was in a circular chamber one hundred feet in diameter, with dozens of fissures and culs-de-sac and passageways leading from it. Apparently the ceiling had been formed by a great upward rush of hot water and steam: a nearly perfect dome, too smooth to have been formed by any but the most exceptional phenomenon—such as freakish volcanic activity. That vault, marked only by a few small stalactites and spider-web cracks, was sixty feet high at the apex and curved to thirty feet where it met the walls. The floor descended toward the center of the room in seven progressive steps, two or three feet at a time, so the overall effect was of an amphitheater. At the nadir of the cavern, where the stage would have been, was a forty-foot-diameter pool of thrashing sea water.
The tunnel.
Hundreds of feet below, that wide tunnel opened into a hollow in the bottom of the iceberg, to the lightless world of the deep Arctic Ocean, where the Ilya Pogodin would be waiting for them.
Harry was as mesmerized by the dark pool as he would have been by a gate between this dimension and the next, by a door in the back of an old wardrobe that led to the enchanted land of Narnia, by any tornado that could spin a child and a dog to Oz.
“I’ll be damned.” His voice echoed back to him from the dome.
He was suddenly energized by hope.
In the back of his mind, he had harbored some doubt about the very existence of the tunnel. He had been inclined to think that the Pogodin’s surface Fathometer was malfunctioning. In those frigid seas, how could a long tunnel through solid ice remain open? Why hadn’t it frozen over and closed up again? He hadn’t asked the others if they could explain it to him. He hadn’t wanted to worry them. They would pass the last hour of their lives more easily with hope than without it. Nonetheless, it had been a riddle for which he saw no solution.
Now he had the answer to that riddle. The water inside the tunnel continued to be affected by tremendous tidal forces in the sea far below. It was not stagnant or even calm. It welled up and fell away forcefully, rhythmically, surging as high as six or eight feet into the cavern, churning and sloshing, then draining back swiftly until it was level with the lip of the hole. Swelling and falling away, swelling and falling away… The continuous movement prevented the opening from freezing over, and it inhibited the development of ice within the tunnel itself.
Of course, over an extended period of time, say two or three days, the tunnel would most likely grow steadily narrower. Gradually new ice would build up on the walls, regardless of the tidal motion, until the passageway became impassable or closed altogether.
But they didn’t need the tunnel two or three days in the future. They needed it now.
Nature had been set firmly against them for the past twelve hours. Perhaps now she was working for them and ready to show them a little mercy.