Bending over the graph of the surface Fathometer, the operator said, “I’m registering a fragmented obstruction in the tunnel.”
“Not ice?” Gorov asked.
“No. The obstruction is rising.”
“The boxes.”
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s working,” Zhukov said.
“Seems to be,” the captain agreed.
“Now if the Edgeway people have located the other end of the tunnel—“
“We can get on with the hard part,” Gorov finished for him.
Numbers and images blinked, blinked, blinked across the video display terminals.
At last the squawk box rattled, and Lieutenant Timoshenko said, “Aerial’s up. Balloon’s surfaced, Captain.”
Gorov pulled down a microphone, cleared his throat, and said, “Override the automatic system, Lieutenant. Reel out an additional sixty feet of wire.”
A moment later Timoshenko said, “Sixty additional feet of wire deployed, Captain.”
Emil Zhukov wiped one hand down his saturnine face. “Now the long wait.”
Gorov nodded. “Now the long wait.”
11:10
DETONATION IN FIFTY MINUTES
The helium balloon broke through at the upper end of the tunnel and bobbled merrily on the swell. Although it was a flat blue-gray color, it looked, at least to Harry, like a bright and cheerful party balloon.
One by one, as Timoshenko reeled out additional wire at the far end, the eight watertight aluminum boxes burst through the surface. They bumped against one another with dull, almost inaudible thumps.
Harry was no longer alone in the dome-ceilinged cavern. Rita, Brian, Franz, Claude, and Roger had joined him. By now George Lin would have set foot on the bottom of the crevasse, and Pete Johnson would have started down the rope from the storm-lashed top of the iceberg.
Picking up the grappling hook that they had jerry-rigged from lengths of copper pipe and twenty feet of heavy-gauge wire, Harry said, “Come on. Let’s get that stuff out of the water.”
With Franz’s and Roger’s assistance, he managed to snare the chain and drag the boxes out of the pool. All three men got wet to the knees in the process, and within seconds the storm suits had frozen solid around their calves. Although their boots and clothing were waterproof, even the partial submersion sucked body heat from them. Cold, shuddering, they hurriedly popped open the aluminum cargo boxes and extracted the gear that had been sent up from the Ilya Pogodin.
Each box held a self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. But this was not ordinary scuba gear. It had been designed for use in especially deep and/or extremely cold water. Each suit came with a battery pack that was attached to a belt and worn at the waist. When this was plugged into both the skintight pants and the jacket, the lining provided heat in much the same fashion as did any standard electric blanket.
Harry laid out his own equipment on the ice shore, well back from the highest tide line of the constantly surging and ebbing water in the pool. A compressed-air tank came with each suit. The diving mask was large enough to cover most of the face from chin to forehead, eliminating the need for a separate mouthpiece; air was fed directly into the mask, so the diver could breathe through his nose.
Strictly speaking, they would not be breathing air: The tank contained, instead, an oxygen-helium mixture with several special additives prescribed to allow the user to tolerate great depths. On the radio earlier, explaining the equipment, Timoshenko has assured them that the mixture of gases in the tank would allow a deep dive with only “a reasonable degree of danger” to the respiratory and circulatory system. Harry hadn’t found the lieutenant’s choice of words particularly reassuring. The though of fifty-eight massive charges of plastic explosives, however, was sufficient inducement.
The suits were different in other, less important ways from standard scuba gear. The pants had feet in them, as if they were the bottoms of a pair of Dr. Denton pajamas; and the sleeves of the jacket ended in gloves. The hood covered all of the head and face that was not protected by the oversize mask, as if leaving one centimeter of skin exposed would result in instant, extremely violent death. The wet suits almost seemed to be snug versions of the loose and bulky pressure suits worn by astronauts in space.