ICEBOUND By Dean Koontz

George Lin had entered the cavern while they were unpacking the aluminum boxes. He studied the equipment with unconcealed suspicion. “Harry, there must be something else, some other way. There’s got to be—“

“No,” Harry said, without his usual diplomacy and patience. “This is it. This or nothing. There’s no time for discussion any more, George. Just shut up and suit up.”

Lin looked glum.

But he didn’t look like a killer.

Harry glanced at the others, who were busy unpacking their own boxes of gear. None of them looked like a killer, yet one of the them had clubbed Brian and, for whatever mad reason, might give them a lot of trouble when they were underwater and moving down through the long tunnel of ice.

Bringing up the rear, Pete Johnson squirmed laboriously out of the crawl space from the crevasse into the cavern, cursing the ice around him. He had been a tighter fit than any of the others. His broad shoulders had probably made it difficult for him to squeeze through the narrowest part of that passageway.

“Let’s get dressed,” Harry said. His voice had an odd, hollow quality as it resonated through that domed amphitheater of ice. “No time to waste.”

They changed from their arctic gear into the scuba suits with an efficient haste born of acute discomfort and desperation. Harry, Franz, and Roger were already in pain for their knee-deep immersion in the pool: Their feet had been half numb, not a good sign, but the shock had temporarily restored too much feeling, and now their flesh from calves to toes prickled, ached, burned. The others had been spared that additional suffering, but they cursed and complained bitterly during their brief nakedness. No wind circulated through the cavern, but the air temperature was perhaps twenty or more degrees below zero. Therefore, they changed lower- and upper-body garments in stages to avoid being entirely unclothed at any one time and vulnerable to the killing cold: Outer boots, felt boots, socks, pants, and long underwear were removed first and were quickly replaced by the skintight, insulation-lined scuba pants; then they changed from coats, vests, sweaters, shirts, and undershirts into lined rubber jackets with snug rubber hoods.

Modesty was potentially as deadly as sloth. When Harry looked up after tucking himself into his scuba pants, he saw Rita’s bare breasts as she struggled into her scuba jacket. Her flesh was blue-white and textured with enormous goose pimples. Then she zipped up her jacket, caught Harry’s eye, and winked.

He marveled at that wink. He could guess at the agonizing fear that must be afflicting her. She wasn’t just on the ice any more. She was now in the ice. Entombed. Her terror must already be acute. Before they traveled down the tunnel to the submarine and safety—if, in fact, they were able to make that journey without perishing—she would no doubt relive the death of her parents more than once and recall every hideous detail of the ordeal that she had endured when she was six years old.

Pete was having trouble squeezing into his gear. He said, “Are all these Russians pygmies?”

Everyone laughed.

The joke hadn’t been that funny. Such easy laughter was an indication of how tense they were. Harry sensed that panic was near the surface in all of them.

11:15

DETONATION IN FORTY-FIVE MINUTES

The overhead speaker brought the bad news that everyone in the control room had been expecting from the torpedo officer: “That bulkhead is sweating again, Captain.”

Gorov turned away from the bank of video displays and pulled down a microphone. “Captain to torpedo room. Is it just a thin film, the same as last time?”

“Yes, sir. About the same.”

“Keep an eye on it.”

Emil Zhukov said, “Now that we know the lay of the ice above us, we could take her up to six hundred feet, up into the bowl of the funnel.”

Gorov shook his head. “Right now we have only one thing to worry about—the sweat on that torpedo-room bulkhead. If we ascent to six hundred feet, we might still have that problem, and we’d also have to worry that the iceberg might suddenly enter a new current and be turned out of this one.”

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *