Koontz, Dean R. - Icebound Read online

  ICEBOUND

  By Dean Koontz

  BEFORE…

  From The New York Times:

  [1]

  POLAR ICE PUREST WATER

  IN THE WORLD

  MOSCOW, Feb. 10--According to Russian scientists, the water constituting the Arctic icecap has a far lower bacteria count than any water we now drink or with which we irrigate crops, a discovery that might make this vast frozen reservoir a valuable resource of the future. Because tapping the polar icecap might be cheaper than any current or foreseeable desalinization process, especially since the water would not have to be purified, some Russian researchers speculate that millions of acres of farmland might be irrigated with melted icebergs in the next decade.

  [2]

  SCIENTISTS BELIEVE ICEBERGS

  COULD PROVIDE FRESH WATER

  BOSTON, Sept. 5--Speaking before the annual convention of the American Society of Environmental Engineers, Dr. Harold Carpenter said today that chronic shortages of water in California, Europe, and other regions could be alleviated by a controlled melting of icebergs towed south from the Arctic Circle. Dr. Carpenter’s wife and research partner, Dr. Rita Carpenter, said the concerned nations should consider pooling the capital for the necessary research and development--an investment that would, she said, “be repaid a hundredfold within 10 years.”

  According to the Carpenters, co-recipients of last year’s National Science Foundation Prize, the basic concept is simple. A large iceberg would be “blown loose” from the edge of the icefield and allowed to drift south in natural currents. Later, enormous steel towing cables would be affixed to the berg. A trawler would then tow the ice to a conversion facility at the shore near thirsty farmland. “Because the North Atlantic and North Pacific are cold oceans, perhaps less than 15 percent of the ice would melt before it could be converted to water at the shore and piped to drought-stricken farms,” Dr. Harold Carpenter said.

  The Carpenters both cautioned that no one could be certain the idea was workable. “There are still a great many problems to overcome,” Dr. Rita Carpenter said. “Extensive research on the polar icecap…”

  [3]

  DROUGHT AFFECTS

  CALIFORNIA CROPS

  SACRAMENTO, Calif., Sept. 20--State Department of Agriculture officials estimate that California’s water shortages may have been responsible for as much as a $50 million loss in second-season crops as diverse as oranges, lemons, cantaloupes, lettuce…

  [4]

  SUFFICIENT RELIEF SUPPLIES

  UNAVAILABLE FOR THOUSANDS

  STARVING IN DROUGHT

  UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 5--The director of the United Nations Disaster Relief Office announced that poor harvests in the United States, Canada, and Europe have made it impossible for drought-stricken Africans and Asians to purchase grain and produce from the usually food-rich Western nations. Already, more than 200,000 people have died in…

  [5]

  SPECIAL U.N. FUND TO SEND

  SCIENTISTS TO POLAR ICECAP

  UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 6--Eleven members of the United Nations today contributed to a unique fund that will pay for a series of scientific experiments on the Arctic icecap. The primary intent of the project will be to study the feasibility of towing huge icebergs south, where they can be tapped for the irrigation of crops.

  “It might sound like science fiction,” said one British official, “but since the 1960’s, most environmental specialists have come to see the very real potential.” If such a scheme should prove workable, the major food-producing nations might never suffer bad harvests again. Although the icebergs could not be towed into the warm seas of southern Asia and Africa, the entire world would profit by the insured good harvests of the few countries that the project would directly benefit…

  [6]

  TEAM OF U.N. SCIENTISTS

  ESTABLISHES RESEARCH STATION

  ON ARCTIC ICEFIELD

  THULE, Greenland, Sept. 28--This morning, scientists under the direction of Drs. Harold and Rita Carpenter, co-recipients of this year’s Rothschild Prize in earth science, landed on the Arctic icecap between Greenland and Spitsbergen, Norway. They began construction of a research station two miles from the edge of the icefield where they will conduct United Nations-funded studies for at least nine months…

  [7]

  ARCTIC EXPEDITION TO BLOW LOOSE

  PIECE OF POLAR ICECAP TOMORROW

  THULE, Greenland, Jan. 14--At midnight tomorrow, scientists at the United Nations-funded Edgeway Station will detonate a series of explosive devices to separate a half-mile-square iceberg from the edge of the winter icecap, just 350 miles off the northeast coast of Greenland. Two United Nations trawlers, equipped with electronic tracking gear are waiting 230 miles to the south, where they will monitor the progress of the “bugged” iceberg.

  In an experiment designed to determine if Atlantic currents change substantially in northern regions during the severe Arctic winter…

  CHAPTER ONE: SNARE

  NOON

  DETONATION IN TWELVE HOURS

  With a crystal-shattering shriek, the bit of the power drill bored deep into the Arctic ice. Gray-white slush churned out of the hole, sluiced across the crusted snow, and refroze in seconds. The flared auger was out of sight, and most of the long steel shank also had disappeared into the four-inch-diameter shaft.

  Watching the drill, Harold Carpenter had a curious premonition of imminent disaster. A faint flicker of alarm. Like a bird shadow fluttering across a bright landscape. Even inside his heavy insulated clothing, he shivered.

  As a scientist, Harry respected the tools of logic, method, and reason, but he had learned never to discount a hunch--especially on the ice, where strange things could happen. He was unable to identify the source of his sudden uneasiness, though occasional dark forebodings were to be expected on a job involving high explosives. The change of one of the charges detonating prematurely, killing them all, was slim to nil. Nevertheless…

  Peter Johnson, the electronics engineer who doubled as the team’s demolitions expert, switched off the drill and stepped back from it. In his white Gore-Tex/Thermolite storm suit, fur-lined parka, and fur-lined hood, Pete resembled a polar bear--except for his dark brown face.

  Claude Jobert shut down the portable generator that supplied power to the drill. The resultant hush had an eerie quality of expectancy so intense that Harry glanced behind himself and then up into the sky, half-convinced that something was rushing or falling toward him.

  If Death kissed anyone today, it was more likely to rise up from below than to descend upon them. As the bleak afternoon began, the three men were preparing to lower the last hundred-pound explosive charge deep into the ice. It was the sixtieth demolitions package that they had handled since the previous morning, and they were all uneasily conscious of standing upon enough high-yield plastic explosives to destroy them in a apocalyptic flash.

  No fertile imagination was required to picture themselves dying in these hostile climes: The icecap was a perfect graveyard, utterly lifeless, and it encouraged thoughts of mortality. Ghostly bluish-white plains led off in all directions, somber and moody during that long season of nearly constant darkness, brief twilight, and perpetual overcast. At the moment, visibility was fair because the day had drawn down to that time when a vague, cloud-filtered crescent of sunlight painted the horizon. However, the sun had little to illuminate in the stark landscape. The only points of elevation were the jagged pressure ridges and hundreds of slabs of ice--some only as large as a man, others bigger than houses--that had popped from the field and stood on end like gigantic tombstones.

  Pete Johnson, joining Harry and Claude at a pair of snowmobiles that had been specially rebuilt f
or the rigors of the pole, told them, “The shaft’s twenty-eight yards deep. One more extension for the bit, and the job’s done.”

  “Thank God!” Claude Jobert shivered as if his thermal suit provided no protection whatsoever. In spite of the transparent film of petroleum jelly that protected the exposed portions of his face from frostbite, he was pale and drawn. “We’ll make it back to base camp tonight. Think of that! I haven’t been warm one minute since we left.”

  Ordinarily, Claude didn’t complain. He was a jovial, energetic little man. At a glance, he seemed fragile, but that was not the case. At five seven and a hundred thirty pounds, he was lean, wiry, hard. He had a mane of white hair now tucked under his hood, a face weathered and made leathery by a lifetime in extreme climates, and bright blue eyes as clear as those of a child. Harry had never seen hatred or anger in those eyes. Until yesterday, he had never seen self-pity in them, either, not even three years ago, when Claude lost his wife, Colette, in a sudden, senseless act of violence; he had been consumed by grief but had never wallowed in self-pity.

  Since they had left the comfort of Edgeway Station, however, Claude had been neither jovial nor energetic, and he had complained frequently about the cold. At fifty-nine, he was the oldest member of the expedition, eighteen years older than Harry Carpenter, which was the outer limit for anyone working in those brutal latitudes.

  Although he was a fine arctic geologist specializing in the dynamics of ice formation and movement, the current expedition would be his last trip to either pole. Henceforth, his research would be done in laboratories and at computers, far from the severe conditions of the icecap.

  Harry wondered if Jobert was bothered less by the bitter cold than by the knowledge that the work he loved had grown too demanding for him. Once day Harry would have to face the same truth, and he wasn’t sure that he would be able to exit with grace. The great chaste spaces of the Arctic and Antarctic enthralled him: the power of the extreme weather, the mystery that cloaked the white geometric landscapes and pooled in the purple shadows of every seemingly unplumbable crevasse, the spectacle on clear nights when the aurora borealis splashed the sky with shimmering streamers of light in jewel-like colors, and the vast fields of stars when the curtains of the aurora drew back to reveal them.

  In some ways he was still the kid who had grown up on a quiet farm in Indiana, without brothers or sisters or playmates: the lonely boy who’d felt stifled by the life into which he’s been born, who’d daydreamed of traveling to far places and seeing all the exotic marvels of the world, who’d wanted never to be tied down to one plot of earth, and who’d yearned for adventure. He was a grown man now, and he knew that adventure was hard work. Yet, from time to time, the boy within him was abruptly overcome by wonder, stopped whatever he was doing, slowly turned in a circle to look at the dazzlingly white world around him, and thought: Holy jumping catfish, I’m really here, all the way from Indiana to the end of the earth, the top of the world!

  Pete Johnson said, “It’s snowing.”

  Even as Pete spoke, Harry saw the lazily spiraling flakes descending in a silent ballet. The day was windless, though the calm might not endure much longer.

  Claude Jobert frowned. “We weren’t due for this storm until this evening.”

  The trip out from Edgeway Station--which lay four air miles to the northeast of their temporary camp, six miles by snowmobile past ridges and deep chasms--had not been difficult. Nevertheless, a bad storm might make the return journey impossible. Visibility could quickly deteriorate to zero, and they could easily get lost because of compass distortion. And if their snowmobiles ran out of fuel, they would freeze to death, for even their thermal suits would be insufficient protection against prolonged exposure to the more murderous cold that would ride in on the back of a blizzard.

  Deep snows were not as common on the Greenland cap as might have been expected, in part because of the extreme lows to which the air temperature could sink. At some point in virtually every blizzard, the snowflakes metamorphosed into spicules of ice, but even then visibility was poor.

  Studying the sky, Harry said, “Maybe it’s a local squall.”

  “Yes, that’s just what Online Weather said last week about that storm,” Claude reminded him. “We were to have only local squalls on the periphery of the main event. Then we had so much snow and ice it would’ve kept Père Noël home on Christmas Eve.”

  “So we’d better finish this job quickly.”

  “Yesterday would be good.”

  As if to confirm the need for haste, a wind sprang up from the west, as crisp and odorless as a wind could be only if it was coming off hundreds of miles of barren ice. The snowflakes shrank and began to descend at an angle, no longer spiraling prettily like flakes in a crystal bibelot.

  Pete freed the drill from the shank of the buried bit and lifted it out of its supportive frame, handling it as if it weighed a tenth of its actual eighty-five pounds.

  A decade ago he had been a football star at Penn State, turning down offers from several NFL teams. He hadn’t wanted to play out the role that society dictated for every six-foot-four-inch, two-hundred-pound black football hero. Instead, he had won scholarships, earned two degrees, and taken a well-paid position with a computer-industry think tank.

  Now he was vital to Harry’s expedition. He maintained the electronic data-gathering equipment at Edgeway, and having designed the explosive devices, he was the only one who could deal with them in full confidence if something went wrong. Furthermore, his tremendous strength was an asset out there on the inhospitable top of the world.

  As Pete swung the drill out of the way. Harry and Claude lifted a three-foot bit extension from one of the cargo trailers that were coupled to the snowmobiles. They screwed it onto the threaded shank, which was still buried in the ice.

  Claude started the generator again.

  Pete slammed the drill in place, turned the keyless chuck to clamp the jaws tight around the shank, and finished boring the twenty-nine-yard-deep shaft, at the bottom of which they would plant a tubular charge of explosives.

  While the machine roared, Harry gazed at the heavens. Within the past few minutes, the weather had deteriorated alarmingly. Most of the ashen light had faded from behind the oppressive overcast. So much snow was falling that the sky no longer was mottled with grays and black; nothing whatsoever of the actual cloud cover could be seen through the crystalline torrents. Above them was only a deep, whirling whiteness. Already shrinking and becoming grainlike, the flakes lightly pricked his greased face. The wind escalated to perhaps twenty miles an hour, and its song was a mournful drone.

  Harry still sensed oncoming disaster. The feeling was formless, vague, but unshakable.

  As a boy on the farm, he had never realized that adventure was hard work, although he had understood that it was dangerous. To a kid, danger had been part of the appeal. In the process of growing up, however, as he’d lost both parents to illness and learned the violent ways of the world, he had ceased to be able to see anything romantic about death. Nevertheless, he admitted to a certain perverse nostalgia for the innocence that had once made it possible to find a pleasurable thrill in the taking of mortal risks.

  Claude Jobert leaned close and shouted above the noise from the wind and the grinding auger: “Don’t worry, Harry. We’ll be back at Edgeway soon. Good brandy, a game of chess, Benny Goodman on the CD player, all the comforts.”

  Harry Carpenter nodded. He continued to study the sky.

  12:20

  In the telecommunications shack at Edgeway Station, Gunvald Larsson stood at the single small window, chewing nervously on the stem of his unlit pipe and peering out at the rapidly escalating storm. Relentless tides of snow churned through the camp, like ghost waves from an ancient sea that had evaporated millennia ago. Half an hour earlier, he’d scraped the ice off the outside of the triple-pane window, but already feathery new patterns of crystals were regrowing along the perimeter of the glass. In an hour, another blin
ding cataract would have formed.

  From Gunvald’s slightly elevated viewpoint, Edgeway Station looked so isolated--and contrasted so boldly with the environment in which it stood--that it might have been humanity’s only outpost on an alien planet. It was the only splash of color on the white, silver, and alabaster fields.

  The six canary-yellow Nissen huts had been airlifted onto the icecap in prefabricated sections at tremendous effort and expense. Each one-story structure measured twenty by fifteen feet. The walls--layers of sheet metal and lightweight foam insulation--were riveted to hoped girders, and the floor of each hut was countersunk into the ice. As unattractive as slum buildings and hardly less cramped than packing crates, the huts were nonetheless dependable and secure against the wind.

  A hundred yards north of the camp, a smaller structure stood by itself. It housed the fuel tanks that fed the generators. Because the tanks held diesel fuel, which could burn but couldn’t explode, the danger of fire was minimal. Nevertheless, the thought of being trapped in a flash fire fanned by an arctic gale was so terrifying--especially when there was no water, just useless ice, with which to fight it--that excessive precautions had to be taken for everyone’s peace of mind.

  Gunvald Larsson’s peace of mind had been shattered hours ago, but he was not worried about fire. Earthquakes were that troubled him now. Specifically, suboceanic earthquakes.

  The son of a Swedish father and a Danish mother, he had been on the Swedish ski team at two winter Olympics, had earned one silver medal, and was proud of his heritage; he cultivated the image of an imperturbable Scandinavian and usually possessed an inner calm that matched his cool exterior. His wife said that, like precision calipers, his quick blue eyes continuously measured the world. When he wasn’t working outdoors, he usually wore slacks and colorful ski sweaters; at the moment, in fact, he was dressed as though lolling in a mountain lodge after a pleasant day on the slopes rather than sitting in an isolated hut on the winter icecap, waiting for calamity to strike.