Koontz, Dean R. - Icebound Read online

  Eight feet to the right of them, twenty feet down, previously cloaked in darkness, George Lin lay where he had fallen onto the narrow ledge. He was on his left side, his back against the cliff, facing out toward the open sea. His left arm was wedged under him, and his right arm was across his chest. He had assumed the fetal position, with his knees drawn up as far as his bulky arctic clothing would allow and his head tucked down.

  Roger cupped his free hand to his mouth and shouted: “George! You hear me? George!”

  Lin didn’t move or respond.

  “You think he’s alive?” Brian asked.

  “Must be. Didn’t fall far. Clothes are quilted, insulated--absorbed some impact.”

  Brian cupped both hands around his mouth and shouted at Lin.

  The only answer came from the steadily increasing wind, and it was easy to believe that its shriek was full of gleeful malevolence, that this wind was somehow alive and daring them to remain at the brink just a moment longer.

  “Have to go down and get him,” Roger said.

  Brian studied the slick, vertical wall of ice that dropped twenty feet to the ledge. “How?”

  “We’ve got rope, tools.”

  “Not climbing gear.”

  “Improvise.”

  “Improvise?” Brian said with astonishment. “You ever done any climbing?”

  “No.”

  “This is nuts.”

  “No choice.”

  “Got to be another way.”

  “Like what?”

  Brian was silent.

  “Let’s look at the tools,” Roger said.

  “We could die trying to rescue him.”

  “Can’t just walk away.”

  Brian stared down at the crumpled figure on the ledge. In a Spanish bullring, on the African veldt, on the Colorado River, skin-diving in a shark run off Bimini… In far-flung places and in so many imaginative ways, he had tempted death without much fear. He wondered why he was hesitating now. Virtually every risk he’d ever taken had been pointless, a childish game. This time he had a good reason for risking everything: A human life was at stake. Was that the problem? Was it that he didn’t want to be a hero? Too damned many heroes in the Dougherty family, power-thirsty politicians who had become heroes for the history books.

  “Let’s get working,” Brian said at last. “George’ll freeze if he lies there much longer.”

  1:05

  Harry Carpenter leaned into the handlebars and squinted through the curve of Plexiglas at the white landscape. Hard sprays of snow and spicules of sleet slanted through the headlights. The windshield wiper thumbed monotonously, crusted with ice but still doing its job reasonably well. Visibility had decreased to ten or twelve yards.

  Although the machine was responsive and could be stopped in a short distance, Harry kept it throttled back. He worried that unwittingly he might drive off a cliff, because he had no way of knowing where the iceberg ended.

  The only vehicles in use by the Edgeway expedition were custom-stretched snowmobiles with rotary-combustion engines and specially engineered twenty-one-wheel, three-track bogie suspensions. Each machine could carry two adults in bulky thermal clothing on a thirty-six-inch padded bench. The driver and passenger rode in tandem, one behind the other.

  Of course the machines had been adapted further for operations in the rugged polar winter, in which conditions were dramatically more severe than those encountered by snowmobile enthusiasts back in the States. Aside from the dual starter system and the pair of special heavy-duty arctic batteries, the major modification on each vehicle was the addition of a cabin that extended from the hood to the end of the stretched passenger bench. That enclosure was fabricated of riveted aluminum sheets and thick Plexiglas. An efficient little heater had been mounted over the engine, and two small fans conducted the warm air to the driver and passenger.

  Perhaps the heater was a luxury, but the enclosed cabin was an absolute necessity. Without it, the continuous pounding of the wind would have chilled any driver to the bone and might have killed him on a trip longer than four or five miles.

  A few of the sleds had been further modified in unique ways. Harry’s was one of those, for he was transporting the power drill. Most tools were carried in the shallow storage compartment that was hidden under the hinged top of the passenger bench, or in a small open-bed trailer towed behind. But the drill was too large for the storage compartment and too important to the expedition to be exposed to the shocks that rattled the bed of a cargo trailer; therefore, the last half of the bench was fitted with locking braces, and the drill was now dogged down tightly behind Harry, occupying the space where a passenger ordinarily would have been.

  With those few modifications, the sled was well suited for work on the Greenland ice. At thirty miles per hour, it could be stopped within eighty feet. The twenty-inch-wide track provided excellent stability on moderately rough terrain. And although it weighed six hundred pounds in its adapted form, it had a top speed of forty-five miles per hour.

  At the moment, that was considerably more power than Harry could use. He was holding the snowmobile to a crawl. If the brink of the iceberg abruptly loomed out of the storm, he’d have at most thirty or thirty-five feet in which to comprehend the danger and stop the machine. If he were going at all fast, he would not be able to stop in time. Hitting the brakes at the penultimate moment, he would pitch out into the night, down in to the sea. Haunted by that mental image, he kept the engine throttled back to just five miles per hour.

  Though caution and prudence were necessary, he had to make the best possible time. Every minute spent in transit increased the likelihood that they would become disoriented and hopelessly lost.

  They had struck out due south from the sixtieth blasting shaft, maintaining that heading as well as they could, on the assumption that what had been east prior to the tsunami was now south. In the first fifteen or twenty minutes after the tidal wave, the iceberg would probably have drifted around on the compass as much as it was going to, finding its natural bow and stern; logically, it should now be sailing straight on course. If their assumption was wrong and if the berg was still turning, the temporary camp would no longer lay due south, either, and they would pass the igloos at a considerable distance, stumbling upon them only by accident, if at all.

  Harry wished he could find the way back by visual references, but the night and the storm cloaked all landmarks. Besides, on the icecap, one monotonous landscape looked pretty much like another, and even in broad daylight it was possible to get lost without a functioning compass.

  He glanced at the side-mounted mirror beyond the ice-speckled Plexiglas. The headlamps of the second sled—carrying Pete and Claude—sparkled in the frigorific darkness behind him.

  Although distracted for only a second, he quickly returned to his scrutiny of the ice ahead, half expecting to see a yawning gulf just beyond the black tips of the snowmobile skis. The calcimined land still rolled away unbroken into the long night.

  He also expected to see a glimmer of light from the temporary camp. Rita and Franz would realize that without a marker the camp would be difficult if not impossible to find in such weather. They would switch on the snowmobile lights and focus on the ridge of ice behind the camp. The glow, reflected and intensified, would be an unmistakable beacon.

  But he was unable to see even a vague, shimmering luminescence ahead. The darkness worried him, for he took it to mean that the camp was gone, buried under tons of ice.

  Although he was ordinarily optimistic, Harry sometimes was overcome by a morbid fear of losing his wife. Deep down, he didn’t believe that he really deserved her. She had brought more joy into his life than he had ever expected to know. She was precious to him, and fate had a way of taking from a man that which he held closest to his heart.

  Of all the adventures that had enlivened Harry’s life since he’d left that Indiana farm, his relationship with Rita was by far the most exciting and rewarding. She was more exotic, more myste
rious, more capable of surprising and charming and delighting him, than all the wonders of the world combined.

  He told himself that the lack of signal lights ahead was most likely a positive sign. The odds were good that the igloos still stood on the solid winter field and not on the berg. And if the temporary camp was still back there on the icecap, then Rita would be secure at Edgeway Station within a couple of hours.

  But no matter whether Rita was on the berg or the cap, the pressure ridge that loomed behind the camp might have collapsed, crushing her.

  Hunching farther over the handlebars, he squinted through the falling snow: nothing.

  If he found Rita alive, even if she was trapped with him, he would thank God every minute of the rest of his life—which might total precious few. How could they get off this ship of ice? How would they survive the night? A quick end might be preferable to the special misery of a slow death by freezing.

  Just thirty feet ahead, in the headlights, a narrow black line appeared on the snow-swept plain: a crack in the ice, barely visible from his perspective.

  He hit the brakes hard. The machine slid around thirty degrees on its axis, skis clattering loudly. He turned the handlebars into the slide until he felt the track gripping again, and then he steered back to the right.

  Still moving, gliding like a hockey puck, Jesus, twenty feet from the looming pit and still sliding …

  The dimensions of the black line grew clearer. Ice was visible beyond it. So it must be a crevasse. Not the ultimate brink with only night on the far side and only the cold sea at the base of it. Just a crevasse.

  … sliding, sliding …

  On the way out from camp, the ice had been flawless. Apparently the subsea activity had also opened this chasm.

  … fifteen feet …

  The skis rattled. Something knocked against the undercarriage. The snow cover was thin. Ice offered poor traction. Snow billowed from the skis, from the churning polyurethane track, like clouds of smoke.

  … ten feet …

  The sled stopped smoothly, rocking imperceptibly on its bogie suspension, so near the crevasse that Harry was not able to see the edge of the ice over the sloped front of the machine. The tips of the skis must have been protruding into empty air beyond the brink. A few more inches, and he would have been balanced like a teeter-totter, rocking between death and survival.

  He slipped the machine into reverse and backed up two or three feet, until he could see the precipice.

  He wondered if he were clinically mad for wanting to work in the deadly wasteland.

  Shivering, but not because of the cold, he pulled his goggles from his forehead, fitted them over his eyes, opened the cabin door, and got out. The wind had the force of a blow from a sledgehammer, but he didn’t mind it. The chill that passed through him was proof that he was alive.

  The headlights revealed that the crevasse was only about four yards wide at the center and narrowed drastically toward both ends. It was no more than fifteen yards long, not large but certainly big enough to have swallowed him. Gazing down into the blackness under the headlights, he suspected that the depth of the chasm could be measured in hundreds of feet.

  He shuddered and turned his back to it. Under his many layers of clothing, he felt a bead of sweat, the pure distillate of fear, trickle down the hollow of his back.

  Twenty feet behind his sled, the second snowmobile was stopped with its engine running, lights blazing. Pete Johnson squeezed out through the cabin door.

  Harry waved and started toward him.

  The ice rumbled.

  Surprise, Harry halted.

  The ice moved.

  For an instant he thought that another seismic wave was passing beneath them. But they were adrift now and wouldn’t be affected by a tsunami in the same way as they had been when on the fixed icecap. The berg would only wallow like a ship in rough seas and ride out the turbulence without damage; it wouldn’t groan, crack, heave, and tremble.

  The disturbance was entirely local—in fact, it was directly under his feet. Suddenly the ice opened in front of him, a zigzagging crack about an inch wide, wider, wider, now as wide as his hand, then even wider. He was standing with his back to the brink, and the badly fractured wall of the newly formed crevasse was disintegrating beneath him.

  He staggered, flung himself forward, jumped across the jagged fissure, aware that it was widening under him even as he was in mid-leap. He fell on the far side and rolled away from that treacherous patch of ice.

  Behind him, the wall of the crevasse calved off thick slabs that crashed into the depths, and thunder rose from below. The plain shivered.

  Harry pushed up onto his knees, not sure if he was safe yet. Hell, no. The edge of the chasm continued to disintegrate into the pit, the crevasse widened toward him, and he scrambled frantically away from it.

  Gasping, he glanced back in time to see his snowmobile, its rotary engine humming, as it slid into the chasm. It slammed against the far wall of the crevasse and was pinned there for an instant by a truck-size slab of ice. The fule in the main and auxiliary tanks exploded. Flames gushed high into the wind but quickly subsided as the burning wreckage sought the depths. Around and under him, red-orange phantoms shimmered briefly in the milky ice; then the fire puffed out, and darkness took command.

  1:07

  Cryophobia. The fear of ice.

  Their circumstances made it far harder than usual for Rita Carpenter to repress that persistent, debilitating terror.

  Portions of the pressure ridge had partially collapsed while other sections had been radically recontoured by the tsunami. Now a shallow cave—approximately forty feet deep and thirty feet wide—pocked those white ramparts. The ceiling was as high as twenty feet in some places and as low as ten in others: one half smooth and slanted, the other half composed of countless boulders and partitions of ice jammed together in a tight, mutually supportive, white-on-white mosaic that had a malevolent beauty and reminded Rita of the surreal stage sets in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligart, a very old movie.

  She hesitated in the entrance to that cold haven, reluctant to follow Franz Fischer across the threshold, plagued by the irrational feeling that she would be moving not merely forward a few feet but simultaneously backward in time to that winter day when she was six, to the rumble and the roar and the living death of the white tomb…

  Clenching her teeth, struggling to repress a sense of almost paralyzing dread, she went inside. The storm raged behind her, but she found comparative quiet within those white walls, as well as relief from the biting wind and snow.

  With her flashlight, Rita studied the ceiling and the walls, searching for indications that the structure was in imminent danger of collapsing. The cave appeared to be stable enough at the moment, although another powerful tsunami, passing under the ice, might bring down the ceiling.

  “Risky,” she said, unable to prevent her voice from breaking nervously.

  Franz agreed. “But we don’t have any choice.”

  All three inflatable shelters had been destroyed beyond repair. To remain outside in the increasingly fierce wind for an extended period of time would be courting hypothermia, in spite of their insulated storm suits. Their desperate need for shelter outweighed the danger of the cave.

  They went outside again and carried the shortwave radio—which appeared to have survived the destruction of the camp—into the ice cave and set it on the floor against the rear wall. Franz ran wires in from the backup batter of the undamaged snowmobile, and they hooked up the transceiver. Rita switched it on, and the selection band glowed sea green. The crackle of static and an eerie whistling shivered along the walls of ice.

  “It works,” she said, relieved.

  Adjusting his hood to make it tighter at the throat, Franz said, “I’ll see what else I can salvage.” Leaving the flashlight with her, he went out into the storm, shoulders hunched and head tucked down in anticipation of the wind.

  Franz had no sooner stepped outside than an u
rgent transmission came through from Gunvald at Edgeway Station.

  Rita crouched at the radio and quickly acknowledge the call.

  “What a relief to hear your voice,” Gunvald said. “Is everything all right?”

  “The camp was destroyed, but Franz and I are okay. We’ve taken shelter in an ice cave.”

  “Harry and the others?”

  “We don’t know what’s happened to them,” she said, and her chest tightened with anxiety as she spoke. “They’re out on work details. We’ll give them fifteen minutes to show up before we go looking.” She hesitated and cleared her throat. “The thing is… we’re adrift.”

  For a moment, Gunvald was too stunned to speak. Then: “Are you certain?”

  “A change in wind direction alerted us. Then the compasses.”

  “Give me a moment,” Larsson said with audible distress. “Let me think.”

  In spite of the storm and the strong magnetic disturbances that accompanied bad weather in those latitudes, Larsson’s voice was clear and easy to follow. But then he was only four air miles away. As the storm accelerated, and as the iceberg drifted farther south, they were certain to have severe communications problems. Both understood that they would soon lose contact, but neither mentioned it.

  Larsson said, “What’s the size of this iceberg of yours? Do you have any idea?”

  “None at all. We haven’t had an opportunity to reconnoiter. Right now, we’re just searching for whatever’s salvageable in the wreckage of the camp.”

  “If the iceberg isn’t very large…” Gunvald’s voice faded into static.

  “I can’t read you.”

  Shatters of static.

  “Gunvald, are you still there?”

  His voice returned: “… if the berg isn’t large… Harry and the others might not be adrift with you.”

  Rita closed her eyes. “I hope that’s true.”

  “Whether they are or aren’t, the situation is far from hopeless. The weather’s still good enough for me to get a message by satellite relay to the United States Air Force base at Thule. Once I’ve alerted them, they can contact those UNGY trawlers standing south of you.”