Icebound

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 for 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 blinding 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.

During the past several hours, however, he had lost a large measure of his characteristic composure. Chewing on the pipestem, he turned away from the frost-fringed windowpane and scowled at the computers and the data-gathering equipment that lined three walls of the telecommunications shack.

Early the previous afternoon, when Harry and the others had gone south toward the edge of the ice, Gunvald had stayed behind to monitor incoming calls on the radio and to keep watch over the station. This was not the first time that all but one of the expedition members had left Edgeway to conduct an experiment in the field, but on previous occasions, someone other than Gunvald had remained behind. After weeks of living in a tiny community with eight too-close neighbors, he had been eager for his session of solitude.

By four o'clock the previous day, however, when Edgeway's seismographs registered the first quake, Gunvald had begun to wish that the other members of the team had not ventured so near to the edge of the ice, where the polar cap me the sea. At 4:14, the jolt was confirmed by radio reports from Reykjavik, Iceland, and from Hammerfest, Norway. Severe slippage had occurred in the seabed sixty miles northeast of Raufarhöfn, Iceland. The shock was on the same chain of interlinked faults that had triggered destructive volcanic eruptions on Iceland more than three decades ago. This time there had been no damage on any land bordering the Greenland Sea, although the tremor had registered a solid 6.5 on the Richter scale.

Gunvald's concern arose from the suspicion that the quake had been neither an isolated incident nor the main event. He had good reason to believe that it was a foreshock, precursor to an event of far greater magnitude.

From the outset the team had intended to study, among other things, ocean-bed temblors in the Greenland Sea to learn more about local suboceanic fault lines. They were working in a geologically active part of the earth that could never be trusted until it was better known. If dozens of ships were to be towing colossal icebergs in those waters, they would need to know how often the sea was disturbed by major submarine quakes and by resultant high waves. A tsunami — a titanic wave radiating from the epicenter of a powerful quake — could endanger even a fairly large ship, although less in the open sea than if the vessel was near a shoreline.

He should have been pleased with the opportunity to observe, at such close quarters, the characteristics and patterns of major temblors on the Greenland Sea fault network. But he wasn't pleased at all.

Using a microwave uplink to orbiting communications satellites, Gunvald was able to on-line and access any computers tied into the worldwide Infonet. Though he was geographically isolated, he had at his disposal virtually all the research databases and software that would have been available in any city.

Yesterday, he had tapped those impressive resources to analyze the seismographic data on the recent quake. What he discovered had made him uneasy.

The enormous energy of the temblor had been released less by lateral seabed movement than by violent upward thrust. That was precisely the type of ground movement that would put the greatest amount of strain on the interlinked faults lying to the east of the one on which the first event had transpired.

Edgeway Station itself was in no imminent danger. If major seabed slippage occurred nearby, a tsunami might roll beneath the icecap and precipitate some changes: Primarily, new chasms and pressure ridges would form. If the quake were related to submarine volcanic activity, in which millions of cubic tons of molten lava gushed out of the ocean floor, perhaps even temporary holes of warm water would open in the icecap. But most of the polar terrain would be unchanged, and the likelihood was slim that the base camp would be either damaged or destroyed.

The other expedition members, however, couldn't be as certain of their safety as Gunvald was of his own. In addition to creating pressure ridges and chasms, a hot tsunami was likely to snap off sections of the ice at the edge of the winter field. Harry and the others might find the cap falling out from under them while the sea rushed up dark, cold, and deadly.

At nine o'clock last night, five hours after the first tremor, the second quake—5.8 on the Richter scale — had hit the fault chain. The seabed had shifted violently one hundred five miles north-northeast of Raufarhöfn. The epicenter had been thirty-five miles nearer Edgeway than that of the initial shaker.

Gunvald took no comfort from the fact that the second quake had been less powerful than the first. The diminution in force was not absolute proof that the more recent temblor had been an aftershock to the first. Both might have been foreshocks, with the main event still to come.

During the Cold War, the United States had planted a series of extremely sensitive sonic monitors on the floor of the Greenland Sea, as well as in many other strategic areas of the world's oceans, to detect the nearly silent passage of nuclear-armed enemy submarines. Subsequent to the collapse of the Soviet Union, some of those sophisticated devices had begun doing double duty both monitoring submarines and providing data for scientific purposes. Since the second quake, most of the deep-ocean listening stations in the Greenland Sea had been transmitting a faint but almost continuous low-frequency grumble: the ominous sound of growing elastic stress in the crust of the earth.

A slow-motion domino reaction might have begun. And the dominoes might be falling toward Edgeway Station.

During the past sixteen hours, Gunvald had spent less time smoking his pipe than chewing nervously on the stem of it.

At nine-thirty the previous night, when the radio confirmed the location and force of the second shock, Gunvald had put through a call to the temporary camp six miles to the southwest. He told Harry about the quakes and explained the risks that they were taking by remaining on the perimeter of the polar ice.

“We've got a job to do,” Harry had said. “Forty-six packages are in place, armed, and ticking. Getting them out of the ice again before they all detonate would be harder than getting a politician's hand out of your pocket. And if we don't place the other fourteen tomorrow, without all sixty synchronized charges, we likely won't break off the size berg we need. In effect, we'll be aborting the mission, which is out of the question.”

“I think we should consider it.”

“No, no. The project's too damned expensive to chuck it all just because there might be a seismic risk. Money's tight. We might not get another chance if we screw up this one.”

“I suppose you're right,” Gunvald acknowledged, “but I don't like it.”

The open frequency crackled with static as Harry said, “Can't say I'm doing cartwheels, either. Do you have any projection about how long it might take major slippage to pass through an entire fault chain like this one?”

“You know that's anybody's guess, Harry. Days, maybe weeks, even months.”

“You see? We have more than enough time. Hell, it can even take longer.”

“Or it can happen much faster. In hours.”

“Not this time. The second tremor was less violent than the first, wasn't it?” Harry asked.

“And you know perfectly well that doesn't mean the reaction will just play itself out. The third might be smaller or larger than the first two.”

“At any rate,” Harry said, “the ice is seven hundred feet thick where we are. It won't just splinter apart like the first coat on a winter pond.”

“Nevertheless, I strongly suggest you wrap things up quickly tomorrow.”

“No need to worry about that. Living out here in these damned inflatable igloos makes any lousy shack at Edgeway seem like a suite at the Ritz-Carlton.”

After the conversation, Gunvald Larsson had gone to bed. He hadn't slept well. In his nightmares, the world crumbled apart, dropped away from him in enormous chunks, and he fell into a cold, bottomless void.

At seven-thirty in the morning, while Gunvald had been shaving, with the bad dreams still fresh in his mind, the seismograph had recorded a third tremor: Richter 5.2.

His breakfast had consisted of a single cup of black coffee. No appetite.

At eleven o'clock the fourth quake had struck only two hundred miles due south: 4.4 on the Richter scale.

He had not been cheered to see that each event was less powerful than the one that preceded it. Perhaps the earth was conserving its energy for a single gigantic blow.

The fifth tremor had hit at 11:50. The epicenter was approximately one hundred ten miles due south. Much closer than any previous tremor, essentially on their doorstep. Richter 4.2.

He'd called the temporary camp, and Rita Carpenter had assured him that the expedition would leave the edge of the icecap by two o'clock.

“The weather will be a problem,” Gunvald worried.

“It's snowing here, but we thought it was a local squall.”

“I'm afraid not. The storm is shifting course and picking up speed. We'll have heavy snow this afternoon.”

“We'll surely be back at Edgeway by four o'clock,” she said. “Maybe sooner.”

At twelve minutes past noon another slippage had occurred in the subsea crust, one hundred miles south: 4.5 on the Richter scale.

Now, at twelve-thirty, when Harry and the others were probably planting the final package of explosives, Gunvald Larsson was biting so hard on his pipe that, with only the slightest additional pressure, he could have snapped the stem in two.

12:30

Almost six miles from Edgeway Station, the temporary camp stood on a flat section of ice in the lee of a pressure ridge, sheltered from the pressing wind.

Three inflatable, quilted, rubberized nylon igloos were arranged in a semicircle approximately five yards from that fifty-foot-high ridge of ice. Two snowmobiles were parked in front of the structures. Each igloo was twelve feet in diameter and eight feet high at the center point. They were firmly anchored with long-shanked, threaded pitons and had cushiony floors of lightweight, foil-clad insulation blankets. Small space heaters powered by diesel fuel kept the interior air at fifty degrees Fahrenheit. The accommodations weren't either spacious or cozy, but they were temporary, to be used only while the team planted the sixty packages of explosives.

A hundred yards to the south, on a plateau that was five or six feet above the camp, a six-foot steel pipe rose from the ice. Fixed to it were a thermometer, a barometer, and an anemometer.

With one gloved hand, Rita Carpenter brushed snow from the goggles that protected her eyes and then from the faces of the three instruments on the pole. Forced to use a flashlight in the steadily deepening gloom, she read the temperature, the atmospheric pressure, and the wind velocity. She didn't like what she saw. The storm had not been expected to reach them until at least six o'clock that night, but it was bearing down hard and was liable to be on them in full force before they had finished their work and completed the return journey to Edgeway Station.

Awkwardly negotiating the forty-five-degree slope between the plateau and the lower plain, Rita started back toward the temporary camp. She could move only awkwardly because she was wearing full survival gear: knitted thermal underwear, two pairs of socks, felt boots, fleece-lined outer boots, thin woolen trousers and shirt, quilted thermal nylon suit, a fur-lined coat, a knitted mask that covered her face from chin to goggles, a fur-lined hood that laced under chin, and gloves. In this cruel weather, body heat had to be maintained at the cost of easy mobility; awkwardness, clumsiness, and discomfort were the burdens of survival.

Though Rita was warm enough, the bitter-cold wind and the barren landscape chilled her emotionally. By choice, both she and Harry had spent a large portion of their professional lives in the Arctic and Antarctic; however, she did not share Harry's love of the vast open spaces, the monochromatic vistas, the immense curve of sky, and the primal storms. In fact, she'd driven herself to return repeatedly to those polar regions primarily because she was afraid of them.

Since the winter when she was six years old, Rita had stubbornly refused to surrender to any fear, ever again, no matter how justified surrender might be…

Now, as she approached the igloo on the west end of camp, with the wind hammering her back, she suddenly suffered a phobic reaction so intense that it nearly brought her to her knees. Cryophobia: the fear of ice and frost. Frigophobia: the fear of cold. Chionophobia: the fear of snow. Rita knew those terms because she suffered from mild forms of all three phobias. Frequent confrontation with the sources of her anxieties, like inoculations against influenza, had ensured that she usually suffered only minor discomfort, uneasiness, seldom flat-out terror. Sometimes, however, she was overwhelmed by memories against which no number of inoculations was sufficient protection. Like now. The tumultuous white sky seemed to descend at the speed of a falling rock, to press relentlessly upon her as though the air and the clouds and the sheeting snow had magically metamorphosed into a massive slab of marble that would crush her into the unyielding, frozen plain. Her heart pounded hard and fast, then much harder and faster than before, then faster still, until its frantic cadence drummed, drummed, drummed so loudly in her ears that it drowned out the quarrelsome moaning of the wind.

Outside the igloo entrance, she halted and held her ground, refusing to run from that which terrified her. She required herself to endure the isolation of that bleak and gloom-shrouded realm, as someone who had an irrational fear of dogs might force himself to pet one until the panic passed.

That isolation, in fact, was the aspect of the Arctic that most troubled Rita. In her mind, since she was six years old, winter had been inextricably associated with the fearful solitude of the dying, with the gray and distorted faces of corpses, with the frost-glazed stares of dead and sightless eyes, with graveyards and graves and suffocating despair.

She was trembling so violently that the beam of her flashlight jittered across the snow at her feet.

Turning away from the inflatable shelter, she faced not into the wind but crosswise to it, studying the narrow plain that lay between the plateau and the pressure ridge. Eternal winter. Without warmth, solace, or hope.

It was a land to be respected, yes, all right. But it was not a best, possessed no awareness, had no conscious intention to do her harm.

She breathed deeply, rhythmically, through her knitted mask.

To help quell her irrational fear of the icecap, she told herself that she had a greater problem waiting in the igloo beside her. Franz Fischer.

She had met Fischer eleven years ago, shortly after she earned her doctorate and took her first research position with a division of International Telephone and Telegraph. Franz, who had also worked for ITT, was attractive and not without charm, when he chose to reveal it, and they'd been together for nearly two years. It hadn't been an altogether calm, relaxe, and loving relationship. But at least she had never been bored by it. They'd separated nine years ago, as the publication of her first book approached, when it became clear that Franz would never be entirely comfortable with a woman who was his professional and intellectual equal. He expected to dominate, and she would not be dominated. She had walked out on him, met Harry, gotten married a year later, and never looked back.

Because he had come into Rita's life after Franz, Harry felt, in his unfailingly sweet and reasonable way, that their history was none of his concern. He was secure in his marriage and sure of himself. Even knowing of that relationship, therefore, he had recruited Franz to be the chief meteorologist at Edgeway Station, because the German was the best man for the job.

In this one instance, unreasonable, jealousy would have served Harry — and all of them — better than rationality. Second best would have been preferable.

Nine years after their separation, Franz still insisted on playing the lover scorned, complete with stiff upper lip and soulful eyes. He was neither cold nor rude; to the contrary, he strove to create the impression that at night he nursed a badly broken heart in the lonely privacy of his sleeping bag. He never mentioned the past, showed any improper interest in Rita, or conducted himself in less than a gentlemanly fashion. In the confines of a polar outpost, however, the care with which he displayed his wounded pride was as disruptive, in its way, as shouted insults would have been.

The wind groaned, the snow churned around her, and the ice stretched out of sight as it had since time immemorial — but gradually her racing heartbeat subsided to a normal rate. She stopped shaking. The terror passed.

She'd won again.

When at last Rita entered the igloo, Franz was on his knees, packing instruments into a carton. He had taken off his outer boots, coat, and gloves. He dared not work up a sweat, because it would chill his skin, even inside his thermal suit, and leach precious heat from him when he went outdoors. He glanced up at her, nodded, and continued packing.

He possessed a certain animal magnetism, and Rita could see why she had been drawn to him when she was younger. Thick blond hair, deep-set dark eyes, Nordic features. He was only five nine, just an inch taller than she, but at forty-five he was as muscular and as trim as a boy.

“Wind is up to twenty-four miles,” she said, pushing back her hood and removing her goggles. “Air temp's down to ten degrees Fahrenheit and falling.”

“With the wind-chill factor, it'll be minus twenty or worse by the time we break camp.” He didn't look up. He seemed to be talking to himself.

“We'll make it back all right.”

“In zero visibility?”

“It won't get that bad so fast.”

“You don't know polar weather like I do, no matter how much of it you've seen. Take another look outside, Rita. This front's pushing in a lot faster than predicted. We could find ourselves in a total whiteout.”

“Honestly, Franz, your gloomy Teutonic nature?”

A thunderlike sound rolled beneath them, and a tremor passed through the icecap. The rumble was augmented by a high-pitched, nearly inaudible squeal as dozens of ice strata moved against one another.

Rita stumbled but kept her balance, as though lurching down the aisle of a moving train.

The rumble quickly faded away.

Blessed stillness returned.

Franz finally met her eyes. He cleared his throat. “Larsson's much-heralded big quake?”

“No. Too small. Major movement on this fault chain would be much larger than that, much bigger all down the line. That little shake would hardly have registered on the Richter scale.”

“A preliminary tremor?”

“Maybe,” she said.

“When can we expect the main event?”

She shrugged. “Maybe never. Maybe tonight. Maybe a minute from now.”

Grimacing, he continued packing instruments into the waterproof carton. “And you were talking about my gloomy nature…”

12:45

Pinned by cones of light from two snowmobiles, Roger Breskin and George Lin finished anchoring the radio transmitter to the ice with four two-foot-long belaying pins, and then ran a systems check on the equipment. Their long shadows were as strange and distorted as those of savages hunched over an idol, and the eerie song of the wind might have been the voice of the violent god to whom they prayed.

Even the murky glow of the winter twilight had now been frozen out of the sky. Without the snowmobile headlamps, visibility would drop to ten yards.

The wind had been brisk and refreshing that morning, but as it gathered speed, it had become an increasingly deadly enemy. A strong gale in those latitudes could press a chill through layer upon layer of thermal clothing. Already the fine snow was being driven so hard that it appeared to be sheeting past them on a course parallel to the icecap, as if falling horizontally out of the west rather than out of the sky, destined never to touch ground. Every few minutes they were forced to scrape their goggles and break the crust of snow off the knitted masks that covered the lower half of their faces.

Standing behind the amber headlights, Brian Dougherty averted his face from the wind. Flexing his fingers and toes to ward off the cold, he wondered why he had come to this godforsaken terminus. He didn't belong here. No one belonged here. He had never before seen a place so barren; even great deserts were not a lifeless as the icecap. Every aspect of the landscape was a blunt reminder that all of life was nothing but a prelude to inevitable and eternal death, and sometimes the Arctic so sensitized him that in the faces of the other members of the expedition he could see the skulls beneath the skin.

Of course that was precisely why he had come to the icecap: adventure, danger, the possibility of death. He knew at least that much about himself, though he had never dwelt on it and though he had only a shadowy notion of why he was obsessed with taking extreme risks.

He had compelling reasons for staying alive, after all. He was young. He was not wildly handsome, but he wasn't the Hunchback of Notre Dame, either, and he was in love with life. Not least of all, his family was enormously wealthy, and in fourteen months, when he turned twenty-five, he would gain control of a thirty-million-dollar trust fund. He didn't have a clue in hell as to what he'd do with all that money, if anything, but it surely was a comfort to know that it would be his.

Furthermore, the family's fame and the sympathy accorded to the whole Dougherty clan would open any doors that couldn't be battered down with money. Brian's uncle, once President of the United States, had been assassinated by a sniper. And his father, a United States Senator from California, had been shot and crippled during a primary campaign nine years ago. The tragedies of the Doughertys were the stuff of endless magazine covers from People to Good Housekeeping to Playboy to Vanity Fair, a national obsession that sometimes seemed destined to evolve into a formidable political mythology in which the Doughertys were not merely ordinary men or women but demigods and demigoddesses, embodiments of virtue, goodwill, and sacrifice.

In time, Brian could have a political career of his own if he wished. But he was still too young to face the responsibilities of his family name and tradition. In fact, he was fleeing from those responsibilities, from the thought of ever meeting them. Four years ago, he'd dropped out of Harvard after only eighteen months of law studies. Since then he had traveled the world, “bumming” on American Express and Carte Blanche. His escapist adventures had put him on the front pages of newspapers on every continent. He had confronted a bull in one of Madrid's rings. He'd broken an arm on an African photographic safari when a rhinoceros attacked the jeep in which he was riding, and while shooting the rapids on the Colorado River, he had capsized and nearly drowned. Now he was passing the long, merciless winter on the polar ice.

His name and the quality of several magazine articles that he had written were not sufficient credentials to obtain a position as the official chronicler of the expedition. But the Dougherty Family Foundation had made an $850,000 grant to the Edgeway project, which had virtually guaranteed that Brian would be accepted as a member of the team.

For the most part, he had been made to feel welcome. The only antagonism had come from George Lin, and even that had amounted to little more than a brief loss of temper. The Chinese scientist had apologized for his outburst. Brian was genuinely interested in their project, and his sincerity won friends.

He supposed his interest arose from the fact that he was unable to imagine himself making an equal commitment to any lifelong work that was even half as arduous as theirs. Although a political career was part of his legacy, Brian loathed that vile game: Politics was an illusion of service that cloaked the corruption of power. It was lies, deception, self-interest, and self-aggrandizement: suitable work only for the mad and the venal and the naïve. Politics was a jeweled mask under which hid the true disfigured face of the Phantom. Even as a young boy, he'd seen too much of the inside of Washington, enough to dissuade him from ever seeking a destiny in that corrupt city. Unfortunately, politics had infected him with a cynicism that made him question the value of any attainment or achievement, either inside or outside the political arena.

He did take pleasure in the act of writing, and he intended to produce three or four articles about life in the far, far north. Already, in fact, he had enough material for a book, which he felt increasingly compelled to write.

Such an ambitious undertaking daunted him. A book — whether or not he had the talent and maturity to write well at such length — was a major commitment, which was precisely what he had been avoiding for years.

His family thought that he had been attracted to the Edgeway Project because of its humanitarian potential, that he was getting serious about his future. He hadn't wanted to disillusion them, but they were wrong. Initially he'd been drawn to the expedition merely because it was another adventure, more exciting than those upon which he'd embarked before but no more meaningful.

And it still was only an adventure, he assured himself, as he watched Lin and Breskin checking out the transmitter. It was a way to avoid, for a while longer, thinking about the past and the future. But then…why this compulsion to write a book? He couldn't convince himself that he had anything to say that would be worth anyone's reading time.

The other two men got to their feet and wiped snow from their goggles.

Brian approached them, shouting over the wind, “Are you done?”

“At last!” Breskin said.

The two-foot-square transmitter would be sheathed in snow and ice within hours, but that wouldn't affect its signal. It was designed to operate in arctic conditions, with a multiple-battery power supply inside layers of insulation originally developed for NASA. It would put out a strong signal — two seconds in duration, ten times every minute — for eight to twelve days.

When that segment of ice was blasted loose from the winter field with almost surgical precision, the transmitter would drift with it into those channels know as Iceberg Alley and from there into the North Atlantic. Two trawlers, part of the United Nations Geophysical Year Fleet, were standing at the ready two hundred thirty miles to the south to monitor the continual radio signal. With the aid of geosynchronous polar satellites, they would fix the position of the berg by triangulation and home in on it until it could be identified visually by the waterproof, self-expanding red dye that had been spread across wide areas of its surface.

The purpose of the experiment was to gain a basic understanding of how the winter sea currents affected drift ice. Before any plans could be made to tow ice south to drought-stricken coastal areas, scientists must learn how the sea would work against the ships and how it might be made to work for them.

It wasn't practical to send trawlers to the very edge of the polar cap to grapple with the giant berg. The Arctic Ocean and the Greenland Sea were choked with ice floes and difficult to navigate at that time of year. Depending on what the project experiments revealed, however, they might find that it was not necessary for the two ships to connect with the ice even immediately south of Iceberg Alley. Instead, the bergs might be allowed to ride the natural currents for a hundred or two hundred miles before effort was expended to haul them farther south and coastward.

“Could I get a few pictures?” Brian asked.

“No time for that,” George Lin said shortly. He brushed his hands together, briskly knocking thin plates of ice from his heavy gloves.

“Take just a minute.”

“Got to get back to Edgeway,” Lin said. “Storm could cut us off. By morning we'd be part of the landscape, frozen solid.”

“We can spare a minute,” Roger Breskin said. He wasn't half shouting as they were, but his bass voice carried over the wind, which had escalated from an unearthly groan to a soft ululant howl.

Brian smiled thankfully.

“You crazy?” Lin asked. “See this snow? If we delay?”

“George, you've already wasted a minute carping.” Breskin's tone was not accusatory, merely that of a scientist stating an observable fact.

Although Roger Breskin had emigrated to Canada from the United States only eight years ago, he was every bit as quiet and calm as the stereotypical Canadian. Self-contained, reclusive, he did not easily make friends or enemies.

Behind his goggles, Lin's eyes narrowed. Grudgingly he said, “Take you pictures. I guess Roger wants to see himself in all the fancy magazines. But hurry.”

Brian had no choice but to be quick. Weather conditions allowed no time for setting up shots and focusing to perfection.

“This okay?” Roger Breskin asked, standing to the right of the transmitter.

“Great.”

Roger dominated the frame in the viewfinder. He was five eleven, one hundred ninety pounds, shorter and lighter than Pete Johnson but no less muscular than the former football star. He had been a weight lifter for twenty of his thirty-six years. His biceps were enormous, webbed with veins that resembled steel tubes. In arctic gear, he was an impressively bearish figure who seemed to belong in these vast frozen wastes as none of the others did.

Standing to the left of the transmitter, George Lin was as unlike Breskin as a hummingbird is unlike an eagle. He was shorter and slimmer than Roger, but the differences were not merely physical. While Roger stood as silent and still as a pinnacle of ice, Lin swayed from side to side as if he might explode with nervous energy. He had none of the patience that was reputed to be a trait of the Asian mind. Unlike Breskin, he didn't belong in these frozen wastes, and he knew it.

George Lin had been born Lin Shen-yang, in Canton, mainland China, in 1946, shortly before Mao Tse-tung's revolution had ousted the Kuomintang government and established a totalitarian state. His family had not managed to flee to Taiwan until George was seven. In those early years, something monstrous had happened to him in Canton that had forever traumatized and shaped him. Occasionally he alluded to it, but he refused ever to speak of it directly, either because he was not capable of dealing with the horror of those memories — or because Brian's skills as a journalist were insufficient to extract the story.

“Just hurry,” Lin urged. His breath billowed in skeins of crystalline yarn that unraveled in the wind.

Brian focused and pressed the shutter release.

The electronic flash was reflected by the snowscape, and figures of light leaped and danced with figures of shadow. Then the deep darkness swarmed back to crouch at the edges of the headlamps.

Brian said, “One more for—”

The icecap rose abruptly, precipitously, like the motorized floor in a carnival fun house. It tilted left, right, then dropped out from under him.

He fell, slammed so hard into the ice that even the heavy padding of his insulated clothing did not adequately cushion him, and the painful impact knocked his bones against one another as if they were I Ching sticks clattering in a metal cup. The ice heaved up again, shuddered and bucked, as though striving mightily to fling him off the top of the earth and out into space.

One of the idling snowmobiles crashed into its side, inches from his head, and sharp shards of ice exploded in his face, glittery needles, stinging his skin, barely sparing his eyes. The skis on the machine rattled softly and quivered as if they were insectile appendages and the engine choked off.

Dizzy, shocked, heart stuttering, Brian cautiously raised his head and saw that the transmitter was still firmly anchored. Breskin and Lin were sprawled in the snow, having been pitched about as if they were dolls, as he himself had been. Brian started to get up — but he fell again as the wasteland leaped more violently than it had the first time.

Gunvald's suboceanic earthquake had come at last.

Brian tried to brace himself within a shallow depression in the ice, wedging between the natural contours to avoid being thrown into the snowmobiles or the transmitter. Evidently a massive tsunami was passing directly under them, hundreds of millions of cubic yards of water rising with all the vengeful fury and force of an angry god awakening.

Inevitably, additional waves of still great but diminishing power would follow before the icecap stabilized.

The overturned snowmobile revolved on its side. The headlights swept across Brian twice, harrying shadows like wind-whipped leaves that had blown in from warmer latitudes, and then stopped as they illuminated the other men.

Behind Roger Breskin and George Lin, the ice suddenly cracked open with a deafening boom! And gaped like a ragged, demonic mouth. Their world was coming apart.

Brian shouted a warning.

Roger grasped one of the large steel anchor pins that fixed the transmitter in place, and he held on with both hands.

The ice heaved a third time. The white field tilted toward the new, yawning crevasse.

Although he tried desperately to brace himself, Brian slid out of the depression in which he had sought shelter, as though there were no inhibiting friction whatsoever between him and the ice. He shot toward the chasm, grabbed the transmitter as he sailed past it, crashed hard against Roger Breskin, and held on with fierce determination.

Roger shouted something about George Lin, but the wailing of the wind and the rumble of fracturing ice masked the meaning of his words.

Squinting through snow-filmed goggles, unwilling to risk his precarious hold to wipe them clean, Brian looked over his shoulder.

Screaming, George Lin slid toward the brink of the new crevasse. He flailed at the slick ice. As the last surge of the tsunami passed beneath them and as the winter cap settled down, Lin fell out of sign into the chasm.

Franz had suggested that Rita finish packing the gear and that he handle the heavy work of loading it into the cargo trailers. He was so unconsciously condescending toward “the weaker sex” that Rita rejected his suggestion. She pulled up her hood, slipped the goggles over her eyes once more, and lifted one of the filled cartons before he could argue with her.

Outside, as she loaded the waterproof boxes into one of the low-slung cargo trailers, the first tremor jolted the ice. She was pitched forward onto the cartons. A blunt cardboard corner gouged her cheek. She rolled off the trailer and fell into the snow that had drifted around the machine during the past hour.

Dazed and frightened, she scrambled to her feet as the primary crest of the tsunami arrived. The snowmobile engines were running, warming up for the ride back to Edgeway, and their headlamps pierced the falling snow, providing enough light for her to see the first broad crack appear in the nearly vertical wall of the fifty-foot-high pressure ridge that had sheltered — and now threatened — the temporary camp. A second crack split off the first, then a third, a fourth, ten, a hundred, like the intricate web of fissures in an automobile windshield that has been hit by a stone. The entire façade was going to collapse.

She shouted to Fischer, who was still in the igloo at the west end of the camp. “Run! Franz! Get out!”

Then she took her own advice, not daring to look back.

The sixtieth package of explosives as no different from the fifty-nine that had been placed in the ice before it: two and a half inches in diameter, sixty inches long, with smooth, rounded ends. A sophisticated timing device and detonator occupied the bottom of the cylinder and was synchronized to the timers in the other fifty-nine packages. Most of the tube was filled with plastic explosives. The upper end of the cylinder terminated in a steel loop, and a gated carabiner connected a tempered-steel chain to the loop.

Harry Carpenter wound the chain off the drum of a small hand winch, lowering the package — thirty pounds of casing and one hundred pounds of plastic explosives — into the narrow hole, working carefully because the charge was equivalent to three thousand pounds of TNT. He let down seventy-eight feet of chain before he felt the cylinder touch bottom in the eighty-seven-foot shaft. He connected another carabiner to the free end of the chain, pulled the links snug against the shaft wall, and secured the carabiner to a peg that was embedded in the ice beside the hole.

Pete Johnson was hunkered beside Harry. He looked over his shoulder at the Frenchman and called out above the keening wind: “Ready here, Claude.”

A barrel, which they had filled with snow, stood on electric heating coils in one of the cargo trailers. It brimmed with boiling water. Steam roiled off the surface of the water, froze instantly into clouds of glittering crystals, and was dispersed into the whirling snow, so it seemed as if an endless procession of ghosts was arising from a magical cauldron and fleeing to the far reaches of the earth.

Claude Jobert fixed a metal-ring hose to a valve on the barrel. He opened the valve and handed the nozzle to Carpenter.

Loosening the petcock, Harry let hot water pour out of the hose into the deep shaft. In three minutes the hole was sealed: The bomb was suspended in new ice.

If he left the shaft open, the explosion would vent upward to no purpose. The charge had been shaped to blow downward and expend its energy to all sides, and the hole must be tightly sealed to achieve the desired effect. At midnight, when that charge detonated with all the others, the new ice in the shaft might pop out like a cork from a bottle, but the greater force of the blast would not be dissipated.

Pete Johnson rapped his gloved knuckles against the newly formed plug. “Now we can get back to Edge—”

The icecap jolted up, lurched forward, tilted sharply in front of them, squealed like a great monster, and then groaned before collapsing back into its original plane.

Harry was thrown on his face. His goggles jammed hard against his cheeks and eyebrows. Tears streamed as pain swelled across his cheekbones. He felt warm blood trickling from his nostrils, and the taste of blood was in his mouth.

Pete and Claude had fallen and were holding each other. Harry caught a brief glimpse of them, grotesquely locked in each other's embrace as through they were a pair of wrestlers.

The ice shook again.

Harry rolled against one of the snowmobiles. The machine was bouncing up and down. He clung to it with both hands and hoped that it would not roll over on him.

His first thought had been that the plastic explosives had blown up in his face and that he was dead or dying. But as the ice swelled once more, he realized that tidal waves must be surging beneath the polar cap, no doubt spawned by a seabed quake.

As the third wave struck, the white world around Harry cracked and canted, as if a prehistoric creature were rising from a long sleep beneath him, and he found himself suspended at the top of an ice ramp. Only inertia kept him high the air, at the top of the incline. At any moment he might slide to the bottom along with the snowmobile, and perhaps be crushed beneath the machine.

In the distance, the sound of shattering, grinding ice pierced the night and the wind: the ominous protests of a brittle world cracking asunder. The roar grew nearer by the second, and Harry steeled himself for the worst.

Then, as suddenly as the terror had begun — no more than a minute ago — it ended. The ice plain dropped, became a level floor, and was still.

Having sprinted far enough to be safely out of any icefall from the looming pressure ridge, Rita stopped running and spun around to look back at the temporary camp. She was alone. Franz had not emerged from the igloo.

A truck-size piece of the ridge wall cracked off and fell with eerie grace, smashing into the uninhabited igloo at the east end of the crescent-shaped encampment. The inflatable dome popped as if it were a child's balloon.

“Franz!”

A much larger section of the ridge collapsed. Sheets, spires, boulders, slabs of ice crashed into the camp, fragmenting into cold shrapnel, flattening the center igloo, overturning a snowmobile, ripping open the igloo at the west end of the camp, from which Franz had still not escaped, casting up thousands of splinters of ice that glinted like showers of sparks.

She was six years old again, screaming until her throat seized up — and suddenly she wasn't sure if she had called out for Franz or for her mother, for her father.

Whether she had called a warning to him or not, Franz crawled out of the ruined nylon dome even as the deluge was tumbling around him, and he scrambled toward her. Mortar shells of ice exploded to the left and right of him, but he had the grace of a broken-field runner and the speed born of terror. He raced beyond the avalanche to safety.

As the ridge stabilized and ice stopped falling, Rita was shaken by a vivid vision of Harry crushed beneath a shining white monolith elsewhere in the cruel black-and-white polar night. She staggered, not because of the movement of the icefield, but because the thought of losing Harry rocked her. She ceased trying to keep her balance, sat on the ice, and began to shake uncontrollably.

Only the snowflakes moved, cascading out of the darkness in the west and into the darkness in the east. The sole sound was the dour-voiced wind singing a dirge.

Harry held on to the snowmobile and pulled himself erect. His heart thudded so hard that it seemed to know against his ribs. He tried to work up some saliva to lubricate his parched throat. Fear had dried him out as thoroughly as a blast of Sahara heat could have done. When he regained his breath, he wiped his goggles and looked around.

Pete Johnson helped Claude to his feet. The Frenchman was rubber-legged but evidently uninjured. Pete didn't even have weak knees; perhaps he was every bit as indestructible as he appeared to be.

Both snowmobiles were upright and undamaged. The headlights blazed into the vast polar night but revealed little in the seething sea of windblown snow.

High on adrenaline, Harry briefly felt like a boy again, flushed with excitement, pumped up by the danger, exhilarated by the very fact of having survived.

Then he thought of Rita, and his blood ran colder than it would have if he'd been naked in the merciless polar wind. The temporary camp had been established in the lee of a large pressure ridge, shadowed by a high wall of ice. Ordinarily, that was the best place for it. But with all the shaking that they had just been through, the ridge might have broken apart…

The lost boy faded into the past, where he belonged, became just a memory among other memories of Indiana fields and tattered issues of National Geographic and summer nights spent staring at the stars and at far horizons.

Get moving, he thought, awash in a fear far greater than that which he had felt for himself only moments ago. Get packed, get moving, get to her.

He hurried to the other men. “Anyone hurt?”

“Just a little rattled,” Claude said. He was a man who not only refused to surrender to adversity but was actually buoyed by it. With a brighter smile than he'd managed all day, he said, “Quite a ride!”

Pete glanced at Harry. “What about you?”

“Fine.”

“You're bleeding.”

When Harry touched his upper lip, bright chips of frozen blood like fragments of rubies adhered to his glove. “Nosebleed. It's already stopped.”

“Always a sure cure for nosebleed,” Pete said.

“What's that?”

“Ice on the back of the neck.”

“You should be abandoned here for that one.”

“Let's get packed and moving.”

“They may be in serious trouble at camp,” Harry said, and he felt his stomach turn over again when he considered the possibility that he might have lost Rita.

“My thoughts exactly.”

The wind pummeled them as they worked. The falling snow was fine and thick. The blizzard was racing in on them with surprising speed, and in unspoken recognition of the growing danger, they moved with a quiet urgency.

As Harry was strapping down the last of the instruments in the second snowmobile's cargo trailer, Pete called to him. He wiped his goggles and went to the other machine.

Even in the uncertain light, Harry could see the worry in Pete's eyes. “What is it?”

“During that shaking, I guess…did the snowmobiles do a lot of moving around?”

“Hell, yes, they bounced up and down as if the ice was a damn trampoline.”

“Just up and down?”

“What's wrong?”

“Not sideways at all?”

“What?”

“Well, I mean, is it possible they slid around, sort of swiveled around?”

Harry turned his back on the wind and leaned closer to Pete. “I was holding tight to one of them. It didn't turn. But what's that have to do with anything?”

“Bear with me. What direction were the snowmobiles facing before the tsunami?”

“East.”

“You're sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“Me too. I remember east.”

“Toward the temporary camp.”

Their breath collected in the sheltered space between them, and Pete waved a hand through the crystals to disperse them. He bit his lower lip. “Then am I losing my mind or what?”

“Why?”

“Well, for one thing…” He tapped the Plexiglas face of the snowmobile's compass, which was fixed to the hood in front of the windshield.

Harry read the compass. According to the needle, the snowmobile was facing due south, a ninety-degree change from where it had stood before the ice was shaken by the seismic waves.

“That's not all,” Johnson said. “When we parked here, I know damned well the wind was hitting this snowmobile from behind and maybe even slightly to my left. I remember how it was hammering the back of the sled.”

“I remember too.”

“Now it's blowing across the flank, from my right side when I'm behind the handlebars. That's a damned big difference. But blizzard winds are steady. They don't change ninety degrees in a few minutes. They just don't, Harry. They just don't ever.”

“But if the wind didn't change and the snowmobiles didn't move, that means the ice we're on…”

His voice trailed away.

They were both silent.

Neither of them wanted to put his fear into words.

At last Pete finished the thought: “…so the ice must have revolved one full quarter of the compass.”

“But how's that possible?”

“I have one good idea.”

Harry nodded reluctantly. “Yeah, so do I.”

“Only one explanation makes sense.”

“We better have a look at the compass on my machine.”

“We're in deep shit, Harry.”

“It's not a field of daisies,” Harry agreed.

They hurried to the second vehicle, and the fresh snow crunched and squeaked under their boots.

Pete tapped the Plexiglas face of the compass. “This one's facing south too.”

Harry brushed at his goggles but said nothing. Their situation was so dire that he didn't' want to have to put it into words, as if the worst wouldn't actually have happened until they spoke of it.

Pete surveyed the inhospitable wasteland that surrounded them. “If the damn wind picks up and the temperature keeps dropping… and it will keep dropping… then how long could we survive out here?”

“With our current supplies, not even one day.”

“The nearest help…”

“Would be those UNGY trawlers.”

“But they're two hundred miles away.”

“Two hundred and thirty.”

“And they're not going to head north into a major storm, not with so many ice floes to negotiate.”

Neither of them spoke. The banshee shriek of the wind filled their silence. Furies of hard-driven snow stung the exposed portions of Harry's face, even though his skin was protected by a layer of Vaseline.

Finally, Pete said, “So now what?”

Harry shook his head, “Only one thing's certain. We won't be driving back to Edgeway Station this afternoon.”

Claude Jobert joined them in time to hear that last exchange. Even though the lower part of his face was covered by a snow mask and though his eyes were only half visible behind his goggles, his alarm was unmistakable. He put one hand on Harry's arm. “What's wrong?”

Harry glanced at Pete.

To Claude, Pete said, “Those waves… they broke up the edge of the icefield.”

The Frenchman tightened his grip on Harry's arm.

Clearly not wanting to believe his own words, Pete said, “We're adrift on an iceberg.”

“That can't be,” Claude said.

“Outrageous, but it's true,” Harry said. “We're moving farther away from Edgeway Station with every passing minute… and deeper into this storm.”

Claude was a reluctant convert to the truth. He looked from Harry to Pete, then around at the forbidding landscape, as if he expected to see something that would refute what they had told him. “You can't be sure.”

“All but certain,” Pete disagreed.

Claude said, “But under us…”

“Yes.”

“…those bombs…”

“Exactly,” Harry said. “Those bombs.”