Icebound

1:00 DETONATION IN ELEVEN HOURS

One of the snowmobiles was on its side. The safety cutout had switched off the engine when the machine overturned, so there had been no fire. The other snowmobile was canted against a low hummock of ice. The four headlamps parted the curtains of snow, illuminating nothing, pointing away from the precipice over which George Lin had disappeared.

Although Brian Dougherty was convinced that any search for the Chinese was a waste of time, he scrambled to the edge of the new crevasse and sprawled facedown on the ice at the jagged brink. Roger Breskin joined him, and they lay side by side, peering into a terrible darkness.

Queasiness coiled and slithered in Brian's gut. He tried to dig the metal toes of his boots into the iron-hard ice, and he clutched at the flat surface. If another tsunami set the world adance, he might be tipped or flung into the abyss.

Roger directed his flashlight outward, toward the distant wall of the crevasse. Except for falling snow, nothing was revealed within the reach of the yellow beam. The light dwindled away into perfect blackness.

“Isn't a crevasse,” Brian said. “It's a damned canyon!”

“Not that either.”

The beam moved slowly back and forth: Nothing lay out there. Nothing whatsoever. Less than astronauts could see when they peered from a porthole into deep space.

Brian was baffled. “I don't understand.”

“We've broken off from the main icefield,” Roger explained with characteristic yet nonetheless remarkable equanimity.

Brian needed a moment to absorb that news and grasp the full horror of it. “Broken off…You mean we're adrift?”

“A ship of ice.”

The wind gusted so violently that for half a minute Brian could not have been heard above it even if he'd shouted at the top of his voice. The snowflakes were as busy and furious as thousands of angry bees, stinging the exposed portions of his face, and he pulled up his snow mask to cover his mouth and nose.

When the gust died out at last, Brian leaned toward Roger Breskin. “What about the others?”

“Could be on this berg too. But let's hope they're still on safe ice.”

“Dear God.”

Roger directed the flashlight away from the darkness where they had expected to find the far wall of a crevasse. The tight beam speared down and out into the humbling void.

They wouldn't be able to see the face of the cliff that dropped away just in front of them unless they eased forward and hung partly over the precipice. Neither of them was eager to expose himself to that extreme risk.

The pale light angled to the left and right, then touched upon the choppy, black, unfrozen sea that raged eighty or ninety feet below them. Flat tables of ice, irregular chunks of ice, gnarled rafts of ice, and delicate ever-changing laces of ice bobbled and swirled in the deep troughs of frigid dark water, crashed together on the crests of the waves; touched by the light, they glittered as if they were diamonds spread on black velvet.

Mesmerized by the chaos that the flashlight revealed, swallowing hard, Brian said, “George fell into the sea. He's gone.”

“Maybe not.”

Brian didn't see how there could be a hopeful alternative. His queasiness had slid into full-blown nausea.

Pushing with his elbows against the ice, Roger inched forward until he was able to peer over the brink and straight down the face of the precipice.

In spite of his nausea — and though he was still concerned that another tsunami might sweep under them and cast them into George Lin's grave — Brian moved up beside Roger.

The flashlight beam found the place where their ice island met the sea. The cliff did not plunge cleanly into the water. At its base, it was shattered into three ragged shelves, each six or eight yards wide and six to eight feet below the one above it. The shelves were as fissured and sharp-edged and jumbled as the base of any rocky bluff on dry land. Because another six hundred feet or more of the berg lay below sea level, the towering storm waves could not pass entirely under it; they crashed across the three shelves and broke against the glistening palisades, exploding into fat gouts of foam and icy spray.

Caught by the maelstrom, Lin would have been dashed to pieces. It might have been a more merciful death if he had plunged suddenly into those hideously cold waters and suffered a fatal heart attack before the waves had a chance to hammer and grind him against the jagged ice.

The light moved slowly backward and upward, revealing more of the cliff. From the three shelves at the bottom, for a distance of fifty feet, the ice sloped up at approximately a sixty-degree angle — not sheer by any measure, but much too steep to be negotiated by anyone other than a well-equipped and experienced mountain climber. Just twenty feet below them, another shelf crossed the face of the berg. This one was only a few feet wide. It angled back into the cliff. Above that shelf, the ice was sheer all the way to the brink where they lay.

After he had paused to scrape the crusted snow from his goggles, Roger Breskin used the flashlight to explore that shallow shelf below them.

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 mysterious, 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 urgent 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.”

“But what then? No sensible captain would bring a trawler north into a bad winter storm. He'd lose his ship and his crew trying to save us.”

“They've got the most modern rescue aircraft at Thule, some damn rugged helicopters capable of maneuvering in almost any conditions.”

“There isn't a plane yet invented that can fly safely in this kind of storm — let alone set down on an iceberg in gale-force winds.”

The radio produced only crackling static and warbling electronic squeals, but she sensed that Gunvald was still there.

Yes, she thought. It leaves me speechless too.

She glanced up at the angled slabs that had jammed together to form the ceiling. Snow and shavings of ice sifted down through a few of the cracks.

Finally the Swede said, “Okay, you're right about the aircraft. But we can't give up hope of rescue.”

“Agreed.”

“Because… well… listen, Rita, this storm could last three or four days.”

“Or longer,” she acknowledged.

“You haven't got enough food for that.”

“Hardly any. But food isn't so terribly important,” Rita said. “We can last longer than four days without food.”

They both knew that starvation was not the danger. Nothing mattered as much as the bone-freezing, unrelenting cold.

Gunvald said, “Take turns getting warm in the snowmobiles. Do you have a good supply of fuel?”

“Enough to get back to Edgeway — if that were possible. Not a hell of a lot more than that. Enough to run the engines for a few hours, not a few days.”

“Well, then…”

Silence. Static.

He came back after several seconds. “… put through that call to Thule all the same. They have to know about this. They might see an answer that we've overlooked, have a less emotional perspective.”

She said, “Edgeway came through unscathed?”

“Fine here.”

“And you?”

“Not a bruise.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“I'll live. And so will you, Rita.”

“I'll try,” she said. “I'll sure as hell try.”

1:10

Brian Dougherty siphoned gasoline from the tank of the upright snowmobile and poured it onto a two-foot section of ice at the brink of the cliff.

Roger Breskin twisted open a chemical match and tossed it into the gasoline. Flames erupted, flapped like bright tattered flags in the wind, but burned out within seconds.

Kneeling where the fire had been, Brian examined the edge of the precipice. The ice had been jagged; now it was smooth and slick. A climber's rope would slide over it without fraying.

“Good enough?” Roger asked.

Brian nodded.

Roger stooped and snatched up the free end of a thirty-five-foot rope that he had tied to the frame of the snowmobile and had also anchored to a long, threaded piton identical to those used to secure the radio transmitter. He quickly looped it around Brian's chest and shoulders, fashioning a harness of sorts. He tied three sturdy knots at the center of the young man's chest and said, “It'll hold. It's nylon, thousand-pound test. Just remember to grip the rope above your head with both hands so you'll keep at least some of the pressure off your shoulders.”

Because he did not trust himself to speak without a nervous stammer, Brian nodded.

Roger returned to the snowmobile, which was facing toward the precipice and which he had disconnected from its cargo trailer. He climbed into the cabin and closed the door. He held the brakes and revved the engine.

Trembling, Brian stretched out on his stomach, flat on the ice. He took a deep breath through his knitted ski mask, hesitated only briefly, and pushed himself feet-first over the edge of the cliff. Although he didn't drop far, his stomach lurched, and a thrill of terror like an electrical current sizzled through him. The rope pulled tight, checking his descent when the crown of his head was only inches below the top of the iceberg.

As yet, too little of the line hung past the brink to enable him to reach overhead and get a firm grip on it. He was forced to take the strain entirely with his shoulders. Immediately a dull ache arose in his joints, across his back, and up the nape of his neck. The ache would rapidly escalate into a sharp pain.

“Come on, come on, Roger,” he muttered. “Be quick.”

Brian was facing the ice wall. He brushed and bumped against it as the punishing wind pummeled him.

He dared to turn his head to the side and peer down, expecting to be able to see nothing but a yawning black gulf. Away from the glare of the snowmobile lights, however, his eyes adjusted swiftly to the gloom, and the vague natural phosphorescence of the ice allowed him to make out the sheer palisade against which he hung, as well as the broken shelves of jagged blocks at the bottom. Sixty or seventy feet below, the whitecaps on the churning sea exhibited a ghostly luminescence of their own as they rose in serried ranks from out of the night and crashed with spumous fury against the iceberg.

Roger Breskin throttled the snowmobile down so far that it almost stalled.

He considered the problem one last time. Dougherty was six feet tall, and the ledge was twenty feet below; therefore, he had to lower Dougherty about twenty feet in order to put him on the ledge and allow him six feet of line to ensure him sufficient mobility to deal with George Lin. They had marked off twenty feet of the line with a swatch of bright red cloth, so when that marker disappeared over the brink, Dougherty would be in position. But the rope had to be let down as slowly as possible, or the kid might be knocked unconscious against the side of the iceberg.

Furthermore, the snowmobile was only forty feet from the precipice; if the machine slid forward too fast, Roger might not be able to stop in time to save himself, let alone Dougherty and Lin. He was worried that the sled's lowest speed would prove dangerously fast for this job, and he hesitated now that he was ready to begin.

A violent gust of wind hammered Brian from behind and to the right, pressing him against the face of the cliff but also pushing him leftward, so he hung at a slight angle. When the wind relented after a moment, declining to about thirty miles an hour, he rocked back to the right, then began to swing gently like a pendulum, in a two- or three-foot arc.

He squinted up at the point where the rope met the edge of the cliff. Even though he had carefully smoothed the ice with burning gasoline, any friction whatsoever was bound to wear on the nylon line.

He closed his eyes and slumped in the harness, waiting to be lowered onto the ledge. His mouth was as dry as that of any desert wanderer, and his heart was beating so fast and hard that it seemed capable of cracking his ribs.

Because Roger was highly experienced with the snowmobile, it had seemed logical and reasonable that Brian should be the one to go down to retrieve George Lin. Now he wished that he himself had been the snowmobile expert. What the hell was taking so long?

His impatience evaporated when he suddenly dropped as if the rope had been cut. He landed on the ledge with such force that pain shot up his legs to the top of his spine. His knees crumbled as though they were sodden cardboard. He fell against the face of the cliff, bounced off, and toppled off the narrow ledge, out into the wind-shattered night.

He was too terrified to scream.

The snowmobile lurched and rushed forward too fast.

Roger hit the brakes immediately after he released them. The red cloth vanished over the brink, but the machine was still moving. Because the ice had been swept free of snow and polished by the incessant wind, it provided little traction. As smoothly as a shuffleboard puck gliding along polished pine, the snowmobile slid another ten feet, headlights spearing out into an eternal blackness, before it finally stopped less than ten feet from the edge of the cliff.

The harness jerked tight across Brian's chest and under his arms. Compared to the throbbing pain in his legs and the ache in his back, however, the new agony was endurable.

He was surprised that he was still conscious — and alive.

Unclipping his flashlight from the tool belt that encircled his waist, he cut open the perfect blackness around him with a blade of light, and torrents of snowflakes gushed over him.

Trying not to think about the icy sea below, he peered up at the ledge that he had overshot. It was four feet above his head. A yard to his left, the gloved fingers of George Lin's inert right hand trailed over the shelf.

Brian was swinging in a small arc again. His lifeline was scraping back and forth along the ledge, which had not been melted by burning gasoline. It gleamed sharply. Splinters and shavings of ice sprinkled down on him as the rope carved a shallow notch in that abrasive edge.

A flashlight beam stabbed down from above.

Brian raised his eyes and saw Roger Breskin peering at him from the top of the cliff.

Lying on the ice, his head over the precipice and his right arm extended with a flashlight, Roger cupped his free hand to his mouth and shouted something. The wind tore his words into a meaningless confetti of sound.

Brian raised one hand and waved weakly.

Roger shouted louder than before: “You all right?” His voice sounded as if it came from the far end of a five-mile-long railroad tunnel.

Brian nodded as best he could. Yes, I'm all right. There was no way to convey, with only a nod, the degree of his fear and the worry that was caused by the lingering pain in his legs.

Breskin shouted, but only a few of his words reached Brian: “Going… snowmobile… reverse… draw you… up.”

Again, Brian nodded.

“… slowly… a chance… too fast again… battered… the ice.”

Roger disappeared, obviously hurrying back to the snowmobile.

Leaving his flashlight on, Brian clipped it to his tool belt, with the beam shining down on his right foot. He reached overhead and gripped the taut line with both hands, hoisting himself slightly to take a measure of the strain off his upper arms, which were on the verge of dislocating from his shoulder sockets.

The snowmobile drew up some of the line. The movement was smooth compared to the style of his descent, and he was not thrown against the cliff.

From the knees down, his legs were still below the ledge. He swung them up and over, planted both feet on the narrow shelf of ice, crouching there. He let go of the rope and stood up.

His ankles ached, his knees felt as if they were made of jelly, and pain laced his thighs. But his legs held him.

He took a large piton — a five-inch shaft tapered to a sharp point, topped by a one-inch diameter eye loop — from a zippered pocket of his coat. He freed a small hammer from his tool belt and pounded the pin into a tight crack in the face of the cliff.

Again, Roger's flashlight shone down from the top.

When the anchoring pin was secure, Brian unhooked an eight-foot-long coil of nylon rope from this belt. Before descending, he had knotted one end of it to a carabiner; now he linked the carabiner to the piton and screwed shut its safety gate. He tied the other end of the line around his waist. The resultant tether would bring him up short of death if he slipped and fell off the ledge, yet he was free enough to attend to George Lin. Thus belayed, he untied the knots that held the harness together across his chest and under his arms. When he was free from the main line, he coiled it and hung it around his neck.

To avoid some of the wind's vicious force, he got on his hands and knees and crawled to Lin. Roger Breskin's light followed him. He took his own flashlight from his belt and placed it on the ledge, against the cliff face, with the beam shining on the unconscious man.

Unconscious — or dead?

Before he could know that answer to that question, he had to get a look at Lin's face. Turning the man onto his back was not an easy chore, because Brian had to be careful that the scientist did not roll off into the abyss. By the time Lin was on his back, he'd regained consciousness. His amber skin — at least those few square inches of his face that were exposed — was shockingly pale. Against the slit in his mask, his mouth worked without making an audible sound. Behind his frost-spotted goggles, his eyes were open; they expressed some confusion but didn't appear to be the eyes of a man in severe pain or delirium.

“How do you feel?” Brian shouted above the shrill wind.

Lin stared at him uncomprehending and tried to sit up.

Brian pressed him down. “Be careful! You don't want to fall.”

Lin turned his head and stared at the darkness from which the snow streamed ever faster. When he looked at Brian again, his pallor had deepened.

“Are you badly hurt?” Brian asked. Because of the thermal clothing Lin wore, Brian couldn't determine if the man had any broken bones.

“Some chest pain,” Lin said barely loudly enough to be heard above the storm.

“Heart?”

“No. When I went over the edge… the ice was still rocking… from the wave… the cliff face was slanted. I slid down… and landed here hard on my side. That's all I remember.”

“Broken ribs?”

Lin took a deep breath and winced. “No. Probably not. Only bruised, I think. Damn sore. But nothing's fractured.”

Brian removed the coil of rope from around his neck. “I'll have to make a harness under you arms, across you chest. Can you tolerate that?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No.”

“So I'll tolerate it.”

“You'll have to sit up.”

Groaning, Lin eased cautiously into a sitting position, with his back toward the cliff and his legs dangling in the void.

Brian quickly fashioned a harness, tied a tight double knot over Lin's breastbone, and got to his feet. He reached down and helped the injured man to stand. They turned in place to put the sea and the murderous wind at their backs. Dry, almost granular snow snapped against the wall of ice, bounced from it, and spun against their faces.

“Ready?” Roger called from twenty feet above.

“Yeah. But take it easy!”

Lin clapped his hands rapidly, loudly. Platelets of ice fell from his gloves. He flexed his fingers. “Feel numb… all over. I can move my fingers… but hardly feel them.”

“You'll be okay.”

“Can't feel… toes at all. Sleepy. Not good.”

He was right about that. When the body became so cold that it encouraged sleep to maintain precious heat, death could not be far away.

“As soon as you're topside, get into the sled,” Brian said. “Fifteen minutes, you'll be as warm as toast.”

“You got me just in time. Why?”

“Why what?”

“You risked your life.”

“Not really.”

“Yes, you did.”

“Well, wouldn't you have done the same?”

The taut line was pulled upward, taking George Lin with it. The ascent was smooth. At the top of the precipice, however, Lin got stuck, with his shoulders past the brink and the rest of him dangling in the wind. He was too weak to pull himself to safety.

Roger Breskin's years of training as a weight lifter served him well. He left the snowmobile and easily manhandled George Lin the last few feet onto the top of the iceberg. He untied the harness from the man's shoulders and threw the main line down to Brian.

“Check with you… soon as… George settled!” he shouted. Even though his voice was wind-tattered, the anxiety in it was evident.

Only an hour ago, Brian couldn't have conceived that Roger — rock solid as he was, with his bull's neck and his massive biceps and his powerful hands and his air of total self-reliance — might ever be afraid of anything whatsoever. Now that the other man's fear was evident, Brian was less ashamed of the terror that knotted his own guts. If a tough sonofabitch like Roger was susceptible to fear, then even one of the stoical Doughertys might be permitted that emotion a few times in his life.

He picked up the main line and harnessed himself to it. Then he untied the safety tether at his waist, loosened the other end from the piton, coiled it, and hooked it to his tool belt. He plucked the flashlight from the ledge and also fastened it to the belt. He would have salvaged the piton, too, if he'd had the means and the strength to pry it out of the ice. Their supplies, the fuel, and the tools were priceless. They dared waste or discard nothing. No one could predict what scrap, now insignificant, might eventually be essential to their survival.

He was thinking in terms of their survival rather than his own, for he knew that he was the least likely member of the expedition to come through the forthcoming ordeal with his life. Although he had taken four weeks of training at the U.S. Army Arctic Institute, he was not as familiar with the icecap or as well conditioned to it as were the others. Furthermore, he stood six one and weighed a hundred seventy pounds. Emily, his oldest sister, had called him String Bean since he was sixteen. But he was broad at the shoulders, and his lea arms were muscular: a string bean, then, but not a weakling. A weakling could never have ridden the Colorado River rapids, run with the shark hunters off Bimini, climbed mountains in Washington State. And as long as he had a warm igloo or a heated room at Edgeway Station to which he could return after a long day of exposure to the debilitating cold, he could hold up pretty well. But this was different. The igloos might no longer exist, and eve if they did exist, there might not be sufficient fuel in the snowmobile tanks or life in the batteries to keep them warm for longer than another day. Survival, in this case, demanded a special strength and stamina that came only with experience. He was all but certain that he did not have the fortitude to pull through.

What he would most regret about dying was his mother's grief. She was the best of the Doughertys, above the muck of politics, and she had experienced too much grief already. God knew, Brian had caused her more than a little of it with his…

A flashlight beam found him in the darkness.

“Are you ready to go?” Roger Breskin shouted.

“Whenever you are.”

Roger returned to the snowmobile.

No sooner had Brian braced himself than the rope was drawn up, putting a new and more terrible strain on his aching shoulders. Bettered by the wind, half dazed by pain, unable to stop thinking about the immense watery grave that lapped far below him, he slid along the face of the cliff as smoothly as George Lin had done five minutes ago. When he came to the brink, he was able to push and kick over the top without Roger's help.

He got up and took a few uncertain steps toward the snowmobile's headlamps. His ankles and thighs were sore, but the pain would diminish with exercise. He had come through virtually unscathed. “Incredible,” he said. He began to untie the knots that held the harness together. “Incredible.”

“What are you talking about?” Roger asked as he joined him.

“Didn't expect to make it.”

“You didn't trust me?”

“It wasn't that. I thought the rope would snap or the cliff crack apart or something.”

“You're going to die eventually,” Roger said, his deep voice almost theatrical in its effect. “But this wasn't your place. It wasn't the right time.”

Brian was as amazed to hear Roger Breskin waxing philosophical as he had been to learn that the man knew fear.

“If you're not hurt, we'd better get moving.”

Working his throbbing shoulders, Brian said, “What now?”

Roger wiped his goggles. “Put the second snowmobile right side up and see if it still works.”

“And then?”

“Find the temporary camp. Join up with the others.”

“What if the camp isn't on this iceberg with us?”

Roger didn't hear the question. He had already turned away and started toward the toppled snowmobile.

The cabin of the remaining snowmobile would seat only two men; therefore, Harry elected to ride behind the open cargo trailer. Claude was willing to surrender his place, and Pete Johnson insisted on giving up his seat behind the handlebars, as though riding in the trailer were desirable, when in fact the exposure might prove deadly. Harry cut them short and pulled rank in order to obtain the worst of all positions for himself.

The trailer contained the eighteen-inch-square hot plate and the steel barrel in which they'd melted snow to obtain water to fill the blasting holes. They tipped the barrel off the trailer and rolled it out of their way; the wind caught it and swept it off into the night, and in seconds the hollow clatter of its bounding progress faded into the cacophonous symphony of the storm. The hot plate was small, and because it might come in handy later, Claude found a place for it inside the cabin.

Three or four inches of snow had accumulated in the trailer bed, drifting against the two-foot-high walls. Harry brushed it out with his hands.

The wind gusted behind them, wailing like Apaches in a Western movie, rushed under the trailer and made it bounce lightly up and down on the ice.

“I still think you should drive,” Pete argued when the gale subsided slightly.

Harry was nearly finished cleaning the snow out of the trailer. “I drove my own buggy straight into an ice chasm — and you'd trust me with yours?”

Pete shook his head. “Man, do you know what's wrong with you?”

“I'm cold and scared.”

“Not that.”

“Well, I have neglected clipping my toenails for weeks. But I don't see how you could know.”

“I mean what's wrong inside your head.”

“This isn't an ideal time for psychoanalysis, Pete. Jeez, you Californians are obsessed with therapy.” Harry brushed the last of the snow out of the trailer. “I suppose you think I want to sleep with my mother—”

“Harry—”

“—or murder my father.”

“Harry—”

“Well, if that's what you think, then I don't see how we can just go on being friends.”

“You've got a hero complex,” Pete said.

“For insisting I ride in the trailer?”

“Yeah. We should draw straws.”

“This isn't a democracy.”

“It's only fair.”

“Let me get this straight — you're demanding to ride in the back of the bus?”

Pete shook his head, tried to look serious, but couldn't repress his smile. “Honky fool.”

“And proud of it.”

Harry turned his back squarely to the wind and pulled on the drawstring at his chin, loosening his hood. He reached inside the neck of his coat and got hold of the thick woolen snow mask that had been folded against his throat. He tugged it over his mouth and nose; now not even a fraction of his face was exposed. What the mask did not cover, the hood and the goggles concealed. He drew the hood tight once more and knotted the drawstring. Through the mask, he said, “Pete, you're too damned big to ride in the cargo trailer.”

“You're not exactly a dwarf yourself.”

“But I'm small enough to curl up on my side and get down out of the worst of the wind. You'd have to sit up. It's the only way you'd fit. And sitting up, you'd freeze to death.”

“Okay, okay. You're determined to play hero. Just remember — no medals are given at the end of this campaign.”

“Who needs medals?” Harry climbed into the cargo trailer and sat in the middle. “I'm after sainthood.”

Johnson leaned toward him. “You think you can get into heaven with a wife who knows more dirty jokes than all the men in the Edgeway group combined?”

“Isn't it obvious, Pete?”

“What?”

“God has a sense of humor.”

Pete scanned the storm-whipped icecap and said, “Yeah. A real dark sense of humor.” He returned to the cabin door, glanced back, and with considerable affection again said, “Honky fool.” Then he got behind the handlebars and closed the door.

Harry took a last look at that portion of the icefield revealed by the backwash of the snowmobile's headlamps. He did not often think in metaphors, but something about the top-of-the-world gloom, some quality of the landscape, required metaphors. Perhaps the nearly incomprehensible hostility of the cruel land could only be properly grasped in metaphorical terms that made it less alien, less frightening. The icefield was a crouching dragon of monstrous dimensions. The smooth, deep darkness was the dragon's gaping mouth. The awful wind was its scream of rage. And the snow, whistling by so thickly now that he had trouble seeing even twenty feet, was the beast's spittle or perhaps foam dripping from its jaws. If it chose to do so, it could gobble them up and leave no trace.

The snowmobile began to move.

Turning away from the dragon, Harry lay on his left side. He drew his knees toward his chest, kept his head tucked down, and folded his hands under his chin. That was all the protection he could give himself.

Conditions in the trailer were even worse than he had expected — and he had expected them to be nothing short of intolerable. The suspension system was primitive at best, and every irregularity of the icecap was instantly transmitted through the skis and wheels to the cargo bed. He bounced and slid from one side of the narrow space to the other. Even his heavy clothing could not fully cushion him from the cruelest shocks, and the ribs on his right side soon reverberated with soft pain. The wind roared at him from every direction; blasts of frigid air searched busily and relentlessly for a chink in his arctic armor.

Aware that dwelling on his condition would only make it seem much worse, he guided his thoughts into other channels. He closed his eyes and conjured a vivid picture of Rita. But in order not to think of her as she might be — cold, frightened, miserable, injured, or even dead — he cast his mind back in time, back to the day they had first met. The second Friday of May. Nearly nine years ago. In Paris…

He had been attending a four-day conference of scientists who had participate in the previous United Nations Geophysical Year. From all over the world, three hundred men and women of different disciplines had met in Paris for seminars, lectures, and intense discussions paid for by a special UNGY fund.

At three o'clock Friday afternoon, Harry addressed a handful of geophysicists and meteorologists who were interested in his Arctic studies. He spoke for half an hour in a small room off the hotel mezzanine. When he had made his final point, he put away his notes and suggested they switch to a question-and-answer format.

During the second half of the meeting, he was surprised and enchanted by a young and beautiful woman who asked more intelligent, incisive questions than any of the twenty eminent gray heads in the room. She looked as though she might be half Irish and half Italian. Her amber-olive skin seemed to radiate heat. Wide mouth, ripe lips: very Italian. But the Irish was in her mouth too, for she had a curious, lopsided smile that gave her an elfin quality. Her eyes were Irish green, clear — but almond shaped. Long, lustrous auburn hair. In a group that opted for tweeds, sensible spring suits, and plain dresses, she was a standout in tan corduroy jeans and a dark-blue sweater that accentuated her exciting figure. But it was her mind — quick, inquisitive, well-informed, well trained — that most engaged Harry. Later he realized that he'd more than likely snubbed others in the audience by spending so much time with her.

When the meeting broke up, he reached her before she left the room. “I wanted to thank you for making this a more interesting session that nit might otherwise have been, but I don't even know your name.”

She smiled crookedly. “Rita Marzano.”

“Marzano. I thought you looked half Italian, half Irish.”

“Half English, actually.” Her smile developed into a full, lopsided grin. “My father was Italian, but I was raised in London.”

“Marzano… that's familiar. Yes, of course, you've written a book, haven't you? The title…”

“Changing Tomorrow.”

Changing Tomorrow was popularized science, a study of mankind's future projected from current discoveries in genetics, biochemistry, and physics discoveries in genetics, biochemistry, and physics. It had been published in the United States and was on some best-seller lists.

“Have you read it?” she asked.

“No,” he admitted.

“My British publisher shipped four hundred copies to the convention. They're on sale in the news corner off the lobby.” She glanced at her watch. “I'm scheduled to an autograph session now. If you'd like a signed copy, I won't make you wait in line.”

That night he was unable to put the book down until he turned the last page at three o'clock in the morning. He was fascinated by her methods — her way of ordering facts, her unconventional but logical approaches to problems — because they were startlingly like his own thought processes. He felt almost as though he had been reading his own book.

He slept through the Saturday morning lectures and spent most of the afternoon looking for Rita. He couldn't find her. When he wasn't looking for her, he was thinking about her. As he showered and dressed for the evening's gala affair, he realized he couldn't recall a word spoken in the one lecture to which he had gone.

For the first time in his life, Harry Carpenter had begun to wonder what life was like for a settled man sharing a future with one woman. He was what many women would call “a good catch": five-eleven, a hundred sixty pounds, pleasant-looking if not handsome, with gray eyes and aristocratic features. But he had never wanted to be anyone's catch. He'd always wanted a woman who was his equal, who neither clung nor dominated, a woman with whom he could share his work and hopes and ideas, from whom he could get feedback that interested him. He thought perhaps he had found her.

But he didn't know what to do about it. At thirty-three, with eight years of university education behind him, he had spent far too many hours in academic pursuits and too few learning the rituals of courtship.

The program for the evening included a film study of the major UNGY projects, a banquet, and a floorshow, followed by dancing to a twelve-piece band. Ordinarily, he would have gone only to the film, if that. But there was a good chance that he'd see Rita Marzano at one of the social functions.

She was last in line at the hotel's exhibition hall, where the film was to be shown. She seemed to be alone, and she smiled crookedly when she saw him.

With a candor that he could not control and a blush that he hoped she didn't notice, he said, “I've been looking for you all day.”

“I got bored and went shopping. Do you like my new dress?”

The dress couldn't enhance her beauty, but it complemented all that nature had given her. It was floor-length, long-sleeved, green with beige buttons. Her eyes picked up the shade of the dress while her auburn hair seemed brighter by contrast. The neckline revealed a décolletage uncommon at the dry conferences of scientists, and the clinging, silky fabric vaguely outlined her nipples. With little effort she could have entranced him as quickly as a flute entrances a cobra.

“I like it,” he said, trying not to stare.

“Why were you looking for me all day?”

“Well, of course, the book. I'd like to talk about it if you have a free minute.”

“Minute?”

“Or an hour.”

“Or an evening?”

Damn if he wasn't blushing again. He felt like an Indiana farm boy. “Well…”

She looked along the exhibition-hall line, turned to Harry again, and grinned. “If we skip out on this, we'll have all evening to talk.”

“Aren't you interested in the film?”

“No. Besides, dinner will be awful. The floorshow will be too conventional. And the dance band will be out of tune.”

“Dinner together?”

“That would be lovely.”

“Drinks first at Deux Magots?”

“Marvelous.”

“Lapérouse for dinner?”

She frowned. “That's pretty expensive. You needn't take me first class. I'm as happy with beer as with champagne.”

“This is a special occasion. For me if not for you.”

Dinner was perfect. Paris offered no more romantic atmosphere than that in the upstairs room at Lapérouse. The low ceiling and the murals on the crack-webbed walls made the restaurant warm and cozy. From their table they had a view of the night-clad city, and below them lay the light-stained, oily river like a storybook giant's discarded black silk scarf. They ate flawless oie rôtie aux pruneaux, and for dessert there were tiny tender strawberries in a perfect zabaglione. Throughout the meal, they unraveled an endless skein of conversation, immediately as comfortable as friends who had been dining together for a decade. Halfway through the roast goose, Harry realized that they had not yet discussed her book but had rambled on about art, literature, music, cooking, and much more, without once finding themselves at a loss for words. When he finished his cognac, he was reluctant to let the night end so soon.

She shared that reluctance. “We've been Frenchmen for dinner. Now let's be tourists.”

“What do you have in mind?”

The Crazy Horse Saloon was an all-out assault on the senses. The customers were Americans, Germans, Swedes, Italians, Japanese, Arabs, British, Greeks, even a few Frenchmen, and their conversations intertwined to produce a noisy babble frequently punctuated with laughter. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, perfume, and whiskey. When the band played, it generated enough sound to shatter crystal. The few times Harry wanted to speak to Rita, he was forced to scream, although they were just two feet apart, on opposite sides of a minuscule cocktail table.

The stage show made him forget the noise and smoke. The girls were gorgeous. Long legs. Full, high-set breasts. Tiny waists. Galvanizing faces. More variety than the eye could take in. More beauty than the mind could easily comprehend or the heart appreciate. Dozens of girls, most bare-breasted. All manner of costumes, most skimpy: leather straps, chains, furs, boots, jeweled dog collars, feathers, silk scarves. Their eyes were heavily mascaraed, and some wore sequined designs on their faces and bodies.

Rita said, “After an hour, this gets to be a bore. Shall we go?” Outside, she said, “We haven't talked about my book, and that's really what you wanted to do. Tell you what. We'll walk to the Hôtel George V, have some champagne, and talk.”

He was somewhat confused. She seemed to be sending conflicting signals. Hadn't they gone to the Crazy Horse to be turned on? Hadn't she expected him to make a pass afterward? And now she was ready to talk books?

As they crossed the lobby of the George V and boarded the elevator, he said, “Do they have a rooftop restaurant here?”

“I don't know. We're going to my room.”

His confusion deepened. “You're not staying at the convention hotel? I know it's dull, but this is terribly expensive.”

“I've made a tidy sum from Changing Tomorrow. I'm splurging, for once. I have a small suite overlooking the gardens.”

In her room a bottle of champagne stood beside her bed in a silver bucket full of crushed ice.

She pointed to the bottle. “Möet. Open it, please?”

He took it out of the bucket — and saw her wince.

“The sound of the ice,” she said.

“What about it?”

She hesitated. “Puts my teeth on edge. Like fingernails screeching against a blackboard.”

By then he was so attuned to her that he knew she wasn't telling him the truth, that she had winded because the rattle of the ice had reminded her of something unpleasant. For a moment her eyes were faraway, deep in a memory that furrowed her brow.

“The ice is hardly melted,” he said. “When did you order this?”

Shedding the troubling memory, she focused on him and grinned again. “When I went to the ladies' room at Lapérouse.”

Incredulous, he said. “You're seducing me!”

“It's very late in the twentieth century, you know.”

Mocking himself, he said, “Yes, well, actually. I've noticed women sometimes wear pants these days.”

“Are you offended?”

“By women in pants?”

“By me trying to get you out of yours.”

“Good heavens, no.”

“If I've been too bold…”

“Not at all.”

“Actually, I've never done anything like this before. I mean, going to bed on a first date.”

“Neither have I.”

“Or on a second or a third, for that matter.”

“Neither have I.”

“But it feels right, doesn't it?”

He eased the bottle into the ice and pulled her into his arms. Her lips were the texture of a dream, and her body against his felt like destiny.

They skipped the rest of the convention and stayed in bed. They had their meals sent up. They talked, made love, and slept as if they were drugged.

Someone was shouting his name.

Stiff with cold, crusted with snow, Harry raised himself from the bed of the cargo trailer and from the delicious memories. He looked over his shoulder.

Claude Jobert was staring at him through the rear window of the snowmobile cabin. “Harry! Hey, Harry!” He was barely audible above the wind and the engine noise. “Lights! Ahead! Look!”

At first he didn't understand what Claude meant. He was stiff, chilled, and still half in that Paris hotel room. Then he lifted his gaze and saw that they were driving directly toward a hazy yellow light that sparkled in the snowflakes and shimmered languidly across the ice. He pushed up on his hands and knees, ready to jump from the trailer the instant that it stopped.

Pete Johnson drove the snowmobile along the familiar ice plateau and down into the basin where the igloos had been. The domes were deflated, crushed by enormous slabs of ice. But one snowmobile was running, headlights ablaze, and two people in arctic gear stood beside it, waving.

One of them was Rita.

Harry launched himself out of the trailer while the snowmobile was still in motion. He fell into the snow, rolled, stumbled onto his feet, and ran to her.

“Harry!”

He grabbed her, nearly lifted her above his head, then put her down and lowered his snow mask and tried to speak and couldn't speak and hugged her instead.

Eventually, voice quivering, she said, “Are you hurt?”

“Nosebleed.”

“That's all?”

“And it's stopped. You?”

“Just frightened.”

He knew that she struggled always against the fear of snow, ice, and cold, and he never ceased to admire her unwavering determination to confront her phobias and to work in the very climate that most tested her. “You've good reason this time,” he said. “Listen, you know what we'll do if we get off this damned berg?”

She shook her head and shoved up her misted goggles, so he could see her lovely green eyes. They were wide with curiosity and delight.

“We'll go to Paris,” he told her.

Grinning, she said, “To the Crazy Horse Saloon.”

“George V.”

“A room overlooking the gardens.”

“Möet.”

He pulled up his own goggles, and she kissed him.

Clapping one hand on Harry's shoulder, Pete Johnson said, “Have some consideration for those whose wives don't like frostbite. And didn't you hear what I said? I said, 'The gang's all here.'” He pointed to a pair of snowmobiles racing toward them through the snow.

“Roger, Brian, and George,” Rita said with obvious relief.

“Must be,” Johnson said. “Not likely to run across a bunch of strangers out here.”

“The gang's all here,” Harry agreed. “But where in the name of God does it go next?”

1:32

On the fourteenth day of a hundred-day electronic-espionage mission, the Russian nuclear submarine Ilya Pogodin reached its first monitoring station on schedule. The captain, Nikita Gorov, ordered the maneuvering room to hold the boat steady in the moderate southeasterly currents northwest of Jan Mayen Island, forty miles from the coast of Greenland and one hundred feet beneath the stormy surface of the North Atlantic.

The Ilya Pogodin had been named after an official Hero of the Soviet People, in the days before the corrupt bureaucracy had failed and the totalitarian state had crumbled under the weight of its own inefficiency and venality. The boat's name had not been changed: in part because the navy was tradition bound; in part because the new quasi-democracy was fragile, and care still had to be taken not to offend the bitter and potentially murderous old-guard Party members who had been driven from power but who might one day come storming back to reopen the extermination camps and the institutions of “reeducation"; and in part because Russia was now so fearfully poor, so totally bankrupted by Marxism and by legions of pocket-lining politicians, that the country could spare no funds for the repainting of boat names or for the alteration of records to reflect those changes.

Gorov was unable to obtain even adequate maintenance for his vessel. In these trying days after the fall of empire, he was too worried about the integrity of the pressure hull, the nuclear power plant, and the engines to spare any concern for the fact that the Ilya Pogodin was named after a despicable thief and murderer who had been nothing more noble than a dutiful defender of the late, unlamented regime.

Although the Pogodin was an aging fleet submarine that had never carried nuclear missiles, only some nuclear-tipped torpedoes, it was nonetheless a substantial boat, measuring three hundred sixty feet from bow to stern, with a forty-two-foot beam and a draft of thirty-two feet six inches. It displaced over eight thousand tons when fully submerged.

The southeasterly currents had a negligible influence on the boat. It would never drift more than one hundred yards from where Gorov had ordered it held steady.

Peter Timoshenko, the young communications officer, was in the control center at Gorov's side. Around them, the windows and gauges of the electronic equipment pulsed and glowed and blinked in the half-light: red, amber, green, blue. Even the ceiling was lined with scopes, graphs, display screens, and control panels. When the maneuvering room acknowledged Gorov's order to hold the boat steady, and when the engine room and reactor room had been made aware of it, Timoshenko said, “Request permission to run up the aerial, Captain.”

“That's what we're here for.”

Timoshenko stepped into the main companionway and walked thirty feet to the communications shack, a surprisingly small space packed full of radio equipment capable of receiving and sending encrypted messages in ultrahigh frequency (UHF), high frequency (HF), very low frequency (VLF), and extremely low frequency (ELF). He sat at the primary console and studied the display screens and scopes on his own extensive array of transceivers and computers. He smiled and began to hum as he worked.

In the company of most men, Peter Timoshenko felt awkward, but he was always comfortable with the companionship of machines. He had been as tease in the control room, but his place, with its even heavier concentration of electronics, was his true home.

“Are we ready?” another technician asked.

“Yes.” Timoshenko flicked a yellow switch.

Topside, on the outer hull of the Ilya Pogodin, a small helium balloon was ejected from a pressurized tube on the sail. It rose rapidly through the dark sea, expanding as it went, trailing the multicommunications wire behind it. When the balloon broke the surface, the technicians in the Pogodin were able to monitor every message sent to, from, and within the eastern coast of Greenland via virtually every communications medium except note-passing and underground telephone line. Because it was the same dull gray-blue as the winter sea, the balloon — and the short, complicated antenna attached to it — couldn't have been seen from the deck of a ship even ten yards away.

On land and in civilian society, Timoshenko was frequently self-conscious. He was tall, lanky, rawboned, awkward, and often clumsy. In restaurants and nightclubs, on city streets, he suspected that people were watching him and were quietly amused by his lack of grace. In the Pogodin, however, secure in his deep domain, he felt blessedly invisible, as though the sea were not a part of the world above the surface but a parallel dimension to it, and as though he were a spirit slipping through those cold depths, able to hear the inhabitants in the world above without being heart, to see without being seen, safe from their stares, not an object of amusement any longer. A ghost.

After giving Timoshenko a while to deploy the aerial and scan a wide spectrum of frequencies, Captain Gorov stepped into the doorway of the communications shack. He nodded at the assistant technician. To Timoshenko, he said, “Anything?”

The communications officer was smiling and holding a single earphone to his left ear. “Full input.”

“Of interest?”

“Not much as yet. There's a group of American Marines winter-testing some equipment near the coast.”

Although they were living in the long shadow of the Cold War's passage, in a world where old enemies were supposed to have become neutral toward one another or were even said to have become fine friends, the greater part of the former Soviet intelligence apparatus remained intact, both at home and abroad. The Russian Navy continued to conduct extensive information-gathering along the coastlines of every major Western nation, as well as at most points of strategic military importance in the Third World. Change, after all, was the only constant. If enemies could become friends virtually overnight, they could become enemies again with equivalent alacrity.

“Keep me informed,” Gorov said. Then he went to the officer's mess and ate lunch.

1:40

Crouched at the shortwave radio, in contact with Edgeway Station, Harry said, “Have you gotten through to Thule?”

Although Gunvald Larsson's voice was filtered through a sieve of static, it was intelligible. “I've been in continuous contact with them and with Norwegian officials at a meteorological station on Spitsbergen for the past twenty-five minutes.”

“Can either of them reach us?”

“The Norwegians are pretty much locked in by ice. The Americans have several Kaman Huskies at Thule. That's their standard rescue helicopter. The Huskies have auxiliary fuel tanks and long-range capability. But conditions at ground level aren't really good enough to allow them to lift off. Terrific winds. And by the time they got to you — if they could get to you — the weather would have deteriorated so much they probably wouldn't be able to put down on your iceberg.”

“There doesn't just happen to be an icebreaker or a battleship in our neighborhood?”

“The Americans say not.”

“So much for miracles.”

“Do you think you can ride it out?”

Harry said, “We haven't taken an inventory of our remaining supplies, but I'm sure we don't have enough fuel to keep us warm any longer than another twenty-four hours.”

A loud burst of static echoed like submachine-gun fire in the ice cave.

Gunvald hesitated. Then: “According to the latest forecasts, this is bigger than any major weather pattern we've had all winter. We're in for a week of bitter storms. One atop the other. Not even a brief respite between them.”

A week, Harry closed his eyes against the sight of the ice wall beyond the radio, for in that prismatic surface, he saw their fate too clearly. Even in thermal clothing, even sheltered from the wind, they could not survive for a week with no heat. They were virtually without food; hunger would weaken their resistance to the subzero temperatures.

“Harry, did you read me?”

He opened his eyes. “I read you. It doesn't look good, does it? Then again, we're drifting south, out of the bad weather.”

“I've been studying the charts here. Do you have any idea how many miles per day that berg of yours will travel?”

“At a guess… thirty, maybe forty.”

“That's approximately the same figure I've arrived at with the charts. And do you know how much of that represents real southward movement?”

Harry thought about it. “Twenty miles per day?”

“At best. Perhaps as little as ten.”

“Ten. You're sure? Strike that. Stupid of me. Of course, you're sure. Just how large is this storm pattern?”

“Harry, it ranges one hundred and twenty miles south of your last known position. You'd need eight or ten days or even longer to get out of the blizzard to a place where those helicopters could reach you.”

“What about the UNGY trawlers?”

“The Americans have relayed the news to them. Both ships are making for you at their best possible speed. But according to Thule, seas are extremely rough even beyond the storm area. And those trawlers are two hundred and thirty miles away. Under the current conditions, their best speed won't amount to much.”

They had to know precisely where they stood, no matter how tenuous their position might be. Harry said, “Can a ship that size push a hundred miles or more into a storm as bad as this one without being torn to pieces?”

“I think those two captains are courageous — but not suicidal,” Gunvald said flatly.

Harry agreed with that assessment.

“They'll be forced to turn back,” Gunvald said.

Harry sighed, “Yeah, They won't have any choice. Okay, Gunvald, I'll call you again in fifteen minutes. We've got to have a conference here. There's a chance we'll think of something.”

“I'll be waiting.”

Harry put the microphone on top of the radio. He stood and regarded the others. “You heard.”

Everyone in the ice cave was staring either at Harry or at the now silent radio. Pete, Roger, and Franz stood near the entrance; their goggles were in place, and they were ready to go outside and pick through the ruins of the temporary camp. Brian Dougherty had been studying a chart of the Greenland Sea and the North Atlantic; but listening to Gunvald, he had realized that pinpointing the location of the trawlers was useless, and he had folded the chart. Before Harry had called Edgeway Station, George Lin had been pacing from one end of the cave to the other, exercising his bruised muscles to prevent stiffness. Now he stood motionless, not even blinking, as if frozen alive. Rita and Claude knelt on the floor of the cave, where they'd been taking an inventory of the contents of a carton of foodstuffs that had been severely damaged by the collapsing pressure ridge. To Harry, for a moment, they seemed to be not real people but lifeless, mannequins in a strange tableau — perhaps because, without some great stroke of luck, they were already as good as dead.

Rita said what they were all thinking but what no one else cared to mention: “Even if the trawlers can reach us, they won't be here until tomorrow at the earliest. They can't possibly make it in time to take us aboard before midnight. And at midnight all sixty bombs go off.”

“We don't know the size or the shape of the iceberg,” Fischer said. “Most of the charges may be in the ice shafts that are still part of the main winter field.”

Pete Johnson disagreed. “Claude, Harry, and I were at the end of the bomb line when the first tsunami passed under us. I think we followed a fairly direct course back to camp, the same route we took going out. So we must have driven right by or across all sixty charges. And I'd bet my right arm this berg isn't anywhere near large enough to withstand all those concussions.”

After a short silence Brian cleared his throat. “You mean the iceberg's going to be blown into a thousand pieces?”

No one responded.

“So we're all going to be killed? Or dumped into the sea?”

“Same thing,” Roger Breskin said matter-of-factly. His bass voice rebounded hollowly from the ice walls. “The sea's freezing. You wouldn't last five minutes in it.”

“Isn't there anything we can do to save ourselves?” Brian asked as his gaze traveled from one member of the team to another. “Surely there's something we could do.”

Throughout the conversation, George Lin had been as motionless and quiet as a statue, but suddenly he turned and took three quick steps toward Dougherty. “Are you scared, boy? You should be scared. Your almighty family can't bail you out of this one!”

Startled, Brian backed away from the angry man.

Lin's hands were fisted at his sides. “How do you like being helpless?” He was shouting. “How do you like it? Your big, rich, politically powerful family doesn't mean a goddamned thing out here. Now you know what it's like for the rest of us, for all us little people. Now you have to scramble to save yourself. Just exactly like the rest of us.”

“That's enough,” Harry said.

Lin turned on him. His face had been transformed by hatred. “His family sits back with all its money and privileges, isolated from reality but so damned sure of its moral superiority, yammering about how the rest of us should live, about how we should sacrifice for this or that noble cause. It was people like them who started the trouble in China, brought in Mao, lost us our homeland, tens of millions of people butchered. You let them get a foot in the door, and the communists come right after them. The barbarians and the Cossacks, the killers and the human animals storm right in after them. The—”

“Brian didn't put us on this berg,” Harry said sharply. “And neither did his family. For God's sake, George, he saved your life less than an hour ago.”

When Lin realized that he'd been ranting, the flush of anger drained from his cheeks. He seemed confused, then embarrassed. He shook his head as if to clear it. “I… I'm sorry.”

“Don't tell me,” Harry said. “Tell Brian.”

Lin turned to Dougherty but didn't look him in the face. “I'm sorry. I really am.”

“It's all right,” Brian assured him.

“I don't… I don't know what came over me. You did save my life. Harry's right.”

“Forget it, George.”

After a brief hesitation, Lin nodded and went to the far end of the cave. He walked back and forth, exercising his aching muscles, staring at the ice over which he trod.

Harry wondered what experiences in the little man's past had prepared him to regard Brian Dougherty as an antagonist, which he had done since the day they'd met.

“Is there anything at all we can do to save ourselves?” Brian asked again, graciously dismissing the incident with Lin.

“Maybe,” Harry said. “First we've got to get some of those bombs out of the ice and defuse them.”

Fischer was amazed. “Impossible!”

“Most likely.”

“How could they ever be retrieved?” Fischer asked scornfully.

Claude rose to his feet beside the carton of half-ruined food. “It isn't impossible. We've got an auxiliary drill, ice axes, and the power saw. If we had a lot of time and patience, we might be able to angle down toward each bomb, more or less dig steps in the ice. But, Harry, we needed a day and a half just to bury them. Digging them out will be hugely more difficult. We would need at least a week to retrieve them, maybe two.”

“We only have ten hours,” Fischer reminded them unnecessarily.

Leaving the niche in the wall by the cave entrance and stepping to the middle of the room, Pete Johnson said, “Wait a minute. You folks don't listen to the man. Harry said we had to defuse some of the bombs, not all of them. And he didn't say we'd have to dig them out, the way Claude's proposing.” He looked at Harry. “You want to explain yourself?”

“The nearest package of explosives is three hundred yards from our position. Nine hundred feet. If we can retrieve and disarm it, then we'll be nine hundred and forty-five feet from the next nearest bomb. Each charge is forty-five feet from the one in front of it. So, if we take up ten of them, we'll be over a quarter of a mile from the nearest explosion. The other fifty will detonate at midnight — but none of them will be directly under us. Our end of the iceberg might well survive the shock. With luck, it might be large enough to sustain us.”

“Might,” Fischer said sourly.

“It's our best chance.”

“Not a good one,” the German noted.

“I didn't say it was.”

“If we can't dig up the explosives, which you apparently agree is out of the question, then how do we get to them?”

“With the auxiliary drill Reopen the shafts.”

Fischer frowned. “Perhaps not so wise. What if we drill into a bomb casing?”

“It won't explode,” Harry assured him.

Johnson said, “The plastic charge responds only to a certain voltage of electric current. Neither shock nor heat will do the job, Franz.”

“Besides,” Harry said, “the bits for the ice drill aren't hard enough to cut through a steel casing.”

“And when we've opened the shaft?” the German asked with obvious skepticism. “Just reel in the bomb by its chain, as if it's a fish on a line?”

“Something like that.”

“No good. You'll chew the chain to pieces when you reopen the shaft with the drill.”

“Not if we use the smaller bits. The original shaft is four inches in diameter. But the bomb is only two and a half inches in diameter. If we use a three-inch bit, we might be able to slip past the chain. After all, it's pulled flat against the side of the original shaft.”

Franz Fischer wasn't satisfied. “Even if you can open the hole without shredding the chain, it'll still be welded to the ice, and so will the bomb casing.”

“We'll snap the upper end of the chain to a snowmobile and try to pop it and the cylinder out of the shaft.”

“Won't work,” Fischer said dismissively.

Harry nodded. “Maybe you're right.”

“There must be another way.”

“Such as?”

Brian said, “We can't just lie down and wait for the end, Franz. That doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense.” He turned to Harry. “But if your plan works, if we can get the bombs out of the ice, will it be possible to uncover ten of them in ten hours?”

“We won't know till we try,” Harry said, resolutely refusing either to play into Fischer's stubborn pessimism or to raise false hopes.

Pete Johnson said, “If we can't get ten, maybe eight. If not eight, surely six. Every one we get buys us more security.”

“Even so,” Fischer said, his accent thickening as he became more defensive of his negativism, “what will we have gained? We'll still be adrift on an iceberg, for God's sake. We'll still have enough fuel to keep us warm only until tomorrow afternoon. We'll still freeze to death.”

Getting to her feet, Rita said, “Franz, goddamnit, stop playing devil's advocate, or whatever it is you're doing. You're a good man. You can help us survive. Or for the lack of your help, we may all die. Nobody is expendable here. Nobody is dead weight. We need you on our side, pulling with us.”

“My sentiments exactly,” Harry said. He pulled his hood over his head and laced it tightly beneath his chin. “And if we can buy some time by retrieving a few of the bombs, even just three or four — well, there's always the chance we'll be rescued sooner than seems possible right now.”

“How?” Roger asked.

“One of those trawlers—”

Glancing at Rita, but with no less contention in his voice, as though he and Harry were somehow engaged in a competition to win her backing, Fischer said, “You and Gunvald already agreed that the trawlers can't possibly reach us.”

Harry shook his head emphatically. “Our fate here isn't written in stone. We're intelligent people. We can make our own fate if we put our minds to it. If one of those captains is damned good and damned-all bullheaded, and if he has a really top-flight crew, and if he's a bit lucky, he might get through.”

“Too many ifs,” Roger Breskin said.

Fischer was grim. “If he's Horatio Hornblower, if he's the fucking grandfather of all the sailors who ever lived, if he's not a mere man but a supernatural force of the sea, then I guess we'll have a chance.”

“Well, if he is Horatio Hornblower,” Harry said impatiently, “if he does show up here tomorrow, all flags flying and sailing like the clappers, I want to be around to say hello.”

They were silent.

Harry said, “What about the rest of you?”

No one disagreed with him.

“All right, we'll need every man on the bomb-recovery project,” Harry said, fitting the tinted goggles over his eyes. “Rita, will you stay here and watch over the radio, put through that call to Gunvald?”

“Sure.”

Claude said, “Someone should finish searching the camp before the snow drifts over the ruins.”

“I'll hand that too,” Rita said.

Harry went to the mouth of the cave. “Let's get moving. I can hear those sixty clocks ticking. I don't want to be too near when the alarms go off.”