Icebound

2:30 DETONATION IN NINE HOURS THIRTY MINUTES

Within a minute or two of lying down, Nikita Gorov knew that he was not going to be able to get any rest. From out of the past, one small ghost materialized to haunt him and ensure that he would not find the peace of sleep. When he closed his eyes, he could see little Nikolai, his Nikki, running toward him through a soft yellow haze. The child's arms were open wide, and he was giggling. But the distance between them could not be closed, regardless of how long or fast Nikki ran or how desperately Gorov reached out for him: They were separated by only ten or twelve feet, but each inch was an infinity. The captain wanted nothing half as much as to touch his son, but the unbreachable veil between life and death separated them.

With a soft, involuntary sigh of despair, Gorov opened his eyes and looked at the silver-framed photograph on the corner desk: Nikolai and himself standing in front of a piano-accordion player on a Moscow River cruise ship. At times, when the past lay especially heavy on him, Gorov was monstrously depressed by the photograph. But he could not remove it. He could not put it in a drawer or throw it away any more than he could chop off his right hand merely because Nikolai had often held it.

Suddenly charged with nervous energy, he got up from his bunk. He wanted to pace, but his quarters were too small. In three steps he had walked the length of the narrow aisle between the bed and the closet. He couldn't allow the crew to see how distraught he was. Otherwise, he might have paced the main companionway.

Finally he sat at the desk. He took the photograph in both hands, as if by confronting it — and his agonizing loss — he could soothe the pain in his heart and calm himself.

He spoke softly to the golden-haired boy in the picture. “I am not responsible for your death, Nikki.”

Gorov knew that was true. He believed it as well, which was more important than merely knowing it. Yet oceans of guilt washed through him in endless, corrosive tides.

“I know you never blamed me, Nikki. But I wish I could hear you tell me so.”

In mid-June, seven months ago, the Ilya Pogodin had been sixty days into an ultrasecret, ninety-day electronic-surveillance mission on the Mediterranean route. The boat had been submerged nine miles off the Egyptian coast, directly north of the city of Alexandria. The multicommunications aerial was up, and thousands of bytes of data, important and otherwise, were filing into the computer banks every minute.

At two o'clock in the morning, the fifteenth of June, a message came in from the Naval Intelligence Office at Sevastopol, relayed from the Naval Ministry in Moscow. It required a confirmation from the Ilya Pogodin, thereby shattering the radio silence that was an absolute necessity during a clandestine mission.

When the code specialist had finished translating the encrypted text, Gorov was wakened by the night communications officer. He sat in his bunk and read from the pale-yellow paper.

The message began with latitude and longitude coordinates, followed by orders to rendezvous in twenty-two hours with the Petr Vavilov, a Vostok-class research ship that was currently in the same part of the Mediterranean to which the Pogodin was assigned. That much of it pleasantly piqued Gorov's curiosity: A midnight meeting in the middle of the sea was a more traditional and intriguing piece of cloak-and-dagger work than that to which he was accustomed in an age of electronic spying. But the rest of it brought him straight to his feet, trembling.

At midnight Gorov passed control of his submarine to Zhukov and transferred to the Petr Vavilov. From the main deck of the research ship, a helicopter took him to Damascus, Syria, where he boarded a Russian diplomatic jet for a scheduled flight to Moscow. He arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport at three o'clock on the afternoon of the sixteenth.

Boris Okudzhava, a functionary from the Naval Ministry met him at the terminal. Okudzhava had eyes as dirty gray as laundry water. A cherry-sized wart disfigured the left side of his nose. “A car is waiting, Comrade Gorov.”

“What's wrong with Nikki? What's wrong with my son?”

“I'm no doctor, Comrade Gorov.”

“You must know something.”

“I think we'd better not waste time here. I'll explain in the car, comrade.”

“It's not 'comrade' anymore,” Gorov said as they hurried away from the debarkation gate.

“Sorry. Just long habit.”

“Is it?”

Although the social and economic policies of the communists had been thoroughly discredited, although their thievery and mass murders had been exposed, more than a few former true believers yearned for the reestablishment of the old order. They still enjoyed considerable influence in many quarters, including the nuclear-weapons industry, where production of warheads and missiles continued unabated. For many of them, repudiation of hard-line Marxist ideology was merely a self-serving recognition of the shift of power to more democratic forces, not a genuine change of heart or mind. They labored with apparent diligence for the new Russia while waiting hopefully for a chance to resurrect the Supreme Soviet.

As they left the busy terminal and stepped outside into the mild late spring afternoon. Okudzhava said, “The next revolution should be for more freedom, not less. If anything, we haven't gone far enough. Too many of the old nomenklatura remain in power, calling themselves champions of democracy, praising capitalism while undermining it at every turn.”

Gorov dropped the matter. Boris Okudzhava was not a good actor. The excessive ardency with which he spoke revealed the truth: The grotesque wart alongside his nose flushed bright red, as though it were a telltale blemish bestowed by God, the unmistakable mark of the Beast.

The low sky was mottled with gray-black clouds.

The air smelled of oncoming rain.

Several peddlers had been allowed to set up business outside the terminal. A few worked from large trunks, others from pushcarts, hawking cigarettes, candy, tourist maps, souvenirs. They were doing a brisk business, and at least some must have been comparatively prosperous, but they were all shabbily dressed. In the old days, prosperity had been an offense requiring prosecution, imprisonment, and occasionally even execution. Many citizens of the new Russia still vividly recalled the former consequences of success and the savage fury of envious bureaucrats.

The Ministry car was immediately in front of the terminal, parked illegally, with the engine running. The moment Gorov and Okudzhava got in the backseat and closed the doors, the driver — a young man in a navy uniform — sped away from the curb.

“What about Nikki?” Gorov demanded.

“He entered the hospital thirty-one days ago with what was first thought to be mononucleosis or influenza. He was dizzy, sweating. So nauseous that he couldn't even take fluids. He was hospitalized for intravenous feeding to guard against dehydration.”

In the days of the discredited regime, medical care had been tightly controlled by the state — and had been dreadful even by the standards of Third World countries. Most hospitals had functioned without adequate equipment to maintain sterilized instruments. Diagnostic machines had been in woefully short supply, and health-care budgets had been so pinched that dirty hypodermic needles were regularly reused, often spreading disease. The collapse of the old system had been a blessing; however, the disgraced regime had left the nation deep in bankruptcy, and in recent years the quality of medical care had deteriorated even further.

Gorov shivered at the thought of young Nikki entrusted to the care of physicians who had been trained in medical schools that were no more modern or better equipped than the hospitals in which they subsequently labored. Surely every patient in the world prayed that his children would enjoy good health, but in the new Russia as in the old empire that it replaced, a beloved child's hospitalization was a cause not merely for concern but alarm, if not quiet panic.

“You weren't notified,' said Okudzhava, absentmindedly rubbing his facial wart with the tip of his index finger, “because you were on a highly classified mission. Besides, the situation didn't seem all that critical.”

“But it wasn't either mononucleosis or influenza?” Gorov asked.

“No. Then there was some thought that rheumatic fever might be to blame.”

Having lived so long with the pressure of being a commanding officer in the submarine service, having learned never to appear troubled either by the periodic mechanical difficulties of his boat or by the hostile power of the sea, Nikita Gorov managed to maintain a surface calm even as his mind churned with images of little Nikki suffering and frightened in a cockroach-ridden hospital. “But it wasn't rheumatic fever.”

“No,” Okudzhava said, still fingering his wart, looking not at Gorov but at the back of the driver's head. “And then there was a brief remission of the symptoms. He seemed in the best of health for four days. When the symptoms returned, new diagnostic tests were begun. And then… eight days ago, they discovered he has a cancerous brain tumor.”

“Cancer,” Gorov said thickly.

“The tumor is too large to be operable, far too advanced for radiation treatments. When it became clear that Nikolai's condition was rapidly deteriorating, we broke your radio silence and called you back. It was the humane thing to do, even if it risked compromising your mission.” He paused and finally looked at Gorov. “In the old days, of course, no such risk would have been taken, but these are better times,” Okudzhava added with such patent insincerity that he might as well have been wearing the hammer and sickle, emblem of his true allegiance, on his chest.

Gorov didn't give a damn about Boris Okudzhava's nostalgia for the bloody past. He didn't give a damn about democracy, about the future, about himself — only about his Nikki. A cold sweat had sprung up along the back of his neck, as if Death had lightly touched him with icy fingers while on its way to or from the boy's bedside.

“Can't you drive faster?” he demanded of the young officer behind the wheel.

“We'll be there soon,” Okudzhava assured him.

“He's only eight years old,” Gorov said more to himself than to either of the men with whom he shared the car.

Neither replied.

Gorov saw the driver's eyes in the rearview mirror, regarding him with what might have been pity. “How long does he have to live?” he asked, though he almost preferred not to be answered.

Okudzhava hesitated. Then: “He could go at any time.”

Since he had read that decoded message in his quarters aboard the Ilya Pogodin thirty-seven hours ago, Gorov had known that Nikki must be dying. The Admiralty was not cruel, but on the other hand it would not have interrupted an important espionage mission on the Mediterranean route unless the situation was quite hopeless. He had carefully prepared himself for this news.

At the hospital, the elevators were out of order. Boris Okudzhava led Gorov to the service stairs, which were dirty and poorly lighted. Flies buzzed at the small, dust opaqued windows at each landing.

Gorov climbed to the seventh floor. He paused twice when it seemed that his knees might buckle, then each time hurried upward again after only a brief hesitation.

Nikki was in an eight-patient ward with four other dying children, in a small bed under stained and tattered sheet. No EKG monitor or other equipment surrounded him. Deemed incurable, he had been brought to a terminal ward to suffer through the last of his time in this world. The government was still in charge of the medical system, and its resources were stretched to the limit, which meant that doctors triaged the ill and injured according to a ruthless standard of treatability. No heroic effort was made to save the patient if there was less than a fifty percent chance that he would recover.

The boy was fearfully pale. Waxy skin. A gray tint to his lips. Eyes closed. His golden hair was lank, damp with sweat.

Trembling as though he were an elderly man with palsy, finding it increasingly difficult to maintain a submariner's traditional calm, Gorov stood beside the bed, gazing down at his son, his only child.

“Nikki,” he said, and his voice was unsteady, weak.

The boy didn't answer or even open his eyes.

Gorov sat on the edge of the bed. He put one hand over his son's hand. There was so little warmth in the boy's flesh.

“Nikki, I'm here.”

Someone touched Gorov's shoulder, and he looked up.

A white-coated physician stood beside the bed. He indicated a woman at the end of the room. “She's the one who needs you now.”

It was Anya. Gorov had been so focused on Nikki that he hadn't noticed her. She was standing at a window, pretending to watch the people down on the old Kalinin Prospekt.

Gradually Gorov became aware of the defeat in the slope of his wife's shoulders and the subtle hint of grief in the tilt of her head, and he began to apprehend the full meaning of the doctor's words. Nikki was already dead. Too late to say “I love you” one last time. Too late for one last kiss. Too late to look into his child's eyes and say, “I was always so proud of you,” too late to say good-bye.

Although Anya needed him, he couldn't bear to get up from the edge of the bed — as though to do so would ensure that Nikki's death was permanent, while sheer stubborn denial might eventually cause a miraculous resurrection.

He spoke her name, and though it was only a whisper, she turned to him.

Her eyes shimmered with tears. She was biting her lip to keep from sobbing. She said, “I wish you'd been here.”

“They didn't tell me until yesterday.”

“I've been so alone.”

“I know.”

“Frightened.”

“I know.”

“I would have gone in his place if I could,” she said. “But there was nothing… nothing I could do for him.”

At last he found the strength to leave the bed. He went to his wife and held her, and she held him so tightly. So tightly.

All but one of the other four dying children in the ward were comatose, sedated, or otherwise unaware of Gorov and Anya. The sole observer among them was a girl, perhaps eight or nine years old, with chestnut hair and huge solemn eyes. She lay in a bed nearby, propped up on pillows, as frail as an elderly woman who had seen a hundred years of life. “It's okay,” she told Gorov. Her voice was musical and sweet in spite of how badly disease had ravaged and weakened her body. “You'll see him again. He's in heaven now. He's waiting for you there.”

Nikita Gorov, the product of a strictly materialistic society that had for the better part of a century denied the existence of God, wished that he could find the strength in a faith as simple and strong as that revealed by the child's words. He was no atheist. He had seen what monstrous acts the leaders of society would condone when they believed there was no God; he knew that there was no hope for justice in a world where the concepts of divine retribution and life after death had been abandoned. God must exist, for otherwise humankind couldn't be prevented from destroying itself. Nevertheless, he lacked a tradition of belief in which to find the degree of hope and reassurance that comforted the dying girl.

Anya wept against his shoulder. He held her and stroked her golden hair.

The bruised sky suddenly ruptured, releasing torrents of rain. Fat droplets snapped against the window and streamed down the pane, blurring the traffic below.

During the remainder of that summer, they tried to find things to smile about. They went to the Taganka Theater, the ballet, the music hall, and the circus. They danced more than once at the big pavilion in Gorki Park and exhausted themselves as children might with the amusement at Sokolniki Park. Once a week they ate dinner at Aragvi, perhaps the best restaurant in the city, where Anya learned to smile again when eating the ice cream and jam, where Nikita developed a taste for the spicy chicken zatsivi smothered in walnut sauce, and where they both drank too much vodka with their caviar, too much wine with their sulguni and bread.

They made love every night, urgent and explosive love, as though their passion were a refutation of suffering, cancer, and death.

Although no longer as light-hearted as she had always been, Anya appeared to recover from the loss more quickly and more completely than did Nikita. For one thing, she was thirty-four, ten years younger than he. Her spirit was more resilient than his. Furthermore, she was not burdened with the guilt that he bore like a leaden yoke. He knew that Nikki had asked for him repeatedly during the last weeks of life and especially during the final few hours. Although aware that he was being foolish and irrational, Gorov felt as if he had deserted the boy, as if he had failed his only son. In spite of uncharacteristic long, thoughtful silences and a new solemnity in her eyes, Anya gradually regained a healthy glow and at least a measure of her former spirit. But Nikita only feigned recovery.

By the first week of September, Anya was back at her job full time. She was a research botanist at a large field laboratory in the deep pine forests twenty miles outside Moscow. Her work soon became one more avenue to forgetfulness; she traveled farther along it every day, arriving early and staying late at the laboratory.

Although they continued to spend the nights and weekends together, Gorov was alone too much now. The apartment was full of memories that had grown painful, as was the dacha they leased in the country. He went for long walks, and almost every time, he ended up at the zoo or the museum, or at some other landmark where he and Nikki had often gone together.

He dreamed ceaselessly of his son and usually woke in the middle of the night with a sick, hollow feeling. In the dreams, Nikki was forever asking why his father had abandoned him.

On the eight of October, Gorov went to his superiors at the Naval Ministry and requested reassignment to the Ilya Pogodin. The boat was in the yards at Kaliningrad for scheduled maintenance and to take on some new state-of-the-art electronic-monitoring gear. He returned to duty, supervised the installation of the surveillance equipment, and took the submarine on a two-week shakedown cruise in the Baltic during the middle of December.

He was in Moscow with Anya on New Year's Day, but they did not go out into the city. In Russia this was a holiday for the children. Young boys and girls were everywhere: at the lively puppet shows, the ballet, the movies, at the street shows and in the parks. Even the Kremlin grounds were thrown open to them. And at every corner those small ones would be chattering happily about the presents and the gingerbread men that Ded Moroz — Grandfather Frost — had given to them. Although Nikita and Anya were together, each supporting the other, that was one sight they chose not to face. They spent the entire day in their three-room apartment. They made love twice. Anya cooked chebureki, Armenian meat pied fried in deep fat, and they washed the food down with a great deal of sweet Algeshat.

He slept on the night train to Kaliningrad. The rocking motion and the rhythmic clatter of the wheels on the rails did not bring him the pure, dreamless sleep that he had expected. He woke twice with his son's name on his lips, his hands fisted, and a chill of sweat on his face.

Nothing is more terrible for a parent to endure than to outlive his child. The natural order seems demolished.

On the second of January, he took the Ilya Pogodin to sea on a hundred-day espionage mission. He looked forward to the fourteen weeks beneath the North Atlantic, because that seemed like a good time and place to shrive himself of his remaining grief and of his unshakable guilt.

But at night Nikki continued to visit him, came down through the fathoms, through the dark sea and into the deeper darkness of Gorov's troubled mind, asking the familiar and unanswerable questions: Why did you abandon me, Father? Why didn't you come to me when I needed you, when I was afraid and calling for you? Didn't you care, Father, didn't you care about me? Why didn't you help me? Why didn't you save me, Father? Why? Why?

Someone rapped discreetly on the cabin door. Like a faint note reverberating in the bronze hollow of a bell, the knock echoed softly in the small room.

Gorov returned from the past and looked up from the silver-framed photograph. “Yes?”

“Timoshenko, sir.”

The captain put down the picture and turned away from the desk. “Come in, Lieutenant.”

The door opened, and Timoshenko peered in at him. “We've been intercepting a series of messages you ought to read.”

“About what?”

“That United Nations study group. They call their base Edgeway Station. Remember it?”

“Of course.”

“Well, they're in trouble.”

2:46

Harry Carpenter fixed the steel chain to a carabiner and the carabiner to the frame-mounted tow ring on the back of the snowmobile. “Now we just need a little luck.”

“It'll hold,” Claude said, patting the chain. He was kneeling on the ice beside Harry with his back to the wind.

“I'm not worried about it breaking,” Harry said, getting wearily to his feet and stretching.

The chain looked delicate, almost as if it had been fashioned by a jeweler. But it was four-thousand-pound test, after all. It should be more than strong enough for the task at hand.

The snowmobile was parked virtually on top of the reopened blasting shaft. Inside, behind the slightly misted Plexiglas, Roger Breskin was at the controls, watching the rearview mirror for the go-ahead sign from Harry.

Once he had pulled his snow mask over his mouth and nose, Harry signaled Breskin to begin. Then he turned into the wind and stared at the small, perfectly round hole in the ice.

Pete Johnson knelt to one side of the shaft, waiting for the snowmobile to get out of his way so he could monitor the progress of the bomb when it began to move. Brian, Fischer, and Lin had returned to the other snowmobiles to get warm.

After he revved the engine several times, Roger slipped the sled into gear. The machine moved less than a yard before the chain held it. The engine noise changed pitch, and gradually its shriek became louder than the wailing wind.

The chain was stretched so tight that Harry imagined it might produce, if plucked, a high note worthy of any operatic soprano.

But the bomb did not move. Not an inch.

The chain appeared to vibrate. Breskin accelerated.

Despite what he had said to Claude, Harry began to think that the chain would snap.

The sled was at peak power, screaming.

With a crack like a rifle shot, the links of the chain broke out of the side of the new shaft in which they had been frozen, and the cylinder tore free of its icy bed. The snowmobile surged forward, the chain remained taut, and in the shaft, the bomb scraped and clattered upward.

Pete Johnson got to his feet and straddled the hole as Harry and Jobert joined him. Directing a flashlight into the narrow black well, he peered down for a moment and then signaled Breskin to stop. Grasping the chain with both hands, he hoisted the tubular pack of explosives halfway out of the shaft and, with Harry's help, extracted it completely. They laid it on the ice.

One down. Nine to go.

2:58

Gunvald Larsson was adding canned milk to his mug of coffee when the call came through from the United States military base at Thule, Greenland. He put down the milk and hurried to the shortwave set.

“This is Larsson at Edgeway. Reading you clearly. Go ahead, please.”

The communications officer at Thule had a strong, mellifluous voice that seemed impervious to static. “Have you heard anything more from your lost sheep?”

“No. They're busy. Mrs. Carpenter has left the radio in the ice cave while she salvages whatever she can from the ruins of their temporary camp. I don't expect her to call unless there's a drastic change in their situation.”

“How's the weather at Edgeway?”

“Terrible.”

“Here too. And going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Wind speed and wave heights are setting storm records on the North Atlantic.”

Gunvald frowned at the radio. “Are you trying to tell me the UNGY trawlers are turning back?”

“One has.”

“But they headed north only two hours ago!”

“The Melville is ten or twelve years older than the Liberty. She could probably ride out a storm like this easily enough, but she doesn't have the power or bow construction to plow into it head-on, under power and against the wind. Her captain's afraid she'll break apart if he doesn't turn back now.”

“But he's still on the fringe of the storm.”

“Even there the seas are bad.”

Gunvald wiped one hand across his suddenly damp face and blotted his palm on his pants. “The Liberty is continuing?”

“Yes.” The American paused. The radio hissed with static, as if it were filled with snakes. “Look, if I were you, I wouldn't pin my hopes on her.”

“I've nothing else to pin them on.”

“Maybe not. But her skipper really isn't much more confident than the captain of the Melville.”

“I suppose you still can't get a chopper in the air,” Gunvald said.

“Everything's grounded. Will be for days. We're not happy about it, but there's nothing we can do.”

Static crackled from the speaker.

Gunvald said nothing.

Finally, sounding embarrassed, the officer at Thule said, “The Liberty might just make it, you know.”

Gunvald sighed. “I'm not going to tell the others about the Melville. Not yet.”

“That's up to you.”

“If the Liberty turns back too, then I'll have to tell them. But there's no sense depressing them with this news while there's still some hope.”

The man at Thule said, “We're pulling for them. The story already hit the news in the States. Millions of people are pulling for them.”

3:05

The communications center of the Ilya Pogodin was full of light and motion as seven radiant video display terminals flickered with decoded messages that had been intercepted by the main surveillance aerial one hundred feet above. The programming consoles were aglow with all the primary colors. Two technicians worked at one end of the cramped chamber, and Timoshenko stood near the entrance with Nikita Gorov.

Among the hundreds of communications being continuously sorted and stored by the Ilya Pogodin's computers, a steady stream of data pertained to the Edgeway crisis. The computer had been instructed to create a special file for any intercepted messages that contained one or more of five key words: Carpenter, Larsson, Edgeway, Melville, Liberty.

“Is this complete?” Gorov asked when he finished reading the Edgeway material.

Timoshenko nodded. “The computer produces an updated printout every fifteen minutes. This one is only ten minutes old. There may have been a few minor developments. But you have the basics, sir.”

“If the weather on the surface is half as bad as they're saying, the Liberty will turn back too.”

Timoshenko agreed.

Gorov stared at the printout, no longer reading it, not even seeing it. Behind his night-black eyes was the image of a fresh-faced, golden-haired little boy with arms open wide. The son he had been unable to save.

At least he said, “I'll be in the control room until further notice. Let me know at once if there's any important news about this.”

“Yes, sir.”

Because the Pogodin was not actually under way but was hanging motionless in the sea, the control-room watch consisted of only five men in addition to First Officer Zhukov. Three were sitting in the black command chairs, facing the wall of scopes, gauges, graphs, dials, and controls opposite the diving stations. Zhukov was perched on a metal stool in the center of the chamber, reading a novel that he had propped on the big electronic chart table.

Emil Zhukov was the sole potential opposition with which Gorov would have to contend if he were to carry out the plan that he had begun to formulate. Zhukov was the only man aboard the submarine with the authority to relieve the captain of his command if, in Zhukov's opinion, Gorov had lost his senses or had disobeyed a direct order of the Naval Ministry. The first officer would use his power only in an extreme emergency, for he would have to justify his assumption of command when he got back to Russia; nevertheless, he posed a real threat.

Emil Zhukov, at forty-two, was not a great deal younger than his captain, but their relationship had a subtle child-and-mentor quality, primarily because Zhukov placed such a high value on social order and discipline that his respect for authority bordered on an unhealthy reverence. He would have regarded any captain as a mentor and a source of wisdom. Tall, lean, with a long narrow face, intense hazel eyes, and thick dark hair, the first officer reminded Gorov of a wolf; he had a lupine grace when he moved, and his direct stare sometimes seemed predatory. In fact, he was neither as impressive nor as dangerous as he appeared to be; he was merely a good man and a reliable though not brilliant officer. Ordinarily, his deference to his captain would ensure his faithful cooperation — but under extreme circumstances, his obedience could not be taken for granted. Emil Zhukov would never lose sight of the fact that there were many men of higher authority than Gorov — and that he owed them greater respect and allegiance than he owed his captain.

At the chart table, Gorov put the printout of Edgeway material on top of the novel that Zhukov was reading. “You better take a look at this.”

When he reached the last page of the document, the first officer said, “Quite a trap they've gotten themselves into. But I read a little about this Edgeway Project in the papers, way back when they were still in the planning stages, and these Carpenters sounded like extremely clever people. They might scrape through this.”

“It isn't the Carpenters who caught my eye. Another name.”

Quickly scanning the printout, Zhukov said, “You must mean Dougherty. Brian Dougherty.”

Gorov sat on the only other stool at the Plexiglas-topped, lighted chart table. “Yes. Dougherty.”

“Is he related to the assassinated American President?”

“Nephew.”

“I much admired his uncle,” said Zhukov. “But I suppose you think I'm naïve in that regard.”

Gorov's disdain for politics and politicians was well known to his first officer, who quietly disapproved of his attitude. The captain could not convincingly pretend to have had a change of heart just to win Zhukov's backing for the risky operation that he wanted to conduct. Shrugging, he said, “Politics is strictly about power. I admire achievement.”

“He was a man of peace,” Zhukov said.

“Yes, peace is something they all sell.”

Zhukov frowned. “You think he wasn't a great man?”

“A scientist who discovers a cure for disease — that's a great man or woman. But politicians…”

Zhukov was not one of those who longed for a return of the old regime, but he had little patience for the series of unstable governments that had afflicted Russia in recent years. He admired strong leaders. He was a man who needed to have someone to whom he could look for direction and purpose — and good politicians were his ultimate heroes, regardless of their nationality.

Gorov said, “No matter what I think of the late President, I'll admit the Dougherty family handled their tragedy with grace and fortitude. Very dignified.”

Zhukov nodded solemnly. “An admirable family. Very sad.”

Gorov felt as if his first officer were a sophisticated musical instrument. He had just finished tuning Zhukov. Now he was about to attempt a complicated melody with him. “The boy's father is a Senator, isn't he?”

“Yes, and highly regarded,” Zhukov said.

“He was also shot, wasn't he?”

“Another assassination attempt.”

“After all the American system has done to that family, why do you suppose the Doughertys remain such ardent supporters of it?”

“They're great patriots,” Zhukov said.

Pulling thoughtfully at his well-trimmed beard, Gorov said, “How difficult it must be for a family to remain patriotic to a nation that kills its best sons.”

“Oh, but it wasn't the country that killed them, sir. Blame a handful of reactionaries. Perhaps even the CIA. But not the American people.”

Gorov pretended to think about it for a minute. Then he said, “I suppose you're right. From what I read, Americans seem to have considerable respect and sympathy for the Doughertys.”

“Of course. Patriotism in adversity is the only kind that earns respect. It's easy to be patriotic in times of plenty, when no one is asked to make a sacrifice.”

The melody that Gorov had hoped to play with his first officer was progressing without a sour note, and the captain almost smiled. Instead, he stared at the Edgeway printout for a long beat, and then he said, “What an opportunity for Russia.”

As the captain had expected, Zhukov did not immediately follow the change of thought. “Opportunity?”

“For goodwill.”

“Oh?”

“And in a time when Mother Russia desperately needs goodwill more than at any other moment in her history. Goodwill leads to lots of foreign aid, preferential trade treatment, even military cooperation and concessions of strategic importance.”

“I don't see the opportunity.”

“We're only five hours from their position.”

Zhukov raised one eyebrow. “You've plotted it?”

“I'm estimating. But it's a good estimate. And if we were to go to the aid of the miserable people stranded on the iceberg, we'd be heroes. World-wide heroes. You see? And Russia would be heroic by association.”

Blinking in surprise, Zhukov said, “Rescue them?”

“After all, we'd be saving the lives of eight valued scientists from half a dozen countries, including the nephew of the assassinated President. Such an opportunity for propaganda and goodwill comes no more than once a decade.”

“But we'd need permission from Moscow.”

“Of course.”

“To get the quick answer you need, you'll have to send your request by satellite relay. And to use that equipment, we'll have to surface.”

“I'm aware of that.”

The laser transmission funnel and the collapsible reception dish were mounted atop the submarine's sail, that large finlike projection on the main deck, which also supported the small bridge, radio and radar masts, periscopes, and snorkel. They had to surface before the tracking gear could fix on a series of Russian telecommunications satellites and before the laser could operate properly. But if this breach of secrecy was a disadvantage to a ship like the Pogodin, the incredible speed of laser transmission outweighed the negatives. From practically anywhere in the world, one could send a message to Moscow and immediately receive an acknowledgement of its receipt.

Emil Zhukov's long, saturnine face was suddenly lined with anxiety, because he realized that he was going to have to choose to disobey one authority or another — either the captain himself for the captain's superiors in Moscow. “We're on an espionage run, sir. If we surfaced, we'd compromise the entire mission.”

With one finger, Gorov traced a painted latitude line on the lighted surface of the electronic chart table. “This far north, in the middle of a raging winter storm, who's to see us? We should be able to go up, send, and receive in total anonymity.”

“Yes, all right, but we're under orders to maintain strict radio silence.”

Gorov nodded solemnly, as if to say that he had thought about that issue and was conscious of his awesome responsibility. “When my son was dying, Moscow broke our radio silence.”

“That was a matter of life and death.”

“People are dying here too. Certainly we're under orders to maintain radio silence. I know how serious a matter it is to set aside such orders. On the other hand, in an emergency, a captain is permitted to disobey the Ministry at his discretion.”

Frowning, the lines in his long face cutting so deeply that they began to look like wounds, Zhukov said, “I'm not so sure you could call this an emergency. Not the type of emergency they had in mind when they wrote the rules.”

“Well, that's what I'm calling it,” Gorov said, issuing a quiet but not particularly subtle challenge.

“You'll have to answer to the Naval Board of Inquiry when it's all over,” Zhukov said. “And this is an intelligence mission, so the intelligence services will have some questions.”

“Of course.”

“And half of them are staffed by former KGB men.”

“Perhaps.”

“Definitely.”

“I'm prepared,” Gorov said.

“For an inquiry. But for what the intelligence services might do with you?”

“For both.”

“You know what they're like.”

“I can be tough. Mother Russia and the navy have taught me endurance.” Gorov knew they were approaching the last sixteen bars of the tune. The crescendo was near.

“My head will be on the block too,” Zhukov said morosely as he slid the printout across the table to Gorov.

“No one's head will be on the block.”

The first officer was not convinced. If anything, his frown deepened.

“They aren't all fools at the Ministry,” Gorov said.

Zhukov shrugged.

“When they weigh the alternatives,” Gorov said confidently, “they'll give the permission I want. I'm absolutely positive of it. Clearly, Russia has more to gain by sending us on this rescue mission than she does by insisting upon the continuation of what is, after all, nothing more than another routine surveillance run.”

Emil Zhukov still had his doubts.

Getting up from the stool, rolling the printout into a tight tube, Gorov said, “Lieutenant, I wan the crew at battle stations in five minutes.”

“Is that necessary?”

Except for the complicated or dangerous maneuvers, the regular watch could surface or dive the submarine.

“If we're going to break a Ministry rule at our own discretion, we can at least take all precautions,” Gorov said.

For a long moment they stared at each other, each trying to read the other's mind, trying to see the future. The first officer's gaze was more penetrating than ever.

Finally Zhukov stood up without breaking eye contact.

He's made his decision, Gorov thought. I hope it's one I can live with.

Zhukov hesitated…then saluted. “Yes, sir. It will be done in five minutes.”

“We'll surface as soon as the multicommunications aerial has been wound down and secured.”

“Yes, sir.”

Gorov felt as if hundreds of painful knots were coming untied inside him. He had won. “Go to it, then.”

Zhukov left the control room.

Walking to the circular, railed command pad at the end of the control room, Gorov thought about little Nikki and knew that he was doing the right thing. In the name of his dead son, in honor of his lost boy, not for the advantage of Russia, he would save the lives of those stranded people. They must not die on the ice. This time he had to power to thwart death, and he was determined not to fail.

3:46

As soon as the second package of explosives had been hauled out of the ice, Roger, Brian, Claude, Lin, and Fischer moved on to the site of the third sealed shaft.

Harry remained behind with Pete Johnson, who had yet to disarm the second device. They stood together, their backs to the shrieking wind. The demolitions cylinder lay at their feet, an evil-looking package: sixty inches long and two and a half inches in diameter, black with yellow letters that spelled DANGER. It was encased in a thin, transparent coat of ice.

“You don't have to keep me company,” Pete said as he carefully cleaned the snow from his goggles. His vision must be unobstructed when he set to work on the trigger mechanism.

“I thought your people were afraid of being alone in the dark,” Harry said.

“My people? You better mean electronic engineers, honky.”

Harry smiled, “What else would I mean?”

A strong gust of wind caught them from behind, an avalanche of air that would have knocked them flat if they had not been prepared for it. For a minute they bent with the gale, unable to talk, concerned only about keeping their balance.

When the gust passed and the wind settled down to perhaps forty miles per hour, Pete finished cleaning his goggles and began to rub his hands together to get the snow and ice off his gloves. “I know why you didn't go with the others. You can't deceive me. It's your hero complex.”

“Sure. I'm a regular Indiana Jones.”

“You've always got to be where the danger is.”

“Yeah, me and Madonna.” Harry shook his head sadly. “I'm sorry, but you've got it all wrong, Dr. Freud. I'd much prefer to be where the danger isn't. But it did occur to me the bomb might explode in your face.”

“And you'd give me first aid?”

“Something like that.”

“Listen, if it does explode in my face but doesn't kill me… no first aid, for God's sake. Just finish me off.”

Harry winced and started to protest.

“All I'm asking for is mercy.” Pete said bluntly.

During the past few months, Harry had come to like and respect this big, broad-faced man. Beneath Pete Johnson's fierce-looking exterior, under the layers of education and training, under the cool competence, there was a kid with a love for science and technology and adventure. Harry recognized much of himself in Pete. “There's really not a great change of an explosion, is there?”

“Almost none,” Pete assured him.

“The casing did take a beating coming out of the shaft.”

“Relax, Harry. The last one went well, didn't it?”

They knelt beside the steel cylinder. Harry held the flashlight while Pete opened a small plastic box of precision tools.

“Disarming these sonsofbitches is easy enough,” Pete said. “That isn't our problem. Our problem is getting eight more of them out of the ice before the clock strikes midnight and the carriage turns back into a pumpkin.”

“We're recovering them at the rate of one an hour.”

“But we'll slow down,” Johnson said. With a small screwdriver he began to remove the end of the cylinder that featured the eye loop. “We needed forty-five minutes to dig out the first one. Then fifty-five for the second. Already we're getting tired, slowing down. It's this wind.”

It was a killing wind, pressing and pounding against Harry's back with such force that he felt as though he were standing in the middle of a swollen, turbulent river; the currents in the air were almost as tangible as currents in deep water. The base wind velocity was now forty or forty-five miles an hour, with gusts to sixty-five, steadily and rapidly climbing toward gale force. Later, it would be deadly.

“You're right,” Harry said. His throat was slightly sore from the effort required to be heard above the storm, even though they were nearly head-to-head over the package of explosives. “It doesn't do much good to sit ten minutes in a warm snowmobile cabin and then spend the next hour in weather as bad as this.”

Pete extracted the last screw and removed a six-inch end piece from the cylinder. “How far has the real temperature fallen? Like to guess?”

“Five degrees above zero. Fahrenheit.”

“With the wind-chill factor?”

“Twenty below zero.”

“Thirty.”

“Maybe.” Even his heavy thermal suit could not protect him. The wind's cold blade stabbed continuously at his back, pierced his storm suit, pricked his spine. “I never thought we had much of a chance of getting ten out. I knew we'd slow down. But if we can disarm just five or six, we might have enough room to survive the blowup at midnight.”

Pete tipped the six-inch section of casing, and a timer slid out into his gloved hand. It was connected to the rest of the cylinder by four springy coils of wire: red, yellow, green, and white. “I guess it's better to freeze to death tomorrow than be blown to bits tonight.”

“Don't you dare do that to me,” Harry said.

“What?”

“Turn into another Franz Fischer.”

Pete laughed. “Or another George Lin.”

“Those two. The Whiner brothers.”

“You chose them,” Pete said.

“And I take the blame. But, hell, they're good men. It's just that under this much pressure…”

“They're assholes.”

“Precisely.”

“Time for you to get out of here,” Pete said, reaching into the tool kit again.

“I'll hold the flashlight.”

“The hell you will. Put it down so it shines on this, then go. I don't need you to hold the light. What I need you for is to deal out the mercy if it comes to that.”

Reluctantly, Harry returned to the snowmobile. He bent down behind the machine, out of the wind. Huddled there, he sensed that all their work and risk-taking was for nothing. Their situation would deteriorate further before it improved. If it ever improved.

4:00

The Ilya Pogodin rolled sickeningly on the surface of the North Atlantic. The turbulent sea smashed against the rounded bows and geysered into the darkness, an endless series of waves that sounded like window-rattling peals of summer thunder. Because the boat rode so low in the water, it shuddered only slightly from the impact, but it could not withstand that punishment indefinitely. Gray water churned across the main deck, and foam as thick as pudding sloshed around the base of the huge steel sail. The boat hadn't been designed or built for extended surface runs in stormy weather. Nevertheless, in spite of her tendency to yaw, she could hold her own long enough for Timoshenko to exchange messages with the war room at the Naval Ministry in Moscow.

Captain Gorov was on the bridge with two other men. They were all wearing fleece-lined pea jackets, hooded black rain slickers over the jackets, and gloves. The two young lookouts stood back to back, one facing port and the other starboard. All three men had field glasses and were surveying the horizon.

It's a damned close horizon, Gorov thought as he studied it. And an ugly one.

That far north, the polar twilight had not yet faded entirely from the sky. An eerie greenish glow seeped through the heavy storm clouds and saturated the Atlantic vistas, so Gorov seemed to be peering through a thin film of green liquid. It barely illuminated the raging sea and imparted a soft yellow cast to the foamy crests of the waves. A mixture of fine snow and sleet hissed in from the northwest; the sail, the bridge railing, Gorov's black rain slicker, the laser package, and the radio masts were encrusted with white ice. Scattered formations of fog further obscured the forbidding panorama, and due north the churning waves were hidden by a gray-brown mist so dense that it seemed to be a curtain drawn across the world beyond it. Visibility varied from one half to three quarters of a mile and would have been considerably worse if they had not been using night-service binoculars.

Behind Gorov, atop the steel sail, the satellite tracking dish moved slowly from east to west. Its continuous change of attitude was imperceptible at a glance, but it was locked on to a Soviet telecommunications satellite that was in a tight subpolar orbit high above the masses of slate-colored clouds. Gorov's message had been transmitted by laser four minutes ago. The tracking dish waited to receive Moscow's reply.

The captain had already imagined the worst possible response. He would be ordered to relinquish command to First Officer Zhukov, who would be directed to put him under twenty-four-hour armed guard and continue the mission as scheduled. His court-martial would proceed in his absence, and he would be informed of the decision upon his return to Moscow.

But he expected a more reasoned response than that from Moscow. Certainly the Ministry was always unpredictable. Even under the postcommunist regime, with its greater respect for justice, officers were occasionally court-martialed without being present to defend themselves. But he believed what he had told Zhukov in the control room: They were not all fools at the Ministry. They would most likely see the opportunity for propaganda and strategic advantage in this situation, and they would reach the proper conclusion.

He scanned the fog-shrouded horizon.

The flow of time seemed to have slowed almost to a stop. Although he knew that it was an illusion, he saw the sea raging in slow motion, the waves building like ripples in an ocean of cold molasses. Each minute was an hour.

Bang!

Sparks shot out of the vents in the steel-alloy casing of the auxiliary drill. It chugged, sputtered, and cut out.

Roger Breskin had been operating it. “What the hell?” he thumbed the power switch.

When the drill wouldn't start, Pete Johnson stepped in and dropped to his knees to have a look at it.

Everyone crowded around, expecting the worst. They were, Harry thought, like people gathered at an automobile accident — except that the corpses in this wreckage might be their own.

“What's wrong with it?” George Lin asked.

“You'll have to take apart the casing to find the trouble,” Fischer told Pete.

“Yeah, but I don't have to take the sucker apart to know I can't repair it.”

Brian said, “What do you mean?”

Pointing to the snow and frozen slush around the partially reopened third shaft, Pete said, “See those black specks?”

Harry crouched and studied the bits of metal scattered on the ice. “Gear teeth.”

Everyone was silent.

“I could probably repair a fault in the wiring,” Pete said at last. “But we don't have a set of spare gears for it.”

“What now?” Brian asked.

With Teutonic pessimism, Fischer said, “Back to the cave and wait for midnight.”

“That's giving up,” Brian said.

Getting to his feet, Harry said, “But I'm afraid that's all we can do at the moment, Brian. We lost the other drill when my sled went into the crevasse.”

Dougherty shook his head, refusing to accept that they were powerless to proceed. “Earlier, Claude said we could use the ice ax and the power saw to cut some steps in the winter field, angle down to each package—”

The Frenchman interrupted him. “That would only work if we had a week. We'd need six more hours, perhaps longer, to retrieve this one bomb by the step method. It's not worth expending all that energy to gain only forty-five feet of safety.”

“Okay, let's go, let's pack up,” Harry said, clapping his hands for emphasis. “No point standing here, losing body heat. We can talk about it back at the cave, out of this wind. We might think of something yet.”

But he had no hope.

At 4:02 the communications center reported that a message was coming in from the Naval Ministry. Five minutes later the decoding sheet was passed up to the bridge, where Nikita Gorov began to read it with some trepidation.

Gorov was disappointed. The Ministry's indecision cranked up the level of his tension. The next hour would be more difficult for him than the hour that had just passed.

He turned to the other two men. “Clear the bridge.”

They prepared to dive. The lookouts scrambled down through the conning tower and took up stations at the diving wheels. The captain sounded the routine alarm — two short blasts on the electric horns that blared from speakers in the bulkheads of every room on the boat — and then left the bridge, pulling the hatch shut with a lanyard.

The quartermaster of the watch spun the hand-wheel and said, “Hatch secure.”

Gorov hurried to the command pad in the control room. On the second blast of the diving klaxon, the air vents in the ballasts tanks had been opened, and the sea had roared into the space between the ship's two hulls. Now, to Gorov's right, a petty officer was watching a board that contained one red and several green lights. The green represented hatches, vents, exhausts, and equipment extruders that were closed to the sea. The red light was labeled LASER TRANSMISSION PACKAGE. When the laser equipment settled into a niche atop the sail and an airtight hatch slid over it, the red light blinked off and the safety bulb beneath it lit up.

“Green board!” the petty officer called.

Gorov ordered compressed air released into the submarine, and when the pressure indicator didn't register a fall, he knew the boat was sealed.

“Pressure in the boat,” the diving officer called.

In less than a minute they had completed the preparations. The deck acquired an incline, the top of the sail submerged, and they were out of sight of anyone in a ship or aircraft.

“Take her down to one hundred feet,” Gorov ordered.

The descent was measured by signifying beeps from the computer.

“At one hundred feet,” the diving officer announced.

“Hold her steady.”

“Steady, sir.”

As the submarine leveled off, Gorov said, “Take over for me, Lieutenant Zhukov.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You can return the control room to a skeleton watch.”

“Yes, sir.”

Gorov left the chamber and walked aft to the communications center.

Timoshenko turned toward the door just as the captain entered the room. “Request permission to run up the antenna, sir.”

“Denied.”

Blinking in surprise, Timoshenko tilted his head to one side and said, “Sir?”

“Denied,” Gorov repeated. He surveyed the telecommunications equipment that lined the bulkheads. He had been given rudimentary training in its use. For security reasons, the telecommunications computer was separate from the ship's main computer, although the keyboards were operated in the same manner as those in the control room with which he was so familiar. “I want to use your coder and the communications computer.”

Timoshenko didn't move. He was an excellent technician and a bright young man in some ways. But his world was composed of data banks, programming keys, input, output, and gadgets — and he was not able to deal well with people unless they behaved in a predictable, machinelike manner.

“Did you hear me?” Gorov asked impatiently.

Blushing, embarrassed, and confused, Timoshenko said, “Uh… yes. Yes, sir.” He directed Gorov to a chair before the primary terminal of the communications computer. “What did you have in mind, sir?”

“Privacy,” Gorov said bluntly as he sat down.

Timoshenko just stood there.

“You're dismissed, Lieutenant.”

His confusion deepened, Timoshenko nodded, tried to smile, but instead looked as if he had just been jabbed with a long needle. He retired to the other end of the room, where his curious subordinates were unsuccessfully pretending that they had heard nothing.

The coder — or encrypting machine — stood beside Gorov's chair. It was the size and shape of a two-drawer filing cabinet, housed in burnished steel. A keyboard — with all the usual keys plus fourteen with special functions — was built into the top. Gorov touched the ON switch. Crisp yellow paper automatically rolled out of the top of the coder cabinet and onto the platen.

Gorov quickly typed a message. When he was finished, he read it without touching the flimsy paper, then pressed a rectangular red key labeled PROCESS. A laser printer hummed, and the coder produced the encrypted version under the original message. It appeared to be nonsense: clumps of random numbers separated by occasional symbols.

Tearing the paper from the encrypting machine, Gorov swung around in his chair to face the video display terminal. Referring to the encoded version of the message, he carefully typed the same series of numbers and symbols into the communications computer. When that was done, he pressed a special-function key that bore the word DECODE and another labeled PRINTOUT. He did not touch the READOUT tab, because he didn't want his work displayed on the large overhead screen for the benefit of Timoshenko and the other technicians. After dropping the flimsy yellow sheet from the encrypting machine into a paper shredder, he leaned back in his chair.

No more than a minute passed before the communiqué—now decoded and in its original state — was in his hands. He had come full circle in less than five minutes: The printout contained the same fourteen lines that he had composed on the coder, but it was now in the usual type style of the computer. It looked like any other decoded message received from the Ministry in Moscow, which was precisely what he wanted.

He instructed the computer to erase from its memory banks every detail of what he had just done. With that, the printout was the only evidence that remained of the exercise. Timoshenko would not be able to quiz the computer about any of this after Gorov left the cabin.

He got up and went to the open door. From there he said, “Oh, Lieutenant?”

Timoshenko was pretending to study a logbook. He glanced up. “Yes, sir?”

“In those dispatches you intercepted, the ones having to do with the Edgeway group, there was mention of a transmitter on that drift ice with them.”

Timoshenko nodded. “They've got a standard shortwave set, of course. But that isn't what you're talking about. There's also a radio transmitter, a tracking beacon, that puts out a two-second signal ten times every minute.”

“Have you picked it up?”

“Twenty minutes ago.”

“Is it a strong signal?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Have you got a bearing?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, run another check on it. I'll be back to you on the intercom in a few minutes,” George said. He returned to the control room for another conversation with Emil Zhukov.

Harry had not yet finished telling Rita how the auxiliary drill had broken down, when she interrupted him. “Hey, where's Brian?”

He turned to the men who had entered the ice cave behind him. Brian Dougherty was not among them.

Harry frowned. “Where's Brian? Why isn't he here?”

“He must be around somewhere. I'll take a look outside,” Roger Breskin said.

Pete Johnson left with him.

“He probably just went behind one of the hummocks out there,” Fischer said, although he surely knew better than that. “Nothing especially dramatic, I'll wager. Probably just had to go to the john.

“No,” Harry disagreed.

Rita said, “He would have told someone.”

Out on the icecap, far from the security of Edgeway Station or the inflatable igloos of a temporary camp, no one could afford to be modest even about bladder and bowel habits. When going to the john, they all realized that it was necessary to inform at least one other person as to exactly which hill or pressure ridge would serve as a screen for their toilet. Acutely aware of the vagaries of the icefield and the weather, Brian would have let others know where to start looking if he didn't make a timely return.

Roger and Pete reappeared in less than two minutes, pulling up their goggles, tugging down their ice-veined snow masks.

“He's not at the sleds,” Roger said. “Or anywhere else we can see.” His gray eyes, usually expressionless, were troubled.

“Who rode back here with him?” Harry asked.

They looked at one another.

“Claude?”

The Frenchman shook his head. “Not me. I thought he rode with Franz.”

“I rode with Franz,” George Lin said.

Rita was exasperated. Tucking an errant strand or reddish hair back under her hood, she said, “For God's sake, you mean he was left behind in the confusion?”

“No way. He couldn't have been,” Harry said.

“Unless that was what he wanted,” George Lin suggested.

Harry was perplexed. “Why should he want to be left behind?”

Clearly untouched by their anxiety about Brian, Lin took time to blow his nose, fastidiously fold the handkerchief, and return it to a zippered pocket of his coat before answering the question. “You must have read some of the newspaper stories about him. Spain… Africa… all over, he's been risking his life for a lark.”

“So?”

“Suicidal,” Lin said, as though it should have been obvious to them.

Harry was astonished and not a little angry. “You're saying he stayed behind to die?”

Lin shrugged.

Harry didn't even need to think about that. “Good God, George, not Brian. What's the matter with you?”

“He might have been hurt,” Pete said. “A fall.”

Claude Jobert said, “Fell, hit his head, unable to cry out, and we were so eager to get out of there and back here, we didn't notice.”

Harry was skeptical.

“It's possible,” Pete insisted.

Dubious, Harry said, “Maybe. All right, we'll go back and look. You and me, Pete. Two snowmobiles.”

Roger stepped forward. “I'm going with you.”

“Two can handle it,” Harry said, quickly fixing his goggles in place.

“I insist,” Breskin said. “Look, Brian handled himself damn well out there on the ice today. He didn't hesitate when he had to go over that cliff to get a line around George. I'd have thought about it twice myself. But he didn't. He just went. And if it was me in trouble now, he'd do whatever he could. I know it. So you can count me in on this whether or not you need me.”

As far as Harry could remember, that was the longest speech that Roger Breskin had made in months. He was impressed. “Okay, then. You'll come along. You're too damn big to argue with.”

The Ilya Pogodin's cook was its greatest treasure. His father had been the head chef at the National Restaurant in Moscow, and from his papa he had learned to perform miracles with food that made the Bible story of loaves and fishes seem like an unremarkable exercise. The fare at his table was the best in the submarine service.

He had already begun to make fish selianka for the first course of the evening meal. White fish. Onions. Bay leaves. Egg whites. The aroma drifted from the galley past the communications center, then filled the control room.

When Gorov entered the room, Sergei Belyaev, the diving officer on duty, said, “Captain, will you help me talk sense to Leonid?” He gestured at a young seaman first class who was monitoring the alarm board.

Gorov was in a hurry, but he did not want Belyaev to sense his tension. “What's the trouble?”

Belyaev grimaced. “Leonid's on the first mess shift, and I'm on the fifth.”

“Ah.”

“I've promised if he'll change shifts with me, I'll fix him up with an absolutely gorgeous blonde in Kaliningrad. The woman is nothing short of spectacular, I swear to you. Breasts like melons. She could arouse a granite statue. But poor, dumb Leonid won't deal with me.”

Smiling, Gorov said, “Of course he won't. What woman could be more exciting than the dinner prepared for us? Besides, who would be simple-minded enough to believe that an absolutely gorgeous blonde with breasts like melons would have anything to do with you, Sergei Belyaev?”

Laughter echoed in the low-ceilinged chamber.

Grinning broadly, Belyaev said, “Perhaps I should offer him a few rubles instead.”

“Much more realistic,” Gorov said. “Better yet, U.S. dollars if you have any.” He walked to the chart table, sat on one of the stools, and put a folded printout in front of Emil Zhukov. It was the message that he had run through the coder and communications computer only a few minutes ago. “Something else for you to read,” he said quietly.

Zhukov pushed aside his novel and adjusted his wire-rimmed eyeglasses, which had slid down on his long nose. He unfolded the paper.

After he had chewed on his lower lip for a moment, Zhukov turned his intense stare on Gorov and said, “What's this?”

Gorov kept his voice low, but he tried not to seem secretive to any crewmen who might be watching. “What is it? I think you can see what it is, Emil. A forgery.”

The first officer didn't know what to say.

Gorov leaned toward him. “It's for your protection.”

“My protection?”

Gorov plucked the printout from his first officer's hands and carefully refolded it. He put it in his shirt pocket. “We're going to plot a course and set out at once for that iceberg.” He tapped the chart table between them. “We're going to rescue those Edgeway scientists and Brian Dougherty.”

“You don't actually have Ministry permission. A forgery won't stand up to—”

“Does one need permission to save lives?”

“Please, sir. You know what I mean.”

“Once we're under way, I'll give you the forged communiqué that you just read. It will be yours to keep, your protection if there's ever an inquiry.”

“But I saw the real message.”

“Deny it.”

“That might not be easy.”

Gorov said, “I am the only one aboard this ship who knows that you saw it. I will tell any court-martial magistrate that I showed you the forgery and nothing else.”

“If I'm ever interrogated, there's a chance drugs would be used. Besides, I just don't like going against orders when—”

“One way or another, you'll be going against orders. Mine or theirs. Now, listen to me, Emil. This is right. This is the thing we should do. And I will protect you. You do feel I'm a man of my word, I hope?”

“I have no doubt,” Zhukov said immediately and finally broke eye contact, as though embarrassed by the thought that he should ever doubt his captain in any way.

“Then? Emil?” When the first officer remained silent, Gorov said quietly but forcefully, “Time is wasting, Lieutenant. If we're going after them, then for God's sake let's not wait until they're dead.”

Zhukov took off his glasses. He closed his eyes and pressed his fingertips to them. “I've served with you how long?”

“Seven years.”

“There have been tense moments,” Zhukov said.

Like this one, Gorov thought.

Zhukov lowered his hands from his face but didn't open his eyes. “That time the Norwegian corvette dropped depth charges on us when it caught us in Oslo Fjord.”

“Tense indeed.”

“Or that cat-and-mouse game with the American submarine off the coast of Massachusetts.”

“We made fools of them, didn't we?” Gorov said. “We've made a good team.”

“Never once have I seen you panic or issue orders that I thought were inappropriate.”

“Thank you, Emil.”

“Until now.”

“Not now either.”

Zhukov opened his eyes. “With all due respect, this isn't like you, sir. It's reckless.”

“I disagree. It's not reckless. Not at all. As I told you earlier, I'm quite certain the Admiralty will approve the rescue mission.”

“Then why not wait for the transmission at 1700 hours?”

“We can't waste time. The bureaucratic pace of the Ministry just isn't good enough in this case. We've got to reach that iceberg before too many more hours have passed. Once we've located it, we'll need a lot of time just to get those people off the ice and aboard with us.”

Zhukov consulted his watch. “It's twenty minutes past four. We've only go to wait another forty minutes to hear the Admiralty's decision.”

“But on a rescue mission like this, forty minutes could be the difference between success and failure.”

“You're adamant?”

“Yes.”

Zhukov sighed.

“You could relieve me of my command,” Gorov said. “Right now. You have reason. I wouldn't hold it against you, Emil.”

Staring at his hands, which were trembling slightly, Zhukov said, “If they deny you the permission you want, will you turn back and continue the surveillance run?”

“I would have no choice.”

“You would turn back?”

“Yes.”

“You wouldn't disobey them?”

“No.”

“Your word?”

“My word.”

Zhukov thought about it.

Gorov rose from the stool. “Well?”

“I must be crazy.”

“You'll agree to this?”

“As you know, I named my second son after you. Nikita Zhukov.”

The captain nodded. “I was honored.”

“Well, if I've been wrong about you, if I shouldn't have named him Nikita, I won't be able to forget it now. He'll be around as a reminder of how wrong I was. I don't need that thorn in my side. So I'll have to give you one more chance to prove I've been right all along.”

Smiling, Gorov said, “Let's get a new bearing on that iceberg and plot a course, Lieutenant.”

After returning to the third blasting shaft, Pete and Roger left the two snowmobiles in park, with engines running and headlights blazing. Exhaust fumes plumed in brilliant crystalline columns. They set out in different directions, and Harry set out in a third to search for Brian Dougherty in the drifts, waist-high pressure ridges, and low ice hummocks around the site.

Cautious, aware that he could be swallowed by the storm as quickly and completely as Brian had been, Harry probed the black-and-white landscape before he committed himself to it. He used his flashlight as if it were a machete, sweeping if from side to side. The insubstantial yellowish beam slashed through the falling snow, but the white jungle was undisturbed by it. Every ten steps, he looked over his shoulder to see if he was straying too far from the snowmobiles. He was already well out of the section of the icefield that was illuminated by the headlights, but he knew that he must not lose sight of the sleds altogether. If he got lost, no one would hear his cries for help above the screeching, hooting wind. Although it was diffused and dimmed by the incredibly heavy snowfall, the glow from the snowmobiles was his only signpost to safety.

Even as he searched assiduously behind every drift and canted slab of ice, he nurtured only a slim hope that he would ever locate Dougherty. The wind was fierce. The snow was mounting at the rate of two inches an hour or faster. In those brief moments when he stopped to take a closer look into especially long, deep shadows, drifts began to form against his boots. If Brian had lain on the ice, unconscious or somehow stricken and unable to move, for the past fifteen minutes, maybe longer… Well, by this time the kid would be covered over, a smooth white lump like any hummock or drift, frozen fast to the winter field.

It's hopeless, Harry thought.

Then, not forty feet from the blasting shaft, he stepped around a monolith of ice as large as a sixteen-wheel Mack truck and found Brian on the other side. The kid was on his back, laid out flat, one arm at his side and the other across his chest. He still wore his goggles and snow mask. At a glance he appeared to be lolling there, merely taking a nap, in no trouble whatsoever. Because the upturned slap of ice acted as a windbreak, the snow had not drifted over him. For the same reason, he'd been spared the worst of the bitter cold. Nevertheless, he didn't move and was most likely dead.

Harry knelt beside the body and pulled the snow mask from the face. Thin, irregularly spaced puffs of vapor rose from between the parted lips. Alive. But for how long? Brian's lips were thin and bloodless. His skin was no less white than the snow around him. When pinched, he didn't stir. His eyelids didn't flutter. After lying motionless on the ice for at least a quarter of an hour, even if he had been out of the wind for the entire time and even though he was wearing full survival gear, he would already be suffering from exposure. Harry adjusted the snow mask to re-cover the pale face.

He was deciding how best to get Brian out of there when he saw someone approaching through the turbulent gloom. A shaft of light appeared in the darkness, hazy at first, getting sharper and brighter as it drew nearer.

Roger Breskin staggered through a thick curtain of snow, holding his flashlight before him as a blind man held a cane. Apparently he had become disoriented and wandered out of his assigned search area. He hesitated when he saw Brian.

Harry gestured impatiently.

Pulling down his snow mask, Breskin hurried to them. “Is he alive?”

“Not by much.”

“What happened?”

“I don't know. Let's get him into one of the snowmobile cabins and let the warm air work on him. You take his feet and I'll—”

“I can handle him myself.”

“But—”

“It'll be easier and quicker that way.”

Harry accepted the flashlight that Roger passed to him.

The big man bent down and lifted Brian as if the kid weighed no more than ten pounds.

Harry led the way back through the drifts and hummocks to the snowmobiles.

At 4:50 the Americans at Thule radioed Gunvald Larsson with more bad news. Like the Melville before her, the trawler Liberty had found the storm to be an irresistible force against which only big warships and fools tried to stand. She simply could not head straightaway into the massive, powerful waves that surged across nearly all of the North Atlantic and the unfrozen portions of the Greenland Sea. She had turned back five minutes ago when a seaman discovered minor buckling of the starboard bow plates. The American radioman repeatedly assured Gunvald that everyone stationed at Thule was praying for those poor bastards on the iceberg. Indeed, prayers were no doubt being said for them all over the world.

No number of prayers would make Gunvald feel better. The cold, hard fact was that the captain of the Liberty, although certainly of necessity and only with great remorse, had made a decision which virtually sentenced eight people to death.

Gunvald couldn't bring himself to pass on the news to Rita. Not right away, not that minute. Maybe on the hour — or at a quarter past. He wanted time to get in control of himself. These were his friends, and he cared about them. He didn't want to be the one who delivered their death notice. He was trembling. He had to have time to think about how he would tell them.

He needed a drink. Although he was not a man who usually sought to relieve tension with liquor, and in spite of being known for his steely nerves, he poured himself a shot of vodka from the three-bottle store in the communications pantry. When he had finished the vodka, he was still unable to call Rita. He poured another shot, hesitated, then made it a double, before putting the bottle away.

Although the snowmobiles were stationary, the five small engines rumbled steadily. On the icecap, in the middle of a fierce storm, the machines must never be switched off, because the batteries would go dead and the lubricants in the engines would freeze up within two or three minutes. The unrelenting wind was growing colder as the day wore on; it could kill men and machines with ease.

Harry came out of the ice cave and hurried to the nearest snowmobile. When he was settled in the warm cabin, he screwed off the top of the Thermos bottle that he'd brought with him. He took several quick sips of the thick, fragrant vegetable soup. It had been brewed from freeze-dried mix and brought to the boiling point on the hot plate that they had used earlier to melt snow at the open blasting shafts. For the first time all day, he was able to relax, though he knew this was a temporary state of peace.

In the three snowmobiles to his left, George Lin, Claude, and Roger were eating dinner in equal privacy. He could barely see them: dim shapes inside the unlighted cabins.

Everyone had been given three cups of soup. At this rate, they had enough supplies for only two more meals. Harry had decided against rationing the remaining food, for if they were not well fed, the cold would kill them that much sooner.

Franz Fischer and Pete Johnson were in the ice cave. Harry could see them clearly, for his machine's headlamps shone through the entrance and provided the only light in there. The two men were pacing, waiting for their turn at warm cabins and Thermos bottles full of hot soup. Franz moved briskly, agitatedly, almost as if marching back and forth. In perfect contrast, Pete ambled from one end of the cave to the other, loose-jointed, fluid.

Rita knocked and opened the cabin door, startling Harry.

Swallowing a mouthful of soup, he said, “What's wrong?”

She leaned inside, using her body to block out the wind and its gibberous voice. “He wants to talk to you.”

“Brian?”

“Yes.”

“He's still improving?”

“Oh, yes. Nicely.”

“Does he remember what happened?”

“Let him tell you,” she said.

In the fifth snowmobile, the one parked farthest from the cave, Brian was slowly recuperating. Rita had been in the cabin with him for the past twenty minutes, massaging his chilled fingers, feeding him soup, and making sure that he didn't lapse into a dangerous sleep. He had regained consciousness during the ride back from the third demolition shaft, but he had been in too much agony to talk. When he first woke, he'd been racked with pain as his numbed nerve endings belatedly responded to the severe cold that had nearly killed him. The kid would not feel half normal for at least another hour.

Harry capped his Thermos bottle. Before he pulled his goggles in place, he kissed Rita.

“Mmmmm,” she said. “More.”

This time her tongue moved between his lips. Snowflakes swept past her head and danced across his face, but her breath was hot on his greased skin. He was flushed with a poignant concern for her. He wanted to protect her from all harm.

When they drew apart she said, “I love you.”

“We will go back to Paris. Somehow. When we get out of this.”

“Well, if we don't get out of it,” she said, “we haven't been short-changed. We've had eight good years together. We've had more fun and love than most people get in a lifetime.”

He felt powerless, up against impossible odds. All his life he had been a man who took charge in a crisis. He had always been able to find solutions to even the most difficult problems. This new sense of impotency enraged him.

She kissed him lightly on one corner of his mouth. “Hurry now. Brian's waiting for you.”

The snowmobile cabin was uncomfortably cramped. Harry sat backward on the narrow passenger bench, facing the rear of the machine, where Brian Dougherty was facing forward. The handlebars pressed into his back. His knees were jammed against Brian's knees. Only a vague, amber radiance from the headlamps filtered through the Plexiglas, and the darkness made the tiny enclosure seem even tinier than it was.

Harry said, “How do you feel?”

“Like hell.”

“You will for a while yet.”

“My hands and feet sting. And I don't mean they're just numb. It's like someone's jabbing lots of long needles into them.” His voice was shaded with pain.

“Frostbite?”

“We haven't looked at my feet yet. But they feel about the same as my hands. And there doesn't seem to be any frostbite on my hands. I think I'm safe. But—” He gasped in pain, and his face contorted. “Oh, Jesus, that's bad.”

Opening his Thermos, Harry said, “Soup?”

“No, thanks. Rita pumped a quart of it into me. One more drop, and I'll float away.” He rubbed his hands together, apparently to ease another especially sharp prickle of pain. “By the way, I'm head over heels in love with your wife.”

“Who isn't?”

“And I want to thank you for coming after me. You saved my life, Harry.”

“Another day, another act of heroism,” Harry said. He took a mouthful of soup. “What happened to you out there?”

“Didn't Rita tell you?”

“She said I should hear if from you.”

Brian hesitated. His eyes glittered in the shadows. At last he said, “Someone clubbed me.”

Harry almost choked on his soup. “Knocked you out?”

“Hit me on the back of the head.”

“That can't be right.”

“I've got the lumps to prove it.”

“Let me see.”

Brian leaned forward, lowered his head.

Harry stripped off his gloves and felt the boy's head. The two lumps were prominent and easy to find, one larger than the other, both on the back of the skull and one slightly higher and to the left of the other. “Concussion?”

“None of the symptoms.”

“Headache?”

“Oh, yeah. A real bastard of a headache.”

“Double vision?”

“No.”

“Any slurred speech?”

“No.”

“You're certain you didn't faint?”

“Positive,” Brian said, sitting up straight again.

“You could have taken a nasty bump on the head if you'd fainted. You might have fallen against a projection of ice.”

“I distinctly remember being struck from behind.” His voice was hard with conviction. “Twice. The first time he didn't put enough force into it. My hood cushioned the blow. I stumbled, kept my balance, started to turn around — and he hit me a lot harder the next time. The lights went out but good.”

“And then he dragged you out of sight?”

“Before any of you saw what was happening, evidently.”

“Not very damned likely.”

“The wind was gusting. The snow was so thick I couldn't see more than two yards. He had excellent cover.”

“You're saying someone tried to murder you.”

“That's right.”

“But if that's the case, why did he drag you behind a windbreak? You would have frozen to death in fifteen minutes if he'd left you in the open.”

“Maybe he thought the blow killed me. Anyway, he did leave me in the open. But I came to after you'd all left. I was dizzy, nauseated, cold. I managed to drag myself out of the wind before I passed out again.”

“Murder…”

“Yes.”

Harry didn't want to believe it. He had too much on his mind as it was. He didn't have the capacity to deal with yet another worry.

“It happened as we were getting ready to leave the third site.” Brian paused, hissed in pain. “My feet, God, like hot needles, hot needles dipped in acid.” His knees pressed more forcefully against Harry's knees, but after half a minute or so, he gradually relaxed. He was tough; he continued as if there had been no interruption. “I was loading some equipment into the last of the cargo trailers. Everyone was busy. The wind was gusting especially hard, the snow was falling so heavily I'd lost sight of the rest of you, then he hit me.”

“But who?”

“I didn't see him.”

“Not even from the corner of your eye?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Did he speak to you?”

“No.”

“If he wanted you dead, why wouldn't he wait for midnight? The way it looks now, you'll die then with the rest of us. Why would he feel he had to hurry you along? Why not wait for midnight?”

“Well, maybe…”

“What?”

“This sounds crazy… but, well, I am a Dougherty.”

Harry understood at once. “To a certain breed of maniac, yes, that would make you an appealing victim. Killing a Dougherty, any Dougherty — there's a sense of history involved. I suppose I can see a psychopath getting a real thrill out of that.”

They were silent.

Then Brian said, “But who among us is psychotic?”

“Seems impossible, doesn't it?”

“Yeah. But you do believe me?”

“Of course. I can't make myself believe you knocked yourself unconscious with two blows to the back of the head, then dragged yourself out of sight.”

Brian sighed with relief.

Harry said, “This pressure we're under… If one of us was a borderline case, potentially unstable but functional, maybe the stress was all that was needed to push him over the edge. Like to take a guess?”

“Guess who it was? No.”

“I expected you to say George Lin.”

“For whatever reasons, George doesn't care for me or my family. He's sure made that abundantly clear. But whatever's wrong with him, whatever bee he's got up his ass, I still can't believe he's a killer.”

“You can't be sure. You don't know what's going on inside his head any more than I do. There're few people in this life we can ever really know. With me… Rita's the only person I'd ever vouch for and have no doubts.”

“Yes, but I saved his life today.”

“If he's psychotic, why would that matter to him? In fact, in his twisted logic, for some reason we'd never be able to grasp, that might even be why he wants to kill you.”

The wind rocked the snowmobile. Beads of snow ticked and hissed across the cabin roof.

For the first time all day, Harry was on the verge of despair. He was exhausted both physically and mentally.

Brian said, “Will he try again?”

“If he's nuts, obsessed with you and your family, then he's not going to give up easily. What does he have to lose? I mean, he's going to die at midnight anyway.”

Looking out the side window into the churning night, Brian said, “I'm afraid, Harry.”

“If you weren't afraid right now, kid, then you'd be psychotic.”

“You're afraid too?”

“Scared out of my wits.”

“You don't show it.”

“I never do. I just pee my pants and hope nobody'll notice.”

Brian laughed, then winced at another spasm of stinging pain in his extremities. When he recovered, he said, “Whoever he is, at least I'll be prepared for him now.”

“You won't be left alone,” Harry said. “Either Rita or I will stay with you at all times.”

Rubbing his hands together, massaging his still cold fingers, Brian said, “Are you going to tell the others?”

“No. We'll say you don't remember what happened, that you must have fallen and hit your head on an outcropping of ice. Better that your would-be killer thinks we don't know about him.”

“I had the same thought. He'll be especially cautious if he knows we're waiting for his next move.”

“But if he thinks we don't know about him, he might get careless the next time he tries for you.”

“If he's a lunatic because he wants to murder me even though I'll probably die at midnight anyway… then I guess I must be nuts too. Here I am worrying about being murdered even though midnight's only seven hours away.”

“No. You've got a strong survival instinct, that's all. It's a sign of sanity.”

“Unless the survival instinct is so strong that it keeps me from recognizing a hopeless situation. Then maybe it's a sing of lunacy.”

“It isn't hopeless,” Harry said. “We've got seven hours. Anything could happen in seven hours.”

“Like what?”

“Anything.”

5:00

Like a whale breaching in the night sea, the Ilya Pogodin surfaced for the second time in an hour. Glistening cascades of water slid from the boat's dark flanks as it rolled in the storm waves. Captain Nikita Gorov and two seamen scrambled out of the conning-tower hatch and took up watch positions on the bridge.

In the past thirty minutes, cruising at its maximum submerged speed of thirty-one knots, the submarine had moved seventeen miles north-northeast of its assigned surveillance position. Timoshenko had taken a bearing on the Edgeway group's radio beacon, and Gorov had plotted a perfectly straight course that intersected with the estimated path of the drifting iceberg. On the surface, the Pogodin was capable of twenty-six knots; but because of the bad seas, it was only making three quarters of that speed. Gorov was anxious to take the boat down again, to three hundred feet this time, where it would glide like any other fish, where the turbulence of the storm could not affect it.

The satellite tracking gear rose from the sail behind the bridge and opened like spring's first blossom. The five petal-form radar plates, which quickly joined together to become a dish, were already beginning to gleam and sparkle with ice as the snow and sleet froze to them; nevertheless, they diligently searched the sky.

At three minutes past the hour, a note from Timoshenko was sent up to the bridge. The communications officer wished to inform the captain that a coded message had begun to come in from the Ministry in Moscow.

The moment of truth had arrived.

Gorov folded the slip of paper, put it in a coat pocket, then kept his eyes to the night glasses. He scanned ninety degrees of the storm-swept horizon, but it was not waves and clouds and snow that he saw. Instead, two visions plagued him, each more vivid than reality. In the first, he was sitting at a table in a conference room with a gilt-trimmed ceiling and a chandelier that cast rainbows on the walls; he was listening to the state's testimony at his own court-martial, and he was forbidden to speak in his own defense. In the second vision, he stared down at a young boy who lay in a hospital bed, a dead boy rank with sweat and urine. The night glasses seemed to be a conduit to both the past and the future.

At 5:07 the decoded message was passed through the conning-tower hatch and into the captain's hands. Gorov skipped the eight lines of introductory material and got straight to the body of the communiqué.

At the bottom of the decoding sheet, Timoshenko had written two words in pencil: RECEIPT ACKNOWLEDGED. There was nothing to do now but act upon their new orders — which they had been doing anyway for the past half an hour.

Although he was not at all sure that sufficient time remained in which to get those people off the iceberg, Gorov was happier than he had been in a long time. At least he was doing something. At least he had a chance, however slim, of reaching the Edgeway scientists before they were all dead.

He stuffed the decoded message into a coat pocket and sounded two brief blasts on the electric diving horns.

By 5:30 Brian had been in the snowmobile nearly an hour. He was suffering from claustrophobia. “I'd like to go out and walk.”

“Don't rush yourself.” Rita switched on a flashlight, and the sudden brightness made her eyes water. She studied his hands. “Numb? Tingling?”

“No.”

“A burning sensation?”

“Not much any more. And my feet feel a lot better.” He saw that Rita still had her doubts. “My legs are cramped. I really need to exercise them. Besides, it's too warm in here.”

She hesitated. “You face does have some color now. I mean, other than the attractive blue it was. And your hands don't look translucent any more. Well… all right. But when you've stretched you muscles, if you still feel any tingling, any numbness, you've got to come back here right away.”

“Good enough.”

She pulled on her felt boots and then worked her feet into her outer boots. She picked up her coat from the bench between them. Afraid of working up a sweat in the warm air, she hadn't been wearing all of her gear. If she perspired in her suit, the moisture against her skin would leach away her body heat, which would be an invitation to death.

For the same reason, Brian wasn't wearing his coat, gloves, or either pair of boots. “I'm not as limber as you are. But if you'll step outside and give me more room, I think I'll manage.”

“You must be too stiff and sore to do it yourself. I'll help.”

“You're making me feel like a child.”

“Rubbish.” She patted her lap. “Put your feet up here, one at a time.”

He smiled. “You'd make a wonderful mother for someone.”

“I already am a wonderful mother for someone. Harry.”

She worked the outer boot onto his somewhat swollen feet. Brian grunted with pain when he straightened his leg; his joints felt as if they were popping apart like a string of decorative plastic beads.

While Rita threaded the laces through the eyelets and drew them tight, she said, “Well, if nothing else, you've a wealth of material for those magazine pieces.”

He was surprised to hear himself say, “I've decided not to write them. I'm going to do a book instead.” Until that moment his obsession had been a private matter. Now that he had revealed it to someone he respected, he had forced himself to regard it less as an obsession and more as a commitment.

“A book? You'd better think twice about that.”

“I've thought about it a thousand times the last few weeks.”

“Writing a book is an ordeal. I've done three, you know. You may have to write thirty magazine articles to get the same word count as a book, but if I were you, I'd write articles and forget about being an 'author.' There isn't half as much agony in the shorter work as there is in the writing of a book.”

“But I've been swept along by the idea.”

“Oh, I know how it is. Writing the first third of the book, you're almost having a sexual experience. But you lost that feeling. Believe me, you do. In the second third, you're just trying to prove something to yourself. And when you get to the last third, it's simply a matter of survival.”

“But I've figured out how to make everything hand together in the narrative. I've got my theme.”

Rita winced and shook her head sadly. “So you're too far gone to respond to reason.” She helped him get his right foot into the sealskin boot. “What is your theme?”

“Heroism.”

“Heroism?” She grimaced as she worked with the laces. “What in the name of God does heroism have to do with the Edgeway Project?”

“I think maybe it has everything to do with it.”

“You're daft.”

“Seriously.”

“I never noticed any heroes here.”

Brian was surprised by her apparently genuine astonishment. “Have you looked in a mirror?”

“Me? A hero? Dear boy, I'm the furthest thing from it.”

“Not in my view.”

“I'm scared sick half the time.”

“Heroes can be scared and still be heroes. That's what makes them heroes — acting in spite of fear. This is heroic work, this project.”

“It's work, that's all. Dangerous, yes. Foolish, perhaps. But heroic? You're romanticizing it.”

He was silent as she finished lacing his boots. “Well, it's not politics.”

“What isn't?”

“What you're doing here. You're not in it for power, privilege, or money. You're not out here because you want to control people.”

Rita raised her head and met his gaze. Her eyes were beautiful — and as deep as the clear Arctic sea. He knew that she understood him, in that moment, better than anyone ever had, perhaps even better than he knew himself. “The world thinks your family is full of heroes.”

“Well.”

“But you don't.”

“I know them better.”

“They've made sacrifices, Brian. Your uncle was killed. Your father took a bullet of his own.”

“This will sound mean-spirited, but it wouldn't if you knew them. Rita, neither of them expected to have to make a sacrifice like that — or any sacrifice at all. Getting shot or killed isn't an act of bravery — any more than it is for some poor bastard who gets gunned down unexpectedly while he's withdrawing money from an automatic teller machine. He's a victim, not a hero.”

“Some people get into politics to make a better world.”

“Not anyone I've known. It's dirty, Rita. It's all about envy and power. But out here, everything's so clean. The work is hard, the environment is hostile — but clean.”

She had never taken her eyes from his. He couldn't recall anyone ever having met his gaze as unwaveringly as she did. After a thoughtful silence, she said, “So you're not just a troubled rich boy out for the thrills, the way the media would have it.”

He broke eye contact first, taking his foot off the bench and contorting himself in the small space in order to slip his arms into the sleeves of his coat. “Is that what you though I was like?”

“No. I don't let the media do my thinking for me.”

“Of course, maybe I'm deluding myself. Maybe that's just what I am, everything they write in the papers.”

“There's precious little truth in the papers,” she said. “In fact, you'll only find it one place.”

“Where's that?”

“You know.”

He nodded. “In myself.”

She smiled. Putting on her coat, she said, “You'll be fine.”

“When?”

“Oh, in twenty years maybe.”

He laughed. “Good God, I hope I'm not going to be screwed up that long.”

“Maybe longer. Hey, that's what life's all about: little by little, day by day, with excruciating stubbornness, each of us learning how to be less screwed up.”

“You should be a psychiatrist.”

“Witch doctors are more effective.”

“I've sometimes thought I've needed one.”

“A psychiatrist? Better save your money. Dear boy, all you need it time.”

When he followed Rita out of the snowmobile, Brian was surprised by the bitter power of the storm wind. It took his breath away and almost drove him to his knees. He gripped the open cabin door until he was certain of his balance.

The wind was a reminder that his unknown assailant, the man who had struck him on the head, was not the only threat to his survival. For a few minutes he'd forgotten that they were adrift, had forgotten about the time bombs ticking towards midnight. The fear came back to him like guilt to a priest's breast. Now that he had committed himself to writing the book, he wanted very much to live.

The headlamps on one of the snowmobiles shone through the mouth of the cave. In places, the fractured ice deconstructed the beams into glimmering prisms of light in all the primary colors, and those geometric shapes shimmered jewellike in the walls of the otherwise white chamber. The eight distorted shadows of the expedition member rippled and slid across that dazzling backdrop, swelled and shrank, mysterious but perhaps no more so than the people who cast them — five of whom were suspects and one of whom was a potential murder.

Harry watched Roger Breskin, Franz Fischer, George Lin, Claude, and Pete as they argued about the options open to them, about how they should spend the six hours and twenty minutes remaining before midnight. He ought to have been leading the discussion or at the very least contributing ot it, but he couldn't keep his mind on what the others were saying. For one thing, no matter how they spent their time, they could not escape from the iceberg or retrieve the explosives, so their discussion could resolve nothing. Furthermore, although trying to be discreet, he couldn't prevent himself from studying them intensely, as though psychotic tendencies ought to be evident in the way a man walked, talked, and gestured.

His train of thought was interrupted by a call from Edgeway Station. Gunvald Larsson's voice, shot through with static, rattled off the ice walls.

The other men stopped talking.

When Harry went to the radio and responded to the call, Gunvald said, “Harry, the trawlers have turned back. The Melville and the Liberty. Both of them. Some time ago. I've known, but I couldn't bring myself to tell you.” He was unaccountably buoyant, excited, as if that bad news should have brought smiles to their faces. “But now it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, Harry!”

Pete, Claude, and the others had crowded around the radio, baffled by the Swede's excitement.

Harry said, “Gunvald, what in the hell are you talking about? What do you mean, it doesn't matter?”

Static shredded the airwaves, but then the frequency cleared as Larsson said, “…just got word from Thule. Relayed from Washington. There's a submarine in your neighborhood, Harry. Do you read me? A Russian submarine.”