Icebound

10:45 DETONATION IN ONE HOUR FIFTEEN MINUTES

Dressed in heavy winter gear and standing on the bridge of the Pogodin, Nikita Gorov methodically searched one third of the horizon with his night glasses, alert for drift ice other than the iceberg that was carrying the Edgeway group. That formidable white mountain lay directly ahead of the submarine, still driven by the deep current that originated three hundred forty feet below the surface and extended to about seven hundred eighty feet.

The storm-tossed sea, which churned on all sides of the boat, exhibited none of its familiar, rhythmic motion. It affected the ship in an unpredictable fashion, so Gorov couldn't prepare for its next attack. Without warning, the boat rolled to port so violently that everyone on the bridge was thrown sideways; the captain collided with Emil Zhukov and Semichastny. He disentangled himself from them and gripped an ice-sheathed section of the railing just as a wall of water burst across the sail and flooded the bridge.

As the ship righted itself, Zhukov shouted, “I'd rather be down at seven hundred feet!”

“Ah! You see?” Gorov shouted. “You didn't know when you were well off!”

“I'll never complain again.”

The iceberg no longer provided a leeward flank in which the Ilya Pogodin could take shelter. The full force of the storm assaulted the berg from behind, and both of its long flanks were vulnerable to the pitiless wind. The boat was forced to endure on the open surface, pitching and heaving, rocking and falling and rising and wallowing as though it were a living creature in its death throes. Another of the monumental waves battered the starboard hull, roared up the side of the sail, and cast Niagaras of spray down the other side, repeatedly drenching everyone on the bridge. Most of the time, the submarine listed heavily to port on the back of a monstrous black swell that was simultaneously monotonous and terrifying. All the men on the bridge were jacketed in thick ice, as was the metalwork around them.

Where it was not covered by goggles or protected by his hood, Gorov's face was heavily smeared with lanolin. Although his post did not require him to confront the fiendish wind directly, his nose and cheeks had been cruelly bitten by the viciously cold air.

Emil Zhukov had been wearing a scarf over the bottom half of his face, and it had come undone. At his assigned post, he had to stare directly into the storm, and he could not be without some protection, because his skin would be peeled from his face by the spicules of ice that were like millions of needles on the hundred-mile-an-hour wind. He quickly twisted and squeezed the scarf in both hands, cracking the layer of ice that encrusted it, then hastily retied it over his mouth and nose. He resumed his watch on one third of the murky horizon, miserable but stoical.

Gorov lowered his night glasses and turned to look back and up at the two men who were working on top of the sail just aft of the bridge. They were illuminated by the red bridge bulb to some extent and by a portable arc light. Both cast eerie, twisted shadows like those of demons toiling diligently over the bleak machinery of Hell.

One of those crewmen was standing atop the sail, wedged between the two periscopes and the radar mast, which must have been either immeasurably more terrifying or more exhilarating then riding a wild horse in a Texas rodeo, depending on the man's tolerance for danger, even though a safety line encircled his waist and secured him to the telecommunications mast. He presented one of the strangest sights that Captain Gorov had ever seen. He was swathed in so many layers of water-proof clothes that he had difficulty moving freely, but in his dangerously exposed position, he needed every layer of protection to avoid freezing to death where he stood. Like a human lightening rod at the pinnacle of the submarine superstructure, he was a target for the hurricane-force winds, the ceaseless barrage of sleet, and the cold sea spray. His suit of ice was extremely thick and virtually without chink or rent. At his neck, shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, and knees, the encasing ice was marred by well-delineated cracks and creases, but even at those joints, the cloth under the glistening storm coat was not visible. Otherwise, from head to foot, the poor devil glittered, sparkled, gleamed. He reminded Gorov of the cookie men, coated with sweet white icing, that were sometimes among the treats given to children in Moscow on New Year's Day.

The second seaman was standing on the short ladder that led from the bridge to the top of the sail. Tied fast to one of the rungs in order to free his hands for work, he was locking several watertight aluminum cargo boxes to a length of titanium-alloy chain.

Satisfied that the job was nearly completed, Gorov returned to his post and raised the night glasses to his eyes.

10:56 DETONATION IN ONE HOUR FOUR MINUTES

Because the rampaging wind was behind them, they were able to proceed to the crevasse in their snowmobiles. If they had been advancing into the teeth of the storm, they would have had to cope with near zero visibility, and in that case they would have done as well or better on foot, though they would have to have been tied together to prevent one of them from being bowled over by the wind and carried away. Driving with the wind, however, they could often see ten to fifteen yards ahead, although visibility was decreasing by the minute. Soon they would be in a full-fledged whiteout.

When they were in the vicinity of the chasm, Harry brought his sled to a full stop and, with a measure of reluctance, climbed out. Though he held tightly to the door handle, a hundred-mile-per-hour gust immediately knocked him to his knees. When the murderous velocity declined enough, he got up, though not without considerable effort, and hung on to the door, cursing the storm.

The other snowmobiles pulled up behind him. The last vehicle in the train was only thirty yards from him, but he could see nothing more than vague yellow aureoles where the headlights should have been. They were so dim that they might have been merely a trick of his bleary vision.

Daring to let go of the handle on the cabin door, hunching low to present the smallest possible profile to the wind, he hurried forward with his flashlight, scouting the ice, until he ascertained that the next hundred feet were safe. The air was bone-freezing, so cold that breathing it even through his snow mask hurt his throat and made his lungs ache. He scrambled back to the comparative warmth of his snowmobile and cautiously drove thirty yards before getting out to conduct further reconnaissance.

Again he found the crevasse, although this time he avoided nearly driving over the brink. The declivity was ten or twelve feet wide, narrowing toward the bottom, filled with more darkness than his flashlight could dispel.

As far as he could see through his frosted goggles — which were speckled with new ice the instant that he wiped them — the wall along which he would have to descent was pretty much a flat, unchallenging surface. He couldn't be entirely sure of what he was seeing: The angle at which he was able to look into the chasm, the curious way in which the deep ice refracted and reflected the light, the shadows that cavorted like demon dancers at the slightest movement of his flashlight, the windblown snow that spumed over the brink and then spiraled into the depths — all conspired to prevent him from getting a clear view of what lay below. Less than a hundred feet down was what appeared to be a floor or a wide ledge, which he thought he could reach without killing himself.

Harry turned his sled around and gingerly backed it to the edge of the chasm, a move that might reasonably have been judged suicidal; however, considering that barely sixty precious minutes remained to them, a certain degree of recklessness seemed not only justifiable but essential. Except for professional mannequins and British Prime Ministers, no one ever accomplished anything by standing still. That was a favorite maxim of Rita's, herself a British citizen, and Harry usually smiled when he thought of it. He wasn't smiling now. He was taking a calculated risk, with a greater likelihood of failure than success. The ice might collapse under him and tumble into the pit, as it had done earlier in the day.

Nevertheless, he was prepared to trust to luck and put his life in the hands of the gods. If there was justice in the universe, he was about to benefit from a change of fortune — or at least he was overdue for one.

By the time the others parked their snowmobiles, got out, and joined him near the brink of the crevasse, Harry had fixed two one-thousand-pound-test, ninety-strand nylon lines to the low hitch of his sled. The first rope was an eighty-foot safety line that would bring him up short of the crevasse floor if he fell. He knotted it around his waist. The second line, the one that he would use to attempt a measured descent, was a hundred feet long, and he tossed the free end into the ravine.

Pete Johnson arrived at the brink and gave Harry his flashlight.

Harry had already snapped his own flashlight to the tool belt at his waist. It hung at his right hip, butt up and lens down. Now he clipped Pete's torch at his left hip. Twin beams of yellow light shone down his quilted pants leg.

Neither he nor Pete attempted to speak. The wind was shrieking like something that had crawled out of the bowels of Hell on Judgment Day. It was so loud that it was stupefying, louder than it had been earlier. They couldn't have heard each other even if they had screamed at the top of their lungs.

Harry stretched out on the ice, flat on his stomach, and took the climbing line in both hands.

Bending down, Pete patted him reassuringly on the shoulder. Then he slowly pushed Harry backward, over the ledge, into the crevasse.

Harry thought he had a firm grip on the line and was certain that he could control his descent, but he was mistaken. As though greased, the line slipped through his hands, and he dropped unchecked into the gap. Maybe it was the crust of ice on his gloves, maybe the fact that the leather was soft with Vaseline from all the times in recent days when he had unconsciously touched his grease-protected face. Whatever the reason, the rope was like a live eel in his hands, and he plunged into the abyss.

A wall of ice flashed past him, two or three inches from his face, flickering with the reflections of the two flashlight beams that preceded him. He clenched the rope as tightly as he could and also tried to pin it between his knees, but he was in what amounted to a freefall.

In the whirl of blown snow and the peculiar prismatic refraction of the light in the deep ice, Harry had thought that the wall was a flat and relatively smooth surface, but he hadn't been entirely sure. Now the shorter safety line wouldn't save him if he encountered a sharp spike of ice that projected from the wall of the crevasse. If he dropped at high speed onto a jagged outcropping, it could rip even his heavy storm suit, tear him open crotch to throat, impale him…

The rope burned through the surface slickness of his gloves, and abruptly he was able to stop himself, perhaps seventy feet below the brink of the crevasse. He percussive heart was pounding out a score for kettledrums, and every muscle in his body was knotted tighter than the safety line around his waist. Gasping for breath, he swung back and forth on the oscillating line, banging painfully — and then more gently — against the chasm wall while shadows and frantic flares of reflected light swarmed up from below like flocks of spirits escaping from Hades.

He dared not pause to settle his nerves. The timers on those packages of explosives were still ticking.

After easing down the rope another fifteen or twenty feet, he reached the bottom of the crevasse. It proved to be about ninety feet deep, which was fairly close to the estimate he had made when he had studied it from above.

He unclipped one of the flashlights from his tool belt and began to search for the entrance to the tunnel that Lieutenant Timoshenko had described. He remembered from his first encounter with the chasm earlier in the day that it was forty-five or fifty feet long, ten or twelve feet wide at the midpoint but narrower at both ends. At the moment he did not have view of the entire floor of the crevasse. When part of one wall had collapsed under his snowmobile, it had tumbled to the bottom; now it constituted a ten-foot-high divider that partitioned the chasm into two areas of roughly equal size. The badly charred wreckage of the sled was strewn over the top of that partition.

The section into which Harry had descended was a dead end. It contained no side passages, no deeper fissures large enough to allow him to descend further, and no sign of a tunnel or open water.

Slipping, sliding, afraid that the jumbled slabs of ice would shift and catch him like a bug between two bricks, he climbed out of the first chamber. At the top of that sloped mount, he picked his way through the smashed and burned ruins of the snowmobile and through more slabs of ice, which shifted treacherously under his feet, then slid down the far side.

Beyond that partition, in the second half of the chasm, he found a way out, into deeper and more mysterious realms of ice. The right-hand wall offered no caves or fissures, but the left-hand wall didn't come all the way to the floor. It ended four feet above the bottom of the crevasse.

Harry dropped flat on his stomach and poked his flashlight into that low opening. The passageway was about thirty feet wide and no higher than four feet. It appeared to run straight and level for six or seven yards under the crevasse wall, sideways into the ice, before it curved sharply downward and out of sight.

Was it worth exploring?

He looked at his watch. 11:02

Detonation in fifty-eight minutes.

Holding the light in front of him, Harry quickly wriggled into the horizontal passage. Although he was squirming on his stomach, the ceiling of the crawl space was so low in some places that it brushed the back of his head.

He wasn't claustrophobic, but he had a logical and healthy fear of being confined in an extremely cramped place ninety feet beneath the ice, in the Arctic wilderness, while surrounded by fifty-eight enormous packages of explosives that were ticking rapidly toward detonation. He was funny that way.

Nevertheless, he twisted and writhed and pulled himself forward with his elbows and his knees. When he'd gone twenty-five or thirty feet, he discovered that the passageway led into the bottom of what seemed to be a large open space, a hollow in the heart of the ice. He moved his flashlight to the left and right, but from his position, he was unable to get a clear idea of the cavern's true size. He slid out of the crawl space, stood up, and unclipped the second flashlight from his belt.

He was in a circular chamber one hundred feet in diameter, with dozens of fissures and culs-de-sac and passageways leading from it. Apparently the ceiling had been formed by a great upward rush of hot water and steam: a nearly perfect dome, too smooth to have been formed by any but the most exceptional phenomenon — such as freakish volcanic activity. That vault, marked only by a few small stalactites and spider-web cracks, was sixty feet high at the apex and curved to thirty feet where it met the walls. The floor descended toward the center of the room in seven progressive steps, two or three feet at a time, so the overall effect was of an amphitheater. At the nadir of the cavern, where the stage would have been, was a forty-foot-diameter pool of thrashing sea water.

The tunnel.

Hundreds of feet below, that wide tunnel opened into a hollow in the bottom of the iceberg, to the lightless world of the deep Arctic Ocean, where the Ilya Pogodin would be waiting for them.

Harry was as mesmerized by the dark pool as he would have been by a gate between this dimension and the next, by a door in the back of an old wardrobe that led to the enchanted land of Narnia, by any tornado that could spin a child and a dog to Oz.

“I'll be damned.” His voice echoed back to him from the dome.

He was suddenly energized by hope.

In the back of his mind, he had harbored some doubt about the very existence of the tunnel. He had been inclined to think that the Pogodin's surface Fathometer was malfunctioning. In those frigid seas, how could a long tunnel through solid ice remain open? Why hadn't it frozen over and closed up again? He hadn't asked the others if they could explain it to him. He hadn't wanted to worry them. They would pass the last hour of their lives more easily with hope than without it. Nonetheless, it had been a riddle for which he saw no solution.

Now he had the answer to that riddle. The water inside the tunnel continued to be affected by tremendous tidal forces in the sea far below. It was not stagnant or even calm. It welled up and fell away forcefully, rhythmically, surging as high as six or eight feet into the cavern, churning and sloshing, then draining back swiftly until it was level with the lip of the hole. Swelling and falling away, swelling and falling away… The continuous movement prevented the opening from freezing over, and it inhibited the development of ice within the tunnel itself.

Of course, over an extended period of time, say two or three days, the tunnel would most likely grow steadily narrower. Gradually new ice would build up on the walls, regardless of the tidal motion, until the passageway became impassable or closed altogether.

But they didn't need the tunnel two or three days in the future. They needed it now.

Nature had been set firmly against them for the past twelve hours. Perhaps now she was working for them and ready to show them a little mercy.

Survival.

Paris. The Hôtel George V.

Moët & Chandon.

The Crazy Horse Saloon.

Rita…

Escape was possible. Just barely.

Harry clipped one of the flashlights to his belt. Holding the other light in front of him, he wriggled back through the crawl space between the domed cavern and the bottom of the open crevasse, eager to signal the others to descend and begin their tortuous escape from that prison of ice.

11:06 DETONATION IN FIFTY-FOUR MINUTES

At the command pad, Nikita Gorov monitored the series of five video display terminals arrayed on the ceiling. With little strain, he was simultaneously tracking the computations — some expressed in dimensional diagrams — provided by five different programs that were constantly collecting data regarding the boat's and the iceberg's positions, relative altitudes, and speeds.

“Clear water,” said the technician who was operating the surface Fathometer. “No ice overhead.”

Gorov had jockeyed the Ilya Pogodin under the quarter-mile-long, disc-shaped concavity in the bottom of the iceberg. The sail of the submarine was directly below the forty-foot-wide tunnel in the center of that concavity. Essentially, they were holding steady under an inverted funnel of ice and had to remain there for the duration of the operation.

“Speed matched to target,” Zhukov said, repeating the report that had come over his headset form the maneuvering room.

One of the technicians along the left-hand wall said, “Speed matched and checked.”

“Rudder amidships,” Gorov said.

“Rudder amidships, sir.”

Unwilling to look away, Gorov scowled a the VDTs as though speaking to them rather than to the control-room team. “And keep a damned close watch on the drift compass.”

“Clear water. No ice overhead.”

An enormous structure of ice was overhead, of course, a huge island, but not directly above the surface Fathometer package on the sail. They were sounding straight up into the forty-foot wide funnel at the top of the cavity, and the return signal showed clearance all the way to the surface, six hundred feet above, where the tunnel terminated in the bottom of the crevasse that Dr. Carpenter had described to Timoshenko.

The captain hesitated, reluctant to act until he was absolutely certain that they were properly positioned. He studied the five screens for another half minute. When he was satisfied that the speed of the boat was as closely coordinated with the iceberg's progress as was humanly possible, he pulled down a microphone and said, “Captain to communications center. Release the aerial at will, Lieutenant.”

Timoshenko's voice grated from the overhead speaker. “Aerial deployed.”

Topside, eight watertight, aluminum cargo boxes nestled among the masts and periscopes and snorkels on the Pogodin's sail. They were held in place by multiple lengths of nylon cord, some of which had no doubt snapped, as expected, during the submarine's second descent to seven hundred feet.

When Timoshenko released the aerial, a helium balloon had been ejected in a swarm of bubbles from a pressurized tube on top of the sail. If it was functioning properly — as it always had before — the balloon was now rising rapidly in the dark sea, trailing the multicommunications wire behind it. As an intelligence-gathering boat, the Ilya Pogodin had deployed that aerial in the same fashion on thousands of occasions over the years.

The eight watertight boxes fastened atop the sail, however, were not a standard feature. They were secured to the communications wire with a fine-link titanium alloy chain and spring locks. When the rising helium balloon was twenty feet above the sail, it should jerk the chain tight and draw the boxes upward, pulling hard enough against the remaining nylon restraining lines to cause them to slip their knots. Because the aluminum boxes were buoyant, they would then rise instantly from the sail and would not be a drag on the balloon.

In seconds, that helium-filled sphere was up to six hundred feet, then five hundred fifty feet, and then five hundred — well into the bowl of the inverted funnel above the boat. Four hundred feet and rising. The cargo boxes should be soaring upward in its wake. Three hundred fifty feet. The air bubbles from the pressure tube would fall behind the aerial and the boxes almost from the start, because the helium in the balloon expanded and rose much faster than did the oxygen in the bubbles. At approximately four hundred feet, the balloon would slide smoothly into the entrance to the long tunnel and continue to rise effortlessly, towing the boxes higher, higher, faster, faster…

Bending over the graph of the surface Fathometer, the operator said, “I'm registering a fragmented obstruction in the tunnel.”

“Not ice?” Gorov asked.

“No. The obstruction is rising.”

“The boxes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It's working,” Zhukov said.

“Seems to be,” the captain agreed.

“Now if the Edgeway people have located the other end of the tunnel—”

“We can get on with the hard part,” Gorov finished for him.

Numbers and images blinked, blinked, blinked across the video display terminals.

At last the squawk box rattled, and Lieutenant Timoshenko said, “Aerial's up. Balloon's surfaced, Captain.”

Gorov pulled down a microphone, cleared his throat, and said, “Override the automatic system, Lieutenant. Reel out an additional sixty feet of wire.”

A moment later Timoshenko said, “Sixty additional feet of wire deployed, Captain.”

Emil Zhukov wiped one hand down his saturnine face. “Now the long wait.”

Gorov nodded. “Now the long wait.”

11:10 DETONATION IN FIFTY MINUTES

The helium balloon broke through at the upper end of the tunnel and bobbled merrily on the swell. Although it was a flat blue-gray color, it looked, at least to Harry, like a bright and cheerful party balloon.

One by one, as Timoshenko reeled out additional wire at the far end, the eight watertight aluminum boxes burst through the surface. They bumped against one another with dull, almost inaudible thumps.

Harry was no longer alone in the dome-ceilinged cavern. Rita, Brian, Franz, Claude, and Roger had joined him. By now George Lin would have set foot on the bottom of the crevasse, and Pete Johnson would have started down the rope from the storm-lashed top of the iceberg.

Picking up the grappling hook that they had jerry-rigged from lengths of copper pipe and twenty feet of heavy-gauge wire, Harry said, “Come on. Let's get that stuff out of the water.”

With Franz's and Roger's assistance, he managed to snare the chain and drag the boxes out of the pool. All three men got wet to the knees in the process, and within seconds the storm suits had frozen solid around their calves. Although their boots and clothing were waterproof, even the partial submersion sucked body heat from them. Cold, shuddering, they hurriedly popped open the aluminum cargo boxes and extracted the gear that had been sent up from the Ilya Pogodin.

Each box held a self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. But this was not ordinary scuba gear. It had been designed for use in especially deep and/or extremely cold water. Each suit came with a battery pack that was attached to a belt and worn at the waist. When this was plugged into both the skintight pants and the jacket, the lining provided heat in much the same fashion as did any standard electric blanket.

Harry laid out his own equipment on the ice shore, well back from the highest tide line of the constantly surging and ebbing water in the pool. A compressed-air tank came with each suit. The diving mask was large enough to cover most of the face from chin to forehead, eliminating the need for a separate mouthpiece; air was fed directly into the mask, so the diver could breathe through his nose.

Strictly speaking, they would not be breathing air: The tank contained, instead, an oxygen-helium mixture with several special additives prescribed to allow the user to tolerate great depths. On the radio earlier, explaining the equipment, Timoshenko has assured them that the mixture of gases in the tank would allow a deep dive with only “a reasonable degree of danger” to the respiratory and circulatory system. Harry hadn't found the lieutenant's choice of words particularly reassuring. The though of fifty-eight massive charges of plastic explosives, however, was sufficient inducement.

The suits were different in other, less important ways from standard scuba gear. The pants had feet in them, as if they were the bottoms of a pair of Dr. Denton pajamas; and the sleeves of the jacket ended in gloves. The hood covered all of the head and face that was not protected by the oversize mask, as if leaving one centimeter of skin exposed would result in instant, extremely violent death. The wet suits almost seemed to be snug versions of the loose and bulky pressure suits worn by astronauts in space.

George Lin had entered the cavern while they were unpacking the aluminum boxes. He studied the equipment with unconcealed suspicion. “Harry, there must be something else, some other way. There's got to be—”

“No,” Harry said, without his usual diplomacy and patience. “This is it. This or nothing. There's no time for discussion any more, George. Just shut up and suit up.”

Lin looked glum.

But he didn't look like a killer.

Harry glanced at the others, who were busy unpacking their own boxes of gear. None of them looked like a killer, yet one of the them had clubbed Brian and, for whatever mad reason, might give them a lot of trouble when they were underwater and moving down through the long tunnel of ice.

Bringing up the rear, Pete Johnson squirmed laboriously out of the crawl space from the crevasse into the cavern, cursing the ice around him. He had been a tighter fit than any of the others. His broad shoulders had probably made it difficult for him to squeeze through the narrowest part of that passageway.

“Let's get dressed,” Harry said. His voice had an odd, hollow quality as it resonated through that domed amphitheater of ice. “No time to waste.”

They changed from their arctic gear into the scuba suits with an efficient haste born of acute discomfort and desperation. Harry, Franz, and Roger were already in pain for their knee-deep immersion in the pool: Their feet had been half numb, not a good sign, but the shock had temporarily restored too much feeling, and now their flesh from calves to toes prickled, ached, burned. The others had been spared that additional suffering, but they cursed and complained bitterly during their brief nakedness. No wind circulated through the cavern, but the air temperature was perhaps twenty or more degrees below zero. Therefore, they changed lower- and upper-body garments in stages to avoid being entirely unclothed at any one time and vulnerable to the killing cold: Outer boots, felt boots, socks, pants, and long underwear were removed first and were quickly replaced by the skintight, insulation-lined scuba pants; then they changed from coats, vests, sweaters, shirts, and undershirts into lined rubber jackets with snug rubber hoods.

Modesty was potentially as deadly as sloth. When Harry looked up after tucking himself into his scuba pants, he saw Rita's bare breasts as she struggled into her scuba jacket. Her flesh was blue-white and textured with enormous goose pimples. Then she zipped up her jacket, caught Harry's eye, and winked.

He marveled at that wink. He could guess at the agonizing fear that must be afflicting her. She wasn't just on the ice any more. She was now in the ice. Entombed. Her terror must already be acute. Before they traveled down the tunnel to the submarine and safety — if, in fact, they were able to make that journey without perishing — she would no doubt relive the death of her parents more than once and recall every hideous detail of the ordeal that she had endured when she was six years old.

Pete was having trouble squeezing into his gear. He said, “Are all these Russians pygmies?”

Everyone laughed.

The joke hadn't been that funny. Such easy laughter was an indication of how tense they were. Harry sensed that panic was near the surface in all of them.

11:15 DETONATION IN FORTY-FIVE MINUTES

The overhead speaker brought the bad news that everyone in the control room had been expecting from the torpedo officer: “That bulkhead is sweating again, Captain.”

Gorov turned away from the bank of video displays and pulled down a microphone. “Captain to torpedo room. Is it just a thin film, the same as last time?”

“Yes, sir. About the same.”

“Keep an eye on it.”

Emil Zhukov said, “Now that we know the lay of the ice above us, we could take her up to six hundred feet, up into the bowl of the funnel.”

Gorov shook his head. “Right now we have only one thing to worry about — the sweat on that torpedo-room bulkhead. If we ascent to six hundred feet, we might still have that problem, and we'd also have to worry that the iceberg might suddenly enter a new current and be turned out of this one.”

If they cautiously ascended a hundred feet or more into the concavity to relieve some of the tremendous pressure on the hull, the Pogodin would essentially be tucked into the berg as if it were an unborn baby nestled in the belly of its mother. Then if the berg began to move faster or slower than it was traveling at the moment, they might not realize what was happening until it was too late. They would collide with the deeper ice lying beyond their bow or with that to their stern.

“Steady as she goes,” Gorov said.

The notebook had an evil power that Gunvald found horribly compelling. The contents shocked, disgusted, and sickened him, yet he couldn't resist looking at one more page, then one more, then another. He was like a wild animal that had come upon the guts and half-eaten flesh of one of its own kind that had fallen victim to a predator: He poked his nose into the ruins and sniffed eagerly, frightened but curious, ashamed of himself, but utterly and morbidly fascinated by the dreadful fate that could befall one of his own kind.

In a sense, the notebook was a diary of dementia, a week-by-week chronicle of a mind traveling from the borderlands of sanity into the nations of madness — although that was obviously not how its owner thought of it. To that deranged man, it might seem like a research project, a record from public sources of an imagined conspiracy against the United States and against democracy everywhere. Newspaper and magazine clippings had been arranged according to their dates of publication and affixed to the pages of the notebook with cellophane tape. In the margin alongside each clipping, the compiler had written his comments.

The earliest entries seemed to have been snipped from various amateurishly produced political magazines of limited circulation, published in the U.S. by both extreme left- and right-wing groups. This man found fuel for his burning paranoia at both ends of the spectrum. They were wildly overwritten scare stories of the most mindless sort, simpleminded and scandalous. The President was a dedicated hard-line communist — yet, in another clipping, he was a dedicated hard-line fascist, the President was a closet homosexual with a taste for underage boys — or perhaps an insatiable satyr for whom ten bimbos a week were smuggled into the White House; the Pope was alternately a despicable right-wing zealot who was secretly supporting Third World dictators and a left-wing maniac intent on funding the destruction of democracy and confiscating all the wealth of the world for the benefit of the Jesuits. Here it was reported that the Rockefellers and the Mellons were the descendants of conspiratorially minded families who had been trying to rule the world since the fourteenth century or maybe the twelfth century or maybe even since the dinosaurs had given up the turf. One clipping claimed that in China girls were raised from infancy on government-funded “prostitute farms” and given at the age of ten to sexually demented politicians in the West in return for national-security secrets. Greedy businessmen were said to be polluting the planet, so money-crazed that they didn't give a damn if they killed every baby seal in existence, made patio furniture out of the last of the mighty redwoods, poisoned children, and destroyed the earth in pursuit of the almighty dollar; their evil conspiracies were so complex and so extensive that no one could be sure that even his own mother wasn't in their employ. Space aliens from another galaxy were trying to take over the world, too, with the nefarious, clandestine cooperation of (pick one) the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the Libertarian Party, Jews, blacks, born-again Christians, liberals, conservatives, middle-aged white trucking-industry executives. The tenor of the clippings was such that Gunvald wouldn't have been surprised to find one about Elvis faking death in order to secretly control the international banking establishment from an underground mansion in Switzerland.

With the newspaper clipping on page twenty-four, the notebook became uglier and more disturbing. It was a photograph of the late President Dougherty. Above the photograph was a headline: DOUGHERTY ASSASSINATION — TEN YEARS AGO TODAY. In the margin, in cramped but carefully hand-printed red letters, was a psychotic rant: His brain has rotted away. His mind no longer exists. His tongue can't produce any more lies. He has gone to the worms, and we're spared any more children he might have had. I saw a poster today that said, “I cannot convince a man of my truth simply by silencing him when he tries to speak his own.” But that is a lie. Death does convince a man. And I believe it helps to convince his followers. I wish that I had killed him.

From that point forward, more and more space in the notebook was devoted to the Dougherty family. By page one hundred, a third of the way through the book, they had become his sole obsession. Every clipping in the subsequent two hundred pages dealt with him. He had saved important and trivial stories: a report of a campaign speech that Brian's father had made two years ago, a piece about a surprise birthday party given for the late President's widow, a UPI dispatch concerning Brian's adventures in one of Madrid's bullrings…

On page two hundred ten was a Dougherty family portrait taken at the wedding of Brian's sister and reprinted in People magazine. Beneath it was a two-word, handwritten notice in red: The enemy.

On page two hundred thirty, the last lingering veils of sanity were cast off, and the screaming face of purest madness was revealed. The compiler had pasted up a page from a magazine, a color photograph of Brian's oldest sister, Emily. A pretty young woman. Button nose. Large green eyes. A splash of freckles. Auburn hair to her shoulders. She was facing sideways and laughing at something that someone had said or done out of camera range. Neat printing spiraled around her face, hundreds of repetitions of three words that filled the rest of the page to every border: pig, whore, maggot, pig, whore, maggot, pig, whore, maggot…

The pages that followed were hair-raising.

Gunvald tried calling Harry once more. No response. He could communicate with no one. The storm was his only companion.

What in the name of God was happening on that iceberg?

Brian Dougherty and Roger Breskin were the only members of the group who had extensive diving experience. Because Brian was not an official member of the expedition, merely an observer, Harry didn't think the kid should have to assume the front position in the descent through the tunnel, which might prove to be dangerous in ways that they had not yet imagined. Therefore, Roger Breskin would lead.

They would follow Roger in an orderly procession: Harry second, then Brian, Rita, George, Claude, Franz, and Pete. A lot of thought had gone into that arrangement. Brian would be between Harry and Rita, the only two people that he could fully trust. George Lin was behind Rita and might be a threat to her and Brian. Because of his age and convivial temperament, Claude Jobert seemed the least likely of all suspects other than Pete, so he would be behind Lin, where he would surely notice and attempt to prevent any foul play. If Franz was the guilty party, his freedom to strike out at Brian would be severely limited by the fact that Pete would be keeping a watch on him from behind. And in the unlikely event that Pete Johnson was the would-be murderer, he wouldn't find it easy to get past Franz, Claude, Lin, and Rita to reach Brian.

If they had been descending through the water-filled tunnel in darkness, their order on the line wouldn't have mattered, because in darkness anything could have happened. Fortunately, the aluminum cargo boxes had contained three powerful halogen lamps designed for use underwater at levels of considerable pressure. Roger would carry one at the front of the procession; in the middle, George Lin would have one; and Pete would be in charge of the third. If each member of the group maintained then feet between himself and the person he was following on the way down, the distance from the first to the third light would be approximately forty yards. They wouldn't be swimming through bright light, but Harry figured the illumination should be sufficient to discourage murder.

Each of the heated wet suits came with a waterproof watch that featured a large, luminescent digital readout. Harry looked at his when he finished suiting up. Eighteen minutes past eleven.

Detonation in forty-two minutes.

He said, “Ready to go?”

Everyone was suited up, masks in place. Even George Lin.

Harry said, “Good luck, my friends.” He slipped on his own mask, reached over his left shoulder to activate the air feed on his tank, and took a few deep breaths to be sure that the equipment was working properly. He turned to Roger Breskin and gave him the thumbs-up sign.

Roger picked up his halogen lamp, sloshed through the shallow edge of the pool, hesitated for only a second — and jumped feet-first into the forty-foot-wide mouth of the tunnel.

Harry followed, cutting the water with less of a splash than Roger had made. Although he knew better, he expected the ice-cold embrace of the sea to snatch his breath away and make his heart stutter, and he gasped involuntarily as the water closed around him. But his battery pack and the heated lining of his wet suit functioned extremely well, and he felt no temperature change from the cavern to the tunnel.

The water was murky. Millions of particles of dirt, clouds of tiny diatoms in sufficient quantity to feed a pack of whales, and beads of ice drifted in the diffused, yellowish beam of the waterproof lamp. Behind the halogen glow, Roger was a half-seen shape, perfectly black and mysterious in his rubber suit, like a shadow that had escaped from the person who had cast it, or like Death himself without his customary scythe.

As instructed, Brian plunged into the water without delay, to thwart a possible attempt on his life after Harry and Roger had departed the cavern.

Roger had already begun to pull himself downward on the multicommunications wire that led back to the Ilya Pogodin.

Harry brought his left wrist close to his face mask to look at the luminous digital readout on his watch: 11:20.

Detonation in forty minutes.

He followed Roger Breskin down into the unknown.

11:22 DETONATION IN THIRTY-EIGHT MINUTES

“Officer's mess to captain.”

In the control room, Nikita Gorov reached for the microphone. “Report.”

The words came out of the squawk box so fast that they ran together and were nearly indecipherable. “We've got sweat on the bulkhead here.”

“Which bulkhead?” Gorov asked with businesslike calm, though his stomach fluttered with dread.

“Starboard, sir.”

“How serious?”

“Not very serious, sir. Not at this point. It's a thin dew, two yards long, a couple of inches wide, just below the ceiling.”

“Any indication of buckling?”

“No, sir.”

“Keep me informed,” he said, without revealing the depth of his concern, and he let go of the microphone.

The technician seated at the surface Fathometer said, “I'm picking up a partial blockage of the hole again.”

“Divers?”

The technician studied the graph for a moment. “Yes. That could be the interpretation. Divers. I've got downward movement on all the blips.”

The good news affected everyone. The men were no less tense than they had been a minute ago. For the first time in several hours, however, their tension was qualified by guarded optimism.

“Torpedo room to captain.”

Gorov surreptitiously blotted his damp hands on his slacks and pulled down the microphone once more. “Go ahead.”

The voice was controlled, though an underlying note of distress was apparent. “The sweat on the bulkhead between number four tube and number five tube is getting worse, Captain. I don't like the looks of it.”

“Worse to what extent?”

“Water's trickling down to the deck now.”

“How much water?” Gorov asked.

The overhead speaker hissed as the torpedo officer assessed the situation. Then: “An ounce or two.”

“That's all?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any buckling?”

“Nothing visible.”

“The rivets?”

“No distortion of the rivet line.”

“Any sounds of metal fatigue?”

“We've been going over it with a stethoscope, sir. No alarming noise, no fatigue signatures, just the usual.”

“Then why do you sound so concerned?” Gorov demanded, getting directly to the heart of the issue.

The torpedo officer didn't respond immediately but finally he said, “Well, sir, when you lay your hand against the steel… there's a strange vibration.”

“Engine vibrations.”

From the squawk box, the torpedo room officer said, “No, sir. It's something else. I don't know just what. But something I've never felt before. I think…”

“What?”

“Sir?”

“What do you think,” Gorov demanded. “Spit it out. What do you think you feel when you put your hand to the steel?”

“Pressure.”

Gorov was aware that the control-room crew had already lost its guarded optimism. To the torpedo officer, he said, “Pressure? You can't feel pressure through the steel. I suggest you control your imagination. There's no reason to panic. Just keep a close watch on it.”

The torpedo officer evidently had expected more of a reaction. Morosely, he said, “Yes, sir.”

Zhukov's lupine face was distorted by fear but also by doubt and anger, a mosaic of emotions that were dismayingly distinct and readable. A first officer needed to have better control of his expressions if he hoped to become a captain. He spoke so softly that Gorov had to strain to hear: “One pinhole, one hairline crack in the pressure hull, and the boat will be smashed flat.”

True enough. And it could all happen in a fracture of a second. It would be over before they even realized that it had begun. At least death would be mercifully swift.

“We'll be all right,” Gorov insisted.

He saw the confusion of loyalties in the first officer's eyes, and he wondered if he was wrong. He wondered if he should take the Pogodin up a few hundred feet to lessen the crushing pressure on it, and abandon the Edgeway scientists.

He thought of Nikki. He was a stern enough judge of himself to face the possibility that saving the Edgeway expedition might have become an obsession with him, an act of personal atonement, which was not in the best interest of his crew. If that was the case, he had lost control of himself and was no longer fit to command. Are we all going to die because of me? he wondered.

11:27 DETONATION IN THIRTY-THREE MINUTES

The descent along the communications wire proved to be far more difficult and exhausting than Harry Carpenter had anticipated. He was not a fraction as experienced in the water as were Brian and Roger, although he had used scuba gear on several occasions over the years and had thought that he knew what to expect. He had failed to take into account that a diver ordinarily spent the larger part of his time swimming more or less parallel to the ocean floor; their headfirst descent on that seven-hundred-foot line was perpendicular to the seabed, which he found to be tiring. Inexplicably tiring, in fact, because there was no physical reason why it should have been markedly more difficult than any other diving he'd ever done. At any angle, he was essentially weightless when he was underwater, and the flippers were as useful as they would have been had he been swimming parallel to the seabed. He suspected that his special weariness was largely psychological, but he could not shake it. In spite of the suit's lead weights, he constantly seemed to be fighting his natural buoyancy. His arms ached. Blood pounded at his temples and behind his eyes. He soon realized that he would have to pause periodically, reverse his position, and get his head up to regain equilibrium; otherwise, although his weariness and growing disorientation were no doubt entirely psychological, he would black out.

In the lead, Roger Breskin appeared to progress effortlessly. He slid his left hand along the communications wire as he descended, held the lamp in his other hand, and relied entirely on his legs to propel him, kicking smoothly. His technique wasn't substantially different from Harry's, but he had the advantage of muscles built through regular diligent workouts with heavy weights.

As he felt his shoulders crack, as the back of his neck began to ache, and as sharp new currents of pain shot down his arms, Harry wished that he had spent as much time in gyms as Roger had put in over the past twenty years.

He glanced over his shoulder to see if Brian and Rita were all right. The kid was trailing him by about twelve feet, features barely visible in the full-face diving mask. Eruptions of bubbles steamed out of Brian's scuba vent, were briefly tinted gold by the backwash from Roger's lamp, and quickly vanished into the gloom above. In spite of all that he'd endured in the past few hours, he seemed to be having no trouble keeping up.

Behind Brian, Rita was barely visible, only fitfully back lighted by the lamp that George Lin carried in her wake. The yellowish beams were defeated by the murky water; against the eerily luminous but pale haze, she was but a rippling shadow, at times so indistinct and strange that she might have been not human but an unknown denizen of the polar seas. Harry couldn't get a glimpse of her face, but he knew that her psychological suffering, at least, must be great.

Cryophobia: fear of ice.

The frigid water in the tunnel was as dark as if it had been tainted with clouds of squid ink, for it was thick with diatoms and specks of ice and inorganic particulates. Rita wasn't able to see the ice that lay only twenty feet from her in every direction, but she remained acutely aware of it. At times her fear was so overwhelming that her chest swelled and her throat tightened and she was unable to breathe. Each time, however, on the shuddering edge of blind panic, she finally exhaled explosively, inhaled the metallic-tasting mixture of gases from the scuba tank, and starved off hysteria.

Frigophobia: fear of cold. She suffered no chill whatsoever in the Russian wetsuit. Indeed, she was warmer than she had been at any time during the past few months, since they had come onto the icecap and established Edgeway Station. Nevertheless, she was unavoidably aware of the deadly cold of the water, conscious of being separated from it by only thin sheath of rubber and electrically heated layers of insulation. The Russian technology was impressive, but if the battery pack at her hip was drained before she reached the submarine far below, her body heat would be quickly leached away. The insistent cold of the sea would insinuate itself deep into her muscles, into her marrow, torturing her body and swiftly numbing her mind…

Down, ever down. Embraced by a coldness that she couldn't feel. Surrounded by ice that she couldn't see. Curved white walls out of sight to the left of her, to the right, above and below, ahead and behind. Surrounding and entrapping her. Tunnel of ice. Prison of ice. Flooded with darkness and bitter cold. Silent but for the susurrant rush of her breathing and the thud-thud-thudding of her heart. Inescapable. Deeper than a grave.

As she swam down into depths unknown. Rita was sometimes more aware of the light ahead of her than she was at other times, because she was repeatedly flashing back to the winter when she was only six years old.

Happy. Excited. On her way to her first skiing holiday with her mother and father, who are experienced on the sloped and eager to teach her. The car is an Audi. Her mother and father sit up front, and she sits alone in the back. Ascending into increasingly white and fantastic realms. A winding road in the French Alps. An alabaster wonderland all around them, below them, great vistas of evergreen forests shrouded with snow, rocky crags looming high above like the old-men faces of watching gods, bearded with ice. Fat white flakes suddenly began to spiral out of the iron-gray afternoon sky. She's a child of the Italian Mediterranean, of sun and olive groves and sun-spangled ocean, and she's never before been to the mountains. Now her young heart races with adventure. It's so beautiful: the snow, the steeply rising land, the valleys crowded with trees and purple shadows, sprinkled with small villages. And even when Death suddenly comes, it has a terrible beauty, all dressed resplendently in white. Her mother sees the avalanche first, to the right of the roadway and high above, and she cries out in alarm. Rita looks through the side window, sees the wall of white farther up the mountain, sliding down, growing as rapidly as a storm wave sweeping across the ocean toward shore, casting up clouds of snow sea spray, silent at first, so white and silent and beautiful that she can hardly believe it can hurt them. Her father says, “We can outrun it,” and he sounds scared as he jams his foot on the accelerator, and her mother says, “Hurry, for God's sake, hurry,” and it comes onward, silent and white and huge and dazzling and bigger by the second…silent.. then a barely audible rumble like distant thunder.

Rita heard strange sounds. Hollow, faraway voices. Shouting or lamenting. Like the voices of the damned faintly wailing for surcease from suffering, issuing from the ether above a séance table.

Then she realized that it was only a single voice. Her own. She was making hard, panicky sounds into her face mask, but since her ears weren't in the mask, she heard her own cries only as they vibrated through the bones of her face. If they sounded like the wails of a damned soul, that was because, at the moment, Hell was a place within her, a dark corner in her own heart.

She squinted past Brian and desperately concentrated on the shadowy shape farther along the line: Harry. He was dimly visible in the murk, kicking down into the black void, so near and yet so far away. Twelve or fifteen feet separated Rita from Brian; count six feet for the kid, and maybe twelve feet between him and Harry: thirty or thirty-five feet altogether, separating her from her husband. It seemed like a mile. As long as she thought about Harry and kept in mind the good times that they would have together when this ordeal ended, she was able to stop screaming into her face mask and continue swimming. Paris. The Hôtel George V. A bottle of fine champagne. His kiss. His touch. They would share it all again if she just didn't let her fears overwhelm her.

Harry glanced back toward Rita. She was still where she should be, following Brian along the communications line.

Looking ahead again, he told himself that he was excessively worried about her. In general, women were supposed to have greater endurance than men. If that was true, it was especially true of this woman.

He smiled to himself and said, “Hang in there,” as though she could hear him.

Ahead of Harry, when they were perhaps a hundred fifty feet down the dark tunnel, Roger Breskin finally paused for a rest. He performed a somersault as though engaged in a water ballet and turned around on the line until he faced Harry in a more natural position: head up and feet down.

Five yards behind Roger, Harry also paused and was about to do a somersault of his own when Roger's halogen lamp winked out. Two lights still glowed behind Harry, but the beams were diffused by the cloudy water and didn't reach him or Roger. He was enveloped in darkness.

An instant later Breskin collided with him. Harry couldn't hold on to the communications wire. They tumbled down and away into the blackness, at a descending angle toward the tunnel wall, and for an instant Harry didn't understand what was happening. Then he felt a hand clawing at his throat, and he knew that he was in trouble. He flailed at Breskin, putting all his strength into the blows, but the water absorbed the energy of his punches and transformed them into playful pats.

Breskin's hand closed tightly around Harry's throat. Harry tried to wrench his head away, pull back, but he couldn't escape. The weight lifter had an iron grip.

Breskin drove a knee into Harry's stomach, but the water worked against him, slowing and cushioning the blow.

Harder and sooner than he had expected, Harry's back thumped against the tunnel wall, and pain coruscated along his spine. The bigger man pinned him against the ice.

The two remaining halogen lamps — one held by George and one by Pete — were far above and about twenty feet farther toward the center of the tunnel, vaguely luminous ghost lights haunting the cloudy water. Harry was essentially blind. Even at close range, he could not see his assailant.

The hand at this throat slipped higher, pawed at his chin. His face mask was torn off.

With that strategic stroke, Harry was denied his breath and what little vision he'd had, and he was exposed to the killing cold of the water. Helpless, disoriented, he was no longer a threat to Breskin, and the big man let him go.

The cold was like a fistful of nails rammed hard into his face, and his body heat seemed to pout out as though it were a hot liquid streaming through the resultant punctures.

Terrified, on the verge of panic but aware that panic might be the death of him, Harry rolled away into the darkness, grappling behind himself for the precious mask that floated at the end of his air hose.

A second after the lamp went out at the head of the procession, Rita realized what was wrong: Breskin was the would-be killer of Brian Dougherty. And a second after that, she knew what she had to do.

She let go of the line and swam out of the amber light from George Lin's lamp, which glowed behind her and silhouetted her for Breskin. Praying that George wouldn't follow her and blow her cover, she soon came up against the wall of the tunnel, the smooth curve of… ice.

The rumble swells into a roar, and again her father says, “We'll outrun it,” but his words are now more of a prayer than a promise. The great white wall comes down down down down, and her mother screams…

Rita shook off the past and strove to repress her fear of the ice against which she pressed. The wall wasn't going to collapse on her. It was solid, hundreds of feet thick, and until the packages of plastique were detonated at midnight, it was under no pressure great enough to cause it to implode.

Swinging around, putting her back to the wall she looked out toward the commotion along the communications wire. She resisted the steady downward pull of her weight belt by treading water and pressing one hand tightly against the ice at her side.

The ice wasn't a living thing, not a conscious entity. She knew better than that. Yet she felt as though it wanted her. She could sense its yearning, its hunger, its conviction that she belonged to it. She would not have been surprised if a mouth had opened in the wall under her hand, savagely biting it off at the wrist or opening wider still and swallowing her whole.

She tasted blood. She was struggling so hard to repress her burgeoning terror that she had bitten into her lower lip. The salty, coppery taste — and the pain — helped clear her mind and focus her on the real threat to her survival.

In the center of the tunnel, Roger Breskin roared out of the black depths and into the dim light from George Lin's lamp.

Harry had vanished into the abyss below, which suddenly seemed to bore away not merely thousands of feet but to eternity.

Breskin went straight for Brian.

Clearly, Brian had just begun to understand what was happening. He would never be able to move fast enough to escape Breskin, even though he was an experienced diver.

Rita pushed away from the wall and swam in behind the attacker, wishing she had a weapon, hoping that the element of surprise would be all the advantage that she needed.

s Brian saw Roger Breskin soar like a shark from the lightless depths, he recalled a conversation they'd had earlier in the day, just after they'd rescued George from the ledge on the flank of the iceberg. Brian had been hoisted back to the top of the cliff, shaking, weak with relief:

Incredible.

What are you talking about?

Didn't expect to make it.

You didn't trust me?

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

You're going to die. But this wasn't you place. It wasn't the right time.

Brian had thought that Roger was being uncharacteristically philosophical. Now he realized that it had been a blunt threat, a heartfelt promise of violence.

Maybe Breskin hadn't wanted George to be a witness, or maybe he hadn't struck earlier for other, inexplicable, and insane reasons of his own. This time, he had more than one witness, but he seemed not to care.

Even as that conversation replayed in Brian's memory, he tried to turn from Breskin and kick toward the tunnel wall, but they collided and tumbled away together into the darkness. Breskin's powerful legs encircled Brian, clamping like a crab pincer. Then a hand at his throat. At his face mask. No!

George Lin thought that Russian divers from the submarine were attacking them.

From the moment the Russians had offered to help, George had known that they had some trick in mind. He'd been trying to figure what it might be, but he hadn't thought of this: a murderous act of treachery deep in the tunnel. Why should they go to so much trouble to kill a group of Western scientists who were already destined to be blown to bits or dumped into a deadly cold sea at midnight? This was senseless, pointless lunacy, but on the other hand, he knew that nothing the communists had ever done made sense, not anywhere in the world, not in Russia or in China or anywhere else, not at any time during their reign of terror. Their ideology was nothing but a mad hunger for unrestrained power, politics as a cult religion divorced from morality and reason, and their bloody rampages and bottomless cruelty could never be analyzed or understood by anyone not of their mad persuasion.

He preferred to swim straight to the top of the tunnel, clamber out of the pool, return to the top of the ice, find a blasting shaft, lie down upon it, and let the midnight explosion tear him to pieces, because that would be a cleaner death than any at the hands of these people. But he couldn't move. His left hand was curled around the communications wire so tightly that the two might have been soldered together. With his right hand, he gripped the halogen lamp so hard that his fingers ached.

He waited to die as his sister had died. As his mother had died. As his grandfather and grandmother had died. The past had surged forward to overwhelm the present.

He'd been a fool to have believed that he'd escaped the horror of his childhood. In the end, no lamb could escape the slaughter.

The air hose trailed along the side of Harry's head, and the diving mask was attached to the end of it, floating above him. He pulled the mask down and clamped it to his face. It was full of water, and he dared not breathe immediately, even though his lungs felt as though they were on fire. When he peeled up one corner of the rubber rim, the influx of oxygen-helium mixture forced the water out from behind the Plexiglas faceplate, and when all the water had been purged, he pressed that corner down tight again and sucked in a deep breath, another, another, spluttering and choking and gasping with relief. The slightly odd smell and taste of the gas was more delicious than anything that he had ever eaten or drunk before in his entire life.

His chest was sore, his eyes burned, and his headache was so fierce that his skull seemed to be splitting apart. He wanted only to hang where he was, suspended in the tenebrous sea, recuperating from the assault. But he thought of Rita, and he swam up toward the two remaining lights and a turmoil of shadows.

Brian gripped Breskin's left wrist with both and hands and tried to wrench the big man's steely hand from his face, but he wasn't able to resist. The diving mask was torn loose.

The sea was colder than the freezing point of ordinary water, but it still had not turned to ice because of its salt content. When it gushed across his face, the shock was nearly as painful as having a blazing torch shoved against his skin.

Nevertheless, Brian reacted so calmly that he surprised himself. He squeezed his eyelids shut before the water could flash-freeze the surface tissues of his eyeballs, clenched his teeth, and managed not to breathe either through his mouth or nose.

He couldn't hold out long. A minute. A minute and a half. Then he would breathe involuntarily, spasmodically…

Breskin clamped his legs tighter around Brian's midsection, pushed his rubber-sheathed finger between Brian's compressed lips, and tried to force his mouth open.

Rita swam in behind and above Roger Breskin, into the sour light from George's hand-held lamp. She glided onto Breskin's back and wrapped her long legs around his waist as he had wrapped hi legs around Brian.

With reflexes sharpened rather than dulled by maniacal frenzy, Breskin let go of Brian and seized Rita by the ankles.

She felt as though she was riding a wild horse. He twisted and bucked, a powerful beast, but she gripped him with her thighs and grabbed for his mask.

Sensing her intent, insane but not stupid, Breskin released her ankles and seized her wrists just as her hands touched the rim of his faceplate. He bent forward, kicked his flippers, did a somersault. Rolling through the water, he tore her hands from his face, and using the dynamics of the sea to achieve a leverage that she couldn't hope to match, he pitched her away from him. She kicked furiously as she went, hoping to connect with the crazy bastard, but none of her kicks landed.

When she oriented herself again, she saw that Pete and Franz had descended on Breskin. Franz struggled to maintain a wristlock while Pete tried to pin at least on of the madman's arms.

Breskin was a trained diver, however, and they were not. They were slow, clumsy, confused by the physics of the gravity-free realm in which they battled, while Breskin writhed as if he were an eel, supple and quick and fearfully strong, at home in deep water. He broke their hold on him, rammed an elbow into Pete's face, ripped Pete's mask over his head, and shoved him into Franz.

Brian was at the wire, fifteen feet below George Lin. Claude was with him. The Frenchman held Pete's lamp in one hand and was using his free hand to steady Brian while the kid got the water out of his mask.

Kicking away from Pete and Franz as they tumbled in disarray, Breskin streaked toward Brian again.

Rita glimpsed movement out of the corner of her eye, turned her head, and saw Harry shoot up from the darkness below.

Harry knew that Breskin didn't see him coming. Certain that he had temporarily disabled all opposition, the big man spun away from Pete and Franz, kicked with all the power of his muscular legs, and went directly for his preferred prey. He was no doubt sure that he could deal swiftly with a man of Claude's age and then finish Brian before the kid was able to clear his fouled mask and draw a restorative breath.

Rising under Breskin, Harry could have collided with him and hoped to deflect him from Brian. Instead, he kicked to one side, shot past the madman, and grabbed the air hose that connected his face mask to the pressurized tank on his back. Harry flutter-kicked again, soaring up, jerking the hose out of the clamp that held it to the feed valve at the top of the tank. Because he and Breskin were moving in different directions, the hose also uncoupled from the diving mask.

The icy water didn't pour in through Roger's mask coupling when the hose was torn loose. There must be a safety feature, a shutoff valve.

He fumbled for the hose, but he realized that it had been ripped away not merely from the mask but from the tank on his back. It was gone and couldn't be reconnected.

Alarmed, he scissored his legs and went up toward the mouth of the tunnel as fast as he could. His only hope was to reach the surface.

Then he remembered that the pool in the domed ice cavern was more than a hundred fifty feet above him, too far to reach with the weight belt pulling him down, so he fumbled at his waist, trying to free himself of the burdensome lead. The release wasn't where it ought to be, because the damn belt was made by the Russians, and he had never before used Russian equipment.

Roger stopped kicking so he could concentrate on the search for the belt release. At once he began to sink slowly back into the tunnel. He patted-tugged-wrenched at the belt, but he still could not find the release, Jesus, dear Jesus God Almighty, still couldn't find it, and finally he dare waste another second, would have to get to the surface even with the hampering belt. Arms straight down at his sides, trying to be as sleek as an arrow, creating as little resistance to the water as possible, kicking smoothly, rhythmically, he struggled up, up. His chest ached, and his heart was hammering as if it would burst, and he couldn't any longer resist the urge to breathe. He opened his mouth, exhaled explosively, desperately inhaled, but there was nothing to breathe except the meager breath that he had just expelled, which was even thinner the next time he exhaled. His lungs were ablaze, and he knew that the darkness around him was no longer that of the tunnel but a darkness behind his eyes. He would lose consciousness if he didn't breathe, and if he passed out he would die. So he ripped off his mask and sucked a deep breath of the air in the domed cavern, except he was nowhere near the domed cavern, of course — why had he imagined that he'd reached the surface, how could he have been so stupid? — and he inhaled water so bitterly cold that pain shot through his teeth. He closed his mouth, choking violently, but at once he tried to breath again. There was only more water, water, nothing but water. He clawed at the water with both hands, as if it were a thin curtain that he could tear apart to get to the blessed air just beyond it. Then he realized that he wasn't kicking any longer, was sinking under the influence of the diving weights. He wasn't clawing at the water any more either, just drifting down and down, gasping, and it felt as though he had more lead weights inside his chest than around his waist…

He saw that Death had neither a face of raw bone nor the face of a man. It was a woman. A pale, strong-jawed woman. She was not without some beauty. Her eyes were a lovely, translucent gray. Roger studied her face as it rose out of the water before him, and he realized that she was his mother, from whom he had learned so much, in whose arms he had first hear that the world was a hostile place and that people of exceptional evil secretly ruled ordinary men and women through interlocking conspiracies, with no intention but to crush the free spirit of everyone who defied them. And now, through Roger had made himself strong to resist those conspirators if they ever came after him, although he had applied himself to his studies and had earned two degrees in order to have the knowledge to outwit them, they had crushed him anyway. They had won, just as his mother had told him they would, just as they always won. But losing wasn't so terrible. There was a peace in losing. Gray-haired, gray-eyed death smiling at him, and he wanted to kiss her, and she took him into her motherly embrace.

Harry watched as the corpse, lungs full of water and burdened with lead weights, drifted past them on its journey to the bottom of the sea. Air bubbles gushed from the tank on its back.

11:37 DETONATION IN TWENTY-THREE MINUTES

The tension had sharpened Nikita Gorov's mind and he forced him to confront an unpleasant but undeniable truth. Fools and heroes, he saw now, were separated by a line so thin that it was the next thing to invisible. He had been so intent on being a hero. And for what? For whom? For a dead son? Heroism could not change the past. Nikki was dead and in the grave. Dead! And the crew of the Ilya Pogodin—the seventy-nine men under his command — were still very much alive. They were his responsibility. It was inexcusable to have risked their lives merely because, in some strange way, he wanted to fulfill an obligation to his dead son. He'd been playing hero, but he'd been only a fool.

Regardless of the danger, regardless of what he should have done, the submarine was committed to the rescue mission now. They couldn't abandon it this close to success. Not unless those two sweating bulkhead began to show signs of structural deterioration. He had gotten his men into this, and it was up to him to get them out in a way that would save their hide without humiliating them. Men of their courage didn't deserve to be humbled by his failure, but they surely would be worse than humbled in their own eyes if they turned tail now and ran without good reason. He'd been playing hero, but now he wanted nothing more than to make heroes of them in the eyes of the world, and get them home safely.

“Any change?” he asked the young technician reading the surface Fathometer.

“No, sir. The divers are stationary. They haven't descended a foot in the last few minutes.”

The captain stared at the ceiling, as if he could see through the double hull and all the way up the long tunnel. What were they doing up there. What had gone wrong?

“Don't they realize there's no time left?” Zhukov said. “When those explosives split the iceberg at midnight, we've got to be out from under. We've got to be.”

Gorov checked the video displays. He looked at the clock. He pulled on his beard and said, “If they don't start moving down again in five minutes, we'll have to get out of here. One minute later than that, and they can't make it aboard before midnight anyway.”

11:38

Rita swam up to Claude and hugged him. He returned her embrace. Her eyes glistened with tears.

They pressed the faceplates of their diving masks flat against each other. When she spoke, he could hear her as if she were in another room. The Plexiglas conducted their voices well enough.

“Brian didn't fall earlier tonight. He was clubbed, left to die. We didn't know who did it. Until now.”

When Rita finished, Claude said, “I wondered what the hell—? I wanted to help subdue him, but Pete shoved the lamp into my hand and pushed me out of the way. I suddenly feel as old as I am.”

“You're not even sixty.”

“Then I feel older than I am.”

She said, “We're going to continue the descent. I'll take that lamp back to Pete.”

“Is he all right?”

“Yes. Just a bloody nose when the mask was pulled up over his head. He'll make it.”

“Something's wrong with George.”

“Shock, I think. Harry's explaining to him about Roger.”

“You've got tears on your cheeks,” Claude said.

“I know.”

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Harry's alive.”

11:39

As he followed Claude Jobert down the wire once more, Franz thought about what he would say to Rita if they reached the other side of midnight.

You handled yourself well. You're amazing. You know, I once loved you. Hell, I still do. I never got over you. And I learned a lot from you, whether it was ever apparent or not. Oh, I'm still an asshole, yes, I admit it, but I'm slowly growing up. Old attitudes die hard. I've been acting like a total idiot these past months, quarrelsome with Harry and distant with you. But that's finished. We can never be lovers again. I see what you and Harry have together, and it's unique, more than you and I ever had or ever could have. But I'd like to be friends.

He hoped to God he lived to say all that.

11:40

Brian swam down along the wire.

He wasn't worried much about the ticking bombs overhead. He was increasingly convinced that he and the others would reach the submarine and survive the explosions. In the throes of the obsession about which Rita had warned him, he was worried instead about the book that he intended to write.

The theme would definitely be heroism. He had come to see that there were two basic forms of it. Heroism that was sought, as when a man climbed a mountain or challenged an angry bull in one of Madrid's rings — because a man had to know his limits, heroism sought was important. It was far less valuable, however, than heroism unsought. Harry, Rita, and the others had put their lives on the line in their jobs because they believed that what they were doing would contribute to the betterment of the human condition, not because they wanted to test themselves. Yet, although they would deny it, they were heroes every day of the week. They were heroes in the way that cops and firemen were heroes, in the way that millions of mothers and fathers were quiet heroes for taking on the ominous responsibilities of supporting families and raising children to be good citizens, the way ministers were heroes to dare talk of God in a world that had come to doubt His existence and to mock those who still believed, the way many teachers were heroes when they went into schools racked by violence and nevertheless tried to teach kids what they would need to know to survive in a world that had no mercy for the uneducated. The first brand of heroism — heroism sought — had a distinct quality of selfishness, but heroism unsought was selfless. Brian understood now that it was this unsought heroism, not the tinsel glory of either politics or bullrings, that was the truest courage and the deepest virtue. When he had finished writing the book, when he had worked out all his thoughts on the subject, he would be ready to begin his adult life at last. And he was determined that quiet heroism would be the theme.

11:41

The technician looked up from the surface-fathometer graph. “They're moving again.”

“Coming down?” Gorov asked.

“Yes, sir.”

The squawk box brought them the voice of the petty officer in the forward torpedo room. It contained a new note of urgency.

Taking the neck of the overhead microphone as gingerly as if he were handling a snake, Gorov said, “Go ahead.”

“We've got a lot more than a couple ounces of water on the deck now, Captain. Looks like a liter or two. The forward bulkhead is sweating all the way from overhead to deck.”

“Distortion of the rivet line?”

“No, sir.”

“Hear anything unusual with the stethoscope?”

“No, sir.”

“We'll be on our way in ten minutes,” Gorov said.

11:42

In places, the tunnel narrowed just enough for the halogen light to reflect off the ice, and then the face of their imprisonment could not be as easily put out of mind as when darkness lay to all sides.

Rita was pulled continually between the past and the present, between death and life, courage and cowardice. Minute by minute, she expected her inner turmoil to subside, but it grew worse.

A stand of widely scattered trees spot the steep hillside above the alpine road. It's not a dense forest, but maybe it's enough of a barrier to break the force of the avalanche and dam the roaring flow: tall evergreens with thick trunks, ancient and strong. Then the white tide hits the trees, and they snap as though they're breadsticks. Her mother screams, her father cries out, and Rita can't look away from the onrushing wave of snow, a hundred feet high, growing, disappearing into the winter sky, huge, like the face of God. The juggernaut hits the Audi, tumbles the car, shoves it across the roadway, sweeps under and over it, casting it across the guardrail and into a ravine. An enwrapping whiteness all around. The car turns over, over again, the sleds sideways, down, down, rebounds from a tree, turns into the slide, races down once more in a great river of snow, with another impact, yet another. The windshield implodes, followed by a sudden stillness and a silence deeper than the silence in a deserted church.

Rita wrenched herself from the memory, making meaningless, pathetic sounds of terror.

George Lin was urging her on from behind.

She had stopped swimming.

Cursing herself, she kicked her feet and started down again.

11:43

At three hundred fifty feet or thereabouts, having covered little more than half the distance to the Ilya Pogodin, Harry began to doubt that they could make it all the way down. He was aware of the incredible pressure, primarily because his eardrums kept popping. The roar of his own blood rushing through his veins and arteries were thunderous. He imagined he could hear faraway voices, fairy voices, but the words made no sense, and he figured that he'd really be in trouble when he understood what they were saying. He wondered if, like a submarine, he could collapse under extreme pressure and he squashed into a flat mess of blood and bones.

Earlier, on the shortwave radio, Lieutenant Timoshenko had offered several proofs that the descent could be made successfully, and Harry kept repeating a couple of them to himself: In Lake Maggiore, in 1961, Swiss and American divers reached seven hundred and thirty feet in scuba gear. Lake Maggiore. Seven hundred and thirty feet. 1961. Swiss and American divers. In 1990, Russian divers in more modern gear had been as deep as… he forgot. But deeper than Lake Maggiore, Swiss, Americans, Russians… It could be done. By well-equipped, professional divers anyway.

Four hundred feet.

11:44

Following the wire farther into the shaft, George Lin told himself that the Russians weren't communists any more. At least the communists weren't in charge. Not yet. Maybe one day in the future, they would be back in power; evil never really died. But the men in the submarine were risking their lives, and they had no sinister motives. He tried to convince himself, but it was a hard sell, because he had lived too many years in fear of the red tide.

Canton. Autumn 1949. three weeks before Chiang Kia-shek was driven from the mainland. George's father had been away, making arrangements to spirit the family and its dwindling assets to the island nation of Taiwan. There were four other people in the house: his grandmother; his grandfather; his mother; his eleven-year old sister, Yun-ti. At dawn, a contingent of Maoist guerrillas, seeking his father, invaded the house. Nine heavily armed men. His mother managed to hide him inside a fireplace, behind a heavy iron screen. Yun-ti was hidden elsewhere, but the men found her. As George watched from within the fireplace, his grandparents were beaten to their knees and then shot in the head. Their brains splattered the wall. In that same room, his mother and sister were raped by all nine men, repeatedly. Every degradation, every humiliation was perpetrated upon them. George was a child, not even seven years old: small, terrified, powerless. The guerrillas stayed until three o'clock the next morning, waiting for George's father, and when they finally left, they slit Yun-ti's throat. Then his mother's throat. So much blood. His father had come home twelve hours later — and found George still hiding in the fireplace, unable to speak. He remained silent for more than three years after they escaped to Taiwan. And when at last he had broken his silence, he had first spoken the names of his mother and sister. Speaking them, he'd wept inconsolably until a physician came to their house and administered a sedative.

Nevertheless, the men in the submarine below were Russians, not Chinese, and they weren't communists any more. Perhaps they had never been true communists. After all, soldiers and sailors sometimes fought for their country even when they believed that the men running it were thugs and fools.

The men below would not be like those who had violated his mother and sister and then killed them. These were different people in a different time. They could be trusted. He must trust them.

Nevertheless, he was infinitely more afraid of the Pogodin's crew than of all the high explosives in the world.

11:46

“Officer's mess to captain.”

“I read you.”

“That starboard bulkhead is streaming, Captain.”

“Buckling?”

“No, sir.”

“How much water?”

“Half a liter, sir.”

Trouble in both the torpedo room and the officer's mess. They would soon have to get the hell out of there.

“Stethoscope?” Gorov asked.

“Lots of noise past the bulkhead, sir, but no standard stress signatures.”

“We'll be on our way in five minutes.”

11:47

With the submarine almost within reach, Harry remembered more reason to be hopeful. According to Lieutenant Timoshenko, British divers at Alverstoke, Hampshire, and French divers at Marseilles had reached fifteen hundred feet with advanced scuba gear in simulated chamber dives.

Of course, that one qualifying phrase prevented the data from being as reassuring as he would have liked: “simulated chamber dives.”

This was the real thing.

The tunnel widened out. The ice walls receded until they no longer reflected any of the light.

He had a sense of vastly greater space around him. The water was clearer than it had been above, probably because there were fewer particles of ice in it. Within seconds, he saw colored lights below, first green and then red. Then his hand-held light revealed a great, gray shape hovering in the abyss below him.

Even when he arrived at the sail of the Ilya Pogodin and rested against the radar mast, Harry was not sanguine about their chances of surviving the tremendous pressure. He was half convinced that his lungs would explode with the force of grenades and that his blood vessels would pop like balloons. He didn't know much about the effects of great pressure on the body; maybe his lungs wouldn't explode, but the mental image was convincing.

Furthermore, Harry didn't like the looks of the submarine. Waiting for the others to catch up with him, he had nearly a minute to study the boat. All the running lights were aglow: red on the port side, green on the starboard side, white on the sail, a yellow overtaking light… Maybe his thought processes were affected by pressure or exhaustion, but the Pogodin seemed too gaudy to be substantial. After so much darkness, the boat resembled a damned slot machine or a Christmas tree. It seemed delicate, fragile, a construction of dark cellophane.

11:49

Rita expected her fear to abate when she reached the bottom of the tunnel and the ice was no longer to every side of her. But the island of ice was still overhead, as high as a seventy-story building and four fifths of a mile long, as enormous as several blocks of Manhattan skyscrapers. She knew that it was buoyant and wouldn't sink on her or crush her into the ocean floor, but she was terrified by the thought of it hanging over her, and she dared not look up.

It's cold in the Audi, because the engine is dead and no heat comes from the vents. Snow and shattered tree limbs have poured into the front seat, through the shattered windshield, covering the dashboard and burying her parents to the waist. They sit silently in the snow, both dead, and as time passes, Rita knows that she can't survive in just her own winter coat until help comes. The dashboard lights are on, as is the dome light, so the interior of the Audi isn't dark; she can see the snow pressing at every window, on all sides of the car; she is an intelligent girl, so she is aware that the snow may be a hundred feet deep, too deep to allow her to dig her way out and escape by herself. Rescuers will be a long time reaching her. She needs her father's heavy coat, and after delaying a dangerously long time, she steels herself for what she will see, and she crawls into the front seat. Icicles of crimson blood hang from her father's ears and nostrils, and her mother's throat is pierced by the jagged end of a tree branch that was driven through the windshield by the avalanche. Their faces are blue-gray. Their open eyes are entirely white, because the frost has sheathed them. Rita takes one look and no more, keeps her head down, and begins to dig the snow away from her father. She is only six years old, an active child and strong for her age, but still so small. She would find it impossible to get the coat off her father's stiffening corpse if his arms were through the sleeves. But during the drive he had shrugged out of the coat. Now his body sits on it, leans back against it, and with a lot of prying and tugging, she works it out from under him. She scrambled with her prize into the backseat where the snow doesn't intrude, curls up, draws the coat tightly around her, and waits for help to come. She even keeps her head under his coat, trapping not merely her body heat but her breath inside the satiny lining, because her breath is warm. After a while she begins to have trouble staying awake, and she drifts out of the cold car into colder-places within her own mind. Each time she rises blearily from her dangerous sleep, she is groggier than the time before, but she remembers to listen for the sounds of rescue. After what seems a long time, she hears instead — or thinks she hears — movement in the front seat: the crackle ice breaking as her dead father and dead mother get tired of sitting there and decide to crawl into the back with her. They want to creep under the comfort of the big heavy coat. Crackle: the sound of bloody icicles falling out of his nostrils. Again, the crackle of ice: Here they come. The terrible crackle of ice: They must be climbing into the rear of the car. The crack-crack-crackle of ice…and is that a voice whispering her name, a familiar voice whispering her name? And a cold hand reaching under the coat, envious of her warmth…

Someone touched Rita, and she cried out in horror, but at least the scream drove the Audi and avalanche into the past where they belonged.

Pete was on one side of her, Franz on the other. Evidently, she had stopped moving, and they were holding her by the arms and bringing her down the final few fathoms between them. The submarine was directly ahead. She saw Harry holding on to the radar mast above the sail.

11:50

Harry shuddered with relief at the sight of Rita between Pete and Franz, and a thrill of hope coursed through him.

When the other six joined him, he half crawled and half swam along the sail, climbed down the short ladder to the bridge, and pulled himself along the line of cleats on the forward superstructure deck. If he floated off the boat, he would not be able to catch up with it easily, for the nine-knot current would not affect him in precisely the same way that it did the three-hundred-foot-long boat.

His relationship to the submarine was much like that of an astronaut to his craft during a spacewalk: There was an illusion of stillness, though they were both moving at considerable speeds.

Cautious, but conscious of the need for haste, he continued to pull himself hand over hand along the cleat line, searching for the air-lock hatch that Timoshenko had described over the radio.

11:51

A warning siren shrieked.

The green numerals and dimensional diagrams disappeared from the central video display directly above the command pad. Red letters replaced them: EMERGENCY.

Gorov punched a consol key labeled DISPLAY. The screen cleared immediately, and the siren shut off. A new message appeared in the usual green letters: MUZZLE DOOR COLLAPSED ON FORWARD TORPEDO NUMBER FIVE. TUBE FILLED WITH WATER TO BREECH DOOR.

“It's happening,” Zhukov said.

Number five tube must have torqued when they had collided with the ice floe earlier in the night. Now the muzzle door at the outer hull had given way.

Gorov said quickly, “Only the outer door collapsed. Just the muzzle door. Not the breech door. There's no water in the boat. Not yet — and there won't be.”

A seaman monitoring on of the safety boards said, “Captain, our visitors have opened the topside hatch to the air lock.”

“We're going to make it,” Gorov told the control-room crew. “We're damned well going to make it.”

11:52

The air-lock hatch on the forward escape trunk was unlocked by someone at a control panel in the submarine. Harry gazed down into a tiny, brightly lighted, water-filled compartment. As Lieutenant Timoshenko had warned them, it was large enough to accommodate only four divers at a time — and even at that size, it was twice as large as the escape trunks on many submarines.

One by one, Brian, Claude, Rita, and George went down into the round room and sat on the floor with their backs pressed to the walls.

From outside, Harry closed the hatch, which was faster than waiting for someone inside to use a lanyard to pull it down and then spin the sealing wheel.

He looked at his luminous watch.

11:53

Gorov anxiously watched the bank of VDTs.

“Escape trunk ready,” Zhukov said, repeating the message that he received on his headset, and simultaneously the same information appeared on one of the VDTs.

“Process the divers,” Gorov said.

11:54

In the air lock, Rita held on to wall grips as powerful pumps extracted the water from the chamber in thirty seconds. She didn't remove her mask, but continued to breather the mixture of gases in her scuba tank, as they had been instructed to do.

A hatch opened in the center of the floor. A young Russian seaman appeared, smiled almost shyly, and beckoned with one finger.

They moved quickly from the air lock, down a ladder into the escape-chamber control room. The seaman climbed the ladder again behind them, pulled the inner hatch shut, sealed it, and descended quickly to the control room. With a roar, water flooded into the upper chamber again.

Acutely aware that a huge island of ice, mined with explosives, loomed directly above the boat, Rita went with the others into an adjoining decompression chamber.

11:56

Harry tried the hatch again, and it swung open.

He waited until Franz and Pete had entered, and then he followed them and dogged down the hatch from inside.

They sat with their backs to the walls.

He didn't even have to look at his watch. An internal crisis clock told him that they were about four minutes from detonation.

The drain dilated, and the pumps drained the escape trunk.

11:57

A mountain of ice on the verge of violent disintegration loomed over them, and if it went to pieces when they were under it, the boat would most likely be battered to junk. Death would be so swift that many of them might not even have a chance to scream.

Gorov pulled down an overhead microphone, called the maneuvering room, and ordered the boat into immediate full reverse.

The maneuvering room confirmed the order, and a moment later the ship shuddered in response to the abrupt change of engine thrust.

Gorov was thrown against the command-pad railing, and Zhukov almost fell.

From the overhead speaker: “Maneuvering room to Captain. Engines full reverse.”

“Rudder amidships.”

“Rudder amidships.”

The iceberg was moving southward at nine knots. The submarine was reversing northward at ten… twelve… now fifteen knots against a nine-knot current, resulting in an effective separation speed of fifteen knots.

Gorov didn't know if that was sufficient speed to save them, but it was the best that they could do at the moment, because to build to greater speed, they needed more time than remained until detonation.

“Ice overhead,” the surface-Fathometer operator announced. They were out from under the funnel-shaped concavity in the center of the berg. “Sixty feet. Ice overhead at sixty feet.”

11:58

Harry entered the decompression chamber and sat beside Rita. They held hands and stared at his watch.

11:59

The center of attention in the control room was the six-figure digital clock aft of the command pad. Nikita Gorov imagined that he could detect a twitch in his crewmen with the passage of each second.

11:59:10.

11:59:11.

“Whichever way it goes,” Emil Zhukov said, “I'm glad that I named my son Nikita.”

“You may have named him after a fool.”

“But an interesting fool.”

Gorov smiled.

11:59:30.

11:59:31.

The technician at the surface-Fathometer said, “Clear water. No ice overhead.”

“We're out from under,” someone said.

“But we're not yet out of the way,” Gorov cautioned, aware that they were well within the fallout pattern of blast-hurled ice.

11:59:46.

11:59:47.

“Clear water. No ice overhead.”

11:59:49.

For the second time in ten minutes, a warning siren sounded, and EMERGENCY flashed in red on one of the overhead screens.

Gorov keyed up a display and found that another torpedo tube in the damaged area of the hull had partially succumbed: MUZZLE DOOR COLLAPSED IN FORWARD TORPEDO TUBE NUMBER FOUR. TUBE FILLED WITH WATER TO BREECH DOOR.

Pulling down a microphone, Gorov shouted, “Captain to torpedo room! Abandon your position and sell all watertight doors.”

“Oh, dear God,” said Emil Zhukov, the atheist.

“The breech doors will hold,” Gorov said with conviction, and he prayed that he was right.

11:59:59.

12:00:00.

“Brace yourselves!”

12:00:03

“What's wrong?”

“Where is it?”

12:00:07.

The concussion hit them. Transmitted through the shattering iceberg to the water and through the water to the hull, it was a surprisingly mild and distant rumble. Gorov waited for the power of the shock waves to escalate, but it never did.

The sonar operator reported massive fragmentation of the iceberg.

By 12:02, however, when sonar had not located a substantial fragment of ice anywhere near the Ilya Pogodin, Gorov knew they were safe. “Take her up.”

The control-room crew let out a cheer.