Icebound Read online

  “We’ll make it back all right.”

  “In zero visibility?”

  “It won’t get that bad so fast.”

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

  “Honestly, Franz, your gloomy Teutonic nature—”

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

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

  The rumble quickly faded away.

  Blessed stillness returned.

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

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

  “A preliminary tremor?”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “When can we expect the main event?”

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

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

  12:45

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “At last!” Breskin said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Take just a minute.”

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

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

  Brian smiled thankfully.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Great.”

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

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

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

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

  Brian focused and pressed the shutter release.

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

  Brian said, “One more for—”

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

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

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

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

  Gunvald’s suboceanic earthquake had come at last.

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

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

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

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

  Brian shouted a warning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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