58 Icebound by Dean Koontz

Author:Dean Koontz
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Horror
ISBN: 9780345527134
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2011-09-16T04:03:50+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR: NIGHT

8:20

DETONATION IN THREE HOURS

FORTY MINUTES

Gorov, Zhukov, and Seaman Semichastny clambered onto the bridge and faced the port side.

The sea was neither calm nor as tumultuous as it had been when they had surfaced earlier to receive the message from the Naval Ministry. The iceberg lay off to port, sheltering them from some of the power of the storm waves and the wind.

They couldn’t see the berg, even though the radar and sonar images had indicated that it was massive both above and below the water line. They were only fifty to sixty yards from the target, but the darkness was impenetrable. Instinct alone told Gorov that something enormous loomed over them, and the awareness of being in the shadow of an invisible colossus was one of the eeriest and most disconcerting feelings that he had ever known.

They were warmly dressed and wore goggles. Riding in the lee of the iceberg, however, made it possible to go without snow masks, and conversation was not as difficult as when they’d been running on the surface a few hours previously.

“It’s like a windowless dungeon out there,” Zhukov said.

No stars. No moon. No phosphorescence on the waves. Gorov had never seen such a perfectly lightless night.

Above and behind them on the sail, the hundred-watt bridge lamp illuminated the immediate steelwork and allowed the three men to see one another. Clotted with scattered small chunks of ice, choppy waves broke against the curved hull, reflecting just enough of that red light to give the impression that the Pogodin was sailing not on water but on an ocean of wine-dark blood.

Beyond that tiny illumined circle lay an unrelieved blackness so flawless and deep that Gorov’s eyes began to ache when he stared at it too long.

Most of the bridge rail was sheathed in ice. Gorov gripped it to steady himself as the boat yawed, but he happened to take hold of a section of bare metal. His glove froze to the steel.

He ripped it free and examined the palm: the outer layer of leather was torn, and the lining was exposed. If he had been wearing sealskin gloves, he would not have stuck fast, and he should have remembered to get that particular item of arctic gear out of the storage locker. If he hadn’t been wearing gloves at all, his hand would have welded instantly to the railing, and when he pulled loose, he would have lost a substantial patch of flesh.

Staring in amazement at the captain’s shredded glove, Seaman Semichastny exclaimed:

“Incredible!”

Zhukov said, “What a miserable place.”

“Indeed.”

The snow that swept across the bridge was not in the form of flakes. The subzero temperatures and the fierce wind conspired to produce hard beads of snow—what a meteorologist would call “gravel,” like millions of granules of white buckshot, the next worst thing to a storm of ice spicules.

Tapping the bridge anemometer, the first officer said, “We’ve got wind velocity of thirty miles an hour, even leeward of the iceberg. It must be blowing twice to three times that hard on top of the ice or on the open sea.

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