Icebound (9 page)

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

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

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

“What do you have in mind?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The sound of the ice,” she said.

“What about it?”

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

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

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

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

Incredulous, he said “
You’re
seducing
me
!”

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

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

“Are you offended?”

“By women in pants?”

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

“Good heavens, no.”

“If I’ve been too bold…”

“Not at all.”

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

“Neither have I.”

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

“Neither have I.”

“But it feels right, doesn’t it?”

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

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

Someone was shouting his name.

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

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

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

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

One of them was Rita.

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

“Harry!”

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

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

“Nosebleed.”

“That’s all?”

“And it’s stopped. You?”

“Just frightened.”

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

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

“We’ll go to Paris,” he told her.

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

“George V.”

“A room overlooking the gardens.”

“Moët.”

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

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

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

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

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

1:32

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s what we’re here for.”

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

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

“Are we ready?” another technician asked.

“Yes.” Timoshenko flicked a yellow switch.

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

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

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

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

“Of interest?”

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

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

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

1:40

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

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