George Bartram - Under the Freeze

The submersible’s pilot had been standing to their left on the deck. Now he moved toward them.

“ Alors ,” he said sourly. “ L’oeuf se crasse , eh ?”

“What’d he say?” the man with Tarp said. He was Gance, a good diver but a poor linguist.

“He said they’re almost ready.”

“He doesn’t sound too happy about it.”

“He thinks they’re going to drop it.”

The man behind them sucked in his breath as the cable tightened between the helicopter and the submersible. Something happened on the deck and men started to wave their arms, and he hissed, “ Oh , la ,” and began to make a sound in his throat like eh-eh-eh-eh-eh.

“They got it aboard all right, what the hell,” Gance said. “They didn’t use the chopper.”

“Christ, no, they used a big crane. It was doodle-zip the way they did it, like lifting a suitcase.”

“That thing’s heavy.”

“Christ, these big choppers haul tanks around. What the hell, it’s a piece of cake. Of course, they’re French.”

The man behind them started to hum. It sounded like a wail. “Don’t look,” Tarp said to him in French.

“Eh-eh-eh — that’s easy to say.”

“Go have breakfast. They’ll be hours yet.”

“Eh, when they drop my egg, I want to see it crack.” His face was very red from the cold. He had grizzled hair that was plastered down by a black watch cap; on his cheeks, the hairs of silver stubble gleamed like little nails. “That’s my child, that thing—” he said. He did a little dance on the steel deck because he was cold and tense.

Gance looked sideways at Tarp. “Christ, tell him to cool it, will you?” he said.

Tarp turned to the pilot. “My friend says it will go well.”

“No offense, but your friend does not know shit from shoe polish. Does he speak French?”

“No.”

“Shit from shoe polish, I say it again.”

“He meant well.”

“Eh!” He jerked his head toward the helicopters. “So do those morons.”

There was an iceberg off to their right, sitting majestically in the waves like an island; ahead there was a band of silver where the drift ice met the clouded sky. “That little egg has to travel a long way on the cable, my friend.”

“Five hours, I know,” Tarp said.

“Has it ever been done?”

“They say they’ve done it with a truck. They say they can do it.”

“Eh, of course they do. Morons.”

Coils of plastic lay around the submersible on the deck. They formed an inflatable collar that had been jury-rigged from a boom designed to contain oil spills. If the helicopters actually got the Vairon to the open water inside the drift ice, the collar would stabilize it while Tarp and the others boarded. The pilot believed it might flip over or take on enough water to sink in rough seas. Tarp thought he was a neurotic fussbudget, but he was willing to concede that the man knew more about it than he did.

The men on the deck hurried away from the submersible again. The helicopter’s motors got louder. One of the men waved. The helicopter seemed to grow as the noise of its engines rose to a roar, but the submersible clung to the deck.

“Holy God,” the pilot muttered.

“Go, go,” Gance chanted to himself. “Go, you mother, go.”

The Vairon lifted suddenly, easily, and seemed to spring ten yards into the air. Tarp glanced at the Frenchman, who had his lower lip caught firmly between his front teeth. His cap was wadded in his fists.

“Ooop, allez- oop !” he was saying.

A cheer carried down the deck to them like a scrap of paper on the wind.

“ Go , you mother!”

The white egg was moving into the sky and pulling ahead of the ship. When it was several hundred yards up, it leveled, hung there like a spider on a strand of its own web. Then the egg and the chopper began to move slowly toward the silver horizon.

“Hey!” Gance was shouting. “Hey, man, hey, man, hey, how about that, man!” He was pounding the Frenchman on the shoulder. The pilot, still capless, was nodding his head and smiling, shrugging and pouting out his lower lip, bouncing up and down on his toes. He shook his cap in a gesture of victory.

“Not bad for morons,” Tarp said to him.

“If they don’t drop it now.”

“How about a brandy all around?” He looked at Gance. “Brandy?”

“Hey, you’re talking, man. I thought you didn’t touch it when you were diving.”

“We’ve got hours and hours. Let’s go below.”

Gance grinned at the Frenchman. “Brandy, Pierre? Huh? Vous comprendi , brandy?”

“Brandy, oui , cognac .”

“Pierre, you’re okay.”

“ Qu’est - ci qu’il a dit ?”

“He says you’re a good man.”

“Why does he call me Pierre?”

“He can’t pronounce your name.”

“My name is Jean-Marie.”

“I know, but he can’t get the sounds right.”

Three-quarters of an hour later they climbed into the second helicopter, which had returned from flying watchdog on the first one. The tanker would keep station where it was, its captain refusing to go closer to the ice. If the weather cleared, a Russian satellite would pick it up, and Tarp wanted to move quickly.

The chopper was as big inside as a bus. With only the three of them and their gear, it felt as big as a church. Gance began checking over the special suits he had brought. Surrounded now by the tools of his craft, he was content. He even whistled, but the sound was lost in the noise.

Tarp looked down. The tanker was far behind. He could see a dozen icebergs; ahead, they seemed to merge into a solid mass.

Jean-Marie was sprawled against one wall. He was doing something with a calculator.

“What’s that?” Tarp shouted.

“Figuring battery consumption!”

“You’ve figured it twice before!”

“I like to be sure!”

Tarp moved back to Gance, who was checking the seals between a helmet and a suit. “Looks like a spaceman without the spaceman!” Tarp shouted.

“Beautiful stuff! Beautiful! Four hundred feet in this mother! Beautiful!”

Tarp had heard it all on the tanker. They had been four days together. If the Prinz von Homburg lay below three hundred and sixty feet, it would be beyond them; if it lay more than twenty miles from the polynya , they would not be able to reach it and return. He pinched the material of the suit that Gance was working on. It felt like very thick rubber with a nylon surface. It felt fragile. Tarp disliked the idea of deep diving in a self-contained suit; yet this was a state-of-the-art unit developed from NASA’s experience in space. There was no way to go after the Homburg in scuba gear and no way to go after it with umbilically connected equipment.

“We won’t have much room in the sub with these suits on!”

“I know!” Gance seemed pleased by the idea. Tarp moved to Jean-Marie and shouted, “We won’t have much room with those suits!”

Jean-Marie looked at the suit that was spread out on the floor. “You won’t have any,” he said, and he went back to his calculator.

But they had already been in the submersible with the suits on. There was virtually no room, it was true; Tarp had simply been venting his own concern about it. They had already found that they had to enter the Vairon in a definite order, Jean-Marie first; once inside, there was no changing places.

Tarp watched the drift ice flow beneath them. The icebergs had given way to a vast blue-gray field that was marked with black lines like rivers and canals. There were crevices and ridges, miniature mountain ranges of ice, and cracks wide enough to take a big ship into.