George Bartram - Under the Freeze

A cold desert , he thought. A very tough place to die . Yet they had seen whales that morning, and he knew there were organisms that lived in the water and even in the ice itself. Man is the alien here . Man is the soft one . Very fragile . He looked again at the suit, which, spread on the chopper floor, looked manlike but two-dimensional. Very fragile .

They caught up with the other aircraft and kept pace with it for half an hour. The two pilots chatted. Tarp’s swung below the other and looked at the cable and the Vairon . Satisfied, it surged ahead. They reached the edge of the polynya and Tarp stationed himself behind the pilot. They swung west and began to drop sonar buoys.

The chopper turned above a point of ice that jutted into open water. There were black dots on the ice.

“ Petrol !” he shouted. They had brought in fuel the day before.

The satellite will spot that , Tarp thought. As soon as the clouds lift .

They dropped more buoys and swung northeast. The pilot pointed. “We dropped them over there yesterday. No response.”

He moved over the open water and placed three deep-water probes, which would sink to a predetermined depth and send back pulses from a floating antenna.

“How thick is the ice?” Tarp shouted.

The pilot made a face. “Near the edge, eight meters! Farther into the ice field — eighty meters, maybe.”

“Is that from the sounders?”

The pilot nodded. “It is like a dome. No ice in the middle, then very thin ice, then it gets thicker. Like a dome of water under the ice.”

They dropped three more deep probes, then headed back toward the point and met the other helicopter as it approached the polynya . Below them, whitecaps flashed like lights on the dark water. Tarp moved into the cavernous midsection and found the other two still occupied with their work. He moved again restlessly to the cabin.

“He has a chart,” the pilot said, nodding at the navigator, who sat behind him and to the right. Charts were spread on a table; electronic gear surrounded him on three sides.

“We are here,” the navigator said. He seemed like a boy to Tarp. He touched a penciled map. “There are the probes. These lines are echo bars — they are clarified by a computer that adjusts for distance and so on. The red lines are ten-meter depths — of ice, not water. The very dark line is the edge of the ice.”

“He said it’s dome-shaped.”

“Like a dome, yes. A very uneven dome. Like a cave.”

“Any sign of metal yet?”

“Nothing. But we’re out of range of some sounders yet.”

They flew on. There was radio chatter. The pilot called Tarp forward. “The other aircraft is burning up fuel because of the load! If we don’t find anything soon, we have to put the vessel into the water. Then we’ll refuel and put out more probes!”

Tarp grimaced. Once the submersible was in the water, getting it out again would be very difficult, perhaps impossible. It was hoped that, if they had to scuttle it, they would have found the Homburg first. If, however, it was put into the water miles from where the Homburg lay, and it then had to traverse those miles under its own power, they would lose time and the Russian satellite might track them.

They flew on. Minutes passed. The pilot shook his head. Fifteen minutes more.

“Eh, the sweetheart,” Tarp heard the navigator say. The boy looked up with a beatific smile on his face. “ Voilà ,” he said.

“You’ve got it?”

The grinning kid fiddled with a dial and a high-pitched ping ! sounded above the engine noise. “Metal!” he cried. “Lots of lovely metal!”

“Big enough to be a ship?”

“Absolutely! A big ship!” His voice rose. “A German cruiser, at least!”

He turned the gain up still more. The sonar return was like an enormous tuning fork in the throbbing space. “It’s got a German accent!” he shouted happily.

In wet suits they jumped from the helicopter to the water thirty yards from the submersible. It floated in its disorderly rings of inflated tubing like an egg surrounded by sausage.

Tarp hit the water first and felt it like a thrill of excitement, as if the cold were a pulse along his nerves instead of something outside his own body. The wet suit seemed first colder, then warm, and he reached the surface already looking for the vessel. He swam toward it, welcoming movement as the second and astonishing shock of the cold reached him. The Vairon rose on a wave and disappeared, its collar moving supplely with the water like a raft of grasses.

He could not pull himself up on the slippery tubing, which collapsed under him because it was not fully inflated; he had to find one of the lines that bound the long boom into coils and slide up and over with its help until he could get a foothold in the yielding mass. Supporting himself against the white side of the sub, he watched Gance grasp a line on the other side. Beyond him, Jean-Marie was swimming toward the collar.

Gance heaved himself up and began to tear off his flippers. “Cold, man. I mean, that’s cold.” An iceberg about the size of a suburban house floated a hundred yards away, and he pointed at it.

“Let’s get this thing under as soon as we can!” Tarp shouted. “Those clouds are going to break up soon!” The wind blew into his mouth and almost choked him. Jean-Marie was pulling himself up on the collar. “ Vite , vite !” Tarp shouted at him.

Jean-Marie was lying on his belly on the soft collar. He looked up at Tarp with great disgust, pulled himself to a sitting position, and slowly began to take off his flippers.

Tarp grinned. “ Pas si vite ?” he shouted.

Jean-Marie nodded. He clambered up the rows of the collar and began to undo the entrance hatch. “We make haste slowly,” he said. “ I am the captain now.”

Tarp and Gance worked to loosen the collar. They had hoped to open it into one large ring that would serve as a protective boom for the submersible in the waves, most of all when they tried to reattach the cable for the return to the tanker.

“No way we’re gonna move this mother,” Gance said. “You can’t budge this stuff. It’s like soft concrete.”

Tarp signaled a line down from the chopper. They attached it to an end of the boom and the aircraft pulled it away from the Vairon , then changed course and pulled another section free.

“He is moving us!” Jean-Marie shouted.

“It can’t be helped!”

Tarp and Gance pushed the next coil of tubing free, and Gance put his fins on again and went into the water to reattach the cable close to the submersible. Another ring straightened, and then Vairon was enclosed in a single layer, the rest curving behind like the tail of a comma.

“Enough!” Jean-Marie shouted.

“We have to attach the ends!”

Jean-Marie disappeared down the hatch. Tarp put on fins again, bracing himself for the water and then welcoming it when he was in it. They reattached the cable and saw the tubing pulled into a circle, with the Vairon spinning slowly at the other end as the last coil opened. When the ends were joined, however, the egg floated within the protective ring of yellow tubing. They pulled themselves aboard the vessel.

“Cold,” Tarp said to Gance.

“My ass it is!”

“I didn’t think that would work.”

“I knew it wouldn’t! How come it did?”

Gance signaled to the helicopter and one of the free-dive suits started down. It looked like a big corpse being lowered.