Icebound Read Online Free PDF Page B

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