Free Icebound by Dean Koontz Page B

you…soon as…George settled!” he shouted. Even though his voice was wind-tattered, the anxiety in it was evident.
    Only an hour ago, Brian couldn’t have conceived that Roger—rock solid as he was, with his bull’s neck and his massive biceps and his powerful hands and his air of total self-reliance—might ever be afraid of anything whatsoever. Now that the other man’s fear was evident, Brian was less ashamed of the terror that knotted his own guts. If a tough sonofabitch like Roger was susceptible to fear, then even one of the stoical Doughertys might be permitted that emotion a few times in his life.
    He picked up the main line and harnessed himself to it. Then he untied the safety tether at his waist, loosened the other end from the piton, coiled it, and hooked it to his tool belt. He plucked the flashlight from the ledge and also fastened it to the belt. He would have salvaged the piton, too, if he’d had the means and the strength to pry it out of the ice. Their supplies, the fuel, and the tools were priceless. They dared waste or discard nothing. No one could predict what scrap, now insignificant, might eventually be essential to their survival.
    He was thinking in terms of
their
survival rather than his own, for he knew that he was the least likely member of the expedition to come through the forthcoming ordeal with his life. Although he had taken four weeks of training at the U.S. Army Arctic Institute, he was not as familiar with the icecap or as well conditioned to it as were the others. Furthermore, he stood six one and weighed a hundred seventy pounds. Emily, his oldest sister, had called him String Bean since he was sixteen. But he was broad at the shoulders, and his lean arms were muscular: a string bean, then, but not a weakling. A weakling could never have ridden the Colorado River rapids, run with the shark hunters off Bimini, climbed mountains in Washington State. And as long as he had a warm igloo or a heated room at Edgeway Station to which he could return after a long day of exposure to the debilitating cold, he could hold up pretty well. But this was different. The igloos might no longer exist; and even if they did exist, there might not be sufficient fuel in the snowmobile tanks or life in the batteries to keep them warm for longer than another day. Survival, in this case, demanded a special strength and stamina that came only with experience. He was all but certain that he did not have the fortitude to pull through.
    What he would most regret about dying was his mother’s grief. She was the best of the Doughertys, above the muck of politics, and she had experienced too much grief already. God knew, Brian had caused her more than a little of it with his—
    A flashlight beam found him in the darkness.
    “Are you ready to go?” Roger Breskin shouted.
    “Whenever you are.”
    Roger returned to the snowmobile.
    No sooner had Brian braced himself than the rope was drawn up, putting a new and more terrible strain on his aching shoulders. Battered by the wind, half dazed by pain, unable to stop thinking about the immense watery grave that lapped far below him, he slid along the face of the cliff as smoothly as George Lin had done five minutes ago. When he came to the brink, he was able to push and kick over the top without Roger’s help.
    He got up and took a few uncertain steps toward the snowmobile’s headlamps. His ankles and thighs were sore, but the pain would diminish with exercise. He had come through virtually unscathed. “Incredible,” he said. He began to untie the knots that held the harness together. “Incredible.”
    “What are you talking about?” Roger asked as he joined him.
    “Didn’t expect to make it.”
    “You didn’t trust me?”
    “It wasn’t that. I thought the rope would snap or the cliff crack apart or something.”
    “You’re going to die eventually,” Roger said, his deep voice almost theatrical in its effect. “But this wasn’t your place. It