Frozen Solid A Novel

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SHE ROSE TO THE SURFACE, EXHALING A THIN STREAM OF BUBBLES on the way up to keep her lungs from exploding as the pressure lessened, and floated there without making a sound. At first, she let only her lips and mask show above water. She had no way of knowing what she would find in the dive shed. Guillotte and Merritt might well be waiting there—just to make sure she didn’t return. If they were, this time they would knock her unconscious or kill her before putting more weights around her waist and shoving her back into the hole.

She waited and listened for several minutes, hearing nothing. As quietly as possible, she worked free of her diving harness and let go of the double tanks. Still fully charged, they were negatively buoyant and sank out of sight. The edge of the dive shed’s ice floor, with its plywood covering around the shaft mouth, was two feet above the water’s surface.

She performed a slow, careful 360-degree rotation, listening for any sound Guillotte or Merritt might make. Nothing. No scraping boot, indrawing breath, rustling clothing. She had begun to shiver, the first stage of hypothermia. She needed to get out of the water. But looking up at the edge of the circular shaft gave her pause. In the salt water she was positively buoyant. Her body weight was about 135 pounds. The dry suit, underlayers, fins, and mitts added another 25. Every inch of her and gear that came out of the water would reclaim its full weight. Looking up at the lip, she knew she would have to get at least far enough above it to perform a mantle, the climbing move she had shown Graeter to help him escape the crevasse. To do that, she would have to lift three feet of her body out of the water: head, arms, and shoulders above the edge, which meant that her torso in the shaft would be above water, too. So at least 50 percent of her body and the dry suit—say 70 or 80 pounds.

The question would be whether she could submerge with a full breath, fin and swim straight up, and pop out high enough to hook her arms and elbows over the lip of the shaft. It was a very good thing that they had floored the shed with plywood. She would have no chance at all trying to claw her way out of the hole over slick ice.

It would be the height of black irony, she thought, to have saved herself from dying as Merritt and Guillotte had intended only to freeze to death two feet from the surface. There was still the possibility that one or both of the others might be up there waiting for her. If they were, she would fight, of course, and probably could overcome Merritt, though the encumbering dry suit would be a huge disadvantage. She would have no chance against Guillotte.

She needed to push herself deeper into the shaft, as deep as possible until her buoyancy overcame her strength, but her mitted hands could find no purchase on the smooth ice walls. She unbuckled both of her dive computers from her left arm and held one in each palm, straps around her knuckles. Each computer was worth $2,000, and using them as imitation claws would destroy them, but this was not the time to be worrying about money. The computers had rectangular metal cases with sharp corners and edges. Her hope was that when she slapped them against the ice wall, they would dig in and grab enough to let her push herself down a couple of feet, then repeat the action until she had gone as deep as her buoyancy allowed.

If that worked, she would propel herself upward with fins and arms. Their energy, plus that of the buoyancy, would have to shoot her far enough out of the shaft. If not, somebody would find her floating right there in the hole, frozen solid.