But it was—and it was not—what he remembered. He had remembered a look of utter horror on her face, eyes wide and mouth shaped in a scream…but that was not what she looked like now. Although it was impossible—and he knew he would never try to explain this part of it to Murphy O’Connor—her eyes were level, and her mouth composed. She looked not like a person in extremis, but instead like someone in the midst of a mildly troubling dream. Someone who would soon awaken.
Lawson swam down toward him, the salvage line trailing behind, and when he, too, saw the face in the ice, he held still in the water, taking it in. All along, Michael knew Lawson had been secretly dubious, wanting to believe what Michael had said but well aware of the tricks that deep-sea diving can play on the mind. But this was no trick, and now he would know that for sure. If they were going to extricate her, they would have to get to work fast—there were at least several inches of ice covering her, and covering whatever else there might be clinging close behind her.
Lawson placed his saw against the ice, about five or six feet down, and indicated that he would be cutting laterally there. He lifted the tip of Michael’s saw, and made a horizontal cutting motion about three inches above the woman’s head. The plan was to leave just enough leeway to be safe, but no more than that—a block of ice with a body inside was going to weigh a ton as it was.
Michael tucked his flashlight back into its belt loop and let the jagged teeth of the saw bite into the ice. He drew the blade toward him, like drawing the bow on a violin, and a thin groove opened. He pushed it back and the groove deepened, translucent slivers of ice peeling away. It would be a long job, but the saw seemed up to it. The hard part was making sure that he kept his body, and his fins in particular, angled away from Lawson, who was working below.
It was also important to keep his eyes on the deepening groove and not let them stray to the face in the ice. Looking at her could make his blood run cold, and the iron chain wrapped around her neck was the stuff of nightmares. He tried to regulate his breathing and listen not to his own thoughts but to the hissing of the regulator, and the occasional groan or sputter from the ice. It crossed his mind, in the strange way that he knew humans anthropomorphized everything, that the glacier was in pain, that it could feel the bite of the saw cutting into it, that it was fighting to hold on to its frozen prize.
But it would not win. Michael made steady progress up top, and when he felt that he’d gone deep enough, he turned to making a vertical incision. Gradually, both he and Bill were cutting a box around the figure, and around the other shape—also human, or something else entirely?—that lurked behind. Michael saw Lawson check his dive watch, then hold up a hand with bulky fingers spread, twice, to indicate that they should cut away whatever else they could for ten more minutes. After that, it would be up to the winch to do the rest.
Lawson removed a dagger-sharp piton from his harness kit, and with steady blows drove it into the back of the ice block they’d been carving. Then he drove several more. The idea was simply to create enough of a fracture plane behind the block that a sudden and powerful tug would tear the whole piece loose. When he had the pitons in, he unfurled the net, wrapped it as best he could around the chopped block, and secured it with several more pieces of Alpine hardware—the same sort that Michael routinely used on mountain climbs. When that was done, and he had clamped all the hardware to the unbreakable salvage line, he gave the line three hard tugs, waited, then gave it three more.
Michael and Lawson back-paddled a few yards off and waited for the winch to kick in. The first thing they saw was the salvage line, which had shown almost no slack, suddenly straighten out like an arrow; Michael could hear a high-tension thrumming in the water, and a second or two later, he saw the ice block budge. It inched forward, then stopped; he could hear the cracking and grinding of the ice. It was like sliding a block out of a gigantic pyramid, and he suddenly had a terrible vision of the whole ice wall crumbling down around him. He moved farther back and inflated his suit to rise a few yards higher in the water.