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before the icecap stabilized.
    The overturned snowmobile revolved on its side. The headlights swept across Brian twice, harrying shadows like wind-whipped leaves that had blown in from warmer latitudes, and then stopped as they illuminated the other men.
    Behind Roger Breskin and George Lin, the ice suddenly cracked open with a deafening
boom!
and gaped like a ragged, demonic mouth. Their world was coming apart.
    Brian shouted a warning.
    Roger grasped one of the large steel anchor pins that fixed the transmitter in place, and he held on with both hands.
    The ice heaved a third time. The white field tilted toward the new, yawning crevasse.
    Although he tried desperately to brace himself, Brian slid out of the depression in which he had sought shelter, as though there were no inhibiting friction whatsoever between him and the ice. He shot toward the chasm, grabbed the transmitter as he sailed past it, crashed hard against Roger Breskin, and held on with fierce determination.
    Roger shouted something about George Lin, but the wailing of the wind and the rumble of fracturing ice masked the meaning of his words.
    Squinting through snow-filmed goggles, unwilling to risk his precarious hold to wipe them clean, Brian looked over his shoulder.
    Screaming, George Lin slid toward the brink of the new crevasse. He flailed at the slick ice. As the last surge of the tsunami passed beneath them and as the winter cap settled down, Lin fell out of sight into the chasm.

    Franz had suggested that Rita finish packing the gear and that he handle the heavy work of loading it into the cargo trailers. He was so unconsciously condescending toward “the weaker sex” that Rita rejected his suggestion. She pulled up her hood, slipped the goggles over her eyes once more, and lifted one of the filled cartons before he could argue with her.
    Outside, as she loaded the waterproof box into one of the low-slung cargo trailers, the first tremor jolted the ice. She was pitched forward onto the cartons. A blunt cardboard corner gouged her cheek. She rolled off the trailer and fell into the snow that had drifted around the machine during the past hour.
    Dazed and frightened, she scrambled to her feet as the primary crest of the tsunami arrived. The snowmobile engines were running, warming up for the ride back to Edgeway, and their headlamps pierced the falling snow, providing enough light for her to see the first broad crack appear in the nearly vertical wall of the fifty-foot-high pressure ridge that had sheltered—and now threatened—the temporary camp. A second crack split off the first, then a third, a fourth, ten, a hundred, like the intricate web of fissures in an automobile windshield that has been hit by a stone. The entire facade was going to collapse.
    She shouted to Fischer, who was still in the igloo at the west end of the camp. “Run! Franz!
Get out!”
    Then she took her own advice, not daring to look back.

    The sixtieth package of explosives was no different from the fifty-nine that had been placed in the ice before it: two and a half inches in diameter, sixty inches long, with smooth, rounded ends. A sophisticated timing device and detonator occupied the bottom of the cylinder and was synchronized to the timers in the other fifty-nine packages. Most of the tube was filled with plastic explosives. The upper end of the cylinder terminated in a steel loop, and a gated carabiner connected a tempered-steel chain to the loop.
    Harry Carpenter wound the chain off the drum of a small hand winch, lowering the package—thirty pounds of casing and one hundred pounds of plastic explosives—into the narrow hole, working carefully because the charge was equivalent to three thousand pounds of TNT. He let down seventy-eight feet of chain before he felt the cylinder touch bottom in the eighty-seven-foot shaft. He connected another carabiner to the free end of the chain, pulled the links snug against the shaft wall, and secured the carabiner to a peg that