Part 2

The two silhouettes were looking down at him, and he knew they had been attracted by the explosion of their gelatinous picket buoy. He looked all around for the dim gray outline of their submarine, but there was no sign of their "home," and his gaze concentrated with wide-eyed intensity on their black paddling shapes as his minisub rose from the depths.

He saw them exchange hurried hand signals. They began to swim away, side by side, their fins fluttering rapidly now. They were swimming a definite course, and still there was no sign of their submarine as his minisub inexorably gained on them.

Now that he had reached their altitude, he noticed they were already tiring. One diver looked back, then swam frantically to catch up with the other. Like a slow fighter plane, the minisub came in on them from behind, and one diver pushed at the other. They again exchanged hand signals, losing yards to the minisub, and one began to swim hard while the other turned back, facing the minisub, raising his hand in what appeared to be a courteous military salute. The minisub kept coming straight at him.

Then the diver spread his arms in a gesture of peace. The minisub's torpedo-shaped nose rammed his belly. Unsheathing his long blade, the Murderer struck.

As the diver wriggled, the Murderer withdrew the blade and struck again. Air bubbles streamed from the diver's chest with each exhalation of breath as he backwatered. His expression seemed mild surprise as the Murderer struck a third time, driving the blade down between the man's neck and collar bone, pushing him deeper. The next blow smashed the mask. Belatedly, the man's hand flurried, seeming to clutch at his bubbles as he sank.

The Murderer looked up. Far off under the ice, the other diver had stopped, was looking down, watching, and the Murderer held up his blade as a signal and turned the minisub upward, after him. This diver took evasive action among the downward bulges of old Siberian ice and suddenly vanished.

Although there was no sky glare in the water, the Murderer supposed the diver had found an open lead in the ice and would rather freeze to death, or at least put up a fight from the edge of the ice, than die in the water.

* * * * *

Valving more air into the minisub's flotation tanks, the Murderer steered it rapidly up into the oddly round, oddly dim lead in the ice pack. At the edge of his mask-vision he glimpsed a longish tubular shape suspended in the water, but the minisub was rising too fast for him to get a good look. The overbuoyant minisub bloomed above the surface and sloshed back, rolling unsteadily while the film of water slid off his mask without freezing and he saw.

The white blur became the biggest twin-rotored copter he had ever seen, squatting there on the ice, white except for its glass. Then his eyes were attracted by motion, by the parka-clad men hauling the surviving diver up on the ice. Other darkish figures were simply standing there, some of them beginning to point.

Behind them was a smaller helicopter with the loop-shaped aerial of a radio location finder mounted atop its plastic dome. There was something wrong with the sky, and the Murderer realized it was not the sky. It was a vast white canvas dome, dimpling in the polar wind. The unnatural circle in the ice and the equipment grouped around it all were hidden from aerial observation.

Pointing at him from the fuselage of the huge helicopter, and so close that his eyes had avoided it, was a metal boom with a hoist cable taut into the water, tethering something below the surface. Some of the men were running toward the huge helicopter now. In front of them at the edge of the ice lay shapeless bundles of what appeared to be black rubberized canvas, and he wondered fleetingly if these contained more of the soon-to-be gelatinous picket buoys. One of the figures was aiming something at him. As the Murderer let air out of the flotation tanks and swiftly sank, he realized it had not been a gun; it had been a camera with a telephoto lens.

He passed the tubular shape on the end of the cable. It was an anti-submarine torpedo. When he sank deeper, he passed a cylinder dangling from two black rubber-insulated cables.

He valved compressed air back into the flotation tanks and came up under the ice, so hazardously close he had to duck his head as he steered a weaving course among the downward bulges of old Siberian ice. Even though he had been deafened, he felt the sonar pulsing against the ice, searching for him. Then he felt it knocking against the minisub, pinging against his air tanks, thudding accusingly against his bones. It followed him wherever he steered.

He smiled blearily. This would be the ultimate if they unleashed the expensively intricate homing torpedo--at one man riding a cheap minisub constructed by a big-handed, happily singing petty officer on his own time. He hoped they _would_ waste the torpedo on him. If he had to be destroyed by a gadget, an infernal machine, at least it was better to be killed as an individual rather than in a group so large he would be nameless in death.

Abruptly the sonar left him. They must have decided he was not going to lead them back to his submarine. Now they were hurriedly ranging for it.

He cruised on and on with his dead cargo.

Then he felt the echo of sonar from the submarine's hull. He must be close. The helicopter, with its sonar system lowered into the water like a fisherman's hook, had caught the Fleet Ballistic Missile submarine.

He could feel the submarine's sonar searching frantically. They would be sounding for another submarine. He could imagine horror on the sonar men's faces as they realized they couldn't detect anything at the apparent source of the unidentified sonar that had caught them.

The submarine's sonar caught something--him.

* * * * *

He steered directly into it and found the submarine. Bow into the current, the gray undersea boat was still holding its position. The Murderer guessed the commander had decided that the best move was no move.

Valving out air, he brought the minisub down, opened the outer hatch and dragged the minisub into the water-filled chamber. A great weariness had come over him and it was all he could do to lock the hatch. He knocked on the bulkhead, while the persistent sonar pinging went on and on. Someone tapped very gently, although they might as well hammer with a wrench; it wouldn't make any difference now. The Murderer realized they were waiting for him to plug into the telephone socket and give his maximum depth and time spent there and other decompression data he hadn't kept. They intended to decompress him as if this were just another safe-and-sane training exercise.

In the chamber lights, Barney's rubber suit had sagged over the side of the minisub like a black rag doll. The Murderer averted his eyes and plugged in.

"One--two--three--" he said automatically.

"Barney?"

"Barney's dead."

"This is the commander. There is a submarine out there. For some reason, we can't locate it with our sonar. Have you seen it?"

"Commander, it's a helicopter. They have an anti-submarine torpedo in the water."

"I'm having difficulty reading you--"

"Helicopter. Anti-sub torpedo!"

"Did they take any aggressive action against you?"

"Depends on how you look at it. Their picket buoys are under here. Barney tried to recover one. It was booby-trapped to destroy itself."

"Barney?" the commander's voice persisted.

"I told you he's dead! I got one of their divers."

"One of their divers? He was attacking you?"

"I killed him. He was trying to get away."

There was a long pause. Only the persistent knocking of the giant helicopter's sonar reached the Murderer's ear.

When the commander spoke again, it was as if murder had been done. "Do they know?"

"The other one looked back. Sure they know. They know."

"Then they may consider we're the ones who've taken aggressive action," the commander said slowly. "We'll have to wait. If we move off, their commanding officers on the spot may feel committed to local retaliatory action. We'll have to wait while they're radioing for instructions. We'll have to hope their side will decide to take this before an international court."

"Court? What sort of court? A murder court?"

"Let's hope it's only one murder," the commander's voice came through distantly, "and not one hundred million. We'll have to sit it out."

As decompression began, the Murderer sank down beside Barney's body in the water-filled chamber. Superimposed upon the commander's two little kids, swinging on their swings, he saw the surprised face of the diver--and even the little fish, lost from its school, and its wondrous eye--two billion years of evolution waiting for a verdict of life or death.

End of Project Gutenberg's Murder Beneath the Polar Ice, by Hayden Howard