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Icebound: A chilling thriller of a race against time by [Dean Koontz]

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Dean Koontz

Icebound: A chilling thriller of a race against time Kindle Edition

by Dean Koontz (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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A desperate struggle for survival...

Set in the Arctic icefields, Dean Koontz's Icebound is a compelling thriller that delivers icy chills. Perfect for fans of Harlan Coben and Richard Laymon.

'Jammed with the tensions of imminent disaster. The whole thing unfolds with the timing of a quartz watch' - Chicago Tribune

A widespread drought is causing murderous famine. There is one possible solution: Arctic ice could be moved south to parched coastlines and melted for water.

In an Arctic icefield, a special team of scientists have planted bombs that will detonate automatically at midnight to break away some of the ice. Before they withdraw to the safety of their base camp, a shattering tidal wave breaks loose the ice on which they are working. Now they are marooned on an iceberg during the worst winter storm of the decade. The bombs in the ice beneath them are buried irretrievably deep... and ticking. Abruptly thrown into a desperate struggle for survival, the scientists are plagued by the discovery that one of them is a ruthless killer on a strange mission of his own...

What readers are saying about Icebound:

'The thrilling chain of events that follows, in the race to disarm all the explosives, is positively gripping'

'The plot unfurls with a frozen precision that grips you with its icy fingers, always intriguing, always willing you to guess what comes next'

'I read this book in one sitting. Just could not put it down. Can Koontz get any better?'

Print length

371 pages
Language

English
Sticky notes

On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

Headline
Publication date

December 6, 2012
File size

2618 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Jammed with the tensions of imminent disaster. The whole thing unfolds with the timing of a quartz watch."—Chicago Tribune

"Viscerally exciting...An extended, tense tour de force...An expertly crafted, ornate suspenser...Koontz fans will love it."—Publishers Weekly, starred review --This text refers to the mass_market edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Snare

Noon
Detonation in twelve hours

With a crystal-shattering shriek, the bit of the power drill bored deep into the Arctic ice. Gray-white slush churned out of the hole, sluiced across the crusted snow, and refroze in seconds. The flared auger was out of sight, and most of the long steel shank also had disappeared into the four-inch-diameter shaft.

Watching the drill, Harry Carpenter had a curious premonition of imminent disaster. A faint flicker of alarm. Like a bird shadow fluttering across a bright landscape. Even inside his heavily insulated clothing, he shivered.

As a scientist, Harry respected the tools of logic, method, and reason, but he had learned never to discount a hunch–especially on the ice, where strange things could happen. He was unable to identify the source of his sudden uneasiness, though occasional dark forebodings were to be expected on a job involving high explosives. The chance of one of the charges detonating prematurely, killing them all, was slim to nil. Nevertheless . .
Peter Johnson, the electronics engineer who doubled as the team's demolitions expert, switched off the drill and stepped back from it. In his white Gore-Tex/Thermolite storm suit, fur-lined parka, and fur-lined hood, Pete resembled a polar bear–except for his dark brown face.

Claude Jobert shut down the portable generator that supplied power to the drill. The resultant hush had an eerie quality of expectancy so intense that Harry glanced behind himself and then up into the sky, half convinced that something was rushing or falling toward him.

If Death kissed anyone today, it was more likely to rise up from below than to descend upon them. As the bleak afternoon began, the three men were preparing to lower the last hundred-pound explosive charge deep into the ice. It was the sixtieth demolitions package that they had handled since the previous morning, and they were all uneasily conscious of standing upon enough high-yield plastic explosives to destroy them in an apocalyptic flash.

No fertile imagination was required to picture themselves dying in these hostile climes: The icecap was a perfect graveyard, utterly lifeless, and it encouraged thoughts of mortality. Ghostly bluish-white plains led off in all directions, somber and moody during that long season of nearly constant darkness, brief twilight, and perpetual overcast. At the moment, visibility was fair because the day had drawn down to that time when a vague, cloud-filtered crescent of sunlight painted the horizon. However, the sun had little to illuminate in the stark landscape. The only points of elevation were the jagged pressure ridges and hundreds of slabs of ice–some only as large as a man, others bigger than houses–that had popped from the field and stood on end like gigantic tombstones.

Pete Johnson, joining Harry and Claude at a pair of snowmobiles that had been specially rebuilt for the rigors of the pole, told them, "The shaft's twenty-eight yards deep. One more extension for the bit, and the job's done."

"Thank God!" Claude Jobert shivered as if his thermal suit provided no protection whatsoever. In spite of the transparent film of petroleum jelly that protected the exposed portions of his face from frostbite, he was pale and drawn. "We'll make it back to base camp tonight. Think of that! I haven't been warm one minute since we left."

Ordinarily, Claude didn't complain. He was a jovial, energetic little man. At a glance, he seemed fragile, but that was not the case. At five seven and a hundred thirty pounds, he was lean, wiry, hard. He had a mane of white hair now tucked under his hood, a face weathered and made leathery by a lifetime in extreme climates, and bring blue eyes as clear as those of a child. Harry had never seen hatred or anger in those eyes. Until yesterday, he had never seen self-pity in them, either, not even three years ago, when Claude lost his wife, Colette, in a sudden, senseless act of violence; he had been consumed by grief but had never wallowed in self-pity.

Since they had left the comfort of Edgeway Station, however, Claude had been neither jovial nor energetic, and he had complained frequently about the cold. At fifty-nine, he was the oldest member of the expedition, eighteen years older than Harry Carpenter, which was the outer limit for anyone working in those brutal latitudes.

Although he was a fine arctic geologist specializing in the dynamics of ice formation and movement, the current expedition would be his last trip to either pole. Henceforth, his research would be done in laboratories and at computers, for from the severe conditions of the icecap.

Harry wondered if Jobert was bothered less by the bitter cold than by the knowledge that the work he loved had grown too demanding for him. One day Harry would have to face the same truth, and he wasn't sure that he would be able to exit with grace. The great chaste spaces of the Arctic and Antarctic enthralled him: the power of the extreme weather, the mystery that cloaked the white geometric landscapes and pooled in the purple shadows of every seemingly unplumbable crevasse, the spectacle on clear night when the aurora borealis splashed the sky with shimmering streamers of light in jewellike colors, and the vast fields of stars when the curtains of the aurora drew back to reveal them.

In some ways he was still the kid who had grown up on a quiet farm in Indiana, without brothers or sisters or playmates: the lonely boy who'd felt stifled by the life into which he'd been born, who'd daydreamed of traveling to far places and seeing all the exotic marvels of the world, who'd wanted never to be tied down to one plot of earth, and who'd yearned for adventure. He was a grown man now, and he knew that adventure was hard work. Yet, from time to time, the boy within him was abruptly overcome by wonder, stopped whatever he was doing, slowly turned in a circle to look at the dazzlingly white world around him, and thought: Holy jumping catfish, I'm really here, all the way from Indiana to the end of the earth, the top of the world!

Pete Johnson said, "It's snowing."

Even as Pete spoke, Harry saw the lazily spiraling flakes descending in a silent ballet. The day was windless, though the calm might not endure much longer.

Claude Jobert frowned. "We weren't due for this storm until this evening."

The trip out from Edgeway Station–which lay four air miles to the northeast of their temporary camp, six miles by snowmobile past ridges and deep chasms–had not been difficult. Nevertheless, a bad storm might make the return journey impossible. Visibility could quickly deteriorate to zero, and they could easily get lost because of compass distortion. And if their snowmobiles ran out of fuel, they would freeze to death, for even their thermal suits would be insufficient protection against prolonged exposure to the more murderous cold that would ride in on the back of a blizzard.

Deep snows were not as common on the Greenland cap as might have been expected, in part because of the extreme lows to which the air temperature could sink.. At some point in virtually every blizzard, the snowflakes metamorphosed into spicules of ice, but even then visibility was poor.

Studying the sky, Harry said, "Maybe it's a local squall."

"Yes, that's just what Online Weather said last week about that storm," Claude reminded him. "We were to have only local squalls on the periphery of the main event. Then we had so much snow and ice it would've kept Père Noël home on Christmas Eve."

"So we'd better finish this job quickly."

"Yesterday would be good."

As if to confirm the need for haste, a wind sprang up from the west, as crisp and odorless as a wind could be only if it was coming off hundreds of miles of barren ice. The snowflakes shrank and began to descend at an angle, no longer spiraling prettily like flakes in a crystal bibelot.

Pete freed the drill from the shank of the buried bit and lifted it out of its supportive frame, handling it as if it weighed a tenth of its actual eighty-five pounds.

A decade ago he had been a football star at Penn State, turning down offers from several NFL teams. He hadn't wanted to play out the role that society dictated for every six-foot-four-inch, two-hundred-pound black football hero. Instead, he had won scholarships, earned two degrees, and taken a well-paid position with a computer-industry think tank.

Now he was vital to Harry's expedition. He maintained the electronic data-gathering equipment at Edgeway, and having designed the explosive devices, he was the only one who could deal with them in full confidence if something went wrong. Furthermore, his tremendous strength was an asset out there on the inhospitable top of the world.

As Pete swung the drill out of the way, Harry and Claude lifted a three-foot bit extension from one of the cargo trailers that were coupled to the snowmobiles. They screwed it onto the thread shank, which was still buried in the ice.

Claude started the generator again.

Pete slammed the drill in place, turned the keyless chuck to clamp the jaws tight around the shank, and finished boring the twenty-nine-yard-deep shaft, at the bottom of which they would plant a tubular charge of explosives.

While the machine roared, Harry gazed at the heavens. Within the past few minutes, the weather had deteriorated alarmingly. Most of the ashen light had faded from behind the oppressive overcast. So much snow was falling that the sky no longer was mottled with grays and black; nothing whatsoever of the actual cloud cover could be seen through the crystalline torrents. Above them was only a deep, whirling whiteness. Already shrinking and becoming grainlike, the flakes lightly pricked his greased face. The wind escalated to perhaps twenty miles an hour, and its song was a mournful... --This text refers to the mass_market edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00A7ZJRPM
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Headline; New Ed edition (December 6, 2012)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 6, 2012
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2618 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 371 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,690,046 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #120 in Polar Regions Sports
- #138 in Polar Regions Travel
- #438 in Artic Polar Region Travel Guides

Customer Reviews:
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Dean Koontz

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Dean Koontz, the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers, lives in Southern California with his wife, Gerda, their golden retriever, Elsa, and the enduring spirits of their goldens, Trixie and Anna.

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4.4 out of 5

1,182 global ratings

5 star		61%
4 star		22%
3 star		11%
2 star		3%
1 star		2%

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Grey bird lady

Not his usual genre

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 1, 2022

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I thoroughly enjoyed this departure from Koontz usual style and genre. It reminded me throughout of an Alistair McClain novel , and was gratified to read in the afterword that this was, in fact, the author’s intent. But I prefer his usual style and content.
I am glad, however, that he has laid off the preaching of religion in subsequent years!

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Kindle Customer

Best to be read on a hot day

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 7, 2022

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Due to the brazen marketing techniques of short articles as books on Kindle and the repetitive substance of his latest works, I had thrown Koontz into the dustbin. I'm glad I took a chance on this book as I enjoyed reading it. The story moved slowly to me until about the 65% mark, then it moved right along. Upon discovering it is a revamped early work, I was not surprised.

One person found this helpful

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Captain Ron

Suspend the laws of physics

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 3, 2023

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The entire premise, actions, results, and everything to do with reality on the ocean and in the arctic is so wrong it's inconceivable this book was ever written. The author knows nothing about any of the subjects depicted in this fantasy novel. He didn't bother to check with any arctic explorers, submariners, scuba divers or even a simple boat captain about how reality works in these environments. Nearly every chapter had me laughing out loud. Worse than the worse Dirk Pitt novel ever and that's a pretty high bar for silliness.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 14, 2022

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I love this book so much. I could see everything written in my minds eye. A couple of scenes were so vivid in my imagination. This was my first read by Koontz and can’t wait to read more of his works.

One person found this helpful

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Jackie

Wow--what a surprise!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 17, 2003

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First of all, I'm a great Koontz fan. He is a superlative writer, and this early book--updated by the author--is an example of his extraordinary talent. FEW writers can combine great adventure and plot WITH excellent characterization. Koontz is a master of doing just this.
Icebound is a departure from Koontz's horror genre. This is strictly a techno-thriller. The action is nonstop--never a dull moment, and all very, very well done. It is about a group of scientists who are carrying out an assignment in the arctic...very believable scenario, I might add. As a result of severe weather storm conditions and sub-oceanic quakes, a large chunk of ice breaks off and they find themselves stranded on an iceberg upon which they had implanted explosives scheduled to go off in 12 hours. There are no American ships that can rescue them because of their distance and the severe weather. Only a Russian sub on a clandestine mission is close enough and has the ability to possibly rescue the team of scientists.
The stories of the men, especially the submarine captain, make you really care about the outcome. Although Koontz, in his afterword, is humble enough to diminish his technological detail as compared with a Tom Clancy, I found the whole thing so real that I was there! I love submarine adventures and to me, this numbers with the best of them.
Noteworthy is the graphic detail of what it must be like to work in such an extreme environment. The descriptions of the arctic and the weather conditions are awesome. Even the death scene where one man dies through drowning is so realistic I could imagine vividly what it felt like to die this way.
On top of the natural perils they face, there is a one twisted mind with them who is obsessively determined to commit murder. This portion of the story is also very well executed.
In short (I should have said this some paragraphs back!), I can find nothing negative to say about this story or writing style. I read it at breakneck speed because it was so riveting. I heartily recommend this book to not only Koontz fans but to anyone who enjoys a techno-thriller.
If you're looking only for a supernatural horror story, this is not the ticket. But...if you love Koontz's immense talent and want to read an exciting thriller, have at it!

84 people found this helpful

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Atmospheric and transportive!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 21, 2022

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Definitely not your usual Dean Koontz, but such an atmospheric, transportive read! Trust me, you’ll actually felt cold while reading it. Trapped, cold, on a verge of a disaster, with a psychopath in your group’s midst—it just doesn’t get any more compelling that this. I consumed it in a matter of a couple of days without noticing. Thank you, Mr. Koontz, for reissuing these stories and sharing them with us!

One person found this helpful

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constance harter

Full of action & suspense!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 11, 2022

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First book I ever read by Dean Koontz and it is not a horror book. It is an action packed, suspenseful thriller where a group of scientists get trapped on a floating iceberg. Massive winter storm prevents rescue by ship or plane and of course, one of the scientists is a psychotic killer but which one is it?! Very enjoyable read with an exciting ending that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

One person found this helpful

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CJ Fox

Intense

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 24, 2022

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This one kept me on the edge of my seat until the very end. I really wasn't sure how it would end. As usual, it was great!

One person found this helpful

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Sir Benedict Godfrey

Bound to give you chills

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 19, 2021

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I normally associate Koontz as a horror writer, but this is more of a mystery thriller. A great read set in the vast landscape of the article, Koontz really captures the atmosphere.

I would say it's pretty original, with a good set of characters with different backgrounds, but all fit for arctic exploration.

Great read from a brilliant writer.

suzie

Chilling!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 24, 2019

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This is one of those stories that you can't believe what's happening, however it is happening and all you can do is keep reading in the slim chance that hope will win over despair. Get ready for a tense unstoppable read....

2 people found this helpful

S. JOHNSON

A glimpse into the very near future!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 4, 2018

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I’m still reading this book but I can say it’s a page turner, and in light of recent news coverage about drought conditions in South Africa and the possibility of using icebergs to help ease the situation, the storyline is prophetic!

One person found this helpful

Rachel K.

Not his best work

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 25, 2020

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I love DK n it pains me to give him anything but a five star..this book just didn't do it for me...had a good concept but was rather boring..

Gary from Barry

Too cold for me!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 6, 2010

Verified Purchase

Never been disappointed with a Dean Koontz book and this is no exception!
This book is quite literally one of those books that 'Once you start to read it you can't put it down!'
From the very start and right to the very end this story has you gripped by the ... well, you know!
Recommended to all Dean Koontz fans and those who are undecided!

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