Until Thy Wrath Be Past Read Free

would do that?
    I try to push the door to one side, using both hands. I’ve dropped the line and the torch; they’ve both sunk slowly to the bottom of the lake. I can’t shift the door. My heavy breathing echoes like thunder in my ears as I tug at the door in vain. It dawns on me that the joker is standing on top of it. Someone is standing on the door.
    Swimming away from the door, I take out my diving knife. Start hacking a hole in the ice. It’s hard. The water makes it difficult to move my hand quickly enough. There’s no strength in my thrusts. Twisting the knife, I stab at the ice. At last I break through. It’s easier now. I rotate the knife round the hole, scraping away at the sides. It’s getting bigger.
    Simon swims through the wreck as carefully as he can. He has passed the radio operator’s seat behind the cockpit and continued into the cabin. He thinks he feels a slight tug on the line. He wonders if it is Wilma signalling to him. But he had said two tugs to come up. What if her airline is blocked? Worried now, he decides to swim out of the wreck. It is impossible to see anything in any case. The air and his own movements have stirred up so much mud that if he holds out his arm and shines his torch on it, he cannot even see his hand. It is like swimming through green soup. They might as well go back up.
    He pulls at the line tied to his weight belt so it will tighten and allow him to follow it out. But it does not tighten. He hauls in more and more of the line, metre after metre. Eventually he is holding the end of the line in his hand. Wilma is supposed to be holding on to it. And the end is supposed to be fastened to the wooden cross over the hole in the ice.
    Fear hits Simon’s solar plexus like a snakebite. No line to follow. How is he going to find his way back to the cockpit window? He can’t see a bloody thing. How is he going to get out?
    He swims until he bumps into a wall. Groping around, he then starts swimming in the opposite direction, no longer knowing which is backwards, forwards, sideways.
    He bumps into something that is not fastened down. Something that floats off to one side. He shines his torch. Sees nothing. Gets it into his head that it is a body. Flounders around. Swims away. Quickly, quickly. Soon he will be swimming through masses of limbs floating about. Arms and legs that have come away from bodies. He must try to calm down, but where is he? How long has he been down here? How much longer will his air last?
    He has no concept of up or down, but does not realize this. Fumbles for one of the seats – if he can grab onto one, he will be able to work his way forward through the passenger cabin, but he is groping around on the ceiling, so he does not find a seat.
    He swims back and forth in an aimless panic. Up and down. He cannot see a thing. Nothing at all. The line attached to his belt keeps catching, on cargo hooks on the floor, on a seat that has been wrenched from its moorings, on a loose safety belt. Everywhere. Then he begins swimming into the line. Gets tangled up in it. It is all over the inside of the plane like a spider’s web. He cannot find his way out. He dies in there.
    I’ve managed to hack a hole in the ice with my diving knife. I’m battling to make it bigger. Stabbing away. Working the knife round the edge. When it’s as big as my hand, I check the pressure metre. Twenty bars left.
    I mustn’t breathe so rapidly. I must calm down. But I can’t get out. I’m trapped under the ice.
    I stick my hand up through the hole. I do it without thinking. My hand reaches out for help of its own accord.
    Someone up there grips my hand firmly. At first I’m relieved to know that someone is helping me. That someone is going to pull me out of the water. Save me.
    Then whoever it is really does start pulling on my hand. Bending it backwards and forwards. And then it dawns on me that I’m a prisoner. I’m not going anywhere. I try to jerk my hand free, but only succeed in