Snake swallowed.
Barnaby stared at him coldly. ‘It’s what I would have done.’
At that moment, a young SAS corporal came up behind Barnaby. ‘Sir.’
‘Yes, Corporal.’
‘Sir, the charges are being set around the perimeter.’
‘At what range?’
‘Five hundred yards, sir. In an arc, like you ordered.’
‘Good,’ Barnaby said. Soon after he had arrived at Wilkes, Barnaby had ordered that eighteen Tritonal charges be placed in a semi-circular arc on the landward side of the station. They were to have a special purpose. A very special purpose.
Barnaby said, ‘Corporal, how long do you expect the laying of the charges to take?’
‘Allowing for the drilling, sir, I’d say another hour.’
‘Fine,’ Barnaby said. ‘When they’re all set, bring me the detonation unit.’
‘Yes, sir,’ the corporal said. ‘Oh, and sir, there’s one other thing.’
‘Yes.’
‘Sir, the prisoners who fell from the American hovercraft have just arrived. What should we do with them?’
Barnaby had already been told via radio of the soldier and the little girl who had fallen from one of the escaping hovercrafts and been picked up by his men.
‘Take the girl to her quarters. Keep her there,’ Barnaby said. ‘Bring the Marine to me.’
Libby Gant was standing in a dark corner of the underground cavern, alone. The beam of her flashlight illuminated a small horizontal fissure in the ice wall.
The fissure was at ground level, at the point where the ice wall met the floor. It was about two feet high and stretched horizontally for about six feet.
Gant crouched on her hands and knees and peered down into the horizontal fissure. She saw nothing but darkness. There did, however, appear to be empty space in there –
‘Hey!’
Gant turned.
She saw Sarah Hensleigh standing underneath the spacecraft at the other end of the cavern, over by the pool, waving her arms.
‘Hey!’ Hensleigh called excitedly. ‘Come and have a look at this.’
Gant walked over to the big black spaceship. Montana was already there when she arrived. Santa Cruz was standing guard over by the pool.
‘What do you think of that?’ Hensleigh pointed at something on the underbelly of the ship.
Gant saw it, frowned. It looked like a keypad of some sort.
Twelve buttons, arranged in three columns, four buttons per column, with what looked like a rectangular screen at the top of it.
But there was something very odd about this ‘keypad’.
There were no symbols on any of the keys.
Like the rest of the ship, the keypad was completely and utterly black – black buttons on a black background.
And then Gant saw that there was one button which did have markings on it. The second button in the middle column had a small red circle printed on it.
‘What do you think it is?’ Montana asked.
‘Who knows,’ Hensleigh said.
‘It could be a way to open it up,’ Gant suggested.
Hensleigh snorted. ‘Not likely. Do you know any aliens that use keypads?’
‘I don’t know any aliens.’ Gant said. ‘Do you?’
Hensleigh ignored her. ‘There’s no telling what it is,’ she said. ‘It could be an ignition key, or a weapons system . . .’
‘Or a self-destruct mechanism,’ Gant said dryly.
‘I say we just press it and find out,’ Hensleigh said.
‘But which button do we press?’ Montana said.
‘The one with the circle on it, I suppose.’
Montana pursed his lips in thought. He was the senior man down here. It was his call. He looked to Gant.
Gant shook her head. ‘We’re not here to see what it does. We’re just here to hold it until the cavalry arrives.’
Montana looked to Santa Cruz, who had come over from the pool to look.
‘Press it,’ Cruz said. ‘If I’m gonna buy it for this fuckin’ thing, I wanna see what’s inside it.’
Montana turned back to face Sarah Hensleigh. She nodded. ‘Let’s see what it does.’
At last, Montana said, ‘Okay. Press it.’
Sarah Hensleigh nodded and took a deep breath. Then she stretched out with her hand and pressed the button with the red circle on it.
At first, nothing happened.
Sarah Hensleigh lifted her finger off the keypad and looked up at the spaceship above her, as if she expected it to take off or something.
Suddenly, there came a soft harmonic tone, and the screen above the keypad began to glow.
And then another second later, a sequence of symbols appeared across the screen.
‘Oh, shit,’ Montana said.
‘What the . . .’ Hensleigh said.
The screen read:
24157817 – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
ENTER AUTHORIZED ENTRY CODE
‘Numbers?’ Montana said.
‘English?’ Sarah Hensleigh said. ‘What the hell is this thing?’
For her part, Gant just shook her head. And as she walked away from the ‘spaceship’ she began to laugh softly.
Schofield and Renshaw lay flat on their backs on the cold hard surface of the iceberg, listening to the rhythmic sound of the waves crashing against the ice cliffs two hundred yards away.
They just lay there for a while, catching their breath.
After a few minutes, Schofield reached around with his hand until he found a small black unit attached to his waist. He pressed a button on the unit.
Beep!
‘What are you doing?’ Renshaw said, not looking up.
‘Initialising my GPS unit,’ Schofield said, still lying on his back. ‘It’s a satellite location system that uses the Navistar Global Positioning System. Every Marine has one, for use in emergencies. You know, so people can find us if we end up in a life raft out in the middle of the ocean. I figured this wasn’t too much different.’ Schofield sighed. ‘In a dark room on a ship somewhere, a flashing red dot just appeared on someone’s screen.’
‘Does that mean they’re gonna come for us?’ Renshaw asked.
‘We’ll be long dead by the time anybody gets here. But they’ll at least be able to find our bodies.’
Renshaw said, ‘Oh, great. It’s nice to see my tax dollars at work. You guys build a satellite location system so that they can find my body. Wow.’
Schofield turned to look at Renshaw. ‘At least I can leave a note attached to our bodies telling whoever finds us exactly what happened at the station. At least then they’ll know the truth. About the French, about Barnaby.’
Renshaw said, ‘Well, that makes me feel better.’
Schofield propped himself up on his elbow and looked out toward the cliffs. He saw the mountainous waves of the Southern Ocean smash against them and explode in spectacular showers of white.
Then, for the first time, Schofield took in the iceberg around him.
It was big. In fact, it was so big it didn’t even rock in the heavy seas. Above the surface, the whole thing must have been at least a mile long. Schofield couldn’t even begin to guess how large it was under the surface.
It was roughly rectangular in shape with an enormous white peak at one end. The rest of the iceberg was uneven and cratered. It looked to Schofield like a ghostly white moonscape.
Schofield stood up.
‘Where are you going?’ Renshaw said, not getting up. ‘You gonna walk home?’
‘We should keep moving,’ Schofield said. ‘Keep warm for as long as we can, and while we’re at it, see if there’s some way we can get back to the coast.’
Renshaw shook his head and reluctantly got to his feet and followed Schofield out across the uneven surface of the iceberg.
They trudged for almost twenty minutes before they realised they were going in the wrong direction.
The i
ceberg stopped abruptly and they saw nothing but sea stretching away to the west. The nearest iceberg in that direction was three miles away. Schofield had hoped they might be able to ‘iceberg-hop’ back to the coast. It wouldn’t happen in this direction.
They headed back the way they had come.
They made very slow going. Icicles began to form around Renshaw’s eyebrows and lips.
‘You know anything about icebergs?’ Schofield asked as they walked.
‘A little.’
‘Educate me.’
Renshaw said, ‘I read in a magazine once that the latest trend among assholes with too much money is “iceberg climbing”. Apparently it’s quite popular among mountaineer-types. The only problem is that eventually your mountain melts.’
‘I was thinking about something a little more scientific,’ Schofield said. ‘Like, do they ever float back in toward the coast?’
‘No,’ Renshaw said. ‘Ice in Antarctica moves from the middle out. Not the other way round. Icebergs like this one break off from coastal ice shelves. That’s why the cliffs are so sheer. The ice overhanging the ocean gets too heavy and it just breaks off, becoming,’ – Renshaw waved his hand at the iceberg around them – ‘an iceberg.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Schofield said, as he trudged across the ice.
‘You get some big ones, though. Really big ones. Icebergs bigger than whole countries. I mean, hell, take this baby. Look how big she is. Most large icebergs live for about ten or twelve years before they ultimately melt and die. But given the right weather conditions – and if the iceberg were big enough to begin with – an iceberg like this could float around the Antarctic for up to thirty years.’
‘Great,’ Schofield said dryly.
They came to the spot where Renshaw had hauled Schofield out of the water after Schofield had destroyed the French submarine.
‘Nice,’ Renshaw said. ‘Forty minutes of walking and we’re back where we started.’
They started up a small incline and came to the spot where the French submarine’s torpedo had hit the iceberg.
It looked like a giant had taken a huge bite out of the side of the iceberg.
The large landslide of ice that had just fallen away under the weight of the explosion had left a huge semi-circular hole in the side of the iceberg. Sheer, vertical walls stretched down to the water ten metres below.
Schofield looked down into the hole, saw the calm water lapping up against the edge of the enormous iceberg.
‘We’re gonna die out here, aren’t we?’ Renshaw said from behind him.
‘I’m not.’
‘You’re not?’
‘That’s my station and I’m gonna get it back.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Renshaw looked out to sea. ‘And do you have any idea as to exactly how you’re gonna do that?’
Schofield didn’t answer him.
Renshaw turned around. ‘I said, how in God’s name do you plan to get your station back when we’re stuck out here!’
But Schofield wasn’t listening.
He was crouched down on his haunches, looking down into the semi-circular hole the torpedo had carved into the iceberg.
Renshaw came over and stood behind him.
‘What are you looking at?’
‘Salvation,’ Schofield said. ‘Maybe.’
Renshaw followed Schofield’s gaze down into the semi-circular hole in the iceberg and he saw it immediately.
There, embedded in the ice a couple of metres down the sheer, vertical cliff-face, Renshaw saw the distinctive square outline of a frozen glass window.
Schofield tied their two parkas together and using the two jackets as a rope, got Renshaw to lower him down to the window set into the ice cliff.
Schofield hung high above the water, in front of the frozen glass window. He looked at it closely.
It was definitely man-made.
And old, too. The wooden panes of the window were weathered and scarred, bleached to a pale grey. Schofield wondered how long the window – and whatever structure it was attached to – had been buried inside this massive iceberg.
The way Schofield figured it, the blast from the submarine’s torpedo must have dislodged the ten metres or so of ice in front of the window, exposing it. The window and whatever it was attached to, had been buried deep within the iceberg.
Schofield took a deep breath. Then he kicked hard, shattering the window.
He saw darkness beyond the now open window, a small cave of some sort.
Schofield pulled a flashlight from his hip pocket and with a final look up at Renshaw, swung himself in through the window and into the belly of the iceberg.
The first thing Schofield saw through the beam of his flashlight were the upside-down words:
‘HAPPY NEW YEAR 1969!
WELCOME TO LITTLE AMERICA IV!’
The words were written on a banner of some sort. It hung limply – upside-down – across the cave in which Schofield now stood.
Only it wasn’t a cave.
It was a room of some sort – a small wooden-walled room, completely buried within the ice.
And everything was upside-down. The whole room was inverted.
It was a strange sensation, everything being upside-down. It took Schofield a second to realise that he was actually standing on the ceiling of the under-ground room.
He looked off to his right. There seemed to be several other rooms branching off from this one –
‘Hello down there!’ Renshaw’s voice sailed in from outside.
Schofield poked his head out through the window in the ice cliff.
‘Hey, what’s happening? I’m freezing my nuts off out here,’ Renshaw said.
‘Have you ever heard of Little America IV?’ Schofield asked.
‘Yeah,’ Renshaw said. ‘It was one of our research stations back in the sixties. Floated out to sea in ’69 when the Ross Ice Shelf calved an iceberg nine thousand square kilometres big. The Navy looked for it for three months but they never found it.’
‘Well, guess what,’ Schofield said. ‘We just did.’
Cloaked in three thick woollen blankets, James Renshaw sat down on the floor of the main room of Little America IV. He rubbed his hands together vigorously, blew on them with his warm breath, while Schofield – still dressed in his waterlogged fatigues – rummaged through the other rooms of the darkened, inverted station. Neither man dared to eat any of the thirty-year-old canned food that lay strewn about the floor.
‘As I remember it, Little America IV was kind of like Wilkes,’ Renshaw said. ‘It was a resource exploration station, built into the coastal ice shelf. They were after off-shore oil deposits buried in the continental shelf. They used to lower collectors all the way to the bottom to see if the soil down there contained –’
‘Why is everything upside-down?’ Schofield asked from the next room.
‘That’s easy. When this iceberg calved, it must have flipped over.’
‘The iceberg flipped over?’
‘It’s been known to happen,’ Renshaw said. ‘And if you think about it, it makes sense. An iceberg is top heavy when it breaks off the mainland, because all the ice that’s been living underwater has been slowly eroded over the years by the warmer seawater. So unless your iceberg is perfectly balanced when it breaks free from the mainland, the whole thing tips over.’
In the next room, Schofield was negotiating his way through piles of rusty, overturned junk. He stepped around a large, cylindrical cable-spooler that lay awkwardly on its side. Then he saw something.
‘How long did you say the Navy looked for this station?’ Schofield asked.
‘About three months.’
‘Was that a long time to look for a lost station?’
In the main room, Renshaw shrugged. ‘It was longer than usual. Why?’
Schofield came back in through the doorway. He was carrying some metal objects in his hands.
‘I think our boys were doing some things down here that they weren’t suppo
sed to,’ Schofield said, smiling.
He held up a piece of white cord. It looked to Renshaw like string that had been covered over with white powder.
‘Detonator cord,’ Schofield said, as he tied the white powdery cord in a loop around his wrist. ‘It’s used as a fuse for close-quarter explosives. That powdery stuff you see on it, that’s magnesium-sulfide. Magnesium-based detonator cords burn hot and fast – in fact, they burn so hot that they can cut clean through metal. It’s good stuff, we sometimes use it today.
‘And see this,’ Schofield held up a rusted, pressurised canister. ‘VX poison gas. And this’ – he held up another tube – ‘sarin.’
‘Sarin gas?’ Renshaw said. Even he knew what that was. Sarin gas was a chemical weapon. Renshaw recalled an incident in Japan in 1995, when a terrorist group had detonated a canister of sarin gas inside the Tokyo subway. Panic ensued. Several people were killed. ‘They had that stuff in the sixties?’ he asked.
‘Oh, yes.’
‘So you think this station was a chemical weapons facility?’ Renshaw asked.
‘I think so, yes.’
‘But why? Why test chemical weapons in Antarctica?’
‘Two reasons,’ Schofield said. ‘One: back home, we keep nearly all of our poison gas weapons in freezer storage, because most poison gases lose their toxicity at higher temperatures. So it makes sense to do your testing in a place that’s cold all year round.’
‘And the second reason?’
‘The second reason is a lot simpler,’ Schofield said, smiling at Renshaw. ‘Nobody’s looking.’
Schofield headed back into the next room. ‘In any case,’ he said as he disappeared behind the doorway, ‘none of that’s really much use to us right now. But they do have something else back here that might be helpful. In fact, I think it might just get us back in the game.’
‘What is it?’
‘This,’ Schofield said, as he reappeared in the doorway and pulled a dusty scuba tank out into view.
Schofield set to work calibrating the thirty-year-old scuba gear. Renshaw was tasked with cleaning out the breathing apparatus – the mouthpieces, the valves, the air hoses.