A chill ran down Linda’s back that had nothing to do with the weather. Through the green optics of her night vision binoculars, Wilson/George Station had an eerie feel unlike anything she had ever seen. Blowing wisps of snow took on the shapes of earthbound spirits doomed to haunt this desolate place.
“What do you think?” Linda asked to break herself out of the dark visions.
Mark turned to her. “A couple of days ago, I thought I was on the set of Apocalypse Now. Now I feel like I’m staring at the base from The Thing.”
“Interesting observation, but not what I’m talking about.”
“I’d say no one’s home,” Linc said.
“Looks like it to me.” Linda stuffed her binoculars back in her bag. “Let’s go, and stay low.”
Her arctic clothing was doing its job of keeping out the cold, but there was nothing she could do about the knot tightening in her stomach. The sense of foreboding built with each slow pace toward the station. Something bad had happened here, she felt, something very bad.
There were no tracks around the base, meaning nothing had moved here since the storm, though it was possible someone had come right before or during it. Linc climbed the stairs at the entrance, his assault rifle at the ready. Mark moved into position next to him, and Linda carefully reached for the handle. It pulled outward, revealing a dim vestibule beyond. The main entry door into the facility was ajar, meaning whatever latent heat that might have been trapped by the station’s thick coating of insulation had long since dissipated. There was no hope of any of the scientists surviving such prolonged exposure.
Linda indicated that Linc take point. The former SEAL nodded and peered through the station’s door. He recoiled slightly, then turned.
He mouthed, This ain’t good.
Linda moved up to his side and looked for herself. The room was in shambles. Clothing was strewn across the floor. Lockers had been emptied and overturned. A bench where workers once donned their boots had been flipped onto an object that truly held her attention. It was the body of a woman, turned blue from the cold. She was wearing a hoarfrost death mask, tiny icicles that clung to her skin and made her eyes opaque. What was worse was the blood, a pool of it frozen solid on the floor under her. Her chest was covered in it, and streaks and splashes decorated the walls.
“Gunshot?” Linda whispered after taking off her face shield.
“Knife,” Linc grunted.
“Who?”
“Dunno.” He swept his weapon’s light around the space, checking each square foot, before stepping into the room. Linda and Mark entered at his side.
It took ten tension-fraught minutes to confirm that everyone at the station was dead. There were thirteen bodies in total. All of them showed similar signs of a gruesome death. Most had been stabbed and lay in hardened lakes of blood. A couple showed blunt force trauma, as if someone had taken a baseball bat to them. One of them showed defensive breaks to the arms—he had clearly put up a fight. The bones were splintered. Another looked like he’d been shot with a large-bore gun, though Linda had been assured that there were no firearms at the base. In fact there were none on the entire continent.
“Someone’s missing,” Linda told them. “Wilson/George had a winter staff of fourteen.”
“It’s gotta be our killer,” Mark said.
“I’ll go check the vehicle shed,” Linc said. “How many snowcats should there be?”
“Two, and two snowmobiles.”
A few minutes later, Linda was searching through a desk drawer when Mark called out to her from another module. His voice made her jump. To say the research station and its grisly inhabitants gave her the creeps was putting it mildly. The hair on her arms had yet to stand down. She found him in one of the small crew’s rooms, his light trained on more bloody smears on the wall. It took her a second to realize the lines weren’t random. It was writing.
“What does that mean?”
Mark read it aloud, “ ‘Mime Goering for crow Nicole.’ ”
“Was someone saying they were killed by Hermann Göring?”
“I don’t think so,” Mark said absently.
“It doesn’t make any sense. No one stationed here was named Nicole. I checked their roster.”
Murph didn’t reply. His lips moved silently as he read the bizarre sentence again and again.
“What are you thinking?” Linda asked, as the seconds dragged out to a minute.
“Whose room was this?”
“I’m not sure.” They looked around and found a book with “Property of Andrew Gangle” written on the flyleaf.
“Who was he?”
“I think a tech. A grad student, if I recall.”
“He’s also our killer, and confessed before he carried out the murders. He was also very sick.”
“No kidding. Hello? Thirteen slashed-up bodies. He was sick, all right.”
“I mean ill. He had aphasia.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a speech disorder where the victim can’t process language properly. It’s usually caused by a stroke or brain injury, or it can progress as a result of a tumor, Parkinson’s, or Alzheimer’s.”
“And you’re able to figure this out how?”
“There was a game I used to play with some neuroscience grad students back at MIT. We’d make up sentences as if we had aphasia and challenge the others to decipher them.”
“You didn’t go on many dates, did you?”
Mark ignored her jab. “We usually had to give a clue, like a theme to the sentence, otherwise it would be impossible to work it out. The clue here was the killings, the murder, okay.”
“Sure, but what does ‘Mime Goering for crow Nicole’ have to do with murder?”
“What do you call a group of crows?”
“I don’t know, a flock?”
“A murder,” Mark said with a triumphant gleam. For someone who was always the smartest person in the room, he still enjoyed showing off his intellect. “A group of crows is called a murder. In Gangle’s brain, the two words—‘murder’ and ‘crow’—were synonymous.”
“So then we’re looking for some Nazi other than Göring?”
“No. Aphasia doesn’t work like that. The connections in the brain are messed up. It could be words that sound alike or words that describe objects that go together or words that reminded Gangle of something out of his past.”
“Oh, so Mime Goering sort of sounds like ‘I’m going.’ ”
“Exactly. ‘I’m going to murder.’ Gangle wrote the word ‘I’m going “for” murder’ instead of ‘to.’ I’m thinking in his brain, two is half of four. Switch numbers with prepositions and you get ‘I’m going to murder’ instead of ‘I’m going for murder’.”
“Okay, smart guy, what’s up with Nicole?”
Mark threw her a cocky grin. “That was the easiest part of all. Nicole Kidman stared in a horror movie called The Others.”
“ ‘I’m going to kill the others,’ ” Linda said, stringing together the complete translation. “Wait, does aphasia make you go nuts?”
“Not usually. I think the underlying illness that caused his aphasia also caused him to turn against his crewmates.”
“Like what?”
“You’d have to ask Doc Huxley. I only know about the condition because of the word game I used to play.”
There was a sudden sharp bang that made both of them jump.
“Linda, Murph, we got company,” Linc’s baritone echoed throughout the entire base.
Both grabbed up their assault rifles from where they’d laid them on the bed and rushed out of Andy Gangle’s disturbing bedroom. They met Linc in the rec hall.
“What did you find?”
“Some weird stuff, but not now. There’s a snowcat heading our way from the south. That’s where the Argentines have their closest research base, right?”
“Yeah,” Linda replied. “Maybe thirty miles down the coast.”
“I saw it when I was on my way
back. We’ve got less than a minute.”
“Everyone, outside.”
“No, Linda. There isn’t enough cover.” Concern etched Linc’s face. “They’d see us, no problem.”
“Okay, find a place to hide, and be quiet. Let’s just hope they’re doing a little recce and not planning on setting up housekeeping. If you’re discovered, come out with guns blazing.”
“What if these are just scientists checking on the station?” Mark asked. It was a reasonable question.
“Then they would have shown up here a week ago like our government had asked. Now, go!”
The trio split up. Linda returned to Andy Gangle’s room. The ceiling was acoustical tile made of a cardboardlike material hanging from metal support tracks. As limber as a monkey, she hoisted herself onto a dresser and lifted one of the tiles with the barrel of her gun. There was a three-foot crawl space between the ceiling and the dome’s insulated roof. She set her gun onto the ceiling and boosted herself up. Her heavy clothing made it an almost impossible job, but by twisting her hips and kicking her legs she managed to lever her upper body through the opening.
She heard the front door crash open and someone calling out in Spanish. To her ears, it sounded like shouted commands rather than inquiring hails.
She slithered her legs up into the crawl space and carefully set the thin tile back to its original position. There was an insulated Flexi-tube nearby connected to a ceiling grate that was used to feed warm air into the room. Linda pulled the silvery tube off the grate and peered downward. She had a pretty good bird’s-eye view.
The adrenaline that shot through her system when she heard Linc’s shouted warning was wearing off fast, and she became aware of the cold again. She didn’t have to contend with any wind, but the crawl space was the ambient thirty-plus degrees below zero. Her face was numb, and her fingertips were starting to lose sensation despite the heavy mittens. Keeping still was the worst thing possible for her body right now, but it was exactly what she had to do.
More bursts of guttural Spanish sounded below. She closed her eyes, imagining soldiers scouting the base as she and her team had just done. What would they make of the massacre? Would they even care?
A man wearing a white arctic uniform and carrying a large pistol suddenly entered the bedroom. He wore a mask much like the one Linda had sported, so she could not see his features. Like Mark, he stared at the bloody writing on the wall.
It happened so fast, there was nothing Linda could do to stop it. A drop of clear fluid dripped from her nose and pattered against the man’s shoulder. He brushed at it without turning his head and made to leave and continue his search.
As soon as he stepped out of the room, Linda was in motion. Like a spider keeping to its web, she moved hand and foot along the tile ceiling’s support rails. They weren’t meant to take the weight of a fully grown person, and she was afraid the wires that kept them in place would snap.
There came a sudden eruption of gunfire. The tile where she’d been a moment earlier exploded in a fine powder and fell down into the bedroom. Two more shots boomed out and two more tiles disintegrated. Seeps of weak sunlight filtered through the holes the bullets had torn through the outer roof.
Linda used the sound of the blasts, and the momentary deafness sure to accompany them, to slide over a larger trunk line for the base’s ventilation system. This tube was more than big enough to hide her. The safety on her rifle was off.
She knew not to hold her breath but to let it come slow and even. With her heart racing, she needed oxygen. The roof above her snapped into sharp focus under the beam of a flashlight.
The Argentine had realized something liquid had dripped on his shoulder, but with the base so cold any fluid would be frozen solid. He had become suspicious.
Breathe, Linda, breathe. He can’t see you, and he’s too big to crawl up here.
Ten of the tensest seconds of her life went by. Ten seconds that she knew he could fire a shot into the ventilation hose for the fun of it and put a round through her head.
There came the sounds of another man entering the room—heavy footfalls and a shouted question. A terse conversation followed, and suddenly the light went away, and she could tell the men had left the room below.
She willed her body to relax and ever so gently sniffled.
That would have beat all, Linda thought. Killed because of a runny nose. This was one story she knew she’d keep to herself. She buried her face in her parka’s fur-lined hood and prepared to wait out the Argentine search party for as long as it took.
FIFTEEN
CABRILLO WAITED FOR THE WINCH TO START HAULING him up, but nothing happened. Then he realized that wasn’t true, more of the line was coming down the shaft and forming an ever-enlargening loop just below where he hovered in the water. Max had hit the wrong button. Juan tried to hail him over the comm link but received no reply. Hanley had gone off alone to deal with the Argentine threat. And in his haste had trapped Juan in the Treasure Pit.
The prudent thing to do would be to surface according to the dive tables he’d memorized decades ago and wait for Max to return. But Juan wasn’t one to let opportunity go to waste, so he inverted himself and swam back for the bottom. There was no sense leaving until he was positive he’d missed nothing.
He examined the niche first, going so far as to press himself into it to see if it activated any kind of device. The chiseled stone around him remained innocuous. He sank lower still. The silt he’d kicked up earlier had settled back to the bottom. He cleared away an area where the wall met the floor. And something caught his attention. He pulled his dive knife from the sheath strapped to his calf and ran it along the seam. The tip vanished into a tiny gap between the floor and wall. He tried again at another spot and found the same thing.
Three more attempts convinced him that the floor of the Treasure Pit was fitted like a plug. There was something deeper in the earth, something buried below this false bottom.
He thought for a moment. There had to be a way to get there. The Ronishes had figured it out. Cabrillo swam a slow circuit of the floor, his dive light shining on the joint. It was in a corner. A stone was wedged tightly between the floor and a small irregularity projecting from the wall.
Juan didn’t touch it. Instead, he pulled his knees up to his chest and thrust them down onto the floor. The impact sent pain shooting up from his heels but also made the entire floor of the pit bobble ever so slightly. He glanced back up at the niche.
Clever, he thought. Very, very clever.
He returned to the rock wedge and got himself ready. He had no idea how much time he had, but he assumed he’d have to be quick. Reaching out a hand, he pulled the stone free, then finned for the grotto as fast as he could. Where a second ago all he could hear was the sound of his breathing, the pit was suddenly filled with the scrape of stone against stone.
The bottom of the chamber was an enormous float, kept in place by the wedge. Juan threw himself into the niche just as the silt-covered floor reached it. He pressed himself as far back as possible. The pit’s designers hadn’t had bulky scuba tanks, so the fit was tight. He watched in awe as the floor rose higher and higher. It climbed past his knees, then waist, and continued upward. It wasn’t so buoyant that it raced for the surface, but rather it ascended at a stately pace.
He realized that his fiber-optic cable was trapped between the float and the wall, and said a silent prayer that it wouldn’t get cut. No sooner had he thought it than the frayed end drifted down over him, the plastic abraded away. A second later, the loose end of his lifeline drifted past, too.
He had no idea how the float would stop but he figured it must, otherwise the Ronish brothers would have perished down here seventy years ago.
One mystery was solved when he got his first look at the side of the giant float. The top layer was just a thin veneer of slate while the rest of it was metal. When he tapped it, it rang hollow. The metal had withstood centuries of immersion in salt water because th
e designer had covered it in a layer of fine gold flake. Gold never corrodes, and could protect the metal float for centuries.
There were marks in the gold, thin lines cut through it as if someone had scraped some away with a knife. He imagined it had been one of the Ronish boys thinking the whole drum was made of gold only to see it was just a patina not even a millimeter thick. Where the knife had left scars, Juan could see that the float was made of bronze. While this metal resisted corrosion better than steel, he figured in another couple of decades the sea would find a way to eat through the scar. The hollow float would fill with water, and the trap would never work again.
Cabrillo estimated the drum was ten feet tall, and when the bottom of it finally passed over his head it stopped in line with the top of the niche. It had to have hit another small projection from the shaft wall that he had overlooked on his way down. He marveled at the engineering it took to make this work.
He swam out of the niche and looked up. There was a handle on the underside of the float. He grabbed it and tugged. The buoyancy had been so perfectly calculated that he was able to pull the enormous contraption downward a bit. He knew he could get out by tying his lead weight belt to the handle and letting the float settle back to the bottom while he waited in the niche. He assumed that’s what the Ronishes had done, only their weight had dropped away. He descended past where the bottom of the shaft had been and sank lower still.
In the exact center of the real floor of the Treasure Pit he found a pile of rocks from the beach. The Ronish brothers’ counterweight. The bag that had once held them had long since been dissolved by the Pacific’s salt water. The other discovery Juan made was far more intriguing. There was a low tunnel off the main vertical shaft.
Cabrillo entered it, his tanks tapping on the ceiling because the fit was so tight. The tunnel angled up sharply, forcing him to pause several times in order to let the excess nitrogen dissolve out of his system. He checked his air supply. If he didn’t dawdle, he’d be okay.