Hoffman broke in. “But you own Stygian Enterprises, Mr. Adler. It is a decision that you are capable of making.”
“I am only one among many, Doctor,” Adler responded coldly, staring. “I do not control the company. I would need the approval of the Executive Council before I could terminate this experiment.”
Hoffman released a puff of pipe smoke. “So for the sake of procedure, you are willing to put the lives of over a hundred men and women at risk? Listen to me! We have created on this island and under your supervision”—he pointed with the pipe—”the most terrifying beast to ever walk the face of the earth! I personally do not believe that anything equal to it has ever existed. Just think, man! What if this creature should escape the Containment Chamber? I tell you quite literally that no one inside this facility would survive. It would kill us all. Easily. And if it somehow made it to the surface of the island, the men and women of the support crew would be caught completely off guard. And they would certainly be attacked because the creature’s food consumption level is dramatically accelerated, commensurate with its metabolism. It requires at least a thousand pounds of meat every two hours in order to survive and—’
“I’m familiar with the statistics, Dr. Hoffman,” Adler interrupted. “And I don’t want any of you to misunderstand me. I also place a high value on human life.” His tone hardened. “But we have a job to do, gentlemen. And without the final two tests to measure this creature’s ability to survive heavy weapons fire and its ability to defeat humans in a military conflict, this experiment remains a failure.” His teeth gleamed. “And if failure is the curtain that closes this facility, gentlemen, I can assure you there will be no more funding whatsoever for Electromagnetic Chromosomal Research. Because this billion-dollar exercise, fully funded by Stygian Enterprises, will be viewed as a complete waste of expenditures.” He nodded. “I can assure you of that.”
A discordant silence blanketed the bunker. Frank noticed that the overhead lights had ceased blinking. Fresh air was flowing through the ducts. The room was cooler. Systems were on-line.
“Two more tests,” Adler nodded. “Two more tests and then we’ll have the data we require. Colonel Chesterton, you may have this support foreman repair the electrical line. And I will make arrangements through the company for filling the Containment Cavern corridors with cement. It shall be done as quickly as possible.”
Chesterton stared. “I think I should take care of the cement, Mr. Adler. It’s part of my—”
“Yes, Colonel,” Adler gestured sharply, “it is part of your job. But the United States Government does not fund this experiment. And cementing the Containment Cavern will cost Stygian a great deal of money, so it is something that I will have to authorize. And then you can supervise the procedures.” He paused. “Is this acceptable to your demands?”
A pause, and Chesterton nodded.
“Very well then. It’s decided.” Adler rose, gathering his files. “We shall make safety adjustments, and this creature shall live until we complete the final two tests. Our respective obligations shall be fulfilled; and then, and only then, gentlemen, will we receive authorization to destroy this creature and perform an autopsy.”
No one spoke as Adler crossed the room. But when he reached the door, he turned abruptly back. His face, rigidly cold and implacable, allowed no room for misunderstanding.
“Leviathan lives, gentlemen. It lives until it’s time for it to die.”
Chapter 3
Connor smiled as he watched Chesterton’s approach through the storm window of the warehouse. Walking stiffly, Chesterton crossed the wide expanse of wind-frozen tundra until he quickly opened the door and closed it even more quickly behind him. He stood for a moment in the warmth, as if he’d been shocked. He had a look of severe impatience.
Connor laughed out loud. “What’d your people blow up this time, Chesterton?”
“We’ve got a big problem, Connor,” he replied, walking forward. “There’s a 1,000-amp line that’s been burned up. We’ve got circuit breakers blown all over the place.”
Chesterton glanced at a bright-eyed four-year-old boy sitting contently on the bulldozer’s tread. Barely three feet tall, the child was contentedly consuming a large candy bar, fingers and face coated with chocolate.
“Well,” the Colonel smiled, “how are you doing today, Jordan?”
Jordan nodded politely. “Fine.”
“Is that a good candy bar?”
“Yes, sir. Daddy gave it to me.”
“Well, it sure looks like a good candy bar,” Chesterton said, leaning forward. “Think you might share a bite with me?”
Jordan paused, staring seriously. Then he stretched out the half-consumed candy bar in a chocolate-covered hand and Chesterton laughed easily. “That’s all right, partner.” He patted the pocket of his coat, whispering, “I’ve got a few of ‘em in my coat.”
Jordan received the news without blinking and returned to his snack while Connor picked up a rag, wiping hydraulic fluid from his hands. “How did your people burn up a 1,000-amp line, Chesterton?”
“You could call me Colonel, Connor.”
“I could call you a lot of things, Chesterton,” Connor responded with a slight smile. “But before we get personal, why don’t you tell me how your people burned up a 1,000-amp line?”
“Good grief, Connor, I don’t know. Do I look like an electrician? It was overloaded. It surged. It did whatever electrical lines do when they blow. I think they were trying some kind of experiment with lasers or something and they just blew the thing up.”
Connor dropped the rag over an engine line and gathered a handful of tools. “Did you see it blow?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then you were a lucky man.”
Chesterton leaned back, staring. “I figured that much, Connor.” He paused. “But now that these preliminaries are over, can we get on with fixing the thing? We’re on a schedule.”
Dropping tools in a leather pouch, Connor nodded. “All right. I’ll send a crew down in a few minutes.”
“No.” Chesterton shook his head. “We can’t use a regular crew on this. It’s a highly classified area and everybody below is already nervous about it. They expressly said they don’t want a crew poking around the damage. You’ll have to handle this one by yourself.”
Something in Chesterton’s voice made Connor turn. Staring for a long moment, he leaned a shoulder against the bulldozer. “So I need to do it myself, huh?”
“That’s right.”
Studious, Connor glanced again at Jordan and the boy looked up, continuing to munch happily. With a laugh Connor reached down to tousle the light brown hair. But when he looked back to Chesterton, his face hardened; something focused sharply between the two of them.
Chesterton blinked.
“I’ve never seen a 1,000-amp line burn up before, Chesterton. I’ve never even heard of a 1,000-amp line burning up.” Connor paused. “Just how much power was it pulling?”
“Connor,” Chesterton replied, harder, “I have no idea how much power that thing was pulling. But I assume that it was a lot. And now, if you don’t mind, we need to get on with fixing the thing.”
Raising his chin, Connor gestured to a large, two-story stone building behind them. “Did you know that that building was built ten years ago when Norway tried to turn this place into a loading port? And all they used was 440 wiring. That’s all they needed.”
“I know about Grimwald Island, Connor. And I’m not sure whether the history of this place is relevant to what we need to be doing.”
With a shrug, Connor picked up the leather electrician’s belt. “I just wasn’t sure if you knew as much about this island as I do, Chesterton. I wasn’t sure if you knew—”
“Connor,” Chesterton broke in, “believe me, I know everything there is to know about Grimwald Island.” He paused. “Thi
s place is one hundred fifty square miles of land with three hundred miles of coastland. It’s located ninety miles east-northeast from Iceland and approximately fifty miles inside the Arctic Circle. It’s got a forty-mile gap between the south coast and the north coast and a sixty-mile gap between the east and west coasts. It’s mostly mountain but it’s got some valleys and four freshwater lakes. The highest peak is 7,792 meters, and it’s got a wheelbarrow load of arctic bear, wolf, elk, and seal that make for real good hunting. But we don’t have any time to hunt any of them because we’re always working. And nobody’s ever managed to colonize this place because the winters are too hard and the ground can’t keep the cattle or sheep alive. There’s nobody here now but us.”
“And Thor,” replied Connor.
Chesterton stared. “Who?”
“Thor.”
Confusion gave way to amazement.
“He lives in the tower on the other side of the island.”
Chesterton was already nodding. “Yeah, yeah, all right. I forgot about him. The big guy. But what does any of this have to do with anything? I came up here with a simple request”—he shook his head to express wonder at how a simple request could get so sidetracked—”and you start asking me about the history of Grimwald Island and some old lighthouse keeper and—”
“A line of 440 can handle a lot of power,” Connor said, locking eyes. “But a 1,000-amp line can handle a whole lot more, Chesterton. More power than you can probably even imagine. It would take an unbelievable power surge to burn one up.”
“Yeah?” Chesterton replied. He hesitated a long time, abruptly still. “What kind of power are we talking? A million volts, maybe?” He stared strangely. “Maybe more?”
“It’d take a lightning bolt, Chesterton.” Connor noticed a faint trembling in Chesterton’s hands. His face seemed suddenly pale. “That’s the kind of power we’re talking about. The kind of power that can vaporize steel.”
“You still don’t have total clearance,” Chesterton said as they stepped into the elevator. “So just go by the drill, Connor. Don’t mess with anything that’s not involved in the job.”
Without replying, Connor casually held the ribs of the cage. Maybe it was Chesterton’s overly rigid control or maybe it was something else, but Connor somehow already knew the answer to his question.
“So where’s the problem at?”
“It’s at the Observation Room located beside the Containment Cavern.” Chesterton was staring into the darkness beneath them. “We’ve got a line burned out.”
Connor smiled. “Yeah. You said that.”
Chesterton glanced up, expressionless, and turned away. Connor studied him for a moment more but found nothing in the disciplined face and tried to shift his mind to something else. He watched the white chalk walls of the elevator shaft sliding past them and remembered how this cavern formation was created.
Created shortly after volcanic activity thrust Grimwald Island through the crust of the Norwegian Sea to tower high in the Arctic Circle, the sprawling maze-cave was almost the only one like it in this region of the world. Not formed solely as a result of volcanic activity, it had been burned out of the island’s heart by hydrogen sulfide gas rising from nearby oil reserves. As the hydrogen sulfide reached the ocean floor, it reacted with oxygen, creating sulfuric acid that ate through the limestone of Grimwald Island to form a complex labyrinth of tunnels, over twenty miles of them.
The cavern itself was a far-ranging complex of passages and cathedral openings deep inside the island, beneath sea level. Although some of the tunnels were merely narrow crevices, most were immensely wide, even wide enough to accommodate heavy equipment, trucks, dozers, whatever was needed for extensive construction. And Connor knew there were at least twenty major caverns, the deepest and largest cavern being over 4,000 feet across with a 600-foot ceiling.
One of the chambers housed the living quarters for the thirty supervisory and science personnel who managed the research project. Another was a barracks for military personnel, while still another was a command center that housed military operations. And one cavern held an elaborate supercomputer known as GEO, a powerful multiprocessing creation of artificial intelligence that oversaw all aspects of the secret research operation.
Another cavern, deemed the power plant, was dedicated to an electrical generator system that linked the underground laboratory with a powerful Norwegian power cable laid across the Atlantic floor. That was where Connor spent most of his time, breaking down the incredible voltage of the line so the power could be used in substations located in the rest of the facility.
The entire cavern was a maze of high-voltage wires. But the most troublesome section was the Containment Cavern, a place Connor had rarely seen since his early days on Grimwald. Although Connor didn’t know exactly what the cathedral-sized chamber was designed to contain, he knew there was a sophisticated computer room adjoining it. And he knew that the cavern itself was heavily reinforced by niobium-titanium fire walls.
It also housed a strangely designed sphere—more like one sphere balanced concentrically inside another—wired to create an electromagnetic pulse above a 500,000-volt cooling platform.
Shrouded in secrecy, the sphere had been delivered during a secret midnight landing of a C-130, and Connor wasn’t surprised that they would be having more problems with the mystery machine. When it arrived almost a year ago, he had installed it himself, quickly and efficiently completing circuit tests, wiring, and backup systems. Connor had never asked any questions about the purpose of the sphere. But in his bones, he remembered, it had always troubled him. And not because of its strange power demands or unexplainable electromagnetic design. But because its purpose had, from the very first, been cloaked in such nervous silence, and remained so even today.
A nagging concern began to tug at Connor as they descended deeper into the cavern, sloping at a sharper and sharper angle. And he wondered why, in the last six months, they had not needed him to repair the troublesome thing. Perhaps, the thought came to him with disturbing intensity, because it had been functioning perfectly.
Without revealing his mind, Connor wondered what they might have done with the sphere. But after a moment he knew that he’d manage only the wildest uneducated guess. He had no idea what it was truly designed to accomplish, had never possessed an idea, even when he installed it. He was an electrician, a welder. He knew metals and construction and had a general understanding of just about anything mechanical. But he wasn’t a scientist. And whatever the thing was, it was definitely high science.
With a frown Connor gazed at the passing, prodigious formations of calcite, their huge rounded columns rising toward the surface. And little by little he realized the air was falling utterly still. It was something he had never gotten used to.
Always, it seemed to him, the cave was like some supernatural subterranean netherworld with air so motionless it felt like outer space might feel, if space had a constant temperature of 71 degrees and a humidity level of 100 percent.
No one could endure the thick, humid heat of the cavern without the strategically positioned large-capacity dehumidifiers that made the place livable, machines that Connor and his men also maintained. But because of the unbearable working conditions for welding and wiring, pain-soaking exercises that made the cavern an endless marathon of mental toughness, Connor’s crew had hatefully dubbed it “the Inferno.”
Though originally created by acidic gas, the Inferno was void now of corrosive fumes. Whatever colossal power had created the underground cavern was claimed by another time. But ventilators had been installed to ensure that the atmosphere remained non-poisonous, though the ventilators couldn’t begin to match the cave’s natural force of expiration. For at the cavern entrance, over 1,000 feet above them, wind howled from the tunnel to the surface at over seventy miles per hour. It was nature’s way of stabilizing the cavern’s internal atmospheric
pressure with the surface.
Connor recalled how a company called Stygian Enterprises had purchased the site several years ago for private research. And yet, though Stygian owned the facility and the cavern, the complex itself was designated as a United States Arctic Research Station and operated under the protection of the United States Army.
Once construction had been completed in the cavern, Connor arrived to begin a three-year stint as foreman of the civilian support crew. Although he didn’t know the exact purpose of the laboratory, he didn’t care. He only knew that Grimwald Ice Station was a semi-military installation and that the tax-free hourly salary was more than twenty times what he could have earned in the States. And for the money—money that would change the life of his family forever—Connor had chosen to briefly endure the arctic climate. Then one month after he arrived, a team of twenty-odd scientists and supervisory personnel landed to inhabit the cavern’s living quarters.
Connor suspected that they had initiated classified research with the sphere, but he didn’t ask questions. He didn’t know, and he didn’t want to know. He was determined to do his job and finish his three-year contract as easily as possible. Then he’d leave this godforsaken place and buy a nice house and a good-sized chunk of land where he could live in peace. Maybe Montana, he thought often enough. Or Wyoming. Or maybe he would return to Kentucky, where he was born. But it would be a place where his family could live safely. Yet the thought of safety only reminded Connor again of Grimwald, and how this dark and dismal place had never truly known any peace at all. And probably never would.
Norway’s doomed attempt to colonize the island had failed miserably, partly because of Grimwald’s harsh weather and inhospitable terrain, but also because of the superstitious dread Norwegians and Icelanders reserved for it. The Scandinavians passionately labeled the island as haunted and cursed and with unbending stubbornness refused to settle it.
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