“We found coordinates in Harald Kruger’s notes. These coordinates pin right here.”
He touched a spot on the map.
Then he declared:
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is a historic moment! You are the first people since the end of the Second World War to see not only the location of the German station on this map, but also its exact layout. I expect to have located the entrance to it tomorrow afternoon.”
No one made a sound. The wind outside had tapered off in the middle of Miller’s speech. All eyes were on the map.
During the night, Ted Cooper had regained some of his spirits, if he lost them at some point before, that was. He started clapping. It sounded dry as his hands were stamping together. Perhaps on account of the dry air, it did sound like knocking two stones together.
“Bravo, bravo, splendid,” he sang.
No one joined him.
Frank Miller invited the camp to rest until the storm subsided. He glanced at Olivia and Peter, he nodded at Ted Cooper. Itay Friedman unhooked the maps and rolled them up.
Ted Cooper asked Peter Williams, “Did you give Miller that map?”
Olivia said she did.
“Against the wishes of a dead man,” Cooper sneered.
Olivia frowned, “Miller is worth several billion dollars, Professor Cooper. I could have given it to you if you were so much as a good friend when Peter needed you.”
“Whoa.” Cooper shrunk back. “Easy Ms. Olivia, mind your words.”
When they raised their heads again, Miller had vanished. Ted Cooper left the camp shortly too, letting in a draft so strong it shook the tent. Some snow blew in too.
“You shouldn’t have said that, Olivia,” Peter said.
Olivia ignored him; she watched Itay Friedman. The bodyguard had finished packing the map stand and was putting away the case containing the maps.
Olivia shot a look at Peter. “Why did Miller not tell the crew Harald was dead?”
“He needs us.”
“Sure.”
Olivia started recording.
Itay Friedman watched her from the corner of his eye.
—
The Combat Exercise Protocol required a segmented conclusion. The ship with the lowest ranking officer took the lead, followed by the next in line. Each ship would lead approximately five nautical miles.
That was almost ten thousand miles between one ship and another. And that puts him in the rear.
It was enough for Admiral Anton Huebner.
“Set course to twenty knots,” Admiral Huebner commanded.
His exec transmitted the order. The ship dropped to half its former speed. Soon the officers ahead will wonder why the admiral had dropped speed. They’d call in to inquire if there was a problem.
His was a plan with crucial stages and this was just the beginning. His exec beside him observed with grim attention. The ship hummed with half power, the crew went about in wonder. Should he provide an explanation? Will they still follow him? The officers were trained patriots; like their admiral, they would go down with the flag.
But today, what he did, he did for himself and his name, not country.
“Vasquez?” the admiral barked.
The man rarely called his officers by their names. He was an officer first, human second. But for the first time since he could recall, the exec heard the man call his name. Instinctively, the young man knew his admiral was about to ask him to do something out of the ordinary.
“Yes sir.”
“New course,” Huebner said.
The exec did what he was trained to do—receive an order and relay it down the line.
Admiral Anton Huebner dipped his hand in his pocket. When he removed it a piece of paper followed it. With set jaws like concrete and eyes like black hot coals, he gave the order that would change his life forever, and those of his officers.
“Set course to 55569– 09257, 653478– 973-539.”
Vasquez made the call with shaking hands and a steady voice.
“All coms down, make a hard turn, left port. Now!”
It had begun, and no one was asking where they were headed.
—
Sunlight streamed in through a small patch in the window. The tent was covered with a heavy layer of snow, making the ordinarily 24.5 weigh more than 30 kilos. Now that everyone shared a common objective, noted Olivia, a better disposition had descended on the camp.
Frank Miller had come in sometime in the night. Olivia had fallen asleep waiting to note his arrival. Now she felt that there was a gap in her chronicle. Frank Miller was a principal character in her narrative.
In the middle of it all, Olivia had battled her urge for alcohol all night, waking up several times, dry-mouthed and jittery. Like a junkie in need of a fix. She had eyed Nicolai's flask stuck in his hand while he snored. Olivia had only managed then to catch a little sleep.
A male voice sang a raucous rendition of a Russian folk song. The noise filtered into the tent through the open door. Olivia awoke to find Peter’s face inches from his. She roused him.
Cold, dry air hit her face outside. They were standing in a meter of snow. When she turned back the only sign that there was a tent there was when someone opened the door. The tent was covered in snow.
“Guys,” someone called from behind the tent. “Guys, come on. You all need to see this.”
It was Anabia Nassif. Olivia followed the rest of the men around the tent. Nassif was standing before a satellite dish half-buried in the snow. Only the dish wasn’t its spherical shape anymore. Now it was a mangled cauliflower.
“Aw shit,” said Liam Murphy.
The singing voice approached the group. It was Nicolai. He carried two boxes with him. “What is the matter?” he asked as he joined the ponderous group.
Victor Borodin pointed at the banged satellite. “Communication is shot down.”
Frank Miller pushed by Olivia and stopped short. His mouth opened slowly but no words came.
“Do you think the storm..?” Liam Murphy suggested.
“We can’t say,” Miller answered, “but it seems…”
He bent down to examine the device, turning it around. He shook his head. When he rose up again there was a distant look in his eyes that Olivia couldn’t read. He gazed out over the group at the surrounding snow. The hill behind the camp was almost invisible as it was covered as well.
“We have to move now,” the billionaire said finally.
—
Within an hour, the tent had collapsed into foldable components behind Nicolai. Miller’s hovercraft took the lead. The coast lay on the right and sprawled in front of the expedition was endless whiteness.
“Don’t be deceived by the snow,” Miller hollered. “We are much closer to the site than it seems. The whiteness is the snow's optical illusion, like it is in the desert.”
On they forged, the crafts making deep furrows in the snow, leaving behind luminous ice below.
A quarter of a mile later, Miller spread Harald Kruger’s map before him. It flapped as the wind tried to snatch it. Itay Friedman checked his compass, slowly raised his hand.
“Here!” Friedman yelled.
Frank Miller yelled, “Halt! Halt!”
The hovercrafts all screeched to a stop. Right in front of the group was a flat terrain of ice. With Friedman’s compass before him and a magnetic device he had picked up from the station in Novolazarevskaya, Miller stumbled out ahead. Steam and vapor spurt from his mouth as he puffed on. His heart beat fast, expectant eyes followed his progress.
He stopped suddenly.
He turned around slowly. Pointing at the spot where he stood he said, “Here, there’s something here.”
Itay Friedman jumped off the hovercraft with a snow spade. “Come on, everyone. Get a spade if you can, let’s dig that spot. Now, now, now!”
—
“With all due respect, sir. Either you tell us what is going on, or we—”
“Or what!?” Vasquez spa
t.
He knew this would happen. Someone would grow balls and ask questions, and that person was the first lieutenant, a sharp Sicilian soldier from a navy family. His name was Juelz. A few officers had already gathered behind him.
“We have radioed command, Vasquez,” he said. “The admiral is mad.”
“Yes, I am.”
Vasquez turned to see Admiral Anton Huebner behind him. He had changed his uniform to dress grey. He had a pistol in his hand.
“My exec here has tried to speak for me. I shall do the talking by myself. As of this moment this ship is on a mission. My mission.” Huebner’s eyes sparked. “If any officer is not in support, you have three options: jump off the side of this ship, take a bullet, or just do your job.”
Uncertain eyes wavered from the admiral to the exec and back. Juelz trembled.
“What do you say, Juelz?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Sir.”
“Good. Now, arm yourselves. We are going for a little walk on the ice soon.” To Vasquez the admiral said, “We are not going to be alone, I have friends in the army joining us.”
On the gangway, as they made their way back up to their stations, Vasquez asked, “Where are we going, Admiral?”
“To stop World War Three.”
—
Olivia’s breath was coming out of her in gusts of excitement. She couldn’t believe her eyes. She was talking rapidly into her recorder, kicking snow off what appeared to be concrete underneath the thin layer of ice.
The others were doing the same. Men with small spades walking about the perimeter that has now been marked with yellow tape like a crime scene.
“And in a sense, it was a crime scene of sorts,” said Olivia into her recorder.
“Come on, let’s find the entrance,” Miller said to Friedman. “There’s got to be a way in around here.”
Friedman started digging in a spot some meters away from Olivia. The other men joined them. Olivia took photos of them. She discovered after taking the photo that Ted Cooper was not in it.
Ted was at the other angle of the square. He was on his knees, scraping with his hands, his spade lying beside him on the snow. Ted had rolled his sleeves up, his hairy hands working furiously.
Olivia took pictures of him. He heard the click and looked her way.
He waved her over.
Olivia walked over to him on shaking legs. She could not believe much of what was going on.
“Here, this place, I think we could go in through here,” he puffed. “Come on, take photos of me digging.”
Olivia shook her head. “Seriously?”
“Come on, this is my moment.”
After a moment, when Olivia thought the man was a man in a boy's body, she took the photos. Ted Cooper opened up a hole in the snow. He picked his spade and started using the pointed edge to chip at the ice.
Beneath the ice Olivia could make the outline of what appeared to be, not concrete like what the others have found, but the head of a hatch. If the ice could be broken, the hatch could be opened and then from there they could gain entrance.
In order to be sure, she held Ted’s digging hand. “Wait, do you know what that is?”
“No, what?”
Olivia brought her face closer. She saw clearer when Ted’s shadow blocked the sun.
“It’s what I thought.” She got up, dusted snow from her trousers. “It’s a hatch.”
“I know.”
Ted started cutting with his spade.
“Guys, Ted’s found something!” Olivia called out.
—
They marked out what amounted to two times the size of a regular football pitch.
Peter Williams and Anabia Nassif dug the left long side of the perimeter, while Victor Borodin and Liam Murphy continued on the right side where they had been digging.
Itay Friedman and Frank Miller set up sensors in the measured distance in the middle of the perimeter, to discern depth and material.
Ted Cooper had now broken thought the ice and was working the lock on the hatch. It was rusty with age, oxidation, and stiff from lack of use.
Olivia Newton got her notes and wrote drafts of her paper. She took relevant photos as the men worked. Nicolai had commenced his singing of home in mother Russia. He drank vodka from a clear bottle.
Olivia asked him about the song he was singing. And then she eyed the bottle of vodka.
Glassy-eyed, the Russian said it was a song from the war. Russians in the concentration camps Oswiecim, as the Germans called the place in Poland, sang it in memory of the news of who got taken.
“It is an old song from wartime,” Nicolai explained. “They call it the ‘Juden Song.’”
Olivia wrote the words:
“Long may you live, O Juden
Though death your hand has taken,
And love the world’s forsaken,
Still long may you live, O Juden.”
That was when it happened.
Ted Cooper got the turning cap of the hatch to move only about a quarter of an inch and it stopped. He reasoned that since the metal was crusty up here, it may also be flaky underneath.
He decided perhaps the smart thing to do was weaken the joint by forcing friction on it. He climbed on the hatch and began jumping up and down on it. It made a muffled sound that ended in choked echoes down under.
The others glanced up from their digging, gave the professor a hasty glance, and went back to work.
Nicolai had started singing another song, eyes closed, his mouth twisted in a doleful serenade. Olivia watched Peter. Slowly, she started walking towards the man.
“Stop,” he said.
Ted Cooper was sweating though the temperature had dropped below -40°C since they arrived at the site. He jumped higher every time and he tried to double his force with every thump.
“Ted?”
Olivia dropped her notebook, her hands reaching out as if to grab the professor. The echoing sound had deepened but the man didn’t notice it. Olivia could, though she could not understand how she knew, that any second now, Ted Cooper was going to cave in with it.
“Ted, stop!”
Ted Cooper’s eyes bulged in surprise as the hatch caved in under his feet. His mouth froze in disbelief as the ice broke under him in a circle of about two meters wide. He turned his head just in time to see Olivia flying through the air, her hands seeking his flailing arm.
Their hands grasped each other in the air and they fell.
The ice around Ted Cooper’s feet fell away. His feet dangled over a dark hole. Falling debris and ice made flat, distant sounds at the bottom where they shattered.
“Oh shit! Oh shit!” Ted screamed.
Olivia cried out too. “Help!!”
Someone grabbed her by the waist as she felt herself slip off the ice towards the gaping hole, pulled by Ted’s weight. It was Nicolai. He too called for help. The others quickly grabbed hold and a human rope was formed.
Ted and Olivia were dragged to safety.
“Oh Jesus.” Ted trembled.
—
Somewhere on the west coast of the ice shelf of Antarctica, another expedition had arrived.
Ten snowmobiles painted green and brown, the color of elite Argentine special forces. At two miles from their target the leading snowmobile stopped. Special visors went on the masked face of one of the soldiers, he being the leader.
“Target is two miles, sir,” he spoke in Spanish into a talkie.
A voice squawked in clear English, “This mission is a go, approach at your own discretion. Stop trespassers on contact. Detain until advised otherwise.”
“Copy that, Admiral.”
The soldier twirled his right index finger in the air. The regiment moved again.
—
Admiral Anton Huebner made sure there was no one in sight before receiving the call. He discharged his exec and went down to his quarters around the same time that Ted Cooper’s feet were flailing over the open mouth of the hole he had
created in the ice.
Everything was timed.
There was a knock on his door.
“Come in.”
The door opened and the exec was there. “Admiral, we have a radio communication from OttoII, sir. They request an explanation for our delay, sir.”
Huebner tucked his talkie away and directed the exec to move. In the coms room the officers there stared at the admiral in confusion.
“Turn off all coms,” he ordered. “We are going radio silent.”
Then he turned to the exec.
“We are watching these waters for a while.”
The exec saluted. The admiral looked at the four officers in the communication room. They understood what was expected of them and they saluted. But when Vasquez went down to the ship's quarters there was trouble.
A mutiny was underway, led by lieutenant Juelz.
—
It ended in blood, as quietly as it began.
Admiral Huebner was ready for it. He shot Juelz himself and his supporters laid their weapons aside.
“This is for country and humanity,” said Huebner.
4
The cave-in spot was part of the roof of the main laboratory that was weak from rust and the weight of the ice on it. Ted’s stumbling had made it weaker, thus the collapse.
Ted recovered fast from his accident. Olivia took more photos of the hole in the ice.
Miller ordered that tarpaulin be cut and spread on the edge of the hole. It was so dark down there that even the sun’s rays could not penetrate. However, a little way down, it became clear that this was a spherical hole, and there were metal rungs on the side.
“How are we going to get down there?”
Liam Murphy said, “I guess that’s why I’m here.”
Liam proceeded to prepare harness and hooks, such that mountaineers use. He made points in the ice around the hole and drove huge, long pins into the points. Then he tied ship ropes on them.
Hunt for the Holy Grail Page 11
