The Black Knight

by Dean Crawford

  Lieutenant Riggs pushed his point.

  ‘Something man-made, like a chemical leak?’

  Chandler stood up and nodded.

  ‘Something exactly like that,’ he agreed. ‘This cave could become highly poisonous at any time, and we know that it has broken close to the surface above us in recent months, perhaps recent weeks. If it floods again…’

  ‘We get the picture,’ Riggs cut in. ‘Keep moving.’

  Ethan followed Saunders as they picked their way forward through the tunnel, the glowing waters now illuminating their path as they advanced ever deeper into the glacier. Ethan knew that the water had to be flowing downhill to reach the ocean somewhere on the Antarctic coast, so technically they were going uphill. Thus, the immense mass of ice above them would likely be getting thicker with every step that they took. He had read somewhere that at its thickest the Antarctic ice sheet was three miles deep, all of it snow compacted until it became as hard as granite. The thought of the warm water weakening that immense mass of ice and bringing it down on the team, either crushing them instantly to death or trapping them to freeze for all eternity was too terrible to contemplate, so he put his head down and pushed on, Hannah just behind him.

  They walked for several more minutes until Saunders’ harsh voice snapped just loudly enough to be heard over the rushing water.

  ‘Enemy!’

  ***

  XXII

  Ethan’s response was almost as swift as that of the SEALS. In an instant he dropped into a crouch, his pistol appearing in his hand as he drew it and aimed alongside Saunders, who had dropped into a similar crouch and was holding his rifle tight into his shoulder and aiming down the tunnels. To Ethan’s surprise and delight he saw Hannah’s pistol just to the right of his head, the former FBI agent covering him and aiming in the same direction.

  The rest of the SEAL team had mirrored their actions, all eight of their rifles aiming over or around their civilian charges as they sought the enemy that Saunders had seen.

  Ethan peered into the shimmering blue depths ahead of them and saw a figure standing on the ledge, the clear shape of a rifle in his grasp. Ethan aimed at the figure as he heard Saunders challenge the man.

  ‘On your knees, put your weapon down now!’

  Ethan watched the figure, waiting for him to capitulate as he identified the soldiers massed before him, but the man was either suicidal or fearless for he did not move.

  ‘Last chance!’ Saunders snapped. ‘Down on the ground!’

  The command echoed above the freezing water rushing by them, rolling into the empty darkness, and was answered with silence. Ethan peered at the shadowy figure for a few moments longer and then Saunders fired a single shot.

  The crack of the rifle was ear shatteringly loud in the tunnel’s confines, and even in the faint bioluminescence of the blue water he saw the shot impact the man in the center of his chest with a sharp secondary crack and a brief flash of light.

  To his amazement, the figure did not move and Saunders lowered his rifle and looked over his shoulder, somewhat confused.

  ‘Sorry, trick of the light I guess.’

  Ethan frowned. ‘Had me fooled too.’

  It was Hannah who spoke up in the SEAL’s defense.

  ‘That’s no trick of the light, stay sharp.’

  The SEALS did not respond except to keep their weapons trained on the shadowy figure and begin advancing as one, edging their away around the scientists crouched on the path and moving toward the figure.

  Ethan moved into position behind them with Hannah alongside him as they crept forward and began to emerge onto a slender ledge that jutted out on a curve in the tunnel, where the water had once washed around a smooth bend and scoured from the ice a wider platform. Ethan lowered his pistol as he saw the SEALs relax, and then his jaw dropped as he realized what Saunders had seen.

  The light from the water was piercing the ice walls of the tunnel, creating an illusion of open air instead of the solid ice that confronted them. There, trapped within that ice was the shape of a man, a rifle held in his long dead hands. Ethan heard Hannah gasp as she noted the uniform the man was wearing.

  ‘That’s a German soldier!’

  Her exclamation echoed down the tunnel and within moments the scientists were hurrying to join them and staring at the frozen corpse. Ethan had recognized the distinctive shape of the German Wehrmacht helmet just a moment before Hannah, and then the gray uniform replete with collar insignia, the winged Swastika and belt kit the soldier had worn when he had died. Near his grasp was a pristine Sturmgewehr 44 rifle, suspended in the ice a few inches beyond his hands, which were outstretched as though trying to shield himself from something rushing toward him.

  Ethan could not help himself as he marveled at the perfect preservation of the body. The soldier’s face was contorted in pain and fear, his mouth wide open and his eyes squeezed shut, his head turned away from whatever had been threatening him. His skin had turned leathery and black, probably as the result of the freezing that had damaged his soft tissue at the cellular level but otherwise preserving his body as though he had died the previous day.

  ‘Remarkable,’ Chandler uttered as he managed to get a good look at the grisly frozen corpse. ‘Perfectly preserved, he must have been frozen shortly after death.’

  Lieutenant Riggs looked at the ice surrounding the body.

  ‘Looks like he was drowned and the water froze rapidly with him trapped inside it,’ he suggested.

  ‘Almost certainly correct,’ Chandler agreed, ‘as was my conjecture that this cave is susceptible to regular floods, the water freezing as soon as it stops flowing.’ The doctor looked at the curve in the tunnel and nodded to himself. ‘He drowns, is caught in this corner of the tunnel by a vortex of spinning water curling around on itself on the outside of the turn, and then when the tunnel is full of water it freezes, enveloping him forever.’

  Ethan looked at the water flowing past them and still glowing with its unnerving blue light.

  ‘Now the warm water has eroded some of the ice away and exposed him again,’ he said. ‘All the more reason to push on and at least this solves one mystery: there definitely were German soldiers up here during or after the Second World War.’

  ‘We must be close,’ Lieutenant Riggs agreed. ‘Del Toro, Sully, up front with Saunders, the rest of you back at the vanguard.’

  The SEALS deployed rapidly as Lieutenant Riggs positioned himself ahead of the scientists but just behind Ethan and Hannah as they advanced deeper into the tunnel. The glow from the water was beginning to fade now as the bioluminescent bacteria in the frigid water passed by. Ethan switched on his light once more and glanced over his shoulder to see the other-worldly glow fade away behind them, as though the headlight of some ghostly blue train were steaming away into the darkness.

  The depths of the tunnel ahead were plunged once more into absolute darkness, the harsh white beams of the flashlights cutting this way and that and passing through the clear ice close to the tunnel walls in shimmering shafts of dispersed light.

  Ethan trudged along behind the SEALs at the head of the team, and was lost in his thoughts of Lopez for what felt like several minutes. It was tough for him to be on deployment knowing that his partner of so many years remained in a hospital ward back in DC, as though somehow he were betraying her. He was so consumed by his thoughts of her that he barely heard the command echo down from the darkness ahead.

  ‘Stay alert.’

  Ethan looked up and saw ahead the three flashlights of the leading SEALs reflecting off something ahead of them that was not ice. He could hear the rush of the water still but now above it there was another sound, more violent, as though water were spilling from a great height and crashing down upon something and the sound of the impact dispersed across a great area.

  The noise of the water grew louder and he saw the flow of the subterranean river becoming more turbulent and disturbed, the black water roiling and swirling as it plunged i
nto the tunnel. Ahead, the beams of the SEAL’s flashlights suddenly stopped breaking up in the tunnel ice and he realized that they were walking out into a more open area, the sound of their footfalls changing despite the deep blackness.

  Ethan saw the tunnel open out into a vast cavern, the beam from his light vanishing into the gloom around them. To his right he could hear water thundering down and crashing into the floor of the cavern before flowing away down toward the tunnel itself, and suddenly he realized that he was walking not on ice but on a solid, uniform surface. He looked down as he heard the spikes on his boots crunch into crumbling asphalt.

  The SEALs slowed as Lieutenant Riggs pulled two flares from his belt kit and without hesitation pulled their caps and tossed them ahead of the team. The two flares arced through the air and burst into life with brilliant, fierce orange glows that illuminated the vast cavern in a flickering sunset hue.

  Ethan almost toppled sideways as he saw the huge cavern glowing in the light from the flares, the ceiling sloping down toward an immense fissure in the walls to his right where water crashed out from somewhere else in the glacier and flowed away toward the tunnel entrance across a vast asphalt dock.

  The ceiling looked as though it had partially collapsed, making the entire cavern appear lop-sided and putting Ethan and the team off balance until the second flare illuminated two long, low docks extending away from them, each filled with icy black water that shimmered like oil in the light from the flares. The two docks ran parallel to each other and ahead was an immense fortified building encased within the ice, walls of stone and steel sheened with frost that glistened in the light from the flares.

  ‘This is it,’ Chandler said in awe. ‘We found it.’

  Lieutenant Riggs looked at his scanner.

  ‘The signal is coming from inside, from beyond the dock,’ he said. ‘They must have had some kind of power source in there to maintain it for so long. This base must have been here for at least seventy years.’

  Ethan looked at the docks.

  ‘Submarine pens,’ he identified them. ‘This is how they must have built the base. That tunnel was here for decades, perhaps centuries, carved out by the warm water channel. The Nazis used it for access to the interior of the ice sheet and then built the base right under the ice where it would never be found.’

  Doctor Chandler nodded in agreement.

  ‘The volcanism of Mount Erebus has been ongoing for centuries, millennia perhaps. This chamber may have been a natural consequence of warm water passing through the glacier and excavating this cavern. The Germans could have monopolized on that and built this facility within the existing cavity.’

  Lieutenant Riggs surveyed the entrance to the base, massive steel doors left wide open, the interior as black as deep space and every bit as cold.

  ‘Let’s get going,’ he ordered. ‘We only have a few hours left.’

  A voice prevented any of them from moving as Trooper Del Toro crouched down by something on the asphalt nearby.

  ‘You might want to hang tight a moment,’ he said as he looked over his shoulder at them. ‘I don’t think we’re alone down here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Chandler asked. ‘Nothing significant could survive in this cavern, there simply aren’t sufficient resources.’

  ‘Then how do you explain this?’ Del Toro asked, and gestured to something lying on the asphalt at his feet.

  Chandler and the rest of the team edged their way closer, and Ethan realized what he was looking at. On the asphalt and contrasting starkly with the ice and water was a large mound of animal scat. Ethan stared at it for a moment before speaking.

  ‘There’s something alive down here.’

  Del Toro nodded

  ‘And it was here recently,’ he said, ‘because this scat hasn’t frozen yet. My guess is that whatever it is heard us coming long before we got here, especially after Saunders fired that shot.’ He looked into the blackened depths of the Nazi base. ‘It knows we’re here.’

  ***

  XXIII

  DIA Holding Cell

  Washington DC

  Doug Jarvis walked down the corridor of the holding cells with no less than eight armed men escorting him, all of them professional soldiers and DIA agents. Ahead, three security gates stood between them and the cells, of which there were just ten.

  The security guards accessed the gates one by one, always sealing the last behind them before entering the next, until Jarvis was admitted to the cells. Only one was occupied, a red light active above the cell door. He waited as the guards approached the door and shouted their commands.

  ‘Mitchell, step up to the door, hands behind your back!’

  Jarvis heard the shuffling of chains as Mitchell obeyed the commands, and through a hatch in the six-inch thick steel the guards manacled his wrists together before daring to open the cell door.

  Jarvis watched as they stood back and beckoned Mitchell out, the towering man shuffling into the corridor. Even in prison fatigues Mitchell still cut an impressive figure for his age, standing a head above the guards who were not themselves small men. Jarvis wondered how such a physically imposing individual could have remained hidden, allegedly dead, for so many decades.

  Mitchell turned to Jarvis, locking eyes with him as he stood in silence in the corridor and waited. Jarvis chose his words with care, uncertain of the assassin’s motives.

  ‘You turned yourself in,’ he said simply, ‘not what I would have expected from a lifelong servant of Majestic Twelve.’

  ‘Like I said,’ Mitchell rumbled in response, ‘things have changed.’

  ‘Haven’t they just,’ Jarvis said as he sauntered across to a heavily-barred window and perched on the ledge. ‘You’ve put me in an interesting position, Aaron. On the one hand I now have a captive who could tell me a great deal about Majestic Twelve, and on the other I have to ask myself what you have to gain by being here?’

  ‘Majestic Twelve sold me out,’ he replied. ‘They were willing to let me rot, and I wasn’t willing to trust that they would extricate me from the security max facility in which the FBI deposited me.’

  ‘And on whose orders do you believe you were incarcerated?’

  Mitchell’s sombre features cracked into a smile. ‘You know that’s not how this game works, Mister Jarvis.’

  ‘You’re well informed,’ Jarvis replied, ‘there aren’t many people outside of the DIA who know my name, which merely tells me that you know a great deal more besides and that you’re not in any position to negotiate terms of any kind.’

  ‘I didn’t come here to negotiate.’

  ‘Just as well,’ Jarvis said, ‘as we know damned well who put you in the security max, just as we know of the connection of various senior level FBI operatives to Majestic Twelve. Your employers’ little scheme is beginning to unwind, Mitchell, and your arrest and incarceration is just the beginning.’

  ‘The Antarctic is where it will end,’ Mitchell said, ‘and you don’t have long to put a stop to it.’

  Jarvis managed not to let his expression slip as he kept his gaze on Mitchell.

  ‘The Antarctic,’ he echoed, ‘and what would that have to do with Majestic Twelve?’

  ‘Like I said,’ Mitchell repeated, ‘that’s not how we play this game.’

  Jarvis looked at his shoes for a moment in thought before he replied.

  ‘You know, of course, that handing you over to the Feds would be a wonderful way of placing an operative inside the enemy on the pretence of defection?’

  Mitchell nodded.

  ‘Which was why I ensured that Lopez was not harmed,’ Mitchell replied. ‘I knew that as soon as I escaped from custody MJ-12 would initiate a clean-up mission to prevent me from gaining leverage to seek refuge with their enemies. That’s why they attacked Lopez when they did, and it was only good fortune that I got to her in time or I would not be standing here.’

  ‘Where would you be then?’

  ‘Forgotten,’ Mitchell replied. ‘
Even today, it’s possible to disappear completely if you really want to.’

  ‘Majestic Twelve would find you eventually,’ Jarvis countered.

  ‘Perhaps, but then that’s why I’m here. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. You help me to retire in peace and I’ll help you dismantle Majestic Twelve one piece at a time.’

  Jarvis weighed up the pros and cons of Mitchell’s likelihood of deception. This was a man who had once crushed another beneath a twenty ton shipping container in Dubai. He had killed, repeatedly, murdering Stanley Meyer and many others during the long course of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s mission to expose and destroy MJ-12, and now he was standing before Jarvis and offering his assistance.

  ‘You’re going to have to give me something to work with that I can verify and fast,’ Jarvis demanded. ‘I’m not about to open our doors to a paid killer on empty promises.’

  Mitchell nodded.

  ‘I wouldn’t expect you to, and besides, I have a personal reason to expose as many of MJ-12’s assets to you as possible at an early stage. I know that one of them personally was responsible for my incarceration in Colorado.’

  ‘Whom?’

  Mitchell took a breath.

  ‘Gordon LeMay,’ he replied finally, ‘Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He is the primary senior officer within the intelligence community currently in MJ-12’s pocket and responsible for…’