The Black Knight

by Dean Crawford

‘Where’s the fire?’ Riggs asked, standing up.

  Ethan reached the edge of the nearest submarine pen, and then he reached down onto the dock and pulled free a chunk of ice. He turned and lowered the ice into the water and watched as the rest of the team joined him on the dock.

  Ethan stared down at the chunk of ice in the water before him, and as he watched so it began drifting down toward the tunnel entrance. Hannah watched it go with him, and understood immediately.

  ‘The warm water channel isn’t in the fissure in the wall,’ she said. ‘It’s passing beneath the pens.’

  Ethan nodded, watching as the chunk of ice slowly began to melt before his eyes as it travelled south down the dock.

  ‘If Black Knight came through here, it went below the base. It’s somewhere down there,’ he said as he pointed toward the frigid black water.

  Lieutenant Riggs cursed as he peered down into the dock.

  ‘How the hell are we going to get it out?’

  Ethan was about to answer when another of Riggs’ men called out in a harsh whisper.

  ‘Enemy!’

  Ethan whirled to where he could see Del Toro and Saunders near the tunnel entrance, their weapons pointed down into the impenetrable darkness.

  There, just visible to the naked eye, Ethan could see the flickering of distant lights as the MJ-12 soldiers advanced toward them.

  ‘We’re running out of time,’ he said to Riggs.

  Another voice called out to Riggs from up on the command center.

  ‘Lieutenant? You’d better take a look at this!’

  ***

  XXVIII

  Ethan hurried up the stairwell in pursuit of Riggs as they rushed toward the command center. Riggs had placed two fresh SEALs near the tunnel entrance to relieve Saunders and Del Toro, ready to ambush the MJ-12 troops once they arrived, and now they dashed into the command center to see Sully beckoning them to follow.

  ‘This way.’

  Ethan followed the two soldiers down a narrow flight of steps that headed away from the main docks, descending down until they reached a steel door that had been burned open by the SEALs, the harsh odor of burning metal hanging in the air.

  Sully led them out onto a smaller, secondary dock, and this time the dock was not empty.

  Ethan slowed as he stared at the submersible moored alongside the dock, a metallic device that reminded him of a U-Boat except that it was only around twelve meters long, its black hull and red stencil markings looking cruel and dangerous in the minimal illumination offered by their flashlights.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ Riggs said, ‘it’s a Seehund.’

  ‘A what?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘It’s a German midget submarine,’ Riggs replied, ‘two man crew, two torpedoes. They were deployed toward the end of the war and sank a fair few vessels before Germany surrendered at the end of the conflict. They were also known as Type Twenty Seven U-Boats, and were based on a British design used in an attempt to sink the German battleship Tirpitz.’

  Ethan looked at the submarine, which had almost certainly been abandoned in the dock since the end of the war.

  ‘Is it serviceable?’ Ethan asked.

  Riggs looked the submarine over. ‘It’s floating, but I don’t know whether she’ll hold water once submerged.’

  Ethan saw that the submarine had a clear dome atop her bridge, allowing for visual inspection of her surroundings, and that her torpedo shoots were empty.

  ‘It’s too small to have come all the way down here from the North Atlantic,’ Ethan guessed. ‘That means it must have been brought here for a reason.’

  ‘The warm water channel,’ Riggs picked up on Ethan’s train of thought. ‘They built this base and planned to investigate the channel, and this submarine would be the only vessel that was small enough to do the job.’

  ‘And that’s not all,’ Sully added. ‘Take a look at this.’

  Sully led them back inside the base to a hatch that Ethan had not taken much notice of when they had walked in. Inside the door entrance was a large box-like structure suspended in mid-air within an underground chamber.

  ‘It’s an anechoic chamber,’ Sully explained, ‘although what the hell they’d have built one of these down here for I have no idea.’

  An anechoic chamber was a form of room that was isolated from exterior sound or electromagnetic radiation sources, preventing the reflection of wave phenomena. The chamber was supported slightly above the floor using tensile springs and surrounded on all sides by sound-proofing layers of anechoic tiles, a concrete shield and a full six inches of near vacuum-pressure air.

  Ethan stepped inside and looked around. ‘It’s quite small, no more than ten men.’

  His voice sounded dead, monotone, its vocal resonance lost within the room as though Ethan were listening to it underwater. He stepped out and walked with Riggs and Sully back to the Seehund in the rear dock.

  Ethan peered into the black water and then looked at Riggs.

  ‘If we want to recover Black Knight, we’re going to have to go down there. Do you think that this sub’ could bring it back?’

  Riggs was about to reply when Hannah burst into the dock.

  ‘They’re travelling up the tunnel toward us!’ she said urgently. ‘We need everybody in the pens, now!’

  Ethan ran with Riggs and Sully as they sprinted up the stairwell back toward the command post. Riggs posted the team’s sniper, Saunders, in the command center, looking down on the submarine pen entrance as he and Ethan hurried down onto the docks and across to where the ice cavern’s mouth extended into the blackness of the tunnel carving its way south through the deep glacier.

  Ethan let his eyes adjust to the gloom for a moment, and gradually he began to detect the distant flashes of light that drifted like ghosts through the pristine ice.

  ‘They’re still some way off,’ Doctor Chandler reported as he observed the slowly shifting lights. ‘The ice down here is so clear that some of the glow from their flashlights is making it this far. Incredible.’

  Riggs did not share the scientist’s enthusiasm for the lights as he crouched down and surveyed the walls of the tunnel.

  ‘Best thing we can do is bring the tunnel down on them,’ he said finally. ‘Set charges around the walls, work in darkness so they don’t detect either our flashlights or our night vision goggles.’

  Hannah frowned. ‘They can see the light from night vision goggles?’ she asked.

  ‘The goggles fire a laser beam to illuminate the darkness and capture reflected light artifacts to build a picture for the wearer,’ Riggs explained. ‘If somebody else happens to be wearing one, they can also see the laser beam although it’s invisible to the naked eye.’

  Sully, Del Toro and Riggs began unpacking explosive charges from their kit as Ethan eyed the tunnel.

  ‘If you blow this tunnel we lose our only way out of here,’ he pointed out. ‘Not to mention the fact that you might bring the rest of the cavern down with it.’

  Riggs unpacked one of the C4 charges and lodged it into the ice near the tunnel entrance as he replied.

  ‘We’re not isolated,’ he said. ‘The Navy knows we’re here and will send support. One way or the other, all we have to do is survive long enough to be located.’

  Ethan shot the tunnel another glance. ‘I’d rather they found us and rescued us rather than found us and dug our frozen corpses out of the ice.’

  ‘You all knew the risks,’ Riggs snapped back as he worked.

  ‘Reassuring,’ Hannah said as she peered into the gloom at the oncoming soldiers. ‘They’ll be here within the hour. It didn’t take us much longer than that to reach the base and they’re not encumbered with scientists.’

  As if on cue, one of the scientists burst from the base and hurried across the slippery ice to Doctor Chandler’s side.

  ‘You’ve got to see this!’ he insisted in a harsh whisper, conscious of the way sound might travel down the tunnel and alert their pursuers.

  �
��See what?’ Chandler asked.

  ‘The algae plumes,’ the scientist replied. ‘We’ve analyzed them and it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before. There’s new life down here.’

  Chandler turned slowly to look at his colleague. ‘New life?’

  ‘New life,’ the scientist confirmed. ‘Completely new. We could have used Amy Reece here.’

  Chandler stared at the younger man for a long moment and then turned to Lieutenant Riggs.

  ‘Lieutenant, you cannot blow the tunnel in now. There are new forms of life present in this cave system that demand greater study and…’

  ‘The tunnel’s going,’ Riggs snapped, cutting the old man off. ‘You won’t be able to study anything if you’re dead. Your call.’

  Chandler did not budge as he replied.

  ‘You don’t understand, Lieutenant. New life means that this glacier is a perfect preserve for…’

  ‘For anything that dies inside it,’ Riggs shot back. ‘You’re not here to study, doctor, only to advise us in any way possible on how to recover Black Knight. That’s all.’

  ‘But that’s what I’m saying!’ Chandler implored. ‘You cannot seal that tunnel because by doing so you risk trapping us inside a cavern that floods not occasionally but on a regular basis.’

  Ethan looked back at the base and suddenly he realized why the interior of the construction was filled with heavy blast doors.

  ‘It’s a submarine in itself,’ he said. ‘That’s why there are pressure doors all through it.’

  ‘Precisely!’ Chandler said. ‘There is a fresh water channel running through the glacier from somewhere to the north and it routinely floods this cavern system. That’s why we found the Nazi soldier pinned in the ice – he was one of the ones who probably didn’t make it back to the base during a lockdown.’

  Riggs looked at his fellow SEALs for a moment before he replied.

  ‘And how often does this chamber flood, do you think?’

  Chandler gestured with an oddly casual jab of his thumb to one side, at the pristine walls of the chamber.

  ‘Look at that ice,’ he said. ‘It’s mirror smooth due to the passage of warmer water polishing its surface on a regular basis. You remember those steps inside the tunnel, the ones that looked hand carved that were created by gradually receding flood water? They were each two or three inches deep – water receding gradually. But the walls were also mirror polished. It’s my guess that this cavern floods perhaps every few days and then the water recedes over a few days, leaving the steps in the ice. There cannot be much warning of a deluge as otherwise no soldier would have been so slow as to be drowned down that tunnel.’

  Ethan began looking around them at the cavern system and at the water gushing from the ragged fissure in the east wall of the cavern.

  ‘The Nazis must have placed a warning system of some kind into the tunnels, or perhaps out here, something to give their soldiers at least a chance of making it inside the base.’

  Lieutenant Riggs was about to reply when from the deep black water they heard a thunderous moan shudder through the cavern. Ethan felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise up as he turned instinctively toward the hellish groan, as though the entire base was shifting position and wrending the very metal from which it was built.

  Lieutenant Riggs stood up alongside him as Ethan’s eye caught on the black water of the docks before them.

  ‘Look at that,’ Hannah said as she pointed at the water.

  To Ethan’s amazement he saw the water shivering in miraculously symmetrical waves, rippling as though sound were travelling through it, and he realized that it actually was.

  ‘The water is cavitating,’ Chandler gasped as he observed the phenomenon, raising his voice to be heard above the reverberating moan. ‘Something is emitting enough power to cause all that water to shiver in response.’

  The sound slowly died away, fading into the darkness as the rippling water settled down once more.

  ‘I don’t want to meet what caused that,’ Hannah said as she backed away from the water’s edge a few paces.

  Doctor Chandler walked in the opposite direction. ‘I most certainly do,’ he replied. ‘Do you have any idea how much energy was required to achieve that? Any biological form capable of such an emission must be gigantic, far larger than a Blue Whale.’

  Lieutenant Riggs turned back to his explosive charges as though nothing had happened but Ethan could sense him thinking fast as he worked.

  ‘We’ll rig the charges anyway, but we’ll hold off for as long as we can before detonating them. Only if the MJ-12 team breach the entrance do we blow them, understood?’

  The SEALs all acknowledged the order as Doctor Chandler turned to his colleague, his features taut with excitement.

  ‘You said that you found new life down here?’

  ‘Yes,’ the scientist replied, momentarily distracted by the unearthly moan they had heard coming from beneath the water, his eyes still fixed warily upon the dock. ‘It does not share a genetic code with any known life form in our database.’

  That caused even the SEALs to stop working and glance across at Chandler.

  ‘No known genetic match?’ Chandler echoed.

  ‘That’s right,’ the scientist replied. ‘It’s a form of life that might not have originated on this planet. It’s exo-biology, an alien life form.’

  ***

  XXIX

  Ethan and Hannah followed Doctor Chandler into the command center and through to a large back room that had once probably been used as a planning or operations center, the room dominated by a large table where Chandler’s scientists had prepared a simple laboratory in the glow of luminous light sticks.

  ‘How much work have you completed?’ Chandler asked.

  ‘We have performed nucleic acid sequencing and have deduced the metabolic pathways of the bacteria represented in the flowing water we sampled and, by extension, in the chambers that may lay beyond further inside the glacier,’ the younger man replied. ‘We have already found over a hundred unique gene sequences, ninety per cent or so from bacteria with the rest from Eukarya. Taxonomic classifications are underway for most of the sequences.’

  ‘And how would you classify what you have found so far?’ Chandler asked urgently.

  ‘The taxa are similar to organisms previously described from lakes, brackish water, marine environments, soil, glaciers, ice, lake sediments, deep-sea sediments, deep-sea thermal vents, animals and plants. There are multiple sequences both aerobic and anaerobic, psychrophilic, thermophilic, halophilic, alkaliphilic, acidophilic and desiccation-resistant. Autotrophic and heterotrophic organisms are present, including some multicellular eukaryotes.‘

  Both Ethan and Hannah stared bug-eyed at the scientists.

  ‘So, in English, what does that all mean?’ Ethan asked.

  Doctor Chandler stared into space for a moment and then he walked past them without another word and back into the command center. Ethan exchanged a glance with Hannah and then followed Chandler into the center to see him staring at the Piri Reis map on the wall there.

  ‘Let me guess,’ Ethan quipped, ‘you don’t have a clue and you’re just covering up.’

  If Chandler heard Ethan, he didn’t respond to it directly.

  ‘I think I know where the water’s coming from,’ he said finally.

  Ethan felt a pulse of excitement. ‘Good. If we can shut it off we’ll prevent the chamber from flooding, right?’

  A ghost of a smile flickered across Chandler’s features. ‘You won’t be shutting this flow off, my boy,’ he replied.

  ‘You wanna start telling us what’s going on?’ Hannah demanded. ‘Y’know, lives on the line and all that?’

  Chandler roused himself from his reverie and gestured to the map.

  ‘This map, as you know, may or may not show Antarctica ice-free. However, we know that the continent was indeed ice free in the distant past and that it was filled with all manner of life including dinosaurs.’ />
  ‘I got today’s history lecture,’ Hannah confirmed. ‘Cut to the chase.’

  ‘Then Antarctica drifted south as a result of natural plate tectonics and became shrouded with ice that is now several miles thick,’ he went on. ‘That means, logically, that biologically preserved material and perhaps species were trapped within and beneath that ice in completely unique environments.’

  Ethan glanced at the map on the wall and began to understand where the scientist was going with this.

  ‘You think that something else has evolved under the ice?’ he suggested.

  ‘Not something,’ Chandler corrected, ‘but an entirely different and isolated ecosystem, a Lost World of sorts. Antarctica has been frozen beneath an ice sheet for at least fifteen million years, more than enough time for new and novel species to have adapted through natural selection to the conditions encountered beneath the ice.’

  Ethan frowned.

  ‘But how could anything get out if it’s trapped beneath miles of ice?’

  Chandler reached up to the map and pointed to a small oval that looked like a lake, drawn on the surface of what was presumed to be Antarctica.

  ‘Lake Vostok,’ he said finally. ‘It’s a submarine lake, trapped beneath the glaciers of Antarctica for fifteen or more million years. Its water is said to be utterly pristine, totally sealed off from the rest of the world for eons. If biological remains of species made it into the lake before the ice sealed it in, there could be anything lurking down there.’

  ‘Anything?’ Hannah echoed.

  Chandler’s assistant spoke up.

  ‘Most of the larger forms of life that existed in prehistoric times did so because the atmosphere of the time was markedly different from today’s and contained a far greater proportion of oxygen, allowing the existence of very large species like dinosaurs and insects with wingspans larger than today’s birds of prey.’

  Ethan smiled as he saw Hannah shiver.

  ‘I’ve seen artwork of dragonflies as big as eagles,’ he said, enjoying Hannah’s discomfort, ‘and millipedes as big as anacondas.’