by Tom Grace
The Ice Queen and her sisters once formed the backbone of the VXE-6 Squadron. Since the mid-fifties, the squadron had fulfilled the mission objectives of the ongoing Operation Deep Freeze, providing logistical support to research stations in the Antarctic. It was a tough job that earned the unit the unofficial nickname Ice Pirates. VXE-6 had owned the skies over the frozen southern continent until the end of the 1999 season, when the squadron returned to its home base at Point Mugu Naval Air Station and was disestablished.
Like many veterans of VXE-6, Kuhn felt anger and a sense of loss when the squadron was phased out, its planes mothballed and its mission reassigned to a National Guard air wing. He’d flown over Antarctica for twenty-four years and had fallen in love with the icy untamed wilderness.
In the years since, the Ice Queen sat tightly wrapped in a plastic cocoon in the high desert air of Arizona. She was one of the hundreds of military and commercial aircraft that sat row upon row in the Boneyard, as the Aircraft storage and Reclamation Facility was known.
‘The old bitch looks pretty good, eh, Greg?’
Kuhn turned as Len Holland walked up.
‘Is that any way to talk about a lady?’ Kuhn asked.
Holland shook Kuhn’s hand, then looked over at the Ice Queen. ‘Hard to believe our planes have been sitting in the desert all these years.’
‘No different than the day we left them here.’ Kuhn nodded down the flight line at another LC-130R. ‘Polar Pete came out of hibernation just fine, too. Where’s the rest of the guys?’
‘Right behind me.’
Ten men emerged from the flight operations building, all sporting aviator jackets similar to Kuhn’s. Each plane flew with a crew of six men – a pilot, a copilot, a navigator, a flight engineer, and two cargo handlers. Escorting the flight crews was a man in a button-down shirt with a bolo tie and a clipboard.
‘Commander Kuhn,’ the escort said warmly. ‘I’m Jim Evers, the manager here at ASRF.’ Evers pronounced the facility acronym ay-surf. ‘Both XD-10 and XD-11 have been checked out, and all systems are flight ready.’
Kuhn pulled a thick envelope from his breast pocket and handed it to Evers. ‘Here’s our flight plan for this short hop to Waco.’
Evers pocketed the envelope. ‘Your planes are fueled, so once you finish your preflight you can get out of here.’
‘Thanks.’ As Evers walked away, Kuhn turned to the two flight crews. ‘You guys know the drill. Let’s get these old birds in the air.’
The Ice Queen and Polar Pete flew a low route across southern Texas, carefully avoiding civilian air-traffic control radar as they bypassed Waco and headed into the Gulf of Mexico. The flight crossed over the Yucatan peninsula, then turned south toward Honduras.
‘I’m picking up the beacon,’ the navigator announced. ‘Bearing two-one-five.’
Kuhn glanced out his window at the rain forest below, the thick foliage barely a hundred feet beneath the aircraft.
‘About friggin’ time,’ Kuhn said impatiently. He had wanted to land before sunset, but an unexpected head wind had increased their flight time.
Kuhn deftly turned the Ice Queen until his heading matched the one his navigator had given him. Five minutes later, he saw a gaping hole in the jungle canopy. The runway looked to be in good condition and certainly long and wide enough to handle a Hercules. Along one side of the runway, he saw a cluster of large tents, a few heavy trucks, a helicopter, and a tall pole with a windsock fluttering in the breeze.
‘X-Ray Delta One Zero to X-Ray Delta One One, over.’
‘One One, over,’ Holland replied.
‘I’m going to circle around and land. You follow me in.’
‘Lead the way, One Zero. X-Ray Delta One One out.’
Kuhn piloted the Ice Queen in a smooth arc that aimed the nose of his plane down the length of the runway. Descending, he skimmed over the treetops and then dropped into the clearing. Sunbaked earth exploded into clouds of dust when the wheels touched down, the gray plume trailing the Ice Queen down the length of the runway. Holland waited until the dust cloud settled before making his approach.
‘Just like riding a bike,’ Holland said as he brought his plane down perfectly.
Once on the ground, Holland taxied Polar Pete behind a jeep with a sign that read FOLLOW ME and was led to a space beside the Ice Queen. A man with orange-tipped wands guided the plane into position and, once there, signaled Holland to cut his engines.
As Kuhn, Holland, and their crews stepped out of the planes into the steamy heat of the Honduran jungle, five brown-skinned men trotted out from the tents. Each grabbed a length of steel pipe from a large pile and began assembling scaffolding around the aircraft.
‘Commander Kuhn.’
Kuhn turned as a tall, lanky man dressed in militarystyle khakis walked toward him. The man had thick black hair and a full beard that gave him the look of a left-wing revolutionary.
‘Summer Duroc?’ Kuhn asked.
‘Yes, it is a pleasure to finally meet you,’ Duroc said perfunctorily in Gallic-tinged English.
‘You cut this strip?’ Kuhn asked.
‘No, the Nicaraguan Contras cleared this area to receive supplies from you Americans. We merely restored it. Did you encounter any problems?’
‘None,’ Kuhn replied. ‘Everything went according to plan and both aircraft are flying perfectly.’
‘Good. For the next few days I expect you and your men to work with my staff in preparing for our mission.’
‘My men’ll be ready, but right now we’re in need of a bite to eat and some down time.’
‘Tents have been assigned to you and your crew.’ Duroc made a motion with his hand, and a swarthy man dressed in khaki ran over. ‘Commander, this is my executive officer, Leon Albret. Leon, show the commander and his men their quarters, then take them to the mess tent and see that they are fed.’
‘Yes, sir.’
After finishing his dinner, Kuhn stepped out of the mess tent and walked back over to the planes. Both were now enmeshed in a framework of vertical poles, crossbars, and wooden planks. A diesel generator purred nearby, powering work lights attached to the scaffolding. At several points, tall poles rose out of the scaffolding to support a broad sheet of camouflage fabric that completely covered both planes. The fabric not only hid the aircraft from view, but during coming days it would also prevent the sun from heating the aluminum skin on the planes like a skillet.
Duroc stood alongside the Ice Queen, watching as the workmen began the tedious process of carefully stripping off the aircraft’s paint scheme and markings.
‘Your men got this rigging up pretty quick,’ Kuhn said as he walked up to Duroc.
‘That’s what they were paid to do.’
‘Do they know what they’re doin’ to my plane? I’d hate to have one of them break somethin’.’
‘Like you, they were hired because of their skills,’ Duroc replied. ‘These are not the first planes they’ve rechristened.’
‘It’s gotta make you sick to see her like that,’ Holland remarked, ‘all done up like she’s air force – a guard unit at that.’
Kuhn nodded as he studied the new paint scheme that decorated his beloved Ice Queen. In two days, the Hondurans had stripped her down to bare metal, removing the red-black scheme and her sexy namesake. Now she bore air force markings and her wingtips and tail were painted orange. Stenciled letters identified the Ice Queen and Polar Pete as Skier-98 and Skier-99 – aircraft currently assigned to the National Guard unit that took over the Antarctica mission from the navy.
‘Make you sick enough to turn down Duroc’s money?’ Kuhn asked.
‘Hell, no. I just don’t like flying false colors.’
‘It don’t matter what she’s wearing on the outside,’ Kuhn said, ‘underneath, she’s still the Ice Queen.’
‘Looks like shit, don’t it?’ Holland said. ‘Got no personality whatsoever.’
‘Maybe,’ Kuhn replied, ‘but for the first time in the h
istory of VXE-6, we’re going to really live up to our nickname.’
Duroc, Albret, and the rest of the two flight crews emerged from the camp and walked over to where Kuhn stood with Holland.
‘Commander, are your aircraft ready to fly?’ Duroc asked.
‘Yes, sir,’ Kuhn replied. ‘The tanks are all topped off and it doesn’t look like your paint crew did any damage.’
‘Good.’ Duroc nodded to Albret, who handed packets to Kuhn and Holland. ‘Here are the flight plan and the latest weather reports.’
Kuhn opened the manila envelope and glanced over the southbound route. From Honduras, the planes would fly along the Pacific coast of South America, landing at remote airstrips to rest and refuel. In the final leg, they were to cross over southern Chile into Argentina.
‘I will meet you in Rio Gallegos,’ Duroc said. ‘There, we will load the men and equipment required for the mission. Any questions?’
‘Not a one,’ Kuhn replied, holding out his hand. ‘I guess we’ll see you in Argentina.’
Duroc stood near the helicopter and watched the two LC-130s depart. The cargo planes circled the jungle airstrip once, then veered south toward the Pacific coast. Finding these unique planes and the crews to fly them was one of the more formidable challenges of this project, and he was pleased with his success. So far, everything was proceeding as planned, but Duroc knew that there was still much to be accomplished and many places where things could go disastrously wrong.
‘The workmen are in the mess tent, as you ordered,’ Albret announced. ‘They are eager for their wages.’
‘Understandably so.’
Duroc unlocked the cargo compartment of the Bell 427 and pulled out a Halliburton briefcase.
‘Put the rest of our gear on board while I take care of the men,’ Duroc ordered.
Albret nodded and jogged away as Duroc walked over to the largest tent in the compound. Inside, he found the five Hondurans laughing and enjoying the cold beer Duroc had provided. All eyes turned to him as he entered the tent.
‘Gentlemen,’ Duroc said, easily slipping into Spanish, ‘I wish to thank you for your excellent work over these past few days. As we agreed, here is five hundred thousand dollars in U.S. currency.’ Duroc set the briefcase down atop the table where the men were seated and opened it so the contents faced the men. Inside, the case was filled with neat bundles of U.S. twenty-dollar bills. ‘It has been a pleasure doing business with you.’
Duroc shook a few hands and the rest of the Hondurans raised their bottles in his honor. One of the men picked up a battered guitar and began strumming – they were rich and it was time to celebrate. Duroc smiled and left what promised to be a wild day of drinking.
By the time Duroc returned to the helicopter, Albret had their gear loaded and the rotors turning. Duroc slipped on a pair of dark aviator sunglasses and climbed into the copilot’s seat. Albret ran through the rest of his checklist, powered up the twin turbine engines, and lifted off.
As the helicopter rose above the treetops and began to move away from the runway, Duroc keyed a command into the onboard computer that instructed it to transmit a series of pulses at a specific frequency. Less than two seconds later, a thin layer of plastic explosive lining the interior of the briefcase exploded.
The five men barely felt the searing heat from the blast or the shards of fragmented metal from the briefcase. Everything within fifty feet of the bomb disappeared in a fireball that incinerated the encampment. The explosion left a crater twenty feet across and ten feet deep.
Duroc’s helicopter sped over the rain forest toward Tegucigalpa, where he and Albret would board a private jet for Argentina.
2
JANUARY 24
LV Research Station, Antarctica
Collins stood beneath a clear blue sky bathed in the whitest light he had ever known, a light blinding with brilliant intensity. The hard-packed crystals of ice that covered the glacial plateau glowed in dazzling imitation of the sun. Were it not for the yellow-lens goggles protecting his eyes, he would have been snow-blind as soon as he stepped outside the station. From his vantage point, less than seven hundred miles from the South Pole, the sun traced another unbroken ellipse in the sky. Endless day.
Click.
Ansel Adams could’ve worked some real magic down here, Collins mused as he adjusted the exposure setting on his camera.
Today, the wind, temperature, and sky conspired to produce one of nature’s rarest and most dazzling sights: parhelic circles. Sunlight, refracted through tiny airborne ice crystals, created the illusion of luminous halos, arcs, and flaring parabolas in the sky. Collins counted twenty distinct formations dancing around the sun.
Click.
Like a surrealist painting, distance was an illusion in the interior of the southernmost continent. It was generally accepted that the otherworldliness of this place was due in equal parts to extremes in temperature, altitude, and lifelessness. Over fifty years of record keeping by Russian crews manning the Vostok Research Station – Collins’s closest neighbors some forty miles to the south – bracketed the local temperature range as between −40 degrees and −128 degrees Fahrenheit.
Satisfied that he’d captured at least one decent image from this spot, Collins moved his camera around to the opposite side of the station. LV Research Station had been home to Collins and his wife, Nedra, since November and had been entirely prefabricated in the U.S. as a mock-up of the habitat for NASA’s manned-mission to Mars. At the center of the station stood a short domed tower. Four cylindrical modules – each the size of a railroad tanker car – stood mounted on thick legs and radiated out from the tower in a cruciform configuration. The modules provided space for research, crew quarters, power and environmental systems, and storage.
Beneath LV Station, the sheet of glacial ice that blanketed nearly all of Antarctica rose to a height of 11,500 feet above sea level. Thanks to the katabatic winds – dense sheets of frigid air that flowed down from the nearby ice domes – the rarified air that Collins breathed was even thinner than that of other sites of equal elevation around the world. These winds siphoned low-oxygen air from the upper atmosphere to fill the void left behind as they flowed down toward the coast. When they had first arrived here, it took Collins and his wife several days to acclimate themselves, and both still had to be wary of overexertion.
Collins could attest to the extremes in temperature and altitude, but assumption that this place was totally lifeless was something that he and many other scientists around the world were challenging. Until the latter part of the twentieth century, energy in the form of sunlight was assumed to be essential to the formation of life, but then life was found in the darkest depths of the oceans. When communities of organisms were discovered not merely living but thriving in the superheated mineral-saturated waters of geysers and hydrothermal vents, environments lethal to most other forms of life on earth, scientists were forced to rethink their assumptions about the conditions that might give rise to life. Being more tenacious than anyone had previously considered, life seems to need only three things to start: heat, minerals, and liquid water.
Walking past a row of thirty-inch in diameter metal spheres that contained liquid hydrogen for the station’s fuel cells, Collins approached the reason that NASA and a group of partner companies had financed this project. Fifty feet from the station stood a cobalt blue tetrahedron that was as out of place atop the glacial ice of Antarctica as Arthur C. Clarke’s monolith on the moon: the Ice Pick probe.
Collins shortened the legs on his tripod, lowering the camera to capture both the hard lines of the probe’s first stage and the luminous parhelic circles. Satisfied with the composition, he adjusted the exposure setting and snapped another picture.
‘Hey, Philip, how’s the show?’ Nedra asked, her voice clear over his headset.
‘Amazing. You should come out and see it.’
‘I snuck a peek out the window. Just wanted to let you know we’re ready for another dip in
the lake.’
Far beneath LV Station, sandwiched between a glacier and the rocky surface of Antarctica, lay one of the largest lakes on Earth – a body of liquid water that could have easily been seen from space were it not concealed by the ice. When British and Russian scientists confirmed the existence of Lake Vostok in 1996, they theorized that heat rising from the earth’s interior through rifts in the crust kept the water from freezing. Seismic activity in the area increased the likelihood of hydrothermal vents in Lake Vostok, meaning that the lake had the water, heat, and minerals necessary to support life. What form that life would take, in a place isolated from the rest of the world for the last 20 million years, was the subject of great speculation.
In 1610, Galileo pointed his telescope at Jupiter and discovered four moons orbiting the giant planet. This discovery came at a time when the whole of Western civilization believed that the earth was the center of the universe. News of Lake Vostok’s discovery and the possibility of life in its hidden waters coincided with the arrival at Jupiter of a spacecraft bearing the great astronomer’s name. During a fly-by of one of the moons discovered by Galileo – an ice-covered rock named Europa – the spacecraft transmitted a series of images as astounding to the scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as the discovery of the moon itself was to Galileo four hundred years earlier.
Europa was named after the mythical Phoenician princess that Zeus carried off and ravaged. Detailed images from the spacecraft revealed a pattern of fractures on the frozen moon’s surface similar to ice flows in the Arctic Ocean – evidence that beneath Europa’s frozen shell lay an immense body of liquid water larger than all Earth’s oceans. Dark regions mottling the moon’s surface revealed ongoing volcanic and seismic activity, likely the result of Jupiter’s intense gravity wracking Europa’s molten core. With heat, minerals, and liquid water, scientists now saw Europa as the most promising place in our solar system to search for extraterrestrial life.
