by John Glasby
“I can’t wait to get there and see it all for myself,” Carradine said as his breakfast was placed in front of him.
Chuck gave a shrewd stare as he commenced eating. “Forgive me saying this. But it seems to me that you must be on some really important mission to even get permission to go there. I take it that you’re not a military man?”
Carradine nodded. “A friend of mine managed to pull a few strings in the right quarters and here I am.”
Chuck shook his head. “I don’t know how you wangled that. Still, Darren and I will be glad of your company on the flight this afternoon. The Met boys reckon that we should have a smooth and uneventful flight. Trouble is I never take what they say as gospel. Always find that something turns up on the route to give us a bumpy journey. Especially at this time of the year.”
“You wouldn’t be trying to spoil my appetite for this excellent breakfast, would you?” said Carradine, grinning.
“Sorry.” The other shook his head. “Wasn’t thinking, I guess. We spent most of the night checking the plane. Everything seems OK.” He glanced at his watch, scraped back his chair. “Now if you’ll excuse us, we’ll grab ourselves a little shut-eye before this afternoon.”
Carradine watched them leave, then settled himself in his chair and finished his breakfast, washing down the excellently cooked food with hot, sweet coffee. He had just finished, was sitting back, when a voice behind him said genially: “Good morning, Commander. Sleep well?”
“Close on ten hours, Major.” Carradine motioned to one of the empty chairs. “Breakfasted even better. You know how to look after yourselves here.”
Allison smiled. “It’s the only thing we have to do to make life bearable. We’re right at the very edge of civilisation here. Sometimes, I think it may be better for us if we were a hundred miles or so to the north. At least then we wouldn’t be in this limbo, we’d be clear into Hell. When you know that you’re such a long way from civilisation, you can acclimatise yourself to the loneliness a little more quickly.”
It was a moot point of psychology, Carradine thought; but maybe the other had got something there. “I’ve just had breakfast with the two men who will be flying me out this afternoon,” he said changing the subject adroitly.
Alison nodded briefly. “They’re both good men. Veterans of the Korean War. And they can handle the planes in this weather as well as you or I could drive a car through New York. I’ll get you some protective clothing, though, before you leave. Although you may not need it once you’re inside the base itself, you have quite a way to go from the landing strip and there’s a blizzard blowing there almost all the time, so it’s best to be prepared for everything.”
“Thanks again for all you’re doing.”
“Not at all. My orders were very explicit. To give you all the help I can. It isn’t often that we get anyone like you out here. I can guess that there is something big involved.”
“Perhaps, but believe me, the less you know about it, the better.”
“So I’ve gathered,” murmured the other enigmatically. “I hope you won’t take this to heart, but shortly after you arrived here, I put an urgent call through to New York. You must admit that there seems to be something odd about this entire venture. A civilian coming along, given virtually a carte blanche to do as he likes, to be afforded every facility.”
“And what sort of reply did you get back, Major?” asked Carradine, lifting his brows slightly.
“Simply that your credentials were beyond question. That you are acting on the highest authority. I can’t go against anything like that, now can I?”
“I certainly hope not,” said Carradine fervently. “I’d go to any lengths to carry through this mission.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll see to it that you arrive safely at Station K. What happens after that is out of our hands.” There was a curious look on his face and he seemed to have added the last statement as an afterthought.
Carradine guessed at the reason behind it. “So you’ve heard of some of the odd happenings there too?”
Allison nodded. “Too many things to be explained away by coincidence. But so far, no one back in Washington or New York seems to have taken any notice of this.”
“Well they have now,” Carradine said tightly.
*
The plane was an old Douglas DC-3 Dakota, old but particularly well suited to the task of ferrying men and supplies across the blizzard-strewn Arctic wastes. The two propellers turned slowly as the engine coughed, then spewed out several puffs of black smoke. Within moments, they had become whirring pools and the scream of the engines rose to an ear-splitting whine that grated on Carradine's nerves as he sat on the low step immediately behind the pilot. Vibration tore at the fuselage of the plane as it began to roll along the perimeter track, moving in the direction of the landing strip.
“You all right back there?” asked Chuck, turning his head.
Carradine could just make out the words above the roar of the engines. He gave the thumbs-up sign to indicate that all was well.
The Dakota jerked abruptly as Darren released the brakes. There was a pale green flare hanging low over the control building in the distance. Then they were racing along the runway, screaming with a banshee wail over the windsock at the far end, a windsock that stretched out to its furthermost limit by the wind which had got up during the past hour or so. The plane lifted more slowly than Carradine was accustomed to and he had to tell himself that this was no modern airliner he was in, and that the equipment and supplies which had been stacked neatly at the back, must weigh several tons, dragging down the plane.
Over the end of the runway, they circled, then headed north-east, out to where the endless wilderness of ice and snow lay in front of them, stretching away to the far horizon. He felt a little shiver go through him as he let his gaze wander over the rough ground where tall, clawing peaks lifted to the greying sky. The sun lay somewhere behind them, but there seemed to be a haze clouding it a little and they did not seem to be able to climb above it.
For an hour, they flew over a terrain that was completely featureless but for the mountains that jutted up now and again directly in their path. They were flying at close on ten thousand feet, he reckoned, but even so, several of these peaks were almost on a level with them as they flew steadily northward.
Turning in his seat, Chuck waved an expressive hand in the direction of the flight-covered ridges that seemed to reach up and claw for the belly of the plane as if striving to pull them down from the unfriendly skies. “Don’t let these bother you,” he called loudly. “When you’ve flown this route as long as we have, you find that these mountains are the least of your worries, unless you happen to run into a particularly dense blizzard when your visibility is so low that you’re in danger of running into them.”
“At least there should be no danger of that today,” Carradine said, hoping that his tone sounded a little more full of conviction than he was himself. Many of the peaks outside seemed to be eternally shrouded in mist, looming up out of the writhing haze, then vanishing again behind them.
“It isn’t too bad at all,” confirmed the other. He glanced down at the map spread out on a pad on his knee and then rifled through the papers firmly clipped to it. “Pressure seems to be dropping a little though to the north. We may run into dirty weather there. Fortunately, by that time, we ought to have cleared the mountains.”
Carradine nodded, peered down through the small window near his head. Down below, there was an endless sea of white, dazzling to the eye even with only a dim sunlight flooding it. Lifting his gaze, he stared over Chuck’s shoulder. There was something more than a dim haziness on the horizon in front of them now; something thicker, and more definite, more dangerous. He touched the co-pilot on the shoulder. Pointing through the cockpit, he said in a harsh tone: “What’s that up ahead, Chuck? Trouble?”
The other stared out into the white distance for a moment, and then gave a brief nod. “Very likely it is,” he s
aid flatly. “Like I said back at the airstrip, I never believe a word these Met men tell me. Looks as if I was right again. Whenever we get a low pressure area in this part of the north it means snow, perhaps even an electric storm.”
“Can’t you fly around it?”
“That may not be as easy as it sounds. They can move pretty quickly and erratically. That means we’d find it virtually impossible to predict its movement over the next hour or so. Our best bet is to head straight for it as Darren is doing now. Could be that we’ll only run through the trailing fringe of it if we’re lucky. If not then we’ll be flying blind for an hour or so.”
“Can’t you radio Station K and get a weather check from them?”
“Sure, we could do that. But if that is an electrical storm out there our signals won’t have much chance of getting through.” As if to prove this, he leaned forward and switched on the radio. The crackle and hiss of static boiled in Carradine’s ears and he nodded in answer to the lift of Chuck’s eyebrows.
“I see what you mean,” he called loudly. Inwardly, he felt the sensation of danger. Many times in the past, this feeling of premonition had come to him, something he could never explain satisfactorily to himself.
The Dakota dropped with a sickening sensation as they hit an air pocket. In spite of the tight grip he had on himself, Carradine grasped the metal stanchion near at hand, fingers curling around it and biting into the palm of his hand.
Just how many flying hours had this DC-3 done? he wondered tensely. Sooner or later, metal fatigue ate its way into the structure and it needed only the kind of battering it got flying through a storm such as this for its strength to give way. In addition to this, the extremely low temperature also had an inevitable effect on metal. He tried not to think of this as they dropped again. His stomach lurched up into the place where his chest was supposed to be.
Glancing around out of his half-shut eyes, he saw Darren fighting with the controls. A vivid blue flash glanced across the edge of his vision and the plane rocked and swayed like a mad thing, as if a giant, invisible fist had suddenly, and without warning, smashed against the fuselage, hurling the plane like a stone across the berserk heavens. There was no sign whatever of the sun. All that could be seen in the strange murky gloom outside were the white, whirling clouds of snow as the storm closed in on them from all sides.
Chuck grinned down at him. “Looks as though your first trip has turned out to be a real lulu,” he said, pressing his lips close to Carradine’s ear. “Not often we hit it as bad as this.”
“How long before we get through it?”
“Hard to say. We could come out of it in a few minutes, or it could go on for an hour or so. All we can do now is sit tight and hope that the lightning misses us.”
Carradine suddenly realised how frail and helpless the plane really was, how puny mankind was when it came to facing up to Nature in the raw like this. There were forces at work here which men would never be able to tame. Desperately, he struggled to close his mind to what was going on all around him, to shut out the sound of the storm, the tremendous blue-white flashes of lightning as it zigzagged across the sky.
At length, however, after many minutes of agonising uncertainty, the sky gradually began to lighten around them. The vivid thunderclaps faded into the distance. At first, it was impossible for him to believe that they were actually flying out of it, that they were airborne and nothing drastic had happened to them.
The roar of the engines seemed to settle down to a steady whine. With an effort, Carradine turned his head and glanced through the window. He caught brief glimpses of the ground through what seemed to be a swirling fog, but which he knew to be the blizzard raging around them. Then, at length, the storm drew away from them, the air cleared as if by magic and he saw that they were flying over large ice floes, most of them packed closely together so that apart from very faint, scarcely seen cracks, they appeared to be part of one massive block of ice floating majestically in the serenity of the Arctic Ocean.
Chuck let out his breath in a faint whistle, glanced along the rows of instruments in front of him. “Guess we made it all in one piece,” he said softly. He checked on the figures he had been scribbling on the pad in front of him. “In spite of the delay, I figure that our time of arrival should be only fifteen minutes or so late. Another fifty minutes.”
“I can’t wait for it,” Carradine said with earnest feeling. He sat back in the chair and waited as the minutes ground themselves past.
Chuck touched him on the arm and pointed down through the cockpit. “Take your first look at station K.” There was an odd note in his voice.
Carradine looked. At first, he could make out nothing. The ice and snow stretched as far as the eye could see. Then, following the direction of Chuck’s pointing finger, he could just make out the small cluster of huts, standing out blackly on the snow. “Surely that can’t be it?” he said, scarcely believing what he saw.
“That’s it,” Chuck grinned broadly. “And that’s all the Reds would see from the air if they sent any of their spy planes over for a quick look. Nothing to mark it out from a small weather station.”
“I agree.” Carradine nodded. The Dakota swung around in a wide, descending circle and he was able to make out the long landing strip within half a mile of the huts. Then he saw something else. Now that they had reached a sufficiently low altitude, he was able to pick up the faint tracery of tracks in the snow, leading up to one point and then stopping for no noticeable reason. Not until his eyes suddenly adjusted to perspective was he able to see that they vanished simply because at that point there was a steep decline in the ice, that a vast tunnel had been hollowed out of the ice and snow, leading down to a point several hundred feet below the surface.
Almost all of Station K was two or three hundred feet beneath the solid, unyielding surface of the ice.
CHAPTER 7 - CITY UNDER THE ICE
Stepping out of the plane, Carradine felt a cold more intense and numbing than anything he had ever previously experienced. Ice crackled a little under his polar boots and the biting wind tore through the thick furs of his clothing and lifted small shards of ice, driving them at him, slashing across the exposed flesh of his face until it seemed to be torn to ribbons. He lowered his head instinctively, waited for Chuck and Darren to climb down.
Stamping his feet, he flailed his arms to keep the blood circulating through his body, shivering continually. Within a couple of minutes the ice and snow, whipped off the crests of fantastically shaped white dunes, like some glaring, bleached Sahara, had brought a numbness to his flesh so that he could feel nothing. Whenever the wind died for a moment, the rustling of the slivers of ice as they slid forward over the smooth surface was like a horde of insects on the march.
Slapping his gloved fists together, Chuck dropped lightly to the ground, adjusted his goggles, said: “Better keep your head down. This flying ice can give you a nasty cut in no time at all.”
Darren rubbed the fog from his goggles, peered about him. “No sign of that goddamned jeep,” he observed. “I suppose that they expect us to walk again.”
Chuck said: £This is becoming a long-standing grudge between the men here and ourselves. They’re supposed to send a jeep or a small snowcat out for us, to take us down into the station, but quite often it slips their minds and we have to walk it.”
“Guess we’d better get started then,” Carradine muttered, the bitter wind snatching the words from his mouth and whirling them away. Bending forward into the teeth of the wind, he forced his legs to move. He had not guessed how difficult it was to walk on this stuff. At one moment he would be slipping and sliding helplessly in all directions and at another, the up-thrusting spikes of ice would make movement almost impossible. Chuck and Darren moved alongside him, their furs swiftly becoming white as the powdery snow was lifted from the ground and hurled at them.
There was a high ridge blocking their path a few minutes later. Carradine, moving up just behind the other two
, came on it with a sense of surprise. How in God’s name could there be a ridge there when everything had looked to be so perfectly flat between the plane and the small cluster of wooden huts? Then it came to him that in this utterly white wilderness, it was virtually impossible to have any sense of depth at all when looking out across the terrain.
He stumbled forward after the others, mentally cursing the men at the station for not sending that transport out to meet them. Most of the way they stuck close to the ridge so that it shielded them from the full, biting fury of the wind. Here, it was possible to straighten their backs a little, to lift their heads and look about them through the protective goggles.
They hit the end of the ridge so abruptly that the sudden change from calm to a gale-force wind took them off-balance. Carradine was almost bowled off his feet. Only by reaching out instinctively and catching hold of Chuck’s coat was he able to stay upright.
In spite of the wind, the going seemed easier now. They were no longer struggling uphill. They had hit the downgrade and were now less than a quarter of a mile distant. Off to the left, Carradine could now plainly see the entrance to the great shaft, which led down beneath the polar ice to Station K. It looked massive, a tremendous construction. How anyone had the engineering ability to construct such a place out here in the depths of the Arctic was momentarily beyond him.
He mentioned this to Chuck. The other grinned, wiped some of the snow from his collar. “If you think that’s something, then wait until you see what they have down below. That will take your breath away and—” He broke off sharply, suddenly. The sharp crack of a rifle sounded, briefly but unmistakable, on the thin air. In the same instant, Carradine felt the wind of the slug pass his face, less than a couple of inches from where he stood.
“Hey! There’s some goddamned idiot shooting at us from one of the huts,” exclaimed Darren. “What the hell do they think they’re trying to do?”
