Ice Station ss-1

by Matthew Reilly

  The screen then reverted back to the original screen, with the original eight numbers and the sixteen blank spaces.

  Hensleigh looked at Montana, perplexed. "How did you know that?"

  Montana smiled. "It gives you a second chance if you enter the wrong code. Like most military entry-code systems."

  At the other end of the cavern, Gant was crouched down on the ground over by the fissure she had found at the base of the ice wall. She pointed her flashlight inside the horizontal fissure.

  She wanted to know more about this cavern. There was something about the cavern itself and the man-made "spaceship" they had found in it that made her wonder....

  Gant peered in through the fissure. In the beam of her flashlight she saw a cave. A round, ice-walled cave that seemed to stretch away to the right. The floor of the cave was about five feet beneath her.

  Gant lay down on her back and shimmied through the fissure, and began to lower herself down to the floor of this new cave.

  And then suddenly, without warning, the ice beneath her gave way and she fell clumsily to the floor of the cave.

  Clangggggg?!

  The sound of her landing on the floor of the cave reverberated all around her. It had sounded like someone hitting a piece of steel with a sledgehammer.

  Gant froze.

  Steel?

  And then slowly?very slowly?she gazed down at the floor beneath her.

  The floor was covered with a thin layer of frost, but Gant saw it clearly. Her eyes widened.

  She saw the rivets first?small, round domes on a dark gray background.

  It was metal.

  Thick, reinforced metal.

  Gant panned her flashlight around the small cave. It was cylindrical in shape?like a train tunnel?with a high, round ceiling that rose above the horizontal fissure through which she had come. The horizontal fissure was about halfway up the wall. In fact, Gant could almost see back through the thick ice wall above the fissure, as if it were translucent glass.

  She swung her flashlight around and pointed it at the tunnel leading away from her.

  And then she saw it

  It looked like a door of some sort, made of heavy gray steel. It was set into the ice and was completely covered in frost and icicles. It looked like a door on a naval vessel or submarine?solid-looking, hinged on a sturdy metal bulk.

  "Jesus Christ," she breathed.

  Pete Cameron called the Post's office in Washington D.C. for the third time. He was sitting in Andrew Trent's living room.

  At last, Alison picked up.

  Cameron said, "Where have you been? I've been calling all afternoon."

  "You're not gonna believe what I found," Alison said.

  She recounted for him what she had found on the All States Libraries Database: how the references to latitude and longitude that Cameron had picked up at SETI referred to the location of an ice station in Antarctica?Wilkes Ice Station.

  Cameron pulled out his original notes from his visit to SETI, looked at them as she spoke.

  Then Alison told him about the academics who lived down at the ice station and the papers and books they had written. She also told him about the Library of Congress and the "Preliminary Survey" by C. M. Waitzkin.

  "It was signed out to an O. Niemeyer in 1979," she said.

  Cameron frowned. "Niemeyer? Otto Niemeyer? Wasn't he on the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Nixon?"

  "Under Carter, too," Alison said.

  Andrew Trent came into the living room. "Did someone say Niemeyer?"

  "Yeah," Cameron said. "Otto Niemeyer. Know him?"

  "Know of him," Trent said. "He was Air Force. Full colonel. Got on a plane in '79 and never came back."

  "That's the one," Alison said over the phone. "Hey, who is that?"

  "Andrew Wilcox," Cameron said, looking at Trent.

  "Oh, hey, Andrew, nice to meet you," Alison said. "And yes, you're right. Niemeyer got on a silver Air Force Boeing 727 at Andrews Air Force Base on the night of 30 December 1979, heading for destination unknown. He never returned."

  "Aren't there any records about where he went?" Pete asked.

  "That's classified, baby," Alison said. "Classified. I was able to get a history on him, though. Niemeyer flew Phantoms in Vietnam. Got shot down over the Mekong Delta in '65. POW for a year. Both legs broken. Rescued in '66. Drove a desk at the Pentagon after that. Headed the USAF's Procurement Division for six years from '68 to '74. Appointed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1972 by Nixon, continued there under Carter.

  "Apparently, Niemeyer was a player on the stealth project in '77. He was on the Air Force selection committee that chose the B-2 stealth bomber, made by Northrop-Boeing. The official record, however, shows that Niemeyer voted for the loser in the tender, a consortium made up of General Aeronautics and a small electronics company from California called Entertech Ltd."

  Pete Cameron said, "So why would he steal a preliminary land survey about some university research station in Antarctica?"

  "See, that's the thing," Alison said. "I don't think it's the same station."

  "What?"

  Alison said, "Listen, I was looking in this book I bought by one of those Antarctic guys, a guy named Brian Hensleigh. According to him, Wilkes Ice Station was built in 1991."

  "Uh-huh."

  "But Niemeyer disappeared in 1979."

  "So what are you saying?" Pete said.

  "What I'm saying is that Niemeyer was looking up a station at that location twelve years before Wilkes Ice Station was ever even thought of."

  Alison paused. "Pete, I think there were two stations. Two stations built on the same piece of land. One in 1978?the one for which a land survey by C. M. Waitzkin was drawn up?and another in 1991."

  Pete Cameron leaned forward, spoke into the phone. "What do you mean, you think they built the second station on top of the first one?"

  "I don't think the people who built the second station? Wilkes Ice Station?even knew about the first one," Alison said. "Brian Hensleigh doesn't mention it at all in his book."

  "So what was it?" Pete said. "Niemeyer's station, I mean."

  "Who knows," Alison said.

  At that moment, Andrew Trent saw the sheet of notepaper in Pete's hand, took it, and began examining it.

  Alison said, "So, what about you? Get anything newsworthy on your travels?"

  "You could say that," Cameron said as he recalled in his mind everything Trent had told him about his unit's slaughter, his official "death," and the Intelligence Convergence Group.

  "Hey," Trent said suddenly from across the room. He held up Cameron's SETI notes. "Where did you get these?"

  Pete broke off from Alison and looked at the notes he had made at SETI.

  COPY 134625

  CONTACT LOST?> IONOSPHERIC DISTURB.

  FORWARD TEAM

  SCARECROW

  -66.5

  SOLAR FLARE DISRUPT. RADIO

  115, 20 MINS, 12 SECS EAST

  HOW GET THERE SO?SECONDARY TEAM ENROUTE

  Pete told Trent about his visit to SETI, told him that the notes were his record of what had been caught on the airwaves by SETI's radio telescopes.

  "And these coordinates," Trent said, pointing to the words "-66.5" and "115, 20 mins, 12 secs east," "they refer to a research station in Antarctica?"

  "That's right," Pete said

  Trent looked hard at Pete Cameron. "Do you know anything about Marine Force Reconnaissance Units, Mr. Cameron?"

  "Only what you've told me."

  "They're a forward team," Trent said.

  "OK," Pete said, seeing the words "forward team" on his notes.

  "Scarecrow...," Trent said, staring down at the notes.

  Pete looked from the notes to Trent. "What's a Scarecrow? An operation?"

  "No," Trent said a little too suddenly. "Scarecrow's a man. A Marine lieutenant. A friend of mine."

  Pete Cameron waited for Trent to say something more, but he didn't. And then suddenly Trent looked up i
nto Cameron's eyes.

  "Son of a bitch," Trent said. "Scarecrow's down there."

  "What do you mean?" Alison said a few minutes later. "You think there are Marines down at that station?"

  "We think so, yes," Cameron said, excited.

  "Jesus, there's a secondary team en route, too," Trent said, looking down at the notes again. "Shit."

  Trent turned to Cameron. "Hang up for a second. I have to make a phone call."

  Cameron told Alison he'd call her back.

  Trent quickly dialed a number. Cameron just watched him.

  "Yes, hi, Personnel, please," Trent said into the phone. He waited a second, then said, "Yes, hi. I was wondering if you could tell me where I could find Lieutenant Shane Schofield, please. It's a family emergency.... Yes, I'll hold."

  Trent waited a full minute before someone returned to the line.

  "Yes, hi," Trent said. "What?oh, I'm his brother-in-law, Michael." There was a pause. "Oh, no," Trent said softly. "Oh, my God....Yes, thank you. Good-bye."

  Trent practically slammed the phone down. He turned to Cameron. "Holy shit."

  "What?"

  "According to the United States Marine Corps Personnel Department, First Lieutenant Shane M. Schofield died in a training accident in the South Pacific at 0930 hours yesterday morning. Arrangements are being made to contact his family right now."

  Cameron frowned. "He's dead?"

  "According to them he is," Trent said softly. "But that doesn't necessarily mean it's true, now, does it." Trent paused. "The secondary team..."

  "What about it?"

  "There's a secondary team on its way to Wilkes Ice Station right now, right?"

  "Yeah...."

  "And according to the United States Marine Corps, Shane Schofield is already dead, right?"

  "Yeah..."

  Trent thought about that for a long moment. Then he looked up suddenly. "Schofield's found something. They're gonna kill him."

  Cameron got Alison back on the phone.

  "Quick, send it through now," he said.

  "All right. All right. Just hold on a second, honey buns," Alison said. Cameron heard the clicking of computer keys at the other end of the line.

  "OK, I'm sending it through now," Alison said.

  On the far side of the living room, Trent flicked on his computer. He clicked through several screens, came to his e-mail screen.

  A small information bar at the bottom of the screen blinked:

  YOU HAVE NEW MAIL.

  Trent clicked on the "Open" icon.

  A list appeared immediately on the screen:

  ALL-STATES LIBRARY DATABASE

  SEARCH BY KEYWORD

  SEARCH STRING USED:LATITUDE -66.5°

  LONGITUDE 115° 20' 12"

  NO. OF ENTRIES FOUND: 6

  TITLE

  AUTHOR

  LOCATION

  YEAR

  DOCTORAL THESIS

  LLEWELLYN, D. K.

  STAMFORD, CT

  1998

  DOCTORAL THESIS

  AUSTIN, B.K.

  STAMFORD, CT

  1997

  POSTDOCTORAL THESIS

  HENSLEIGH, S. T.

  USC, CA

  1997

  FELLOWSHIP GRANT RESEARCH PAPER

  HENSLEIGH, B. M.

  HARVARD, MA

  1996

  THE ICE CRUSADE: REFLECTIONS ON A YEAR SPENT IN ANTARCTICA

  HENSLEIGH, B. M.

  HARVARD, MA

  1995 AVAIL: AML

  PRELIMINARY SURVEY

  WAITZKIN, C. M.

  LIBCONG

  1978

  It was the list Alison had got from the All States Database. The list of every work that referred to latitude-66.5° and longitude 115° 20'12".

  "All right," Pete said.

  "What are you going to do with it?" Alison's voice said over the speakerphone.

  "We're gonna use this list to find their addresses," Trent said, typing quickly at the keyboard. "The e-mail addresses of the academics down in Antarctica, so we can send a message to Schofield."

  "We figure that most university professors have e-mail," Pete said, "and we're hoping that Wilkes Ice Station is patched in to a satellite phone so that the message can get through."

  Suddenly Trent said, "All right, I got one! Hensleigh, Sarah T. The e-mail address is at USC in California, but it's been routed to an external address: sarahhensleigh@wilkes.edu.us. That's it!"

  Trent typed some more.

  "All right," he said a minute later. "Excellent. They've got a universal address down there: allwilkes@wilkes.edu.us. Excellent. Now, we can send an e-mail to anyone who has a computer at that station."

  "Do it," Cameron said.

  Trent typed a message, then did a quick cut-and-paste. When he was finished he practically slammed his finger down on the send button.

  Libby Gant stood in front of the heavy steel door set into the small ice tunnel.

  It had a rusty pressure wheel attached to it. With some difficulty, Gant turned it. She rotated it three times.

  And then suddenly she heard a loud clunking noise from within the great steel door, and the door creaked open a fraction.

  Gant pulled the door wide and shone her flashlight beyond it.

  "Whoa," she said.

  It looked like an airplane hangar. It was so big, Gant's flashlight wasn't even strong enough to see the far end. But she could see enough.

  She could see walls.

  Man-made walls.

  Steel walls, with heavy reinforcing girders holding up a high aluminium ceiling. Huge yellow robotic arms stood silently in the gloom, covered in frost. Halogen lights lined the ceiling. Some metal girders lay at awkward angles on the floor in front of her. Gant saw that several of them had jagged marks at their ends?they had been broken clean in two. Everything was covered in a layer of ice.

  Gant saw a piece of paper at her feet. She picked it up. It was frozen solid, but she could still read the letterhead. It read:

  ENTERTECH LTD.

  Gant walked back to the small tunnel that led to the main cavern. She called to Montana and Hensleigh.

  A few minutes later, Montana rolled through the horizontal fissure and walked with Gant into the giant subterranean hangar.

  "What the hell is going on here?" he said.

  They entered the hangar, their flashlights creating beams of light. Montana went left. Gant went right.

  Gant came to an office-type structure that seemed to be overgrown with ice. The door to the office opened with a loud creak, and slowly, very slowly, Gant stepped inside.

  A body was lying on the floor of the office.

  A man.

  His eyes were closed, and he was naked. His skin had turned blue. He looked like he was asleep.

  Gant saw a desk on the far side of the office, saw something on it. Moving toward the desk, she saw that it was a book of some kind, a leather-bound book.

  It just sat there on the desk all by itself. The rest of the desk was bare. It was almost, Gant thought, as if someone had left it there deliberately, so that it would be the first thing a visitor found.

  Gant picked up the book. It was covered in a layer of frost, and the pages were hard, like cardboard.

  She opened it.

  It appeared to be a diary of some sort.

  Gant read an entry near the beginning:

  2 June 1978

  Things are going well. But it's so cold!! I can't believe they brought us all the way down here to build a fucking attack plane! The weather outside is terrible. Blizzard conditions. Thankfully, our hangar is built below the surface, so we stay out of the weather. The sad irony is, we need the cold. The system's plutonium core maintains its grade for longer in the colder temperatures....

  Gant jumped ahead to a page not far from the end of the diary.

  15 February 1980

  No one's coming. I'm sure of it now. Bill Holden died yesterday, and we had to cut Pat Anderson's hands off, they wer
e so frostbitten.

  It's been two months now since the quake hit, and I've given up all hope of rescue. Someone said Old Man Niemeyer was supposed to be coming down here in December, but he hasn't showed.

  When I go to sleep at night, I wonder if anyone but Niemeyer knows we're here.

  Gant flipped back some pages, looking for something. She found what she was looking for around the middle of the diary.

  20 December 1979

  I don't know where I am. We were hit by an earthquake yesterday, the biggest motherfucking earthquake you have ever seen. It was as if the earth opened up and just swallowed us whole.

  I was down in the hangar when it happened, working on the bird. First the ground began to shake and then suddenly this massive wall of ice just thrust up out of the ground and ripped the hangar in half. And then we just seemed to fall. Fall and fall. Massive chunks of the ice shelf (each one the size of a building, I estimated) caved in on either side of us as we were sucked down into the earth?I saw them make enormous dents in the roof of the hangar. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! The quake must have ripped an enormous hole underneath the station and we just fell down into it.

  We just kept going down. Down and down. Shaking and falling. One of the big robot arms fell on Doug Myers, crushed him to death....

  Gant was stunned.

  This "hangar" had been an ice station. An ice station that had been set up in the utmost secrecy to build a plane of some sort?a plane, Gant noticed, that used plutonium. But this station, it seemed, had originally been up on the surface?or, rather, buried just underneath the surface like Wilkes Ice Station?until an earthquake had hit it and sucked it underground.

  Gant flicked to the very last page of the diary.

  17 March 1980

  I am the last one alive. All of my colleagues are dead. It has been almost three months now since the quake hit, and I know no one is coming. My left hand is frostbitten and gangrenous. I cannot feel my feet anymore.

  I cannot go on. I am going to strip myself naked and lie down in the ice. It should only take a few minutes. If anyone should read this in the future, know that my name was Simon Wayne Daniels. I was an aviation electronics specialist for Entertech Ltd. My wife, Lily, lives in Palmdale, although I don't know if she'll be there when you read this. Please find her and tell her that I loved her and tell her that I'm so sorry I couldn't tell her where I went.