SKELETON GOLD: Dark Tide (James Pace Book 4)

by Andy Lucas

  Fighting the instinctive urge to walk towards heat, light and shelter, he found his exhausted body shuffling backwards in the snow until he slid back down the slight rise and was hidden from view of the main building again.

  Dragging himself upright, he moved as fast as he could back towards the water. Not pausing to look back, he carried on around the coast, heading towards the much larger American research base at McMurdo. If he made it there, he knew he could get help for everyone. He just needed to survive long enough to reach it.

  6

  The naked woman smiled at him sexily in the flashing light, unmoving and silent. Despite the shock, it took Pace’s chilled brain a few seconds to realise that he was looking at a painting rather than real flesh and blood. In the same vein as the pin-up girls painted onto the fuselage of hundreds of WW2 bombers, the picture was faded but fairly well preserved; the flesh tones still bright. Her eyes, dark and questioning, stared back at him with a hint of amusement. The other key difference was that this image was secured under a large sheet of clear glass, to protect the paint from waves and underwater travel.

  As his eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness, Pace noticed that the darkness wasn’t quite as solid as it had been. A vague phosphorescence, glowing from minerals trapped within the walls around what appeared to be a vast rock cavern, allowed him the same kind of view as if he were in a darkened cinema.

  The painting adorned the side of the conning tower, on a partially submerged submarine, which was moored alongside a natural rock jetty, worn smooth by eons of water action. Pace had been washed up against the metal cylinder, right beside the lucky charm of a long-dead crew. The main body of the vessel was underwater, as was a few feet of the conning tower. Only ten feet of the sail protruded from the water.

  Scrambling around, Pace spotted the rungs of a ladder and found the energy to pull himself out of the water, flopping down inside the conning tower rails and thumping heavily against the metal wheel of the main hatch. The inside of the platform was dry and had been for a very long time. From his research into submarines, at the time they were searching for the final resting place of K-19, Pace instantly recognised it to be a German U-Boat from the same era. The vessel, and the painting, were a hundred years old. It’s deck gun, barrel half exposed to the cold cave air, still pointed menacingly towards the bow.

  He felt stronger just being out of the water but paused a moment before pulling himself into a seated position next to the hatch, gathering his wits. Turning off the blinking emergency light, he allowed his eyes to grow fully accustomed to the eerie glow inside the cavern while he planned his next move.

  Accidentally, in the manner of several of the world’s greatest discoveries, he knew he had stumbled upon the secret base. Clearly, it had to be nearby because otherwise there would be no need for a German U-Boat to be moored there otherwise. Pringle’s spidery scrawl had told of Germans searching the African base for him after the K-19 went to the bottom, so perhaps they had moved on to the next base to complete their work?

  Wasting no more time with thought, he tested his strength against the top hatch wheel and was pleasantly surprised when it turned easily, with barely a squeak. A couple of turns later and Pace cracked the seal. He lifted the heavy steel hatch open, allowing it to fall back to its hinges until it naturally came to rest a few degrees over the ninety; standing virtually upright to reveal a musty circle of darkness.

  With a rapidly thawing, burning face, he realised that the air temperature in the cave was much higher than outside, possibly even slightly above freezing. With the prospect of a tricky exploration ahead, he decided to ditch the suit in favour of his normal sweater and jeans beneath. With a bit of fiddling, he extricated himself from the suit and allowed it to drop onto the floor. Feeling as light as a feather, and warm enough as long as he kept his limbs moving, he leaned down and managed to remove the small beacon light from the suit and easily switched its intermittent mode over to a continuous beam using nimble fingers, suddenly freed from their gigantic survival mittens.

  He knew the tiny battery would fail much more swiftly this way but he had no intention of tackling the claustrophobic confines of the old submarine with a flashing light as his only guide. If he fell, tripped or hurt himself badly here, he would die.

  Inside, as he expected, the U-Boat was cramped. The musty air smelled faintly of diesel oil and the silence intensified his sense of solitude. Itself lost for nearly a century, entombed in a rock cave locked beneath tons of ice, it was dust and cobweb free. In fact, Pace wondered if the efficient killing machine from a by-gone era might even be salvageable at some point in the future.

  ‘That’s if you live long enough to get out of here,’ he chided himself quietly. ‘Come on, James. Focus.’

  Suitably reminded, he began a slow, steady search of the dead submarine. He wasn’t knowledgeable enough to recognise the submarine but, if he had, he would have realised he was walking inside a Type 51 U-Boat, classified as a torpedo attack boat by the Germans. Over sixty metres long and capable of travelling over nine thousand miles in a single voyage, utilising her powerful 2400 horse-power diesel engines, she had been at the cutting edge of submersible technology in her day.

  With two torpedo tubes in the bow, and another two in her stern, she only carried 6 torpedoes but had established a model upon which later, more deadly U-Boat designs would be based. With a top surface speed of 17 knots, and a respectable 9 knots while running submerged, her thirty-six man crew could dive the boat down a maximum depth of fifty metres. Her deck gun; partially submerged, was an 88mm beast and one of the dark, locked storerooms up towards the bow still held nearly three hundred rounds of ammunition for it.

  Not that Pace knew any of that. To him, it was a cold, dark nightmare, filled with the ghosts of an invisible crew. He was relieved to find the submarine completely deserted, which gave him a glimmer of hope. Where had the crew gone? If they weren’t here, dead, then they must have removed themselves. That meant that there was probably an exit somewhere in the cave that could lead him out.

  After all, the U-Boat was not here by accident, he reasoned. The cave formed a perfect sheltered harbour, hidden from prying eyes. After ten minutes of clambering, crawling and ducking his head, Pace eventually made his way back up to the control room and breathed a deep sigh as he climbed back up the ladder onto the conning tower again.

  He had seen the torpedoes, neatly stowed in their racks, and hundreds of tins of food still stored in the galley, so it did not appear that the crew had starved. They had clearly made it out somehow and he needed to follow in their footsteps.

  Standing up as tall as he could in the tower, He slowly scanned the surrounding gloom. Allowing his eyes to readjust, switching off the light again, he soon began to make out a difference in the depth of some of the shadows. After a couple of minutes, ignoring the burning of his thawing facial skin, he got a clear image of the cave.

  The U-Boat was actually moored about five feet away from a smooth, rock ledge. A jetty extended out from the ledge and butted up to the port side of the submarine, just behind the deck gun. The jetty sat above the water, so it was clear that the submarine was not sinking, and that it had entered the cave slightly submerged. Pace had no idea why it hadn’t fully surfaced once through the tunnel because the cave ceiling was way above his head.

  His heart lurched as his eyes strained and followed the ledge until it came to an abrupt end at a set of steps, leading upwards into the darkness.

  The way out.

  Within seconds, he was back in his survival suit and sloshing across the submerged deck, pleased to find that the jetty was constructed of solid iron and remained sturdy to the touch. Testing it with his weight, the gangway held firm.

  In the surreal half-light thrown out by whatever phosphorescent element was entombed within the cave walls, he sucked in a breath and strode purposefully across to the ledge on the other side. A thin film of ice coated the rocky surface but the rubber soles of his e
mersion suit boots stopped him slipping over.

  Wasting no time, he made his way along the ledge until he reached the stairs. Again, constructed out of iron, they rose in five metre lengths, steeply, bolted to the cave wall itself. Up close, Pace now saw that there were at least three runs of steps that ended close to the ceiling, about five metres in front of him. A handrail, also bolted to the rock, would ensure that he didn’t end up back in the water.

  Slowly, steadily, he made his way up the steps, drawing ever closer to a six foot, rock archway that began to solidify out of the gloom.

  ‘Like walking in the mines of Moria,’ he chuckled, more to keep his own spirits up than through humour. ‘Better not be any marauding goblins waiting for me.’

  He reached the archway without incident. The passageway beyond was pitch black, so whatever phosphorescent rock comprised the cave wall did not extend into the deeper rock. He flicked his light back on and stepped through, finding himself in a narrow passageway, barely large enough to accommodate him, forcing him to stoop a little to avoid knocking his head on the roughly hewn roof.

  Traversing the bare rock floor, he noted that the passageway rose at a gentle incline, turning around a blind bend and depositing him inside a sizeable room before he knew he’d even arrived.

  The room was roughly circular, with a single door leading off from the opposite side. Twenty feet in diameter, crammed with old wooden tables and chairs, coated in very fine dust, he felt a shiver of trepidation as he realised that he had just found the German crew. Dozens of bodies, all dressed in faded uniforms, occupied the chairs, or lay on the rock floor. Skeletal fingers and empty eye sockets mocked him, cursing him.

  The room felt strangely warm, which was clearly why most of the bodies had decomposed although a few looked like they had been mummified instead.

  Scattered amongst the dead submariners were personal items, opened food cans and tin mugs. Rifles hung on their straps over the backs of chairs, or were stacked against the walls. It looked as if they had all died very suddenly. None had tried to escape, or run back to the submarine. Why? Pace had no answer.

  Warily, he picked his way between the occupied tables and tested the handle on the iron door. It turned easily and an audible click cut through the silence as the latch turned. A slight push and the door opened.

  What he found beyond the door was another room, of similar dimensions. Empty, save a few old pieces of wooden furniture, no corpses littered this one. A single, doorless archway beckoned him from across this room and drew him out into the passageway beyond, rising steadily for several hundred feet until it finally deposited him in a much larger space.

  This new room had been purpose-built. Long and rectangular, stretching away into darkness and clad with thick wooden beams, it exuded a sense of solidity. Clearly a working area, the wooden work benches were empty.

  Pace’s small light was not strong enough to cast back the darkness all the way to the far wall but, as he moved deeper into the room, the distant shadow of another door slowly materialised at the far end, about fifty feet further on. Electric lights hung impotently on flexes from the ceiling; their naked bulbs long since extinguished.

  This was definitely the base he was looking for, where he hoped to find more vials of Scorpion. Pace marvelled at his good fortune in stumbling into it but he had more questions than answers at that point.

  What was an old U-Boat doing moored here and why had her crew all perished without ever seeming to penetrate further than the first room? And why were there no corpses of British scientists? Where had they gone?

  Pushing the questions away, Pace knew he had to focus on getting out, finding Hammond, then summoning a rescue party. Somewhere out there; perhaps very close by, lurked ARC’s murderous helicopter team. Unarmed, apart from the pristine Webley .455 revolver that he still carried in one of the suit’s inner pockets, any fight would be a bloody, unfortunate affair for the McEntire men.

  He crossed to the far wall and tried the door. The mechanism was stiff and squealed with protest but responded grudgingly and allowed itself to be turned. Pushing inwards, Pace found himself in another large room, more square than rectangular. The room was filled with similar wall racks, this time of mechanical equipment. He instantly recognised the hulking shapes of a couple of ancient diesel generators and the air carried a faint hint of fuel, even after all this time.

  Several other items were shrouded with heavy, grey tarpaulins. One, in particular, was huge and occupied a central space in the middle of the room. The floor in this room, interestingly, was comprised of reinforced concrete, as though it had seen heavy wear and tear. Despite a myriad of thin surface cracks, it looked to be in good condition.

  Pace’s interest piqued even further when his light illuminated the shadowy outline of a set of heavy double metal doors, set into the far wall.

  Curiosity getting the better of him, he strode across the concrete floor and took a firm grip of the trailing edge of the tarpaulin covering the massive shape. In a movie, it would have taken only one swift tug to reveal the secret beneath. In reality, the tarpaulin was extremely heavy and he found it difficult to keep a firm grip with his cumbersome mitten gloves.

  It took him a couple of minutes before he managed to wrestle enough of the material off for gravity to do the rest of the work for him. Finally, the heavy cover slid to the floor. The sight that greeted him was not what he had expected.

  ‘Wow,’ he said to himself. ‘Now this is something you don’t see every day.’

  7

  Inside Scott Base, Fiona’s men had everything under control. Taking over had been a simple task. The scientists had no weapons with which to repel an attack and immediately surrendered as soon as her people waved their own guns around.

  Communications, including radio, internet and satellite links to the base telephone network were targeted first. Fiona had a couple of her most ruthless employees guarding the main communications room and it had been a simple task to destroy any phone extensions to other areas of the base, and to confiscate any private satellite phones from the terrified scientists.

  The satisfaction she had felt at murdering the interfering McEntire men had long since evaporated. Fiona hadn’t had to kill anyone at the base yet. They had fired a few rounds into the ceiling when the scientists started to get a little bolder with their language, which had served to quieten them down immediately.

  Scott Base was the perfect site from which to launch their search for the second science lab. Fiona knew, very roughly, the coordinates she had to search and hijacking this established community meant she could get on with the job quickly, unhindered by having to cart tons of equipment out onto the ice or build her own shelters.

  Scott Base also had its own small runway, kept free from snow and ice, except in the most horrendous conditions. Long enough to land a sizeable aircraft, ARC had managed to get an old Hercules transport plane, fitted with skis, down on the runway without any difficulty. The stalwart workhorse had been stripped bare inside and adapted to carry the helicopter and thirty mercenaries. Fiona rode up front, in comfort, with the flight crew for the multi-leg, two-day journey.

  Coming in low towards the base, the pilot had pulled up to a thousand feet barely five minutes out from the landing strip and then radioed Scott Base, requesting an emergency landing.

  Not having any reason to doubt the call, permission was granted and the welcome party that came out from the buildings to greet the apparently stricken aircraft were less than pleased at being met with the evil-looking muzzles of automatic weapons.

  That had all happened yesterday, allowing the helicopter to be decanted and flown off on its murderous mission to find, and sink, Pace’s lifeboat. A radio message, sent just before their own ship was sunk, indicated that two men had escaped in one of the McEntire vessel’s lifeboats. It had been a fairly easy task to find it using the tiny tracking device that their unfortunate crew informant had planted in all the lifeboats at the same time that she
had disabled their communications. Pace and Hammond had been wrongly convinced they were just unlucky at being spotted from the air.

  Picking up the signal, they had flown straight to the lifeboat, sunk it, and been back in time for a hot meal and a few glasses of pure Russian vodka, with ice.

  Fiona had kept the scientists confined to their quarters for the first day and brought them together in the main lounge area an hour earlier, to challenge them on the increased noise. Some of the braver staff had been banging on their doors and demanding to be let out.

  She did not want to kill them, not yet anyway, so coldly threatened to have them all shot, staged a mock execution of a particularly terrified young female geologist, then had her men shoot a few bullets into the ceiling to ram her message home. She would suffer no rebellious behaviour, she assure them. Suitably chastened, they had allowed themselves to be meekly led back to captivity, like sheep.

  Oblivious to the fact that one of the men she thought she’d killed was now aware of the situation at Scott Base, and was desperately fighting through a strengthening blizzard to try and reach American help, she revelled in the sense of a job well done.

  They had set up an operations room in one of the science labs, where she now sat at a desk, sipping a mug of hot chocolate. Computer screens showed detailed topographical displays of the surrounding terrain and a flashing red circle, five miles away from Scott Base, identified their primary search area. The data discovered recently, at another site, had pointed them to this spot, where Fiona hoped she would find more information, and samples, of the elusive agent known as Scorpion. Their current supplies were almost exhausted and they had to find more of the pure agent if they were to make a success of their master plan.

  Her team were good. Hard, ruthless men, drawn from several nationalities. All had served the military of their own nations before realising the financial benefits of becoming freelance operatives. They were the same ex-soldiers who had performed so efficiently in despatching their own colleagues at the Namibian dig, at the direct command of Josephine Roche. They had proven themselves to be loyal, and happy to ask no questions when it came to following dubious orders.