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Maddock’s gag reflex jerked him back into reality, waking him into a nightmare of drowning. He thrashed about blindly, his body wracked with a coughing spasm as it tried to purge his lungs of the cold sea water. It took him a moment to realize that he was on the surface. It took a lot longer for him to remember where he had been before that.
He lifted his head out of the water and saw flames, scattered pools of oil and floating debris burning all around him, and realized intuitively what had happened.
The grenade he had tossed onto the rear deck had triggered a secondary explosion, probably the fuel tanks, and that had blown the cabin cruiser to smithereens. The blast had launched him out into open water.
His relief at having survived that catastrophe immediately gave way to panic. He dog-paddled in a circle, searching all around for Sea Foam.
“Maddock!”
The shout was faint but unmistakable. He spun around again, looking for the source of the voice, waving his arms above his head. “Corey! Here!”
A searchlight stabbed out through the gloom. Maddock oriented himself toward it and began swimming, but after a few seconds, the illuminated circle fell upon him, followed quickly by a ring lifesaver. He slipped one arm through the hole in the center and allowed his crewmate to reel him in like the catch of the day.
Corey still dressed in his bright orange survival suit and dripping wet from his own excursion, was alone at the other end of the rope.
“Where’s Matt?” Maddock said as the other man reached down to pull him aboard.
“Out cold,” Corey replied, nodding over his shoulder to an unmoving form sprawled on the deck.
“Shot?”
Corey shook his head. “I think he got hit by some flying debris. I made sure he was alive and breathing. Then I started looking for you.”
“Any survivors on their side?”
“I didn’t see anyone else. I think all that gear they were wearing probably dragged them down. Boss, what the hell happened?”
“We got lucky.” Maddock looked out over the water again. “This time.”
The damage to Sea Foam was mostly cosmetic and all above the water-line. Matt Barnaby on the other hand probably had a concussion, but even if his injuries had not been serious enough to warrant medical attention, Maddock’s decision to return to port would have remained unchanged.
Although piracy on the high seas was becoming increasingly common, Maddock was fairly certain that the men who had attacked them had not been mere brigands attempting to seize a target of opportunity. They had been speaking English, with American accents, and their weapons and equipment marked them as professionals—paramilitaries or mercenaries.
A hit squad.
But working for whom?
Until he had an answer to that question, the search for the Waratah would have to be put on hold.
The sat phone started ringing when they were still fifty miles from port. It was Bones.
“You’re not gonna believe what happened to us.”
Maddock felt his pulse quicken. “Let me guess. Someone tried to kill you.”
There was a long silence on the line—the unavoidable delay of satellite transmission lag—and then he heard Bones say. “Dude, you told him?”
Willis’s voice was barely audible. “When would I have done that? We’ve been together the whole time.”
“Just tell me what happened,” Maddock said.
He listened patiently as Bones recounted everything that had transpired, beginning with their meeting at the Buffalo University and ending with their narrow escape from the two gunmen.
“We had some unexpected company here, too,” Maddock said when his partner finished.
“That proves it then. They’re going after everyone who knows that we found Falcon’s tomahawk.”
Maddock frowned. “Bones you know how I feel about coincidences, but honestly, I can’t see how an old axe head rates attention from an international hit team.”
“The tomahawk is just the tip of the iceberg. Rose can explain it better than me. I’ll let her tell you when we get there.”
“Wait, you’re coming here? Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“Positive,” Bones said. “If she’s right, that’s where the answers are.”
“You mean the wreck?”
The lag delay was maddening, but not as maddening as Bones’ cryptic answer. “Not exactly.”
“Antarctica?” Maddock glanced over at Bones, and then back to Rose Greer. “You’re serious?”
The red-haired woman nodded confidently. “That’s where Captain Falcon found it.”
“The Outpost?”
“That’s what my great-granddad called it in his book.”
They were gathered in the restaurant of the Durban hotel where Maddock and the others were checked in under assumed names. Despite a killer headache and a new scar, Matt had declared himself fit for duty, but Maddock thought it best to steer clear of Sea Foam for a while.
“I read the book on the flight over,” Bones supplied. “It matches exactly what we found. The clipper, the second airplane and the mid-air collision. Even the hatchet was right where the book said it would be. It all fits.”
Maddock made a mental note to add In the Shadow of Falcon’s Wings to his already out of control To-Be-Read list, even though he was pretty sure Rose had already hit all the salient points.
As she told it, in 1938 or thereabouts, a young pulp fiction author named David “Dodge” Dalton had gone looking for Falcon—the man who had inspired his fictional stories—after the kidnapping of the American president. That daring crime had been committed by a gang of mercenaries using technology that, even in the present sounded like it belonged in a Buck Rogers story—exoskeletons made of an indestructible metal that imbued the wearer with, among other things, the power of flight and the ability to shoot lightning bolts. Over the course of the novel, it was revealed that the exoskeletons were actually the creation of an advanced early human civilization—artifacts discovered by the “real” Captain Falcon in an ancient outpost buried under the ice at the bottom of the world. Dodge pursued the president’s kidnappers literally to the ends of the earth, and after escaping the Outpost—which actually seemed to be some kind of elaborate prison facility—chased after the kidnappers’ plane—a stolen prototype for the Boeing 314—in a smaller floatplane—a bi-wing Grumman J2F “Duck.” In the climax of the story, the two planes collided in mid-air, and were last seen plummeting from the sky as the heroes escaped using some of the advanced Outpost technology.
All except for Captain Falcon, who made the ultimate heroic sacrifice.
“Think about it,” Bones continued, enthusiastically. “There’s no way the government would have let a story like that go public. A kidnapped president. The theft of an advanced aircraft. Lightning weapons. They had to cover it up. Then and now.”
Maddock raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You think our government sent those killers after us?”
“Not the whole government. You know how it works. One hand doesn’t know what the other is doing. Plausible deniability. We’re probably dealing with some kind of black-budget defense research agency. They’ve probably been exploiting the tech from the Outpost for the last eighty years.”
Maddock frowned. “If any of that were true, why would they have let this Dodge Dalton write his book in the first place?”
“Because, without tangible evidence—like that plane—it reads like science fiction. You try to suppress that, it just makes people suspicious.”
“Actually,” Rose added, “the story was only published a few years ago. Maybe it went out before they could stop it, and they’ve been watching to see if anyone would take it seriously.”
Bones turned to Rose. “Tell him the rest.”
“There’s more?” Maddock said.
Rose grinned sheepishly. “It’s more conjecture than proof, but... Mr. Maddock, have you ever heard of Station 211?”
“Sounds like the name of a ska band.”
“It’s actually the name of a facility rumored to have been built by the Nazis in 1939, in Neuschwabenland or New Swabia, a territory in the region of Antarctica known as Queen Maud Land. It’s about 2,600 miles south of here.”
Maddock nodded slowly. “Nazis.”
“Station 211 is just a rumor, but a Nazi expedition to Antarctica really happened in 1938. The area was officially a Norwegian territory, but that didn’t stop the Nazis from moving in. The purpose of the expedition was ostensibly to create a whaling outpost for Germany. Whale oil was still an important resource at the time, but the explorers spent the better part of two years flying over the interior, surveying it and, according to some reports, finding ice free areas in the Mühlig-Hofmann Mountains, fertile green valleys fed by hot springs. In the more outlandish stories, they found technology from the ancient civilization of Atlantis.”
Maddock exchanged a look with Bones.
“I know,” Rose went on, misinterpreting the look. “It sounds crazy. But after the war, Admiral Richard Byrd put together a huge expedition—Operation High Jump—to explore the same area. Byrd reported finding a green valley with forests growing on the surrounding slopes. Even stranger, in an interview Byrd warned of an unspecified threat from aircraft based in the polar region.”
“He actually used the words ‘flying objects,’” Bones chimed in. “A lot of people believe that Operation High Jump was actually a mission to retrieve alien spaceships originally discovered by the Nazis.”
Maddock knew that his partner loved a good conspiracy theory, especially when aliens were involved.
“Another popular theory was that Byrd was speculating about the possibility of a hollow earth, with entrances at the poles. That’s also something the Nazis believed.” Rose raised her hands in a defensive gesture. “I’m not saying I believe any of that, but it’s a well-known fact that the American government scooped up a lot of Nazi scientists after the war.”
“Operation Paperclip,” Bones supplied.
“Admiral Byrd might have been acting on secret information about Nazi activities in Antarctica.”
“So you think this Station 211 is the Outpost described in your grandfather’s book.”
“Great-grandfather, but yes. I mean, until you guys showed up, I didn’t think any of it was real, but...” She shrugged and looked over at Bones. “Like he said. It all fits.”
Maddock wondered if Bones and Rose were being a little too hasty in pinning everything on a grand conspiracy, but he was having trouble coming up with a plausible alternative. Complicating the situation was the fact that Jimmy Letson had gone off the grid. That wasn’t like Jimmy, and it had Maddock more than a little worried.
If the government really was willing to kill them to cover something up, then there was only one way to take the heat off.
Expose it for everyone to see.
“Okay,” he said. “Pack your long johns. We’re going south.”