| |
Maddock had a rough idea of the challenges they would face below the Antarctic Circle, but the first major obstacle presented itself before they could even depart. Just getting to Antarctica would be a prodigious undertaking.
At her maximum sustainable cruising speed, it would take Sea Foam five days to reach the coast of Antarctica, a voyage that would take her through some of the most dangerous seas on the planet. But even if the yacht had been built to withstand the harsh polar environment, there was another far more compelling reason not to travel by water. Sea Foam had already been attacked only 200 miles from port. Maddock doubted they would survive a second attack, especially if it happened 2,000 miles from civilization. Flying in was a much better option, but unfortunately it was almost prohibitively expensive.
Almost.
For the low price of just $20,000, a Cape Town-based logistics agency provided round-trip air passage to Novolazareskaya, a Russian research base situated on the Lazarev Ice Shelf. In addition to being a hub for scientific pursuits, “Novo Base” provided a staging area for thrill-seekers and adventure tourists with more money than sense.
Maddock secured passage for himself, Bones and Rose—the rest of the crew would stay in Durban with Sea Foam, to hopefully leave a blind trail for the hit squad to follow—and after dropping a few more bills on polar equipment, the three of them boarded the plane, a massive Russian-made Ilyushin Il-76, painted white with a bright blue nose and a stripe running down the length of the fuselage, for the six hour flight to the end of the earth.
“This little jaunt is going to put a dent in our rainy day fund,” Maddock said.
“What good is having a platinum card if you can’t splurge once in a while?” Bones replied. “Besides, if we don’t come up with something to get those goons off our backs permanently, all the money in the world isn’t going to make much difference.”
“True enough. Which brings us to the question of where we go once we get there.” He turned to Rose. “Any idea where we’re supposed to look for this Station 211?”
“If that was known, it wouldn’t be a rumor anymore. It’s generally believed that Admiral Byrd found what he was looking for in the Mühlig-Hofmann Mountains, but you won’t read that in the official sources. It’s the same reason why you won’t see it on Google Earth.”
“I see why you and Bones get along so well. How did Dodge Dalton find the Outpost?”
“The devices from the Outpost react with each other. Sort of a magnetic attraction. They’re drawn to it like a homing beacon. It’s something to do with the metal. A scientist my great-granddad worked with called it ‘adamantine.”’
“Like in the comic books?” Bones said.
“Greek mythology, actually. It was the indestructible metal of the gods. The chains of Prometheus were forged from it.”
“Unfortunately, we seem to be fresh out of ancient adamantine gizmos,” Maddock said. “Unless you’ve been holding out on us.”
“Actually, I think we do have something.” She dipped into her shoulder bag and brought out the tomahawk head.
Bones folded his arms over his chest. “The aliens made that?”
“They weren’t aliens, Bones,” Rose replied patiently. “And no they didn’t, but I think it’s possible that it may have picked up some of the properties of adamantine.”
“Sort of like magnetizing a piece of steel,” Maddock said. “That could explain why it doesn’t show any sign of corrosion. You think that will be enough to guide us?”
“I was thinking we could suspend it on a string, like a pendulum or dowsing rod. Once we get close to the mountains, we should observe some kind of effect.” Rose gave a helpless shrug. “I hope. Sorry. It’s the best I’ve got.”
Maddock just nodded.
It was a balmy 31 degrees Fahrenheit on Schirmacher Oasis, the ice-free plateau where Novo Base, with its three-mile-long airstrip was situated. Rose, with her heavy parka tied around her waist, and her polar-fleece jacket liner unzipped, strolled down the plane’s cargo ramp like it was a summer day—which in fact, it was. She stretched after the long flight and took in a deep breath. “Wow. Africa and Antarctica in the same day. Now I can cross them both off my bucket list.”
Bones, fully-outfitted in his cold-weather clothes, was less enthusiastic. “I could have gone my whole life without coming here. Remind me again why I’m here instead of Matt? Rangers love this cold weather crap.”
“You mean aside from his concussion?”
Bones made a dismissive gesture. “Pshaw. I had a flash-bang blow up in my face. I still can’t hear out of my left ear.”
“Okay. Then how about the fact that we might just be about to crack one of the biggest UFO mysteries in history. Admit it. You wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
Bones gave a non-committal grunt. “I’m just saying, I wish it was a little warmer.”
“This is warmer,” Rose said. “You really should peel off some of those layers until we’re out on the ice. You’re going to perspire in there, and believe me, you don’t want your sweat freezing.”
“Oh, suddenly you’re the polar expert?”
“I’m from Buffalo. I know a thing or two about cold weather.”
“Keep your goggles on though,” Maddock added. “Snow blindness is one of the biggest dangers of being here.”
It would have been more accurate to say that snow blindness—literally sunburned eyeballs—was one of the most common dangers. The affliction, which caused symptoms ranging from a painful sensation—some described it as a feeling like having broken glass under the eyelids—to temporary loss of vision, was just one of a long list of hazards awaiting visitors to the southern ice, but unlike those others, it took a few hours of unprotected exposure to the glare of sunlight reflecting off the ice for the symptoms to set in. It was painful, but not immediately lethal, unlike most of the other items on that list.
Although there were limited guest facilities on the plateau, it seemed prudent to spend as little time there as possible, so as soon as their gear was off the plane and loaded onto a bright yellow snowcat—another service provided by the logistics company for a small fortune—they headed out.
In keeping with their cover story, they had submitted an itinerary for their “adventure ski vacation,” but it had also seemed wise to avoid stating their actual destination, which meant that the weather report and crevasse map supplied by the logistics company were pretty much useless once they left the plateau. The only way to safely negotiate the various hazards of the landscape—weak ice-bridges over geothermal heated lakes and streams, crevasses that could swallow the snowcat whole—was by moving slowly and paying attention to tell-tale clues on the surface. The Mühlig-Hofmann Mountains were only about a hundred and twenty miles from Novo Base, but traveling in a straight line was out of the question, and what should have taken them four hours took closer to fourteen, or at least it felt that way.
Maddock was used to long hours of travel on the water, but driving the snowcat was nothing like putting Sea Foam on a heading and letting her do all the work. He had to be wide-awake and fully alert every second, even when he wasn’t at the controls. After two hours, he switched out with Bones, and then Rose demanded a turn. Since the cab was heated and they had round the clock daylight it made sense to keep driving, but by the time they finally reached the figurative end of the road, they were almost too exhausted to set up camp.
Outside, they got a taste of what Antarctica really had to offer. Maddock and Bones had to fight a steady ten-mile-an-hour polar blast and sub-zero temperatures, but once the tent was pitched and anchored, the interior immediately began warming up thanks to constant sunlight bathing the exterior panels. With the last of their energy, they stripped down to their thermal underwear and crawled into their sleeping bags.
“Yes!”
Rose’s shout roused Maddock from a deep dreamless sleep. He felt like he had only just drifted off but when he glanced at his watch, he saw that more than six hours had passed.
He sat up and looked over to see the historian bent over something on the floor of the tent, but looking at him with a triumphant grin. “It works,” she said. “Check it out.”
Maddock squirmed out of his warm sleeping bag and crawled over to her. When he saw what she was doing, he reached over and slugged Bones until the latter stirred.
Maddock ignored his friend’s warning growl. “Wake up,” he said. “You need to see this.”
Rose had threaded a length of paracord through the axe eye—the slot where the wooden handle, or haft, was supposed to go—and was dangling the tomahawk head like a plumb bob.
Only it wasn’t dangling. Not straight down at least. Instead, the cord was stretched taut at a shallow angle, just a few degrees below horizontal. Maddock reached out and touched a cautious finger to the metal blade. It was warmer than he expected, and swayed a little. He applied more pressure, pushing it down several inches, but when he moved his hand away, it fell—or rather rose—back to its previous position.
“Holy crap,” Bones muttered, now fully awake. “That’s trippy.”
“Like I told you,” Rose said. “We can follow it like a dowsing rod. This will take us right to the Outpost.”
“In case you weren’t paying attention today,” Bones replied, “You can’t always travel in a straight line down here. And we don’t know if it’s a mile or a hundred miles.”
“I think there’s a way to narrow it down a little,” Maddock said, pulling on his snow pants.
Once they were suited up, they all headed out into the biting cold. The hatchet head continued to hang askew, always pointing in the same direction no matter which way they turned. Maddock oriented his GPS unit—unlike the sat phone, which relied on communications satellites, the global positioning system was truly “global” in its coverage—and stared toward the mountain peaks in the distance.
He plotted the azimuth into the GPS, then they started off on foot, heading away from it and the shelter of their camp, at a perpendicular angle to the invisible line for a distance of about a mile, and then plotted in another vector. The two lines crossed in a valley about twenty-five miles southwest of their camp. The elevation at the site was nearly two hundred meters higher than their present location, but the hatchet head was still pointing at a slight downward angle.
“It’s under the ice,” Bones said. “That’s not going to make this easy.”
“If you’re right about Base 211, someone else may have already done all the hard work,” Maddock replied. “I guess we’ll know when we get there.”
It took three hours to find a pass through the maze to the valley marked on the GPS. As they got closer, the “angle of the dangle” as Bones put it, increased but surprisingly even when they were squarely on the coordinates, it did not point straight down.
“I guess X doesn’t mark the spot after all,” Bones said.
“Maybe I was off by a couple degrees when I ran the plot,” Maddock said. He doubted that was true, but couldn’t think of a better answer.
“I don’t think that’s it,” Rose said. She held the axe head out in front of her and turned her body until she was facing the same direction it was pointing. “I think we just need to keep following wherever it leads.”
Maddock glanced over at Bones who was peering through the cab window. “I’m not sure we’ll have to do that,” he said, his enthusiasm finally breaking the grip of the cold. “I know where we need to go.” He pointed toward a distant black peak protruding above the ice in the direction Rose was indicating.
“That mountain? You seeing something I’m not?”
“It’s not a mountain,” Bones said. “Look closer. It’s a pyramid.”
Maddock was not as certain about the identification as Bones. The jutting black massif did look perfectly symmetrical, with what looked about like the same angles as the Great Pyramid of Khufu on the Giza Plateau in Egypt, but he had seen plenty of similar rock formations carved by nature rather than the artifice of human engineers.
Man-made or not though, the axe head was leading them in that direction.
They drove the snowcat as close to it as the terrain would allow, and then debarked to finish the trek on foot. The slope was so steep that they had to break out the mountaineering equipment in order to keep going. The axe head continued to lead them forward even though, by climbing, they were almost certainly moving further and further away from whatever it was they were trying to find.
Then they found the cave.