“I’ve got an opening.” Riley broke Sammy out of her snowy reverie. He was poking his shovel through the ice. Together, Riley and Devlin scratched away to widen the opening. The tunnel continued on ahead for another ten feet before angling off to the right.
“Let’s see what we have,” Riley said, as he led the way.
Sammy crawled along on her hands and knees behind Riley and Devlin, her Gore-tex pants sliding on the steel. Fifty more feet and they reached a thick hatch. Riley turned the wheel and the door slowly opened. Another two hundred feet. Then another hatch. They squeezed out the second one and could finally stand. A small shielded room opened out onto the reactor’s core. Radiation warning signs were plastered all over the walls. Sammy looked through the thick glass at the slots where the rods were to be inserted in the reactor core itself. In front of the glass was a small control panel with a few seats.
“Unbelievable.” Devlin shook his head. “They really thought something this poorly constructed could work. No wonder the one at McMurdo had to be taken apart.”
“You have to remember this was twenty-five years ago,” Riley reminded him.
“Hell, even twenty-five years ago someone should have had more common sense.” Devlin ran his hands over the thick glass separating them from the core. “Why are people so stupid?”
“Let’s get Conner. She’ll want to get this on tape.” Devlin reentered the access tunnel and headed back. Riley and Sammy stayed a few seconds, checking out the room, and then followed.
Pak watched as Sergeant Chong finished securing the steel cable that would hold their static lines to the roof of the airplane, just in front of the aft passenger door. Pak had never jumped out of an IL-18, but he had heard that it had been done. The IL-18 was not specifically designed for paratroop operations, but the team was making the best of the situation, which seemed to be the overriding concept for this whole mission. Everything about the operation was being improvised due to the time constraint, and Pak didn’t like that.
He looked out a small porthole at the polar ice cap glistening below. They were flying at the plane’s maximum altitude. Pushing up against the glass and looking forward, Pak could make out a dark line indicating the storm blanketing Lesser Antarctica. The OPLAN had told him about it. Jumping into the high winds was going to be extremely dangerous, a factor the bureaucrats at Special Forces Command seemed to have overlooked.
Pak checked his watch. They were less than an hour and a half from the target. ‘Time to rig!” he yelled.
Splitting into buddy teams, the nine men who would be jumping began to put on their parachutes, Sergeant Chong helping the odd man. Pak threw his main parachute on his back and buckled the leg and chest straps, securing the chute to his body and making sure it was cinched down tight. The reserve was hooked onto the front. Rucksacks were clipped on below the reserve, and automatic weapons were tied down on top of the reserve.
After Sergeant Chong inspected all the men, they took their seats, each man lost in his own thoughts, contemplating the jump and the mission ahead.
Pak pulled the OPLAN out of his carry-on bag and checked the numbers in the communications section. With those in mind, he waddled his way up the aisle toward the cockpit.
The wind had actually diminished, although it was still kicking along with gusts up to thirty-five miles an hour. Visibility was increasing to almost fifty feet at times. The slight break in the storm could last for minutes or hours.
Below the surface, in the base itself, the party was taking turns sleeping. Vickers, Kerns, and Lallo were seated at the doors to unit B2, standing guard on the sleepers and each other.
In the communications unit, A3, all was quiet. The lights had been turned off since Conner finished videotaping hours earlier. There was no one in the room to notice the small red light that suddenly flickered and came alive on the transponder. Someone had initiated the beacon using a radio on the proper frequency, and it was now pulsing out the location of Eternity Base to any receiver within a three-hundred-miles radius in all directions.
Chapter 20
The young nurse looked up from her romance novel as the doors at the end of the corridor opened. Four men appeared, one pushing an empty wheelchair. The nurse glanced up at the clock behind her work station, wondering what they wanted this early in the morning. They trooped to a halt at her desk, and the older man in front slid a piece of paper out of his briefcase. The other three men flanked him, their faces expressionless.
“I’m Doctor Wallace. This is the transfer order for one of your patients. We’d like to pick him up immediately.”
The nurse frowned. At four in the morning? “I’ll have to get the intern on duty to sign off on that.”
The man gave a grimace that seemed intended as a smile. “We’ll wait.”
Two minutes later the intern stood before the men scratching his head as he read the order. “This is a legitimate transfer, but normally the patient’s doctor is the one who signs off on the transfer. The intern shot a pointed glance at the clock on the wall. “That’s usually why they occur during regular duty hours.”
Wallace seemed not to have heard. “The paper is in order. Note the signature by the hospital director. Please sign.”
The intern had noted the signature. That effectively relieved him of responsibility. Still, he knew that the patient’s doctor would probably give him a dose of grief. “All right,” he finally said, taking this easiest course of action. His pen scratched in the proper spot.
“He’s in three-nineteen,” the nurse offered.
Wallace inclined his head and the three men strode down the hallway.
“He’s hooked up to monitors and IVs,” the nurse said as she stood. “They’re going to need help unhooking him.”
Wallace held up a hand, the command implicit in the gesture stopping her. “One of them knows how to do it.”
In three minutes the men reappeared, one wheeling the chair, the IV carried by another. The third held a bag containing the patient’s possessions. The patient appeared to be semiconscious and didn’t say a word as they passed by. The party was gone in record time.
“That’s strange,” the nurse muttered, the intern barely picking it up.
“What is?”
“The patient, General Woodson, always was very alert.”
The intern shrugged. “Nobody, especially not a man who’s had half his guts removed for cancer, likes being jerked out of bed at four in the morning.”
The nurse shook her head as the intern headed back to his cot. She’d have sworn that Woodson looked drugged. But that wasn’t possible; they had him on only a mild pain suppressant. She picked up her novel. Within a few minutes, General Woodson’s transfer was forgotten as she plunged back into the heroine’s perils in Victorian England.
Thirty minutes later a figure slipped in the fire door at the other end of the corridor and moved to room 319. The man quietly opened the door and stepped into the room, drawing a syringe out of his pocket at the same time. He halted, surprised by the empty bed. He checked the chart at the foot of the bed to be sure that it had held his target. Replacing the syringe, the man retraced his steps and departed the hospital.
He went to the first pay phone he could find and dialed the number he’d memorized when assigned this mission.
“Peter here.”
“This is Lucifer. The target is gone. I was too late.”