‘Our primary mission is to recover a highly classified military satellite that is descending out of orbit prematurely toward the glacier,’ Veer shouted above the roar of the engines. ‘The enemy is made up of scientists and soldiers of unknown allegiance but we should not underestimate them: they will be well armed, highly paid and highly motivated, just like all of us. The difference is that the satellite belongs to our country, and we will get it back from them!’
‘Hoo-Rar!’
Veer pointed to the ATVs and the aircraft around them.
‘Expect hostile action! Deploy with full and lethal force! If there are no survivors from the enemy team, then our President will not have to explain to the world what happened up here and the security of our country will remain inviolate!’
‘Hoo-Rar!’
Veer reached for a face mask that lay on the rear of an ATV beside him. He prepared to don the mask and then shouted:
‘Thirty seconds, open the doors!’
The C-130’s loadmaster punched a series of large buttons attached the fuselage wall, and instantly a huge ramp at the rear of the aircraft began to slowly lower and provide a vertiginous view of the world below. The sky above was a deep indigo blue flecked with stars, and behind the aircraft’s massive turboprop engines swirling vapor trails glowed gold in the sunrise as they billowed into the distance in the aircraft’s wake.
The air was cold enough to take Veer’s breath away, ice clinging to his eyebrows and beard until he donned the mask. Oxygen flowed from the mask, allowing him to breath in the bitter cold and the high altitude, low pressure air as he strode to the ATVs. His men lined up on either side of the aircraft’s fuselage, where two hatches were manned by the loadmasters.
A red light high on the fuselage wall suddenly turned green, and the loadmasters opened the hatches to allow a freezing gale to flow through the aircraft as Veer roared into his microphone.
‘Go, now, now, now!’
The troopers deployed one after the other, hurling themselves out of the open hatches either side of the aircraft into the frigid air thirty thousand feet above Antarctica. Veer turned and watched as the loadmasters, all of them protected by masks and Arctic survival clothing, began pushing the ATV’s out of the Hercules.
The vehicles fell away behind the craft one by one, large parachutes deploying behind them and billowing out to slow the vehicles’ descent toward the ice far below. Veer watched for a moment longer as his men poured from the Hercules into the void, and then he sprinted down the fuselage, running faster than the ATVs rolling off the back of the aircraft as he reached the point of no return and hurled himself off the back ramp of the Hercules into the abyss.
Antarctica was sprawled below him, a vast continent of ice bathed in an orange glow from the rising sun behind Veer as he plummeted away from the Hercules. The roar of the aircraft’s engines faded swiftly into memory as he reached terminal velocity, following the black specks of his men as they rocketed in freefall down toward the barren, frigid wastes far below.
The Antarctic coastline demarked clearly the mouth of the Totten Glacier to their south, the glacier tiger-striped with long dark shadows from ridge lines and ranges of hills spreading for miles across the empty, desolate continent.
The roar of the Hercules’ engines was replaced by the scream of wind rocketing past Veer as he plummeted ever downward. He checked his altitude and then squinted down at the icy wastes far below, seeking any sign of their quarry. Within a few moments he spotted a series of glowing streaks, perhaps twelve trails or plumes churned up by vehicles travelling far below them on the surface. On his visor, a small blinking red light marked the location where the signals his employers had detected from what they called Black Knight had been.
Veer spoke into his microphone, loudly enough to be heard over the roar of the wind buffeting past him.
‘Enemy seen, deploy between them and the target. Repeat, cut them off!’
Veer tucked his arms and legs in and tilted his body down, accelerating as he sought to catch his men up and be the first to touch down on the Antarctic wastes. His massive body raced downward and he plummeted past some of his men, who quickly accelerated along with him as they plunged through thin veils of cirrus cloud, the surface of Antarctica increasing in detail below them. Veer could see the vehicles’ plumes more clearly now, the machines heading north toward the same spot marked on his visor with the red icon.
A last glance south revealed the presence of a fairly large ship many miles away, anchored near the coast. Veer grinned inside his mask, knowing that the team on the ice would believe themselves the only people even aware that Black Knight even existed.
They won’t know what’s hit them.
XV
‘All call signs report in!’
Ethan gripped hold of the ice glider’s handles as he glanced back over his shoulder. The Polar Star was anchored in the frigid black water of the glacier’s mouth, surrounded by immense chunks of flat, floating ice that had calved off the enormous glacier into the Antarctic Ocean.
The low morning sun flared across the horizon behind the ship, the ocean sparkling like burnished copper beneath its glare as the SEAL team deployed their equipment and maneuvered their vehicles into position at the head of the convoy.
The ice gliders they were using were extraordinary tandem twin-seat vehicles, set on three skis in a tricycle configuration, with the two independently suspended outboard skis located at the end of curved arms in the manner of a seaplane’s wings and floats. Behind Ethan, who sat in the rear cockpit of one such craft, was a bio-fuel powered Rotax 914 aircraft engine attached to a three-bladed pusher-propeller with variable pitch. The four-cylinder turbocharged engine pushed out a hundred horsepower and was capable of driving the glider at an incredible eighty miles per hour across the ice.
In the enclosed cockpit, a GPS-enhanced radar system designed to detect voids in the ice and report coordinates to the rest of the team was allied to a computer-controlled aiming system for the two machine guns embedded in the glider’s nose. Ethan checked his harnesses and reveled in the warmth billowing into the cockpit from the engine as the driver, Lieutenant Riggs, looked over his shoulder.
‘All set?’
Ethan offered the soldier a thumbs-up and then Riggs opened the throttle and as one the twelve ice gliders soared away from the coast, following a path alongside the glacier as they headed in-land toward the source of the signals detected by NASA and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
‘The location of the signals is just over a hundred miles in from the coast,’ Riggs reported. ‘We’ll be there in a couple of hours, so just hang on and enjoy the ride.’
Ethan gripped hold of the sides of his seat as the glider accelerated across the ice, which was sparkling white in the low sun and striped with deep blue shadows stretching away from them, cast by low hills and jagged, angular outcrops of solid ice shaped by the winds that frequently scoured the barren snow fields.
On a monitor in front of him Ethan could see the GPS display mapping the frigid Antarctic wastes, and on it a small red spot that blinked on and off, demarking their destination deep in the ice fields. Ethan knew that each ice glider carried a small amount of personal baggage along with the SEAL’s weapons and equipment. Weighed down by the excess gear the vehicles were limited to around sixty miles per hour across the ice, much of which was maintained by their momentum once moving. The engine behind him roared, his ears protected by a headset that allowed him to communicate both with the driver and the other members of the team.