‘That’s a German soldier!’
Her exclamation echoed down the tunnel and within moments the scientists were hurrying to join them and staring at the frozen corpse. Ethan had recognized the distinctive shape of the German Wehrmacht helmet just a moment before Hannah, and then the gray uniform replete with collar insignia, the winged Swastika and belt kit the soldier had worn when he had died. Near his grasp was a pristine Sturmgewehr 44 rifle, suspended in the ice a few inches beyond his hands, which were outstretched as though trying to shield himself from something rushing toward him.
Ethan could not help himself as he marveled at the perfect preservation of the body. The soldier’s face was contorted in pain and fear, his mouth wide open and his eyes squeezed shut, his head turned away from whatever had been threatening him. His skin had turned leathery and black, probably as the result of the freezing that had damaged his soft tissue at the cellular level but otherwise preserving his body as though he had died the previous day.
‘Remarkable,’ Chandler uttered as he managed to get a good look at the grisly frozen corpse. ‘Perfectly preserved, he must have been frozen shortly after death.’
Lieutenant Riggs looked at the ice surrounding the body.
‘Looks like he was drowned and the water froze rapidly with him trapped inside it,’ he suggested.
‘Almost certainly correct,’ Chandler agreed, ‘as was my conjecture that this cave is susceptible to regular floods, the water freezing as soon as it stops flowing.’ The doctor looked at the curve in the tunnel and nodded to himself. ‘He drowns, is caught in this corner of the tunnel by a vortex of spinning water curling around on itself on the outside of the turn, and then when the tunnel is full of water it freezes, enveloping him forever.’
Ethan looked at the water flowing past them and still glowing with its unnerving blue light.
‘Now the warm water has eroded some of the ice away and exposed him again,’ he said. ‘All the more reason to push on and at least this solves one mystery: there definitely were German soldiers up here during or after the Second World War.’
‘We must be close,’ Lieutenant Riggs agreed. ‘Del Toro, Sully, up front with Saunders, the rest of you back at the vanguard.’
The SEALS deployed rapidly as Lieutenant Riggs positioned himself ahead of the scientists but just behind Ethan and Hannah as they advanced deeper into the tunnel. The glow from the water was beginning to fade now as the bioluminescent bacteria in the frigid water passed by. Ethan switched on his light once more and glanced over his shoulder to see the other-worldly glow fade away behind them, as though the headlight of some ghostly blue train were steaming away into the darkness.
The depths of the tunnel ahead were plunged once more into absolute darkness, the harsh white beams of the flashlights cutting this way and that and passing through the clear ice close to the tunnel walls in shimmering shafts of dispersed light.
Ethan trudged along behind the SEALs at the head of the team, and was lost in his thoughts of Lopez for what felt like several minutes. It was tough for him to be on deployment knowing that his partner of so many years remained in a hospital ward back in DC, as though somehow he were betraying her. He was so consumed by his thoughts of her that he barely heard the command echo down from the darkness ahead.
‘Stay alert.’
Ethan looked up and saw ahead the three flashlights of the leading SEALs reflecting off something ahead of them that was not ice. He could hear the rush of the water still but now above it there was another sound, more violent, as though water were spilling from a great height and crashing down upon something and the sound of the impact dispersed across a great area.
The noise of the water grew louder and he saw the flow of the subterranean river becoming more turbulent and disturbed, the black water roiling and swirling as it plunged into the tunnel. Ahead, the beams of the SEAL’s flashlights suddenly stopped breaking up in the tunnel ice and he realized that they were walking out into a more open area, the sound of their footfalls changing despite the deep blackness.
Ethan saw the tunnel open out into a vast cavern, the beam from his light vanishing into the gloom around them. To his right he could hear water thundering down and crashing into the floor of the cavern before flowing away down toward the tunnel itself, and suddenly he realized that he was walking not on ice but on a solid, uniform surface. He looked down as he heard the spikes on his boots crunch into crumbling asphalt.
The SEALs slowed as Lieutenant Riggs pulled two flares from his belt kit and without hesitation pulled their caps and tossed them ahead of the team. The two flares arced through the air and burst into life with brilliant, fierce orange glows that illuminated the vast cavern in a flickering sunset hue.
Ethan almost toppled sideways as he saw the huge cavern glowing in the light from the flares, the ceiling sloping down toward an immense fissure in the walls to his right where water crashed out from somewhere else in the glacier and flowed away toward the tunnel entrance across a vast asphalt dock.
The ceiling looked as though it had partially collapsed, making the entire cavern appear lop-sided and putting Ethan and the team off balance until the second flare illuminated two long, low docks extending away from them, each filled with icy black water that shimmered like oil in the light from the flares. The two docks ran parallel to each other and ahead was an immense fortified building encased within the ice, walls of stone and steel sheened with frost that glistened in the light from the flares.
‘This is it,’ Chandler said in awe. ‘We found it.’
Lieutenant Riggs looked at his scanner.
‘The signal is coming from inside, from beyond the dock,’ he said. ‘They must have had some kind of power source in there to maintain it for so long. This base must have been here for at least seventy years.’
Ethan looked at the docks.
‘Submarine pens,’ he identified them. ‘This is how they must have built the base. That tunnel was here for decades, perhaps centuries, carved out by the warm water channel. The Nazis used it for access to the interior of the ice sheet and then built the base right under the ice where it would never be found.’
Doctor Chandler nodded in agreement.
‘The volcanism of Mount Erebus has been ongoing for centuries, millennia perhaps. This chamber may have been a natural consequence of warm water passing through the glacier and excavating this cavern. The Germans could have monopolized on that and built this facility within the existing cavity.’
Lieutenant Riggs surveyed the entrance to the base, massive steel doors left wide open, the interior as black as deep space and every bit as cold.
‘Let’s get going,’ he ordered. ‘We only have a few hours left.’
A voice prevented any of them from moving as Trooper Del Toro crouched down by something on the asphalt nearby.
‘You might want to hang tight a moment,’ he said as he looked over his shoulder at them. ‘I don’t think we’re alone down here.’
‘What do you mean?’ Chandler asked. ‘Nothing significant could survive in this cavern, there simply aren’t sufficient resources.’
‘Then how do you explain this?’ Del Toro asked, and gestured to something lying on the asphalt at his feet.
Chandler and the rest of the team edged their way closer, and Ethan realized what he was looking at. On the asphalt and contrasting starkly with the ice and water was a large mound of animal scat. Ethan stared at it for a moment before speaking.
‘There’s something alive down here.’