Zahra stared at the second team.
“Don’t be concerned,” Kyle said, stepping up next to her. “They’ve all signed NDAs. Your being here will remain a secret.”
That relieved Zahra some. She took a deep inhalation of the frigid air and instantly regretted it. Zahra coughed hard. As her eyes teared up, the liquid stung her skin as it tried to freeze.
Kyle chuckled. “You’re going to want to avoid doing that.”
Zahra silently held up her hand, giving him the “okay” sign. She should have known better, too. Her lungs had acclimated to the warmer air inside the Sno-Cat and had spasmed when reintroduced to the cold.
The first team headed out, with Zahra and the others following close behind. The hike came and went quickly. The ground rose and fell dramatically, explaining why the Sno-Cats had been ditched.
They crested a rise that gave Zahra a view she wasn’t prepared for. “Wow.”
Yana joined her. “Much wow.”
Hammet agreed. “Magnificent.”
“People can have their sun-kissed beaches,” Kyle said. “I’ll take this any day.”
The Southern Ocean stretched on forever. The only thing in sight besides the crystal blue water was the cliff in front of them. Still, even the cliff ended about seventy feet from their location.
The two teams separated here. Zahra’s squad continued to the cliff while the second team began to set up a bevy of scientific equipment.
Satisfied with their position, Kyle and the driver, Ethan, headed back to the Sno-Cats. The plan was to tie off their rappelling lines to the vehicles instead of trying to pound anchors into the rocky surface. The coastal areas of Antarctica lacked ice in places, revealing the raw land that formed the foundation of the continent. Zahra figured that was what the climatologist was here to study.
While everyone else went about the tasks, Zahra, Yana, and Hammet approached the precipice that made up the edge of the continent.
“Careful,” Hammet warned.
Zahra glanced over her shoulder and nodded but didn’t speak. Yana stepped up to her right. The pair quickly clutched one another’s arms for balance as a sharp gust nearly took them off their feet. Hammet appeared on Zahra’s left, and he snagged her arm.
Then, the trio leaned forward and looked down.
A one-hundred-foot-long, dark gray tube jutted out of the ice four stories beneath their feet. Zahra calculated that there was another twenty to thirty feet of air between the U-boat and the ocean. It was both marvelous and an oddity.
“Amazing,” Hammet whispered.
Zahra agreed. “Yeah. Pretty insane, right?”
“Is it safe?” Yana asked.
Zahra and Hammet looked at one another before anyone answered. They had no idea.
The Russian sighed. “I guess we are going to find out, huh?”
Zahra grinned. “You bet your ass we are.”
Kyle and Ethan descended first. As luck would have it, the conning tower was free of the continent’s embrace, as was the entry hatch. As soon as their boots touched down, they stopped and waited, testing their footing. There was no telling what a slight shift would do to the eighty-year-old watercraft.
Zahra breathed easy when nothing happened.
She watched the two men converse before stepping up to hatch. When they reached the hatch they both knelt. Ethan gently set down his bag, pulled out a small blowtorch, and immediately started cutting his way inside. Zahra couldn’t imagine the state of the hinge after all this time.
“Incredible,” Zahra said. She glanced at Hammet. “Any ideas what we’re dealing with down there?”
He softly nodded. “From up here, it looks like a Type IX model, maybe an IXD. They were the longest and heaviest of the Kriegsmarine’s U-boats.”
“How big did they get?” Yana asked.
Hammet scratched his head. “Three hundred feet, give or take.”
Zahra’s eyes opened wide. “That means there’s another two hundred feet of submarine buried within the ice.”
Yana whistled. “That’s a lot of boat.”
“Yes, it is,” Hammet said. “They were originally built as long-distance attack subs but were eventually retrofitted to primarily be used as cargo vessels.”
“How far could they travel?” Zahra asked.
“I’m not sure exactly, but I know it's somewhere around thirty thousand nautical miles.”
The only thing Zahra could respond with was a long, drawn-out exhalation where her lips smacked together, making a farting noise. She had no words.
Yana gave her a playful elbow. “I guess Antarctica would be considered long-distance, yes?”
Zahra nodded. “Definitely.”
“Indeed,” Hammet added. “Hmmm.”
“What’s wrong?” Zahra asked.
He tipped his chin down to the submersible. “Why was a transport vessel out here?”
Zahra patted his shoulder. “That, my friend, is why we’re here.”
A clunk focused everyone’s attention below. Kyle looked up at them and waved.
“They’re in,” Zahra said. “You guys ready?”
“Me?” Yana nervously laughed and adjusted her harness. “Come on, you’ve never rappelled down the face of Antarctica and onto a Nazi sub before?”
Zahra grinned and clipped onto one of the two lines. She sat on her butt and inched forward until her feet dangled out over nothing except U-boat and water.
She looked up at her compatriots. “Not gonna lie,” she held up her hand, keeping her thumb and forefinger centimeters apart, “I’m this close to soiling myself right now.”
“Then I thank you for going first,” Hammet said.
Zahra smiled.
“Yes,” Yana added, “being underneath you would be shitty.”
Chapter 18
Zahra
The incoming ocean air battered Zahra. It slammed her against the cliff face a half dozen times before her feet touched down atop the U-boat’s conning tower platform. She quickly unclipped and stabilized herself against the wall before turning and joining up with Kyle and Ethan. The two men had smartly secured the rappelling line to the rail of the sub’s conning tower so they wouldn’t have to hold it steady themselves.
Let’s hope the sub doesn’t break free.
Zahra pictured the vessel falling and dragging along one of their Sno-Cats. Then again, the line would more than likely snap before that would happen.
“Well, that was awful,” she muttered, blowing out a long breath of air.
“Yeah,” Kyle agreed, “I’ve had better descents. Had worse, too.”
Zahra nodded. “Same. Why wasn’t this found before now? It’s kind of hard to miss.”
“That’s easy,” Kyle replied. “A chunk of ice the size of a bus station broke loose last week. Our boat’s been right here the entire time but just out of sight. We’re lucky the ice didn’t shear off the entire front half of it.”
Zahra was impressed. Still, they needed to get moving. “So, what do we have?”
“Besides an open U-boat. Not much,” Ethan said. Zahra hadn’t talked to the man all that much and had just noticed that his accent was similar to Kyle’s.
“You from Northern Wisconsin, too?” Zahra asked.
Ethan shook his head. “Dad was, but I was born in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.”
“Oh, a Yooper, huh?”
“I am, though I only lived there until high school. Moved down to the suburbs of Detroit when I was fourteen.” He grinned. “should have heard my accent back then. You would have needed Google Translate to understand a word I was saying.”
Zahra smiled and looked up, hearing a roar of anger above. Yana was also having some trouble with her descent, though she was being much more vocal about it than Zahra had. The coherent words were in Russian, and they were incredibly foul.