“Hello?”
“May I please speak to William Freely?”
“He’s at work. May I take a message?”
“Could I get his work number, please?” “It’s 654-9329.”
“Thanks.” Conner dialed the new number.
“Freely’s Building Supply. This is Anita. How may I help you?”
“Is Mister Freely in?”
“Hold on. I think he’s out back on the loading dock.”
While she waited, Conner drew up a blank screen on her computer and began typing questions.
“Bill Freely here.” The voice sounded slightly out of breath and very deep.
“Mister Freely, this is Conner Young from SNN news. I’m doing research on army installations and I’m particularly interested in a project your unit was involved with in 1971.”
“Yeah?” The voice was not friendly. “Which project? We did a whole lot of stuff that year.”
“I’m interested in what B Company, 67th Engineers, built down in Antarctica between August and December 1971.”
There was a long pause. “I’m sorry, miss, but you’ve got your facts wrong. We were never in Antarctica. I surely would have remembered that.”
“I’m sure you would have, Mister Freely, especially since you were treated for severe frostbite on two fingers on your left hand at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, on 19 November 1971. Tell me, did you get frostbite while taking those photographs of Eternity Base? The photos I have copies of?” Conner waited. The fact that he didn’t hang up right away was a good sign.
Freely’s voice was sharp. “Listen, lady. We were told that everything about Eternity Base was classified. I mean, it was a long time ago and all that, but still a guy can get in trouble. I forgot all about taking those pictures.”
Conner leaned forward in her seat. “I have them here on my desk and they have your name on the back.”
Another long pause. Finally Freely came back, his voice resigned. “Yeah, I took those damn pictures. I don’t see what the big deal about the whole thing was anyway. They told us not to talk about it — national security and all that — and we were just so happy to be out of Vietnam that everyone went along with it. At least in the beginning. But after a couple of weeks down there in that hellhole, Vietnam started looking like a good deal.”
Conner thought quickly. She’d learned to keep people talking by shifting subjects. They were so busy thinking about the answers that they’d forget the importance of what they were saying. “What about the aircrews that flew you in there? Do you know where they were from?”
“There was only one aircrew. I think they were home-based in Hawaii.”
Conner cut back to something else that might get a reaction. “How’s your hand doing?”
Freely’s voice rose an octave. “That was part of the bullshit about that mission. We’d just finished off-loading the plane and it had headed back when I got hurt. I’d been working on the surface shaft doors and I got careless. You’d think I’d have known better after three months, but. . anyway I got the bite bad and needed to be medevacked.
“Well, this major who was in charge wouldn’t send another plane out to get me. I had to wait until that particular plane got back to McMurdo, set down, refueled, and came back out to pick me up. Probably wasted about three hours because of that.
“Since the whole thing was classified, they wouldn’t medevac me out of Antarctica after I received my initial treatment. So I had to go back to Eternity Base with my hand like that until the entire unit was pulled out. That’s what really screwed up my fingers more than anything else. And that’s why I only have three fingers on my left hand. I had to have the sons of bitches amputated eight years ago. The civilian doctor who did it said it was because they’d never healed right due to the prolonged exposure. So you can take the goddamn army and its station down there and shove it. I don’t want to have anything more to do with it.”
“I can understand that you are somewhat bitter, Mister Freely. You spent the entire four months there in Antarctica?” Conner coaxed.
“Yeah.”
“When did you leave?”
“About four or five days before Christmas.”
“Where were you stationed? At McMurdo?”
“No. Like I said, we only went to McMurdo for emergencies — we didn’t have a doctor with us. We were stationed right there at Eternity Base.”
“Where was Eternity Base?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? You didn’t know where you were?”
Freely’s voice took on that “I’m talking to an idiot” tone that Conner hated. “I mean, I knew we were in Antarctica, but I couldn’t tell you where. We weren’t allowed any maps. When we flew, they blacked out the windows in the hold of the C-130. No one in the company knew where the hell we were.”
“You had to have some idea. East, west, north, or south of McMurdo?”
“Lady, you ever been to Antarctica?” Freely didn’t wait for an answer. “The goddamn place is one big jumbled-up mass of ice and mountains. North or south?” Freely laughed. “Compasses don’t work too well down there. Do you know that the magnetic pole is farther north of the true South Pole than McMurdo? In fact, magnetic south from McMurdo is actually west if you look at a map. That was the most screwed-up place I’ve ever been. All I know is that the site was a little less than a two-hour flight by C-130 from McMurdo. You look at the pictures and you got as good an idea of where that place was as I do.”
“What did you build there?”
“We didn’t really ‘build’ anything. We put together a Tinkertoy set. It was all prefab,” he explained. “They flew it in by sections. Someone with a lot more brains than we had in our outfit designed that thing. Each piece could fit in a 130, yet when we put it all together it was pretty big. Of course there were a shit load of 130 loads coming in. Hell, they spent almost an entire week just bringing in fuel bladders. That plane flew every moment the weather allowed.”
“What was it you put together?” Conner asked quietly, hoping she could keep Freely going.
“My best guess is that it was some sort of C & C structure — Command and Control. We just put the buildings together. Before we were even done, they brought in more guys to put in other stuff. I remember a lot of commo equipment. They sealed off sections of the place as we finished, so I really couldn’t tell you what it looked like on the inside when it was completed.
“We stayed in two prefab Quonset huts on the surface, and we broke those down and took them back out with us when we left. All you could see when we took that last flight out was the entry and ventilation shafts. Everything else was underground.”
“What did it look like underground?”
“There were twelve of the prefab units.”
“How were the units laid out?”
“We set them up in three rows of four, about eight to ten feet apart, and roofed over the space between, which just about doubled the underground area of the main base.”
“That took four months?”
“What took the most time was digging out that much ice and snow even before they brought in the first unit. We also dug two really big tunnels on either side for storage and two areas for fuel. Plus the long tunnel and area for the power station.”
“Do you have any idea who occupied it?”
“You know, that was the funny thing. That last day when we flew out, I really don’t think there was anybody left behind. There was this major who was in charge. He was a real strange fellow. Spooky. Anyway, he was on the last flight out with us.”
“Do you remember that major’s name?”
“I don’t know. Claxton or something like that. He made everyone nervous — always sneaking around, checking on people.”