“Damn.” Vickers sat there rubbing his head through the parka hood. “That hurts.”
Sammy found it darkly amusing to get this far and maybe not be able to get in. But what truly worried her was the weather. The sky was dark with clouds and the wind was really howling now, knifing through her clothes. They needed to get out of the wind, and there were only two choices: into the base or back to the plane.
She looked at Vickers again; something dark was seeping through the hood. “Shit,” Sammy muttered. “Stay down,” she ordered as Vickers tried standing up. She carefully pushed aside the big man’s hood. The inside was caked with blood that had already frozen. The gash from the wound wasn’t hard to find on his bald head. It was about three inches long but didn’t appear to be deep.
“What’s wrong?” Conner asked.
Without answering, Sammy opened the first aid kit attached to her rucksack and pulled out a sterile gauze pack. She quickly tore it open and then put her mittens back on before pressing the cloth against the cut. It immediately turned bright red.
“He got cut. It’s not deep, but scalp wounds bleed a lot because the blood vessels are right on the surface.” Sammy looked up. “We need to go back to the plane now and settle in. Hopefully this thing will blow over quickly.”
Swenson shook his head. “I don’t think so, mate. McMurdo says this is a big front. We may be stuck for days.”
Sammy took a deep, icy breath as she considered the situation. “All right.” She looked at Conner. “Here, you hold this and replace it every couple of minutes. Make sure you keep the pressure on. We need to stop the bleeding. There’s some more gauze in this pack here.”
She gestured to the men. “Let’s all get on this thing.” They grabbed hold of the wheel. “On my count of three, counterclockwise. Ready? One. Two. Three.” All leaned into the wheel and strained. “Again. One. Two. Three.” The second attempt was also a failure.
“All right. Take a break for a second.”
Riley looked at the wheel. “Let’s do it again, but let’s try it the other way — clockwise.”
The men reassumed their positions. Sammy coordinated their effort. “Ready? One. Two. Three.” With a loud screech the wheel moved ever so slightly. “Again. One. Two. Three.” More than nine hundred pounds of man and woman power leaned into the wheel again. It turned almost a full inch.
“Again.” Inch by inch, the wheel turned. After five minutes of struggle, Sammy estimated they had done one complete revolution, yet there was no indication that they’d unlocked the door.
They continued on, the wheel moving a little easier now. After another five minutes the wheel stopped and wouldn’t budge.
“I think we’ve gone as far as it goes,” Devlin said. “I’d say it opens inward. It makes sense. You want doors to open in down here because the outside could be blocked with snow.”
Riley examined the joints of the door. There was an overlap on the outside — another indication that the door opened inward. “All right. Stand back.”
Riley lay down with his back wedged against the ice, then he put his feet on the bottom of the door and pushed. Seeing what he was doing, Lallo and Swenson joined in, pushing on the sides with their arms. With a low creak, a small gap appeared on the right side near the wheel. As they kept up the pressure, the door slowly swung wider and wider, Riley scrambling along the ice to keep his leverage until finally the opening was wide enough for a person to slip through.
“Hold it!” Conner called out. She peered around the edge of the door. In the darkness she could just make out a metal landing and staircase. Eternity Base beckoned.
“Light her up,” she said to Lallo.
The cameraman pulled the cover off his camera rig. A bright light just over the lens came on. Conner slipped through the door, Lallo following, recording the entry. The stairs did a ninety-degree turn and then seemed to descend directly down. An open area next to the stairs had a pully system on top, suggesting that was how supplies were lowered. Shining the light down, they could make out wood planking about fifteen feet below. Something else was at the bottom of the stairs, but from their position they could spot only a vague outline.
Lallo leaned over the railing and froze as his light illuminated the scene. What a moment ago had been only a meaningless shape now assumed the form of a man. He was lying at the base of the stairs, face down, hands stretched out in front of him, almost an act of supplication.
Conner stumbled backward into Riley. “What’s wrong?” he asked as he kept her from falling.
“There’s someone down there!” she hissed.
Riley let go of her and walked forward, peering down. After a few seconds he gestured to her. “Come on. Everyone else stay put.”
Conner cautiously followed Riley down the metal steps. The form still hadn’t moved. When they reached the bottom, Riley shone his light on the body, revealing a figure clothed in army issue clothes. Three black holes punched a line across the back of the man’s jacket, surrounded by a red frame of blood. Riley knelt down and turned over the body. Sightless eyes peered out from a young face, forever frozen in the surprised grimace that must have come as the bullets slammed into his back.
Riley looked closely at the face of the corpse, marveling at the frozen preservation. He wondered how long the man had been dead. He didn’t realize he was thinking aloud until he heard Conner’s quiet reply. “He’s been dead for about twenty-five years.”
Chapter 11
Conner, after her initial shock seemed to be on track. She was supervising Lallo as he filmed the body from different angles.
“How long do you think he’s been down here?” Sammy asked, as the rest of the party piled up their baggage in the dimly lit space at the base of the stairs. Riley glanced over at Sammy. “Your sister seems to think he’s been here since the base was closed down in ‘71.” He moved back to the body and began checking the man’s clothing, cracking the frozen fabric. The man wore unmarked army fatigues under olive-drab cold-weather gear — old-style-issue gear, Riley knew. There was no name tag on the man’s shirt.
Riley pulled a poncho out of his rucksack and gently draped it over the body. “Whoever he worked for shot him in the back to keep him from talking about what he saw here. Judging by the size of the wounds, I’d say it was a small-caliber gun — probably a .22. You have to be damn good to kill someone with a gun that small.”
Conner turned to the rest of the group. “We’ve got to find out everything we can about this place. I want to know who built it and why, and then I’m going to nail their asses.”
Conner began organizing the group. She stared down the corridor, trying to pick up details. Devlin’s flashlight reflected off the metal sides of the corridor and faded out after thirty feet. The ceiling, ten feet above, consisted of steel struts holding metal sheeting that blocked out the ice and snow. Conduits, pipes, and wires crisscrossed the ceiling, going in all directions. The corridor itself was about ten feet wide; the floor was made up of wood planks, each separated by a few inches to allow snow and ice to fall through the cracks to the sloping steel floor below.
It was as cold down here as it was outside, but at least they were out of the wind. Riley pulled a sleeping bag from his backpack and helped Vickers into it.
In the excitement of actually entering the base and the horror of finding the body, Conner had forgotten about Vickers’s wound. “Is he going to be all right?” she asked Riley, who was examining the bandage with his flashlight.
“Yeah. We could use some heat, though.”
“There ought to be some sort of generator or space heaters down here,” Devlin said, playing his light around the immediate area.