"I'm not, Jefferson," Fatima was scrutinizing the sonar. "We're really deep down, and there's a solid mass above us. There's nowhere we can surface around here."
"And nobody thought to check this before we set off?" Daniels' face was turning livid pink beneath the tan.
"It's not like there was a map!" Fatima snapped. "Nobody was exactly planning this!"
"Ok, ok," Sam took Jefferson by the shoulders and steered him away. "Come on. Let's try to keep our cool. We've been making steady progress for a while now, we'll find somewhere soon."
"We're not looking for a motorway service station, Mr. Cleave," Professor Matlock joined in. "We have been sailing for around forty minutes. Unless we find a place to surface within the next fifteen minutes or so, we will run out of oxygen. You do know what happens in that eventuality, don't you?"
"Stop talking!" Fatima snarled, her gaze never wandering from the sonar. "The more you talk, the more air you use up."
Jefferson and Professor Matlock clearly wanted to argue, but they knew that she was right. They fell into a surly silence. Sam picked his way along the U-boat toward the navigation area, where Purdue and Blomstein were waiting for any new information from Fatima to tell them where to go. The division of tasks had happened swiftly and naturally. Alexandr had taken responsibility for the engine room. Fatima, who had done a few dives before, knew how to read sonar. Blomstein had served aboard a submarine previously, although he did not divulge the circumstances. Sam and Nina were acting as runners, transferring communication from one part of the boat to the others. In theory they were sharing this task with Jefferson and Professor Matlock, but they could not be torn away from the sonar, where they waited desperately for any signs of open water. Sam shot Nina a smile as they crossed paths. He was not feeling particularly brave, but he knew that she was struggling to keep her claustrophobia under control and wanted to be supportive.
"Anything?" Purdue asked as Sam entered. Sam shook his head. "I see," said Purdue. "I will start looking for any oxygen tanks, then."
Sam nodded and slumped against the door. Is this really going to be it? he wondered. I never thought I'd suffocate in a cramped metal tube beneath the Antarctic Ocean…
"We've got one!" Fatima yelled. "Prepare to take her up!"
The hatch creaked open. Purdue was first to climb out. They found themselves in a vast grotto, hewn from the ice by the hot springs, with dripping stalactites reaching down from the high ceiling. Nina had never felt as small as she did in that space, nor so glad to be in a cavernous chamber.
When they were done with gulping down lungfuls of the fresh, salty air, they made their way down the ladder. By great good fortune, the grotto contained a small outcropping of rocks that was within jumping distance and made a decent makeshift dock. Once on the rocks they had to clamber over a little mound to reach the plateau on the other side.
"Oh!" Purdue stopped as he reached the top of the mound. He looked around at the others. "You might want to prepare yourselves," he said. "We are evidently not the only travelers ever to have found our way into this cave, and some of you might find the presence of our predecessors a little distressing."
This stopped some of the others in their tracks, but Sam's curiosity got the better of him and he could see that the same was true for Nina. Sam was secretly pleased to see that the bodies that lay scattered across the plateau had long since decomposed and were now just skeletons. After his encounter with the murdered soldiers, he was in no hurry to see any more fresh corpses.
Much more disturbing than the dead bodies was the rusted, partly-submerged U-boat. Evidently there was more than one point of access to the grotto, but this party had never made it out again. Perhaps it was because their own means of exit was by no means certain, but Sam found the sight of the abandoned boat quite chilling.
Alexandr and Nina, on the other hand, were exhilarated. They scrambled straight onto the plateau and rushed toward the objects of their fascination — in Nina's case the corpses, which she wanted to examine, and in Alexandr's case the defunct submarine, which he wanted to plunder for fuel.
"Stop!" Fatima's voice rang out urgently, amplified and echoed back by the cavern's acoustics. "Nina, Alexandr, wait!"
But it was too late. Nina was already on her knees next to the nearest skeleton, her fingers in the pocket of its duffel coat, and Alexandr had reached the U-boat and laid a hand on its rusty surface.
"Oh, shit…" said Fatima, "What have you done?"
"What?" Nina asked. "What's the matter?"
"Where do you think that U-boat came from?" Fatima demanded. "Because I'll bet it came from one of those empty spaces in the dock at Wolfenstein. What if these guys were trying to escape from exactly the same thing that we were? We don't know what they died of. We don't know whether it's something that's still alive — and we may just have exposed ourselves to it, again."
Sam felt a prickling, uneasy sensation creeping up the back of his neck. "But we've been vaccinated now, right? So we should be ok?"
"Some of us were vaccinated," Fatima said darkly. "And for all I know, it could have mutated over time. If we're looking at a different strain, my vaccine won't be worth a damn — assuming that it ever was in the first place."
"Shit," said Sam. He waited for the feelings of doom and hopelessness to take hold, but all he felt was a certain resignation. "Look, does anyone mind if I smoke?"
An argument broke out after that, of course. Accusations flew as everyone blamed one another for the danger they were now in. There were recriminations about whether they should have taken the U-boat, whether they should have opened the locked doors in Wolfenstein, whether they should have set out for Antarctica in the first place. None of it brought them to any kind of conclusion except that if they were infected it was too late to do anything about it, and they were not going to be rescued down here.
"The device needs a satellite connection to work," Purdue lamented, prodding idly at the tiny, paper-thin device in his hand. "That will have to be my next challenge, I think. Building a device that satisfactorily avoids the normal constraints placed on communications."
"So we must reach the surface," Alexandr said. "There is likely to be a little fuel left onboard the other boat. Give me long enough to transfer it to our own tanks and we will try again."
While Alexandr busied himself with siphoning fuel from the defunct U-boat, Sam joined Nina by the skeletons. She was carefully searching through their pockets, trying not to disturb them more than was strictly necessary.
"I just want to find something that tells me who they are," she said, placing the contents of their pockets a little pile at each skeleton's feet. "Presumably they either came from the ice station or were on their way to it. Their uniforms aren't from the 1940s, and this one has an appointment diary from 1953."
1953! Sam suddenly remembered Karl Witzinger's letter. His hands flew to his pockets, feeling for the leather wallet, but he found nothing but a filled-up memory card and a lighter. He checked his inside pocket. Nothing. It's in my backpack, isn't it? He thought. Along with my camera. And my tobacco pouch. All sitting neatly next to my bunk… Shit.
"What's up?" Nina asked, seeing him searching for something. "What have you lost?"
Sam opened his mouth to tell her about Witzinger's letter and how these skeletons were probably the scientists who had attempted to escape from the ice station, but at that moment Alexandr called out to them.
"We have all the fuel we are likely to get," he cried. "So let's get out of here!"