Beyond the ceiling there was only inky darkness, but as he ventured into it, he realized that he was not looking at the black void of the Abyss, but rather the lightless expanse of the Antarctic night sky.
With the walls of their prison breached, the last chains holding them fast fell away. Hurricane opened his eyes and ascended the remaining distance to join Dodge outside where both men got a look at their surroundings.
Hurley’s bullets had chewed through a sheet of ice several feet thick on the sheer face of a glacier. The vertical wall fell away beneath them and was absorbed into the landscape below, where presumably the tunnels of the ancient outpost honeycombed the frozen polar crust. The glacier afforded a little protection from the blizzard conditions, but beyond close proximity, everything was a blur.
“How do we find our way back?” Dodge shouted.
Hurley peered at the snowscape, then looked heavenward. “If we can go high enough to get above this weather, we can use the stars.”
Dodge nodded and as soon as Father Hobbs emerged from the Abyss, they flew straight up into the buffeting winds. The journey toward the stratosphere was more tumultuous even than the initial expedition across the ice, but after several minutes of struggle, they abruptly topped the clouds high above the frozen continent.
The Southern Cross lay just off to their left. It was a poor point of reference for navigating away from the South Pole since the heavens orbited around that constellation and none of the other stars were fixed. Hurley finally picked one of the brighter stars as a beacon and they set out, all too aware that they might very well be moving away from their goal. None of the men spoke that fear aloud; they all knew what was at stake.
More than an hour passed, an interminable period of solitude in which Dodge’s sense of helplessness grew to exponential proportions. The possibilities for defeat were infinite, while the probability of success seemed infinitesimally small. But then, when he was certain that all was lost, the clouds parted and Hurricane’s thunderous voice reached through the thin atmosphere to vibrate against his force field:
“I see them!”
Dodge followed his pointing finger to the endless sea of white below and caught a glimpse of motion, a lone dark speck sliding relentlessly forward. They were close, perhaps only ten minutes behind the flying disk, but there was no way to cut their enemy’s lead. For another hour, they chased the distant mote, gaining not an inch, as the shore came into view over the horizon. Not long thereafter, they saw the plane rolling in the embrace of the sea.
“That is where we must make our move,” Hurley declared. “We must catch them before they can take off.”
The big man’s words were strangely comforting to Dodge. He means to win this battle, he thought. With a friend like that on my side…
“He lost a few men in that cave in,” Hurricane continued. “If we can keep the element of surprise, we just might be able to each take out one of them before they know what’s happening.”
Dodge shook his head. “You know that won’t work. We have to take him.”
Hurley shot him a wary look, but nodded reluctantly. “Won’t be easy.”
“No it won’t,” agreed Hobbs. “But the strategy is sound. Cut off the head of the serpent and the snake will die.”
“The snake.” Hurley’s voice was just a murmur, but Dodge understood and shared his sentiment.
The disk ship drove onward, now skimming above the wave tops, slowing as it approached the final rendezvous. The plane was also barely discernible, separated by more than ten miles distance, but its silver outline was distinctive against the dark water. The airship came to a complete halt under the shadow of one wing, the disembarking passengers too small to be seen by the naked eye. Dodge felt a momentary elation as the distance separating them from their quarry began to diminish at last.
His anticipation was short lived. Almost the instant that the airship vanished from view, the plane began to move. Mere seconds after their arrival, the enemy was on the go again, this time racing across the open water until the plane’s speed was sufficient to lift it skyward.
The aircraft remained visible for a few moments longer, but as it shrunk to nothing in the distance, so too did all of Dodge’s hopes.
CHAPTER 19
FINAL FLIGHT
Dodge’s heart plummeted like a stone. They had failed.
A procession of evils that he imagined would be unleashed by this defeat paraded through his mind, not the least of which was their own fate. They were thousands of miles from any form of civilization, and at the exoskeletons’ top speed it would take days for them to reach safety — days in which they would be without food or water. An outcry from Hurley jolted him out of his anguish.
“There’s another plane down there.”
He looked, but lacking Hurricane’s sharp eyes, did not see it until nearly a minute later. His inability to distinguish the aircraft did not owe so much to any shortcoming of his eyesight, but rather the plane’s diminutive size. When compared to the enormous X-314, the little bi-plane being tossed about in the swells looked like a bothersome gnat.
“It’s the Duck,” Hobbs declared.
Dodge kicked himself for having surrendered so quickly to despair; of course there was another plane. Their foe could not have come so far without one. And while the Grumman JF didn’t have the same range as the larger Boeing, it was just as fast. The race was not over yet.
Their final approach to the small amphibious craft was unexpectedly nerve-wracking. Salt spray sizzled against their energy shields as they hovered above the pitching plane. To avoid getting electrocuted by a rogue wave, they took a stationary position above the wings, and when the plane rose to the crest of a swell, each man in turn deactivated his exoskeleton and dropped the remaining distance onto the fuselage. Without the protective bubble of the force field, the freezing cold ocean spray and wintry air chilled them to the bone instantaneously.
Once they were safely down, Dodge pushed back the canopy and slid into the pilot’s well, while his companions squeezed into the observer’s compartment. It took him only a moment to familiarize himself with the switches and levers in the cockpit; though radically different from Boeing, the Duck’s control mechanisms were much simpler than those in the larger plane. After a moment of searching, he found the switch that started the lone Wright Cyclone engine.
His takeoff was nothing to be proud of. The plane yawed and banked dangerously close to the turbulent sea as he over-corrected again and again, but once clear of the swells, he quickly learned where a feather touch was required, and adjusted the flaps and propellers to pull the little biplane aloft.
Hurley guided him onto the track of the X-314, now too distant to be observed in the night sky, and Dodge took the plane as high as he dared to get above the weather and increase visibility. He kept the throttle wide open, pushing the nine-cylinder engine into the red. The fuselage shuddered violently from the torque of prolonged excessive exertion, but Dodge saw no alternative. The race would not be won with caution.
They spied the larger plane’s running lights ten minutes later, a twinkling pinpoint too nimble to be a star on the horizon. Taking it as an omen that their fortunes were finally changing for the better, Dodge wrestled another five knots from the Cyclone engine and threw the aircraft into a dive that yielded two more. As focused as he was on the pursuit, Dodge kept one wary eye on the fuel gauge. It had registered less than half a tank when they had first reached the Duck; now they were down to nearly a quarter-tank. Although they were finally creeping up on their foe, there would be only a narrow window of opportunity to act before they ran out of fuel and plunged into the sea.