Eubanks neither confirmed nor denied her words, but the view from the ridge lived up to the rumors Lois had heard.
The remote outpost, which rarely housed more than fifty residents at a time, had ballooned into a miniature city supporting hundreds of US and Canadian troops. Temporary structures consisting of insulation draped over steel and aluminum frames had been erected in the snowbound valley. Barracks, garages, hangars, and mess halls had sprung up practically overnight. Mechanical earth movers had been employed to carve out a large settlement out of the permafrost.
And at the center of the base was a deep pit, where a thermal meltdown generator was being used to bore through the packed ice. Steam rose from the borehole.
Lois could only imagine the money and logistics that had been required to set up an operation this massive in the middle of a frozen, barely habitable wasteland. NORTHCOM wouldn’t have gone to such lengths unless they’d had a very good reason—one she was determined to ferret out. She could practically smell a scoop.
The station’s tactical operations center was located within walking distance of the pit. Eubanks led her into the hut, where he handed her off to the folks in charge. They didn’t look happy to see her. That was fine with Lois. She hadn’t expected them to be.
The commanding officer stepped forward and introduced himself.
“I’m Colonel Nathan Hardy with US NORTHCOM,” he said brusquely. He had a receding hairline and a stern disposition. His ramrod bearing practically screamed “career military,” as did the eagles on his uniform. He gestured toward the man beside him. “This Dr. Emil Hamilton with DARPA.”
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency specialized in developing new scientific technologies for use by the military. Hamilton certainly looked the part of an egghead scientist. He was a professorial type, in his sixties, with a bald pate and neatly trimmed goatee. Lois could easily envision him puttering in a lab somewhere, working on various hush-hush projects.
“We were expecting you tomorrow,” Hardy said gruffly.
She just shrugged.
“Which is why I showed up today,” she replied.
Hardy scowled, but Lois refused to be intimidated. She took off her hood and laid her cards on the table.
“Let’s get one thing straight, okay, guys? The only reason I’m here is because we’re on Canadian soil, and the appellate court overruled your injunction to keep me away. So if we’re done measuring manhoods, you want to tell me what your knob turners found?”
Hardy looked as if he would have preferred to assemble a firing squad, but orders were orders, so he and Hamilton led her over to a bank of sophisticated computers and monitoring equipment, where they introduced her to Staff Sergeant Sekowsky. Unlike his tight-lipped superiors, the curly haired technician seemed eager to talk about what his crew had discovered.
“NASA’s EOS satellites pinged the anomaly first.” He pointed to computer screens cycling through false-color portraits of the seabed and nearby glacial topography. The glacial ice was rendered in shades of blue, while the ocean appeared as green above the rocky gray sea floor. Layers of snow were, appropriately, white. “The ice shelf plays hell on the echo soundings… but there’s definitely something down there.”
Lois squinted at the screens. She wasn’t an expert on interpreting images of this sort, but it was evident that that there was a large solid object embedded deep beneath the ice.
“A submarine, maybe?” she speculated. “Soviet-era?” That would be interesting, but not quite the front-page story she was hoping to find.
“Doubt it,” Hardy said. “At three hundred meters, that’s considerably larger than anything we know they built back then.”
Lois did the conversion in her head. Three hundred meters was roughly a thousand feet long.
That would be an awfully big sub.
Dr. Hamilton asked Sekowsky to call up an “aerial reflection radiometer view.” Lois made a mental note to look that up later, and observed that the image on the screen appeared to have been taken from orbit.
“And then there’s this,” Hamilton said. “You’d expect a sub to be buried in the seabed, but this thing’s lodged one hundred feet above sea level, at the base of this tidewater glacier.”
Lois saw his point. How would a sub end up frozen in the ice, a significant distance above the ocean?
Unless it dropped from the sky.
“Could an earthquake have moved it?” she asked.
“Maybe,” Sekowsky said. “But that’s not the spooky part. The ice surrounding it is nearly twenty thousand years old.”
Twenty thousand years?
Lois was still processing that as Colonel Hardy marched her across the encampment to her quarters. The Arctic sun had dipped below the horizon, taking with it what passed for warmth. Shivering in her parka, Lois decided she would never complain about Metropolis winters again.
“Here it is,” Hardy said, like a grumpy innkeeper. Joe tagged along behind him, still carrying Lois’s duffle bag. Hardy opened the door to the shelter, then realized that Lois had lagged behind. “Ms. Lane.”
Despite the cold, she had paused to take in the view. Steam rose from the excavation site where the meltdown generator was living up to its name. The Aurora Borealis shimmered high overhead, spreading across the night sky in rippling curtains of green and red. Pristine sheets of ice reflected the aurora.
“Try not to wander,” Hardy said impatiently. “Temperatures drop to minus forty at night. And if a whiteout rolls in, we won’t find your body until next spring.”
Lois tore her eyes away from the heavenly lightshow.
“What if I need to tinkle?”
“There’s a bucket in the corner.”
Lois entered the shelter, which turned out to resemble an industrial cargo container more than a cozy bed-and-breakfast. Sure enough, the accommodations consisted of a cot, a sleeping bag—and a bucket.
Hardy smirked before taking his leave. Joe, the hunky baggage carrier, gave Lois an apologetic shrug as he put the duffle bag down, then left without a word. Lois found herself alone in a glorified shack in the middle of an Arctic wasteland.
Could be worse, she thought. Somebody else might be onto this story.
She waited long enough to let her babysitters to get out of the cold, then cracked open the door of the shelter and peeked outside. As she’d hoped, there wasn’t a guard posted. Where was she supposed to go anyway? Hardy clearly expected her to stay inside, where it was safe and warm.
How little he knew her.
Getting the official story wasn’t enough. If she wanted to find out what was really going on, she needed to shake her handlers and poke around on her own.
Slipping outside, she zipped up her parka as far as it would go, then crept down toward the excavation site. Nobody in their right mind was outdoors after dark, so she managed to get a good look at the meltdown generator, which resembled a large steel top hanging from a chain. Hot water circulated through copper lines wrapped around the tip of the machine, which was melting the ice below at a slow but steady rate.
Pumps cleared the melted ice water from the borehole. Lois recalled that a similar gadget had been used to uncover a long-buried WWII fighter plane in Greenland several years earlier. She was hoping for an even bigger discovery here.
Twenty thousand years?
Fishing a digital camera from her pocket, she snapped a few shots of the excavation site. She was looking around for something else worth photographing when she spotted a lone figure moving across a snowy ridge outside the camp. She zoomed in on the figure, using the camera’s telephoto lens, and was surprised to see Joe the baggage handler disappearing into the Arctic wastes.