“Sounds impressive to me,” Ira said.
Igor grinned. “She also sent picture with her application. You want impressive? Wait until you see her.” He bunched his fingers and kissed them away like an Italian. “Beautiful.”
The sled weighed nearly two hundred pounds and had been designed to be towed by a vehicle. When they started their search the third morning, they tried using the Land Cruiser, but the uneven terrain made it too difficult to control. It fell on the men to push the ground-penetrating radar unit, an exhausting task since their search grid was on a long slope. The uphill legs left the men panting and dangerously overheated.
All were thankful that the area wasn’t larger than it was.
Because Camp Decade had been secured to an under-ice mountain, it had remained stable as the glacier flowed around it. The Surveyor’s Society had requested Geo-Research establish their new base within a quarter mile of where Camp Decade lay hidden. On the fourth pass with the sled they found a corner of the base, a discovery met with cheers but they knew that was only part of the battle. Now they had to map the entire facility and locate the main entrance, where they would sink their shaft.
Camp Decade was laid out like a huge letter H. One long leg contained storage areas and a cavernous garage that once had a ramp to the surface. The other leg was designated for crew accommodations and laboratories, with the bulk of the administration area connecting the two segments. There were countless side chambers attached to the complex as well as a long tunnel running from the garage that led to the small nuclear reactor that had powered the facility. The Air Force had assured the Surveyor’s Society that there had never been a single incidence of radiation leakage, and the reactor had been one of the few things removed when the camp was abandoned.
As Mercer watched the monitor attached to the radar set reveal dark shadows thirty-five feet below them, he kept a surreptitious eye on the Geiger counter he had borrowed in Iceland. The unit was an old Victoreen model CDV-700 6A that he had cajoled from Thorsteinn Jonsson, the director of Reykjavik’s small geology museum. He hadn’t seen Jonsson since the volcanologist had hosted the conference that first brought Mercer to Iceland years earlier, and Jonsson had been reluctant to lend out his only counter until Mercer gave him a hundred-dollar “rental fee.”
The photograph of cancer-ravaged Stefansson Rosmunder was too compelling for Mercer to trust the Air Force’s assurances. Before first light, he’d gotten up and walked the entire area, sweeping the ice with the Geiger counter. The machine hadn’t uttered more than a few clicks, which indicated normal background radiation. There was one spot, presumably over where the reactor had once been buried, that sped up the counter but the levels were far below anything dangerous.
He didn’t tell the others what he had done, nor did he reveal the counter as they worked now. He’d seen people panic at just the presence of one of these little machines. To the uninformed, the slow clicks of ambient radiation sounded as dangerous as the tail shake of a rattlesnake. He kept the counter in a pack hanging from the side of the sled and wore the earphones that Thorsteinn had given him. Since he was the only person who knew how to operate the radar unit, no one questioned the extra equipment. If he’d found something, he would have told them immediately, but after completing half of this slower sweep, he felt that the military had told the truth about the site. There was no hazardous radiation anywhere near Camp Decade.
At noon, Mercer downloaded the raw data they had accumulated onto a laptop computer that would create a digital version of the base. Because of the thick ice, the resolution was poor and the images were grainy and blurred, but there was still enough detail for him to pick out individual features. The radar had penetrated through the roof of Camp Decade, so the pictures resembled an X ray. Inside the facility, he could see wall partitions and even furniture. It was eerie because he was the first person to see inside the camp in fifty years.
He was also very relieved. While the facility was anchored to bedrock and protected from glacial pressure by a peak of rock on its upflow side, he had harbored the fear that the entire place had been ground to debris by the shifting ice. The radar scans showed it had had little problem weathering the past five decades.
“All right, let’s wrap this up for now,” Mercer said, shutting off the radar and checking the computer and GPS system that was part of the sledge. “We’ll compare this data with the original drawings done by the engineers who built this place.”
Even without the additional Geo-Research scientists, the mess hall was crowded for lunch, and they had to wait until afterward to clear enough room on one of the tables to spread out their findings. The original drawings had been scanned into the computer, so Mercer brought up the shadowy images recorded this morning and overlaid them with the neat architectural sketches. Instantly, they had the orientation of the base locked down and saw they had only mapped a third of the sprawling complex. Still, it was enough for them to extrapolate the location of the main entrance and determine its GPS coordinates.
Mercer pointed to the spot on the computer screen. “X marks the spot.”
“You sure?”
“Do you think I want to dig two holes out there? With your permission, Marty, we can start tunneling through the snow to reach the base.”
“That’s what we’re here for,” Bishop replied. “Why don’t you go out and mark the area over the entrance? Ira, you go get the Sno-Cat with the crane and plow attachments and haul over the plastic sleeves and hotrocks. I’ll tell Werner that we need one of his people for a while.”
“That sounds like a plan,” Mercer agreed.
“How goes your search?” Igor Bulgarin had appeared with Erwin Puhl at his side. Both men had just entered the mess hall and were covered in snow.
“Oh, God!” Ira made his face into a frightened mask. “It’s the Yeti!”
Roaring with laughter, the Russian placed a huge arm on the much shorter Puhl. “And this is my Yetette.”
“We’ve already located the entrance, Igor. We’re going to start digging right now.”
“So quickly?” Bulgarin sobered. “You Americans, I don’t know how you do it.”
“I take it you’re not having any luck finding meteorites?”
He laughed again. “Is success if I find one or two this trip.”
“How’s Koenig’s group coming?” Mercer asked.
“All morning they work to mount the drill tower on one of the trailers to make it potable.”
“Portable,” Erwin corrected. “Beverages are potable.”
“This coffee isn’t.”
“Da, portable. Is not going well, I think.” He frowned. “Germans are supposed to be good engineers. These people, bah! Like children with Legos.”
“How about you, Erwin?” Mercer asked. “What’s the weather forecast?”
“That I can’t tell you.” Puhl removed his coat. “But don’t expect the satellite phones or radios to have the best range for a while.”
“Atmospheric interference?”
The scientist nodded. “And it’s just beginning. In another four or five days we can forget about contacting the Njoerd except for a few periods of calm when the solar wind dies down.”
“Erwin thinks some communications satellites in orbit are going to be kaput because of radiation,” Igor added.
Marty stood. “Then let’s bust a hump. I want to be able to call my father and tell him we’ve reached the base before this gets worse.”
It took a few minutes to sort out their coats and boots, zip up properly, and secure the Velcro straps around their gloves. It wasn’t cold enough to need face guards, but each man leaving or entering the mess hall had all but a bit of his eyes exposed from under hoods and neck gaiters. Mercer put on his glacier glasses and threw open the door, then leaned into the wind that lifted a dense fog of snow.