Moments later, Aaron drove out of Florence ADX and vanished toward the north.
VIII
‘Welcome to the bottom of the world.’
The voice sounded disembodied to Ethan’s ears as he sat in an uncomfortable seat in the shuddering belly of a giant C-130 Hercules aircraft, the loadmaster speaking into a microphone that connected to the headphones Ethan wore to protect his ears from the tremendous roar of the engines.
Through a small window beside his shoulder Ethan peered out into the frigid atmosphere outside the aircraft. The wing stretched away above him, huge turboprop engines trailing turbulent vapor that glowed in the light of a sun blazing amid a stream of molten metal searing the distant horizon. Far below a featureless canvass of ice fields stretched away into infinity, cast into dark and frosty shadows.
‘We’ll make our final approach to McMurdo in the next few minutes,’ the loadmaster said as he walked between them and tugged on their harnesses to check that they were secure.
Ethan saw his companions jab their thumbs in the air in unison. Hannah Ford, two scientists named Willem Chandler and Amy Reece and their two respective assistants, and twelve Navy SEALs occupied the interior of the aircraft along with their respective equipment, compact vehicles and weapons. The soldiers had been deployed from the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center at Andros Island in the Bahamas, while the two scientists seemed to have been plucked from some mysterious back room at the DIA.
Chandler, he had learned, was employed by the DIA as what they called a futurist and was apparently an authority on conspiracy theories, while Amy Reece was an exobiologist and linguistics specialist who specialized in the search for life outside the Earth and the effects of extra-terrestrial environments on living organisms. Between them and their respective assistants, Ethan figured they represented the closest things to an expert opinion on Black Knight that the agency had been able to rustle up at short notice.
Ethan glanced outside as the Hercules dipped its wing and began a gentle turn. The beams of pale sunlight glowing through the windows into the aircraft’s cavernous interior vanished as they were plunged into darkness. The engine roar subsided enough for Ethan to hear the flaps and undercarriage deploy to the sound of whining hydraulics, the huge aircraft dipping and bouncing in the wintry gales blustering across the vast ice plains. Ethan clenched his harness as a tight knot of anxiety in his guts threatened to eject his breakfast over his boots.
Through the open hatchway to the cockpit far to his left, Ethan spotted the green glow of cockpit instruments and a glimpse of twinkling runway lights stretching out into the dark void ahead. The Hercules bumped and gyrated as it descended, and then a thump reverberated through the fuselage as the aircraft touched down on the ice and the pilots deployed the spoilers and threw the huge engines into reverse. The aircraft thundered and vibrated as though it were coming apart at the seams, and then slowed as it turned off the runway and taxied toward a parking spot.
Ethan breathed a sigh of relief and closed his eyes. He heard the engines whine down as he watched the loadmaster get out of his seat and hit a large red button inside the fuselage. The rear of the Hercules yawned slowly open as a ramp dropped down onto the ice. Half a dozen soldiers, wrapped up in thick Artic camouflage and armed with rifles, strode up the ramp. The loadmaster pointed at Ethan’s group and waved them over.
Ethan unstrapped himself from his seat and hefted a large holdall onto his back. He then pulled on thick gloves, tightened his thickly padded jacket and pulled the hood tight over his head as he looked about at their bleak surroundings.
The station owed its designation to nearby McMurdo Sound, which had been named after Lieutenant Archibald McMurdo of HMS Terror, which first charted the area in 1841 under the command of British explorer James Clark Ross. British explorer Robert Falcon Scott first established a base nearby in 1902 and built Discovery Hut, which still stood adjacent to the harbor at Hut Point. The volcanic rock of the site was the southernmost bare ground accessible by ship in the Antarctic, and the founders initially called the station Naval Air Facility McMurdo from its creation in 1956.
Ethan knew that McMurdo had become a center of scientific and logistical operations in the Antarctic. The Antarctic Treaty, signed by over forty-five governments, regulated intergovernmental relations with respect to Antarctica and governed the conduct of daily life at McMurdo for United States Antarctic Programs. The first scientific diving protocols were established before 1960 and the first diving operations were documented in 1961, with a hyperbaric chamber available for support of polar diving operations.
From his vantage point outside the Hercules aircraft as he trudged off the ramp, Ethan could see rugged hills and valleys through the dawn gloom, and a nearby slate and shale shore. The black water of the Ross Sea was encrusted with jagged chunks of ice and a large ship was anchored there, its deck lights blazing in the darkness.
‘Polar Star,’ Hannah said as she saw the ship, her breath forming dense clouds on the frigid air as she spoke. ‘That’s our ride, part of the US Coast Guard fleet.’
The Polar Star was a stocky, thick-hulled vessel, her paintwork red and white for high visibility against both the black water and brilliant ice floes. The ship’s bridge was almost a perfect cube, spinning radar dishes perched atop its lofty heights and glowing interior lights hinting at blessing warmth within. Nearly four hundred feet long and with a maximum speed of eighteen knots, Polar Star could continuously break six feet of ice at three knots, and could break twenty one feet of ice if backing and ramming, so Ethan had heard.
‘Let’s get the hell aboard then,’ Ethan said, glancing again at the bitter gloom surrounding them. ‘The less time I spend out here, the better I’ll feel.’
Ethan followed the SEALS and scientists as they trudged across the base, soldiers armed with rifles watching them and ensuring that they did not stray far from their assigned path toward the rugged, icy shoreline. Although McMurdo was as much a research station as a military outpost, the soldiers were under orders to shoot anybody who strayed too far. Bristling with sophisticated listening devices and other obscure military technology, McMurdo’s military contingent was still shrouded in Cold War secrecy.
‘There anybody else out here we need to worry about?’ Ethan asked as they walked, weighed down by their heavy backpacks.
‘The French have an outpost, Dumont d’Urville, about fifteen hundred nautical miles south of Tasmania, but they’re a long way from us,’ Hannah said. ‘Our plan, according to Jarvis, is to use Polar Star to break a channel across McMurdo Sound and make it to Ross Island and the station there as part of a standard resupply and refuel operation conducted every year at this time. We’ll deploy before Polar Star moves on.’
Ethan marched up a ramp resting on the ice that climbed up onto the ship’s deck, the vessel entirely surrounded by the ice sheets but its crew apparently unconcerned. He could see her captain watching as the SEALS hauled their heavy weapons and wheeled several strange vehicles aboard the vessel, clearly unhappy with the volume of military hardware suddenly appearing on his vessel. A tall, broad shouldered man with the rugged features of the experienced seaman, he extended a gloved hand.