‘Captain James Forrester,’ he introduced himself as Ethan stepped aboard the ship.
‘Ethan Warner. When will we get underway?’
‘As soon as you’re aboard,’ Forrester assured him. ‘We’ve established a link to your senior officer in Washington DC and your team will be briefed as soon as we’re on our way.’
Ethan eyed the captain uncertainly.
‘How many of the crew know why we’re here?’
‘None of them,’ Forrester promised, ‘and I’ve already signed a non-disclosure agreement. Our mission route is routine anyway, so it’s not going to raise any eyebrows with Ivan or any other of the research stations out here.’
Ethan smiled inwardly. It had been a long time since he had heard the Russians described as Ivan, a Cold War moniker that Forrester had likely been raised using.
‘I’ll have the team assemble as soon as possible,’ Ethan promised.
‘Your quarters are ready,’ Forrester said as he turned to oversee the rest of the crew. ‘Ensign DuPont will show you the way.’
A young sailor beckoned for Ethan to follow him even as the Polar Star’s crew hauled the boarding ramp up from the icy wasteland below the ship and he heard the sound of the vessel’s powerful engines begin to reverberate through the hull. He followed the Ensign through a hatch beneath the bridge and felt a waft of blessed warm air envelop him as he and Hannah walked through the interior.
‘Damn,’ Hannah uttered behind him, ‘I’ve just realized that I couldn’t feel my face.’
‘The temperature outside is seventeen degrees below zero,’ Ensign DuPont explained as he strode through the ice breaker’s myriad corridors. ‘You kind of get used to it.’
‘I’d rather not,’ Hannah replied, and then looked at Ethan as she pulled the thickly lined hood of her jacket off. ‘You got any idea what this briefing is about? I thought that Jarvis laid it all out back in DC?
‘No idea,’ Ethan admitted, ‘but it must be important to have it all set up, and the SEALS didn’t look like they knew what it was about either.’
DuPont led them to their quarters, little more than a pair of bunks in a room barely larger than a broom cupboard.
‘You won’t be staying aboard for long,’ the Ensign informed them, ‘so this is really just a place to store your kit while we cross the sound. The briefing room is just a little further down the corridor, to the right.’
Ethan thanked the Ensign, dumped his kit and thick polar jacket on his bunk and then headed straight for the briefing room with Hannah close behind.
The briefing room was located a deck below the bridge and was dominated by a table covered with a sheet of Perspex, beneath which was a map of the southern hemisphere, the Antarctic at its center. Ethan figured that the captain and his officers used this room for detailed navigation and planning.
The SEALS were already in the room, leaning against the walls and trying to remain inconspicuous despite the air of restrained violence that often enshrouded Special Forces troops. Around the map table were Chandler and Amy, both of them wrapped in winter weather clothing and whispering excitedly as a wall-mounted monitor at the far end of the room glowed into life and Doug Jarvis appeared upon it.
‘Ethan,’ Jarvis said, ‘I take it your team is in place?’
‘The ship’s already in motion and we should make Ross Island in a few hours,’ Ethan confirmed.
‘Good,’ Jarvis replied, ‘because we’ve uncovered more data regarding the Earth-based signals we detected answering those belonging to Black Knight.’
The SEAL team leader, Lieutenant Riggs, stepped forward. ‘Can we expect any kind of resistance?’
Jarvis appeared non-committal.
‘That’s uncertain at this time, as we simply don’t have enough data. What we do have is evidence that the signals are being emitted from a site that was originally occupied in 1946.’
Ethan stared at the monitor for a long beat before he could speak. ‘Who the hell was up here in 1946?’
Jarvis appeared as stunned as the rest of the crew as he replied.
‘According to what we’ve managed to uncover, the only country known to have established a base up here in Antarctica in the months following World War Two was Germany. Not only that, but we chased them up here in an attempt to destroy what they created.’
Hannah Ford spoke up. ‘And what exactly did they create up here?’
‘A subterranean base,’ Jarvis replied, ‘and we’ve been trying to locate it for seventy years.’
IX
‘The Nazis had an Antarctic base?’ Ethan asked.
The briefing room had fallen silent as the soldiers, scientists and Polar Star’s Captain Forrester listened to Jarvis as he replied from the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington DC.
‘The Germans had been sending exploratory missions down to Antarctica since the early nineteenth century,’ he said. ‘The Antarctic Plateau was claimed for Norway by Roald Amundsen as the King Haakon VII Plateau when his expedition was the first to reach South Pole in 1911. The name Queen Maud Land was initially applied in January 1930 to the land between 37°E and 49°30’E discovered by Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen and Finn Lützow-Holm during Lars Christensen’s Norvegia expedition of 1929. Norway’s claim was disputed by Germany, which in 1938 dispatched the German Antarctic Expedition, led by Alfred Ritscher, to fly over as much of it as possible. The ship Schwabenland reached the pack ice off Antarctica in January 1939. During the expedition, an area of about a hundred forty thousand square miles was photographed from the air by Ritscher, who dropped darts inscribed with swastikas every sixteen miles. Germany attempted to claim the territory surveyed by Ritscher under the name New Swabia, but lost any claim to the land following its defeat in the Second World War.’
Ethan frowned as Hannah replied.
‘So if they were prevented from annexing the territory after their defeat then how could they have built any kind of operational base up here, much less kept it secret for seventy years? There are at least twelve research stations all across Queen Maud Land belonging to many different nations.’
‘That’s what’s caused the confusion,’ Doctor Chandler replied. ‘The entire story of a German base being built in Antarctica at the end of the Second World War, which has been in circulation for decades, has always been rejected by historians based on the assumption that because the Germans spent so much time surveying Queen Maud Land, that’s where the site of the base must be. These recent signals intelligence tells us that the assumption has been wrong.’
A digital image of Antarctica replaced Jarvis on the monitor as Chandler went on.
‘The legend purports that the Nazi mission was supposed to establish a base on Antarctica in order to set up a staging post for further invasions of countries in the southern hemisphere prior to the invasion of Poland. However, records show that the mission was merely an attempt to scout new territories into which the Nazi machine could spread as the war progressed. Historians have repeatedly pointed out that the supposed discovery by the Nazis of warm water and vegetation within Antarctica’s wastes, which would have been used to sustain a population or a base of some kind, were false and that there were no such sources.’ The image changed again to a portion of the continent’s eastern shores, north west of the Polar Star’s current location.
‘That was until 2015,’ Chandler said, ‘when surveys conducted by scientific teams on the continent and orbiting satellites detected a series of subterranean pathways that were channeling warm water beneath the Totten Glacier, a seventy mile long and eighteen mile wide feature and the largest on the continent’s east coast.’