Ethan looked out of the long, tear-drop shaped canopy and saw other ice gliders blazing across the ice nearby, their propellers whipping up spiralling vortexes of snow behind them that glowed and sparkled in the sunlight. He turned back to the view forward and almost immediately he spotted something on the display before them.
Another, small and intermittent contact flickered in and out of view as the glider bounced and careered across the ice.
‘There’s a new contact on the monitor,’ he reported to the driver.
The SEAL looked at his display and frowned.
‘Could be an artifact of some kind, a reflection,’ he replied. ‘The data is coming in via a downlink to a military satellite and we often get anomalous reflections appearing and then disappearing. It’s not a perfect system, especially down here with all the cold weather and ice. Don’t worry, the nearest people are hundreds of miles of us!’
Ethan frowned.
‘There are people on the glacier?’
‘There’s a Russian research station at Lake Vostok, a subterranean lake more than two miles beneath the ice. The Ruskies drill bore holes down there, looking for life forms different to those we’re familiar with. The station is manned year-round, but we’re not going to be going anywhere near them.’
Ethan held on grimly as the ice glider seemed to almost fly across the sheer white surface of Antarctica, occasionally hitting rises in the terrain that felt as though they were in a vehicle that had hit a pot hole in the road. Ethan’s arms began to go numb from the vibrations as he held on and hoped that the constant juddering wouldn’t give him the mother of all headaches by the time they reached their destination.
On the GPS display appeared a second warning screen and this time Ethan spotted a countdown timer appear, showing just two hours and seven minutes.
‘That’s the object’, Riggs identified the new display. ‘We’re getting live tracking information from NASA. It’s coming down, whatever the hell it is.’
‘We need to get established and ready to pick this thing up,’ Ethan replied.
The ski gliders thundered across the icy wastes for another bone-jarring two hours, Ethan peering at the empty wilderness around them, bathed in the orange glow of the low sun and slashed with giant crevasses that plunged into chilly blue depths, forcing them to find alternative routes.
Ethan’s bones and joints were aching by the time the SEAL lieutenant began to slow, and Ethan looked up to the GPS monitor and saw that the flashing icon denoting the position of the signal was almost now in the center of the screen and that they were within five nautical miles of its position. The ski glider’s motion across the ice smoothed as Riggs began bothering to pick less rough routes across the surface of the ice, and Ethan peered up into the blue sky above that was laced with high cirrus clouds glowing like angel’s wings in the permanent sunrise.
‘Four miles now,’ the driver said. ‘Firing team, weapons hot, stay sharp.’
As they travelled, Ethan saw Riggs slide an M-16 rifle out of its slot inside the canopy rail of the glider and allow it to rest across his thighs as with the other hand he flipped up a protective cover over the arming switch of the two cannons built into the glider’s nose. Ethan heard a humming sound begin to emanate from where he guessed a belt-fed drum contained the guns’ ammunition, the drum spinning up ready to fire.
It was then that he looked up into the sky above and shouted a warning.
‘Incoming!’
Riggs looked up and his voice echoed over the communications channel. ‘Holy crap!’
Across the vivid, deep blue vault of the heavens a fearsomely bright flare of light rocketed through the atmosphere. A trail of glowing debris followed it as it plunged across the sky, leaving a billowing cloud of smoke behind it that glowed in the low sunlight as it streaked overhead. Ethan saw a faint concave shockwave of vapor ahead of the object enveloped by the bright halo, and a moment later above the sound of the ski glider’s engine he heard a terrific crash as the sonic boom hit the air around them.
‘Black Knight is down!’ Riggs yelled.
Ethan saw the bright object plummet toward the Antarctic and then a brilliant flare of light burst like a second sunrise ahead of them as it hit the ground at tremendous speed. A broad cloud of debris churned up from the impact burst into the air a few miles ahead of them as the object ploughed into the deep ice.
Ethan looked up at the roiling cloud of debris left behind by Black Knight’s terminal descent, and then saw an aircraft flying high over the Antarctic, the vapor trails from its four engines glowing like golden needles across the chill blue heavens.
‘There’s an aircraft up there,’ Ethan said.
Riggs looked up at the aircraft.
‘The only thing that’s going to be allowed to over fly this area is a military aircraft, and we haven’t been informed of any support for this mission yet.’
Moments later, through the billowing debris cloud emerged the shapes of parachutes with vehicles descending slowly toward the ice fields before them, and other fast moving specks plummeting toward the surface.
Riggs keyed his microphone and called out to the entire formation.
‘We’ve got company!’
XVI
‘They’re coming down ahead of us!’
Ethan saw the specks plummeting toward the ground before them, and then suddenly black parachutes billowed into life as the freefalling soldiers pulled their ‘chutes and slowed dramatically.
Ethan recognized the tell-tail method of a HALO jump — High Altitude, Low Opening, the preferred insertion method of Special Forces soldiers into enemy territory, usually at night under the cover of darkness. Too small to be detected by radar, and dressed all in black, the soldiers would normally be invisible to their enemy as they descended.
‘That looks like half an army,’ Riggs uttered in dismay from the front of the cockpit. ‘I count at least a hundred.’
Ethan nodded, scanning the beautiful skies now marred with dozens of billowing parachutes.
‘They’re trying to cut us off short of the target and get there first,’ he replied.
They saw a few of the parachutes plummet to the ground in flames, and Riggs’ features twisted into a grim smile.
‘Looks like a few of them got torched by Black Knight on the way down, but they still have almost seven times the number of men we can field,’ Riggs pointed out. ‘We’re going to have to get creative here.’
‘I’ve got vehicles deploying!’
The call came in over the radio from one of the other SEALS, and Ethan craned his head up higher into the sky to see the larger, black objects still descending through the dawn sky, each suspended from three large parachutes.
‘Damn,’ Riggs cursed. ‘Who the hell are these people? How did they even know we were here?’
Ethan did not have the time to give Riggs an extensive debrief of the history of Majestic Twelve, and he was pretty sure that revealing the Director of the FBI to be one of their number and the likely reason for the enemy force’s well equipped arrival would be a step too far in exposing state secrets.
‘They’re part of something known as Majestic Twelve,’ he replied. ‘They have a lot of money and a lot of connections. We’ve been working with the DIA to dismantle their organization for some time.’
‘Not with much luck by the looks of it,’ Riggs uttered in reply, and then keyed his microphone to speak to the rest of the team. ‘We need to get past them before their vehicles land and they can direct heavy fire! Push through at maximum speed!’