‘This way.’
Ethan followed the two soldiers down a narrow flight of steps that headed away from the main docks, descending down until they reached a steel door that had been burned open by the SEALs, the harsh odor of burning metal hanging in the air.
Sully led them out onto a smaller, secondary dock, and this time the dock was not empty.
Ethan slowed as he stared at the submersible moored alongside the dock, a metallic device that reminded him of a U-Boat except that it was only around twelve meters long, its black hull and red stencil markings looking cruel and dangerous in the minimal illumination offered by their flashlights.
‘I’ll be damned,’ Riggs said, ‘it’s a Seehund.’
‘A what?’ Ethan asked.
‘It’s a German midget submarine,’ Riggs replied, ‘two man crew, two torpedoes. They were deployed toward the end of the war and sank a fair few vessels before Germany surrendered at the end of the conflict. They were also known as Type Twenty Seven U-Boats, and were based on a British design used in an attempt to sink the German battleship Tirpitz.’
Ethan looked at the submarine, which had almost certainly been abandoned in the dock since the end of the war.
‘Is it serviceable?’ Ethan asked.
Riggs looked the submarine over. ‘It’s floating, but I don’t know whether she’ll hold water once submerged.’
Ethan saw that the submarine had a clear dome atop her bridge, allowing for visual inspection of her surroundings, and that her torpedo shoots were empty.
‘It’s too small to have come all the way down here from the North Atlantic,’ Ethan guessed. ‘That means it must have been brought here for a reason.’
‘The warm water channel,’ Riggs picked up on Ethan’s train of thought. ‘They built this base and planned to investigate the channel, and this submarine would be the only vessel that was small enough to do the job.’
‘And that’s not all,’ Sully added. ‘Take a look at this.’
Sully led them back inside the base to a hatch that Ethan had not taken much notice of when they had walked in. Inside the door entrance was a large box-like structure suspended in mid-air within an underground chamber.
‘It’s an anechoic chamber,’ Sully explained, ‘although what the hell they’d have built one of these down here for I have no idea.’
An anechoic chamber was a form of room that was isolated from exterior sound or electromagnetic radiation sources, preventing the reflection of wave phenomena. The chamber was supported slightly above the floor using tensile springs and surrounded on all sides by sound-proofing layers of anechoic tiles, a concrete shield and a full six inches of near vacuum-pressure air.
Ethan stepped inside and looked around. ‘It’s quite small, no more than ten men.’
His voice sounded dead, monotone, its vocal resonance lost within the room as though Ethan were listening to it underwater. He stepped out and walked with Riggs and Sully back to the Seehund in the rear dock.
Ethan peered into the black water and then looked at Riggs.
‘If we want to recover Black Knight, we’re going to have to go down there. Do you think that this sub’ could bring it back?’
Riggs was about to reply when Hannah burst into the dock.
‘They’re travelling up the tunnel toward us!’ she said urgently. ‘We need everybody in the pens, now!’
Ethan ran with Riggs and Sully as they sprinted up the stairwell back toward the command post. Riggs posted the team’s sniper, Saunders, in the command center, looking down on the submarine pen entrance as he and Ethan hurried down onto the docks and across to where the ice cavern’s mouth extended into the blackness of the tunnel carving its way south through the deep glacier.
Ethan let his eyes adjust to the gloom for a moment, and gradually he began to detect the distant flashes of light that drifted like ghosts through the pristine ice.
‘They’re still some way off,’ Doctor Chandler reported as he observed the slowly shifting lights. ‘The ice down here is so clear that some of the glow from their flashlights is making it this far. Incredible.’
Riggs did not share the scientist’s enthusiasm for the lights as he crouched down and surveyed the walls of the tunnel.
‘Best thing we can do is bring the tunnel down on them,’ he said finally. ‘Set charges around the walls, work in darkness so they don’t detect either our flashlights or our night vision goggles.’
Hannah frowned. ‘They can see the light from night vision goggles?’ she asked.
‘The goggles fire a laser beam to illuminate the darkness and capture reflected light artifacts to build a picture for the wearer,’ Riggs explained. ‘If somebody else happens to be wearing one, they can also see the laser beam although it’s invisible to the naked eye.’
Sully, Del Toro and Riggs began unpacking explosive charges from their kit as Ethan eyed the tunnel.
‘If you blow this tunnel we lose our only way out of here,’ he pointed out. ‘Not to mention the fact that you might bring the rest of the cavern down with it.’
Riggs unpacked one of the C4 charges and lodged it into the ice near the tunnel entrance as he replied.
‘We’re not isolated,’ he said. ‘The Navy knows we’re here and will send support. One way or the other, all we have to do is survive long enough to be located.’
Ethan shot the tunnel another glance. ‘I’d rather they found us and rescued us rather than found us and dug our frozen corpses out of the ice.’
‘You all knew the risks,’ Riggs snapped back as he worked.
‘Reassuring,’ Hannah said as she peered into the gloom at the oncoming soldiers. ‘They’ll be here within the hour. It didn’t take us much longer than that to reach the base and they’re not encumbered with scientists.’
As if on cue, one of the scientists burst from the base and hurried across the slippery ice to Doctor Chandler’s side.
‘You’ve got to see this!’ he insisted in a harsh whisper, conscious of the way sound might travel down the tunnel and alert their pursuers.
‘See what?’ Chandler asked.
‘The algae plumes,’ the scientist replied. ‘We’ve analyzed them and it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before. There’s new life down here.’
Chandler turned slowly to look at his colleague. ‘New life?’
‘New life,’ the scientist confirmed. ‘Completely new. We could have used Amy Reece here.’
Chandler stared at the younger man for a long moment and then turned to Lieutenant Riggs.
‘Lieutenant, you cannot blow the tunnel in now. There are new forms of life present in this cave system that demand greater study and…’
‘The tunnel’s going,’ Riggs snapped, cutting the old man off. ‘You won’t be able to study anything if you’re dead. Your call.’
Chandler did not budge as he replied.
‘You don’t understand, Lieutenant. New life means that this glacier is a perfect preserve for…’
‘For anything that dies inside it,’ Riggs shot back. ‘You’re not here to study, doctor, only to advise us in any way possible on how to recover Black Knight. That’s all.’
‘But that’s what I’m saying!’ Chandler implored. ‘You cannot seal that tunnel because by doing so you risk trapping us inside a cavern that floods not occasionally but on a regular basis.’
Ethan looked back at the base and suddenly he realized why the interior of the construction was filled with heavy blast doors.
‘It’s a submarine in itself,’ he said. ‘That’s why there are pressure doors all through it.’
‘Precisely!’ Chandler said. ‘There is a fresh water channel running through the glacier from somewhere to the north and it routinely floods this cavern system. That’s why we found the Nazi soldier pinned in the ice — he was one of the ones who probably didn’t make it back to the base during a lockdown.’