Ethan reached out and activated the batteries by flipping a series of switches. The German inscriptions didn’t help matters, but Riggs had been familiar enough with such submarines to be able to give Ethan a guide as to which switch did what.
The Seehund hummed into life as the batteries fed power to the electric motor, and a few small indicator lights lit up green as pressure gauges whipped into life and various other meters began indicating oxygen reserves and other essential information.
‘Time to go,’ Ethan said. ‘Ready?’
‘Ready,’ Amy confirmed, giving him a gloved thumbs-up over her shoulder, her face buried in the laptop as she scrutinized the visuals from the underwater camera she had attached in front of the dome.
Ethan closed his eyes for a brief moment and hoped that this time he had not taken a step too far. He truly wished that Lopez were with him, or that Hannah had prevailed and not given up her seat to Amy.
Then, he pulled a lever. The ballast tanks issued forth a rush of compressed air that bubbled upon the water’s surface as it was allowed to bleed from vents along the hull, and with alarming speed the Seehund sank beneath the waves.
Ethan looked up and caught a last glimpse of the dock, Riggs and Hannah watching them vanish beneath the water, and then they shimmered into a rippling image of light and darkness as bubbles streamed past the acrylic dome and darkness consumed the submarine.
Ethan reached out and, cautious of draining the submarine’s batteries too quickly, illuminated only a single navigation lamp. A beam of harsh white light scythed into the blackness and flared off the walls of a vertical shaft hacked into the glacier itself.
‘It’s man-made,’ Amy marveled. ‘The Nazis cut down into the ice and made this dock.’
‘Delighted for them,’ Ethan murmured in reply as he concentrated on controlling the submarine and preventing either the bow or stern from bumping into the walls of the shaft.
He glanced periodically at the pressure gauges, which told him both the pressure and the temperature outside the hull. The acrylic dome could only take so much pressure, and with the water being compressed in places beneath the ice he knew that one false move could breach the dome. Their lives would be measured in seconds if such a catastrophic breach were to occur.
The lights continued to reflect off the walls of the shaft, and then suddenly the light that was illuminating Ethan’s acrylic sphere weakened as the submarine descended out of the shaft and into complete darkness, the light beam spreading out and vanishing into the black water.
‘Sub-glacial chamber,’ Amy reported. ‘This is the water that provides the entrance to the main base’s submarine pens. It must flow on beneath the entire facility and exit into the Antarctic Ocean further down the glacier’
Ethan nodded, looking over his shoulder into the darkness to the south east, or so his magnetic compass told him. ‘That’s how the Nazi U-Boats would have got in and out, if the channel is still navigable.’
‘We won’t have time to check that out,’ Amy advised him. ‘The signal is coming from dead ahead, about two hundred yards.’
Ethan closed the bleed valves, the stream of bubbles from the vents clearing and the vibrations through the hull ceasing as the pressure equalized and the submarine hung in the blackness. For a few moments the silence was eerie and Ethan realized that he could just as easily have been in deep space as beneath the Antarctic ice sheet.
‘What are you waiting for, a red carpet?’ Amy snapped. ‘Let’s go.’
Ethan gently engaged the electric motor and the hum from the stern became a vibration as the screws began to turn and the submarine eased forward through the freezing blackness toward the distant signal blinking on Amy’s laptop computer.
Ethan found himself glancing over the pressure gauges every few seconds, obsessed with the clinging fear that the dome would fail and freezing water would rush in under immense pressure, killing them both instantly. Although his common sense told him that it would all be over long before he could even begin to comprehend what was happening, somehow the knowledge that he would never be found, that they would both be frozen solid for millennia beneath the glacier seemed a fate too horrible to bear.
Ethan leaned forward and peered over Amy’s shoulder to look at her laptop’s screen and take his mind off his morbid thoughts, the blue glow from it illuminating the cold and dark interior of the submarine with an unearthly glow.
‘A hundred fifty yards,’ she said without looking over her shoulder, her breath condensing in clouds on the cold air. ‘Keep it steady.’
Ethan nodded, saw the blue glow growing brighter from the screen, and then he realized that the laptop was not responsible for the shimmering blue white glow. Ethan jerked back upright, his head bathed in a glorious halo of light as the blackness around him was banished by a mass of pulsing blue creatures flooding through the icy depths.
XXXVIII
Paralysis. Gordon LeMay could not move an inch from where he lay on the back seat of a luxurious SUV driving north out of the city. He got the occasional glimpse through dry eyes of a road sign outside the tinted windows as it passed by, the asphalt humming beneath the wheels outside.
His heart beat felt slow, a dull nausea infecting his guts due to low blood pressure even though he was lying on his back. The motion of the vehicle on the road exacerbated that nausea, which in turn was infected with a fear that he was facing the last moments of his life.
Majestic Twelve had betrayed him, of that much he was sure, but he could not for the life of him fathom why. He had not failed them — had they suspected that he was behind the drone that he had seen filming them? He recalled lying on the thickly carpeted floor of the apartment as the members of MJ-12 looked down at him over their champagne flutes and laughed. Thus, LeMay’s drugging had been premeditated, his betrayal born of some other failure that he could not possibly conceive of.
LeMay was overcome with a regret that threatened to swamp him and squeeze the life from his body long before MJ-12 managed to finish him off. He thought of his wife and their kids, three teenagers just about to venture out into the world, and his grief overwhelmed him as tears trickled down his cheeks. He had struck a deal with the devil — not the fanciful, mythical devil of biblical tales but the true evil among humanity, that of men with no cares but their own wealth and power.
He had been tracked, they had said, somehow, and LeMay could only guess at how the DIA might have managed to follow him so accurately. Wilms had seemed as surprised and shocked as LeMay and the others at the sight of the drone however, and yet that suggested they could not possibly have known in advance of its presence.
The vehicle turned off the road and into the drive of a large country mansion. LeMay knew that they were probably in Larchmont, an exclusive area just a few clicks out of Manhattan and near the Connecticut border. The car slowed and then waited before easing forward into a large garage, LeMay glimpsing an electric door opening above them as they moved inside.
The engine was shut off and the doors of the vehicle opened. LeMay was dragged out by strong hands, his body pliant and loose, heavy and sagging. Unable to do anything except watch through eyes that would not close, and hope that his body retained enough physical control to keep breathing, LeMay was carried through the interior of a house that contained no furniture. He figured in a moment of abstract reverie that the property was one of countless hundreds owned by the cabal as safe houses and places where they could do their work without interference from the outside world.