‘It’s holding,’ he said, ‘that thing must be a lot lighter than it looks but this isn’t going to be easy. All the weight’s under the bow.’
Amy understood immediately and she abandoned her seat and moved past below and beside him toward the amid ship position. Ethan felt some of the stress on the controls ease as Amy’s weight shifted aft, and he realized that he could have done with the moveable ballast weights originally fitted to these kinds of submarines.
He peered up out of the dome and saw the underside of the glacier above him dimly reflecting the submarine’s lights as it ascended toward the base.
‘Full steam ahead, cap’ain,’ Amy chortled from somewhere below.
‘Will you cut it out?’ he said as he tried to control the submarine and account for the drift pulling him toward the south. ‘We’re moving with the stream, going faster, but if I don’t time this just right we’ll miss the dock entrance and continue on because we don’t have enough power to fight the current with Black Knight attached to us. Get your hands on the ballast lever and be ready to pull on my mark.’
Amy’s gloved hands appeared on the lever near Ethan’s knee and she peered up at him from the hull.
‘Ready when you are, skipper.’
Ethan ignored her frivolity and kept his eyes peeled ahead, and within a couple of minutes he saw the shadowy form of the vertical shaft that led up into the Nazi base concealed within the glacial ice.
‘Stand by,’ he warned.
Amy’s grip on the lever tightened as Ethan pitched the submarine as bow high as he could and prepared to pull off the power.
‘Nearly there,’ he said.
Amy’s scream shattered the silence as something loomed outside the viewing dome, and Ethan flinched as a huge white and bulbous form slammed into the submarine and rocked it from side to side as an alarm claxon rang out inside the hull and huge white fangs slammed against the dome.
XL
‘What the hell was that?!’
Amy’s terrified scream rang in Ethan’s ears as he saw the huge creature lunge directly at the dome and a set of massive fangs slam into the acrylic inches from his face, a deep, red mouth lined with razor sharp teeth that scraped down the acrylic and left deep gashes in the surface.
The Seehund rocked to one side and threw Amy from her seat, her body slamming against the pressure hull as Ethan struggled to maintain control.
The fearsome teeth and massive body vanished instantly into the blackness, the submarine’s lights illuminating a vortex of disturbed sediment and phytoplankton that swirled in eddies through the freezing black water.
Ethan’s heart hammered in his chest and his breath came in short, sharp gasps as he struggled to recover from the attack. He peered out into the gloom, suddenly fearful of what might be out there in the darkness.
‘I think Chandler was right,’ he said finally. ‘We’re not alone down here.’
Amy climbed back into her seat but kept one hand pressed against the hull for balance as she sat in silence and stared into the blackness, listening for any sign of the creature that had attacked them so viciously.
The silence deepened, as did it seemed the darkness as they waited. Ethan flinched as he realized that they were still drifting with the current, the underside of the glacier moving past above them. He cursed as he realized that he had lost track of their position.
‘Can you reach Chandler?’
Amy did not respond, sitting frozen in silence inside the submarine.
‘Amy?’
She shook herself awake and turned to the laptop as she keyed the microphone.
‘Doctor Chandler, can you hear us?’
A soft static replied to her with its empty hiss. Ethan bit his lip and cursed again as he peered up at the glacier’s underbelly and sought any sign of the shaft that would bring them up into the docks.
‘Damn it,’ he snapped finally. ‘I think we’ve missed it.’
Amy began to panic, her voice trembling as she replied.
‘But what are we going to do? We can’t stay down here Ethan, our air won’t last long enough and…’
A deep boom reverberated through the Seehund’s hull as something massive slammed into them once again. Ethan’s forehead smacked into the acrylic dome as he saw something move below them in the glow of the lights. His guts convulsed as he saw the immense body of the creature move swiftly through the lights, its back a dark and mottled gray and a stream of bubbles left in its wake. Deep lesions in its surface betrayed the scars battles with other creatures both dangerous and perhaps unknown.
‘Can you see it?’ Amy asked fearfully.
Ethan nodded, his hands gripping the controls tightly. ‘It’s big,’ he replied, ‘maybe eighteen feet or more.’
Amy turned to her laptop and re-wound the footage. A silence consumed the submarine once more as she surveyed what her camera had detected, and to Ethan’s amazement she breathed a sigh of relief.
‘Thank God,’ she uttered.
‘Are you kidding?’
‘It’s a sea leopard,’ she replied.
‘A what?’
‘A sea leopard,’ Amy repeated. ‘They’re common predators in the Antarctic.’
Ethan peered out into the gloom. ‘There’s nothing good or common about that thing out there, it’s huge!’
‘It may have grown large due to the unusual amount of nutrients and food down here.’
‘We lost our chance to surface in the dock shaft,’ Ethan said, ‘and I have no damned idea where we are now.’
‘Did you see where it went?’ Amy asked.
‘The leopard seal? Yeah, south,’ Ethan replied, quickly able to orientate their position and the direction in which the animal had departed.
‘Good,’ Amy said, ‘follow it.’
‘You want me to do what?’
‘Follow it,’ Amy insisted. ‘Seals are mammals, they have lungs.’
Ethan stared down at her for a moment and then he got it. ‘They breathe air.’
He turned the submarine around to point in the same direction as the current and immediately they began to accelerate as they joined the natural flow of the water.
‘How are they getting their air?’ Ethan asked. ‘We didn’t see any of them in the submarine pens.’
‘No, but we did see one of Veer’s men dragged into the water by something,’ Amy said, ‘and leopard seals are known to be large enough to kill humans. The ice in this channel beneath the glacier is highly oxygenated, and any cavities that exist will likely have breathable air in them. All we have to do is follow that seal and hope that the cavities are large enough to accommodate the submarine.’
‘Big hope,’ Ethan pointed out, and then something caught his eye.
Through the gloom he saw a large, streamlined shape moving through the water. From the blackness emerged an enormous seal, three times as long as a man. Ethan had seen such animals on the television but he was stunned by their incredible size and he realized that they would easily be capable of taking down a full grown man.
‘That’s got to weigh at least fifteen hundred pounds,’ he said as he looked at it.
‘The leopard seal is second only to the killer whale on the Antarctic food chain,’ Amy said as she watched the animal on the screen. ‘They’ve been known to kill humans too, dragging them off the ice sheets or attacking them in the water and pulling them down to their deaths.’