‘The docks,’ Ethan realized. ‘It’s their calls we’ve been hearing, right?’
‘That and the turbines under pressure,’ Amy confirmed. ‘Leopard seals growl quite loudly both above and below the surface. Any sign of a breathing chamber yet?’
Ethan could see bubbles periodically streaming from the seal’s mouth as it swam, and then it began to ascend. Ethan eased back on the power and pulled the hydroplanes back, causing the Seehund to follow the seal up.
Almost immediately he saw a shadowy fissure above them, perhaps twenty feet wide and of unknown depth.
‘I can see surface water,’ he said.
The water rippled and glittered as the Seehund’s lights caught it, and then suddenly he saw the seal burst through the surface before diving back down into the depths again, bubbles streaming from its nostrils like shimmering chrome spheres. Ethan guided the submarine upward into the cavity and suddenly the dome broke through the surface water as the lights illuminated a concave chasm in the ice.
Ethan could tell at a glance that the formation was natural, perhaps created as the glacier had moved slowly over rocky formations on the seabed somewhere to the north and thousands of years before. Ragged, linear scars in the roof of the cave marked the glacier’s progress, dark lines scoring the ice where debris and sediments had been dragged along with the ice and frozen in time.
Ethan reached out and pulled a lever, extending the submarine’s breathing tube as he then reached out and opened a valve. He heard a hissing sound as the air outside, under high pressure from the water pinning it in place against the ice, bled immediately into the low pressure atmosphere inside the submarine.
A cold blast of pristine air rushed through the Seehund to hit Ethan’s face and he breathed it in deeply.
‘Damn, that’s so good it hurts,’ Amy gasped.
Ethan looked up at the interior of the cavity and recognized the same natural lines that adorned the ceiling of the submarine pens.
Amy joined him and managed to peer up past his shoulder to get a glimpse of their surroundings.
‘This air must be millions of years old,’ she confirmed. ‘For all we know we could have breathed in ancient pathogens.’
‘You go girl, and keep our spirits up.’
Amy did not reply for a moment, her brow furrowed in deep thought.
‘This glacier is also millions of years old,’ she said finally, ‘and glaciers move.’
‘Yeah,’ Ethan agreed, ‘so what?’
Amy dropped back into her seat as she stared at her laptop screen.
‘The Nazi base must also move with the glacier.’
‘We know that,’ Ethan said, ‘and that movement is slowly tearing up the turbines they built in the water channels.’
Amy shook her head.
‘That’s not what I mean,’ she added. ‘The Totten Glacier is the primary outlet of the Aurora Subglacial Basin and has the fastest rate of thinning in East Antarctica. Circumpolar deep water has been linked to glacial retreat in West Antarctica, so why not here? It’s been observed here all year-round on the continental shelf a few hundred meters beneath the Antarctic surface water.’
‘You’re losing me,’ Ethan admitted.
‘The warm water currents both outside the continent and coming from within it are what created these sub-glacial chambers,’ Amy went on. ‘We just saw a large leopard seal, a mammal that requires large volumes of food and a reliable air supply to survive, and yet here we are some seventy miles in from the Antarctic coast.’
Ethan realized what Amy was getting at.
‘There must be an existing channel still available to the open ocean that passes directly through the submarine pens, and it must be large enough and with consistent enough air pockets to allow large predators to reach this far beneath the glacier, perhaps even live here permanently. That leopard seal might be one of countless species here beneath the glacier, and we might be able to follow that channel out of here to the coast.’
Ethan glanced at the oxygen indicators and saw that the submarine’s tanks were full. He closed the vents and retracted the air pipe.
‘I don’t want to meet any more speciess, thanks all the same. We missed the entrance to the north dock,’ he said as he looked up at the lines running through the ceiling of the air pocket, ‘but if we orientate with those lines we might be able to pick up the main pens and surface there.’
Amy shot him a sharp look.
‘The main pens are where Veer and his men are,’ she warned. ‘We show up there, it will be like handing Black Knight over to them.’
Ethan knew that she was right, but he also knew that nobody knew anything about whether they had actually recovered Black Knight or not yet. With the device tethered below the submarine and submerged beneath the water even when the Seehund breached the surface, nobody would be able to tell what had happened to it.
‘We can’t stay down here forever, and we can’t make a run for the coast and leave the rest of the team behind in there.’
‘Riggs and his men would not hesitate to leave us behind,’ Amy pointed out. ‘That’s probably why he was so keen to lead this expedition. He could have simply sailed out of here and left us behind.’
‘I think Riggs has more humanity than you give him credit for,’ Ethan said as he prepared to dive the submarine.
‘We can escape, right now,’ Amy insisted. ‘We could reach the coast in a few hours, deny Veer and his men their prize and complete our mission!’
‘And Hannah, Doctor Chandler and the others?’ Ethan demanded. ‘Either way, we can’t necessarily sail out of here. Just because a leopard seal or two can make it through seventy miles of sub-glacial ice doesn’t mean this submarine will, and we don’t have weapons to blast our way through. Either we make it back to the base and take our chances, or we’re stuck down here forever. Which would you prefer?’
Amy scowled, but she had no alternative for Ethan as he turned the Seehund in the water and then eased the throttle forward as he aimed the hydroplanes down.
Slowly, the submarine slid back into the icy blackness below and the cave was plunged once more into absolute blackness.
XLI
‘It’s this way, and pardon the convicts, ma’am.’
Lopez grinned as she followed the duty sergeant into the centre. ‘I’ve visited before.’
Lopez walked down a service corridor as the duty sergeant signed them in and signalled a colleague nearby in a small booth surrounded by bullet-proof glass. A motor whined as unseen locks disengaged and a large steel-barred door rolled open.
Lopez walked through with the sergeant onto D-Block, a high security wing of the centre dedicated to holding high-profile inmates. The block was deserted, steel tables and benches bolted to the floor.
‘Has he said anything?’ Lopez asked.
‘No,’ the sergeant replied. ‘But then, like you asked, we didn’t check in on him much.’
A gruesome symphony of whoops rang out from the tiers nearby as the population caught sight of Lopez striding through the block below. She glanced up and saw dark faces appear at barred cell doors, stark against the orange correctional jump suits as they shouted and bellowed profanities at her. She ignored them as she followed the sergeant through a door at the end of the block that led to a small corridor with three heavy security doors along one wall.
‘Has he been held alone?’ Lopez asked the sergeant.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘Newcomers are held in four man cells, but your guy’s tests aren’t due back until tomorrow. He’ll go on the block overnight, then he’ll be on Twelve Main after that.’