Through the windows he saw something, and for a moment he thought that a second sun had appeared high in the western sky. A bright flare of light burst against the evening sky far behind them, and then he detected for the briefest of moments a flash of something rocketing down through the sky.
The sunset behind the Catalina suddenly brightened ten-fold and Ethan squinted away as the missile hit the Nazi base with enough force to bury itself half a mile down into the glacier. He waited for a moment and then opened his eyes in time to see an immense fireball expanding out behind the Catalina, a tremendous mushroom cloud billowing out from the impact site and towering up into the Antarctic sky.
Moments later, the Catalina was hurled forwards through the sky as the shockwave from the ferocious blast slammed into the aircraft.
Lopez saw the missile icon strike the Antarctic and vanish without any graphic to determine what had happened, but on another screen a satellite’s visual image of the Antarctic flared with light as data began spilling down screens nearby.
‘Nuclear grade detonation strike!’ Hellerman called as he read the data pouring down the screens. ‘Yield equivalent to five megatons, impact point matches the location of Black Knight’s descent into the ice fields. We’re looking at a major destabilization of the glacier’s northern fields and…’
Vaughn’s hand on Hellerman’s shoulder silenced him. ‘Let’s maybe leave that debrief for a bit, okay?’
Hellerman nodded as he glanced at Lopez and saw her head hanging, hidden behind her long black hair. ‘Sure.’
Lopez could hear them both clearly however, and her voice rang clear in the otherwise silent room.
‘What’s the blast radius?’ she asked.
Hellerman looked at the main screen, where the spy satellite’s sensitive cameras were recording data from the impact site.
‘At least one mile,’ he replied, ‘expanding as we speak but losing power and velocity now.’
Lopez looked up at the screen for a moment as Hellerman, working swiftly, overlaid fresh graphics on the blast zone where Lopez could already see a large cloud of flame and smoke billowing up from the surface and casting a long, dark shadow away from the impact sight across the Antarctic.
‘The blast radius would be non-fatal at anything beyond two miles,’ Hellerman added as he surveyed the data. ‘If they got to the surface and were able to travel away from the site far enough, they could have made it.’
Jarvis shook his head.
‘Ethan would have made contact by now,’ he said. ‘He’d know we were monitoring the situation down there.’
Lopez reached into her pocket and retrieved her cell phone. There were no messages, nothing to suggest that Ethan had tried to contact her, but then of course being so far south it was unlikely he would have any means of reaching her.
She turned to Hellerman.
‘That satellite detects movement, right?’ she asked.
‘Sure,’ Hellerman said, ‘but it’s not sensitive enough to detect people. They’d be too small and move too slowly. Even the ski-gliders would be too tiny to…’
‘Look for something larger, doing about a hundred fifty knots.’
Hellerman stared at her. ‘Say what now?’
‘Just do it,’ Lopez insisted.
Hellerman tapped in a series of commands, re-tasking the satellite’s sensors to pick up any object of a defined size travelling at the speed Lopez had suggested in the vicinity of the blast zone.
The computer whirred for a few moments as the satellite’s on board computer reset the optics for the new resolution and tracking request, and moments later a small icon appeared on the screen, travelling south away from the blast zone.
Jarvis walked closer to the screen as the satellite zoomed in under Hellerman’s control, and he shook his head slowly as he recognized the pixellated form of an old World War Two aircraft, an unmistakable shape.
‘That’s a Catalina,’ he said.
‘I’ll be damned,’ Hellerman gasped in delight as he looked at Lopez. ‘How the hell did you get him there in time?’
‘The text message,’ Vaughn said, glancing admiringly at Lopez, ‘when we were sent after LeMay. I can see why Warner relies on you so much.’
Lopez looked at the tiny icon on the screen and then her cell phone rang and she picked it up.
The Catalina’s fuselage was humming with the growl of the two piston engines as they labored to lift the aircraft higher into the evening sky. Ethan could see the billowing clouds of their exhaust trailing behind them, just as similar clouds had done from the C-130 Hercules when they had arrived in the Antarctic what seemed like an age before.
The Catalina had climbed high enough that it was able to achieve a data link with Polar Star, and from there to satellites. The links were strong enough that Ethan’s cell phone had picked up a signal, and he had seen a dozen or so missed calls from Nicola Lopez.
‘Ethan?’
The sound of her voice in his ear, one that he had not heard for so long, was one of the best things he could ever recall hearing. He sat with his legs out in front of him on the deck of the aircraft, slumped against the seats as he replied.
‘Nicola.’
‘Christ you’re okay! That’s another one you owe me, wise guy!’
Ethan smiled, dragged one hand down his face and realized that it came away wet.
‘Yeah.’
The tone of Lopez’s voice changed. ‘You sure you’re okay? I mean, I just called you after waking up from a coma of six months and all. Don’t get yourself too excited or anything.’
Ethan’s hand still rested on Hannah’s wound, and her hand was still upon his, but there was no longer any strength in her grip. Arnie squatted beside him, the medical pack and dressings he had rushed to Hannah’s side with soaked in blood as he shook his head slowly.
Ethan let Hannah’s hand remain where it was, not wanting to remove it, and looked into her clear green eyes. They stared in silence at the ceiling of the Catalina’s fuselage, empty now of the vibrant spirit that seemed to have soared the very moment the bomb had detonated behind them.
‘We’re coming home,’ Ethan replied, his throat tight, ‘but only one of us is coming back.’
After a long pause Lopez’s reply came back gently across the line.
‘I’m sorry, Ethan. I’ll speak to you when you get here.’
Ethan nodded, rubbed his eyes angrily. ‘I’ll look forward to it.’
Ethan cut the line off, and then reluctantly he lifted his hand free of Hannah’s and gently closed her eyes for the last time.
L
Ethan Warner sat quietly on a seat opposite the DIA’s Patriot’s Wall, a series of hexagonal gold plaques set alongside each other in a shape reminiscent of the continental United States and flanked by the flags of both the agency and the United States of America. The wall honored DIA personnel who had lost their lives while working for the agency around the globe. Ethan knew that the wall was not exhaustive due to exclusion of agents with links to classified missions — nobody knew how many personnel the agency had lost in classified circumstances over the decades.
A new plaque now shone on the wall, emblazoned with Hannah Ford’s name. Ethan stared at it in silence for a long time, and knew that if either he or Lopez had lost their lives in the battle against the enemies of their country their names would not be honored upon the wall. Unlike the CIA, contractors were not included on the DIA’s wall due to the often highly sensitive nature of their work.