There was no way to know how long he'd been out, but when Denzel awoke the sounds of gunfire had ceased. He pried himself up from the rock ledge and looked out over the dark water to the imposing gray bulk of the submarine, cast into silhouette by the lights over the walkways and the gangplank. From this vantage point, he could just make out the dock beyond. He could hear talking, as it echoed from the walls.
“Start working on a way to get in there,” a woman’s voice said.
Denzel recognized it immediately.
Gail McCarthy.
“We could try shaped charges again,” a man with a British accent said. “Like we did on the door to this chamber.”
“No one does anything to jeopardize that submarine or its cargo, do you understand?”
Denzel couldn't make out the rest of what was said, but it seemed clear enough. Whatever was onboard that sub was more critical to Gail than getting to Kotler. That meant that Kotler and Vicente would be safe, for now.
Denzel wasn't so sure about himself.
His pack had been with the crates they'd quickly loaded into the sub, so he had no access to any provisions, a change of clothes, or anything else. All of that would have been soaked by his dunk in these icy waters anyway, mitigating its usefulness.
As he shivered and huddled in on himself, rubbing his hands over his chest to warm his core, the one thing he regretted most was losing his weapon. It was inevitable that he would eventually come into conflict with Gail and her team of mercenaries and with a weapon he would at least have a fighting chance.
It was too late to worry about that, and there was nothing he could do to resolve it anyway. For now. He would have to make do and deal with things as they came.
Although, at the moment, making do was going to be a tall order. He was stuck on a shelf of rock, with icy waters lapping close at hand, and no resources to speak of.
He looked around to see if there might be a way out of this mess.
Back away from the shelf he was sprawled on, the walls of the cavern sloped up into a natural dome. It looked natural to Denzel, at least, though clearly it had been added to by human hands at some point.
Nazis?
That seemed the most likely scenario, and yet it was still fantastic and hard to believe. Denzel had read and heard about Nazis having an interest in Antarctica, but it was mostly considered rumor. To find an actual Nazi U-boat here, not only under the ice but in an abandoned Nazi base, was mind-boggling.
What were they after, here in this frozen wasteland? What did they find, and what was the significance of it?
I’m starting to sound like Kotler, Denzel thought, shaking his head.
It wasn't important what brought the Nazis here. Not at the moment. For now, Denzel had to come up with a plan to survive this, to take out Gail McCarthy and her men, and to rescue Kotler and Vicente from that sub. That was the mission.
The impossible, painful mission.
Denzel stood, his body stiff and aching from the cold, and forced himself to move. He shuffled around the shelf, rubbing his numbed hands on his stomach and chest. With his core warming, his extremities started to follow, and as feeling returned in painful tingles, Denzel channeled that sensation into energy he could use to survive this.
The shelf protruded out into the water by a good eight feet, which gave him plenty of room to move. He left its edge and began exploring the wall of the cavern. Maybe he could find a way to reach the metal framework of the dock and slip by any guards that were there.
Maybe, too, he'd find a magic lamp and make some wishes, while he was at it. As long as he was considering unlikely and impossible options, may as well go big.
He stopped in his tracks when he spotted a small depression in the rock, up ahead.
It wasn't just that single depression, though. He stepped back, moving aside so the light leaking into this spot could help him see what was in front of him in more detail.
He spotted a pattern.
There were divots chipped into the rock wall. Two columns of them, in fact, and each divot staggered diagonally from the other.
Rungs.
Someone had carved a set of rungs into the wall here—a way to climb up from this spot.
Who had done it? And why?
It didn’t matter. It was the thin thread of hope Denzel really needed at that moment, and he was going to grasp it with both hands.
His fingers and toes had finally thawed, and though his clothes were still wet and cold, he had warmed up considerably thanks to moving. He was feeling loose and ready to do this.
He put his fingers into the highest handhold he could reach, then brought up his right foot and braced it in a comfortably placed rung to give him leverage. He took some quick breathes and started climbing.
He was working with two worries: That he might lose his grip and fall if his hands weren't sufficiently thawed; and that someone on the other side of the U-boat would spot him and open fire. He'd be a sitting duck here, exposed and vulnerable and clinging to the stone wall out in the open, though he hoped he might be out of range for their weapons.
It was a risk, all the way around. It was also his only shot. He climbed.
After several minutes he gripped the stone rungs and leaned back slightly, as much as he could manage. He tried to get a view of what was above him. It would be a complete disaster if he managed to make this climb to the top, only to discover that this little escape route was abandoned before anyone managed to build an exit or landing of some sort.
Again, a risk. And again, no way around it. But as he looked up, he thought he saw signs of a dark, larger opening, just at the curve of the cavern's ceiling. A tunnel, maybe? A way out, Denzel hoped.
“Hey!” a man’s voice shouted from the dock.
Denzel couldn't look back to see anything, so instead, he doubled his efforts and picked up speed, climbing as rapidly as he was able.
Shots were fired. Then more. And soon it was apparent that several members of Gail McCarthy's team were lining up to take shots at him. His luck held out, for the moment, as he seemed to be out of range.
Though he could hear the disconcerting sounds of rounds striking stone nearby. It wouldn’t be long before some sharpshooter in the group managed to correct and get a hit.
Denzel was only a few rungs from the opening when a shot hit the rock just above him, sending shards of stone into his eyes.
"Gah!" he shouted and gripped tightly with his right hand as he used his left to brush the debris out of his vision. His eyes watered and stung, but he could see. He pressed on as more shots hit nearby, until finally he reached the opening and quickly pulled himself up and in, rolling away from the edge quickly. He wanted to put as much distance as he could between him and the sheer drop, not to mention the cascade of weapons fire.
He lay on his back in the darkness, huffing from the exertion, adrenaline surging through him. He couldn't see anything in this darkness and had no flashlight. But for now, it was safe.
It would only be a matter of time before someone from Gail’s team managed to get to that rock shelf and make that same climb. They would have weapons and lights, among other advantages. So, despite the impending exhaustion Denzel already felt overtaking him, he had to force himself up and get moving.
Here, in a darkened tunnel with the walls literally within reach in all directions, Denzel felt that old, familiar, sickening tingle of his claustrophobia gripping and clenching his guts. He felt his chest tighten and his legs weaken.
He also heard Kotler's voice in his head, telling him to breathe, to focus on the task, to keep moving.
Kotler’s voice.
“Kotler, this is Denzel, can you hear me?”
The radio was still in Denzel’s ear, but he heard nothing. It was waterproof, so that wasn’t a worry. But Kotler was in that sub, while Denzel was in a darkened tunnel. Those two things would surely keep any signals from getting through.
But maybe the radio could help him in another way.
>
He took the base unit out of its clip on his belt. It was made to be stealthy and durable, running on a set of lithium-ion batteries that could power it for a week from a full charge.
To check that charge, all one had to do was open the battery compartment and press a tiny little button. A series of LEDs would light up to indicate how much juice was left.
Denzel didn't care how much power was remaining, but the LEDs were a godsend. He pressed the button, and for a few seconds the tiny, green LEDs threw light into the tunnel ahead of him. It was slight, but in this utter darkness and with his pupils fully dilated, it might as well have been a torch. It gave him enough light to see by, at any rate, and as he pressed the button every few seconds, he was able to make his way steadily forward, at a much faster and much safer pace than he would have made groping along in the darkness.
The activity, the rhythm and pattern of hitting the button and trying to make as much progress as possible, also helped to keep his mind off of the walls and the ceiling and the crushing darkness. It gave him something to focus on, which kept him from losing it. A distraction.
Denzel smiled.
Guess I’m starting to think like Kotler, too.
Chapter 12
Kotler tried the radio, with no luck. Assuming Denzel was still alive out there, the steel hull of the sub would likely block all transmission. He was effectively cut off from his friend.
If Denzel was even still alive.
Kotler eyed Vicente, lying prone and still, and felt grief over his friend's death. He pulled him to a spot where he could be arranged in repose and covered his face with his coat. It was the best he could do, for now. He offered a few silent words, a prayer for the man's soul and his family, and then turned away.
There was work to do. The grieving would have to wait. The priority now was to do whatever it took to survive and to escape this place, so his friend could be avenged.
Kotler spent the next several minutes gathering all the supplies they'd brought onboard, stacking everything at the bottom of the ladder, below the hatch. It wouldn't necessarily stop anyone from getting in if they got that hatch open, but it might slow them down. He was living in a slivered universe now, where any slice of time might mean the difference between life and death.
Now what? he thought.
He had his flashlight, and Vicente's, as well as an ample supply of food, water, and ammunition. By his estimate, he could hold out here for a couple of weeks, if he had to. Maybe more, if he stretched things.
A couple of long, miserable weeks with no idea what the enemy was up to, where his friend was, or whether he'd ever see daylight again.
It was a classic Tomb scenario.
Back in his college days, Kotler hadn't had much time for play. He was pushing himself for multiple PhDs, in two very intensive fields of research. When breaks did come, they usually came in the form of field research—trips to distant lands, with teams of researchers and students, helping to explore some remote site. These were some of his favorite times while pursuing his graduate studies. But they weren't without challenges of their own.
Some challenges, though, were more intellectual than life-threatening.
One of his professors insisted that as they traveled they would play a mind game of his own devising. He called it "Tomb," and the gist was that he would give the students a hypothetical scenario, in which they found themselves trapped in a tomb with apparently no way out, and with a limited supply of food and resources. He would name some random objects—a can opener, a set of car keys, a guitar string, or anything else he could think of—and the students had to think of as many creative ways to use the objects as they could, in the name of survival and escape.
It was all hypothetical, and the professor took great glee in upsetting a student’s carefully constructed plans by introducing sudden threats that were never mentioned previously. A sort of Daemon Ex Machina, as it were. A Demon in the Machine, meant to randomly wreck best-laid plans and add complications to the story.
Kotler detested the professor's penchant for arbitrarily introducing chaos. He was a scientist, after all. Or a scientist in training. And science was about determining and discovering the order of things, wasn't it? Sure, chaos happened. Things could get messy. But the point was to dig deeper and find the why of it. Springing surprises on them just to see them scurry was a little like kicking an anthill, in young Kotler's opinion. Chaos for the glee of it.
When he was older and more experienced, he realized that chaos was, ironically, the default order of everything anyway. The more prepared he was to accept it, the better he could deal with it when it popped up. A lesson hard-learned over time.
Kotler might not be fond of the arbitrary chaos, but he loved the mind game itself. He certainly had no desire to find himself trapped in a tomb with air and time both running out and nothing more than what he'd happened to have brought with him as a resource. But at the same time, the whole notion thrilled him. He was someone who loved to rely on his wits and resourcefulness. He wanted to always be prepared—sort of the Scout's motto as a way of life. So, though he, like the rest of the grad students, found the professor's semi-sadistic game a bit annoying, he was also glad of it, and accepted the challenge of it.
The game was something that stuck with Kotler, more than just about anything he had learned or experienced as part of his graduate training. More than once, since leaving grad school, he'd actually had call to use that resourcefulness in real-life scenarios. That idea—that he should always be thinking of how to use what he had on hand, that his resources were only as limited as his imagination—was a core part of his being.
Maybe it was because of what had happened to his parents.
He stopped himself right there. He always stopped himself, when that particular door started to creak open. Thinking about his parents would only put him in a panic. It would open floodgates of frustration, anger, and regret. It wouldn't help. It would just slow him down.
Kotler eyed the metal rungs, descending into the lower depths of the sub. Somewhere on this boat was something Gail McCarthy would kill to get her hands on. Something that had remained hidden here for decades, if not most of a century.
Whatever it was, Kotler determined then and there that he would make sure she never got her hands on it. He wasn't sure how or even if he could get out of this mess alive, but if he died here, he would make sure, if it was his final act, that Gail McCarthy failed in her own objectives. This was it. The last stand.
He took stock of the resources he had. He armed himself with both the 1911 and with Vicente's weapon. He sorted through his pack, removing what he could and shoving as much food and ammunition as he could, along with anything else that might be useful. He put more resources into Vicente's backpack and carried this by the handle sewn into its top. He grabbed pitons, rope, and pickaxes and clipped these to his pack.
In moments, he felt he had a good balance of useful resources. He could come back later for everything else he was leaving behind, making multiple return trips if necessary. He had a feeling he'd have some time to kill.
He then took the first rung in his hand and swung himself onto the ladder, quickly descending into the guts of the U-boat.
Kotler wasn't an expert on German U-boats, but he knew enough to recognize this one. It was a U-505—a typical German sub that was small and maneuverable and had been quite a pestering threat to Allied naval operations during World War II. Kotler found himself wishing he'd spent more time studying technology from that era because if it came to it, he had no idea how to operate this sub or anything in it. Meaning there were several resources available in this particular tomb scenario that he couldn't even use. He wasn't even sure if he had the terminology down.
He'd have to make do.
As he climbed down the ladder and eventually came to the bottom deck, he found himself in an open space with a curved ceiling. Along one wall was a bank of controls and gauges, and Kotler vaguely remembered that this sectio
n was referred to as the control room—the middle of the boat, with bulkheads on either side and portals leading to the inner workings of the vessel.
As Kotler faced the control room wall and the ladder he’d just descended, he pictured the sub’s layout in his mind. He’d toured one of these, a decade or so ago, on an impromptu field trip. It was something he’d done for fun, along with a date who had been bored out of her mind. He’d been distracted by trying to distract her, as he recalled. But he remembered the tour well enough to have some idea of what to expect here.
To his right would be the radio sound room and beyond that some crew quarters and the galley. Ultimately, in that direction, he'd come to the forward torpedo bay, which also served as additional crew quarters.
To his left, he'd find the engine room, which housed the immense diesel engine that drove and powered this vessel while at sea. Beyond that … well, he couldn't recall precisely what lay beyond that, but it had something to do with the engine, he thought. And, of course, ultimately, he'd come to the aft torpedo room, which again doubled as crew quarters.
That was the extent of his knowledge, but it was comforting to at least remember that much from a tour that had played double duty as a bad date. It allowed him to have a mind map of the space, at least, which would help in his exploration and possibly aid him in unexpected ways later.
Kotler had learned long ago that one Tomb resource he could always have with him was whatever knowledge he could cram into his head. It was part of the reason for his obsessive study, even all these years since graduation.
The only question, then, was “now what?” He was here with no real agenda, beyond survival and surveillance—so what first?
Looking left and right, passing the beam of his flashlight over the bulkheads and doors, he found no clear guidance. It really didn't matter which direction he chose first. To his right, however, he would eventually come to the galley. That had some appeal.
The Antarctic Forgery Page 10