Ice Fortress (A Jack Coulson Thriller)

by Robert B. Williams

  Barnes composed himself. “I sense a ‘but’ coming.”

  “Yes, our operatives were able to destroy the entire Pine Gap communications groundwork, as ordered, but it appears that one aircraft got away before the airfield was targeted.”

  “And the range of this aircraft?”

  “Ah … I see your point, sir,” the Ambassador thumbed through his notes, “it was a mid-air refueling tanker, so it would easily have enough fuel to reach the site, sir.”

  Barnes stared hard at the incompetent man on the screen.

  “But it couldn’t possibly land on the ice-shelf,” the diplomat added, hopefully.

  “It doesn’t have to land, you idiot. I want an assault team at that base and I want them there yesterday. Is that understood?”

  “What about the Russian attack sub? Should we encourage them to send their Naval Spetsnaz squad to secure the objective?”

  Barnes had no desire to use the Russian navy any more than he had to. The Russians had only sent their latest Yasen attack sub after the Americans because The Brotherhood had fed false intelligence to the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service.

  If they were to find out what was really trapped in the ice, the Antarctic would fast turn into a warzone with China, Russia and the Americans entering the fray and competing for the prize. And that, The Brotherhood couldn’t afford. For the moment, it was enough that the Russians believed the Americans were littering the ice shelf with counter intelligence monitoring devices.

  Barnes was reluctant to reveal his hand so early in the operation, but he had no choice with the Russian submarine captain going rogue and firing live torpedoes. The Argentinians hadn’t established a ‘research’ on the edge of Ronne Ice Shelf by pure chance. It had been a strategic base of operations of the Brotherhood for decades. Now the foresight of his predecessors would give them a decisive tactical advantage.

  “No. Send our own men. Issue orders to the team stationed at the Belgrano II base.” Barnes was about to terminate the conference when he was interrupted.

  “Won’t the Argentinians have something to say once it’s discovered that we have used their base to launch an armed assault?”

  “No,” Barnes smiled with deep satisfaction, “The Argentinians will remain silent and compliant, just as they’ve done since 1939. They need us and our gold far more than we need them. They’re not totally stupid. They must have suspected why we were keeping an armed force on the ice and a Hercules LC-130 fueled and ready to fly, even if they didn’t know for sure.”

  “How many men do you want me to send?”

  Barnes smiled. “All of them.”

  J. Clifford Barnes ended the call. The prize The Brotherhood had been searching for, Dr. Kammler’s greatest weapon, his legacy was finally within reach. Very soon, the world would become a very different place and General Kammler will have kept his solemn promise to their Fuhrer.

  Chapter 9

  November 20, 1944

  Gandau Airfield

  Breslau (now known as Wroclaw)

  Poland

  Caged bunker lights cast a dim yellow glow along the length of the tunnel. Boot steps echoed against the walls hewn from solid rock. Hans Kammler had to stoop slightly as he walked the length of the underground shaft to his test chamber. He cursed himself, as he did each time he came here to conduct a test. With a brilliant mind and an inexhaustible slave labor force from the camps, Hans Kammler could build rockets capable of reaching space and huge underground factories to mass produce the world’s first jet fighter plane, the Messerschmitt ME 262. He even had a number of radioactive weapons in various stages of development, ready for his next generation of rockets. Yet he hadn’t been able to oversee the construction of a tunnel through which he could walk without hunching.

  Perhaps the design flaw wasn’t his, he thought, but instead some pathetic attempt at rebellion or a foolish prank by the inmates responsible for chiseling the tunnel through solid rock. It can’t have been coincidence that they had built it just inches lower than the general’s height. Kammler would have punished them for their brazenness, but they were already dead. The testing of the device had seen to that. Which was a problem, not because of the fast rate at which the device annihilated inmates, after all, the camps swelled with test subjects and new arrivals were squeezed into the overcrowded camps each day, but because the device was not designed as a weapon. Word had quickly spread through the nearby camp as thousands of Polish Jews told of the horrors they had witnessed deep underground where the monster they knew as Waffen-SS General Kammler conducted his insidious experiments using the weapon they called The Bell.

  Kammler laughed when he heard the stories about his weapon and the torturous, cruel death it was able to deliver. If they knew what it was really supposed to do, they would have been far more terrified. For the sake of maintaining a cloak of security around his project, he was pleased with the rumors that spread like wildfire. Kammler only wished he could take the credit for such misdirection. Unfortunately, it was his inability to harness the power of the device that resulted in so many accidents. Once he perfected the device, the results would be entirely different.

  Through the foot thick glass window, the eerie blue haze increased in hue as the counter rotating hemispheres of the bell shaped device gained momentum. Half as tall again as Kammler himself, the mass of the object took time to reach operating revolutions and the lights in the bunker dimmed noticeably as the power from the generators was diverted to the experimental chamber.

  A rail thin man with hollow cheeks was manacled to an iron ring embedded in the concrete floor beside the spinning device. He wore only his filthy, threadbare prison clothes. Despite the bluish reflection from the aura of the device, his eyes were haunted with fear. Behind the protective glass, Kammler wore a heavy lead lined apron and dark goggles. He looked more like a demonic blacksmith than an engineer as he watched the light begin to reach its peak, the high pitched whine of the machine penetrating the three feet of concrete wall separating him from the test chamber.

  “Revolutions?” he asked a bespectacled prisoner at his side.

  The prisoner, a physics professor a lifetime ago, wiped the sweat from his face with the sleeve of his filthy prison uniform before glancing at the panel of instruments before him.

  “One thousand, five hundred per minute, general.” The professor kept his eyes affixed to the instruments. Better that than seeing what was happening inside the chamber, of that he was sure.

  If the latest consignment of Xerum 525 was as well refined as Kammler had been assured, at two thousand revolutions per minute the transfer rate of electrons through the spinning plates inside the machine would increase to the point that a nuclear fusion reaction would finally be achieved.

  “Two thousand, general.” The professor didn’t wait to be asked this time, all the while his eyes remained glued to the instrument panel.

  Kammler couldn’t resist a better view and pushed the dark goggles to his forehead and peered through the thick glass into the chamber. A shimmering blue haze blurred the image of the terrified man whose hands bled as sheets of skin peeled away from them as he tore frantically at his chains. In an instant the man vanished altogether and Kammler leaned closer still to the glass, his senses heightened in anticipation. Then just as suddenly, a bright red, jelly like mucus was slammed against the glass with a savage velocity. Both men could swear they heard the impact, which of course was impossible given the thickness of the radiation proof glass.

  “Shut it down,” ordered Kammler. “We will try again this afternoon. Next time increase the Xerum 525 volume in the central chamber by twenty five percent.”

  Throwing his apron and goggles onto a nearby bench, Kammler turned on his polished boots and made his way to the door. Without turning, he called over his shoulder, “And clean up that mess before this afternoon.”

  Unfortunately for the professor, the general wasn’t talking about his abandoned protective clothing. Through sq
uinted eyes he risked a glance at the red sludge on the glass. If his stomach wasn’t empty after three days without food, he would have vomited on the spot.

  Chapter 10

  November 9, 2017, 01:00 UTC

  Ronne Ice Shelf (Antarctica)

  77° 51' 19.79" S 61° 17' 34.20" W

  USS Barracuda

  Depth 1500 feet

  “Son-of-a-bitch.” Juan Alvarez hadn’t shoveled a pretzel into his mouth for over an hour. His fingers were too busy blurring across his keyboard to waste time dealing with low priority tasks like stuffing his face.

  “What have you got Juan?” asked Leah who was massaging her temples and beginning to wonder when she had last slept. When any of them had last slept.

  A faint snore came from Dave Sutton’s workstation. The man could sleep anywhere, through anything.

  “No idea, but I’ve now got a much more detailed 3D image to work with if Dave wants to join the land of the living, again and take a look.” Juan hurled a pretzel at Dave, hitting him square in the face.

  “I wasn’t asleep. I was … um … visualizing the last sonar scans,” he protested.

  “I’m not going to say anything,” said Juan with an earnestness that surprised both Leah and Dave. He continued, “I want you to look at these renderings and tell me what you conclude for yourselves.”

  Their interest stirred, both leaned into the console and digested the images Juan had been working on from the sonar data uploaded before they lost contact with Nellie.

  Leah was the first to voice her opinion. “I’m going to say aloud what I was too afraid to say before. This structure isn’t natural, at least not in its present configuration. It’s man-made but it can’t be because it’s beyond a scale that’s even possible, at least in this hostile environment.”

  “I agree,” were the only words Dave could find as he studied the images, mouth agape.

  “With which part?” asked Leah.

  “All of it.”

  “I have one word that covers all of that and explains this weird cigar shaped object over here.” Juan’s finger stabbed at the section of the image containing the mystery object that seemed to cause the captain enough concern that he’d been quietly studying charts on his computer ever since.

  With eyes ablaze with expectation, Leah and Dave stared at Juan, willing him to continue.

  “Are you ready for it?” asked Juan, drawing the moment out.

  “If you even think of making a drumroll sound, I’ll slap you,” warned Leah.

  Instead, Juan mimed a drum roll with imaginary drumstick in his hands.

  “One word — Extraterrestrial!”

  Dave and Leah slumped visibly with disappointment and looked at each other as they rolled their eyes. How many times had Juan shared his UFO conspiracy theories with them during long nights at sea?

  “I’ll see your UFO, Juan,” said the captain with a tone that suggested he was serious, “and raise you.”

  “Raise what?” asked Leah, looking from the captain to Juan. It was clear that Juan had no idea what the captain was talking about, either.

  “I’ll raise you one Type XXI Elektroboat.” The captain folded his arms.

  “You’re not bluffing, are you?” Dave was making a statement, not asking a question.

  Leah shook her head and her perky blonde ponytail swayed from side to side. “Does anyone want to tell me what an Elekro … thingy is?”

  Juan took the bait, “He’s saying … we’ve found a World War II German submarine. A fricking Nazi U-Boat.”

  There was a stunned silence as they digested what the captain was proposing.

  “How do we know for sure it’s not a UFO?” Juan looked to Dave for support, “it still could be, right?”

  Dave shrugged noncommittally. He’d never found either one before, so he wasn’t willing to stake his reputation by making a call.

  “Look at the shape,” Jameson indicated to the long, smooth artifact on the screen, before continuing, “if it was meant to fly, it would be a lot more aerodynamic and we’d see some evidence of control surfaces. There are none, it’s sleek and streamlined, like it was designed to glide through water with minimal resistance. It’s a submarine, not a spacecraft and a very old one at that. The shape dates it to the Second World War and the dimensions are right on the money for a Type XXI U-Boat. I’d bet the farm on it.”

  Leah drew a circle with her finger around the enormous void they’d found in the ice mountain, “This entire area is shaped like a giant ice cream cone. You can see the concentric striations, as if it were carved from the ice with a melon scoop, starting at the base, where the sea water enters through a tunnel in the ice, forming some kind of lake within the structure.”

  She paused to see if they were following her. She took their silence as a cue to continue.

  “Down here … and here,” she indicated two impressions in the graphic, “appear to be quite significant horizontal channels or tunnels bored through the ice linking this ‘lake’ with the open sea below the ice cap.”

  “Where are you going with this, Dr. Anderson? I’m not sure I follow.” Captain Jameson looked Leah in the eyes, confusion on his face.

  “Ocean here,” she stabbed at the monitor, earning a look of disdain from Juan. “Tunnel here.” She stabbed again. “Apparently a man-made lake, here.” She stabbed once more making the monitor shudder from the impact.

  They still didn’t get it.

  Leah let out a long sigh. “If this is a submarine, then how in the hell did it end up way over here, embedded in an ice mountain that’s been frozen above the water line for over a hundred thousand years?”

  The silence was absolute.

  Chapter 11

  November 9, 2017, 01:00 UTC

  Ronne Ice Shelf (Antarctica)

  -77° 51' 19.79" S 61° 17' 34.20" W

  Jack and Sam used harnesses and straps to haul the surviving pallet of equipment over the rough, wind torn ice to the protruding conning tower of the submarine. The bizarre nature of their mission and the fact that a World War II submarine should be embedded in the ice in the middle of an ice pack at the bottom of the world was not lost on either of the two men. However, in that moment, they were too busy trying to make survival plans to think too much about it. Incessant winds pinged snow and ice off their goggles and stung their exposed faces as they battled the elements, seeking shelter from the lee side of the submarine sail.

  Exhausted and sweating profusely, despite the -50 degree temperature and the life threatening wind chill, both men dropped the haul straps and collapsed onto the hardened ice once they were out of direct line of the pummeling wind.

  Shouting over the howling squall, Jack instructed Sam, “You see what needs to be done to access the sub and I’ll start an inventory of what weapons and survival gear we still have.”

  “And food,” Sam added.

  “You’ll be a frozen, wind chilled icicle long before you starve to death,” Jack assured him.

  Sam looked to the sky but all he could see was a swirl of ice and snow, limiting visibility to no more than a few yards.

  “What time does it get dark?” he asked, pointing overhead to where he thought the sun would be through the clouds and snow.

  Jack ripped apart the Velcro on his expedition jacket sleeve and made a show of looking at his watch.

  “Sunset will be around … March. So you’d better get moving while I sort through the equipment you didn’t manage to drop down the ice hole.” He slapped Sam on the back and proceeded to release the ratchets on the tie downs securing their gear to the pallet.

  Shaking his head, unsure if Jack was yanking his chain or not, Sam trudged across the slippery ice and stopped at the base of the conning tower to marvel at its pristine condition. He had no idea that the frozen wasteland in which he now found himself preserved old boats so well. Still carrying his pack, Sam climbed the ice encrusted rugs hand-over-hand ensuring he always had a firm grip in case he lost his footing. He’
d been around ships and subs long enough for that kind of caution to be second nature. They were in an environment where even a short fall from a ladder could get you killed.

  Peeling back the tarps covering the equipment, Jack stole a glance at the conning tower, also. He’d seen a lot of high altitude helicopters wrecks in the Himalayas and quite a few ice bound ships in the Arctic during his time in the service, but he’d never seen anything in the condition of the conning tower trapped in the ice before him, like a giant fossil frozen in both ice and time. With the wind picking up there was no time to ponder the many mysteries of the Polar Regions. The mission and their very survival depended on the equipment that Sam hadn’t managed to lose to the frigid depths.

  Reaching the top of the conning tower, Sam looked back down at Jack. The guy was really starting to get on his nerves and his comment about losing the equipment in the ice hole didn’t sit well with the career navy man who took great pride in his work and didn’t take criticism of his professionalism well.

  “Ice hole,” Sam grumbled, “I know who the ice hole is on this mission, buddy.”

  No sooner were the words out of his mouth when he heard the distinctive pinging of live rounds against steel. Looking down at the ice shelf, he could see row after row of bullets strafing the ice, making a direct line to Jack’s position, some of them ricocheting off the base of the tower. With his hood covering his ears and the roar of the wind, Sam knew that Jack couldn’t hear the barrage of fire closing in on him. Sparks flew from around the conning tower ladder as rounds found a new target, perched high up and vulnerable.

  Descending the ladder into the field of fire would be suicidal, so Sam continued up the ladder and dropped himself over the top and into the relative safety of the heavily armored conning tower. Just in time too as the ladder he had been standing on erupted in a hail of gunfire. Sam was getting a little tired of dodging death. He’d had enough of that for one day. Maybe even an entire lifetime.