Shining a light into the pipe, he could see he needed more. He looked around him, considered what he might find back on the snowmobile and then made a quick decision.
Pulling off his oversized Canadian hat, he reluctantly stuffed it into the tube. After packing it down, he slotted the other explosives into the barrel, one on top of the other.
In the distance he could hear Gamay trading fire with the men in the trench. He hoped he was about to give them a big surprise. With the detonator in hand, he crawled to a safe distance, dropped flat to the snow and selected 1 on the detonator.
Covering his head, he pressed the button. A hollow boom sounded, and the pipe itself blew apart, with fragments flying in all directions.
In the flash of light, Paul saw the charges being hurtled through the air. He watched with great pride as they flew toward their adversaries, landed and skidded through the snow in the general direction of the trench.
Seeing this, Paul switched the detonator to 2 and pressed the button again. Three explosions went off in rapid order. One in front of the trench, one behind the trench and the third from inside it.
Fire, snow and smoke blasted upward in a long, straight line. The walls of the trench were blasted outward before collapsing in. The detonation seemed to calm the wind for a second. By the time it returned, Gamay was up and running, charging toward the target like a soldier storming the beach.
Paul followed the best he could. When he arrived, Gamay had taken the trench without firing a shot.
There were three men in the trench. Two of them appeared dead. The third was bleeding and burned in places. He raised his hands before lapsing into shock and losing consciousness.
Gamay took their guns just in case.
“Well, we’ve secured the area,” Paul said. “Now what?”
Gamay shone a light toward the end of the trench. A heavy steel door stood there. It resembled a watertight hatch on a ship. “Now we find out if we have enough explosives left to get through that.”
52
When Joe had recovered enough from his time under the snow, he and Kurt backtracked to the snowmobile. They dug it out and righted it. The machine was damaged, but still operational, and the hardy electric motors sprang to life the instant Kurt twisted the accelerator on the bent handlebar.
While the motor was fine, the battery pack was not. It registered twenty percent and the icon on the dash was flashing yellow.
“Let’s go find Paul and Gamay,” Joe said. “Before we end up walking.”
“One stop first.”
Kurt eased the machine down the slope, conserving power and allowing gravity to do most of the work. They slid to a stop several feet from where the snowcat had come to rest. The last surviving light was growing dim, but it still cast an amber circle across a few feet of the snow.
Kurt got off and walked toward it. He found Yvonne stuck in the snow, buried up to her chin. Her face was frozen white, covered in frost.
Joe came up beside him. “She might still be alive. Should we dig her out?”
Kurt glanced at his watch. They’d lost too much time already. “Leave her,” he said, turning back toward the snowmobile.
“But Kurt . . .”
“She killed half a dozen crewmen on the Grishka,” Kurt said. “Shot them in their sleep. This is a better end than she deserves.”
Joe didn’t argue the point. He climbed back on the snowmobile and grabbed the handholds as Kurt twisted the throttle. They drove around the buried snowcat and down toward the glacier.
* * *
—
Three . . . two . . . one . . .”
As Paul and Gamay crouched fifty yards away from the steel door, Paul pressed the button on the detonator. They’d decided the best plan was to use a pair of the charges on the door and save the second pair for the turbine once they got inside.
The detonation sent a column of fire upward and back, blasting a ten-foot crater in the snow around the door. When the smoke cleared, the door, blackened and dented but unbroken, still stood.
“Well, that didn’t work,” Paul said.
They examined the blast’s pattern and discovered the problem. While the door had been singed and bent in slightly, the force of the blast had merely rebounded, surged outward, making the V-shaped crater and sending a fireball down it.
“We’re going to need something heavy to direct the explosion into the door,” Paul said.
“If we use these last explosives, we might not be able to destroy the turbine once we get inside,” Gamay replied.
“We won’t be able to do anything if we don’t get in there,” Paul countered.
“Maybe we could knock the door down with our snowmobile,” she said. “This trench makes for a perfect alleyway.”
Paul nodded. “Worth a shot.”
Gamay climbed on the machine while Paul packed the snow down in front of the door and then limped out of the way. She backed the snowmobile down into the trench, using the slope created by the initial mortar explosion.
Once she was inside the trench, she lined the snowmobile up and started her run.
Moving slow at first, she opened the throttle wide and secured it in place with the thumb lock. As the machine sped up, Gamay slipped off the back and slid in the snow, covering her head until she came to a stop.
She looked up in time to see the snowmobile careening down the trench. It sideswiped one wall, bounced off the other side and straightened up just before slamming into the steel door.
The fiberglass nose of the snowmobile shattered. The door on the receiving end of the blow buckled and flew off its hinges. The machine came to a stop on its side with the tracks still spinning. The door lay on the ground a few feet away.
Standing up, Gamay stared proudly at the destruction. “That was oddly satisfying,” she said, rubbing her shoulder, which had taken the brunt of her landing.
“I’ll be sure to enter you in a demolition derby,” Paul replied.
As the two of them admired their work, they kept their eyes on the door, which was lit up brightly by the lights on the front of their jackets.
What they didn’t see was the injured member of Yvonne’s tactical team stirring. He’d been knocked out cold by the original explosion and felt like a rag doll when Paul and Gamay laid him in the snow beside his comrades. Burns on his face and blood oozing from several shrapnel wounds had made them think he’d been killed by the blast, but he wasn’t dead and had now regained consciousness.
He saw the door cave in. He heard the two of them talking. And despite the ringing in his ears and a general state of confusion, he knew what he had to do.
He stood awkwardly and began walking toward them. He pulled a hunting knife from the sheath in his boot, gripped it tightly, testing and retesting the strength of his hand as he got closer. With his anger fueling him, he charged forward.
Gamay heard the footsteps coming and turned to see the man racing toward them. “Paul.”
The man crashed into both of them, sending her tumbling into the trench and taking Paul to the ground.
Gamay watched in horror as the attacker straddled Paul, raising the knife above his head for the kill shot.
Just as the man’s arm reached its maximum extension, his back arched suddenly and the point of a spear burst from his chest. His mouth opened but no sound came forth, only blood. He toppled over onto his side, dropped the knife and lay in the snow not moving.
Gamay ran to Paul as a snowmobile slid to a stop beside them. Kurt was at the controls. Joe had thrown the spear from the spot behind him.
Paul squirmed out from under the dead man, pushing and sliding backward. “Never thought I’d be happy to see someone harpooned.”
Gamay checked the man with the spear poking through his chest. He was definitely dead now.
Stepping away from him, she turned
to Kurt and Joe. “We thought we’d lost you. We heard the avalanche.”
“You almost lost me,” Joe said. “Kurt took his sweet time digging me out. I think he even stopped for a coffee break halfway through.”
Kurt laughed and explained the search and rescue effort. Then he explained why they’d created the avalanche and what happened after.
“Are Yvonne and her people gone?” Gamay asked.
“Yvonne is buried and frozen,” Kurt said. “But something else was unearthed, or perhaps uncovered would be a better choice of words.”
“And what might that be?” Gamay asked suspiciously.
“The Dornier flying boat that Captain Jurgenson crash-landed. It was up there on the ridge. When Joe set off the explosives, the avalanche cleared eighty years of snow, revealing the plane’s last resting place.”
“And the spear?” Paul asked.
“It’s one of the Nazi markers from the expedition,” Joe replied. “We found several of them lying around back there.”
“That’s amazing,” Gamay said.
Kurt agreed. “Assuming we can put a stop to all of this, it might be fun to come back and excavate the old aircraft.”
“As long as we come in the summer,” Gamay said.
“Then let’s make sure there’s going to be a summer,” Kurt replied. “What’s the story here?”
Gamay explained how they’d fought their way to the front door and had finally smashed it in. “We were about to go inside. Care to join us?”
Kurt grinned. Right on time. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
53
With weapons drawn, Kurt, Joe and Gamay entered the bunker. The roof, walls and floor were plated with steel. The walls sloped inward at the top, a design that helped support the weight of the ice and snow above it.
While the three of them moved inside, Paul remained on guard near the entrance where he could be warmed by the heat escaping the station.
As soon as they were out of earshot, Kurt turned to Gamay. “How bad is Paul’s leg?”
“Worse than he’s letting on,” Gamay said. “But the bleeding has mostly stopped.”
Paul would need help soon. The loss of blood would magnify the effects of the cold. His body would struggle to compensate. Falling into shock was a distinct possibility.
“As soon as this is done, we’ll break into the habitat,” Kurt said. “We can shelter there, wait out the storm and dig around for medical supplies.”
Gamay nodded. “Do you think we’ll face any more resistance?”
Kurt shook his head. “No one bothered Joe and me after we got out of the snow. No one showed up to rescue Yvonne. If there’s any resistance left, we’re going to find it in here.”
“Or more likely,” Joe said, “down there.”
They’d come to a gap in the metal floor. It was a portal to a vertical shaft that dropped straight down.
While the bunker was steel, the shaft had been carved, or more likely melted, from the solid ice of the glacier. The walls were smooth and the hole was almost fifteen feet in diameter. A sturdy pair of steel beams stretched across the gap. Several cables hung from a pulley system connected to counterweights and a heavy-duty winch. They dropped down into the darkness, connected to something that could not be clearly seen.
“Lifting cable and counterweights,” Joe said.
“But no elevator,” Gamay said. “There’s never one around when you need it.”
“I think it’s down there,” Kurt said.
“You want to bring it up?” Joe said, pointing to the controls.
“And let them know we’re coming?” Kurt said. “No thanks.”
He swung his weapon over his shoulder and climbed onto the beam, stepping carefully until he reached the central cable.
“You shouldn’t go alone,” Gamay said.
“We only have two explosive charges,” Kurt said. “There’s no sense all of us risking our lives to set them. Besides, I might need the two of you to pull me back up if anything goes wrong.”
Dropping down, he swung his leg out and hooked the cable with his foot. Easing off the beam, he wrapped his hands around the cable and began a controlled slide.
Picking up a little too much speed, he gripped the cable tighter, allowing the friction to bite into his gloves and slow him down. He reached the bottom, touched down almost silently and pulled the MP5 from his shoulder.
Crouching near the wall, he glanced around. The shaft had brought him to the intersection of two tunnels—or galleries, as miners sometimes called them. One went off to the left, but it was narrow and short, and as he shone a light into it he could see the far end. It had either been abandoned early or excavated for some other purpose. He saw tools and gear stored in there, but nothing important.
The other tunnel was far more impressive. Twice as wide and deeper, it had electrical cables running along the wall and was an off color, to a degree. Stepping closer, Kurt found the walls to be translucent to a depth of several inches. He could see metallic mesh hidden inside. Its appearance reminded him of the submersible that had rammed the Grishka.
Touching the walls, he found them to be cold and wet yet oddly granular instead of slick. They were made of ice, but some strange form of ice he’d never seen before. Despite the heat in the complex, he saw little evidence of melting.
He wondered if Ryland and Yvonne had used their algae to shore up the walls or if they’d found some other way to manipulate the formation of ice crystals. Deciding that was something to ponder later, Kurt began exploring this larger tunnel. He could hear and feel a machine-like hum coming from the far end.
He moved cautiously, noticing that the floor led slightly downslope and was marred by parallel grooves where something heavy had been dragged along it.
Kurt hugged the wall and moved deeper. The humming grew more pronounced, a definite high-speed vibration. It had to be the turbine.
The tunnel widened at the far end. An opening yawned directly ahead of Kurt, while on the right he saw a large machine with a circular, convex front. It sat motionless on a pair of Caterpillar tracks. It reminded him of a drilling machine without the bit on the end.
After a cursory exam, he bypassed it and arrived at the opening to a large cavern.
The interior looked like the floor of a power plant or a factory left over from the early days of the Industrial Revolution. Pipes of all sizes crisscrossed the ceiling and floors. A makeshift boiler and steam engine were connected to reduction gears that were linked, in turn, to the turbine system brought in by Tunstall Industries.
The turbine was connected to a pair of large-diameter pipes that entered from one side of the room and pierced the wall on the far side, heading toward the sea. The operation buzzed and hummed like the engine room of a great ship, but Kurt saw no one at the controls.
He took a step forward and saw movement. A man with a shotgun appeared from behind the steam engine. Kurt pulled back as the man fired. The spread of buckshot tore into the wall, showering Kurt with chips of ice.
“I won’t let you stop us,” the man shouted. “Not now.”
Kurt glanced into the room and saw an older man with stevedore arms hiding behind part of the steam engine. He pumped the shotgun and fired again.
Kurt spun backward and pressed himself against the wall. The man seemed to be handy with the shotgun. Even if he hadn’t been, the twelve-gauge wasn’t the type of weapon that required a marksman.
“Yvonne and the others are dead,” Kurt shouted. “You don’t have to die with them.”
The man started laughing. “I was willing to sacrifice myself the moment I got involved. You think I’m going to change my mind now? Trust me, you’re going to be the one who dies here. Not me.”
Kurt dropped to the floor, peeked around the corner and fired back. Sparks flew from the steel frame of the
large piston, but it kept churning. The man stepped behind it, firing blindly around the corner without looking.
Pulling back once more, Kurt considered the dilemma. There was little chance of getting into the room without getting cut down by the shotgun, but, like Paul and Gamay had realized earlier, a stalemate was a win for the other side.
He shrugged off the backpack and pulled out the charges. He wanted to save them for destroying the pumps yet was willing to bet that one, in just the right place, could do the job.
He took out a charge, set it to sequence 1 and armed it. Pressing his back against the wall, he readied himself to throw it. “Sorry, old man,” he said to himself. “I need you out of the way.”
With a swing of his arm, Kurt hurled the twelve-pounder around the corner. It flew in the general direction of the cave’s lone defender.
A pair of shotgun blasts rang out in quick succession, but Kurt was safely back behind the wall. He dropped to one knee and pressed the detonator button.
Nothing happened.
He reset it, double-checked that the selector was turned to sequence 1 and pressed it again.
Still nothing.
“What the . . .”
Kurt risked a glance around the corner and instantly saw the problem. The explosive charge lay on the ground in pieces. The guy had literally shot it out of the air like a clay pigeon.
“Crafty old codger,” he said.
Kurt reached into the pack for the last of the explosives. This one he’d detonate midair, rushing in behind it and using the explosion for cover like a flashbang grenade.
Before he could arm the charge, the machine beside him cranked to life.
“Now it’s my turn,” the man shouted from the cavern beyond.
Spinning around on its tracks, the van-sized machine surged toward Kurt, attempting to crush him against the wall.
Kurt dove out of the way and rolled to the side, but it surged toward him again.
Fast Ice Page 28