Conrad was still in grad school back then. “Ancient history.”
“That’s what I heard,” said Lundstrom. “Something about Soviet MiGs and the Ziggurat at Ur.”
Conrad nodded. Four thousand years ago Ur was the capital of Sumer in the land of Abraham. Today it was buried in the sands of modern-day Iraq. “Something like that.”
“Like what?” Lundstrom seemed genuinely curious. Apparently Conrad’s file didn’t include everything.
“The Iraqis had a nasty habit of building military installations next to archaeological treasures as shields for protection,” Conrad said. “So when U.S. satellites detected two Soviet MiG-21 attack jets next to the ruins of the ancient Ziggurat at Ur, the Pentagon concluded the Iraqis were parking the MiGs there to avoid bombing.”
Lundstrom nodded. “I remember hearing that.”
“Well, they also suspected Hussein himself was holed up inside the ziggurat,” Conrad went on. “So I gave them the targeting information they needed to launch a Maverick missile at the site.”
“A Maverick? That was first-generation bunker buster. You’re shitting me.”
“Only a Maverick could burrow its way beneath the pyramid and destroy it from the inside out and make the explosion look like an Iraqi mishap.”
“So you’d wipe an eternal treasure from the face of the earth just to kill some despot du jour?” Lundstrom actually seemed shocked. “What the hell kind of archaeologist are you?”
“The kind you nice people apparently need,” Conrad said. “So now why don’t you tell me—”
Suddenly a throbbing whine alerted the crew. Lundstrom gripped the controls. The copilot checked his instruments.
The navigator shouted, “Side winds at two-fifty G have shifted around to eighty G!”
“Wind sheer,” said Lundstrom, adjusting the yoke. “Damn, she’s stiff. Looks like we found the jet stream.”
Conrad braced himself against his seat as the plane hit heavy turbulence and the gyros began to wander and go wild.
“Gyro’s tumbling,” called the navigator.
Lundstrom shouted, “Give me a celestial fix.”
The navigator swung to the overhead bubble sextant that protruded out the topside skin of the plane and tried to read their location from the stars. But he shook his head. “Soup’s too thick to extrapolate a reading.”
“Ever heard of GPS?” Conrad shouted over the din.
“Useless with the EMP.”
Electromagnetic pulse? thought Conrad. Those kind of microwaves, generated by small explosions of the nuclear variety, had a tendency to knock out all sophisticated technological gear. That explained why they were flying in such an old crate. What the hell was Yeats doing down there on the ice?
Conrad said, “What about a goddamn Doppler navigation system?”
“Negative.”
“Listen to me, Lundstrom. We have to radio the tower at McMurdo for help. How far away are we?”
“You don’t get it, Conrad,” said Lundstrom. “We’re not landing at McMurdo. Our designated landing site is elsewhere.”
“Wherever ‘elsewhere’ is, we’re not going to make it, Lundstrom,” he said. “You’ve got to change course for McMurdo.”
“Too late,” said Lundstrom. “We passed our point of safe return. We’re committed.”
“Or should be,” said Conrad, “along with Yeats and your whole sorry bunch in Washington.”
The navigator shouted, “Headwinds skyrocketing—a hundred knots! Ground speed dropping fast—a hundred fifty knots!”
The plane’s four engines strained to push against the headwinds. Conrad could feel the resistance in the vibrations in the floor beneath his boots. The turbulence rose through his legs like coils of unbridled energy until his insides seemed to melt. For a dead man he felt very much alive and wanted to stay that way.
“Keep this up and we’ll be flying backward,” he grumbled.
“Headwinds a hundred seventy-five knots,” the navigator shouted. “Two hundred! Two twenty-five!”
Lundstrom paused a moment and apparently considered a new strategy. “Cut and feather numbers one and four.”
“Copy,” said the engineer, shutting down two engines.
“Ground speed still dropping,” said the navigator, sounding desperate. “Fuel’s almost spent.”
Conrad said, “What about an emergency landing on the ice pack?”
“Possible,” said Lundstrom. “But this is a wheeled bird. Not a ski bird.”
“Belly land her!” Conrad shouted.
“Negative,” said Lundstrom. “In that stew downstairs we’d probably cream into the side of a berg.”
Another side wind blast hit them so hard that Conrad thought the plane would tip over on its back and spiral down to the ice. Somehow Lundstrom managed to keep her level.
“You’ve got to do something,” Conrad shouted. “Jettison the cargo!”
“General Yeats would sooner jettison us.”
“Then we have to radio for help.”
“Negative. We have radio blackout. Radio’s useless.”
Conrad didn’t believe him. “Bullshit. This is a black ops mission. There’s no goddamn radio blackout. Yeats just wants to keep this quiet.” Conrad slipped behind the radio and tried to put on a headset. But the shaking made it difficult.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Lundstrom demanded.
Conrad slipped the headset on. “Calling for help.”
Conrad heard a click near his ear. But it wasn’t the headset. It was the sliding of a sidearm receiver. He turned to see Lundstrom pointing a Glock 9 mm automatic pistol at his head. Conrad recognized it as his own, which he was relieved of upon boarding the chopper back in Peru. “Get your ass back in your seat, Doctor Conrad.”
“I’m in my seat.” Conrad flicked on the radio switch. A low hum crackled. “You can’t kill me. You need me, Lundstrom. God knows why, but you do. And you better put my gun away. It’s been known to go off accidentally. If this ride gets any bumpier you might miss my head and put a hole through the windshield.”
Lundstrom looked outside at the raging skies. “Damn you, Conrad.”
Conrad leaned over the radio microphone, aware of the barrel of the pistol wavering behind his head as he adjusted the frequency. “What’s our call sign and frequency?”
Lundstrom hesitated. Then a huge jolt almost ejected him out of his seat. Lundstrom lowered the pistol as the turbulence rocked the cockpit. “We’re six-nine-six, Conrad,” Lundstrom shouted, reaching over to adjust the frequency.
Conrad clicked on the radio microphone. “This is six-nine-sixer. Requesting emergency assistance.”
There was no response.
“This is six-nine-sixer,” Conrad repeated. “Requesting emergency assistance.”
Again, no response.
“Look!” shouted the navigator. “Ice Base Orion.”
“Ice Base Orion?” Conrad repeated.
The mist parted for a moment, opening a window onto the wasteland below. A panorama of mountains poked up out of the ice, filling the entire horizon as far as Conrad could see. The flanks of jagged peaks dribbled whipped-cream snow into the bottom of a great valley marked by a black crescent-shaped crack in the ice. Perched on the concave side of the crack was a human settlement of domes, sheds, and towers. Conrad saw it flash by before they were swallowed up by the mist again.
“This is it?” Conrad asked.
Lundstrom nodded. “If only we can find the strip.”
“The strip?” asked Conrad when a thunderous bolt of turbulence almost knocked him out of his chair. If he hadn’t strapped himself in, he realized, his head would now be part of the instrument panel.
“The runway,” Lundstrom explained. “Bulldozed out of the ice.”
“We’re making a white-on-white approach?” Conrad stared at the swirling snow outside the flight deck windshield. Strobe lights and boundary flares were useless against the glare of a whiteout. With the sky overcast, ther
e were no shadows and no horizons. And flying over a uniformly white surface makes it impossible to judge height or distance. Even birds crash into the snow. “You guys are borderline lunatic.”
The radio crackled.
“Six-nine-sixer, this is Tower.” A gruff, monotone voice came in. “Repeat. This is Tower calling six-nine-sixer.”
“This is six-nine-sixer,” said Lundstrom, grabbing the microphone. “Go ahead, Tower.”
The controller on the other end said, “Winds fifteen cross and gusting to forty knots, visibility zero-zero.”
Conrad could tell Lundstrom was doing the math, wondering whether to go for it or go into holding and pray for a miracle.
“Winds shifting to dead cross, gusting to sixty knots, sir,” shouted the navigator.
Conrad grabbed the microphone back. “Trying to land this tin crate on a giant ice cube is suicide and you know it.”
“Search-and-rescue teams standing by,” the controller said. “Over.”
Conrad looked hard into the mist as Lundstrom brought them in. Visibility was nil in the fog and blowing snow. Suddenly the curtain parted again and a row of black steel drums appeared on approach dead ahead. The strip itself was marked in Day-Glo signboards.
“We’re coming in too low,” he said.
“Commence letdown,” Lundstrom ordered.
The copilot gently throttled back, working to keep the props in sync.
The radio popped. “Begin your final descent at the word ‘now,’” the controller instructed.
“Copy.”
“You are right on the glide slope.”
“Copy,” said Lundstrom when a nerve-wracking dip shook the plane from front to back. Conrad tightened the straps of his seat harness and held his breath.
“You are now below the glide slope,” the controller warned. “Decrease your rate of descent and steer two degrees left.”
“Copy.” Lundstrom gently tugged the steering column and Conrad could feel the C-130 level off.
“You are now back on the glide slope,” the controller said. “Coming right down the pike at two miles to touchdown…”
Conrad could still see nothing out the windshield but a white wall.
“…right on at one mile to touchdown…
“…right on at one-half mile…
“…one-quarter mile…
“…touchdown.”
Conrad and Lundstrom stared at each other. They were still floating.
“Tower?” repeated Lundstrom.
An eternity of silence followed, then a slamming crunch. The commandos toppled like dominos over one another and then dangled weightlessly from their weblike seats. The tie-downs in the rear snapped apart and the cargo shifted forward.
Conrad heard the crack and looked back to see several metal containers fly through the main cabin toward the cockpit. He ducked as something whizzed past his ear and struck Lundstrom in the head, driving the pilot’s skull into the controls.
Conrad reached for the steering column just as the ice pack smashed through the windshield and everything collapsed into darkness.
6
DISCOVERY PLUS TWENTY-THREE DAYS, SEVEN HOURS
IT WAS THE BLEEPING SOUND of the C-130’s homing beacon that finally brought Conrad back to consciousness. He blinked his eyes open to a flurry of snow. Slowly the picture came into focus. Through the broken fuselage he could see pieces of the transport scattered across the ice sheet.
He glanced at Lundstrom. The pilot’s eyes were frozen open in terror, his mouth gaping in a fixed scream. Then Conrad saw a metal shard protruding from Lundstrom’s skull. He must have died on impact.
Conrad swallowed hard and gasped for breath. The Antarctic air seemed to rush inside and freeze his lungs. He felt punchy, light-headed. This is no good, he told himself, no good at all. His internal, core temperature was dropping. Hypothermia was setting in. Soon he’d lose consciousness and his heart would stop unless he took action.
He fumbled for his seat buckle, but his fingers wouldn’t move. He glanced down. His right hand was frozen to the seat. His fingertips were white with frostbite. He knew that meant the blood vessels had contracted and the tissue was slowly dying.
Conrad surveyed the cockpit, trying not to panic. Using his numb but gloved left hand, he grasped a thermos from behind Lundstrom’s corpse. He worked it until the top popped open. Then he poured the hot coffee over his right hand, watching a cloud of steam rise over his sizzling hand as he peeled it away from the chair. He looked at his seared palm. It was bloody red and blistered, but he was too numb with cold to feel any pain.
He dragged himself over to the copilot and put an ear to his lips. He was breathing, just barely. So was the navigator. Conrad could hear a few low groans from the commandos in back.
Conrad reached for the transmitter. “This is six-nine-sixer,” Conrad said breathlessly, leaning over the microphone. “Requesting emergency assistance.”
There was no answer. He adjusted the frequency.
“This is six-nine-sixer, you bastards,” he repeated.
But no matter which frequency he dialed, he was unable to break through. After several minutes of empty hissing, the transmitter finally went dead.
Nobody could hear him, he realized.
Conrad worked his way through the cockpit debris, searching for a backup radio. But he couldn’t find one. Surely they had to have a beacon, an EPIRB signal at the least. But perhaps Lundstrom and his team didn’t want to be found in a case like this.
The only thing he discovered was a single flare, and that from his own pack. A lot of good it would do him.
What a sorry way to die, he thought, staring at the flare in his gloved fist. You survive an airplane crash only to turn into a Popsicle. God, how he hated the cold. It was all he ever knew as a child, and to die in the snow was the last way he wanted to go. It would signify he had not traveled as far from home as he once dreamed. And he would never reconcile with his father.
How’s that for irony? he thought as he scanned the temperature reading on his multisensor watch. The digital thermometer displayed −25° F. Then he took a closer look and realized he had missed a digit. −125° F.
Conrad slumped to the floor with the rest of the crew, his eyelids starting to get heavy. He fought to stay awake, but it was a losing battle, and he had begun to drift off into unconsciousness when suddenly the plane started to shake and he thought he heard a dog barking.
He opened his eyes, dragged himself over to his backpack on the floor, and managed to sling it over his shoulder. He then fumbled for his flare, his fingers working slowly, slid down through a hole in the fuselage, and fell onto the ice.
The thud sharpened his senses.
Conrad staggered to his feet and looked across the barren ice. But there was nothing to see. If anything, the snow was coming down even harder. Then, out of the mist, a huge tractorlike vehicle appeared.
It looked like one of those big Swedish Hagglunds. Its two fiberglass cabs were linked together and ran on rubber treads that left wide waffle tracks in the snow.
Conrad quickly broke his flare and started waving his hands. His arms felt heavy and he couldn’t feel the flare in his fist.
The Hagglunds plowed to a stop in front of him. The forward cabin door opened. A white Alaskan husky jumped out and ran past Conrad to the wreckage. Conrad heard clanking and saw the white boots of a large figure emerge from the Hagglunds and descend the rungs of the small ladder to the ice pack.
Conrad could tell from the towering frame and crisp, spare movements that it was his father. Stiff in a white freezer suit with charcoal under his goggles to block the snow glare, Yeats marched toward him, his powerful strides crunching deeply into the snow.
“You broke my radio blackout orders, son.” Yeats stood there like a statue, snow flying all around him. “You blew our twenty.”
“It’s good to see you, too, Dad.”
Yeats took the flare from Conrad’s hand, dropped it into th
e snow, and ground it under his boot. “You’ve attracted enough attention.”
A geyser of anger suddenly erupted inside Conrad. Anger at Yeats and at himself for letting his father reach out across time and pull him back into this personal frozen hell.
“Lundstrom’s dead along with half your men.” Conrad gestured with his frostbitten hand toward the plane.
Yeats spoke into his radio. “S-and-R teams,” Yeats barked. “See what you can salvage from the cargo hold before the storm buries us alive.”
Conrad glanced back at the wreckage and men, which would soon be forgotten under the merciless snow. Then the husky trotted out with a wristwatch in his mouth. Its face was smeared with frozen blood. Conrad felt the husky brush past his leg and looked on as it ran for the Hagglunds.
“Nimrod!” Yeats called out after the dog. But the husky was already scratching at the door of the forward cab.
“Nimrod’s the only one here with half a brain.” Conrad marched toward the Hagglunds. But when he reached the forward cab and grasped the door handle, Yeats blocked it with a stiff arm.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Yeats demanded.
Conrad cracked open the icy cab door, letting Nimrod jump into the warm cab first. “Don’t piss in your pants, Dad. In this cold, something might fall off.”
Conrad glanced at his bandaged hand as he followed Yeats down an insulated corridor inside the mysterious Ice Base Orion. A medic in the infirmary had dressed the hand as best he could. But now that it was thawing, it hurt like the living daylights.
Classical music was piped in through hidden speakers. Only the thin polystyrene walls separated them from the furious storm raging outside. Eight inches and what sounded like the faint strains of Symphony No. 25 in G Minor.
“Mozart,” Yeats said. “Some bullshit experiments proved that classical music has a positive effect on the cardiovascular system. A decade from now it will be blues or rap or whatever turns on the geeks.”
They passed through another air lock into a new module and Conrad felt a weird sensation of vertigo. The upper half of the module looked exactly like the bottom half. And the ceiling area was packed with instrument panels, circuit breakers, temperature dials, and dosimeter gauges. The panel clocks, like Yeats’s wristwatch, were set on central time—Houston.
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