Ice Station Death

by Gustavo Bondoni

  Regardless of his play-acting, the base did look desolate, so they headed to the big red cube, the closest structure. Camila knew that wasn’t a building, but a casing housing astronomical instruments. A few steps beyond that, the rest of the buildings huddled together. The ruined hangar was nearest, but they bypassed that one and headed towards the observatory. This was a rectangular building—also red, like all the others—perched on the side of the small hill.

  The door was open—a terrible breach of energy protocol, Camila imagined, although not as critical in summer as it would be in the cold, dark season—so they walked inside, into a short, dim hallway.

  “Merry Christmas,” the chopper pilot shouted. “Special delivery from the mainland. Who’s up for some chocolate?”

  No one answered.

  “Oh, God, not again,” Javier said. He tried to make it sound like a joke, but it was clear from his face that he was truly worried.

  They advanced to the end of the hall, where the door to an office stood open.

  “What happened here?” Camila said. The room looked like it had been savaged by a tornado. Pages torn from spiral-bound notebooks carpeted the floor. A shattered coffee cup lay on a brown-stained comforter. Three chairs lay on their sides.

  “Is this blood?” Ernesto asked. He was pointing to a rust colored mark on the floor where some viscous liquid had dried on the carpeted floor.

  The pilot looked down at it and shrugged. “If it is, someone is in bad shape. Maybe everyone’s in the infirmary. That would explain why no one was there to meet us.”

  The infirmary was located inside one of the other rectangular buildings, directly up the hill from the observatory and next to the living quarters. They turned the corner and approached the door, the whole group moving together. It made for uncomfortable going in the snow, but suddenly no one wanted to be left behind or get separated. Nine of them—Javier, the scientists and the pilot—made their way slowly.

  Javier, leading the way, stopped dead in his tracks.

  The door, a solid wooden affair, had been torn off its hinges and lay splintered on the ground halfway down the hall.

  Javier rushed inside and looked around. It was clear that this place was built on a different plan: there was a small room just inside the doorway, and the door in the far wall of that one led into a much larger chamber. Camila saw beds in the second room.

  It was an infirmary, but where the Irizar boasted high-tech beds with automated movement and perfect ergonomic adjustments, the six beds in this room were made of pipes welded together and painted military green. No luxury or high-tech medicine, just a comfortable place to recover from minor injuries.

  Or it would have been had it not, like the door, been trashed. One bed lay on its side, most of the rest had been pushed out of any semblance of order. Mattresses and sheets were torn to ribbons; one mattress had actually been torn in half, foam rubber splaying out.

  And this time there was no doubt whatsoever: the dark red stains on every surface, absorbed indelibly into all the fabric could only be blood. Camila got the impression that she was looking at the site of a massacre.

  Martin, one of the students, took one look at the stained sheets and ran out of the building. Sounds of retching followed the rest of the group as they went deeper.

  The next space was the operating room. This, too, resembled something straight out of the nineteen fifties. Whatever the cost of having a presence in Antarctica, the Argentine government had evidently defrayed it partially by not updating the medical center… ever.

  Camila felt fury rising again. She knew that only units with a high concentration of officers or places that appeared on the news frequently had access to decent health care. No one worried about the common soldiers from the base of society’s pyramid.

  In the operating room, it was hard to tell whether the blood had come from some violent action or whether it was the product of an operation. The red splashes were concentrated around the operating table. Blue sheets were stained and tousled, but only a few drops had made it to the floor.

  Javier quickly checked the room and pronounced it clear. He turned back to them: “Let’s get back outside. I want to check the rest of the buildings quickly and return to the Irizar. I’d like to come back with a bunch of marines and some guns.”

  Camila shook her head at his typical male response. Even she could tell that whoever or whatever had done this wasn’t around now. The base felt as if it had been deserted for days if not weeks. She suspected that all of this had happened when they went off the air. There was no need to go charging in like kindergarteners. There was a logical explanation for what had happened here, and the answer would be found by thinking about it, not by playing cowboys and indians. But she doubted the military minds around her would agree.

  Her mind was working at full speed to try to think of who would want to do something like this. She knew of at least two groups who were strongly opposed to a human presence in the virgin wastes of Antarctica, but suspected that neither would have the resources necessary to carry out an attack on a base… but for anyone who did, Belgrano II was probably the ideal candidate: isolated from the rest of the Antarctic community and run by one of the least security-conscious countries with a presence on the continent.

  They huddled together outside.

  “We’ll quickly look over the other buildings and then get back,” Javier said. He turned to the pilot. “Can you restart the chopper?”

  The man nodded. “Yeah, I left the copilot with orders to keep the engine warm. Get back as soon as you can.” He hurried off around the observatory towards the helicopter.

  The other buildings were empty of life as well. The barracks were empty but undamaged. The equipment hangar was perfectly intact, nothing seemed out of place. A pair of technical huts were likewise untouched.

  They left the crushed hangar for last. The doors were locked, but there was no real need to use them because the semi-cylindrical roof had been torn open almost all the way to the ground. They walked in through the torn roof.

  “This was the food storage. Look.”

  Javier was right. Cans, boxes, and even cuts of meat were strewn all over the floor. What had once been crates neatly stacked on pallets now looked like an explosion in a supermarket.

  “This wasn’t done by the wind.” Ernesto pointed to half a cow carcass lying on the ground. Large chunks were missing.

  “That looks like it was bitten.”

  Javier kicked it. “I don’t think so. Something would have had to be fantastically strong to bite into that. It’s frozen solid.”

  “Guys, look at this,” Ingrid said. “I don’t think this was the wind either.” She was pointing at the roof, or what was left of the roof.

  Beside the large hole that exposed the interior of the hangar, three parallel lines had torn through the metal.

  Ernesto studied them critically. “Those look just like the claw marks on the poster for a horror movie,” he said.

  No one contradicted him, and they shuffled their feet in silence.

  At that moment the pilot returned, huffing and red. His service pistol was gripped in one white-knuckled fist. “My copilot’s gone! And the helicopter is trashed.”

  Without thinking, they ran in the direction of the helicopter, slipping and sliding down the slope. The aircraft appeared to be perfectly all right from a distance, but when they got closer, Camila saw that one of the landing struts was bent, and the nose was making contact with the snow.

  The cabin was worse. Instruments had been ripped out of the panel, wiring covered the floor, but the most shocking was the fact that the massive copilot’s seat had been torn out of its mountings. It lay ten meters away from the helicopter. Dark liquid patches covered the chair, and bright red dots adorned the snow around it. The snow itself was churned up… and two long furrows in the pristine white headed in the direction of the sea.

  One of the holes plowed in the snow was sprinkled with blood.


  They stood in silence until something in her subconscious, something she’d been putting off, bubbled to the surface.

  Suddenly, an icy fist grabbed Camila’s heart. “Where’s Martin?”

  Chapter 7

  Breen waited beside the door. The doctor had given him strict orders that Natasha wasn’t to be disturbed until after she’d had her lunch. He had an equally adamant communication from Fort Belvoir telling him that he needed to get the relevant information as soon as possible. They suspected that the Argentines would cut off his access to the Russian woman soon.

  He’d sent a quick message back to his handlers. It was short and to the point:

  What the hell is going on down here?

  He was still awaiting a response, but there were a bunch of questions he’d wanted to add to the initial request, like who was calling the shots. He’d been with Military Intelligence for a good chunk of his career, and the missions he’d been on were usually somewhat related to operations—black or white—happening in the field. This one, on the other hand, smelled like Langley. This was the kind of weird duty that always came up whenever the CIA got involved. The spooks liked nothing more than to pull strings without letting the puppets suspect what might be going on.

  His brief had said that he was supposed to watch out for Russian activity in the extreme south seas, but mainly around Antarctica. Well, the Russians had fallen into his lap in a nearly comical coincidence, but he still had no clue as to the scope of their presence; it was possible that the fishing boat and whatever had been found inside—the Argentines were being coy about it—represented the full extent of the operation. It was also possible that the Russians had built a Bond-villain-like base underneath the Antarctic ice from which they would do dastardly deeds. With the growth of China and the proliferation of threats from the Middle East, no one had been watching Russia as closely as they should have.

  The only specific instruction he’d received was that he was to report any indication of biological or chemical weapons. He’d certainly seen no sign of that so far. All he had was a badly mauled zoologist, so unless the biological weapons program consisted of creating some kind of mutant shark, there was little to report.

  He sighed. He wouldn’t put it past Langley to send him after mutant sharks.

  While he waited for the woman to eat, he stood at a window in an empty room in the clinic and looked out at the ice. The ship was advancing excruciatingly slowly. Every once in a while a sharp crack, reminiscent of a gunshot, would echo over the icy wastes as the solid surface snapped under the onslaught of the sharp prow.

  Suddenly, the ship vibrated like a struck bell. Breen had to catch himself against the wall to keep himself from being pitched to the floor.

  “What the hell was that?” he asked, but there was no one in earshot.

  He ran down out onto the deck and located a staggering Lieutenant who was attempting to run in his direction. “What happened?” he asked in Spanish.

  “I’m going to try to find out now. It sounded like we hit something.”

  “A rock?”

  “There aren’t any rocks down there according to our sonar.”

  The sound came again, louder, if anything. Someone on the bridge must have been listening because the thrumming of the engines, nearly imperceptible, but always there, stopped suddenly. A few moments later, they started up again and Breen felt a small tug… in the opposite direction. The ship was reversing up the channel it had cleared in the ice.

  He followed the officer up the stairs. The captain was telling the sonar operator in no uncertain terms that he wanted to know what the hell they’d hit, and he wanted to know right now. The woman was pale as a sheet. Breen and the other officer stood to one side as she double-checked her readings.

  “I’m sorry sir, there’s nothing showing.”

  The captain snorted in disgust. “Well, we hit something. I want to know what, where and how big it is. Damn this ice. It makes it impossible to see anything.” Then he looked around and saw he had an audience. He chuckled ruefully. “I guess this is what I get for lobbying to take command of an icebreaker.

  “Ah, Hanssen,” he said to the officer who’d climbed up with Breen. “Just the man I needed to see. Please grab a crew and see if we have any damage. We should be all right because the prow is pretty thick, but I want to be damned sure.”

  “Yessir.” The young officer disappeared.

  “And Mr. Breen, don’t worry. We won’t be sinking any time soon, although this might delay us a little. We need to find a way around this invisible barrier.” He made to turn to speak to the poor girl on the sonar, but then something occurred to him. “You can watch from here. It should be pretty interesting… icebreakers usually don’t go backwards for any number of good reasons… but it appears our instruments need space to work.”

  Breen didn’t need to be asked twice. The view was excellent, like looking down from a seven-story building onto a glacier. The ice was dirty grey on the surface, with patches of brilliant white interspersed at intervals, but the broken ice behind them also had bits of blue in it, like the pictures he’d seen of ice in mountain glaciers.

  He’d expected the ice they were ploughing through to be a solid mass, but from here, it was clear that it wasn’t. They were breaking a thin—albeit several feet thick in places—layer on the top of the sea, and there were spots where the water came through in oval puddles. From this high, it was very evident that the ice sheet they were navigating was floating on the sea, not attached to the land.

  As the ship reversed, an open patch of water grew in front of it. Tiny sheets of ice flowed back into the vacated space as Breen watched. He’d always thought that icebreakers tore through thick walls of ice, but now that he thought about it, the thin crust was a much more realistic proposition.

  He could see a female sailor was looking down the railing, over the prow, apparently trying to see whether any damage might have occurred above the water line.

  Breen was turning back to speak to the captain when, out of the corner of his eye, something black about the size of a car darted from the water and made contact with the prow. The entire ship shook and, when Breen looked again, the sailor was gone and the railings were bent.

  “What the fuck?” It came out before he had a chance to think. “Captain, I think you should come over here.”

  “Did you see what hit us?”

  “Yes. Well not in detail, but I saw the movement, and if you look at that railing, you’ll see the effect without my help.”

  The captain rushed over.

  “Holy shit. I wasn’t expecting to be hit by anything above the surface. Do you have any idea of what it might have been?”

  “All I know is that it came out of the water and then it went back in. And it was big.”

  “A submarine?”

  Breen shrugged. “If it was, it had some kind of above-the-surface extension claw which took down one of your crew.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “She was standing right next to the railing. She’s not there now.”

  “Captain,” the woman at the sonar desk said. “I got something, but now it’s gone.”

  “Where was it?”

  “Crossed the bow from left to right and went down. It might have gone under us. No wait, I’ve got a signal coming back up.”

  A huge wave broke impossibly from the open sea between the Irizar and the ice. It was followed by… Breen couldn’t believe his eyes.

  It looked like an alligator’s head. Except it was the size of a minivan. It was perched on an impossibly long and thin neck that shouldn’t have been able to support the head, much less power it from side to side vigorously.

  Then the sound arrived. It was half lion’s roar, half pig’s grunt and all volume, loud even through the hermetically sealed windows. A pair of clawed feet gripped the railings on the deck in the prow. The legs were clearly made for walking on land… but the monstrous feet were webbed.

  The ship ro
cked as the creature tried to pull itself aboard, and then the sway in the other direction as the claws lost purchase and its sheer weight sent it tumbling back into the water.

  “Forward!” the captain shouted. “Pull us forward. Try to crush it!”

  “Crush what?” the man on the throttle asked. Unlike the captain and Breen, he didn’t have a clear view to the front.

  That hesitation proved fatal; just moments after it disappeared under the surface, the creature launched itself back onto the foredeck. The entire ship tilted forward under the weight of the colossus. Breen was certain the nose would sink and send them all to the bottom.

  Then his reflexes, honed in countless hours of training and on more than one informal battlefield, kicked in. He realized the creature’s head was shooting towards the bridge and dove for the stairwell an instant before glass sprayed all over the interior like shrapnel from a mortar. The metal bulkhead buckled and shifted nearly two meters.

  The creature’s snout didn’t make it through the wall, but that made little difference. Huge claws finished tearing out the remains of the wall and then ripped into the bridge. The captain was cut in half.

  From where he stood, Breen had a direct view of the woman at the sonar panel. She’d somehow managed to stay on her seat as the bridge rocked from the blows. Her face changed to shocked horror when the captain flew apart in a spray of blood. She was close enough to get soaked by droplets.

  She looked down at her scarlet uniform, a look of profound incomprehension on her features.

  Then it was Breen’s turn to gasp as the next swipe removed the girl’s head from her shoulders. It arced across the bridge and thudded against the far wall, leaving her body seated at her console as if nothing had happened.

  A couple of heartbeats later, she slumped forward onto her desk, blood from a still-beating heart gushing over the instruments.

  He’d seen enough. Time to go somewhere safer. He rushed down the stairs trying to make as little noise and hoping, against all evidence, that the metal walls down which the stairwell had been built would withstand the onslaught.