Ice Station Death

by Gustavo Bondoni

  The flights flew by until he reached the exterior deck. Breen wasn’t certain why he’d stopped there—the smartest thing to do was probably to bury himself in the deepest part of the ship, surrounded by as much metal as possible, and make the bastard work for it.

  But when he reached the main deck, he heard loud cracks. Was the boat moving through the ice?

  No. Four sailors had found guns somewhere, the ubiquitous FAL rifles that the Argentine military liked so much—and had spent so many resources upgrading and modding over the years—and had begun to shoot at the monstrosity that was now eating the morsels it had been able to pry from the bridge.

  He almost laughed. Infantry rifles against that thing? It was a quarter of the size of the ship. If it had been his call, he would have called in an airstrike, probably using nuclear ordnance, just to be on the safe side.

  But these guys were attacking the thing with assault rifles and actually advancing. He wanted to tell them they were moving in the wrong direction, and that what they really wanted to do was to hide behind the huge beige cube in the middle of the ship.

  Instead, his training took over again and he ran in their direction. “Where can I get a gun?” he asked.

  “Over there.”

  A wooden locker on the deck held FALs and ammunition. He chuckled and pulled one out, surprised to see it came complete with a loaded magazine. The Argentines had fooled him into thinking the ship was lightly defended… he wondered what else was hidden in plain sight.

  He tried to fire a controlled burst, but the gun was one of the fully automatic Argentine versions which was difficult to control—the FAL had always been at the limit of its design capabilities with the 7.62 round, a characteristic that was only made worse by the fully automatic mode. That made no difference, however. The men had a target they would be hard pressed to miss.

  His fears that they wouldn’t even be able to penetrate the lizard’s skin proved unfounded. Blood did spatter, and the thing roared in pain, and standing there firing the kicking gun was one of the most satisfying things he could remember doing… but he still felt the rounds were too small to do any real damage.

  To his surprise, it began to retreat. As the sailors concentrated their fire around its head, the creature began to wave its long arms around as if swatting flies. Eventually, in confusion, it dove back over the side.

  The sailors cheered, but Breen wondered how long the reprieve would last.

  “Do you guys mind if I keep this thing?” he asked them.

  “Be our guest,” the nearest one replied with a nod of thanks for Breen followed by a cold glare at the rest of the ship. “You’ve earned it, unlike everyone else.”

  Breen nodded back. He had a new respect for Argentine sailors… or at least for these four.

  They didn’t even seem surprised that a scientist was able to pick up a random infantry rifle and use it competently. Either they thought everyone in the U.S. was a gun nut… or his cover was blown sky high. He suspected the latter.

  He also suspected there were more important things to worry about.

  ***

  Three minutes later, he was arguing with the doctor.

  “I don’t give a damn what your patient needs,” Breen said and he shouldered past. “We just got attacked by something, and that woman knows what it is, or at least has a much better idea than we do.”

  The doctor spluttered. “I’m going to talk to the captain about this.”

  “Oh yeah? Which half?”

  “What?”

  Breen ignored him. “Go find one of those lieutenants, I assume one of them is in command now. Tell him the captain is dead, the bridge is history and there’s something big after us. Also, tell him to recommend the four sailors who saved our asses for medals. I’ll call you if I need you back.”

  Natasha was sitting in bed, a tray suspended over her legs by a kind of wheeled C-shaped trolley whose bottom half was under the bed and whose top half supported the tray. He’d spent enough time in hospital to be familiar with most of the common equipment. He had little difficulty pulling the tray from under the bed.

  “What happened?” she said. “I heard the noise, felt the ship moving. Did we hit something?”

  He could tell she was scared. More scared than the mere prospect of hitting something should have made her. After all, even if the ship sank, they could walk to the base easily over the ice.

  “I think you know what happened. It was a monster, a big one.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “You do. And you also speak English, probably better than I do. If you don’t tell us what you know, more people are going to die. And this time it will be your fault.”

  “I can’t… they told me…”

  “They’re all gone.” Breen let that sink in. “No one knows you’re here. Hell, no one even knows you’re alive. And if you don’t tell us what we need to know, we won’t be able to save you.”

  “No. My family…”

  “Nothing will happen to them.”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “Of course you do. You’re in a secret intelligence operation pretending to be a Korean fishing boat, except you aren’t Korean, that wasn’t a fishing boat and everyone else disappeared. You obviously know something.” Breen lost his patience. “Did you create that monster?”

  “What? How could you even…”

  Gotcha. “So you do know what it is?”

  Natasha sighed. He was glad she wasn’t a soldier or some kind of fanatic. Those could take days to break. She, on the other hand, appeared to be exactly what his briefing said, a zoologist with no particular national security links…. probably drawn in because of what she knew as opposed to what her politics were. But he had to get her mind back on her own peril and not that of her loved ones. In Russia, worrying about her family would be a perfectly natural response in that situation. The SVR wasn’t above taking their displeasure out on family members. “We don’t know where it came from,” she said in British English tinged with an unmistakable Russian accent. “I mean we know what happened to it, but not where it came from.”

  “Why don’t you start at the very beginning.”

  “Do you think we have time? Will it be back?”

  “Good point. Give me the condensed version. Right now, all I know is that my government is looking for biological weapons that they suspect are hidden somewhere down here, either in Antarctica or in Tierra del Fuego. Maybe southern Chile, but we don’t think so. Pinochet let us go over the whole area with a fine-tooth comb back in the day, and we didn’t find squat.” He paused. “Also, please tell me that thing isn’t the weapon.”

  “You’re looking in the wrong place. You should have sent submarines, not some secret agent guy. The biological weapons are at the bottom of the Bellingshausen Sea.”

  “Then they existed? It was the Sverdlovsk anthrax?”

  She hesitated, but then caved. “Yes.”

  “And the ship carrying it sank?”

  “Yes.”

  “Holy shit. And what happened next?”

  “The government sent ships out to try to find it. Well, not immediately, the eighties and the nineties were a bit of a mess for Russia.”

  “So I heard.”

  “Well, in 2005, the government got paranoid that the Chinese were setting up a presence in Argentina, and that they had somehow gotten wind of the accident. So they sent a small fleet out on maneuvers, with some treasure hunters on board.”

  “Treasure hunters?”

  “You know the type. The ones who have reality shows about how they look for sunken ships carrying Nazi gold and that kind of thing. They already had the equipment we needed.”

  Breen laughed. The Russians were often strapped for cash, but they always found a creative way to get things done. He could only imagine what the Navy would say if they were forced to use reality show stars.

  “So you found the wreck?”

  “They did, yes. But
they found some other things, too.”

  “Other things meaning… like the thing that attacked us?”

  “No… I mean yes. Nothing that big, but they suspected there was something out there.”

  It all clicked. “So that was why they took you along. They needed someone to tell them what those things were…”

  “They already knew what they were. The problem is that each time they went back, the things looked and acted different. The government began to worry that the anthrax strains were affecting them.”

  “Yeah, I’ll say… I don’t recall too many alligators that size from my high school biology classes.”

  “That isn’t an alligator. It never was.”

  “It sure looked like one.”

  “No it didn’t. You probably weren’t paying much attention to it.”

  “I was kind of busy trying not to get killed.”

  “Whatever. The creatures are nothosaurs. Or at least they were before they came into contact with the bio waste.”

  “What the hell is a…” he felt his eyes widen, “a dinosaur?”

  “Not exactly. It is an ancient reptile that coexisted with the dinosaurs, but modern scientists…”

  “I don’t really care about the taxonomy of the thing. Are you telling me we got attacked by a dinosaur as big as this ship?”

  She looked unhappy but nodded. “Close enough.”

  “What the hell is it doing here? Where did it come from?”

  “That’s the beauty of it. They’ve always been here.”

  “The beauty?”

  “You know what I mean. The thing is that this is cold water, and not a lot of people come here. At some point a subspecies of nothosaur adapted to the cold weather, and no one who saw them ever believed their eyes. There were reports about them in the early 1900s, even by British naval officers, but no one really paid them any attention. They were true, though.”

  “And Russia has known about this since…”

  She shrugged. “2005. Or maybe one of the later expeditions. 2007 at the latest.”

  “Oh my God. Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

  “I have no idea. I was recruited for this mission… but I suppose it is because the effects of the bio agents on the creatures were interesting enough that it was worth keeping from other governments.”

  “Interesting? You seem to have a penchant for understatement.”

  “And you have no clue as to what the real problem we’re facing is. You seem concerned about the big creature.”

  “If you’d seen that thing, you’d sure as hell be concerned, too.”

  “But that one can be tracked by radar, and its sheer weight would make it unwieldy on land.”

  “It can go on land?”

  “Of course, nothosaurs are amphibious,” Natasha said as if that was obvious to everyone who wasn’t a zoologist or a paleontologist.

  “Of course.”

  “No, the real problem are the small ones. The ones that can go through doors and get to the people in houses and bunkers. Those are the ones that hit our ship.”

  “And how many of those are we looking for?”

  Again the shrug. “I don’t know. It was dark and everyone was screaming, but I thought there might be twenty of them. I only got away because one of them grabbed Yuri.”

  “Yuri? They told me you were the only person on the ship.”

  “All I was left with was one hand. I think the doctor took it when he operated on me.”

  And she finally broke down and cried. Breen left her to regain her strength. She was going to need it.

  Chapter 8

  “We need to get under cover,” Javier said.

  “What about Martin?” Camila said.

  Javier hoped his face didn’t betray what he was thinking. As far as he was concerned, the student had become a meal for something. The best case scenario he could think of was that he’d survived long enough to die of hypothermia when the creatures pulled him into the sea. He was convinced that was where the attack had come from. The ocean could hide anything under that white wasteland covering. Drowning, of course, would have been worse. “He’s probably back at the base. I didn’t see him when we came down.”

  “And my copilot?”

  “I think he might be dead. I think some large animal got him.”

  This elicited a snort of derision from Camila. “This is Antarctica. What sort of large animal would be hunting here?”

  “I don’t know. A polar bear, maybe?”

  “Don’t be idiotic. Polar bears live in the Arctic, not the Antarctic.” This came from Ingrid, who managed to pip all the other scientists—each of which had started to speak—to the rebuke.

  “Does it matter?” Javier asked.

  That silenced them.

  “I thought so. Now let’s get back to the base.”

  “What for? The base doesn’t seem to have been much of a barrier.”

  “I know, but I’ve been thinking about that. My conclusion is that they got caught by surprise, and weren’t able to prepare.” That was probably true, but the real reason was that cover, any sort of cover, had to be better than an exposed walk over the snow.

  “How do you prepare for something that can rip a metal roof to shreds with its claws?”

  “We don’t know that that’s what happened.”

  “It sure looked that way.”

  “I think the base was attacked by something smaller, probably more than one. I know you think polar bears are a stupid idea, but they fit the bill. They’re big enough to attack a human and strong enough to carry them away. Also, it’s probably much easier to hunt slow humans on land than wait for seals to pop up out of the ocean, which is a good enough reason for the attack. Hell, I’d be surprised if there were even seals here to eat.”

  “There are plenty of seals. Penguins too. But no polar bears, even if they fit the theory.”

  “Look, can we talk about this later? Right now, we need to lock ourselves in the base and try to stay safe.”

  They headed back towards the red buildings.

  “Shouldn’t we try to call the Irizar?” Clark said.

  “The helicopter radio is destroyed,” the pilot informed them. “It was the first thing I checked. Unless one of you has a satellite phone, we’ll need to try calling from the base.”

  Javier sighed. The inability of Base Belgrano II to communicate with the outside world was what had started the whole thing in the first place. He said nothing, however; at least the party was moving in the right direction.

  “We should look for a building strong enough to withstand,” he almost said ‘a bear’, but checked himself in time, “an animal the size of a bear.”

  “And somewhere we can light a fire or connect a heater,” Camila said. “Does the base still have power?”

  “None of the lights were working. I tried. A fire’s a good idea. And we need to get ourselves ready before nightfall.”

  He felt, more than saw, everyone rolling their eyes and remembered the past few nights on board the Irizar—nights in which the sun hadn’t set at all. He laughed at himself.

  “Camila, you seem to be the best-informed about goings-on at the base. Which building do you suggest?”

  She stopped to think about it, looking at the base as they approached the slight rise upon which it was built. Javier admired her single-mindedness in looking forward. More than half of his attention was focused behind them. Everything indicated that the creatures, whatever they were, had come from behind, from the direction of the water, and regardless of whether they were or weren’t bears, they certainly were strong enough to destroy a helicopter and break a wooden door to pieces. He kept his hand near his pistol.

  “I know,” Camila said suddenly. “The base of the observatory dish. It’s a concrete cube. The only concrete structure anywhere in the complex. It’s not ideal because it’s not built on stilts, so we’ll have a hell of a time heating it, but it’s better than the rest of the buildings. Nothin
g is going to be able to get in once we reinforce the door.”

  “Good.” They headed in that direction.

  The building was precisely as described. Solid as hell, cold as hell, and about five meters to a side. A large satellite dish—some kind of radio observatory, he recalled—perched on the roof, and the mechanism for moving it occupied the top half of the cube. The door would need work, but they set about rolling some heavy drums that were stored inside to a place where they could quickly be placed as a makeshift barrier across the entrance.

  Once the barrier was in place, Javier set out, pistol in hand, to see if he could locate the base’s radio. He assumed it would be in the office space they’d only given a cursory glance to during their search for the base’s inhabitants. That place had been hit, but not too badly.

  It was a sign of how worried they were that no one tried to stop him and no one volunteered to go with him.

  About thirty meters separated the two buildings, but it felt like leagues to Javier. The sound of the snow that crunched under his boots echoed on the walls and came back at him from unexpected directions. He pointed his gun first one way, then another, only to find he’d been jumping at shadows, and that there was nothing amiss.

  He even wished the wind would pick up. He’d heard that the wind was what killed you in Antarctica, that it could blow right through countless layers of windproof clothes, that it howled like a train, that it would knock you off your feet.

  None of that appeared to be true. The flag, forgotten and forlorn, hung limp from its frosted pole. Loose snow didn’t swirl, and there certainly wasn’t any howling. In the stillness, he felt as if he could have heard the slightest noise for miles.

  But what he couldn’t stop thinking was that anything out there could also hear him.

  He rushed into the office building like the devil himself was after him, as if the sunny day outside was the coldest of dark Halloween nights.

  Just as Camila had predicted, the base had a radio. It was an old UHF/VHF unit which, at present was serving as a tray for two coffee mugs and a dirty plate. It didn’t appear to have been used this century but, of course, no one would ever throw it away. Eventually, it would just disappear under a mountain of bric-a-brac. The Argentine army never threw anything away. Equipment was repaired and duct-taped forever. Eventually, the government would need to start a war with someone just for the sake of getting all that old equipment blown up.