Ice Station Death

by Gustavo Bondoni

  He sighed. The thing had a power cord and no backup batteries, which meant that, in order to check if it was running, he’d need to find and start the generator. The fact that it wasn’t running was the least of his worries; those things were bulletproof, so it had probably just run out of gas.

  Javier was about to go look for fuel when something moved in the corner of his eye. He desperately looked around the office, but there was nothing in there with him. Then he realized that the movement was outside the window. For a second, hope flared: had the Irizar tried to hail them and, upon receiving no response, realized that something was wrong? Had they sent the other helicopter, or a search party?

  No. The movement was on the ground, something black against the snow in the distance. As he watched, whatever it was came into focus and he couldn’t believe his eyes. A large, lizard-like creature was heading for the base.

  It didn’t look like any lizard he’d seen before, though. Those had reedy legs which stretched straight out to the sides. This one had muscular legs that went straight down from its body, and ended in enormous webbed feet… with what looked like daggers mounted on the ends. It also had a long neck with a disproportionately large head which it held up like… like the old pictures of the loch ness monster. A long tail balanced the neck and head. The walk reminded him more of a horse or a dog—a long, weird-looking horse or dog—than any lizard he’d ever seen.

  He stared. That didn’t look like a picture book dinosaur. Those appeared bloated and slow, plump and relaxed. This one appeared to be pure muscle. Even with its strange, ungainly proportions, it appeared to be moving quickly, even at rest. Dark greenish-grey color stood out against the snow. The creature would have looked more at home in a jungle swamp.

  The distance made it difficult to judge scale but as he watched, mesmerized, it approached a small outbuilding. Javier gasped. Had it held its head up straight, it would have been taller than the little hut—at least four meters in the air. From tip to tail, it must have measured at least ten meters, probably more.

  The creature didn’t hesitate. As if tugged by an invisible string, it headed straight for the concrete cube that housed the scientists and the pilot.

  Javier watched aghast. Would the door hold? Would the team realize that it had company of the worst sort? Were they ready?

  The one thing he had no doubts about whatsoever was that the lizard had been responsible for the disappearance of both the members of his own team and the men and women from the base.

  The monster reached the cube and roared, an awful, purely animal sound that somehow made the creature even more repugnant. A tremor ran down his spine, a desire to run that went past his intellectual faculties straight to the base of his spine, where some primal remnant of pre-mammalian instinct still survived.

  As he fought the paralysis, the creature circled the concrete cube once, twice and then, with another roar, launched itself at the structure. He didn’t have a good angle to see whether it was hitting the door, but if it was, the barrels wouldn’t hold for long. This thing was four times the size of a polar bear. And once the door was down, he realized that the creature was—just—lithe enough to fit through the opening. It would be a massacre.

  His sidearm was a Browning Hi-Power, a nine millimeter pistol, and the range, with such a large target was more than reasonable. He tried to control his breathing as he walked to the door, then, taking cover in the entrance, steadied his arm and inhaled. Javier fired once, then again and again.

  Then he stopped to see whether his shots had had any effect on the creature.

  To his satisfaction, it ran off towards the water. It ran much faster than something that ungainly should have been able to.

  Emboldened by his success, he hurried back to the makeshift shelter.

  At the door, he stopped in his tracks. The wood was splintered and cracked and, despite the drums behind it, the door had been pushed nearly twenty centimeters in. If he’d hesitated just a few more seconds, the creature would have been inside…

  “Let me in!” he shouted. He’d seen the great lizard run off into the distance, but he still couldn’t shake the sense that it was right behind him, just waiting for him to look away before hitting him in the back.

  “Colonel?” the pilot shouted from within as the door opened a crack. “We thought you were dead for sure.”

  They all looked happy to see him, but Camila surprised him most by running up and hugging him. “Thank God. We were all so scared.”

  “Well, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that those things aren’t impervious to bullets. The bad news is that they don’t seem to be easy to kill, either. I hit it three times and it only ran away. It looked like it was perfectly all right.”

  “Where did you hit it?”

  “I got it in the sides. I was trying to make it stop attacking you guys first, and worry about taking it down later.”

  They all studied the door. “I think we’re going to need to beef this up a bit,” the pilot observed.

  “Yeah. When you close it, bring over more drums. All of them if possible.”

  “When we close it? Where do you think you’re going to be?” Camila said.

  “I’m going to hike over the ice to get to the Irizar.”

  Silence met this proclamation. Feet shuffled. Only Camila spoke up. “That’s the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard. Even if there wasn’t some kind of overgrown monster out there eating people, you probably wouldn’t make it anyway.”

  “Why not? The ice the ship was sailing through reaches the shore. I should be able to walk over in a while. An hour at most.”

  “We don’t know if the ice is continuous. An insignificant crack, something four meters wide would cut you off completely.”

  Javier set his jaw. “I have to try. And I need someone to come with me.”

  The pilot immediately raised his hand, but Javier shook his head. “You’ve got your gun, so I need you to stay here and fight off those things if they come again. See if you can find a soft spot.”

  “I’ll go.” Javier was surprised to see Clark, the Australian, stepping forward. He’d had the guy pegged as a pretty boy who’d only act macho enough to get into someone’s pants, and then conveniently forget all about it. But the guy didn’t seem to be in the least afraid of heading out onto the ice.

  Javier nodded.

  “Then I’m coming, too,” Anna said.

  “No way,” Clark replied. “Stay here.”

  “Why, because I’m a girl? I’m not staying here while you go out there. I just got you and now I’m going to take care of you.”

  Javier kept his mouth firmly shut. The Australian didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would consider a few nights to mean anything more than a few nights, but Anna didn’t look like a woman who would care what anyone else thought. Besides, though slim, she was taller than Javier was and well-muscled to go with it. He decided that letting her come might be better than getting decked.

  “All right. But that’s it. The whole point of me going out there is to keep as many of you safe as possible… and now there’s just five of you here and three of us will be out there. Before we go, we’ll help you roll some more drums.”

  Half an hour later, the three volunteers set off, pausing at the helicopter only long enough to retrieve its emergency flares, which Javier wanted to use to signal the icebreaker.

  “We need to hit the ice over there,” he pointed to their right, “where it makes landfall. But we should probably take an inland route. The creature I saw was moving towards the water.”

  “Did you follow it?” Anna asked.

  Javier chuckled. “Are you kidding?”

  “I’m only asking because of that big snow bank between us and the water. The creature might be hiding in there, although that would be strange.”

  “Stranger than other stuff that’s happened already?”

  “Reptiles are cold-blooded. They don’t usually work all that well in free
zing weather. It should have been nearly catatonic.”

  “The one I saw certainly wasn’t.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m doubtful about the accumulated snow. Normally, I’d have bet that the creature—assuming it actually is some kind of big reptile—would have headed straight back to the water because water is usually milder than the cold land around it. But this one seems to be fine on land… so maybe they nest here, too.”

  “Well, if you want to study them, I’m fine with that. But not now, and I’d recommend you come back with an armored division or two. It will make it more likely that you might return.”

  “I’ve worked with dangerous animals before, Colonel.”

  “I thought you worked with microbes.”

  That got him a cold smile. “There is nothing alive more dangerous than microbes. But while I’m a bacteriologist now, that is a relatively new development. I used to work at the Kruger Park tracking big cat and elephant populations. I only went into bacteriology because my sister needed help. She’s going to win the Nobel one of these years… so I decided I might as well have my name on her papers.”

  He chuckled. “Sounds logical.”

  They reached the ice and had to jump from the shore—a place where the rocky grey beach could be seen poking through the snow in places—onto the sea ice. Clark and Anna managed to land softly, but Javier slipped and fell. He hoped the chagrin of taking a pratfall in front of civilians wasn’t too visible in his face. To cover it up, he laughed and made a joke.

  The ship was visible in the distance. It didn’t appear to have made much headway since they’d landed at the base. They walked towards it.

  It was impossible to make a beeline to the Irizar because the ice refused to collaborate. Every few dozen meters, curious pools of water, maybe ten meters across would appear. They weren’t just holes but actually appeared to consist of oval basins filled with water disconnected from the ocean below. Where the water had made it through the ice, the sinkholes had drained into the sea, and all that was visible was a depression in the ice and a dark hole where the water below was visible.

  One of the open holes held a family of seals, and Javier shuddered. An opening that could admit seals could also allow anything else to come up… and they’d left a bunch of these holes behind them. Javier’s very first lesson in officer school, administered by a sadist who’d served in the Falklands War, was that you never left a live enemy behind you. Javier wondered how that man would have handled this particular terrain.

  Time dragged on and the ship began to grow imperceptibly closer.

  Clark held up a hand. “Do you guys see anything wrong with the ship?”

  “Wrong? How?”

  “The bridge looks weird.” He passed around the binoculars, the only set they’d brought with them.

  “You’re right. As if something had exploded in there,” Anna observed after she’d had a look.

  Javier’s turn came last. “That must be why they haven’t moved. But we can worry about that later. First, we need to get there and convince them to send help to the people at the base. Other than that, the ship looks intact, and I don’t see any smoke or anything.”

  “So we’ll be better off there than here?”

  “I have no doubt of that.”

  Chapter 9

  Natasha had fallen into a fitful sleep, so Breen swallowed his questions and went out on deck to check his phone. All sorts of alerts were showing on the screen and he toggled to the encrypted messaging system used by Military Intelligence first. His orders were clear and succinct.

  Your first priority is to stay in contact with the Miss Vodloyeva. Do not allow the Argentines to separate you from her—we will contact the Argentine government to organize a more thorough debriefing.

  If possible, within the scope of your principal assignment, attempt to secure footage of the creatures in Antarctica.

  They were never particularly emotional, these men of Military Intelligence. He knew all the officers who might have given these orders in person, knew all the dispatchers cleared to type them up and send them. He’d gone to dinner at their houses, attended their children’s Bar Mitzvas and drunk with them at innumerable bars. And yet, every time he received orders in the field it could just as easily have been a bunch of strangers talking to him.

  He supposed it was important to keep a certain level of detachment but it still seemed a bit harsh that, as soon as the shit hit the fan, communication became less warm and impersonal. Maybe the powers-at-be felt that a dead agent could only give away as much as the enemy could figure out from his equipment… and worked under the assumption that everyone on the planet could break encryption that would give Fort Meade fits.

  In this particular case, Headquarters also appeared to be under the impression that monstrously mutated nothosaurs would be desperate to read his orders.

  Well, it could have been much worse. All he had to do was to keep the Argentines from airlifting the girl out from under his nose, which, if they were smart, was one of the first things they’d try.

  He headed out to find the colonel in charge of the contingent intended for the base. After the captain was killed, he and Javier were the ranking members of the expedition, even though neither was a naval officer. He would likely be in charge of evacuating the Irizar if it turned out the ship couldn’t move under its own power.

  The man appeared competent enough. He’d posted armed guards and was watching the water alongside his men.

  Breen studied him for a few moments before speaking, trying to get the measure of the man. He was a bald, portly fellow, a bit shorter than Breen himself. He had a mustache that made him look like an Arab officer from the Six Days War. Apart from that, his face was smooth as a baby’s bottom. He’d shaved within the last few hours… which probably made him a stickler for discipline.

  “Good afternoon, Colonel.”

  The man looked at him askance. “They told me what you did during the attack. Would I be right in guessing that you’re not actually a scientist, no matter what Colonel Balzano wants us to believe?”

  “I’ve had some additional training which might be useful. I can handle certain weapons that a civilian might not be familiar with and also help advise on tactics if you want some help.”

  The Colonel nodded. There was no need to say anything more. Black ops were black ops everywhere in the world, and the regular army had learned how to extrapolate from incomplete answers.

  “Fair enough. Keep the gun. We have plenty of them. Do you think the woman can shoot, too? Has she also received additional training?” He made quote marks with his fingers around the last two words.

  “I don’t think so. I think she’s exactly what she says she is: a Russian zoologist pulled into a mission she had nothing to do with, on short notice.” Then Breen smiled. “But, of course, she is Russian, so you never know. I’ll ask her.”

  The Colonel nodded and began to turn back to his study of the dark sea below.

  “That’s not why I came, though. I wanted to know how we’re organizing the evacuation.”

  “We’re not. Right now I think we’re safer staying on the ship than risking a four kilometer walk across the ice.”

  “Walk? We have two helicopters.”

  “One of them is at the base and isn’t responding over the radio…”

  “The other one is fine. It’s in the hangar.”

  “True. But who’s going to fly it?”

  Breen felt sick. Had the Argentines actually mounted a polar expedition with two helicopters and only one set of pilots? Of course they had. In a place like Argentina, where the military was always cash-strapped because the only kind of fighting they ever did was against illegal fishermen and drug smugglers along the jungle borders, equipment would be at a premium, not manpower. Everything would be maintained as well as they could, but there would never be enough parts, and things would break down. So it made perfect sense to bring a spare helicopter along and not a spare flight crew, eve
n though the country probably had ten more pilots than aircraft.

  “Do we have any other plan?”

  “Well, the Air Force has a Hercules that they sometimes rejigger to land on the ice, but that will take them a day, so we’re basically waiting on that. Or for the other helicopter to respond.”

  “Any idea why it’s not working?”

  “None. But my guess is that they decided to get drunk with the base crew and haven’t woken up just yet. Juan Manuel swears the radio was fine, and it was working when they went to check on the Korean boat, so I’d rule out a malfunction.”

  “So we’re waiting for the Air Force?”

  “Yeah.”

  At least the radio link between the icebreaker and the mainland seemed okay… a relief, considering that every other Argentine communication line appeared to have broken down completely.

  Breen wandered to the front of the ship, itching to keep debriefing Natasha, but knowing she would be asleep much longer than the half-hour he’d given her so far. The woman was exhausted.

  A familiar sound caught his attention. Normally, the sound of a plane flying overhead wouldn’t have interested him in the least… but here, in the empty skies above Antarctica, it called like a siren, in much the same way that it would have caught his attention over a battlefield where he’d been told the friendlies wouldn’t be flying, but instead of terror, he was filled with hope.

  His cabin was a few steps away, so he popped in and brought out his binoculars. The plane was visible to the naked eye, but the glasses would help with type identification.