The Black Knight (12 page)

Veer was a giant of a man and stood with his arms folded across a barrel chest, his face half concealed by a thick, dark beard. Cold gray eyes that seemed a reflection of the bitter Antarctic continent far below them scanned the faces of his men and saw neither hubris nor doubt in their gazes.

‘We deploy in ten minutes!’ he boomed, his thick Slavic accent loud enough to be heard above the roar of the Hercules’ four massive turboprop engines. ‘Our target is in the north of Queen Maud’s Land and the Totten Glacier, and we know that an armed force of unknown origin has been deployed to prevent the United States of America from achieving its objectives. It’s our job to ensure that they do not succeed!’

A roar of
Hoo-Rar
filled the interior of the aircraft as the soldiers, a mixture of former Marines, Army Rangers and other highly skilled units clenched their fists as one and punched the air. Dressed in white Arctic camouflage and with M-16 rifles clutched to their chests, they were heavily armed and well suited to the task at hand.

‘Our primary mission is to recover a highly classified military satellite that is descending out of orbit prematurely toward the glacier,’ Veer shouted above the roar of the engines. ‘The enemy is made up of scientists and soldiers of unknown allegiance but we should not underestimate them: they will be well armed, highly paid and highly motivated, just like all of us. The difference is that the satellite belongs to our country, and we will get it back from them!’

‘Hoo-Rar!’

Veer pointed to the ATVs and the aircraft around them.

‘Expect hostile action! Deploy with full and lethal force! If there are no survivors from the enemy team, then our President will not have to explain to the world what happened up here and the security of our country will remain inviolate!’

‘Hoo-Rar!’

Veer reached for a face mask that lay on the rear of an ATV beside him. He prepared to don the mask and then shouted:

‘Thirty seconds, open the doors!’

The C-130’s loadmaster punched a series of large buttons attached the fuselage wall, and instantly a huge ramp at the rear of the aircraft began to slowly lower and provide a vertiginous view of the world below. The sky above was a deep indigo blue flecked with stars, and behind the aircraft’s massive turboprop engines swirling vapor trails glowed gold in the sunrise as they billowed into the distance in the aircraft’s wake.

The air was cold enough to take Veer’s breath away, ice clinging to his eyebrows and beard until he donned the mask. Oxygen flowed from the mask, allowing him to breath in the bitter cold and the high altitude, low pressure air as he strode to the ATVs. His men lined up on either side of the aircraft’s fuselage, where two hatches were manned by the loadmasters.

A red light high on the fuselage wall suddenly turned green, and the loadmasters opened the hatches to allow a freezing gale to flow through the aircraft as Veer roared into his microphone.

‘Go, now, now, now!’

The troopers deployed one after the other, hurling themselves out of the open hatches either side of the aircraft into the frigid air thirty thousand feet above Antarctica. Veer turned and watched as the loadmasters, all of them protected by masks and Arctic survival clothing, began pushing the ATV’s out of the Hercules.

The vehicles fell away behind the craft one by one, large parachutes deploying behind them and billowing out to slow the vehicles’ descent toward the ice far below. Veer watched for a moment longer as his men poured from the Hercules into the void, and then he sprinted down the fuselage, running faster than the ATVs rolling off the back of the aircraft as he reached the point of no return and hurled himself off the back ramp of the Hercules into the abyss.

Antarctica was sprawled below him, a vast continent of ice bathed in an orange glow from the rising sun behind Veer as he plummeted away from the Hercules. The roar of the aircraft’s engines faded swiftly into memory as he reached terminal velocity, following the black specks of his men as they rocketed in freefall down toward the barren, frigid wastes far below.

The Antarctic coastline demarked clearly the mouth of the Totten Glacier to their south, the glacier tiger-striped with long dark shadows from ridge lines and ranges of hills spreading for miles across the empty, desolate continent.

The roar of the Hercules’ engines was replaced by the scream of wind rocketing past Veer as he plummeted ever downward. He checked his altitude and then squinted down at the icy wastes far below, seeking any sign of their quarry. Within a few moments he spotted a series of glowing streaks, perhaps twelve trails or plumes churned up by vehicles travelling far below them on the surface. On his visor, a small blinking red light marked the location where the signals his employers had detected from what they called
Black Knight
had been.

Veer spoke into his microphone, loudly enough to be heard over the roar of the wind buffeting past him.

‘Enemy seen, deploy between them and the target. Repeat, cut them off!’

Veer tucked his arms and legs in and tilted his body down, accelerating as he sought to catch his men up and be the first to touch down on the Antarctic wastes. His massive body raced downward and he plummeted past some of his men, who quickly accelerated along with him as they plunged through thin veils of cirrus cloud, the surface of Antarctica increasing in detail below them. Veer could see the vehicles’ plumes more clearly now, the machines heading north toward the same spot marked on his visor with the red icon.

A last glance south revealed the presence of a fairly large ship many miles away, anchored near the coast. Veer grinned inside his mask, knowing that the team on the ice would believe themselves the only people even aware that Black Knight even existed.

They won’t know what’s hit them.

***

XV

Totten Glacier, Wilkes Land,

Antarctica

‘All call signs report in!’

Ethan gripped hold of the ice glider’s handles as he glanced back over his shoulder. The
Polar Star
was anchored in the frigid black water of the glacier’s mouth, surrounded by immense chunks of flat, floating ice that had calved off the enormous glacier into the Antarctic Ocean.

The low morning sun flared across the horizon behind the ship, the ocean sparkling like burnished copper beneath its glare as the SEAL team deployed their equipment and maneuvered their vehicles into position at the head of the convoy.

The ice gliders they were using were extraordinary tandem twin-seat vehicles, set on three skis in a tricycle configuration, with the two independently suspended outboard skis located at the end of curved arms in the manner of a seaplane’s wings and floats. Behind Ethan, who sat in the rear cockpit of one such craft, was a bio-fuel powered Rotax 914 aircraft engine attached to a three-bladed pusher-propeller with variable pitch. The four-cylinder turbocharged engine pushed out a hundred horsepower and was capable of driving the glider at an incredible eighty miles per hour across the ice.

In the enclosed cockpit, a GPS-enhanced radar system designed to detect voids in the ice and report coordinates to the rest of the team was allied to a computer-controlled aiming system for the two machine guns embedded in the glider’s nose. Ethan checked his harnesses and reveled in the warmth billowing into the cockpit from the engine as the driver, Lieutenant Riggs, looked over his shoulder.

‘All set?’

Ethan offered the soldier a thumbs-up and then Riggs opened the throttle and as one the twelve ice gliders soared away from the coast, following a path alongside the glacier as they headed in-land toward the source of the signals detected by NASA and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

‘The location of the signals is just over a hundred miles in from the coast,’ Riggs reported. ‘We’ll be there in a couple of hours, so just hang on and enjoy the ride.’

Ethan gripped hold of the sides of his seat as the glider accelerated across the ice, which was sparkling white in the low sun and striped with deep blue shadows stretching away from them, cast by low hills and jagged, angular outcrops of solid ice shaped by the winds that frequently scoured the barren snow fields.

On a monitor in front of him Ethan could see the GPS display mapping the frigid Antarctic wastes, and on it a small red spot that blinked on and off, demarking their destination deep in the ice fields. Ethan knew that each ice glider carried a small amount of personal baggage along with the SEAL’s weapons and equipment. Weighed down by the excess gear the vehicles were limited to around sixty miles per hour across the ice, much of which was maintained by their momentum once moving. The engine behind him roared, his ears protected by a headset that allowed him to communicate both with the driver and the other members of the team.

Ethan looked out of the long, tear-drop shaped canopy and saw other ice gliders blazing across the ice nearby, their propellers whipping up spiralling vortexes of snow behind them that glowed and sparkled in the sunlight. He turned back to the view forward and almost immediately he spotted something on the display before them.

Another, small and intermittent contact flickered in and out of view as the glider bounced and careered across the ice.

‘There’s a new contact on the monitor,’ he reported to the driver.

The SEAL looked at his display and frowned.

‘Could be an artifact of some kind, a reflection,’ he replied. ‘The data is coming in via a downlink to a military satellite and we often get anomalous reflections appearing and then disappearing. It’s not a perfect system, especially down here with all the cold weather and ice. Don’t worry, the nearest people are hundreds of miles of us!’

Ethan frowned.

‘There are people on the glacier?’

‘There’s a Russian research station at Lake Vostok, a subterranean lake more than two miles beneath the ice. The Ruskies drill bore holes down there, looking for life forms different to those we’re familiar with. The station is manned year-round, but we’re not going to be going anywhere near them.’

Ethan held on grimly as the ice glider seemed to almost fly across the sheer white surface of Antarctica, occasionally hitting rises in the terrain that felt as though they were in a vehicle that had hit a pot hole in the road. Ethan’s arms began to go numb from the vibrations as he held on and hoped that the constant juddering wouldn’t give him the mother of all headaches by the time they reached their destination.

On the GPS display appeared a second warning screen and this time Ethan spotted a countdown timer appear, showing just two hours and seven minutes.

‘That’s the object’, Riggs identified the new display. ‘We’re getting live tracking information from NASA. It’s coming down, whatever the hell it is.’

‘We need to get established and ready to pick this thing up,’ Ethan replied.

The ski gliders thundered across the icy wastes for another bone-jarring two hours, Ethan peering at the empty wilderness around them, bathed in the orange glow of the low sun and slashed with giant crevasses that plunged into chilly blue depths, forcing them to find alternative routes.

Ethan’s bones and joints were aching by the time the SEAL lieutenant began to slow, and Ethan looked up to the GPS monitor and saw that the flashing icon denoting the position of the signal was almost now in the center of the screen and that they were within five nautical miles of its position. The ski glider’s motion across the ice smoothed as Riggs began bothering to pick less rough routes across the surface of the ice, and Ethan peered up into the blue sky above that was laced with high cirrus clouds glowing like angel’s wings in the permanent sunrise.

‘Four miles now,’ the driver said. ‘Firing team, weapons hot, stay sharp.’

As they travelled, Ethan saw Riggs slide an M-16 rifle out of its slot inside the canopy rail of the glider and allow it to rest across his thighs as with the other hand he flipped up a protective cover over the arming switch of the two cannons built into the glider’s nose. Ethan heard a humming sound begin to emanate from where he guessed a belt-fed drum contained the guns’ ammunition, the drum spinning up ready to fire.

It was then that he looked up into the sky above and shouted a warning.

‘Incoming!’

Riggs looked up and his voice echoed over the communications channel. ‘Holy crap!’

Across the vivid, deep blue vault of the heavens a fearsomely bright flare of light rocketed through the atmosphere. A trail of glowing debris followed it as it plunged across the sky, leaving a billowing cloud of smoke behind it that glowed in the low sunlight as it streaked overhead. Ethan saw a faint concave shockwave of vapor ahead of the object enveloped by the bright halo, and a moment later above the sound of the ski glider’s engine he heard a terrific crash as the sonic boom hit the air around them.

‘Black Knight is down!’ Riggs yelled.

Ethan saw the bright object plummet toward the Antarctic and then a brilliant flare of light burst like a second sunrise ahead of them as it hit the ground at tremendous speed. A broad cloud of debris churned up from the impact burst into the air a few miles ahead of them as the object ploughed into the deep ice.

Ethan looked up at the roiling cloud of debris left behind by Black Knight’s terminal descent, and then saw an aircraft flying high over the Antarctic, the vapor trails from its four engines glowing like golden needles across the chill blue heavens.

‘There’s an aircraft up there,’ Ethan said.

Riggs looked up at the aircraft.

‘The only thing that’s going to be allowed to over fly this area is a military aircraft, and we haven’t been informed of any support for this mission yet.’

Moments later, through the billowing debris cloud emerged the shapes of parachutes with vehicles descending slowly toward the ice fields before them, and other fast moving specks plummeting toward the surface.

Riggs keyed his microphone and called out to the entire formation.

‘We’ve got company!’