Ice Fortress (A Jack Coulson Thriller) Page 4

  “Well, if these guys get us out of this in one piece, I’ll never call them the Chair Force again and that’s a spit promise.” With that he spat in his hand and held it out for Jack to shake.

  Screwing up his nose in revulsion, Jack fastened his belt and folded his arms.

  Sam was not growing on him. Not one bit.

  Jack let out a sigh and pulled a mini commando knife from his belt and began honing the blade with a small ceramic whetstone.

  It was going to be one very long flight to the South Pole.

  Chapter 4

  November 8, 2017, 05:00 UTC

  Ronne Ice Shelf (Antarctica)

  77° 51' 19.79" S 61° 17' 34.20" W

  USS Barracuda

  Depth 1500 feet

  Tension in the confined hull of the Barracuda was palpable. Navy personnel and civilian scientists were an abrasive combination in even the most convivial environments, but in a tactical situation, enclosed in a steel tube below the ice pack and with an unseen enemy firing at them, it was fair to say that the atmosphere was at flashpoint. For two days they had played cat and mouse with their unidentified adversary with no chance of being able to return fire. Their only hope rested with their ability to remain silent and invisible. No longer the lethal attack sub it had once been, the Barracuda was now rendered impotent by the very scientists it was tasked with protecting.

  “I can’t apologize for the order, the safety of the men and women aboard this boat depended on it, but I can empathize, Mr. Alvarez.” Again Captain Jameson tried to ease the tension. If they were going to survive this, they needed to work together, as unpleasant as that might be for all concerned.

  Juan’s eyes blazed with anger. “Nellie took two years to develop and she cost over five million dollars.” Passion for the little sub laced his words.

  “And I’m responsible for a two and a half billion dollar state-of-the-art submarine and the lives of those onboard.

  Those damn fish were targeting the only thing on this vessel not rigged to avoid sonar detection. That pet of yours was painting a target on our backs. I had to jettison it. I’d do the same again if it meant saving your life and the other lives I’m ultimately responsible for. That’s my job. There’s only one captain on this boat, Mr. Alvarez and you’d better start getting used to that.”

  The conversation wasn’t going quite the way Frank Jameson intended, but he was a submarine commander, not a politician.

  Leah felt the need to defuse the unresolvable conflict and wanted to be the first to acknowledge the dangerous elephant in the room. “Now that the alarms have been turned off and we’re not being shot at, for the moment, would somebody care to tell me why the hell somebody is trying to blow up an oceanographic research sub? And just as important as the why is the who.”

  Leah’s eyes flicked back and forth between Jameson and Durand. Both men shared a troubled glance before Captain Jameson explained, “We don’t know for sure. Whatever is down here with us is damn near as undetectable as we are. Our sonar detected nothing until it launched its fish.”

  “Who else has a submarine as advanced as this?” quizzed Leah, “I thought the Barracuda was the most advanced submarine in the world.”

  Jameson paused to consider how much to share with his civilian passengers before continuing, “Every new sub is the most advanced in the world, until someone builds a newer one. It can’t be the Chinese. As much as they might like to carve out a chunk of Antarctic real estate for themselves, they don’t have the sub technology to blindside us like that. So, that leaves only one possible option, but it makes no sense … no sense at all ...”

  “The Russians,” Durand finished the captain’s sentence for him, “only the Russians have a sub that can operate in full stealth mode and if the captain’s, right then God help us all if we have a Yasen class sub hunting us.”

  “Why?” Leah’s voice wavered, unsure if she really wanted to hear the answer to her question.

  Jameson answered, “Because the Yasen class is the deadliest nuclear attack sub to launch since the height of the Cold War. It’s silent, fast and just one of them is loaded with enough cruise missiles and torpedoes to start its own war.

  “So what do we do now?” This time it was Dave Sutton who asked the question on everyone’s lips.

  The captain held up a hand and began counting off his long, slender fingers, “One, we can’t outrun it. The second we power up and make speed, it will most likely get weapons lock on us again, now that their computers have identified our acoustic signature once already, it will be a snap second time around.

  “Two, we can’t go toe to toe and trade punches like Ali and Foreman in Rumble in the Jungle … we have no weapons. Our entire weapons systems were stripped out to make way for your science toys. We don’t have dick to fire back at them and even less in the way of countermeasures.”

  “We’re a sitting duck,” Durand added, as if they might have missed the take away lesson from the captain’s colorful metaphor.

  Leah’s brow pinched. “Rumble in the where?”

  All four men rolled eyes as they faced her.

  Juan sat upright, leaning forward to join the discussion, the fire in his eyes had dulled and he looked to the captain with renewed respect. A man who liked his boxing couldn’t be all bad, even if he had murdered Nellie.

  Again, Dave gave voice to a question on their minds, “Shouldn’t we be asking ourselves why, as Leah suggested earlier?”

  The look they all shared suggested that Dave made a fair point. But nobody dared hazard a guess.

  Alvarez had been pissed right from the moment he’d been ordered to release the docking clamps securing Nellie to the outer hull of the sub. The hatch to the pressure hull always remained sealed, so there was no risk of flooding by letting her go. It was the captain’s ulterior motive that made Juan bristle with anger each time he replayed the scenario in his mind.

  Nellie had been sacrificed. She’d been cut loose and allowed to resume her pre-programmed grid pattern, sonar pings firing in a constant array as she went about her designated mission, oblivious to the fact that she had become a decoy. The shock waves from the torpedo explosions rocked the Barracuda violently, causing significant damage to the propulsion and communications systems. Luckily, the life support systems remained fully functional and the Evaporation Plant and Oxygen Generator were able to produce a continual flow of oxygen from distilled seawater. And seawater was the only thing they had in abundance right now.

  As proud as Juan was that his pride and joy had saved them all by leading the deadly torpedoes away from the Barracuda, he was still overwhelmed at the loss of years of research and development. To occupy his time during their ‘silent running’ time while repairs were made, he’d worked with his sonar counterpart, Dave, to clean up the data brought back by Nellie on her maiden and final voyage.

  With nothing else to occupy their time, the antisocial pair of science nerds stared for hours at their computer monitors as their fingers danced across their keyboards with lightning agility. Dr. Leah Anderson watched with interest from her own workstation as the two argued, shared information and raced to beat each other to various solutions, all at the same time. They were just competitive enough to spur each other on but not so much that they sabotaged their work by trying to beat each other unfairly. A friendly spirit of cooperative competition, that’s how she defined it. She knew she’d selected well when she chose them. She only wished she was as adept at choosing companions for herself.

  “Okay, I think I’ve got it, this time.” The excitement raised the pitch in Juan’s voice an octave.

  “He’s right.” Dave nodded to Leah. “It looks good.”

  “You’ve been saying that for two days, now, guys,” groaned Leah as she leaned into their curved wall of monitors.

  “No, seriously, I take back what I said about Juan’s code being buggy. It’s not. He’s cleaned up my sonar data and the resolution is amazing.” He pointed to the center screen wher
e a detailed 3D vector graphic was building, line by line, pixel by pixel.

  The 3D image Leah was looking at was similar but more detailed than they had worked with when their project was in the testing phase. It clearly showed the thickness and undulations of the ice shelf. The strata of the ice was more or less uniform but for an anomalous bulge in the middle of the graphic. “So there really is a gigantic iceberg encased in the ice shelf.”

  “Technically it’s an ice mountain,” commented Captain Jameson who had quietly positioned himself behind Leah and leaned in to see what was getting the geeks so worked up.

  His warm breath cascaded down the nape of Leah’s neck, causing goosebumps to erupt on her exposed flesh. As she inhaled, the subtle scent of his aftershave brought back memories. Highly inappropriate memories given the circumstances. She stood abruptly to shake off the unwelcome reminiscence.

  “An ice mountain is a —”

  “We know what an ice mountain is, thank you captain,” Leah broke in, immediately sorry she spoke so severely.

  The three scientists knew full well that in this case what they were looking at was a massive chunk of glacial ice that had broken off at some point in the past 30,000 years and been refrozen inside the icepack as sea ice formed around it. The term ice mountain was somewhat misleading as the bulk of the mountain was actually under the ice, not above it as the term ‘mountain’ might suggest.

  “It’s huge,” whispered Dave with a reverence that they all felt. “It’s like, the largest one I’ve ever heard of.”

  “Roger that,” Jameson agreed.

  “But this makes no sense.” Leah pointed to a dark void in the top third of the upside down mountain. Can’t the sonar or software make out what’s there?”

  “That’s the point,” Dave spoke with confidence, “there’s nothing there. It’s an enormous cavern that begins below sea level and continues upward for many stories inside this mountain.” He prodded the image on the screen for emphasis.

  Juan shoved a handful of pretzels into his mouth and smiled as he chomped, crumbs raining down the front of his ‘It’s a Browncoat Thing’ T-shirt. He’d told them his code was solid. But there was no need to rub their doubts in their faces.

  Leah chewed her bottom lip, an expression of deep thought on her face. Before unexpectedly moving to La Jolla to join one of the most respected Oceanography Institutes in the world to pursue her childhood passion for marine life and the sea, Leah had been on a fast track to becoming one of the brightest Quantum Mechanics stars at Stanford. The Quantum Physics department was a second home to her and her professors were shocked and disappointed when she changed disciplines and cities so suddenly.

  While the oceanographer in her marveled at the sight of the magnificent ice mountain and it’s inner void, the engineer in her couldn’t help but wonder if what they were looking at wasn’t a natural phenomenon at all. She was about voice her observation before her thoughts were interrupted.

  “What’s that, over there?” Captain Jameson’s eye was drawn to an elongated shape in the ice a short distance from the void they’d been focused on.

  All eyes were now on the mystery object.

  “How long is it, Dave?” asked the captain.

  Dave studied the 3D graphic and looked to Juan for guidance. “Maybe 250 feet long and, say, 20 feet high?”

  Juan nodded in agreement, his mouth brimful with pretzels.

  Jameson let out a quiet whistle as he exhaled.

  Captain Frank Jameson was a career navy man a submariner, like his father and his grandfather. While other kids were playing Nintendo, Frank was watching The Enemy Below, Run Silent, Run Deep and Hunt for Red October. Over and over again. His grandfather, retired Admiral Hunter Jameson, often watch the movies with him and if he was lucky, young Frank might hear a story or two about grandpa’s service during the war.

  One such story he’d almost forgotten because it wasn’t so memorable to a young boy as it didn’t involve a decisive victory or something blowing up. It was a chase grandpa had lost. The German U-Boat he’d been stalking off the coast of Argentina had got away. Grandpa joked that it had fled to a secret Nazi submarine base hidden deep in the Antarctic ice shelf rather than face his swift and deadly torpedoes.

  He’d thought the whole story was made up because grandpa Hunter had run out of real ones. Then during his Naval Submarine School training, he’d read about the extraordinary post war mission led by the famous Admiral Byrd, who before the war had been an accomplished arctic and Antarctic explorer. During the substantial and highly unusual ‘Operation High Jump’ mission, Byrd had led a colossal expedition of some 4,700 men, an armada of ships, including one aircraft carrier and a fleet of aircraft to the Antarctic where they photographed and searched over half a million square miles of Antarctic ice. The U.S. government had called it a ‘training exercise’. Conspiracy theorists, in the wake of the much publicized Roswell UFO crash in 1947, claimed it was a search for another crashed UFO.

  Captain Jameson wondered if they had unwittingly stumbled across what his grandfather had once chased and what Admiral Byrd had been searching for many years later.

  “Christ on a bike,” he mouthed. When Leah, Dave and Juan turned to face him, he was aware that he’d spoken aloud.

  Chapter 5

  November 11, 1944

  Gandau Airfield

  Breslau (now known as Wroclaw)

  Poland

  Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler was arguably the most powerful general in the Third Reich. Some would say the most powerful figure in all of Nazi Germany, yet few knew anything about him and fewer still had ever seen him, as photographs of SS General Kammler were extremely rare. It would not be for some years before the true genius and abhorrently evil nature of Dr. Hans Kammler would be unveiled. By then, it would be too late.

  Even U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower, himself the single most significant general of the second world war and future president of the United States of America, credited Kammler with being only months away from developing weapons that might have cost the Allies the war.

  Coupled with his undeniable engineering brilliance, Dr. Kammler’s natural sociopathic tendencies accelerated his rise through the ranks of the Waffen-SS from the very early years of the war. Widely acknowledged as the chief architect of the death camps, Kammler’s most satisfying assignment was overseer of ‘Special Projects’, reporting directly to the Fuhrer himself. The task was well suited to his sociopathic personality and his engineering capabilities. Only after Hitler removed the Luftwaffe from the V1 rocket program and handed command of the program to Dr. Kammler did the German rocket program begin to reach its full potential.

  Within months, Kammler’s rocket program produced what might have been the most deadly weapon ever devised — the V2 rocket. While the V1 struck terror throughout London as they rained down on the city with little warning, the Spitfire pilots and anti-aircraft gunners could still bring them down. It became a question of how many would reach their target.

  Rocket scientist Werner von Braun proposed a bold and radical rocket design in which Kammler’s foresight and vision saw great destructive potential — a rocket that could touch the fringes of space on its pre-programmed trajectory before plummeting vertically at terrifying speed to its target. The V2 rocket was impossible to intercept and unleashed catastrophic destruction and unimaginable carnage due to its specially designed warhead payload. If he could overcome the crude sabotage attempts by the Jews and Polaks who worked in the highly toxic underground factories producing the unstable rocket fuels, Kammler might yet launch enough V2’s to turn the tide in Germany’s favor.

  The V2 rocket was the first man made vehicle to reach space, an honor Kammler proudly shared with von Braun, but their collaboration had not yet reached its zenith. The next generation would fly through low earth orbit before re-entering the atmosphere, directly over the United States of America.

  None of this was of any interest to the general as he stood at th
e edge of the muddy airfield dressed in his immaculate uniform and polished boots, awaiting the arrival of a cargo so critical to his research that he felt compelled to supervise the unloading himself. His commanding, black SS uniform was not the reason why most of the airfield personnel avoided him. None of them wanted the attention of the man who commanded the largest contingent of slave labor in all of Europe. There was no point in risking the displeasure of such an imposing and fearsome figure.

  When the heavy transport plane came into view, Kammler marveled at the beauty of the engineering masterpiece. As a gifted engineer himself, the design of the twin tailed transport aircraft was not lost on him. The Junkers 390 was an awe inspiring aircraft that left those not well versed in the ways of aeronautical engineering amazed that something so enormous could take off and actually remain aloft. Just as unbelievable was its previously unheard of 6,000 mile range. With a wingspan of over 160 feet, the flying behemoth would become the first German aircraft to bomb New York City, when it had completed its development. In the meantime, it had more important work to do for the Reich.

  The six powerful BMW radial engines produced a thunderous roar as the pilot expertly touched down on the extended runway. Kammler released a breath that he hadn’t even noticed he’d been holding. At the end of the runway, the aircraft braked to a stop and soon the ear shattering exhaust of the engines was replaced by a symphony of pinging sounds as the engines and manifolds cooled. Kammler strode impatiently toward the rear cargo doors.

  Inside the cavernous belly of the aircraft sat a wooden crate emblazoned with a stenciled Reichsadler or German Imperial Eagle. No other markings were visible. No other identification was necessary. It was the only piece of cargo in the hold of the aircraft and it was destined for one recipient only.