Ice Station Wolfenstein

Chapter 16

The first howling gust of sleet-laced wind tore across the ice field just as Blomstein hauled the heavy metal door open. It groaned and squealed, but it swung open with surprising ease. A dark tunnel lay beneath.

"Jefferson!" Alexandr called over the mounting gale. "If I lead the way, will you see that everyone is in safely?" Jefferson nodded and waved a thumbs-up in response, and Alexandr bounded forward and seized hold of the ladder enthusiastically. In just a couple of seconds he had vanished into the blackness.

Nina was right behind him, scrambling eagerly into the dark. Purdue followed with Blomstein, then at last Sam saw a flicker of light down below as someone switched a torch on. He waved at Admiral Whitsun to go next, thinking it would be a good idea to get the old boy out of the storm. His instinct was to send Fatima down next, but when he made eye contact with her she shot him an amused look. Sam remembered then that she had far more experience in the Antarctic than he did and was much better equipped for all of this, so he closed his fingers around the metal ladder and began his descent.

By the time Sam reached the floor there were several torches lit. Their thin beams showed that the group had arrived in a tunnel with arching corrugated metal walls. Shuffling to one side to make room for the rest of the party, Sam bumped into a banister set into the wall. A little more shuffling confirmed that the floor sloped downhill. Above his head he heard the ominous clang of the circular door being pulled shut. He had never been claustrophobic, but for the first time in his life Sam experienced a pang of nerves at being shut in an enclosed space. He was not the only one. From somewhere behind him he heard a quickly-stifled whimper from Nina.

"You ok?" he muttered to her.

"Yes," she snapped. "I'm fine. Why shouldn't I be?" She shone her torch along the downward slope. "I think we should go this way," she called. "If we head uphill all we're going to find is another exit. This must be the way toward the main complex."

They filed slowly down the corridor, Alexandr and Nina at the front. The place had an odd smell of disinfectant, stale air, and dust, but the one thing that was missing was the odor of rusty metal. Sam directed his beam toward the walls and noticed that they were indeed rust-free. I wonder how that works, he thought. I'll have to ask Alexandr I'd have thought that if this place has been abandoned for so long it would be falling to bits by now. Ah well. I suppose we should just be glad that it isn't.

The corridor opened out into a large, hangar-like room where their footsteps and voices echoed and the torch beams stretched out into the distance. A little exploration revealed a number of massive engines, presumably designed to power the whole station.

"Let's find a way to get these running!" Purdue clapped his hands in delight. "Alexandr, what do you think? Between the two of us we should be able to find a way, should we not?"

"Certainly," Alexandr smirked. "You can smell the diesel, yes? I have never yet found a diesel engine that I could not make run." He pointed his torch toward the base of one of the engines, sizing it up.

"Purdue!" Jefferson Daniels' voice rang out, followed by the sound of a body slumping to the ground. The beams of light zoomed around in the direction of the voice, revealing Jefferson crouching beside the fallen Admiral Whitsun. Fatima was at his side in a second, scrutinizing the admiral's ashen face, wriggling her fingers into the neckline of his snowsuit to check his pulse.

"He's ok," she pronounced. "His pulse is steady; I don't think he's in any danger. He's probably just exhausted, and it's a lot warmer in here than outside, so he might be overheating. We need to find somewhere for him to rest and we can keep an eye on him."

"Very well," said Purdue. "The engines will wait, I suppose. Alexandr, can you take a few people and find us quarters of some kind? It's probably best if we don't drag the admiral along on the search."

Alexandr nodded smartly and pointed to Nina, Sam, and Matlock. "With me," he said, then turned on his heel and set off toward the nearest door. The trio that he had selected fell into line at once. Nina caught up with Alexandr and began discussing the probable layout of the ice station.

"If this is the main furnace room, there should be stairs to all the other levels nearby," she said. There was a tone in her voice that Sam had never heard before — a rushed, gabbling quality, slightly breathy, quite unlike Nina's usual controlled lecturer's tone. He could not tell whether it was simply excitement causing the change, or a touch of fear. "I wish I'd had a chance to copy more of those notes, because I'm completely working from memory here — but there was something in Kruger's notebooks about the main staircases, and one of them was right next to the engine room. So let's all keep a lookout — somewhere along here there's got to be a door."

Nina was right, of course. Her memory and sense of direction were both good. They had gone a little way along the corridor when they found the stairway and followed it down to the level below. A forbidding metal door stood in front of them, marked Schlafsale. Because Nina nodded and reached for the handle, Sam assumed that they had found the dormitories and followed her into a long, narrow, pitch-black room.

The walls were lined with slim bunks, stripped bare to reveal grey mattresses. Under normal circumstances Sam would have found them uninviting, but after a few nights in the tent and the long, choppy sea journey, he had to fight the impulse to hurl himself onto one and sleep for at least forty-eight hours. The beam from Alexandr's torch flashed back and forth as he made a quick inspection of the rest of the room. In the darkness there was the sound of a long-closed cupboard being yanked open.

"Blankets!" Alexandr's voice rang out. "We are in luck, my friends! Here, take this and make up some beds. I shall go and fetch the others." In a flicker of footsteps and torch beams he was gone, leaving Sam and Nina alone in the dormitory with their arms full of sheets and blankets.

Sam took his armload of bedding and dumped it on one of the bunks, then balanced his torch on the bunk opposite so that he could see what he was doing. The bedding had been neatly arranged in piles consisting of a white sheet, a pillowcase, and a grey blanket, though Sam's decision to toss them onto the mattress had sent this system into disarray. He unfolded item after item until he had a complete set, then began putting the sheet on the bed.

"Aren't these amazing?" Nina was in heaven, though her progress with the bed-making was slow thanks to her need to examine the sheets in detail. At least it kept her distracted, keeping her claustrophobia at bay. "All these things have been here since the 1940s, completely undisturbed… No one else has touched these, not since the people who staffed this base! We're going to be sleeping in their actual beds, in this actual dormitory — I know it's morbid and horrible, but there's something so incredible about being the first people to see these things and getting to interact with the artifacts this way! We need to photograph everything, absolutely everything. Look, the sheets are tagged with the serial numbers of the people they'd been issued to! We should be able to find out exactly who each of these sets belonged to — it's incredible!"

Sam fumbled with the stiff mattress, shoving the corner of the sheet beneath it. "So you're telling me that Nazis managed to build this station, but they couldn't manage fitted sheets? Do you know how to do corners?"

"Nope. Just tuck them in and hope for the best."

They continued making the beds inexpertly until they had prepared enough bunks for everyone. By that time the rest of the party had arrived, and Admiral Whitsun was very nearly back on his feet, being helped along by Jefferson and Professor Matlock. They eased him into the nearest bunk, then the group bedded down for the night, their torches blinking out one by one.

Sam flung his arm across his face as bright light flooded the room. In his semiconscious state he heard yells and groans from the others as they protested at the sudden glare. He tried to force his eyes open, but all he could see was painful whiteness. As he rubbed them and waited for the flashing behind his eyelids to stop, there was a rattle of footsteps dashing down the metal staircase outside. The door flew open and Nina and Alexandr tumbled in, giggling like schoolchildren.

"And God saw the light," Alexandr declaimed, flinging his arms wide, "and it was good, and he divided the light from the darkness! I told you that I had never yet seen the diesel engine that I could not make work! Not even after so many years of sitting idle!"

Sam hauled himself up onto one elbow and squinted at the Russian. "You got the lights working?"

Alexandr grinned and hoisted his flask in a salute. "Nastrovje," he smirked. "Miss Nina here could not wait to go exploring, so I had to provide her with light to see by. She was kind enough to translate a few things as we went along."

"It wasn't quite like that," Nina confessed, speaking low enough that only Sam could hear. "I'm excited, yes, but the darkness and the confined space were really getting to me. Alexandr was awake and overheard me trying to talk myself down from a claustrophobic freak-out, so he suggested that we go and see if we could make the lights work."

"Feels like you got the heat working as well," Sam observed. Nina shook her head.

"No. We can't take credit for that, I'm afraid. I don't think it's actually any warmer than it was last night, but we were all too tired and shivery to notice. There are radiators at intervals along the corridors, and all the pipes are warm. There's even a bathroom complete with hot water along the corridor. Just hot, though — no cold. There must be hot springs feeding the water supply, keeping the place warm naturally."

"Hot springs? In Antarctica?"

"You would be surprised," said Alexandr "There are several. Many are below the glaciers, but some are accessible — on Deception Island there are beaches where the springs run so close to the surface that you can dig your own hot tub. It's not allowed any more, no one can legally disturb the ground… but it's still possible." Sam watched the devilish smile spread across Alexandr's face as he spoke. He got the impression that a little thing like the law would never stop Alexandr from doing precisely what he wanted.

"Come on!" Nina dragged Sam's blankets off, snatched up his pile of clothes from the end of the bunk and threw them at him. "Get up! We've got exploring to do and you need to bring your camera. There's something I really need you to get pictures of. It's kind of gruesome, though."

"What is it?"

"There's a furnace up in the engine room," Nina grimaced, "and it looks like someone had an accident up there. Alexandr was taking a look at it and he found a few buttons — someone had obviously burned some clothes, but the fire wasn't hot enough to melt the buttons."

"Wow. Buttons. Scary." Sam rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand and pulled on his sweater.

"Shut it," said Nina. "I haven't got to the creepy bit yet. We found bones in the furnace. Well, bone fragments. It's got a pretty big door. Some poor sod must have tripped and fallen into it."

"Or he got pushed," Sam suggested. "Maybe that's what happened to the Nazis here. Some big Agatha Christie — style murder mystery, but no one solved it so they all got killed. Maybe we'll find the rest of them while we're here, one by one, in all sorts of weird places."

"Grim way to go, however it happened. Now, are you ready? We've got lots to see."

"What about breakfast?" Still too sleepy for anything other than obedience, Sam began hauling his trousers over his thermal underwear.

"There's a sign on the stairwell that says the refectory's downstairs. Alexandr's going to head down and see if there's anything there that works, but we've got time for a quick look around while he gets things going. We won't go too far. Just up and down the stairs. We'll get a rough idea of what's on each level, then we'll head back right in time for a cup of tea and some delicious rehydrated mush. Come on!"

They clanked their way down the metal stairs, stopping on each landing to look down the long corridors. Next to the refectory were more dormitories, and on the level below were individual bedrooms. "Officers' quarters," said Nina, putting her head around a door. "There are plenty to go around. We should move down here and have rooms to ourselves."

Another flight of stairs took them to a corridor that appeared to be almost empty, apart from a single, unmarked door halfway along. Sam forced the stiff handle to turn, and they stepped into a vast, echoing room lit with eerie green light. Unlike the rooms above, its walls were not corrugated metal or wooden planks, but simply smooth rock. It looked as if the walls had been smoothed by prolonged exposure to water, but at some point that water had been drained or dammed leaving only this cave-like room… a perfect dry dock, designed to hold three U-boats. Two of the pens were flooded with icy water that lapped gently against the sides of the enclosures, but in the third, at the far end of the room, sat a majestic and menacing German submarine.

"Wow," Nina sighed, then strode along the narrow walkway that led from one pen to another. She reached the U-boat and laid both hands on the metal. "They actually did it, Sam. An Antarctic base. It's insane."

Sam searched his brain for a witty or insightful response, but in truth he was overwhelmed. It was one thing to agree to come to the Antarctic in search of this place, expecting it either to be a fairytale or to be nothing but ruins. It was quite another to find himself standing in a subterranean U-boat dock with incontrovertible evidence of the place's existence. He let Nina continue to chatter excitedly about the make and model of the submarine and speculate on what the implications of this ice station were for the rest of Nazi history, while Sam made himself useful and began taking as many photographs as he could.