The Citadel

CHAPTER 8

Antarctica

This second landing had been smoother than the first, and the plane was now staked down, three hundred meters to the north of the ice ridge. Next to the ridge itself, Tai, Vaughn, and Smithers were hacking at the ice and snow on the protuberance, while Burke and Logan swept the loose debris away with shovels.

It was obvious to Vaughn there was a man-made object underneath this snow. The shape was too linear to have occurred naturally. He swung the pick, and a section of ice splintered off. His next swing almost broke his hand as the point bounced off something solid. With his gloves, he began wiping ice and snow away, exposing metal.

"I've got something!" he yelled. The others gathered around and stared at his discovery. The metal was painted white, and the pick had gouged the smooth surface.

"Let's clear it out," Logan said, dropping his pick and grabbing a shovel. Shoulder-to-shoulder, Vaughn and Logan used the edge of their shovels to enlarge the clear space on the metal. Soon they exposed a flat sheet of metal, almost three meters wide by two high.

Logan stepped back and looked at it. "This has to be some sort of surface shaft."

"Where's the door, then?" Tai asked.

"There's four sides," Vaughn replied as he began excavating around the corner to the right. Smithers joined him. Without a word, Logan and Burke started on the corner to the left.

As they cut into the ice, they leveled off the area around the shaft, making it flush with the surface of the ice on the nonridge side. The wind had picked up and snow was beginning to lift and blow across the basin.

Vaughn worked smoothly, trying not to break into a sweat. As his body heat rose, he removed his parka in order to equalize the temperature, stuffing it into his rucksack. He warned the others to make sure they did the same.

A meter from the edge he discovered a seam in the metal. He scraped ice away up and down and then to the right. Gradually a door appeared. On the far right side there was a spoked metal wheel. Once the door was completely uncovered he stepped back.

"Do you think it will work?" he asked Logan. The rest of the party had gathered around as Vaughn finished clearing the door.

Logan was running his hands along the seam. "I don't know," he replied. "It ought to. It shouldn't have frozen up, as the temperature here never gets above freezing to produce the moisture needed for that. Let's give it a try."

Vaughn stepped back as Logan gripped the wheel and leaned into it. The metal didn't budge.

"Here, let me try." Smithers placed the handle of the pick through one of the spokes of the wheel and squatted down. Slowly he started to exert pressure up.

"Watch out!" Vaughn yelled as the wood handle broke. The free piece ricocheted off the door and hit Smithers in the head. Dazed, he fell back onto the ice.

"Damn." Smithers sat there rubbing his head through the parka hood. "That hurts."

Vaughn thought it would be darkly amusing if they had found the Citadel but couldn't get in. The only thing that truly worried him was the weather. He had silently gone along with Tai's decision, but now he was beginning to have second thoughts. The sky was dark with clouds now, and the wind was howling, knifing through his clothes. They needed to get out of the wind, and there were only two choices: go into the base or back to the plane.

He looked at Smithers again. Something dark was seeping through his hood. "Shit," Vaughn muttered. "Stay down," he ordered as Smithers tried standing up. He carefully pushed the big man's hood down. The inside was caked with blood that had already frozen. The gash from the wood wasn't hard to find on the man's bald head. It was about three inches long and didn't appear to be deep.

"What's wrong?" Tai asked.

Without answering, Vaughn opened the first aid kit attached to the outside of his rucksack and pulled out a sterile gauze pack. He quickly tore it open and then put his mittens back on before pressing the cloth up against the cut. It immediately turned bright red as the blood soaked through.

"He got cut," Logan said. "It's not deep, but scalp wounds bleed a lot because the blood vessels are right on the surface."

"We need to go back to the plane now and settle in," Vaughn said. "Hopefully, this thing will blow over quickly."

Brothers shook his head. "I don't think so, mate. McMurdo says this is a big front. We may be stuck for days."

Vaughn looked at Tai. She took a deep, icy breath, then took charge. "All right." She pointed at Burke. "You hold the bandage in place. Make sure you keep the pressure on." She gestured to Vaughn, Brothers, and Logan. "Let's all get on this thing."

They grabbed hold.

"On my count of three," Tai said, "we turn counterclockwise. Ready? One. Two. Three."

They leaned into the wheel and strained. To no avail.

"Again. Ready? One. Two. Three."

The second attempt was also a failure.

"All right," Tai said, taking deep breaths. "Let's take a break for a second."

Vaughn looked at the wheel. "How about we try it the other way? Clockwise?"

Tai nodded, and they all reassumed their positions. "Ready?" Tai asked. "One. Two. Three."

They all leaned into it, and with a loud screech the wheel moved ever so slightly.

"Again," Tai gasped. "One. Two. Three."

The wheel turned almost a full inch.

"Again."

As they continued to labor, the wheel turned inch by inch. It was slow and hard, but it moved. Vaughn estimated they made a full revolution of the wheel after five minutes of effort. Yet there was no indication they'd unclocked the door. They went at it again, the wheel moving somewhat easier now, and managed another two complete revolutions. And then it stopped. No amount of effort could get it to move any more.

"I think we've gone as far as we can go," Vaughn said.

Logan tapped the metal door. "I'd say it opens inward. It makes sense down here. You want doors to open in because the outside could be blocked by snow or ice."

Vaughn sat down on the ice, his back to the center of the door. He jammed his feet into the ice and snow as best he could then pushed. The others stared at him for a moment, then Logan sat on one side and Tai on the other. Together they put pressure on the door. With a low creak, a small gap appeared on the right side, and they all adjusted, keeping up the pressure. The door swung open wider, the three scrambling to keep the momentum going until it was wide enough for a person to slip through.

"Hold it!" Vaughn finally called out, and they stopped. He got to his feet and peered around the edge. In the darkness beyond he could just make out a metal landing and staircase. The Citadel beckoned. Tai pressed into his side, shining a flashlight in.

"Ladies first," Vaughn said.

Tai slipped in, followed by Vaughn.

The stairs did a ninety-degree turn and seemed to descend directly down into the depths. An open area next to the top of the stairs had a pulley system rigged on top, suggesting that was the way heavy gear could be transported up and down.

Tai shined the light down, and it showed wood planking about twenty feet down and something else at the bottom of the stairs, but from their position they could only make out a vague outline.

Tai leaned over the railing and shone the light directly down. "Oh, shit," she muttered.

Vaughn leaned over also. What had been a vague form was now clearly the body of a man lying at the base of the stairs, facedown, his hands stretched out in front of him, almost an act of supplication.

"Great," Vaughn muttered. "Come on."

Tai cautiously followed Vaughn down the metal steps. The man hadn't moved. When they reached the bottom, Vaughn shone his own light on the body, revealing a figure clothed in Army-issue clothes, circa the 1950s. Three black holes were stenciled in the back of the man's jacket, surrounded by a red frame of blood. Vaughn knelt down and turned the body over. Sightless eyes peered out from a young face, forever frozen in the surprised grimace that must have come as the bullets slammed into his back.

Vaughn looked closely at the face of the corpse, marveling at the frozen preservation. He wondered how long the man had been dead. He looked up at Tai. "Let's get everyone in here before the storm gets worse."

Indonesia

Among the tens of thousands of islands that made up the Republic of Indonesia, this was one of the smaller and less significant. At least to most outsiders. It was an island whose lone small village had been completely wiped out by the tsunami that struck on December 26, 2004.

The village was now reoccupied. But not by fishermen and their families, as the old village had been. It was occupied by a strange international conglomeration. One drawn together from secret meetings around the world. Surprisingly, it was a group that owed its formation to one man: the President of the United States. Because gathered on this small island, working together and training each other, were small elements from the various countries that had been dubbed the Axis of Evil and from the terrorist organizations the United States was at war with.

There were Al Qaeda operatives, Iranian commandoes, a small group of representatives from the Abu Sayif, remnants of Saddam Hussein's elite inner circle, and an elite Special Forces team from North Korea.

This latter group kept itself apart from the others as much as possible. Mainly because their commander considered his men to be real soldiers and the others to be terrorists at best, although they considered themselves freedom fighters.

The commander, Major Min, once more read through the message his radio operator had decoded twenty minutes ago. It was the longest message he had ever seen transmitted over high frequency radio in all his years of special operations. He was holding a complete operations plan (OPLAN) for a new mission that was to commence immediately.

Min's face twisted in a sneer as he read the concept of operations. Those desk-bound fools in Kaesong! He looked up at the thatched roof of the hut that comprised his team's headquarters. Hyun was a small man, less than five and a half feet tall and weighing no more than 120 pounds dripping wet. He was the spitting image of Bruce Lee, the major difference being that Min had actually killed many more men than Bruce Lee had ever simulated killing in his movies.

"Get me Hyun," he snapped at Kim Chong Man. As his executive officer scurried out to the airstrip, Min leafed through the pages of the OPLAN, his mind trying to rationalize the words. This was going to be difficult, very difficult.

Min had been on this island for four months, supposedly advising the other groups on various Special Forces techniques, particularly bomb-making and covert operations. At least that's what they were supposed to be doing. Min had found that the other groups did not like getting advice. In his personal opinion, the real reason he and his men were here was to make a small political statement to these other groups that North Korea supported them in some manner.

Min had been in Special Forces for twenty-one years and had run more than his share of classified missions, so he was no stranger to being awakened in the middle of the night and handed an OPLAN. This one, however, was different in several important aspects. The first was the fact that it was outside of his immediate area of operations. The second was the strategic significance of the mission. It all looked very nice on paper, but implementation was going to require great sacrifices and effort. One of Min's favorite adages was that nothing was impossible to the man who didn't have to do it.

Typical bureaucratic thinking, Min thought with disdain as he read through. It was the same type of thinking that had left him in the DMZ infiltration tunnel north of Seoul two years ago when they should have pulled out at the first sign of compromise. Indecision in his chain of command had left him and his old team in there long enough for the South Koreans to flood it. Min shuddered as he remembered the torrent of water pouring into the tunnel and the muffled screams of the men who couldn't escape.

Hyun stepped in and snapped a salute, breaking Min out of his black reverie. "Captain Hyun reporting as ordered, sir."

Min looked at the short man in the flight suit with undisguised disgust. "What is your aircraft's range?"

Hyun blinked. "It is 6,500 kilometers with a one hour reserve, sir."

"We need to go 9,700 kilometers."

Hyun looked at Kim, who had accompanied the pilot in, and then back at the major. "We will have to refuel somewhere then, sir."

"If we had someplace to land and refuel I would have told you that." Min's voice was ice cold. "We need to travel 9,700 kilometers without refueling."

"That is impossible, sir."

"Make it possible. You have one hour to be ready to leave." Min turned his gaze to his XO. "Bring the team in and I will brief them."

Antarctica

"How long do you think he's been down here?" Vaughn asked as the rest of the party piled up their gear in the dimly lit space at the base of the stairs. The three flashlights combined with the dull reflected light from the still open door to produce a gloomy effect. The man wore unmarked Army fatigues under olive-drab cold-weather gear. There was no name tag on his shirt. He had the insignia of a captain pinned to his collar.

"He was probably the last one," Tai said, then corrected herself. "Well, the next to last one in here. Sometime in the fifties."

Vaughn pulled a poncho out of his rucksack and gently draped it over the body. "Whoever he worked for shot him in the back to keep him from talking about what he did and what he saw here. Judging by the size of the wounds, I'd say it was a small caliber gun. Probably a.22. You have to be damn good to kill someone with a gun that small."

Tai turned to the rest of the group. "We have got to find out everything we can about this place. I want to know who built it and why."

Vaughn began organizing the group. He stared down the corridor, his eyes trying to pick up details. His flashlight reflected off the metal sides and faded out after thirty feet. The ceiling, ten feet above, consisted of steel struts holding metal sheeting that blocked out the ice and snow. Conduits, pipes, and wires crisscrossed the ceiling, going in all directions. The corridor itself was about ten feet wide, and the floor was made up of wood planks, each separated by a few inches to allow snow and ice to fall through the cracks to the sloping steel floor below.

It was as cold down here as it was outside, but at least they were out of the wind. Vaughn went over to Smithers. "How's the head?"

Smithers pulled back the bandage. "I think the bleeding has stopped." He looked around. "We could use some heat, though."

Logan spoke up. "There ought to be some sort of generator or space heaters down here."

"You think they would still work after all this time?" Vaughn asked.

Logan nodded. "Oh, yes. Antarctica is the perfect place to preserve things. This body is proof of that-the man looks the same as the day he died. Think about it-the temperature never gets above freezing. There's no moisture. No bacteria.

"There are supplies in Shackleton's hut on Ross Island that were placed there in 1907 and are still edible today. I have no doubt that if we find the power source down here, or even a portable heater, we can get it going." He pointed his flashlight at a lightbulb set in a protective cage on the ceiling. "We might even get the lights on."

Tai shined her lights down the corridor. "Where do you think we'd find the power source?"

Logan shrugged. "I don't know. Let's go take a look."

Vaughn turned to the rest of the party. "Brothers, Burke, stay here with Smithers. Break out your sleeping bags and get in them. We're going to see if we can find the power source and get some heat going."

Vaughn, Tai, and Logan walked down the wood planking. After thirty feet the walls disappeared on either side and they entered a cross corridor. Straight ahead was a door. To the left, the corridor had a door, which was shut. To the right, the corridor was open for about ten feet, then a pile of ice and snow blocked the way.

Logan shined his light where pipes in the ceiling disappeared into the pile. "Looks like that's where some ice buckled the ceiling."

"Let's try the door on the left," Tai suggested.

They turned left and tried that door. It wasn't locked and opened easily. The flashlights revealed a room about thirty feet long and ten wide, full of electronic equipment.

"Looks like some sort of communications setup," Tai said. "Everything's way out of date, though."

Logan pointed his light at a pair of large boxes that hung down from the ceiling, one at either end. "This is one of the prefab units. Looks like they're each heated separately by those space heaters. That leaves the corridors under the ice at outside temperatures. The top of each unit is probably heavily insulated to keep the rising heat in."

"How would the power be provided?" Vaughn asked.

"Most likely oil burning generators," Logan said. "That's what runs the majority of the bases here, although they would have had to airlift in all that oil. At McMurdo they bring it in by ship, so it's not a major logistical problem. Here, I don't know."

Tai nodded. "The man I talked to who helped build this place said that they brought in a quite a few bladders of fuel."

Vaughn turned for the door. "We need to find whatever it is that burns that fuel, then."

Next, they went to the door that had been straight across. This unit seemed to be a nicely set-up living quarters. There were three sleeping areas, each separated by a thin wall. Traversing the entire length, they came to a door on the far side. They exited that and were faced with another side corridor extending off to the right and another door directly in front.

"Let's go straight through until we get to the end," Vaughn said.. If there's nothing in this row, we'll work up the next one over."

Logan swung open the door and they stepped in. Large stainless steel tanks lined both sides of a narrow walkway. The tanks were open on the top, and banks of dead lights hung low over them. There were pumps and various tubes arrayed throughout the room.

"What is this?"

Logan shined his flashlight inside one of the tanks. "I don't know. It reminds me of something I've seen before, but I can't place it right now."

They walked the length of that unit and went through the door. The last unit on the row beckoned. Logan pushed open the door and they walked in.

"Ah, this is more like it," Logan said as he turned the flashlight on the machinery inside. "This must be the power room. Look, there's a control panel." He walked over to a console full of dials and switches to the left of the door. "There's the 'on' for the master power, but I'm sure we have no battery power."

He pressed the button with his thumb. Nothing.

"There must be a small auxiliary generator around here to start the main off of." He flashed the light on the other side. "Here we go."

Vaughn watched as he knelt down next to a medium-sized portable generator and unscrewed a cap, shining his flashlight inside. "It's even got fuel. Hold the light while I prime it."

Vaughn hovered over his shoulder as Logan worked. After about five minutes Logan stood. "All right. Let's give it a shot." He held a knob attached to a cord in his hand and pulled.

"Shit," he muttered as the cord didn't move. He pulled more carefully, and the cord slowly unwound. Then he squatted and thrust upward. The engine turned over once with a burp. "Damn. This thing is stubborn."

Vaughn didn't say a word. He found it remarkable that they were trying to start a generator that had sat down there for almost half a century. The concept of a place where nothing deteriorated or rusted was a hard one to grasp.

After five more tries the engine coughed, sputtered, and turned over for almost ten seconds before dying.

"I've got it now." Logan adjusted the choke and pulled once more. The generator sputtered and then roared into life. He let it run on high for a few minutes and then turned the choke down.

"All right. Let's see how we get the main started while that warms up." He took the flashlight from Vaughn's hands, played it over the control panel and laughed. "They've got all the instructions right here, almost as if they expected someone who didn't know how to run this thing to try and start it. Hell, it's even numbered.

"Okay, we've already accomplished step one by getting the auxiliary started. The next step is to open up the main fuel line." He moved to the left of the console and looked up. "Here's the valve."

Vaughn heard a few seconds of metal screeching.

"Okay. We've got fuel. Now we prime this baby." Logan worked for a few minutes, following the instructions step by step. "Last-but not least-we open the power line from the aux to the main generator and give it some juice."

Vaughn watched as lights flickered and glowed on the console. Gradually they steadied. Logan looked over the gauges. "Ready?" he asked.

"Yes."

He pressed the starter button. The lights on the board dimmed, and they heard a sputtering noise behind the console. The sputtering shifted to a whine and then a rhythmic rumble after thirty seconds.

Logan was examining another row of controls to the right. "Here's a bunch of switches labeled north, middle and south, east and west tunnels." Vaughn looked over his shoulder at the schematic of the corridors of the base. At least he could get oriented now. The surface shaft where they had come down opened onto the north end of the east corridor.

Logan threw all the switches, and light suddenly streamed in through the open doorway. "All right!" he yelled.

Vaughn looked at the doorway and flicked on the light switch just inside of it. The room was flooded with the glow from the overheads. He looked down at the other end of the room. "What's that for?"

Logan turned. The entire far end of the unit was filled with massive control panels with uncountable gauges. It made the main generator board look puny. A three-by-three-foot panel with a triangular warning sign was recessed into the left side. Logan walked the twenty feet to it and looked the setup over.

"Oh my God. I don't believe it. I don't fucking believe it."

Tai and Vaughn hurried up to him. "What's the matter?" Tai asked.

Logan looked at Vaughn, his face ashen. "This is the control panel for a nuclear reactor."