Eternity Base

Chapter 6

The phone woke the old man out of a deep sleep. The young woman who was sharing the bed rose without a word and slipped toward the door, not even taking the time to put on a robe. As the door closed on her pert rear end, the man hit the speaker button.

“Peter here.”

“This is Lazarus. I’ve checked out the Pintella woman. She knows little other than that the base is in Antarctica. The exact location is secure. She found some old photos in a file from the engineer unit that built the place. I will secure the photos.”

“Good.”

“We have another problem, though.” The man’s voice paused and then continued. “Pintella told someone about what she found.”

“Who?”

“Her sister. Conner Young. She’s a reporter for SNN. Apparently SNN is planning to send a news team down to Antarctica to check out the story.”

Peter sat up in the bed, flexing the muscles in his right arm as his eyes focused on the phone. “I already know about the SNN contact. Is that the only person she told?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right. I’ll handle SNN. You take care of your end there in St. Louis.”

“Yes, sir.”

Peter terminated the conversation. He sat for a long time, thinking of options. He knew better than to react immediately — there were possibilities to be explored. And, of course, he already had a plan in place at SNN to provide damage control. After forty minutes and several phone calls, the course of action was determined. He dialed Atlanta.

“I’m Conner Young. I will be the team chief for this trip.” Conner looked at the three men assembled around the conference table. “I’d like each of you to introduce yourself.”

An overweight man with thinning gray hair took the initiative. “I’m Les Lallo. Cameraman.”

Seated next to him, a young man with a sallow face under an unruly mop of blond hair bobbed his head nervously. “Tom Kerns. Sound.”

The last man’s voice rumbled. “Keith Vickers. Satellite communications and computer.” Vickers was a large man and looked as though he spent all his time off in the weight room. The muscles under the black skin of his arms rippled and flowed. His shaved head reflected the fluorescent lights in the ceiling.

Conner reached forward and hit a button on the remote built into the tabletop. The men studied the map that appeared on the screen. “What are we going there for?” Lallo asked as he recognized the location.

“The purpose of our trip is to find a place called Eternity Base. It was constructed somewhere in Antarctica in 1971 by a U.S. Army engineer company.”

“What do you mean ‘somewhere in Antarctica’?” Lallo pointed at the screen. “That’s a pretty big place.”

“Right now, all we know is that this place is a little less than a two hour plane ride from McMurdo Station.” Conner wanted to keep the information about the faxed pictures to herself for the time being. Sammy’s warning had made some impression.

“What kind of place is this Eternity Base?” Kerns asked. “And why do we want to find it?”

“It’s a group of buildings constructed under the ice. We want to find it because the existence of the place has been secret.”

Lallo was interested in her first sentence. “If it was built under the ice, how are you going to find it?”

Conner fixed him with a stare. It was time to establish the chain of command. She’d found that men tended to usurp control unless firmly kept in their place. “You’re here to work the camera, right?”

Lallo shrugged. “Yes.”

“How we find Eternity Base is my problem and I’ll take care of it. The purpose of this meeting is to work out the logistics of getting from here to Antarctica.”

Lallo obviously felt put in his place, and he shut up. It was Kerns who asked the next question. “How do we even know it exists?”

“Because there were photos taken of it.”

The communications man, Vickers, stirred for the first time. “Do you have the photos? I’d like to take a look.”

Conner shook her head. “I don’t have them yet.”

Lallo and Kerns exchanged a look. The older man spoke very carefully. “Ms. Young, may I say something?”

She nodded.

“We’re going to be working together for ten days. Now, I know this is probably a very important story to you, since you’re new here. Tom and I… well, we want to help you out as much as possible. For this to work, you’ve got to tell us everything. That goes from the day-today stuff to the story. The better we understand how you are approaching the story, the better we can help you with the shots and the sound. We’re all a bit behind the power curve here because we got notified of this tasking less than an hour ago, so you’re going to have to bear with us a little bit.”

Vickers agreed, pointing at the screen. “Mister Lallo is right about the location. This is a very big area.”

Conner tapped the map. “We’re pretty certain that the base is to the south or east of McMurdo Station.” Her long, manicured finger swept across a large white area labeled Ross Ice Shelf and came to rest on the far side. “It’s probably somewhere here in the Transantarctic Mountains or in Marie Byrd Land. Maybe even in the vicinity of a base that was abandoned in 1972: Byrd Station, located right here.” Her finger was resting in the middle of what appeared to be a vast expanse of nothingness. She’d studied the map; based on what Devlin had told her and her own common sense, this was the best she could come up with.

“We will be met in New Zealand by an expert on Antarctica, and with his help, and the information we do have, I feel certain we’ll find the base. We have four days from arriving at McMurdo, and we will have access to a plane from Our Earth the entire time to help us in the search.”

Lallo nodded slowly. “Can I add something else, Ms. Young?”

Conner considered him for a long second and then nodded.

Lallo leaned forward in his seat. “I know you’re new here, but I’ve been on this kind of fishing expedition before. Sometimes Mr. Parker seems to get a wild hair up his ass, and he sends a news team out on some crazy story. Most of the time they come up with nothing, but every once in a while they hit pay dirt.” Vickers turned to his young partner, Kerns. “Tom, remember Mexico?”

The soundman put his hands over his eyes. “Oh, God! Don’t remind me. I still have nightmares about that.”

“What happened in Mexico?” Conner inquired.

“We went down there because someone had some information — or so they claimed — about the lost treasure of Cortez,” Lallo explained. “We spent two whole weeks crawling through jungle and climbing mountains. Tom damn near had a heatstroke hauling his gear.”

“Yeah, but at least we still have a job,” Kerns threw in.

Lallo agreed. “Correct. That poor reporter we went with — what was his name? Hornacek or something? Anyway, Parker fired his ass the moment we got off the plane for coming back with nothing. That man uses people like sponges.”

Conner looked at the map once more and turned back to the room with a big smile. “Well, you won’t have to worry about heatstroke this time.” She pulled the itinerary out of a folder. Time for business — not war stories. “We depart from Atlanta at six this evening. Nonstop to San Francisco. Then from there to…” Conner ignored the dismayed look on all three men’s faces as she ran through the brutal travel schedule. “If all goes as planned, we arrive at Auckland International on Saturday evening at seven. From there we will be met by a representative of Our Earth, who will arrange transportation down to their base in the Antarctic.”

She put down that piece of paper and picked up another, a copy of which she handed to each man. “This is the list of equipment I want brought.” She looked around. “Are there any questions?”

Three heads indicated negatively. Conner felt good for the first time in a while. She was in charge, and that always gave her confidence.

The aide to the North Korean ambassador to the United Nations looked through the printout, as he did every day, seven days a week, every week of the year, marking the lines with highlighters. Blue meant forward to higher headquarters; green meant requires more information before forwarding; and yellow, no significance and delete.

Three-quarters of the way through the printout a four-line entry caught his attention:

The aide reread the lines again. He was intrigued — as much by what wasn’t mentioned in those four lines as what was. If his agent at SNN, Loki, had more information on Eternity Base, it would have been included. The lack of information meant that this was the first mention of Eternity Base that Loki had come across. Most interesting. The aide used his green marker and moved on to the next item.