The Black Knight

XV

‘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!’