The Black Knight

XXVI

General Veer held onto the railings in the rear of the ATV as it slowed at the head of a convoy of eight vehicles, those that had survived the tactical descent onto the ice fields and the gunfight with the Navy SEAL team.

Before them was a long, low ridge that rose up off the glacier, churned ice and chunks of snow littering its banks. Veer could see as he jumped down off the ATV that the disturbance was recent and that the ski gliders had stopped nearby, their tracks in the snow clearly visible.

The other ATVs switched off their engines and his men dismounted, already down from their original hundred to about eighty five. Three had still been alive after the SEALs had dumped the C4 charges out on the ice fields, badly injured and in need of urgent medical attention. General Veer had ensured that they received the best possible care during a time of such urgency by personally executing them where they lay. Now his men stood and watched him in silence as he clambered up the ridge line and peered down into the shadowy blue depths of the chasm below him.

Rappel pins were still lodged in the rock hard ice, the lines descending down into the fissure and vanishing into the blackness far below. Several of Veer’s officers joined him on the edge of the ridge and peered down inside it.

‘No other way out,’ one of them observed. ‘They’ve taken a hell of a risk leaving us such a clear trail.’

Veer looked up across the plains.

‘They managed to conceal their vehicles though,’ he observed. ‘Send a few men out to find them. They won’t have gone around an obstacle this large, they wouldn’t have had enough time, so they must be under cover somewhere to the east of here.’

An officer immediately hurried down the ridge again and began giving orders as Veer crouched down on one knee and ran his gloved hand down his thick beard as another officer, a former Green Beret, spoke up.

‘Whatever the hell they’re looking for, it’s important enough for them to virtually guarantee their deaths here. They’re barely bothering to disguise what they’re up to.’

General Veer nodded thoughtfully. He had been contacted forty eight hours before by a man named Victor Wilms. Well connected and supremely wealthy, or at least his benefactors were, Wilms had made Veer an offer he simply could not refuse: raise a team of one hundred men, get them to Antarctica and recover an American satellite from rogue forces attempting to sabotage United States interests in the region. The price? Ten million dollars now to raise the group, a further ten million after successful completion of the mission. No taxes, no fuss and no questions asked.

It had taken all of Veer’s mental strength to demand fifteen million dollars or there would be no deal. He had got it without question and immediately wished he’d asked for twenty. Even at that early stage, he had wondered whether the mysterious object he was being asked to recover would not be worth more to him than the payment from Wilms.

‘They must have further support,’ Veer decided as he looked along the length of the ridge, which extended into the distance toward the south east. ‘The SEALs must be an advanced force, with maybe a Naval vessel or two on its way to back them up. We need to move fast or we’ll get boxed in and it’ll be us who are outnumbered.’

Veer stood and strode back down the ridge.

‘Bring me the prisoners!’ he boomed.

His officers hurried to the back of one of the ATV’s, in which lay huddled two hostages pulled from the wreckage of several ski gliders damaged in battle, both of them injured and bound hand and foot. The soldiers hauled them up onto their feet and dragged them out onto the ice.

General Veer could see at once that neither of the captives was a military soldier, which pleased him greatly. SEALs were notoriously tough and trained to be able to withstand interrogation techniques of all kinds, whereas the scientists that had evidently travelled with them were civilians, the weak link in the chain.

The man was middle-aged and virtually bald, the other a young girl with bobbed brown hair who stood shivering on the ice. Veer had ordered their Arctic jackets removed to expose them to the bitter chill, which according to the read-out on his digital watch was a fresh minus twelve in the wind. He moved to stand before them.

‘I’ll make this simple,’ he said. ‘If you don’t tell me what I need to know, I will kill you both. It’s quite likely that your remains will still be here in a thousand years’ time, because I won’t shoot you — I’ll have you buried to your necks in the ice.’

Veer let that fact sink into their minds, let them dwell on how long they would spend being cold before hypothermia would finally lead to death. In truth it probably would not be long but Veer liked toying with the idea of prolonged agony.

‘Your names,’ he demanded.

‘Harrison,’ said the man.

‘Amy,’ the woman replied, her voice barely audible above the bitter winds.

‘Tell me why you are here with those soldiers.’

The balding man looked up at Veer with pleading eyes, his words stumbling from his blue lips as he tried to speak.

‘Please… I have two children…, don’t leave us out here.’

Veer gestured to his officers. ‘Bury him over there.’

The balding man’s eyes flew wide and he screamed as he was dragged away across the glacier by several soldiers, all of them chuckling grimly at his protests. Veer looked at the young girl.

‘Last chance,’ he said, ‘to save yourself and your friend over there.’

‘It’s called Black Knight,’ the scientist gabbled, struggling to get her words out fast enough amid the freezing cold and the desperate cries of her colleague from nearby. ‘It’s a satellite that came down.’

Veer took a pace closer to her. ‘Now tell me something I don’t know.’

‘It’s not ours,’ she mumbled. ‘It’s not Russian, or anybody’s. It wasn’t built by humans.’

General Veer stared at the girl for a long moment and then looked at his officers. ‘That explains the rush to get down here.’

‘It’s been in orbit for thousands of years,’ the scientist went on, ‘and now it’s come down and we’re trying to retrieve it for the government.’

‘Whose government?’ Veer demanded.

She frowned. ‘Our government, the United States. We’re employed by the Defense Intelligence Agency.’

The general peered at the girl before him for a moment, and then he realized that she was telling the truth. If the Navy team was indeed working for the US Government, then that meant that Wilms had been…

Veer turned away from the scientist and walked out across the ice to where the other scientist was being forced to dig his own ice grave on the glacier, weeping and shivering as the soldiers around him waited impatiently. Veer strode up to the scientist and grabbed him by the throat, lifting him up onto his toes as he growled into his face.

‘Who are you working for?’ he demanded.

The scientist croaked his response, his eyes bulging. ‘Defense Intelligence Agency.’

Veer released his grip and the man collapsed to his knees on the ice as the general considered what he had been told. Wilms was a liar and had just spent ten million bucks on an armed force to recover his mysterious alien box of tricks for him under the pretence of Veer working for the government. The fact that FBI Director Gordon LeMay was in on the deal had convinced Veer of Wilms’s credentials, but now…

Veer looked at the ridge line. He had a choice: he had already pocketed four million of the ten million dollars he had been paid by Wilms, the cash squirrelled away in some off shore accounts for when he got back. He could have hired another twenty men with the cash, but he hadn’t reckoned on coming up against Navy SEALs so he’d figured what the hell. Wilms had promised him another ten million on completion, but Veer now wondered just how likely that payment would be. If Wilms was not working with the FBI, then who the hell was he working for and what were the chances of them honoring payment? If the scientists were right, and Veer had no reason to think otherwise seeing as their lives were in his hands, then such a device, an alien satellite, would be worth a hundred times what he was being paid.

Veer looked down at the scientist sobbing on his knees and was overcome with a sense of regret and compassion. He couldn’t let the father of two freeze in the ice alone out here.

Veer stepped back, drew his pistol and aimed it at the scientist’s head. Before the man could respond and beg for his life Veer fired. A spray of crimson blood splattered the ice behind the kneeling man and he toppled onto the glacier, his eyes staring lifelessly at the blue sky above as Veer holstered his pistol and strode back toward the remaining scientist.

The girl collapsed in horror to her knees and promptly vomited onto the ice as Veer strode across to her.

‘He refused to help me,’ Veer growled. ‘For your sake, I suggest you decide otherwise. Can this Black Knight satellite be transported?’

The scientist’s head bobbed frantically up and down as she nodded, her face twisted with fear and disgust.

‘It’s solid and it survived aeons in deep space, it can be moved.’

Veer nodded and turned to his men. ‘Get her a coat and hot coffee. I want her on her feet and moving with us within twenty minutes!’

The troops hurried to carry out their orders as Veer turned to his officers.

‘I want ten men up here to guard the entrance to the chasm,’ he snapped. ‘If they try to come out before us then blow them all to hell. The rest of us will go down there and retrieve the object with maximum force, no considerations, understood?’

The officers nodded.

‘Get to it then!’ Veer boomed.

The soldiers dashed to prepare for their mission as Veer turned and surveyed the wilderness around them. At best, he reckoned he had twenty four hours before the might of the United States Navy descended on the area. At worst he would walk away from the mission with four million bucks tucked away, but if he could recover this Black Knight and get it out of the continent he would make a hundred times that, or even more.

All he had to do was ensure that Navy didn’t take it from him.