The Black Knight

XXXVI

Ethan reached the main blast door of the base with Hannah alongside him and Del Toro behind them both, and together they slid the braces out from behind the door and opened it a crack. Ethan saw the docks extending away from them, the tunnel in the distance dimly illuminated by the fading light of the glow sticks scattered across the dock, and could just make out the shadowy forms of men hiding in the darkness within.

‘This is pretty much suicide,’ Del Toro whispered. ‘They’re gonna shoot you down rather than let you go.’

Ethan pushed ahead through the open door.

‘I’m hoping that their curiosity will get the better of them,’ he replied.

Hannah followed him reluctantly out onto the dock as Del Toro slammed the blast door shut behind them. Ethan noted that he heard only one brace being slid back into place on the far side of the door, Del Toro likely standing by in case they had to run to get back inside.

‘What the hell are you going to say to them?’ Hannah asked in an urgent whisper. ‘Pretty please can we have our friend back?’

‘I hadn’t got that far in my thinking yet,’ Ethan said as he walked at a steady pace, hoping to veil any sign of nerves as they closed in on the tunnel entrance.

‘Reassuring as always.’

Ethan kept walking until he reached a spot perhaps twenty yards from the tunnel mouth, where he came to a stop and waited patiently. A few moments later the deep voice boomed out across the cavern.

‘Ethan Warner, I figured you’d show up sooner or later.’

Ethan did not betray any surprise that this man knew his name. Given their repeated encounters with agents of Majestic Twelve, it in fact only confirmed that they were indeed facing MJ-12’s mercenaries and not the military of some other country hell bent on beating America to the Black Knight.

‘Like a bad penny,’ Ethan replied, peering into the darkness but unable to see much. ‘You know that you’re being paid to walk to your deaths up here, right? You know who your employers are, don’t you?’

‘Need to know basis,’ came the reply, ‘and we’re being paid well enough to have no problem in icing you and your team. Our government knows that we’re here.’

Ethan smiled.

‘That’s strange, because it’s our government that sent our team here too, so how come you’re firing on fellow Americans?’

‘Our mission is our priority! Surrender your positions and you’ll be allowed to leave peacefully!’

Ethan glanced at the corpse of the MJ-12 soldier lying nearby, a ragged bullet wound in his skull bleeding black blood onto the icy dock.

‘Like your comrade here?’ Ethan asked. ‘Nice of you to put him out of his misery.’

‘He was no longer an asset,’ boomed the reply.

Ethan grinned, keen to sow dissent among this man’s followers.

‘Neither is our friend Amy,’ he replied, ‘but we’re standing here hoping to get her back, not putting a bullet in her head for being an inconvenience.’

‘My men are behind me,’ came the reply, ‘and they’re not going to walk away from me, so you can quit the divide and conquer routine.’

‘You’re no military commander,’ Ethan said, ‘you’re a fake who hides behind his men, a coward.’

Ethan heard a rustle of movement and from the shadows loomed a huge man with a thick, black beard that was laced with ice. He peered at Ethan from the mouth of the tunnel, radiating hatred from his every pore.

‘It’s been a long time since anybody dared call me that.’

‘So it’s happened before then,’ Ethan replied. ‘Got us a pattern developing there, don’t we?’

The figure took a pace closer and Ethan spotted a glint of light coming from a pistol the big man held in his hands.

‘Surrender your positions or die,’ he rumbled.

‘Sorry, no can do,’ Ethan chortled in response, covering his fear of death with a bizarre carefree attitude that surprised even himself considering the dire circumstances. ‘Amy won’t make a damn of difference because our priorities match yours. Give her up and maybe we can work together on this little problem of ours.’

The big man’s eyes widened for a moment and then he chuckled, shook his head.

‘Here’s what I intend to do with them if you don’t surrender your positions.’

The big man whistled briefly, and two of his soldiers marched out with a thin, pale man clutched between them. The victim was half naked, shivering with cold, his skin an unhealthy shade of blue. Before Ethan could even speak, the two soldiers suddenly rushed forward and hurled the hostage into the freezing water of the dock.

Ethan instinctively moved to help as Amy cried out in horror, but he knew that to enter the water was suicide. The thin man cried out in agony as he surfaced and gasped for air, his lungs and limbs paralyzed with the cold and unable to swim to safety.

‘Get him out of there!’ Amy screamed at the man holding her.

‘Surrender your positions!’ he boomed back at Ethan.

Ethan was about to cry out to the SEALs to surrender, to save the poor man’s life as he thrashed weakly in the water, when suddenly the black water surged and something enormous loomed beneath the thin man. Ethan’s heart skipped a beat as the scientist suddenly screamed in fresh pain and was yanked under the surface.

The entire chamber fell abruptly silent as the water lapped near the edge of the dock. Ethan stared at the surface of the water as Hannah’s voice broke the silence.

‘What the hell was that?’

Ethan could not break his gaze from the dock as something rose up and broke the surface. He heard Amy gasp in horror and recoil away as a severed leg, its skin a pale blue, emerged to float upon the icy water amid a cloud of scarlet blood.

The big man holding Amy twisted her to face the black water.

‘So, shall I send her for a swim?’

Ethan heard from behind the big man a ripple of agreement, saw a series of tiny red points of light bloom into life on his chest and Hannah alongside him as infrared sights lined up on his body.

‘No escape,’ the big man rumbled as he raised his pistol to point at Ethan, ‘and now I have three captives instead of two. Get down on the ground, lay flat. You move, I’ll blow your goddamned heads off!’

Ethan slowly began to raise his hands above his head, Hannah beside him doing the same as he prepared to get down on his knees.

‘They’ll blow the tunnel,’ Hannah whispered beneath her breath.

‘You grab Amy,’ Ethan whispered back, ‘just get her back to the base.’

Ethan got onto his knees, Hannah alongside him, and was about to lay flat when the cavern suddenly shuddered and a soaring moan erupted from the walls as the black water of the docks once again rippled in perfectly symmetrical eddies.

The moan soared louder and Ethan felt it once again reverberate through his chest as he almost toppled sideways, the vibrations shuddering through the dock beneath him as before him he saw the big man sway to one side.

‘Now,’ he whispered to himself, hoping against hope that Sully would time his detonation well.

Ethan squeezed his eyes shut and ducked his head as he moved his hands from his head to cover his ears, and a moment later a blinding flash seared his vision as behind the big man a blast thundered through the tunnel as the C4 charges were detonated.

Ethan scrambled to his feet with his eyes still shut and his hands over his ears in time to feel the shockwave from the blast hammer into him. He drove into it, opened his eyes and reached for his pistol as he saw the big man hit the dock face down before him and Amy spin away to one side and tumble to her knees on the icy dock.

Ethan lunged for her, reached out with one hand and grabbed her wrist as he yanked her to her feet and almost threw her at Hannah, who staggered upright and reached out for Amy’s hand.

Ethan ducked as a withering hail of fire erupted from the SEALs inside the base and plunged over his head into the mouth of the tunnel. A cacophony of screams and shouts of alarm roared from the tunnel as injured men regained consciousness enough to start screaming and others shouted commands and tried to get further back into the tunnel and out of sight.

Ethan saw Hannah and Amy running for the base as he turned and saw the big man dash out of sight into the blackness of the tunnel, firing blindly behind him as he went. Ethan whirled and sprinted down the dock, the whole cavern shaking as though it were about to tumble down around him, and he realized that the detonation of the C4 charge may have been the trigger necessary to finally bury them beneath billions of tons of ice.

The base door opened before him and he saw Hannah and Amy plunge through the opening as Del Toro appeared and aimed his rifle at Ethan. Ethan flinched as shots whizzed past, aimed not at him but at the tunnel behind to cover his escape, and moments later he plunged into the base as Del Toro retreated inside and slammed the door shut.

The rumbling and trembling began to subside as Ethan paused to catch his breath at the base of the stairwell.

‘You’re too lucky, Warner,’ Del Toro observed as he checked the magazine of his rifle. ‘Those quakes are getting more frequent.’

‘Yeah,’ Ethan gasped in reply, certain that without the unexpected tremor he and Hannah would have likely been hit.

Amy leaped across to Ethan and flung her arms about his neck. He could see that she was injured, blood trickling from her ears where the shockwave from the blast had hit her hard, but otherwise she appeared okay as he returned the embrace and then looked down at her.

‘His name’s Veer,’ she said. ‘Andrei Veer, and they’ll follow him wherever he goes. They don’t care about who lives and who dies, they’re being paid too much money. They executed one of my assistants right outside on the ice.’

Ethan nodded.

‘Mercenaries don’t care much for the lives of others,’ he replied, ‘these guys are in this for the money and Majestic Twelve sure has plenty of that.’

‘It’s only a matter of time before they launch an assault against the base and overrun us,’ Hannah pointed out, ‘especially now they’re under threat of being blasted into pieces inside that tunnel.’

Del Toro nodded and was about to speak when Doctor Chandler hurried down to meet them.

‘You need to see this, right now,’ he said.

The team followed the Doctor, who hurried up the stairwell and into the control center where Riggs and the rest of the team were keeping watch on the docks. Ethan helped Amy into a chair as he looked up expectantly at Riggs.

‘How’s the sub’?’ he asked.

‘It’ll hold water and the batteries are on charge,’ Riggs replied, ‘which is why you need to hear this.’

Riggs looked at Chandler, who gestured to the map of the base pinned to the far wall that Ethan had found.

‘I’ve had a chance to study this schematic,’ Chandler said, ‘and I’m afraid that it does not bode well for us.’

‘We kinda figured we were up the creek without a paddle already, genius,’ Hannah uttered in reply. ‘Get to the point.’

Ethan suppressed a smile. It was almost like having Lopez alongside him.

‘The chamber was indeed supplied with energy by a series of turbines, which had been inserted into deep water channels upstream from the main base where we now stand,’ Chandler explained. ‘The glacier’s weight, along with the force of water reaching us from Lake Vostok and other subterranean bodies of water, mean that the flow is under extremely high pressure. This was an advantage for the Nazis, who were able to harness that pressure to ensure a good flow of electrical energy to this facility. However, decades of being abandoned have weakened the structures they put in place to protect the turbines and now they’re all on the verge of failure.’

‘Which means what?’ Ethan asked.

‘The turbines are mostly locked in position at this time as a result of rust and seizures,’ Chandler explained, ‘which means that instead of turning with the flow of water and generating power they’re effectively acting like dams, holding the flow back. Because the water is no longer flowing it loses what little heat it has and freezes, blocking the channels. The cavitation in the water of the docks and the low frequency emissions we’re hearing are not the sounds of some gigantic beast as we first feared, but of the entire base coming under increasing pressure from the build-up of high pressure water behind the blockages.’

‘I think I know where this is going,’ Ethan murmured as he looked at the map.

‘It’s why the entire cavern system periodically floods,’ Chandler explained. ‘The turbines fail and are crushed beneath the pressure, and the water flows past once more and rushes into the cavern and docks, flooding it until the pressure equalizes once more and the excess flow drains away out of the tunnel we used to enter the base.’

Hannah leaned against a wall.

‘How long?’ she asked. ‘Before it happens again?’

Chandler’s features had paled slightly.

‘It could happen next week or in the next two minutes, but it’s imminent.’

‘Any other ways out?’ Ethan asked Riggs, already knowing the answer.

‘Nope,’ Riggs replied, ‘and that submarine only has two seats. Truth time, people — we’re not getting out of this base alive.’