The Black Knight

XXXVII

‘This is not a good idea.’

Hannah Ford stood on the dock beside the Seehund midget submarine as Lieutenant Riggs and his SEALs hurriedly prepared her for diving. The U-Boat was an ugly black vessel emblazoned with the red stencil numbering of the Nazi fleet, the Kriegsmarine.

‘If this is your plan,’ Riggs added as he worked, ‘then your plan sucks.’

Ethan shared their concerns but he knew that there was no option but to use the tiny submarine to get below the surface and recover Black Knight. What he could not be sure of was what they were going to encounter beneath the waves. Not only would they have to contend with the frigid Antarctic waters, the danger of glacial collapses, the limited energy supply of the submarine and its antiquated controls, but they would also have to be ready to encounter something that was not of this world.

‘We’ll just go down, grab it, and bring it back to the surface,’ Ethan assured her.

‘Sounds easy if you say it quickly enough,’ Hannah mumbled in reply.

Lieutenant Riggs jumped down from the sub’s hull and looked her over one last time.

‘She’s good to go. The hull is secure, no leaks that I can find, so she’s in good shape considering how long she’s been here and you’re lucky — most Seehunds didn’t have ballast tanks but this one has been modified to carry them. My men are trained for this sort of thing and should be the ones going down there, and your experience is only barely enough to control the Seehund. Are you sure you want to go through with this?’

Ethan shook his head.

‘Hell no, I want to be at home with a beer watching the damned game but we’re here so we might as well get on with it. You’re going to need all the firepower you can get up there on the docks, so it makes sense to send somebody else. Get the hell out of here and get on with it.’

Riggs nodded and looked across at Doctor Chandler, who was standing nearby with his hands shoved in the pockets of his Arctic coat, his head almost completely concealed beneath his hood.

‘Are you all hooked up and ready to go?’ Riggs asked him.

Ethan had arranged for the doctor to provide a digital communications link to the dock, so that if they encountered anything that they could not overcome they could fall back on the scientist’s knowledge to help them through.

‘The data link is in place, and communications should be possible to some extent through the water,’ Chandler confirmed. ‘However, there is a common phenomenon in deep water known as thermal layering, whereby denser cold water can move below warmer water and create a barrier to communications. Given what we know about the flow from Lake Vostok beneath the glacier, you may find that at times we cannot communicate.’

‘Perfect,’ Hannah replied. ‘Anything else we might need to know about?’

Riggs gestured to the torpedo clamps on the submarine’s hull, and at the bow section.

‘The clamps are definitely strong enough to lift whatever’s down there, given what we know about its size and mass, but when you resurface you’ll have to come up real careful or you’ll smash the artifact against the dock wall. Do that and you might compromise the hull, which will likely sink you.’

‘Smashing,’ Hannah uttered.

‘There’s a a watertight section of the bow that used to contain a depth charge device that might help you to hook onto whatever’s down there, but you’ll probably have to improvise once you get a look at this thing.’

Ethan was about to grab Hannah’s arm and guide her as gently as possible aboard the submarine before she finally lost her nerve when Amy appeared at the dock hatch and hurried down toward them.

‘Wait for me!’ She hurried across and pointed at the submarine. ‘You need me on this one.’

Ethan shook his head. ‘This is too dangerous.’

Amy shot Ethan an accusing glare. ‘Yeah, right, and being in an unstable Second World War secret Nazi base beneath a moving glacier while under attack from gunmen is the safe option, right?’

‘This submarine might not make it back to the surface and we don’t know what we’ll find down there,’ Ethan replied. ‘It’s not your risk to take.’

‘It’s every bit my risk to take,’ Amy insisted. ‘You can’t take Doctor Chandler, you don’t have any experience in sub-aquatic Arctic environments and Hannah is clearly scared out of her wits!’

‘Hey!’ Hannah protested. ‘I’m just a little concerned about being dunked in a rusting tin can under ten billion tons of ice is all. Cut me a break!’

‘I’m not concerned,’ Amy insisted to Ethan. ‘This is my specialty — it’s why I’m here. You need me down there and they need Hannah up here. She can shoot, I can’t. It makes sense and you damned well know it.’

Ethan bit his lip and glanced at Riggs, who shrugged.

‘Don’t argue with a woman,’ was all that he could say.

‘Damn it,’ Ethan uttered as he released Hannah’s arm. ‘Okay, you’re up.’

Amy’s face beamed with delight as she clambered gamely up the submarine’s hull, a chunky digital camera dangling on a strap about her neck as she called back to Chandler.

‘Use the sonar buoy to increase the communications signal beneath the ice! It might help to burn through any thermal layers we encounter.’

Chandler’s features lit up and he called back. ‘Good idea!’

Hannah looked at Ethan. ‘Looks like you’re in good hands.’

Ethan smiled with a confidence he did not feel. ‘Cover our asses,’ he replied. ‘I don’t want to come back with Black Knight and have to hand it over to Veer and his men.’

‘Over my dead body, literally,’ Hannah assured him. ‘Be careful.’

‘You too.’

Amy’s voice called to him from the submarine’s entrance hatch, where she had attached a small digital video camera attached by a lead to a laptop computer that was tucked under her arm.

‘Are you getting on board or what?!’

Ethan took a deep breath and then clambered up the hull of the U-Boat and climbed carefully into the narrow confines of the tower. He reached over and took one last look at the dock before he pulled the clear dome hatch over his head and closed it, sealing it shut.

The interior of the submarine was cramped and dark, Amy moving into the engineer’s position at the front while Ethan took the commander’s position right behind her. His seat was provided with a periscope and a view through the clear acrylic dome for navigational purposes which could survive depths of almost a hundred and fifty feet, and he familiarized himself with his surroundings as he prepared to dive the vessel. The batteries were in the keel of the pressure hull, while a twenty two horsepower diesel engine was fitted for surface use, which Riggs had figured would give a maximum speed of around five knots. Below the surface, a twenty five horsepower electric motor provided a submerged maximum speed of seven knots.

Ethan reached out and activated the batteries by flipping a series of switches. The German inscriptions didn’t help matters, but Riggs had been familiar enough with such submarines to be able to give Ethan a guide as to which switch did what.

The Seehund hummed into life as the batteries fed power to the electric motor, and a few small indicator lights lit up green as pressure gauges whipped into life and various other meters began indicating oxygen reserves and other essential information.

‘Time to go,’ Ethan said. ‘Ready?’

‘Ready,’ Amy confirmed, giving him a gloved thumbs-up over her shoulder, her face buried in the laptop as she scrutinized the visuals from the underwater camera she had attached in front of the dome.

Ethan closed his eyes for a brief moment and hoped that this time he had not taken a step too far. He truly wished that Lopez were with him, or that Hannah had prevailed and not given up her seat to Amy.

Then, he pulled a lever. The ballast tanks issued forth a rush of compressed air that bubbled upon the water’s surface as it was allowed to bleed from vents along the hull, and with alarming speed the Seehund sank beneath the waves.

Ethan looked up and caught a last glimpse of the dock, Riggs and Hannah watching them vanish beneath the water, and then they shimmered into a rippling image of light and darkness as bubbles streamed past the acrylic dome and darkness consumed the submarine.

Ethan reached out and, cautious of draining the submarine’s batteries too quickly, illuminated only a single navigation lamp. A beam of harsh white light scythed into the blackness and flared off the walls of a vertical shaft hacked into the glacier itself.

‘It’s man-made,’ Amy marveled. ‘The Nazis cut down into the ice and made this dock.’

‘Delighted for them,’ Ethan murmured in reply as he concentrated on controlling the submarine and preventing either the bow or stern from bumping into the walls of the shaft.

He glanced periodically at the pressure gauges, which told him both the pressure and the temperature outside the hull. The acrylic dome could only take so much pressure, and with the water being compressed in places beneath the ice he knew that one false move could breach the dome. Their lives would be measured in seconds if such a catastrophic breach were to occur.

The lights continued to reflect off the walls of the shaft, and then suddenly the light that was illuminating Ethan’s acrylic sphere weakened as the submarine descended out of the shaft and into complete darkness, the light beam spreading out and vanishing into the black water.

‘Sub-glacial chamber,’ Amy reported. ‘This is the water that provides the entrance to the main base’s submarine pens. It must flow on beneath the entire facility and exit into the Antarctic Ocean further down the glacier’

Ethan nodded, looking over his shoulder into the darkness to the south east, or so his magnetic compass told him. ‘That’s how the Nazi U-Boats would have got in and out, if the channel is still navigable.’

‘We won’t have time to check that out,’ Amy advised him. ‘The signal is coming from dead ahead, about two hundred yards.’

Ethan closed the bleed valves, the stream of bubbles from the vents clearing and the vibrations through the hull ceasing as the pressure equalized and the submarine hung in the blackness. For a few moments the silence was eerie and Ethan realized that he could just as easily have been in deep space as beneath the Antarctic ice sheet.

‘What are you waiting for, a red carpet?’ Amy snapped. ‘Let’s go.’

Ethan gently engaged the electric motor and the hum from the stern became a vibration as the screws began to turn and the submarine eased forward through the freezing blackness toward the distant signal blinking on Amy’s laptop computer.

Ethan found himself glancing over the pressure gauges every few seconds, obsessed with the clinging fear that the dome would fail and freezing water would rush in under immense pressure, killing them both instantly. Although his common sense told him that it would all be over long before he could even begin to comprehend what was happening, somehow the knowledge that he would never be found, that they would both be frozen solid for millennia beneath the glacier seemed a fate too horrible to bear.

Ethan leaned forward and peered over Amy’s shoulder to look at her laptop’s screen and take his mind off his morbid thoughts, the blue glow from it illuminating the cold and dark interior of the submarine with an unearthly glow.

‘A hundred fifty yards,’ she said without looking over her shoulder, her breath condensing in clouds on the cold air. ‘Keep it steady.’

Ethan nodded, saw the blue glow growing brighter from the screen, and then he realized that the laptop was not responsible for the shimmering blue white glow. Ethan jerked back upright, his head bathed in a glorious halo of light as the blackness around him was banished by a mass of pulsing blue creatures flooding through the icy depths.