The Citadel Read online

  Vaughn opened his eyes. "How long have you worked for Royce?"

  Logan was startled. "I don't rightly work for him. I do jobs for him when he calls."

  "Why?" Vaughn asked.

  Even under his tan, Logan's face flushed visibly red. "He pays well."

  "And?" Vaughn pressed.

  "And what?" Logan said angrily.

  "What's he holding over you?" Vaughn pressed.

  "Nothing," Logan snapped. He pulled his heavy Gore-Tex jacket tighter around himself and put his hood up. "I suggest we all get some sleep. We're going to need it." He shut his eyes.

  Vaughn glanced at Tai. She shrugged and then closed her eyes also.

  Two hours later Brothers's voice intruded over the numbing roar of the plane. "There's Antarctica."

  Vaughn, along with the others, peered out the right side. "That's Cape Adare," Logan announced. "It's where the Ross Sea begins to the west. It's well over one thousand kilometers across the opening of the Ross Sea to the other side. The international dateline actually cuts right through the middle of the sea."

  Dark peaks, streaked with snow and ice, poked through the low-lying clouds, overlooking the ocean. To the left, the sea ice stretched unbroken as far as the eye could see through a few gaps in the clouds.

  As they continued south, more peaks appeared along the coast they were now paralleling as the ocean turned into the Ross Sea. Logan called the ranges out as they went by: the Admiralty Range; the Prince Albert Mountains; and finally, the Royal Society Range.

  Brothers began to drop altitude as a single massive mountain appeared straight ahead above the clouds, set apart from the others to the right. "That's Mount Erebus. Earth First South Station and McMurdo are both set on the base of Erebus on the far side. It, along with Mount Terror, make up most of Ross Island. Captain Ross, whom the island, the sea, and ice shelf are all named after, christened both mountains after the two ships that he used to explore the Antarctic," Logan explained.

  "He had a ship named Terror?" Tai asked.

  Logan laughed. "Yes. Interesting history to that ship. First, as Americans, you'll be thrilled to know it was originally outfitted as what the British called a bomb vessel, carrying heavy mortars. It was one of the ships that shelled Fort McHenry in the War of 1812 and inspired that fellow to write your 'Star-Spangled Banner.'

  "But more importantly, the ship's later history is a lesson on how brutal conditions are here and in the Arctic. In the 1830s the Terror was on an exploration mission in Hudson Bay when it got caught in the ice. The ship was pressed over fifty feet up the side of a cliff by the pressure of the ice on its hull. It was repaired and was Captain Ross's second ship-he was in command of the Erebus-on his expedition down here from 1840 to 1843.

  "They successfully did that mission but weren't so lucky on their next one to Baffin Bay. The ships were last seen entering the bay and then not heard from again for over a decade, until someone found both ships, completely abandoned by their crews and icebound. Not a single one of either ship's crew was ever found. One hundred percent casualties. Their bodies are still buried somewhere in the ice, as are a lot of other bodies."

  "We're going down," Brothers yelled over his shoulder.

  Tai was startled. "What?"

  "We're going in for our landing," Brothers qualified with a smile.

  "Smart-ass," Tai muttered.

  "We don't have much of a runway," Brothers told them as they descended. "We land on the ice on the Ross Ice Shelf itself, as it's the flattest thing around. The reception party should have marked out a reasonably good stretch for us. We don't need much," he added in way of encouragement.

  Vaughn watched the slopes of Erebus come closer, and then the plane punched into a thick cloud layer and all view was blanketed. Suddenly, the clouds parted and they were in the clear again. The plane was very low now, and Brothers banked hard left, over land.

  "That's McMurdo Station!" Logan yelled. Vaughn pushed his face up against the glass and looked below. The sprawl of buildings and numerous large storage tanks surprised him-McMurdo was much larger than he had imagined. Somehow he had pictured something out of the old science fiction movie The Thing: a few Quonset huts huddled in the snow. At a rough guess he would say there were at least forty buildings down there.

  "All right. Everyone buckle up." Brothers swung out over the ice now, very low. They roared over a snow tractor with a large red flag tied off to the top. Brothers pulled up and did another flyby. A man on top of the tractor was holding a green flag pointing in a northeasterly direction.

  On the third pass, Brothers finally dipped his wings down. With a hiss and then a steady rumble, the skis touched the ice, a thin mist of snow pluming up on either side. Gradually, they slithered to a halt. Brothers turned the plane around and taxied it back to the tractor. Vaughn could now see that the tractor had a flatbed trailer hitched to it with several drums piled on top.

  The silence as Brothers turned off the engines was as shocking as any loud sound. They'd lived with that noise for many hours. As their senses adjusted, the steady whine of wind bouncing off the skin of the plane became noticeable. With the airplane's heater off, the temperature immediately started dropping inside.

  "Everyone bundle up." Logan was cinching down his hood.

  Vaughn pulled his own cold weather equipment out of his duffel bag. He was wearing a Gore-Tex camouflage parka over Patagonia Pile jacket and bib pants that zipped on the sides and the crotch. Tai wore the same thing. Logan and his two men's outer layer was bright orange. They all had polypropylene underwear next to their bodies to wick away any moisture from their skin. Large rubber cold-weather boots-Logan had referred to them as Mickey Mouse boots-covered their feet. The boots had a layer of air trapped in them that insulated the feet remarkably well, but Vaughn knew from experience they also brought about a lot of foot sweating, which had to be carefully monitored.

  Brothers swung open his door, and the blast of cold air slammed into Vaughn's lungs with one quick gulp. Brothers scrambled out and Vaughn followed suit, his feet crunching into the snow. Despite his cold weather training in Special Forces, he'd never felt such cold. The air stung his face, the only exposed part of his body. His skin rebelled, trying to shrink from the pain of the cold, and he felt his muscles tighten, as if he could make himself smaller and that would in some way make him warmer. He forced his muscles to relax.

  The other members of the party piled out and stood looking around. To the north, Mount Erebus was a solid wall reaching up into the cloud covering. To the south, an endless line of ice disappeared where the clouds seemed to touch down. To the west, the Royal Society Range blotted out the space between cloud and ice. They looked amazingly close, as if they could be walked to in an hour or two, yet Vaughn knew from the map that they were almost a hundred miles away.

  The tractor kicked into life, drawing his attention away from the scenery. It roared up, treads clattering, placing the trailer alongside the plane. The driver, looking like a bear in his bright orange garments, waved down at them, pumping his fist. He seemed to be in a bit of a rush.

  "Let's offload," Logan called out.

  As they busied themselves transferring the gear from plane to trailer, Smithers used a sledgehammer to drive ice pitons into the ground. One for each wing, one for the tail, and one for the nose; Brothers attached a rope to each piton to secure the plane to the ice.

  Once all the equipment was off the aircraft, Vaughn watched as Logan gave Tai a boost up onto the wooden platform that made up the floor of the trailer. She tried to get as comfortable as possible among the bags and cases. Vaughn and the three other members of the party climbed on board, and all grabbed on for dear life as the driver threw the tractor into gear and roared off toward the looming form of Mount Erebus.

  Logan leaned over to put his face between Vaughn and Tai. "Welcome to Antarctica."

  Democratic People's Republic of Korea Embassy, Manila

  The ambassador's aide frowned as the secr
etary entered the meeting room and hurried over to his chair. "Mr. Choegu, there is an urgent message for you," she whispered in his ear.

  Making his excuses to the delegation of trade bureaucrats from Singapore, Choegu walked swiftly to his office. The encoded message sat on the center of his desk, only the word URGENT readable in Han Gul, the rest in unintelligible seven letter groups. He turned and unlocked the safe behind his desk and pulled out the onetime pad.

  He wrote the letters out in longhand as he deciphered the message on a single sheet of paper with a hard plastic board underneath in order not to leave an impression copy. As the words coalesced into meaning, Choegu felt both excited and confused.

  – ABU SAYIF SAY THERE IS AN ABANDONED AMERICAN MILITARY BASE IN ANTARCTICA.

  – BASE IS SUPPOSED TO CONTAIN NUCLEAR WEAPONS.

  – WILL CONTINUE TO MONITOR AND RELAY INFORMATION AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

  – ABU SAYIF WILL BE IN CONTACT WITH MORE INFORMATION SOON.

  – RAWSS.

  Choegu knew who Rawss was-one of their deep cover agents in Manila. He didn't even try to sort out the various pieces of the puzzle. He immediately pulled out another onetime pad and transcribed the letters of the message verbatim as quickly as his hand could write.

  Done, he rapidly walked up the stairs to the fourth floor of the embassy building. A guard with an automatic rifle stood in front of a steel door. Despite his rank and stature, Choegu had to show his identification card to the guard, who knew perfectly well who he was.

  Satisfied, the guard opened the steel door and Choegu stepped inside. Another steel door awaited him. An eye appeared at the small peephole, and he once again showed his identification. The door opened and he entered.

  "Sir?" the man who had let him in asked.

  Choegu held out the piece of paper. "Send this immediately."

  Earth First South Station, Antarctica

  Tai's first glimpse of Earth First South Station confirmed what she had expected. A large, squat box building looking more like several trailer homes sealed together than a research station sat on the ice. Established several hundred meters from the base of Mount Erebus, it was painted bright red, and just to the right a cluster of antennas was tied off to a tower. A colorful banner reading EARTH FIRST was strung along the front.

  It had taken the tractor almost forty-five minutes to get them off the ice shelf and up here to the station. As they pulled in front with a clatter, a couple of people stepped out of the building to greet them. As Logan did the introductions, Tai could see Vaughn hanging back. She knew their camouflage cold weather suits didn't fit with the bright outfits and colorful banner hung on the outside of the station, and the lackluster handshakes from the station personnel confirmed that.

  "Let's get our equipment inside," Logan ordered.

  Vaughn helped Tai haul their gear bag inside, not wanting the Earth First people to handle it, especially the weapons cases. They were directed down a short corridor and into a small room barely containing three sets of bunk beds. Tai dumped her gear onto one bed while Vaughn put his across from her. Then they rejoined Logan in the mess hall/meeting room as Logan briefed a skinny bearded man on their mission to find the Citadel. Logan had introduced him as Peter McCabe, Earth First's foremost Antarctic expert. When Logan showed him the faxed photocopy of the picture, McCabe sat down at the table and looked at it for a long time.

  "This looks familiar. It's rare that you have three nunatuks that close to each other." He pulled out a large chart. "Show me again where you think this place might be, based on the air time."

  "The range of the resupply aircraft comes out to roughly five hundred miles." Logan traced a half arc around McMurdo Station.

  "It's not to the west," McCabe firmly announced. "That would put it very close to the French station there. I've been in that area quite a bit lately, and I'd certainly recognize these peaks if they were in that area."

  He stared at the map a long time, his eyes boring in as if he could see the actual ground from just looking at the two dimensional paper. Tai took the opportunity to look over at Vaughn. He appeared to be out of sorts around the civilians, and she shared some of his feelings.

  McCabe turned the map around and placed the photo down on it. He tapped a spot on the far side of the Ross Sea. "It's here. I'd be willing to bet that middle peak is Mount Grace. The one on the right is McKinley Peak. The lower one on the left must be this one that has no name."

  Logan shook his head. "Are you sure? I'd have thought they'd put the base farther south." He pointed at the map. "Down here along the Shackleton coast perhaps."

  McCabe looked up. "No. That's Mount Grace. I knew I'd seen that silhouette before. To the south of it is the glacier where they launched the Byrd Land South Pole traverse in '60. When you fly out in that direction you put the glacier on the right and McKinley on your left. Then it's open ice until you hit the Executive Committee Mountain Range."

  Vaughn spoke for the first time. "How soon can we take off again?" he asked Brothers.

  The pilot was chewing on the end of his bushy mustache. "Ah, well, mate, the plane, it can take off right now. The problem is the pilot. I just put in eight nonstop hours and I could use a couple of hours to rest. How about in four hours?"

  Tai could tell Vaughn wasn't happy about the delay. She half expected him to try and order the pilot to take off immediately. Vaughn sighed and looked around the table. Smithers and Burke had not said a word, but simply listened to the discussion.

  "All right," Vaughn said. "It's presently 3:15 P.M. local time here. We take off at seven-fifteen. The-"

  "What about darkness?" Tai interrupted. "We won't be able to find the place in the dark."

  Logan laughed. "There is no night in the summer down here. The sun gets a little lower on the horizon, but it never sets."

  "As I said," Vaughn continued, "I want everyone gathered in this room ready to go at six. That will give us plenty of time to make it down to the plane and be in the air at seven-fifteen. Are there any questions?"

  Tai saw McCabe looking at Logan, his eyes full of questions about the two people in military camouflage, but the man had the common sense not to say anything in front of Vaughn.

  Vaughn looked over at her. "I'm going to get some sleep. I'll see you all at six."

  He left the conference room then, but reappeared almost immediately, his duffel bag over his shoulder.

  "Where are you going?" Tai asked as he placed his hand on the door leading outside.

  "I'm going to sleep outside. I'll be on the lee side of the building when you want me." With that he stepped out, and the door slammed shut behind him.

  "You brought a weird man with you, Tai," was Logan's only comment before he turned to his crew and to give some more instructions.

  Tai tugged on her parka, grabbed her backpack, and went outside after Vaughn. She found him on the far side of the building, digging in the snow. He briefly glanced up at her, but she said nothing, watching him.

  After completing the slit in the snow, he removed the bungi cord from around a Therm-a-Rest pad and laid it down on the bottom of the trench. Unscrewing the valve on the top corner, the pad quickly expanded to full size, about an inch and a half thick, by a foot and a half wide, by six long.

  Then he pulled out his sleeping bag. It was compressed inside a stuff sack, and he released the cinches and unrolled the bag. Vaughn then stretched a poncho across the top of the trench, fixing down the ends with snow, leaving an opening just large enough to crawl in. All done, he put the shovel down in the hole along with his bag in a place he had dug out near the head.

  "Why are you sleeping out here?" Tai finally asked, unable to restrain her curiosity.

  Vaughn looked up at her. "It takes about four days to acclimatize to a radically new environment. Or at least it takes me four days. Besides, I hate sleeping that close to a bunch of people. I'm a very light sleeper, and the slightest noise wakes me up." He smiled. "Hell, tell the nature lovers in there
that I'm just loving nature."

  "What's that?" Tai asked as he started to slip into a thin bag.

  "It's a vapor barrier, or VB liner, that goes inside the sleeping bag," he explained. "The liner keeps my perspiration inside it. Makes for a damp sleep, but it's better for me to be damp than the bag. I can dry out. I might not be in circumstances where I can dry the bag out, and a wet sleeping bag will kill you here."

  He proceeded to slide all the way in until the only thing visible from the trench was his face. Tai leaned over. "I guess I'll build my own snow trench."

  "Good idea," Vaughn said.

  "I need to send a sitrep to Royce first."

  Vaughn looked at her. "Sure that's a good idea?"

  "Let's not get into that," Tai replied.

  "Whatever," Vaughn said, and shut his eyes.

  Tai walked a dozen yards away and pulled out the small satcom radio from her backpack. She knelt in the snow, opened the small satellite dish and oriented it, then hooked the radio to it. She checked to make sure she had a clear bounce back from the Milstar satellite, which was just on the northern horizon.

  Using a pen on the small keyboard on the radio, she summarized their situation and their intent to search for the Citadel shortly. Then she broke the gear down and put it back in the pack.

  Tai went inside the base to the bunk room where their gear was stored. No one else was around. She opened one of the weapons cases, pulled out a 9mm pistol, loaded a magazine in it, and slid it in one of the pockets of her parka. She took a second one out and did the same, putting it in the opposite pocket. Then she pulled out her air mattress and sleeping bag from her duffel bag. As she turned for the door, it was thrown open. Vaughn stood there.

  "The mess hall now!" he barked, and was gone as quickly as he'd come.

  Tai rushed to the mess hall to find Vaughn leaning over an unconscious Brothers. The pilot was slumped in a chair, his clothes covered with melting ice and snow.

  "What happened?" she asked.

  "I found him outside, lying in the snow, just like this." Vaughn was checking the pilot's bare hands for frostbite as he spoke. "Another five minutes and he'd have frozen to death."