Protocol 7 at-1 Page 24

  There was a low, deep, monotonous beeping sound-not deafening, but impossible to ignore. A shapeless mass appeared on the sonar display and started pulsing a dark, dull red.

  “Ah,” Hayden said, recognizing the tone. “Proximity alert.”

  “Apparently I was wrong,” Max said through clenched teeth.

  He moved his hands almost gracefully, guiding the Spector ten degrees to the right and a gentle five degrees downward. The red blob of the iceberg drifted away from them on the display, fading out of range.

  “Problem solved?” Sam asked hopefully from her seat at the environmental station.

  “For the moment,” Max said. “There will be others.”

  “Lots more,” Ryan said. “I just upped the range on the forward sonar/radar scans, as far as I could. There’s a goddamn forest of these things. The closer we get to the ice wall, the worse it gets.”

  Hayden squinted first at the sonar display, then the front-facing holo-screen. It was difficult to see anything through the unadjusted cameras, even with the high-intensity lights on. “Are we still on target for Station 35?”

  Max responded without moving his head, “I’m not sure. My instruments are showing a different depth than the Spector.”

  Simon saw Nastasia stiffen in her seat. Her eyes narrowed. She tucked the inhaler into her satchel and looked grim.

  Hayden scowled at Ryan and Andrew. “I don’t like this,” he said.

  “There must be an explanation for it, Hayden,” Ryan said. “I know you believe the instrument cluster over the jerry-rigged holo-display cameras, but-”

  “You don’t understand the amount of sensors this thing has,” Hayden said. “They work independently of each other; then the information is cross-referenced and reanalyzed in a thousand ways before you get a signal. Even in its dumbed-down state, the Spector wouldn’t give a warning signal or suggest a course of action if something wasn’t drastically wrong.” He glanced from one instrument set to another, glowering at the console where he was sitting. “But this data is crazy, Simon. I don’t get it. Feels like we’re in the goddamn Bermuda Triangle.”

  Max shook his head, trying to make sense of what was going on himself.

  Andrew called from the navigation array. “Guys,” he said, “the computers are freaking out. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “Hayden,” Max said, “I’m going to adjust course, get us back on track using the instruments only.” The team looked on with growing concern as Max navigated the vessel back on course, ignoring the warning signal.

  “You’re going to kill us!” Hayden shouted. “You just can’t ignore the information like that! It-”

  “Hayden!” Simon snapped. “We made a decision in Chile to trust Max and his experience. He knows what he’s doing.”

  I hope to hell you’re right, Max thought silently. Because at the moment, he felt as if they would be very, very lucky if he didn’t drive them directly into a rogue iceberg and kill them all.

  “This is what it shows is directly ahead of us,” Max said. “We’re really traveling at a depth of six hundred meters, down from 350. I’m sure of that. I can see that on the front-facing cameras. No digital interference there. And it shows us nothing but clear sea for at least two hundred feet above us, while the instrument cluster shows…chaos.”

  Simon shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I. The instrument holo shows icebergs; my eyes see open water. The holo gives six different depths a minute; I see 350 feet. The cluster shows the opening of Station 35 in one place; the map shows the opening in another place. Strap back in.”

  The last comment caught Simon by surprise. “What?” he said.

  “Strap back in!” Simon clutched at the belt, clicked it shut, and Max pulled the Spector up into a seventy-five-degree tip, as he avoided another iceberg, shot forward past an oncoming chunk as big as a skyscraper and tipped level again.

  The entire team stared at the flat-screen, then at the holo, then back at the flat screen again. The black octagonal dot of Station 35 was growing slowly, steadily larger on both. They all frowned or cursed quietly in confusion.

  Nastasia turned back and said, “It’s the same opening.”

  “But-”

  “It is the same opening!”

  Hayden cursed. “Listen! We need to make a decision, there can’t be two Station 35s…we need to make a choice now! We are less than three thousand meters from site one, and five thousand from site two! It’s do or die, people!”

  Or both, Max told himself as they surged forward, closer and closer to the final decision point.

  Years of covert operations had taught him not to expect the expected. He was convinced that one of the two sites that appeared on the navigational instruments was a decoy, a fake…and he was determined to plant the Spector in the right tunnel, the one that would save their lives.

  Max pushed on. Simon watched the octagons of the two Station 35s grow and grow.

  “None of this is making sense,” Ryan said. “None of what I’m seeing is what’s displayed in the satellite maps, and the depth that we are looking at is completely different than what I’ve studied.”

  “Okay,” Max said. “If we can’t trust the sensors…we trust my gut.”

  Simon said, “Max…”

  Max said, “Do or die.”

  “MAX!”

  Max stood up suddenly, threw his arms out, and pushed to the left and up as hard as he could.

  The Spector rushed toward the opening that the map didn’t show, the one the instrument cluster insisted wasn’t there at all.

  Do or die, he told himself one last time.

  Little did he know that the Spector had already passed the threshold of an invisible security parameter deep underwater. Soon, whatever was down there would know that they’d arrived.

  VECTOR5 COMMAND POST

  One mile below the frozen surface, in the depths of the Antarctic ice, an officer turned to his Black Ops commander and said, “Sir, we’ve got an incision in Fissure 9.”

  The commander’s neck almost cracked as his head spun around to face the officer. He never wanted to hear the words “Fissure 9.” Hearing “incision” was bad enough.

  The Black Ops commander, designated “Roland” (everyone in Black Ops had strict orders to use aliases), was an impressive-even intimidating-man in his late forties with graying hair shaved barely above the skull and a tall, athletic build. His military presence and strong frame overpowered the small control room.

  He and the men who surrounded him had the most important secret in the world to protect-and they would fight to the death to keep it.

  Roland’s approach was instantaneous upon hearing the officer’s report on Fissure 9. He walked to the console where the officer was sitting and told him, “That’s not possible.”

  He shifted uncomfortably in the extreme weather rig he was forced to wear made from a heat-equalizing polymer that could function in temperatures from thirty below to 120 above; it wore like a body suit that was half a size too small, complete with ribbed sections running the entire length of the limbs. A highly sophisticated heating system transferred the body heat through the suit’s internal channels, keeping the temperature at a comfortable level in the freezing cold.

  The mission patch on his right shoulder read “Special Ops-Fissure 9.” The insignia above the patch read “Vector 5.”

  Roland knew that an unauthorized “incision”-their official term for entry into the ice shelf-was not only impossible, it was unheard of. He had never known of such an incident in the seventeen years that he had been commander of the unit. It was particularly impossible now. Antarctica was in an absolute quarantine, which prevented anyone landing on the continent. And even before the total lockdown, no one had made an entry through Fissure 9 in twenty years-since its creation.

  Fissure 9 did not exist, according to any maps. To make things even more obscure, the depth readings near the ice shelf were manipula
ted by a set of dedicated computers so all incoming vessels were remotely guided away from the entry through false readings.

  As he stood above the officer, Roland realized that if this young man’s report was true, it could be one of the greatest security breaches in history, and it was NOT going to happen on his watch.

  He had to do something immediately. Not only could his job and possibly his life be in danger, but the political stability of the entire world-precarious as it was at the moment-was at stake as well.

  No one could know what Vector5, the nebulous, nefarious organization for which he worked, was doing deep inside the Antarctic ice. Not now-not ever.

  Roland composed himself and calmly asked the officer, “Did you check the log? Is it one of our subs scheduled for a pickup that managed to enter with an AI malfunction?”

  “No, sir,” the officer replied. “We aren’t due for a transfer until the thirtieth at twenty-two hundred hours. And the uranium capsules won’t even be ready to transfer until the twenty-fifth.”

  “What the fuck is this, then?” the commander said, raising his voice for the first time.

  The officer gulped. “I…don’t know, sir.”

  “A whale? Some sort of…giant fucking squid?”

  “Negative, sir, we’ve scanned for that,” the officer replied instantly.

  The commander turned without another word and walked into the adjacent room. Like all the chambers of the station, it had no real corners, just a flat ceiling above and a flat, pitted floor below a circular wall that curved at the junctures, as if they were standing inside a large square that was trapped between two plates of ice. The shape had something to do with the technology that built the labyrinth; he had heard the explanation about “unusual inflatables” and “induced crystallization” and never understood a word of it. He didn’t care; as long as they held up and prevented millions of tons of ice from burying him, he could live with them-cold as they were. Most of the time his surroundings reminded him of the interior of a submarine-curved, windowless spaces connected by hatches and narrow corridors. Except, of course, this “submarine” was thousands of feet below the ice.

  The monitor room he had entered was the largest in the station. It was filled with officers carefully studying hundreds of security cameras placed throughout the continent, both above and below the ice. From the outside, the station looked like a cocoon tethered under a huge dome of ice that curved five hundred feet into the frosty air, like a subterranean football stadium. The structure was designed as one of Vector5’s key control and command centers-this one chiefly responsible for Fissure 9-and connected to it through several tunnels of various diameters meant for various purposes. These days, since the total quarantine, the primary function of the station had been logistic coordination for incoming submarines picking up minerals, including uranium. The minerals were packaged in special containers and transferred up to Fissure 9 from various locations around the continent.

  The entire operation was incredibly efficient, absolutely controlled, and highly secretive, and it had run without accident, incident, or security breach since its creation.

  At least, the commander thought bitterly, until today.

  Over the years, Roland had come to hate and respect Fissure 9. The massive tunnel led to three dozen entry points in to the Southern Sea, and stretched for fourteen miles under the ice, to another gigantic dome, far larger than the one that was home to Roland’s own recon center, approximately five thousand feet below the surface of the ice. The far end of Fissure 9, so distant from shore, opened into a large underground basin at sea level, where submarines docked to drop off and pick up valuable resources and minerals. But that was all miles away.

  The center’s unique placement and design allowed it to be heated during construction, so it could penetrate the dense ice and then be frozen solid in place. Its sophisticated anchoring system allowed Vector5 to create a network of structures that attached themselves throughout the icy continent thousands of feet below by a series of intricate tunnels. Here in Roland’s three-level recon station, sixty officers carefully monitored the entire length of the construct and carefully accounted for all the submersibles that came to pick up and deliver tons of illegal uranium, and other valuable resources that’d since become scarce.

  Roland stopped for a moment and contemplated the motto etched in the wall over the door to the monitor room: Abditus perpetuo…Forever secret. Ultimately, secrecy was the motto of Vector5, a privatized military force designed for this-one of the greatest heists in human history. Its primary mission was to extract valuable minerals from the core of Antarctica, exporting them to a classified location in the US and covering their tracks forever. Vector5 was so secret that not one of the leaders of the Pentagon, the White House, the Kremlin, or the Chinese Central Committee knew of their existence. Not even the world government in waiting that called itself UNED had a clue.

  It was the most daunting international smuggling operation the world had ever known-vast and deadly in its scope and sophistication.

  If the rest of the world-especially China, with its great interest in Antarctica-discovered what was going on in Antarctica, it would mean instant, inevitable, and unending global warfare. This wasn’t simply an economic scandal of monumental proportions; the scarcity of minerals and the planet’s depleted resources made this exploitation a matter of life and death for billions of people. It would not go unpunished.

  So it could not be discovered. It was that simple.

  Roland shook off his rare contemplative mood and turned back on his team. He was the very picture of barely controlled rage.

  “What are the fucking cameras looking at here? Tell me what the hell has entered Fissure 9!”

  The officers monitoring the information scrambled to answer the question, but nothing made sense. Some of the digitally enhanced images of Station 35-one of twelve separate entrances to Fissure 9-were absolutely blank. Others showed ghost images, or flickers of heat that disappeared as quickly as they came. One radar scanner showed a blob as big as a beluga whale; another showed a writhing tentacular thing that looked like a weather balloon with fingers.

  No one wanted to tell Roland that they had absolutely no idea what they were looking at.

  Finally one of the specialists at the far end of the room cleared this throat and said, “Sir, I think I’ve got a prelim signal, but the cameras are having a hard time reading it.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Roland replied. “We have the most sophisticated camera system in the world, and you can’t tell me what the fuck has entered the tunnel?”

  “It seems to be iridescent, sir-almost invisible. The computers cannot analyze the exact material makeup, or even gauge its size or mass.” He dared to glance at the commander, and then wished he hadn’t. “Assuming, ah…assuming it’s there at all.”

  “Invisible?” Roland asked and pushed the officer to one side as he moved closer to the console to check the screen himself. He tried reading the information for himself, but he wasn’t satisfied by the answer. The holo-display didn’t make a damn bit of sense, and he had more than thirty years of experience reading output like this. It’s beyond them, he realized. Instead, he turned toward the center of the room where a large table showed the sophisticated tunnel system in a ten-by-twenty-foot holo-display.

  “Expand Fissure 9 five to one, Station 35 to three miles.” The AI responded to his verbal command instantly, and the image zoomed forward and in, bringing the long tunnel of Fissure 9 into sharp relief.

  This section of Fissure 9 looked like a digital worm ten feet long floating above the surface of the table. There was the entrance in question: Station 35, one of the digitally camouflaged entrances to the Southern Sea.

  “Give me an infrared readout and locate movement of anomalies,” said the commander. Instantly, the computer analyzed the tunnel, showing a small speck of…something…moving at a rapid speed, deeper down the submarine feeder-tunnel toward the main corridor
of Fissure 9- moving toward them, as it happened.

  Roland tapped a small patch on his left shoulder and spoke distinctly, “This is Fissure 9 Command. Connect me to headquarters.”

  He heard the response in his ear through the tech implanted there years ago: “Roger that.”

  Two seconds later, he heard the voice of the computer on the other side, “Central Command, verify password.”

  “Fissure 9, 9005105,” said the commander, looking at the tunnel with the flickering things moving forward at a steady-and impressive-speed.

  “Hold on, sir,” the computer said, instantly analyzing the password and connecting him to the voice on the other side.

  “What the hell are you doing going audio?” the voice on the other side asked.

  “We have an incision,” said the commander. That was all the explanation the other side would need.

  The voice belonged to the man designated as Mathias, the commander’s counterpart in Central Command. Although Central Command was miles away and over five thousand feet deep in the ice, it was also the point where everything converged. Most of the transport tunnels that crossed underneath the ice connected there, and Mathias would be just as displeased at hearing that word as Roland had been. The moment Roland pronounced it, the other man’s tone changed.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” replied Roland. “We’re still working on the recognition sequence, but I’m convinced it’s not one of ours.”

  Roland hadn’t taken his eyes off the multiple screens, but he was no closer to understanding what he was seeing than he’d been five minutes ago. “Command,” he said, hating the decision even as he made it. “I am requesting a dispatch.”

  Mathias responded immediately, “You do realize how long it will take for the DITVs to get up there?”

  “We’ve got a situation up here,” Roland said, biting it off. “I need assistance.” Dispatching Vector5’s Deep Ice Transport Vehicles (or DITVs) were the biggest, most decisive response he could think of. It was important to hit hard and hit fast. But that wasn’t all.