Warmed finally by the engines, Pitt felt ready to face reality again. He took over the wheel from Giordino, who found a broom in the bunk compartment and used it to brush the ice buildup off the windshields. Released from their frozen bondage, the windshield wipers finished sweeping the glass clean.
The Rockefeller Mountains materialized in the distance and rose above the bow of the vehicle. They were that close.
Pitt pointed to a series of black smudges on the sun-splashed white horizon slightly off to his left.
"There lies the Wolf mining works."
"We did good," said Giordino. "We couldn't have wandered more than a mile off our original track during the storm."
"Another three or four miles to go. We should be there in twenty minutes."
"Are you going to crash the party unannounced?"
"Not a wise move against an army of security guards," answered Pitt. "That low rock ridge protruding from the ice that angles toward the base of the mountains?"
"I see it."
"We can run along out of sight of the compound, using it for cover while we close the final two miles."
"We just might make it," said Giordino, "if they don't spot our exhaust."
"Keep your fingers crossed," Pitt said with a tight grin.
They left the great ice plain of the Ross Ice Shelf and crossed onto ice-mantled land and skirted the ridge that trailed down from the mountain like a giant tongue, keeping below the summit out of sight of the mining compound as they crept ever closer. Soon they were driving beneath towering gray rock cliffs, with streams of ice hanging from their crests like frozen waterfalls, gleaming blue-green under the radiant sun. The path they took along the base of the mountains was not flat or smooth but strewn with wavelike undulations.
Pitt downshifted the Snow Cruiser into second gear to climb the series of low mounds and valleys. The burly machine took the uneven terrain in stride, her wide wheels moving the great mass up and down the grades without effort. His eyes swept the instrument panel for the tenth time in as many minutes. The temperature gauges indicated that the slow speeds at high rpms were causing the diesels to overheat again, but this time they could keep the door open without suffering the agonies of a blizzard.
They were passing the mouth of a narrow box canyon when Pitt suddenly stopped the Snow Cruiser.
"What's up?" Giordino asked, staring at Pitt. "You see something?"
Pitt pointed downward through the windshield. "Tracks in the snow leading into the canyon. They could have only been made by the treads from a big Sno-cat."
Giordino's eyes followed Pitt's outstretched finger. "You've got good eyes. The tracks are barely visible."
"The blizzard should have covered them," said Pitt. "But they still show because the vehicle that made them must have passed through just as the storm was ending."
"Why would a Sno-cat travel up a dead-end ravine?"
"Another entrance to the mining compound?"
"Could very well be."
"Shall we find out?"
Giordino grinned. "I'm dying of curiosity."
Pitt cranked the steering wheel to its stop and sharply turned the Snow Cruiser into the canyon. The cliffs rose ominously above the ravine, their height escalating until the sun's light paled the deeper they drove into the mountain. Fortunately, the twists and turns were not severe, and the Snow Cruiser was able to deftly navigate her bulk around and through them. Pitt's only worry was that they'd find nothing but a rock wall, and then have to back the vehicle through the canyon, since there was no room to turn her around. A quarter of a mile from the canyon's mouth, Pitt braked the vehicle to a stop before a solid wall of ice.
It was a dead end. Disillusionment circled their minds.
They both stepped down from the Snow Cruiser and stared at the vertical sheet of ice. Pitt peered down at the tracks that traveled up the canyon and stopped at the wall. "The plot thickens. The Sno-cat could not have backed out of here."
"Certainly not without making a second set of tracks," observed Giordino.
Pitt moved until his face was inches from the ice, cupped his hands around his eyes to block out the light, and stared. He could make out vague shadows beyond the ice barrier. "Something is in there," he said.
Giordino gazed into the ice and nodded. "Is this where somebody says, Òpen Sesame'?"
"No doubt the wrong code," Pitt said pensively.
"It has to be a good three feet thick."
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
Giordino nodded. "I'll stay on the ground outside and cover you with my Bushmaster."
Pitt climbed back into the Snow Cruiser, shifted the gear lever into reverse, and sent the vehicle back about fifty feet, keeping the tires in the packed depressions made by the Sno-cat for better traction. He paused, grasped the wheel tightly in both hands, and burrowed down in the seat, in case the ice should crash through the windshield. Then he shifted into first and jammed the accelerator pedal flat against the floorboards. With a roar from its exhaust, the big mechanical goliath leaped forward, gathered speed, and then smashed into the frozen wall, rumbling the ground beneath Giordino's feet.
The ice exploded and shattered into a great splash of glittering fragments that showered over the red Snow Cruiser like so many glass shards from a fallen crystal chandelier. The sound of the impact came like a giant gnashing his teeth. At first, Giordino thought the vehicle might have to ram the thick, solidified ice wall several times before breaking through, but he was almost left behind as it bulldozed its way through on the first try and disappeared on the other side. He chased after it, gun cradled in his arms, like an infantryman following a tank for cover.
Once through, Pitt brought the Snow Cruiser to a halt and brushed the glass from his face and chest. A large block of ice had burst through the center windshield, narrowly missing him before it fell to the floor and shattered. His face was cut on one cheek and across the forehead. Neither gash was deep enough to require stitches, but the blood that flowed made him look as though he were badly injured. He wiped the crimson from his eyes onto his sleeve and looked to see where the Snow Cruiser had come to rest.
They were sitting inside a large-diameter ice tunnel, with the vehicle's front end firmly embedded in a frozen wall opposite the shattered entry. In both directions the tunnel looked deserted. Seeing no sign of hostility, Giordino rushed into the Snow Cruiser and climbed the ladder to the control cabin. He found Pitt smiling hideously through a mask of blood.
"You look bad," he said, attempting to help Pitt from the driver's seat.
Pitt gently pushed him away. "It's not nearly as bad as it looks. We can't afford time for a clinical repair. You can patch me up with that old first-aid kit in the crew cabin. In the meantime, I vote we follow the tunnel toward the left. Unless I miss my guess, that will lead us to the mining compound."
Giordino knew it was senseless to contest the issue. He dropped down to the crew cabin and returned with a first-aid kit that hadn't been opened since 1940. He cleaned away the congealing blood on Pitt's face, then smeared the cuts with the antiseptic of the era, iodine, whose sharp sting had Pitt cursing in no quiet tones. Then he dressed the skin cuts. "Another life saved by the capable hands of Dr. Giordino, surgeon of the Antarctic."
Pitt looked into the face that was reflected in a side-view mirror. There was enough gauze and tape to cover a brain transplant. "What did you do?" he asked sourly. "I look like a mummy."
Giordino feigned a hurt look. "Aesthetics is not one of my strong points."
"Neither is medicine."
Pitt gunned the engines and maneuvered the hulking vehicle back and forth until he was able to straighten it around for a journey through the tunnel. For the first time, he wound down his window and studied the width of the tunnel. He figured the clearance between the ice and the vehicle's wheel hubs and its roof was no more than eighteen inches. He turned his attention to a large round pipe that ran along the outer arc of the tunnel, with small tubes
running vertically from its core into the ice.
"What do you make of that?" he said, pointing to the pipe.
Giordino stepped from the Snow Cruiser, squeezed himself between the front tire and the pipe, and laid his hands on it. "Not an electrical conduit," he announced. "It must serve another purpose."
"If it's what I think it is. . ." Pitt's voice dropped portentously.
"Part of the mechanism to break loose the ice shelf," said Giordino, finishing his friend's train of thought.
Pitt stuck his head out his window and stared back into the long tunnel that stretched away to a vanishing point. "It must extend from the mining compound fourteen hundred miles to the opposite end of the ice shelf."
"An inconceivable feat of engineering to bore a tunnel that was equal to the distance between San Francisco and Phoenix."
"Inconceivable or not," said Pitt, "the Wolfs did it. You must remember, it's much easier to bore a tunnel through ice than hard rock."
"What if we cut a gap in the line and stop whatever activation system they've created to split off the ice shelf?" asked Giordino.
"A break might trigger it prematurely," answered Pitt. "We can't take the chance unless we find ourselves left with no other alternative. Only then can we risk dividing the line."
The tunnel looked like a great gaping black mouth. Except for the dim glow of the sun through the thick ice, there was no illumination. An electrical conduit with halogen bulbs spaced every twenty feet ran along the ceiling, but the power must have been shut down at the main junction box, because the lights were dark. Pitt turned on the two small headlights mounted on the lower front end of the Snow Cruiser, engaged gears, and drove off, increasing his speed through the tunnel until they were moving at twenty-five miles an hour. Though it was a pace easily sustained by a bicycle rider, it seemed a breakneck speed through the narrow confines of the tunnel.
While Pitt focused on keeping the Snow Cruiser from brushing against the unsympathetic ice, Giordino sat in the passenger seat, his rifle propped on one knee, eyes fastened as far as the headlights could throw their beams, watching for a sign of movement or any object other than the seemingly unending pipe with its intersecting tubes that ran down into the floor and through the roof of the tunnel.
The ominous fact that the tunnel was deserted suggested to Pitt that the Wolfs and their workers were abandoning the mining facility and preparing to escape to their giant ships. He pushed the Snow Cruiser as fast as it would go, occasionally spinning the wheel hubs into the ice walls and carving a trench before steering the vehicle straight again. Dread began clouding his mind. They had lost too much time crossing the ice shelf. The timetable that Karl Wolf had boasted of in Buenos Aires at the ambassador's party had been four days and ten hours.
The four days had passed, as had eight hours and forty minutes, leaving only an hour and twenty minutes until Karl Wolf threw the doomsday switch.
Pitt estimated that one mile, maybe one and half, separated them from the heart of the facility. He and Giordino were not given satellite maps of the layout, so finding the control center once they were inside would be pure guesswork. The questions nagging his mind were whether the Special Forces team had arrived and had been successful in eliminating the army of mercenaries. The latter would put up a bitter fight-- the Wolfs had surely promised to save them and their families from the cataclysm. Any way he looked at it, the thought did not present a rosy picture.
AFTER another eighteen minutes of negotiating the tunnel in silence, Giordino hunched forward and gestured ahead. "We're coming to a crossroads."
Pitt slowed the Snow Cruiser, as they came to an intersection where five tunnels spread off into the ice. The dilemma was maddening. Time did not allow them to make the wrong choice. He leaned out the side window again and studied the frozen floor of the tunnel. Wheeled tracks branched into them all, but the deepest ruts appeared to travel into the one on the right. "The tube on the right looks like it's had the heaviest traffic."
Giordino jumped down out of the Snow Cruiser and disappeared up the tunnel. In a few minutes, he returned. "About two hundred yards farther on, it looks like the tunnel opens into a large chamber."
Pitt gave a brief nod and turned the vehicle and followed the tracks into the tunnel on his right. Strange structures began appearing locked in the ice, vague and indistinguishable but with the straight lines of objects that were man-made rather than a creation of nature. As Giordino had reported, the tunnel soon widened into a vast chamber whose curved roof was covered by ice crystals that hung down like stalactites. Light filtered down from several openings in the roof that illuminated the interior with an eerie glow. The effect seemed extraterrestrial, magical, timeless, and miraculous. Awed by the sight, Pitt slowly brought the Snow Cruiser to a halt.
The two men went silent in astonishment.
They found themselves parked in what was once the main square, surrounded by the icebound buildings of an ancient city.
<<42>>
No longer covered by the security blanket of the ice storm, the wind having dropped to only five miles an hour, Cleary felt naked, as his white-clad force fanned out and began advancing toward the mining facility. They took advantage of a series of hummocks that rose like camel humps for cover, until they reached the high fence that ran from the base of the mountain to the cliff above the sea and encircled the main compound.
Cleary had no prior intelligence on the force his men were up against. None had been gathered on the facility, simply because the CIA had never considered it a threat to the nation's security. Discovering the true horror of the menace at the last minute had left no time for covert penetration, nor had this simple hit-and-run strategy. It was a surgical operation, uncomplicated, requiring a quick conclusion. The orders were to neutralize the facility and deactivate the ice shelf breakaway systems before being relieved by a two-hundred-man Special Force team that was only an hour away.
All Cleary had been told was that the Wolf security guards were hardened professionals who came from elite fighting units around the world. This was information provided by the National Underwater & Marine Agency-- hardly an organization practiced in intelligence gathering, Cleary mistakenly concluded.
He was confident his elite force could handle any hostiles they encountered.
Little did he know that his small force was outnumbered three to one.
Moving in two columns, they reached what at first looked like a single fence but became two that were divided by a ditch. It looked to (weary as if it had been built decades before. There was an old sign whose paint was badly faded but could still be translated as `No Trespassing' in German. Made up of a common chain link, it was topped by several strings of wire whose barbs had become impotent long before from a thick coating of ice. Once many feet higher than now, ice drifts had built up against it until one could easily hoist one leg and step over it. The ditch had also filled in and was little more than a low, rounded furrow. The second fence was higher and still protruded seven feet above the snow, but posed no serious hazard. They lost precious minutes cutting through the strands until they could enter the grounds of the compound. Cleary took it as a good omen that they had penetrated the outer perimeter without discovery.
Once inside, their movements were shielded by a row of buildings with no windows. Cleary called a halt. He paused to examine a fifteen-by-eighteen-inch aerial photo of the compound. Though he had etched every street, every structure, in his mind during the flight from Cape Town, as had Sharpsburg, Garnet, and Jacobs, he wanted to compare a mark on the map to where they had passed through the outer fences. He was pleased to see they were only fifty feet from their intended infiltration point. For the first time since they had landed, regrouped, and advanced across the ice, he spoke into the Motorola radio.
"Tin Man?"
"I copy you, Wizard," replied the gravel voice of Lieutenant Warren Garnet.
"We split up here," said Cleary. "You know what is expected of you and your Marine
s. Good luck."
"On our way, Wizard," acknowledged Garnet, whose mission, as assigned to his Marine Recon Team, was to secure the generating plant and cut off all power to the facility.
"Scarecrow?"
Lieutenant Miles Jacobs of the Navy SEALs answered quickly. "I hear you, Wizard." Jacobs and his team were to circle around and assault the control center from the side facing the sea.
"You have the farthest to go, Scarecrow. You'd better get a move on."
"We're halfway there," Jacobs replied confidently, as he and his SEALs began moving out down a side road that led in the direction of the control center.
"Lion?"
"Ready to sweep," answered Captain Sharpsburg of the Army Delta Force cheerfully.
"I will accompany you."
"Happy to have an old hand along."
"Let's move out."
There was no synchronizing of watches, no further voice contact, as the teams divided and made their way to their assigned targets. There was no need. They all knew what they had to do, having been fully briefed on the horrendous consequences should they fail. Cleary had no doubts that his men would fight like demons or die without hesitation to stop the Wolfs from launching the apocalypse.
They moved lightly, almost fluidly, in offensive formation, two men ten yards ahead on either flank, and two men covering their rear. Every fifty yards, they stopped, dropped to the ground, or took whatever available cover presented itself, while Cleary studied the terrain and checked with the Marines and the SEAL teams.
"Tin Man, report."
"Sweep is clear. Approaching within three hundred yards of target."
"Scarecrow? Have you encountered anything?"
"If I wasn't sure, I'd say the place is abandoned," answered Jacobs.