Beneath the Ice (15 page)

“Even if we get blown to tiny little
bits?”

“Yeah, I hear Heaven is real nice this time
of year.”

“Any time of year,” Perry said. The
conversation helped keep him calm and focused. Bending at the
waist, Perry handed the deadly device to his closest friend and
felt guilty the moment he did. He should have found some way to
make Jack leave.

“Got it,” Jack said. “Not as heavy as I
thought it would be.” He turned and took a step toward the idling
snowmobile.

“I don’t suppose I should remind you that
you’re walking on ice.”

“Thanks, chum. Up until now I didn’t have
anything to worry about.”

Perry waited until his friend was a few
steps away, then he jumped the short distance to the ice. Jack
moved very slowly. Perry jogged around him, giving him a wide
berth, and reached the vehicle first. He watched Jack take a step,
twisting his foot from side to side to make sure of his footing
before taking another. It was like watching someone walk
underwater—excruciatingly slow. Perry used the time to double-check
the system Jack had set up on the snowmobile. Duct tape ran from
the handlebars to the body. The cardboard box was also secured with
the tape. The flaps had been torn off, leaving just the four sides
and the bottom. Perry hoped the famous fix-it-all tape could stand
the abysmal temperatures a little longer.

Jack arrived and gently set the explosive
device in the box, pushing it to the rear—a good idea, Perry
realized. If the bomb slid, then it might explode while it was
close enough to do real damage.

Jack released his grip and took a step back.
“Your turn.”

Perry nodded, took the piece of tape that
dangled from the accelerator handle, and turned the handle enough
to rev the engine just above idle. Then he secured the tape.

“Now the scary part,” Perry said.

“The other part wasn’t scary?”

“Step back,” Perry ordered, and to his
surprise, Jack did.

Perry reached forward, dropped the
snowmobile in gear, and prayed that it wouldn’t lurch. The engine
chugged a moment, wanting more fuel, but then slowly pulled away.
Perry had no desire to play spectator. He sprinted for the opening
with Jack a step behind. When he reached the hole in the wall, he
dove through it and rolled forward on the floor. He heard a thud
behind him. His big friend had taken the same approach.

Staggering to their feet, they turned and
watched the snowmobile crawl along the ice.

“How far do you think it will go?” Jack
asked.

“There’s some rough ice a hundred yards or
so ahead of it. If Larimore—”

The slow-moving vehicle erupted into a ball
of fire. Perry and Jack hit the floor and covered their heads.

Chapter
12

“
It’s time you came
clean,
” Griffin said.

The entire group sat in the common area of
the Dome. It had been two hours since the snowmobile carried away
the bomb. Perry had called for another search of the facility, and
they had searched every corner, nook, and crevice twice more.
Gleason had filled Perry in on the acid-injured radios and how he,
Sarah, Gwen, and Dr. Curtis had begun searching the area and found
the bomb. It had not been an idea that first occurred to them, and
Gleason bemoaned the fact. They had spent hours trying to construct
a single radio that would work. He and Sarah had cannibalized all
they could with no success. It was in desperation that they began
the search, hoping to find some clue as to who might have done such
a thing.

Perry looked at Griffin and wondered how to
respond. Perry was weary from the previous day’s expedition—seeing
the horrific loss of life, searching wreckage for life he knew
wasn’t there, enduring the windstorm huddled in a makeshift
shelter, riding back against a still too powerful wind, and then
finding the bomb. What Perry really wanted to do was go to bed and
forget, at least for a few hours, all that he had seen in the past
twenty-four hours. That was not to happen. He would not allow
himself that comfort. Not yet.

“Come clean about what?” Dr. Curtis
asked.

“Perry has admitted to
withholding information,” Griffin said. “I think the situation is
such that we need—that we have a
right
to all the information
available.”

“We have more pressing problems,” Sarah
said. “From what Perry has told us, we may have a killer among
us.”

“We don’t know that,” Larimore said. “The
plane may have been brought down by a bomb, but there was a bomb
here as well. Would someone plant such a device in the only shelter
available to him . . . or her?”

Perry had told them of the crash and his
suspicion that it was no accident. The bomb in the bathroom was an
exclamation point to it all.

“It’s not fair that you and your buddies
have all the secrets,” Griffin said. “We’re out here risking life
and limb, just like you.”

“Ease up, Grif,” Jack said. “I don’t know
any more than you, and if that’s the way it has to be, then there
will be no complaints from me.”

Perry looked around the room. Seven faces
looked back, faces that made no secret of their exhaustion. “Dr.
James is right,” he said. “This is as good a time as any. I had
planned to lay out all the cards once the construction crew was
gone.”

“You didn’t trust my men?” Larimore
asked.

“It’s not a matter of
trust, Commander, it’s a matter of secre
cy
and need-to-know information. No one on the crew had a need to
know.”

“I sure need to know,” Gwen said.

Perry stood and clasped his hands behind his
back. He paused, organizing his thoughts. “You already know of the
surveys done by satellite and aircraft. I told you when we arrived
that Lake Vostok, the body of water that is two miles beneath our
feet, is expanding, indicating an under-ice melting that has yet to
be explained. That, of course, is true.”

“Of course,” Griffin said.

“What you don’t know occurred a few months
ago. Dr. Harry Hearns—a scientist with the National Ice Center—made
an un-usual discovery in an iceberg.”

“Don’t you mean
on
an iceberg?” Gwen
corrected.

“No, I mean
in
an iceberg,” Perry
responded. “Dr. Hearns specializes in icebergs and how they calve.
While studying a particular
berg—the
second largest ever seen, as I understand it—the berg
split
, and he shot video of
it.”

“Nothing unusual so far,” Griffin said.

“No, it’s not,” Perry
replied. “There are plenty of such events on video, but what made
this one so different was
what
the video captured. The ice split, and Hearns,
who was in a helicopter, saw a dark object. Once the calving was
complete, the new berg, the portion that split off, was top-heavy
and rolled into the sea.”

“What did he see?” Sarah asked.

“A building,” Perry answered, then waited
for their response. Silence. The seven looked from one person to
the other.

“A building?” Griffin said with disbelief.
“He saw a building on the ice?”

“Not on—in. He filmed a portion of a stone
structure that was, according to his report, 150 meters below the
surface of the ice, entombed.”

“That’s impossible,” Griffin said.

“That’s right,” Perry said. “By today’s
scientific understanding, that is impossible.”

“That’s very old ice. Ice is laid down at
about two centimeters a year, and you’re talking fifteen thousand
centimeters. That’s seventy-five hundred years ago. Not possible.
There’s some mistake. There are seventy million cubic miles of ice
on the continent, and it didn’t get here suddenly. It took millions
of years for this ice sheet to form.”

“Then explain Hearns’s house or whatever
building he saw,” Larimore said.

“As I said, it’s a mistake,” Griffin said
with a dismissive wave. “I’ve met Dr. Hearns, and he seemed a very
serious and capable scientist. Someone has twisted something he
said. I bet he’s furious over it.”

“He’s not,” Perry said. “He’s dead.”

Griffin’s hard expression softened.
“What?”

Perry explained. “He wasn’t satisfied with
the brief glimpse he had from the helicopter. He made arrangements
to dive on the inverted iceberg. While he waited for the ship and
two-man submersible that would allow him a closer look, he studied
the video and still photos, sending them via satellite to several
colleagues. Those colleagues put pressure on the National Science
Foundation and the military to provide Hearns with the necessary
equipment. It worked.”

“It also clued in the military,” Sarah
said.

“Right. Hearns got what he wanted, but
something went wrong on the dive. It appears that the pilot sailed
the craft right into the ice. Maybe the controls jammed, but the
collision breached the hull, and the submersible was flooded with
freezing water. They drowned.”

“That’s horrible,” Sarah said.

“Ghastly,” Gwen agreed.

“Further suspicions were raised when two
Coast Guard pilots died in a fatal crash.”

“Let me guess,” Jack said. “They were the
pilots who were flying Hearns’s helicopter when he saw the
structure.”

Perry nodded. “Exactly.”

“And this is what you’ve been holding back
from us?” Griffin asked.

“There’s more.” Perry handed out manila
folders to the team. “You each received brief packets before you
left your homes to come here. All the information you needed was
contained in those packets. What wasn’t in them is the information
you now need.” Perry waited as the other seven opened the thin
folders. He watched their expressions.

“This is another radar survey of the lake
below the ice,” Curtis said. “It looks different than what I saw
before. For one thing, the lake seems larger than the last
image—”

“What is that?” Griffin asked.

“That is why we’re here,” Perry said.

“It looks like some kind of mound,” Sarah
suggested. “An upheaval of the crust along the edge of the
lake?”

Perry didn’t answer. He was standing in a
room filled with great minds: scientists and engineers from various
fields, each considered an accomplished expert in his or her field.
They would get it given time.

“It’s awfully uniform,” Curtis said. “It’s
difficult to be certain, but it seems symmetrical and shows strong
perimeter lines.”

“Nonsense,” Griffin said. “That would
suggest design. It has to be a natural phenomenon. Why didn’t we
see this before?”

Perry was waiting for that
question. “As you know, you’re
looking at
a radar image taken from a plane. Using sixty megahertz
radar
data, which measures the change in
ice thickness, we have determined that the ice shield has been
melting faster than previously thought. As it melts, new details
can be seen. We combined all the information—data from radar,
satellite imagery, InSAR
interferometry,
and more—and developed a three-dimensional model. That’s
on the next page.”

Papers rustled and then—

“This is a joke,” Griffin said. “This is
your idea of humor.”

“Oh my,” Curtis said, staring at the image.
He leaned back in his chair and stroked his chin.

“Wow,” was all Jack said.

“Dr. Curtis?” Perry prompted. “What do you
think?”

“I think my world has just been turned
upside-down.”

“It’s not real,” Griffin
said, springing to his feet. “First you tell this kindergarten tale
about a stone building in an iceberg, and now you expect me to
believe that there is a . . . a
pyramid
below my feet.”

“Ziggurat,” Dr. Curtis corrected.
“Essentially the same thing, but with some marked differences.”

“Call it what you will,” Griffin snapped.
“But I call it foolishness. If this were true . . .”

“It’s true,” Perry said after a moment. “And
we’re going to take a look at it.”

“I refuse to participate in such a waste of
time,” Griffin said.

“Where you going to go?” Larimore asked.
“What are you going to do? Sit in your room and fabricate new ways
to deny what your eyes tell you?”

“The commander has a point,” Gwen said,
breaking a long silence. “We’re stuck here. It’s not like we can
walk home. There’s no plane, and one isn’t due for weeks.”

“When the transport doesn’t show up on
schedule, they’ll come looking for it,” Griffin said.

“That’s true,” Perry said.
“But in the meantime, I say we occu
py
ourselves with the original task.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Sarah
intoned. “The plane didn’t go down by accident, at least that’s
your contention. And the plastic explosive in the bathroom
certainly was no accident. There’s still a killer somewhere.”

“Unless he blew himself up on the plane,”
Gwen said. “That wouldn’t bring a tear to my eye.”

“If one of us were the killer,” Larimore
began, “then why would he or she blow up the only means of
survival?”

“That very question has been on my mind,”
Perry said. “Things don’t add up. Not yet. Still, we can’t sit
around looking at each other. Let’s carry on with our mission.”

“When?” Jack asked.

“Right now,” Perry said. “It’s time to
unleash Hairy.”

The twin turboprops of the Casa 212 airplane knifed
through the thin Antarctic air. The wing-over-body craft was
painted a white that matched the terrain below. Minutes before, Tia
and her team had watched the blue waters of the southernmost
Pacific Ocean, where Pacific became Atlantic, turn icy white. The
ground below swept by at nearly two hundred knots. The speed seemed
greater since the pilot was skipping along at an altitude of less
than a hundred feet. It was not safe, but it was what Tia had
ordered.