The Black Knight (7 page)

‘Why the hell would I want to move?’ Byron snarled. ‘This place is perfect! I don’t have to listen to idiots like you spouting your psycho-babble to anybody who’ll listen! I don’t have to watch war veterans spat on in the street!’

‘The Vietnam War was a long time ago, Aaron,’ Aaron soothed. ‘The people revere and respect our servicemen now.’

Byron gestured to the cell around them with a hateful grin. ‘Doesn’t look much like that to me, does it?!’

‘You’re here due to the murder of several innocent civilians, Aaron,’ Aaron said calmly. ‘Surely you don’t expect to walk the streets with…’

‘I expect a goddamned trial!’ Byron screamed as he shot up out of his seat and yanked wildly on the chains.

The door to the interview room burst open and the two guards rushed in as Byron thrashed and snarled, fighting uselessly against his captors as they wrestled him face down onto the desk.

‘If I ever see you in here again, I’ll kill you with my bare hands!’ Byron screamed.

One of the guards looked up at Aaron as he struggled to keep Byron pinned down, fully occupied with the task.

‘Get out of here!’

Aaron nodded, his eyes wobbling with fear as he hurried out of the interview room and turned down the corridor. Two more guards were rushing toward him and he pointed back toward the room.

‘Hurry, they’re struggling with him in there!’

The guards dashed past, night sticks in their hands as Aaron continued on. The desk sergeant at the first set of gates opened them immediately as a silent alarm, flashing red lights that would not agitate the other inmates, warned him of the unfolding drama back on the block.

‘He gone crazy again?’ the sergeant asked as Aaron walked through.

‘Can’t stand the solitude,’ Aaron replied as he passed by. ‘Blames everybody but himself.’

‘Shouldn’t murder people then, should he,’ the sergeant replied as he filled out a form and passed it to Aaron. ‘Sign here please, doctor.’

Aaron dutifully signed the form, having practiced the signature in his mind a thousand times. The sergeant compared it to another on file, and then opened the second security gate to allow Aaron to pass through.

‘Have a good day, Doc’.’

‘You too.’

Aaron passed through no less than twelve more gates, all manned by security staff who had seen Byron pass through a half hour before. Nobody challenged him, although he was subject to the same rigorous searches as Byron would have been on the way in. There was nothing to find, and ten minutes after donning the Doctor’s clothes Aaron James Mitchell walked out of the prison’s main entrance and into the parking lot.

The sun was up in the sky now, the fearsome orb flaring in the perfect blue sky. Mitchell inhaled deeply on the air, but forced himself to walk normally as he pulled the doctor’s keys from his pocket and hit the central locking button. A silver Prius’s tail lights flashed nearby and Aaron subtly altered course toward it, conscious of the watch towers arrayed around the prison and the armed guards likely watching him from within.

Moments later, Aaron drove out of Florence ADX and vanished toward the north.

***

VIII

McMurdo Sound,

Antarctica

‘Welcome to the bottom of the world.’

The voice sounded disembodied to Ethan’s ears as he sat in an uncomfortable seat in the shuddering belly of a giant C-130 Hercules aircraft, the loadmaster speaking into a microphone that connected to the headphones Ethan wore to protect his ears from the tremendous roar of the engines.

Through a small window beside his shoulder Ethan peered out into the frigid atmosphere outside the aircraft. The wing stretched away above him, huge turboprop engines trailing turbulent vapor that glowed in the light of a sun blazing amid a stream of molten metal searing the distant horizon. Far below a featureless canvass of ice fields stretched away into infinity, cast into dark and frosty shadows.

‘We’ll make our final approach to McMurdo in the next few minutes,’ the loadmaster said as he walked between them and tugged on their harnesses to check that they were secure.

Ethan saw his companions jab their thumbs in the air in unison. Hannah Ford, two scientists named Willem Chandler and Amy Reece and their two respective assistants, and twelve Navy SEALs occupied the interior of the aircraft along with their respective equipment, compact vehicles and weapons. The soldiers had been deployed from the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center at Andros Island in the Bahamas, while the two scientists seemed to have been plucked from some mysterious back room at the DIA.

Chandler, he had learned, was employed by the DIA as what they called a
futurist
and was apparently an authority on conspiracy theories, while Amy Reece was an
exobiologist
and linguistics specialist who specialized in the search for life outside the Earth and the effects of extra-terrestrial environments on living organisms. Between them and their respective assistants, Ethan figured they represented the closest things to an expert opinion on Black Knight that the agency had been able to rustle up at short notice.

Ethan glanced outside as the Hercules dipped its wing and began a gentle turn. The beams of pale sunlight glowing through the windows into the aircraft’s cavernous interior vanished as they were plunged into darkness. The engine roar subsided enough for Ethan to hear the flaps and undercarriage deploy to the sound of whining hydraulics, the huge aircraft dipping and bouncing in the wintry gales blustering across the vast ice plains. Ethan clenched his harness as a tight knot of anxiety in his guts threatened to eject his breakfast over his boots.

Through the open hatchway to the cockpit far to his left, Ethan spotted the green glow of cockpit instruments and a glimpse of twinkling runway lights stretching out into the dark void ahead. The Hercules bumped and gyrated as it descended, and then a thump reverberated through the fuselage as the aircraft touched down on the ice and the pilots deployed the spoilers and threw the huge engines into reverse. The aircraft thundered and vibrated as though it were coming apart at the seams, and then slowed as it turned off the runway and taxied toward a parking spot.

Ethan breathed a sigh of relief and closed his eyes. He heard the engines whine down as he watched the loadmaster get out of his seat and hit a large red button inside the fuselage. The rear of the Hercules yawned slowly open as a ramp dropped down onto the ice. Half a dozen soldiers, wrapped up in thick Artic camouflage and armed with rifles, strode up the ramp. The loadmaster pointed at Ethan’s group and waved them over.

Ethan unstrapped himself from his seat and hefted a large holdall onto his back. He then pulled on thick gloves, tightened his thickly padded jacket and pulled the hood tight over his head as he looked about at their bleak surroundings.

The station owed its designation to nearby McMurdo Sound, which had been named after Lieutenant Archibald McMurdo of HMS
Terror
, which first charted the area in 1841 under the command of British explorer James Clark Ross. British explorer Robert Falcon Scott first established a base nearby in 1902 and built Discovery Hut, which still stood adjacent to the harbor at Hut Point. The volcanic rock of the site was the southernmost bare ground accessible by ship in the Antarctic, and the founders initially called the station
Naval Air Facility McMurdo
from its creation in 1956.

Ethan knew that McMurdo had become a center of scientific and logistical operations in the Antarctic. The Antarctic Treaty, signed by over forty-five governments, regulated intergovernmental relations with respect to Antarctica and governed the conduct of daily life at McMurdo for United States Antarctic Programs. The first scientific diving protocols were established before 1960 and the first diving operations were documented in 1961, with a hyperbaric chamber available for support of polar diving operations.

From his vantage point outside the Hercules aircraft as he trudged off the ramp, Ethan could see rugged hills and valleys through the dawn gloom, and a nearby slate and shale shore. The black water of the Ross Sea was encrusted with jagged chunks of ice and a large ship was anchored there, its deck lights blazing in the darkness.

‘Polar Star,’ Hannah said as she saw the ship, her breath forming dense clouds on the frigid air as she spoke. ‘That’s our ride, part of the US Coast Guard fleet.’

The Polar Star was a stocky, thick-hulled vessel, her paintwork red and white for high visibility against both the black water and brilliant ice floes. The ship’s bridge was almost a perfect cube, spinning radar dishes perched atop its lofty heights and glowing interior lights hinting at blessing warmth within. Nearly four hundred feet long and with a maximum speed of eighteen knots,
Polar Star
could continuously break six feet of ice at three knots, and could break twenty one feet of ice if backing and ramming, so Ethan had heard.

‘Let’s get the hell aboard then,’ Ethan said, glancing again at the bitter gloom surrounding them. ‘The less time I spend out here, the better I’ll feel.’

Ethan followed the SEALS and scientists as they trudged across the base, soldiers armed with rifles watching them and ensuring that they did not stray far from their assigned path toward the rugged, icy shoreline. Although McMurdo was as much a research station as a military outpost, the soldiers were under orders to shoot anybody who strayed too far. Bristling with sophisticated listening devices and other obscure military technology, McMurdo’s military contingent was still shrouded in Cold War secrecy.

‘There anybody else out here we need to worry about?’ Ethan asked as they walked, weighed down by their heavy backpacks.

‘The French have an outpost, Dumont d’Urville, about fifteen hundred nautical miles south of Tasmania, but they’re a long way from us,’ Hannah said. ‘Our plan, according to Jarvis, is to use
Polar Star
to break a channel across McMurdo Sound and make it to Ross Island and the station there as part of a standard resupply and refuel operation conducted every year at this time. We’ll deploy before
Polar Star
moves on.’

Ethan marched up a ramp resting on the ice that climbed up onto the ship’s deck, the vessel entirely surrounded by the ice sheets but its crew apparently unconcerned. He could see her captain watching as the SEALS hauled their heavy weapons and wheeled several strange vehicles aboard the vessel, clearly unhappy with the volume of military hardware suddenly appearing on his vessel. A tall, broad shouldered man with the rugged features of the experienced seaman, he extended a gloved hand.

‘Captain James Forrester,’ he introduced himself as Ethan stepped aboard the ship.

‘Ethan Warner. When will we get underway?’

‘As soon as you’re aboard,’ Forrester assured him. ‘We’ve established a link to your senior officer in Washington DC and your team will be briefed as soon as we’re on our way.’

Ethan eyed the captain uncertainly.

‘How many of the crew know why we’re here?’

‘None of them,’ Forrester promised, ‘and I’ve already signed a non-disclosure agreement. Our mission route is routine anyway, so it’s not going to raise any eyebrows with Ivan or any other of the research stations out here.’

Ethan smiled inwardly. It had been a long time since he had heard the Russians described as
Ivan
, a Cold War moniker that Forrester had likely been raised using.

‘I’ll have the team assemble as soon as possible,’ Ethan promised.

‘Your quarters are ready,’ Forrester said as he turned to oversee the rest of the crew. ‘Ensign DuPont will show you the way.’

A young sailor beckoned for Ethan to follow him even as the
Polar Star’s
crew hauled the boarding ramp up from the icy wasteland below the ship and he heard the sound of the vessel’s powerful engines begin to reverberate through the hull. He followed the Ensign through a hatch beneath the bridge and felt a waft of blessed warm air envelop him as he and Hannah walked through the interior.

‘Damn,’ Hannah uttered behind him, ‘I’ve just realized that I couldn’t feel my face.’

‘The temperature outside is seventeen degrees below zero,’ Ensign DuPont explained as he strode through the ice breaker’s myriad corridors. ‘You kind of get used to it.’

‘I’d rather not,’ Hannah replied, and then looked at Ethan as she pulled the thickly lined hood of her jacket off. ‘You got any idea what this briefing is about? I thought that Jarvis laid it all out back in DC?

‘No idea,’ Ethan admitted, ‘but it must be important to have it all set up, and the SEALS didn’t look like they knew what it was about either.’

DuPont led them to their quarters, little more than a pair of bunks in a room barely larger than a broom cupboard.

‘You won’t be staying aboard for long,’ the Ensign informed them, ‘so this is really just a place to store your kit while we cross the sound. The briefing room is just a little further down the corridor, to the right.’

Ethan thanked the Ensign, dumped his kit and thick polar jacket on his bunk and then headed straight for the briefing room with Hannah close behind.

The briefing room was located a deck below the bridge and was dominated by a table covered with a sheet of Perspex, beneath which was a map of the southern hemisphere, the Antarctic at its center. Ethan figured that the captain and his officers used this room for detailed navigation and planning.

The SEALS were already in the room, leaning against the walls and trying to remain inconspicuous despite the air of restrained violence that often enshrouded Special Forces troops. Around the map table were Chandler and Amy, both of them wrapped in winter weather clothing and whispering excitedly as a wall-mounted monitor at the far end of the room glowed into life and Doug Jarvis appeared upon it.

‘Ethan,’ Jarvis said, ‘I take it your team is in place?’

‘The ship’s already in motion and we should make Ross Island in a few hours,’ Ethan confirmed.

‘Good,’ Jarvis replied, ‘because we’ve uncovered more data regarding the Earth-based signals we detected answering those belonging to Black Knight.’