Veer swam in pursuit of his men, passing through a deep channel beneath the base where vertical stanchions reached down into the water, enormous buoyancy aids welded to their legs helping the base remain in position. Veer knew that such stanchions could not have been attached to the surface of Antarctica far below, as the glacier’s constant movement would have torn them free within even a year of being built.
Something moved to his right, and through the gloom he saw a large, long black object drifting through the darkness. Veer felt a twist of anxiety wrench his innards as he thought about the scientist he had tossed into the docks that had been chewed up by something living in the water. He saw his own men giving the massive form a wide berth and watched it as it passed by on the very edge of his visibility, cruising south and away from the pens. Veer kicked off again as soon as he lost sight of the black creature, keen to get as far away from it as possible.
Above him in the gloom he saw a faint rectangle of light appear as they passed beneath the base and then he saw his men ascending up toward the rear dock. Veer adjusted his ballast and began to rise as he kicked his fins and accelerated toward the surface.
*
‘Get that rig set up, now!’
Riggs yelled his warning as he jumped down onto the rear dock and hurried across to the tent. Inside, Sully was attaching a C4 charge to the side of the Black Knight, his face hidden inside a biohazard suit as he backed out and re-sealed the tent behind him. Hannah stepped down onto the dock and watched as they prepared the base to defend against Veer’s men.
‘Enemy!’
Sully pointed at the water, which until moments ago had been as smooth as silk. Now, ripples of motion could be seen expanding outward in concentric circles, disturbances from below the surface rippling the water.
‘I don’t see any bubbles,’ Hannah said.
‘Closed breathing apparatus, Special Forces kit,’ Sully explained, and then called a warning in a harsh whisper to Riggs. ‘They’re coming up!’
The SEALs filtered back off the dock toward the hatch. Even as they did so, Hannah saw
that Sully had attached the C4 charges to the surface of Black Knight itself and she cried out a warning to Riggs.
‘Amy said that the device might react to high-intensity sound! You blow that charge, you might set the thing off!’
‘Priorities,’ Riggs replied with a tight grin. ‘If Veer’s men come up through here they’ll overrun us and any worries we might have about Black Knight will be history.’
‘Chandler said that this thing melted the flesh off people,’ Hannah insisted as she grabbed his arm. ‘I call that a damned priority!’
Riggs looked at her, his gaze buried deep into her eyes.
‘Not your call to make,’ he growled back. ‘You don’t like it, then get the hell off the dock and away somewhere safe. Our people will be here in minutes and I don’t intend to miss the ride!’
‘There won’t be a ride if that thing activates!’
‘Good, because if this thing is so lethal it’ll take out all of Veer’s men!’
Riggs pushed her aside and Hannah backed off as she watched the SEALs set up their firing positions inside the main hatch. Ethan had remained in the command center, helping Saunders maintain a steady rate of fire on Veer’s main force, and she wished desperately that he were here now to help convince Riggs to shut off the charge.
‘Are you getting inside or what?!’ Riggs demanded of her.
Hannah looked at the charge on Black Knight and she knew that she couldn’t risk it blowing them all to hell. She launched herself off the stairwell and down onto the dock.
‘Ford, get away from there!’
Hannah ran for the Black Knight, and then all at once she realized that she was too late as four figures broke the surface of the water, ugly black assault rifles pointing at her as the entire cavern erupted to the sound of deafening gunfire.
*
Veer’s men broke free of the water just above him, and almost immediately he saw bullets zipping trails of bubbles through the water as they came under attack, heard the muted rattle of machine gun fire as they fired back. Veer pulled his rifle carefully off his back and hesitated beneath the surface, watching as his soldiers fired at their assailants up on the docks.
One of them twisted violently in the water as his head snapped back, a cloud of scarlet blood billowing in the water as he was hit in the face and killed instantly. His body rotated in the water to lay flat on its back with limbs extended, and Veer kicked for it as he reached the surface, using the dead body as a shield.
Veer broke the surface and opened fire on two Navy SEAL gunmen huddled in a narrow hatchway above the dock. Even as he fired he saw four of his men clamber up onto the dock and hurl grenades at the hatch.
‘Grenade!’
The scream went up from one of the SEALs and they vanished into the corridor and slammed the hatch shut. The two grenades bounced off the closed blast door and detonated, blowing it open again. The blasts were deafeningly loud as Veer’s men ducked to avoid the shrapnel burst from the weapons, chunks of metal zipping through the chamber in all directions. Veer ducked behind the corpse of his soldier before he kicked for the dock and hauled himself out of the water.
Veer turned to look at the biohazard tent and the strange object contained within, a dull black bell-shaped structure. ‘Secure it!’ he bellowed.
The troops swarmed over the object, two of them bursting in through the tent entrance. Veer saw them creep up to the object, their weapons held before them as they reached out to open the interior flap of the tent, and then he saw Hannah Ford hiding beneath the stairwell, crouched with her hands over her ears as she squinted and turned away from Black Knight.
‘No!’ Veer yelled at his men.
A sudden, deafening blast erupted from within the object and Veer ducked and turned aside as from the corner of his eye he saw their heads torn from their necks in a cloud of flame and smoke that ripped through the tent’s transparent plastic.
The tent collapsed around the object, the two bodies of the dead soldiers slumping against it as blood pulsed from the ragged remains of their necks. Two thumps from inside the tent echoed through the dock as their heads bounced on the unforgiving dock beside them.
Veer, his hands clamped over his ears to prevent the blast from bursting his eardrums, saw Hannah Ford break from cover and dash to the hatch.
‘They booby trapped it!’ somebody shouted.
‘Congratulations, genius!’ Veer roared as he pointed to the base door. ‘Get that open! Whatever was inside this thing has likely gone with them!’
The soldiers rushed up to the door of the base, even as Veer’s radio crackled.
‘General, we’ve got company!’
Veer heard a blast of gunfire distort the line as he bellowed his response. ‘What’s going on out there?!’
‘The Navy’s here sir! They’ve got a submarine!’
Veer glared at the door of the rear of the base and realized that he’d been duped. If the submarine surfaced then reinforcements would flood the base and this would all be over – he’d be kissing goodbye to his fortune. He yelled his reply.
‘Drop charges into the water and scare them into staying deep! We’re on our way!’
He was about to make for the door to the main base when a strange vibration caught his attention. Suddenly, he realized that the chamber was shaking softly, and slowly his men fell silent as they all turned to look at the Black Knight.
The strange hieroglyphic text around the base of the object was glowing a bright electric blue, like a halo that was growing in intensity with every passing second. Veer squinted as a piercing pain struck his eardrums and he whirled away. Nausea wrenched his stomach and he staggered sideways and vomited onto the dock, his vision blurring and the entire dock trembling as though struck by an earthquake.
Through blurred eyes he saw and heard his men staggering about and crying out in agony as the emanations from the Black Knight grew in intensity. The water of the dock rippled and swirled in angular peaks, like a model of an impossibly uniform mountain range, and Veer grabbed at his facemask as he hurled himself toward the water.
To his left, alongside Black Knight, one of his men’s agonized cries was twisted to a new and unbearable crescendo as his flesh seemed to melt off his bones, his wetsuit bubbling as though made from boiling oil. Veer saw the man’s face collapse in upon itself as the chamber’s walls shivered and chunks of ice began spilling from the walls and crashing into the dock.
Veer threw himself into the water and plunged deep beneath the waves.
*
Hannah felt the incredible noise coming from the rear dock sear through her eardrums as she stumbled down the corridor, and she knew that she would not be able to make it out of the building and onto the dock in time to escape the horrendous agony consuming Veer’s men on the docks outside.
She hurried along the darkened corridor in pursuit of Riggs’ men, and then she came up against a steel door that had been firmly closed. Hannah reached out and pulled the handles of the door, but the SEALs had fled and secured it closed behind them, preventing Veer’s men from following them easily into the main base.
Hannah cursed as the noise intensified, an ear-splitting screech that seemed so powerful that it was a physical thing, as though invisible men were assaulting her all around her body, battering her with endless blows. In her pain and confusion, she turned away from the source of the sound and in doing so found herself looking at the entrance to the anechoic chamber.
And suddenly she understood.
She staggered alongside a pressure hatch and turned right, stumbling into the anechoic chamber as she turned and tried to force the door shut. Her limbs were numb, the noise reverberating through her chest like war drums and shaking her eyeballs in their sockets as she heaved the door closed, squeezing her eyes shut as she felt what seemed like razor blades piercing them and her eardrums.
The hatch sealed and some of the intolerable pain eased. Hannah sighed in incredible relief as she leaned against the hatch and twisted the valve closed. The terrible pain and the horrific noise vanished and she slumped to her knees, her vision starring and her ears ringing as though they were about to burst.
*
Veer floated thirty feet beneath the waves and watched as his men hurled themselves into the water. He could still hear the infernal noise screeching across the dock above, but down here it was sufficiently muted that he could bear it.
The bodies landed in the water, some of them missing limbs, some of them thrashing in agony and gradually falling apart, the water stained red with blood that diffused the already meagre light from the glow sticks on the docks.
Veer remained silent and still, even when the enormous form of a sea leopard loomed past him, homing in on the gruesome feast appearing on the surface of the water. The enormous creature was three times Veer’s size, but it remained beneath the surface of the water until the terrible cacophony had faded away before it climbed and began tearing at the mass of flesh now clogging the surface.
Veer allowed himself to ascend slowly, saw one or two of his men appear from the darkness around him and clamber out of the water again, careful to avoid the gigantic predator feasting on the grisly remains all around them.
Veer swam to the dock and pulled himself out of the water, then yanked his mask from his face.
‘What the hell happened?’ one of his men asked in horror.
The dock was littered with corpses, most of them no longer recognizably human, the flesh having split from the bones and been reduced to a bloodied jelly inside the wetsuits his men had worn.
‘Acoustic weapon of some sort,’ Veer uttered, his voice sounding strange in his own ears as he looked at the blast door and then at his companions. Three men, of an original hundred, remained with him.
‘With me, let’s finish this!’
‘Get that door open, and let’s finish this right now!’
Veer led his men inside the corridor at a run, weapons held before them and their barrel-mounted flashlights illuminating the interior in stark beams of white light. They only covered fifty paces before they came upon the sealed blast door.
‘Blow it, now!’
Veer watched impatiently as his men attached charges to the sealed door and then backed away down the steps. Veer huddled in below the door and covered his ears as the troops activated their detonator and flipped the switch.
An ear shattering blast thundered through the chamber and Veer heard the heavy door crash down as his men burst from their hiding places and rushed the door with weapons drawn.
Veer prepared to open fire even as Hannah Ford stumbled out of an adjoining door, a pistol in her hand. She saw him coming and immediately tried to aim the weapon at his face. Veer smashed the pistol from her grasp, the weapon spinning away across the dock and into the water with a splash as he jammed the barrel of his rifle up under her ribs.
‘Hello again,’ he sneered, water streaming down his face and across his thick beard.
‘It’s here!’ one of his men shouted.
‘Looks like your boyfriends have stood you up at the last,’ he smiled without warmth. ‘Don’t worry though, we’ll make good use of you just as soon as we get out of here.’
‘Got to hell,’ Hannah snapped back at him.
‘You first!’ Veer snapped and shoved her along in front of him.
***
XLVII
‘You did what?!’ Ethan yelled above the clatter of gunfire.
‘Hannah’s still back there!’ Sully replied. ‘She made a dash for Black Knight but Veer’s men showed up and cut her off!’
Ethan’s voice echoed down the corridor as he ran after Sully, rage seething through his veins.
‘There was no time!’ Sully shouted back as he raced up the stairwell to the command center. ‘If I hadn’t shut the door that damned thing would have killed us too!’
Ethan cursed as Riggs and his team hurried across the center to rappel lines Ethan and Saunders had thrown out of the shattered windows, secured against the thick steel legs of the planning table.