Protocol 7 (33 page)

“Sir.” It was one of the soldiers, working on a handheld device the size of a lighter. “Central Command has given us three anomalies. The strategic AIs give low significance scores to two of them. The third is a freighter called the Munro; it foundered and sank at the sixtieth parallel at approximately 1100 hours yesterday. There are no codes assigned to it, but standard satellite surveillance logged a rendezvous with the Chilean Coast Guard just a few hours before it sank.”

“Sank?” the commander repeated, analyzing the situation. “Interesting. Send me the data.”

The tactical officer who had started the discussion touched his device in the corner, and Roland’s own handheld buzzed and showed him the Munro’s stats: length, draft, age, registration. “Sir,” the tactical officer said, “the boat has been traced back for two months. Origin seems to be a port in Portugal—Tavira—and seems to have docked several times, disappearing for a month in Argentina at San Sebastián, before making its way through the Straits of Magellan.”

“That’s our bogie!” Roland said. The size of the ship, the size of its hold, its utter lack of shipping manifest. Fishing boat my ass, he thought. They brought that damn intruder in from Portugal or farther north. “Check the probability of speed from the sinking of the boat to Fissure 9.”

“Sir,” responded the soldier…and a beat later with all efficiency, “Central Command suggests a possibility but low probability. The reason given is that the speed of the vessel would be too high to reach us in time.”

“Oh, I think that little bastard can go just about as fast as it wants,” he said and glared at the display that showed his intruder as a three-dimensional blob, moving closer and closer to the central lake so far below the ice. “I bet it can do almost anything.”

The Spector VI missed the wall of ice by thirty feet. Max could read that measurement quite clearly on the holo-display in front of him. That had been more than ninety seconds ago; now they were speeding away from the side of the tunnel at an oblique angle, moving laterally with great speed and carefully, carefully, even deeper into the tunnel.

On the bridge and in the ready room, the team members tried to gain their composure while Hayden hunched over the tactical console and focused frantically on controlling the new exterior functions of the Spector. Max, intense and committed as ever, simply concentrated on keeping them all alive.

Simon sat next to Max in the co-pilot’s chair and tried to watch the console, the holo-screen, and the crew all at once. He cast a long look over his shoulder and called out, “Is everyone okay?”

“We’re fine,” Ryan replied as he helped Samantha to her feet. The Spector was swaying side to side, fighting the invisible currents of the tunnel’s treated water. It was difficult to stand while the craft gained its equilibrium.

“We’re reaching the end of the tunnel,” said Max, frowning at the forward deep-scan. Not all that deep at the moment, he told himself. This ice interferes with all the passive scans. Might as well be concrete. Not knowing enough—hell, he corrected, not knowing much of anything in this environment—was frustrating and unfamiliar to him. Max was used to being on top of the situation; he was trained to think three steps ahead. But this constant, knife-edge improvisation was wearing on him.

“You have an idea what’s above us?” Hayden asked, still peering at his version of the scans.

“No,” Max said flatly. “My visibility is about three hundred feet. Yours?”

Hayden scowled. “No better.” He spun in his chair and confronted both Simon and Max. “But look,” he said. “The invisibility functions are up and running. All of them. We are now invisible to just about every sensor spectrum known to man: radar, sonar, visible light, infrared, acoustic, even mass spectrography.”

“Very impressive,” Max said.

“Yes it is,” Hayden replied, trying not to sound proud of himself. “But more important, it means we can use the active sensor array and not get caught.” He glanced sideways at the console and allowed himself a small shrug. “At least, we can do it in microbursts, fractions of a second every ten seconds, so that no one can get a lock on us.”

Max grinned as he piloted the vessel toward the end of the tunnel. “So lots of quick peeks are okay, but no staring allowed.”

Hayden nodded eagerly. “Exactly.”

Simon thought it through. “Okay,” he said. “We really do need to see farther and deeper than three hundred feet in any direction. Give it a try. And look for an approaching…anything…at the same time, okay?”

“Done,” Hayden said and spun back to his console. Another hologram block, this one far longer than it was wide, blossomed on the left side of the bridge. “Engaging deepscan burst…now,” he said.

The new image of the world around them snapped into place. The Spector was a tiny glowing button in the middle of a huge—an unbelievably huge—network of tunnels and basins, carved out of the ice of Antarctica. The channels and fissures and caverns and alcoves stretched off in every direction—above, below, forward, aft, left, right—in a 360-degree view that moved slowly as they skimmed down the tunnel.

Even Hayden was amazed. “Mother of god,” Hayden whispered, unaware he was speaking aloud at all. “What’s going on in this frozen hell?”

Simon and Ryan noticed the movements in the tunnels at the same instant. “Forward, about twenty degrees right and…am I reading the scale right?” Simon said. “About half a mile away?” He jumped up and pointed at the blue-diamond blob in one of the approaching tunnel projections.

“Right,” Hayden said. “About three thousand feet as the laser scans.”

“Oh my god,” Samantha said, putting her hand on her stomach, terrified. “Whoever’s out there—they can see us.”

“No,” Simon assured her, “they’re just heading to our last known location, before we disappeared from their scans. Which means we should be somewhere else.” He cast a hard look at Max who nodded without looking back.

“No worries,” he said. “We’re out of here.” He ticked up the power to the thruster, and they surged forward, finally emerging from the endless tunnel that they had entered fourteen miles earlier, back at Station 35, and flew into a vast basin, half a mile deep.

The holo-display showed it clearly: The Spector had burst into a large bowl-shaped depression several hundred feet in diameter. Above it was a gigantic dome and a thin blue plane just a hundred feet over the Spector itself. It took Simon a moment to realize it was an indicator of the water/atmosphere interface.

“So…some of these tunnels are dry?” he said. “I mean, above the water line?”

“By my estimate,” Ryan said, “most of them. We’re more than ten miles inland, remember. We may have entered at four hundred feet below sea level, but we’ve gradually—very gradually—been moving upward. And now, we’re at sea level.”

“It’ll take us a few minutes to breach,” Max said. “Assuming we want to. Then we’ve got to find a way to take cover and quick.” He glanced at the deepscan holo-display and scowled. “Whatever is in that tunnel,” he said, referring to the Dragger Pass, “is approaching us pretty rapidly.”

“I agree. I don’t want to introduce us just yet,” Simon added.

Everyone on board knew the consequences. If they were discovered, their careers and possibly lives would be short-lived.

They ascended to just a few feet below the surface in silence, every eye focused on the deepscan or the flat-screen, trying to draw more information—or even a solution—through sheer force of will.

Hayden was gazing into the infinitely complex maze. “Simon,” he said, “Whatever Oliver has told you must be true. We’ve stumbled on to something dangerous here. Too dangerous for us to be a part of.”

Simon looked at Nastasia, trying to guess at what she was thinking. “I can’t tell you anything that will help you, Simon,” she said. “To my knowledge, there is no technology that can create these tunnels, let alone survive this deep within the ice. These are not the tunnels I spoke of.”

Ryan nodded in agreement. “Way beyond anything I’ve seen. And I’d have to agree with Hayden, this is definitely something we shouldn’t be a part of. It’s just too unbelievable to be true.”

Samantha was shaking her head in astonishment as she stared at the approaching blobs of light. “It makes no sense,” she said. “The Madrid Protocol is still in place, not to mention that Protocol 7 was just initiated. There is an absolute quarantine in Antarctica. No one should be here. No one. This is a violation of global magnitude.”

Simon took it all in, thinking furiously as the Spector pushed toward the open air above them. He tried to take in everything they had learned, everything that had happened in the last few weeks—even in the last few hours. He wondered if Oliver had been dragged down here knowingly or by force. But it didn’t matter—his father was in danger, and he would find him.

Whoever was down here, whoever was running this mad operation, knew where Oliver was and what had happened to him, and Simon would find him and find out for himself.

A small, sudden movement made him turn to look at Nastasia. That mark on the back of her neck, he thought. What does it mean? What does it have to do with my father—with Nastasia herself, and her reason for being here? Does she know I saw it? Why would she have that symbol on her neck?

Her remarkable sapphire eyes revealed nothing. Her small, enigmatic smile offered even less.

Max’s voice broke the silence and brought Simon back into the moment. “Ready to surface,” he said to Simon. “Shall we?”

“Won’t we look like a big dent in the water?” Samantha said. “I mean, just because the Spector is invisible, it doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

Hayden shook his head. “No, the smartskin samples the terrain and builds a multi-spectrum camouflage. We just look like another piece of the sea, with the right color and wave action.”

She shook her head. “Amazing.”

“Yes,” he admitted.

In the brief seconds that remained, Simon tried to put the pieces of the puzzle together. He wondered if there was a connection between UNED and what was happening in Antarctica. Did they know what was going on, or was this somehow beyond them as well? Oliver himself may have been played for a fool. He was requested by UNED for the Antarctica project, but soon he was working for some “department” that had no real name, and not long after that he had “died”—or, rather, disappeared.

And then there were the rumors of all the other scientists who had mysteriously vanished in recent months and years.

Max let the Spector hover just below the surface and put his full attention on the blobs of light—the whatever-they-were who were approaching from the side tunnels. They would be arriving in ten minutes or less.

“Invisible or not,” he said, “I think we’d be much better off confronting these…people…from land. I’m going up.”

Simon turned back to Max with a new look of resolve. “Yes,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

Max grinned. “Thought so.”

He put his hands out, spread his fingers and lifted them both very slowly, and Spector VI rose to breach the frigid water, like some vast supernatural creature of the sea, invisible to mortals but larger than any whale. Water streamed down its glittering sides. Flukes on the left and right side opened, breathing out foul carbon dioxide and replenishing the breathable air.

They were just a few hundred feet from the edge of the icebound shoreline. The cavernous space was lit by some sort of dull illumination that seemed to come from within the ice itself. It was no brighter than the outside world would have been a few moments after sunset, but it was enough to see by. More than enough.

“Let’s get her to shore,” Max said. He snapped his fingers together, locking the console for a moment, then pulled his hands back and turned to his best friends. “So,” he said, “you want to help me engage the treads on this monster?” referring to the tracks that would convert the Spector to an amphibian transport vehicle.

Simon grinned. “What do you need?” he asked.

It took the consent of two pilots, one at either side, to convert the vessel from full submarine capacity to amphibious form. They both palmed the sensor plates at the same time, touched the approval panels when they turned green, and looked down at the floor as the faint rrrrrrrr sound grew louder. The exterior plates were pulling back and locking. The tread compartment was flooding as it was supposed to. The treads were extending downward, covering the curved underside of the vessel, then locking into place. Test lights flashed. Ready lights illuminated as the treads extended fully.

Max slipped back into the command chair and grinned. “We’re good,” he said. He looked at Simon almost triumphantly. He could barely believe what they had accomplished. “We’re going to the surface of the ice.”

For a moment Simon stood silently looking at the holo-screen in front of them. Then he said without needing acknowledgment, “Let’s go get my father.”

“Commander,” the surveillance officer said, “I think you should see this.”

The DITV was making record speed, careening down the slick, smooth walls of Tunnel 3 at twice the recommended speed. But Roland was determined to get there first and do what needed to be done.

Screw Central, he told himself. Screw everybody. Fissure 9 is my responsibility. It has been for nine fucking years, and I will be goddamned if anyone, anyone enters this place without my permission!

The gyroscopes that were designed to keep the transport’s cockpit steady despite its speed and attitudinal changes were whining with stress. In a normal vehicle, the passengers would have been plastered against the walls and quite likely injured already. In the DITV, pushed to the limit as it was, Roland and his men were safe enough, but they found it impossible to stand without help as they traveled at a truly insane speed. Still, Roland made it to his feet using the back of his seat and the edge of the console to stagger across the chamber to the surveillance officer’s side.

There were six different screens and three-dimensional displays arrayed across the forward half of the transport. Five of them showed the churning gray static of interference or a rock-solid, entirely believable representation of the Shipping Dome, their destination.