The Black Knight Page 6

  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.’

  The SEAL team leader, Lieutenant Riggs, stepped forward. ‘Can we expect any kind of resistance?’

  Jarvis appeared non-committal.

  ‘That’s uncertain at this time, as we simply don’t have enough data. What we do have is evidence that the signals are being emitted from a site that was originally occupied in 1946.’

  Ethan stared at the monitor for a long beat before he could speak. ‘Who the hell was up here in 1946?’

  Jarvis appeared as stunned as the rest of the crew as he replied.

  ‘According to what we’ve managed to uncover, the only country known to have established a base up here in Antarctica in the months following World War Two was Germany. Not only that, but we chased them up here in an attempt to destroy what they created.’

  Hannah Ford spoke up. ‘And what exactly did they create up here?’

  ‘A subterranean base,’ Jarvis replied, ‘and we’ve been trying to locate it for seventy years.’

  ***

  IX

  ‘The Nazis had an Antarctic base?’ Ethan asked.

  The briefing room had fallen silent as the soldiers, scientists and Polar Star’s Captain Forrester listened to Jarvis as he replied from the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington DC.

  ‘The Germans had been sending exploratory missions down to Antarctica since the early nineteenth century,’ he said. ‘The Antarctic Plateau was claimed for Norway by Roald Amundsen as the King Haakon VII Plateau when his expedition was the first to reach South Pole in 1911. The name Queen Maud Land was initially applied in January 1930 to the land between 37°E and 49°30’E discovered by Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen and Finn Lützow-Holm during Lars Christensen’s Norvegia expedition of 1929. Norway’s claim was disputed by Germany, which in 1938 dispatched the German Antarctic Expedition, led by Alfred Ritscher, to fly over as muc
h of it as possible. The ship Schwabenland reached the pack ice off Antarctica in January 1939. During the expedition, an area of about a hundred forty thousand square miles was photographed from the air by Ritscher, who dropped darts inscribed with swastikas every sixteen miles. Germany attempted to claim the territory surveyed by Ritscher under the name New Swabia, but lost any claim to the land following its defeat in the Second World War.’

  Ethan frowned as Hannah replied.

  ‘So if they were prevented from annexing the territory after their defeat then how could they have built any kind of operational base up here, much less kept it secret for seventy years? There are at least twelve research stations all across Queen Maud Land belonging to many different nations.’

  ‘That’s what’s caused the confusion,’ Doctor Chandler replied. ‘The entire story of a German base being built in Antarctica at the end of the Second World War, which has been in circulation for decades, has always been rejected by historians based on the assumption that because the Germans spent so much time surveying Queen Maud Land, that’s where the site of the base must be. These recent signals intelligence tells us that the assumption has been wrong.’

  A digital image of Antarctica replaced Jarvis on the monitor as Chandler went on.

  ‘The legend purports that the Nazi mission was supposed to establish a base on Antarctica in order to set up a staging post for further invasions of countries in the southern hemisphere prior to the invasion of Poland. However, records show that the mission was merely an attempt to scout new territories into which the Nazi machine could spread as the war progressed. Historians have repeatedly pointed out that the supposed discovery by the Nazis of warm water and vegetation within Antarctica’s wastes, which would have been used to sustain a population or a base of some kind, were false and that there were no such sources.’ The image changed again to a portion of the continent’s eastern shores, north west of the Polar Star’s current location.

  ‘That was until 2015,’ Chandler said, ‘when surveys conducted by scientific teams on the continent and orbiting satellites detected a series of subterranean pathways that were channeling warm water beneath the Totten Glacier, a seventy mile long and eighteen mile wide feature and the largest on the continent’s east coast.’

  Ethan watched as graphics taken from research published in the Nature Geoscience journal showed a trough some three miles wide that had formed a gateway deep underneath the glacier, along with another tunnel that could allow warmer sea water to penetrate the glacier base.

  Captain Forrester nodded as he observed the graphics.

  ‘It’s is the most rapidly thinning glacier in East Antarctica,’ he said. ‘Our own surveys have shown that much, but we didn’t know anything about a warm water channel beneath it.’

  ‘During a voyage to the frozen region during the past southern hemisphere summer,’ Jarvis replied via the screen, ‘researchers found the waters around Totten Glacier were around a degree and a half Celsius warmer than other areas.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like much,’ Ethan pointed out. ‘Would that have made much of a difference to the Nazis?’

  ‘It could have,’ Chandler said. ‘The warm water channels to the eastern coast could have provided one of the most important access routes into the continent: subterranean sea channels, perfect for concealing the movement of German U-boats that could have been used to supply the base.’

  ‘What does this have to do with Black Knight?’ Hannah asked.

  Jarvis reappeared on the screen as he spoke.

  ‘As many people know, the Nazis and Hitler specifically were obsessed with the occult, the paranormal and pretty much anything other-worldly. The Nazi regime placed great stock in anything that supported their notion of an Aryan master race, from whom they were thus supposedly descended and destined to rule the world. You name it, they went after it: Atlantis, the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail and many other artifacts both mythical and obscure. But one particular device caught the attention of investigators during the post-war period: something called Die Glocke, or The Bell.’

  Jarvis spoke as the screen’s image split into two and revealed an image of a large, metallic object shaped somewhat like an acorn. Ethan could see strange symbols written around the circumference of the object’s base, almost like hieroglyphics.

  ‘This object was reportedly part of the Nazi’s most secretive research and development programs in progress toward the end of the war. The Germans were making truly tremendous strides in technology, pioneering jet engines, electromagnetism, superconductivity and other exotic discoveries that we’re only really coming to terms with today. There were rumors among the allies that in the rush to conquer Germany and occupy Berlin in the final days of the conflict, the governments of America, the United Kingdom and Russia were also keen to confiscate German technology for themselves, acts which created some friction between them even as the last shots of the war were being fired.’

  ‘You’re saying that what might be up here is something that belonged to the Nazis?’ Captain Forrester asked.

  ‘Again, we can’t be sure just what’s up here,’ Jarvis cautioned. ‘The truth is that if the Nazis did have an Antarctic base then they may well have attempted to regroup there in the aftermath of the German defeat, and taken much of their technology with them. It’s not often broadcast by NASA, but after the war the vast majority of former Nazi scientists were brought back to the United States. The men who had previously worked for the Nazis on rocket technology for their infamous V-Bombs ended up pioneering the race for the moon. Werner Von Braun, one of NASA’s best known scientists during the space race and the creator of the Saturn V rockets, was a German scientist who worked for the Nazis.’

  Ethan peered at the schematics of Die Glocke.

  ‘That doesn’t look like anything we ever sent to the moon, except maybe the lunar capsule.’

  ‘Die Glocke was not a spacecraft,’ Doctor Chandler replied, ‘at least as far as we can make out. No evidence of it was ever recovered from Germany after the war, at least as far as official records reveal, and scientists like Von Braun never admitted any awareness of the project. However, there is a tantalizing trail of evidence supporting the notion that something was indeed created in Germany that matches Die Glocke in a number of ways. The Third Reich had an underground scientific laboratory in a facility known as Der Riese, or The Giant, near the Wenceslaus mine near the Czech border. Experiments conducted there refer to a device made out of a hard, heavy metal that was some twelve to fifteen feet high and nine feet wide, similar in shape to a large bell. The device contained two counter-rotating cylinders which were filled with a metallic substance somewhat like mercury but violet in color and code-named Xerum-525. Other leichtmetall, or light metals, like thorium and beryllium oxides are also referenced in the documents, as well as the extraordinary effects that the bell would create when activated. Supposedly, within a zone extended some two hundred meters out from the object crystals would form in animal tissue, blood would gel and separate and plants would decompose into a greasy substance. What sources we do have said that several scientists died while experimenting with the device, and that many feared even approaching it whether activated or not.’

  As Jarvis spoke, the image of a concrete framework standing derelict in a thin forest appeared on the monitor, like a hollow Colosseum with arches intact.

  ‘This object, The Henge, in the vicinity of the Wencelaus mine, is said to have served as a test-rig for the device, which remained tethered within while tests were being performed to determine its supposed anti-gravitational properties.’

  Several of the SEALS tutted and shook their heads, Ethan catching their skeptical mutterings from where he stood.

  ‘It’s myths and fantasies,’ Amy said, speaking for the first time. ‘None of this supposed evidence has ever been substantiated in any way, all of it merely shared by conspiracy theorists on the Internet without any effort to check sources or interview witnesses.’


  ‘It all sounds like conjecture to me,’ Ethan said finally. ‘And again, it doesn’t reveal anything about the Black Knight.’

  ‘Except that it does,’ Chandler replied, ignoring Amy as she rolled her eyes. ‘In 1936 an object is known to have plummeted out of the sky near Freiburg, in Germany’s Black Forest, and was recovered by the Nazis there for study. Whatever the object was, its discovery coincided with the sudden rise in military might and technological prowess of the Third Reich. I had our data analysis team calculate the object’s trajectory and then run it backwards to obtain orbital information, and its position would have coincided almost precisely with the current polar orbit of the Black Knight.’

  Ethan’s eyes narrowed as he tried to understand what he was hearing.

  ‘So Black Knight deployed something? Or maybe there was more than one of them?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Jarvis said. ‘After all, according to orbital data it must have been up there for several thousand years and thus may have become unstable over time. If there was more than one, that’s what the Germans may have ended up with’

  ‘And this supposed German crash?’ Hannah asked. ‘Are you saying that what we’re heading toward in Antarctica must be where the Nazis hid it?’

  ‘All we can say for sure is that elements of the Third Reich fled to Antarctica via South America in the aftermath of their defeat, and that British and American forces attempted to pursue and destroy them in expeditions that ended not just after the war but some decades later.’

  ‘Decades?’ Hannah echoed. ‘We were still chasing them so recently?’

  ‘Many of the most wanted Nazis, those who served the SS and who ran the concentration camps, fled before the end of the war and many of them disappeared in South America,’ Chandler pointed out. ‘Israel especially spent many decades hunting down former war criminals and bringing them to trial.’ He gestured to the map of the Antarctic on the screen beside him. ‘The warm water channels into the Totten Glacier prove that no matter how outlandish it may seem, the Nazis could have travelled deep into the continent’s interior and developed a staging post for their proposed domination of the world, perhaps using Antarctica for a surprise naval attack. The Nazis were extremely fond of their naval power, Germany itself being landlocked, and had very well developed expertise in building submarine pens in marine environments.’