Gant saw a piece of paper at her feet. She picked it up. It was frozen solid, but she could still read the letterhead. It read:
ENTERTECH LTD.
Gant walked back to the small tunnel that led to the main cavern. She called to Montana and Hensleigh.
A few minutes later, Montana rolled through the horizontal fissure and walked with Gant into the giant subterranean hangar.
'What the hell is going on here?' he said.
They entered the hangar, their flashlights creating beams of light. Montana went left. Gant went right.
Gant came to an office-type structure that seemed to be overgrown with ice. The door to the office opened with a loud creak, and slowly, very slowly, Gant stepped inside.
A body was lying on the floor of the office.
A man.
His eyes were closed, and he was naked. His skin had turned blue. He looked like he was asleep.
Gant saw a desk on the far side of the office, saw something on it. Moving toward the desk, she saw that it was a book of some kind, a leather-bound book.
It just sat there on the desk all by itself. The rest of the desk was bare. It was almost, Gant thought, as if someone had left it there
Gant picked up the book. It was covered in a layer of frost, and the pages were hard, like cardboard.
She opened it.
It appeared to be a diary of some sort.
Gant read an entry near the beginning:
2 June 1978
Things are going well. But it's so cold!! I can't believe they brought us all the way down here to build a fucking attack plane! The weather outside is terrible. Blizzard conditions. Thankfully, our hangar is built below the surface, so we stay out of the weather. The sad irony is, we
Gant jumped ahead to a page not far from the end of the diary.
15 February 1980
No one's coming. I'm sure of it now. Bill Holden died yesterday, and we had to cut Pat Anderson's hands off, they were so frostbitten.
It's been two months now since the quake hit, and I've given up all hope of rescue. Someone said Old Man Niemeyer was supposed to be coming down here in December, but he hasn't showed.
When I go to sleep at night, I wonder if anyone but Niemeyer knows we're here.
Gant flipped back some pages, looking for something. She found what she was looking for around the middle of the diary.
20 December 1979
I don't know where I am. We were hit by an earthquake yesterday, the biggest motherfucking earthquake you have ever seen. It was as if the earth opened up and just swallowed us whole.
I was down in the hangar when it happened, working on the bird. First the ground began to shake and then suddenly this massive wall of ice just thrust up out of the ground and ripped the hangar in half. And then we just seemed to fall. Fall and fall. Massive chunks of the ice shelf (each one the size of a building, I estimated) caved in on either side of us as we were sucked down into the earth?I saw them make enormous dents in the roof of the hangar. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! The quake must have ripped an enormous hole underneath the station and we just fell down into it.
We just kept going down. Down and down. Shaking and falling. One of the big robot arms fell on Doug Myers, crushed him to death....
Gant was stunned.
This 'hangar' had been an ice station. An ice station that had been set up in the utmost secrecy to build a plane of some sort?a plane, Gant noticed, that used plutonium. But this station, it seemed, had originally been up on the surface?or, rather, buried just underneath the surface like Wilkes Ice Station?until an earthquake had hit it and sucked it underground.
Gant flicked to the very last page of the diary.
17 March 1980
I am the last one alive. All of my colleagues are dead. It has been almost three months now since the quake hit, and I know no one is coming. My left hand is frostbitten and gangrenous. I cannot feel my feet anymore.
I cannot go on. I am going to strip myself naked and lie down in the ice. It should only take a few minutes. If anyone should read this in the future, know that my name was Simon Wayne Daniels. I was an aviation electronics specialist for Entertech Ltd. My wife, Lily, lives in Palmdale, although I don't know if she'll be there when you read this. Please find her and tell her that I loved her and tell her that I'm so sorry I couldn't tell her where I went.
It is so very cold.
Gant looked at the naked body on the floor at her feet.
Simon Wayne Daniels.
She felt a pang of sadness for him. He had died here, alone. Buried alive in this cold, icy tomb.
And then all of a sudden Santa Cruz's voice exploded across her helmet intercom, shattering her thoughts: '
The team of SAS divers made their way up the underwater ice tunnel with the aid of sea sleds. There were eight of them, and by virtue of their twin-propeller sea sleds they moved quickly through the water. All of them wore black.
'Base. This is Dive Team. Come in,' the lead diver said into his helmet communicator.
'
'Base, time is now 1956 hours. Dive time since leaving the diving bell is fifty-four minutes. We have a visual on the surface. We are coming up to the cavern.'
'Copy, Base. We will. Dive Team out.'
Gant and Montana came sprinting back into the main cavern.
They came up alongside Santa Cruz, who was manning the tripod-mounted MP-5s. He pointed down into the pool.
Several ominous black shadows could be seen rising up through the clear aqua-colored water..
The three Marines took up positions behind various boulders, MP-5s in their hands. Montana told Sarah Hensleigh to stay behind him and stay down.
'
