The Black Knight (31 page)

Ethan reached out and activated the batteries by flipping a series of switches. The German inscriptions didn’t help matters, but Riggs had been familiar enough with such submarines to be able to give Ethan a guide as to which switch did what.

The
Seehund
hummed into life as the batteries fed power to the electric motor, and a few small indicator lights lit up green as pressure gauges whipped into life and various other meters began indicating oxygen reserves and other essential information.

‘Time to go,’ Ethan said. ‘Ready?’

‘Ready,’ Amy confirmed, giving him a gloved thumbs-up over her shoulder, her face buried in the laptop as she scrutinized the visuals from the underwater camera she had attached in front of the dome.

Ethan closed his eyes for a brief moment and hoped that this time he had not taken a step too far. He truly wished that Lopez were with him, or that Hannah had prevailed and not given up her seat to Amy.

Then, he pulled a lever. The ballast tanks issued forth a rush of compressed air that bubbled upon the water’s surface as it was allowed to bleed from vents along the hull, and with alarming speed the
Seehund
sank beneath the waves.

Ethan looked up and caught a last glimpse of the dock, Riggs and Hannah watching them vanish beneath the water, and then they shimmered into a rippling image of light and darkness as bubbles streamed past the acrylic dome and darkness consumed the submarine.

Ethan reached out and, cautious of draining the submarine’s batteries too quickly, illuminated only a single navigation lamp. A beam of harsh white light scythed into the blackness and flared off the walls of a vertical shaft hacked into the glacier itself.

‘It’s man-made,’ Amy marveled. ‘The Nazis cut down into the ice and made this dock.’

‘Delighted for them,’ Ethan murmured in reply as he concentrated on controlling the submarine and preventing either the bow or stern from bumping into the walls of the shaft.

He glanced periodically at the pressure gauges, which told him both the pressure and the temperature outside the hull. The acrylic dome could only take so much pressure, and with the water being compressed in places beneath the ice he knew that one false move could breach the dome. Their lives would be measured in seconds if such a catastrophic breach were to occur.

The lights continued to reflect off the walls of the shaft, and then suddenly the light that was illuminating Ethan’s acrylic sphere weakened as the submarine descended out of the shaft and into complete darkness, the light beam spreading out and vanishing into the black water.

‘Sub-glacial chamber,’ Amy reported. ‘This is the water that provides the entrance to the main base’s submarine pens. It must flow on beneath the entire facility and exit into the Antarctic Ocean further down the glacier’

Ethan nodded, looking over his shoulder into the darkness to the south east, or so his magnetic compass told him. ‘That’s how the Nazi U-Boats would have got in and out, if the channel is still navigable.’

‘We won’t have time to check that out,’ Amy advised him. ‘The signal is coming from dead ahead, about two hundred yards.’

Ethan closed the bleed valves, the stream of bubbles from the vents clearing and the vibrations through the hull ceasing as the pressure equalized and the submarine hung in the blackness. For a few moments the silence was eerie and Ethan realized that he could just as easily have been in deep space as beneath the Antarctic ice sheet.

‘What are you waiting for, a red carpet?’ Amy snapped. ‘Let’s go.’

Ethan gently engaged the electric motor and the hum from the stern became a vibration as the screws began to turn and the submarine eased forward through the freezing blackness toward the distant signal blinking on Amy’s laptop computer.

Ethan found himself glancing over the pressure gauges every few seconds, obsessed with the clinging fear that the dome would fail and freezing water would rush in under immense pressure, killing them both instantly. Although his common sense told him that it would all be over long before he could even begin to comprehend what was happening, somehow the knowledge that he would never be found, that they would both be frozen solid for millennia beneath the glacier seemed a fate too horrible to bear.

Ethan leaned forward and peered over Amy’s shoulder to look at her laptop’s screen and take his mind off his morbid thoughts, the blue glow from it illuminating the cold and dark interior of the submarine with an unearthly glow.

‘A hundred fifty yards,’ she said without looking over her shoulder, her breath condensing in clouds on the cold air. ‘Keep it steady.’

Ethan nodded, saw the blue glow growing brighter from the screen, and then he realized that the laptop was not responsible for the shimmering blue white glow. Ethan jerked back upright, his head bathed in a glorious halo of light as the blackness around him was banished by a mass of pulsing blue creatures flooding through the icy depths.

***

XXXVIII

Larchmont,

New York

Paralysis. Gordon LeMay could not move an inch from where he lay on the back seat of a luxurious SUV driving north out of the city. He got the occasional glimpse through dry eyes of a road sign outside the tinted windows as it passed by, the asphalt humming beneath the wheels outside.

His heart beat felt slow, a dull nausea infecting his guts due to low blood pressure even though he was lying on his back. The motion of the vehicle on the road exacerbated that nausea, which in turn was infected with a fear that he was facing the last moments of his life.

Majestic Twelve had betrayed him, of that much he was sure, but he could not for the life of him fathom
why
. He had not failed them – had they suspected that he was behind the drone that he had seen filming them? He recalled lying on the thickly carpeted floor of the apartment as the members of MJ-12 looked down at him over their champagne flutes and laughed. Thus, LeMay’s drugging had been premeditated, his betrayal born of some other failure that he could not possibly conceive of.

LeMay was overcome with a regret that threatened to swamp him and squeeze the life from his body long before MJ-12 managed to finish him off. He thought of his wife and their kids, three teenagers just about to venture out into the world, and his grief overwhelmed him as tears trickled down his cheeks. He had struck a deal with the devil – not the fanciful, mythical devil of biblical tales but the true evil among humanity, that of men with no cares but their own wealth and power.

He had been tracked, they had said, somehow, and LeMay could only guess at how the DIA might have managed to follow him so accurately. Wilms had seemed as surprised and shocked as LeMay and the others at the sight of the drone however, and yet that suggested they could not possibly have known in advance of its presence.

The vehicle turned off the road and into the drive of a large country mansion. LeMay knew that they were probably in Larchmont, an exclusive area just a few clicks out of Manhattan and near the Connecticut border. The car slowed and then waited before easing forward into a large garage, LeMay glimpsing an electric door opening above them as they moved inside.

The engine was shut off and the doors of the vehicle opened. LeMay was dragged out by strong hands, his body pliant and loose, heavy and sagging. Unable to do anything except watch through eyes that would not close, and hope that his body retained enough physical control to keep breathing, LeMay was carried through the interior of a house that contained no furniture. He figured in a moment of abstract reverie that the property was one of countless hundreds owned by the cabal as safe houses and places where they could do their work without interference from the outside world.

LeMay was heaved by four men into a large room on the ground floor, and he heard the sound of their boots suddenly grinding on plastic as he was hefted up onto a table and swiftly bound to it using lengths of tough para cord. LeMay struggled to speak, to beg for his life, but all that his throat emitted was a series of odd growls, drool spilling from his lips as he wept openly and silently.

The four men completed their work and moved off in silence, leaving LeMay alone on the bench for a few seconds until he heard the approach of two more men. He looked down past his own chest to where he saw Victor Wilms and another man whom he did not recognize, who was wearing a surgeon’s smock, a cloth mask over his mouth and nose.

LeMay’s stomach turned inside him and he let out another strangled cry of panic as Wilms stood watching him, a faint smile on his face as though he were regarding a scolded child.

‘You failed us Gordon, on so many levels,’ Wilms intoned without passion. ‘Did you really think that we would let somebody like you, somebody with absolutely no financial power, no real influence, no real use in the world into a cabal like Majestic Twelve?’

LeMay struggled to answer but Wilms winced as he looked down at LeMay.

‘My God, you really are a pitiful, disgusting little creature Gordon. Let’s get this over with and leave this sorry episode behind us, shall we?’

LeMay saw Wilms stand back as the surgeon moved forward, and LeMay saw that in his hand was a shiny, long chrome device like a narrow pair of forceps that glinted in the harsh light from the ceiling. LeMay’s breathing accelerated and he struggled to move, but his body barely shifted an inch as the surgeon reached out with one gloved hand and pinned LeMay’s head firmly in place.

LeMay let out a last desperate, pinched scream of desperation as the surgeon pressed the tip of the forceps alongside the septum inside his nose and then the man grimaced as with a hefty shove he rammed the device up into LeMay’s nostril with a crunching sound. White pain seared Lemay’s skull and he heard his own agonized scream soar despite the drugs coursing through his veins as the forceps crunched up through cartilage and plunged deep into the frontal lobes of his brain.

*

‘There, through there!’

Lopez yanked the wheel of their vehicle as Vaughn pointed down a broad street lined with Colonial style mansions sheltering behind ranks of towering aspen. Behind Lopez a stream of police pursuit vehicles thundered, their lights flashing like a galaxy of bursting red and blue stars as they swerved into line behind her.

‘It’s got to be one of these,’ Vaughn said as he surveyed the lines of houses.

Lopez keyed her microphone as she drove.

‘Search the databases for any unoccupied premises in the area,’ she ordered. ‘If he’s been taken out here it’ll be some kind of safe house.’

Lopez slowed, peering up the long drives and across spacious lawns at the various properties in the upscale neighborhood. As she did so she spotted a house that had no blinds in the windows, trash cans that looked immaculately clean and no sign of decoration or adornment that was the hallmark of an American home.

‘That one,’ she snapped as she accelerated toward it. ‘We’ll try there.’

‘It could be a rental, somebody travelling abroad,’ Vaughn pointed out.

‘Then we’ll find nothing. Either way, we’re taking a look.’

Lopez drove straight up onto the drive and leaped out of the vehicle as Vaughn joined her, his weapon drawn as behind them the six pursuit cars slid into the sidewalk and armed officers leaped out in support.

Lopez, her pistol held double-handed before her and her gaze fixed on the windows of the house, hurried up the lawn and peered inside the large bay window on the front of the house. Even in the gloom of the interior she could see what she was looking for within an instant.

‘He’s here!’ she bellowed. ‘Drop the door!’

A police sergeant called back to her. ‘We’re waiting for the warrant ma’am, it should be here in just a few…’

Lopez dashed to the front door and aimed at the lock, then fired twice, the two bullets smashing into the door handle and shattering it in a spray of wood and metal. The gunshots were shockingly loud in the otherwise quiet, leafy street as she then stepped back and hurled herself shoulder-first into the door.

The door splintered on her first charge, and then she hit it again and it swung open as she lunged inside and aimed into the house.

‘Police, get on the ground!’

No sound but for the hollow tone of her voice in the empty property greeted her, and she dashed forward with Vaughn close behind as she hurried toward the front room where she had seen the table and the plastic on the floor and the blood.

Lopez hurried into the room and dashed to Gordon LeMay’s side. To her horror, his face had been reduced to a bloated, bruised mess of blood and bone that had spilled in thick loops onto the plastic at her feet and across LeMay’s chest.

‘Call an ambulance!’ she yelled at Vaughn as he reached for his cell phone, police officers rushing through the house with weapons drawn.

Lopez saw that LeMay’s eyes were drifting open, bloodshot and greasy with sweat and tears that streamed even now down the sides of his face. She stared down at him, his nasal bridge split in two and blood spilling in thick floods from the cavity torn through his skull between his eyes.

‘Who did this to you?’ she asked. ‘MJ-12?’

LeMay’s jaw worked but no sound came out but a ragged, tortured whisper that Lopez had to leanb close to hear.

‘Wilms… Victor Wilms…. Kill.’

Lopez looked down into LeMay’s eyes. ‘Wilms?’

Although it probably caused him great pain to do so, LeMay nodded once as he gasped again.

‘Wilms, K-I-L, satellite.’

Lopez reached out to stem the flow of blood from LeMay’s face, but as she looked into his eyes once more she realized that the light of life was already fading from them. She saw his chest sink as the last breath left his body and heard the death rattle in his throat as he died.

She turned to Vaughn and shook her head. ‘He’s gone.’

Vaughn turned to the police officers behind him.

‘I want every home in the street canvassed. They all have security systems and it’s likely they’ll have surveillance cameras. Confiscate the footage and then get onto the traffic cameras too. I want to know who did this!’