Jeremy Robinson - SecondWorld

Hammaker looked to the glossy blue linoleum floor. “Yes, sir.”

Miller gave the kid a pat on the shoulder. He suspected Hammaker had been through a lot. “It was a nice try, though.”

The kid smiled and sat back down.

Miller turned when he heard the bridge door close behind him. Adler, Vesely, and Brodeur stood just inside the door. Ensign Partin gazed out of the long strip of windows lining the front of the high-tech bridge. His helmet had been removed, revealing a gleaming white bald head. The pilots and the two other deck crew members hadn’t joined them.

“Did the president really send you?” Partin asked.

“Yes, you can confirm it by—”

“We have no long-range communications,” Partin said. “Something is blocking satellite communications, from the carrier, the planes, everything. All we have is local radio.”

“Some kind of jammer?” Vesely said.

“Or they just turned the satellites away,” Miller said, then looked at Partin. “You’ll just have to take my word on it. Can you tell me what happened here?”

Partin took a deep breath and let it out with a hiss. “We’ve been here for I don’t know how long—”

“Months,” Hammaker added.

“Months.” Partin turned away from the window and looked at Miller. “Cold-weather training exercises. We put birds in the air every day. Several times a day. And caught them when they came home. It’s what we do on deck. The conditions are beyond miserable here, but harsh-weather exercises test the deck crews as much as the pilots and planes. We did our jobs. No questions asked. A few weeks in, we started sending teams over to the continent. Might have been SEALs. Maybe Rangers. We didn’t ask even though we knew sending troops to mainland Antarctica is against international law. But we’re damn good at our jobs. Damn good. Maybe better than they thought.”

Partin chewed his lower lip for a moment. “They started coming home with more men than they left with. At first it was subtle. One here. Two there. But occasionally there would be ten extra soldiers. Grim-faced sons a bitches, too.”

“They ate like robots,” Hammaker said. “We’ve got some good chow pounders here, but these guys didn’t miss a beat.” He motioned with an imaginary spoon, acting out two scoops per second. “And they did it in unison.”

“In unison?” Adler asked.

“Like when the North Korean Army marches,” Hammaker said. “One, two, three. Scoop, scoop, scoop.”

Partin stared at Adler. “Where are you from?”

Miller quickly understood Partin’s suspicion of Adler’s accent. He stepped forward. “Sorry I haven’t introduced my team yet. This is Elizabeth Adler, she’s a German Interpol liaison.” He motioned to Brodeur. “This is Special Agent Roger Brodeur with the FBI. The man in the cowboy hat is Milo Vesely, a special consultant from the Czech Republic. I can vouch for every one of them and expect them to be treated with the same respect given me. Back to the visiting soldiers.”

Though he was clearly still uncomfortable with Adler’s accent, Partin continued. “They kept to themselves and never spoke to us, which was fine because they scared the shit out of the crew. Then, one day, they were gone. I supervise most flights on and off this ship and I didn’t see them leave. A few days later, the helicopter crews started bringing in big wooden crates, then long metal containers. They stacked them up on the deck like we were a cargo ship.”

“What was in them?” Vesely asked. “Were there any insignias on the wood?”

“I didn’t see any,” Partin said. “But then they started transferring the crates to the support vessels.”

Several ships typically supported an aircraft carrier. Two sub destroyers, two guided-missile cruisers, two antiaircraft warships, a submarine, and two fuel ships. Now that Partin had brought it up, Miller couldn’t remember seeing any support ships surrounding the carrier. “Where are the support ships now?”

Partin shrugged. “One morning, I came on duty and they were gone, along with each and every crate. Crew members who asked questions were thrown in the brig. A group of us started looking for answers. We discovered they were going to the United States, but not what they were taking or their final destination. That’s when we found out about Miami.”

The man leaned forward, clutching a radar console. “I had cousins there.” He looked up. “Did anyone make it out?”

Miller met the man’s eyes. They’d heard about the attack, but not its outcome. “Not many. Millions died.”

“It happened in Tokyo, too,” Adler said.

“And Tel Aviv,” Vesely added.

With a shake of his head, Partin pulled himself out of his despair. “We knew the truth when we heard men cheering. Most of the officers. The commander. Pilots. MPs. Thank God most of the Special Ops guys left with support ships or what followed would have turned out differently. We spread the word and staged a coup that night.” He rubbed a hand over his bald head. “The fighting lasted three days. We lost communications almost immediately and they disabled the screws. We were dead in the water and cut off from the world. Four thousand two hundred men and women served aboard this ship when we left port. I suspect at least two hundred had already left with the support ships, more if you count the newcomers, and we outnumbered them, two to one, but most of us were support crew—flight deck, engineers—” He motioned to Hammaker. “Cooks. We fought guns with knives, with hands, with anything we could find. When their ammunition ran low, we took the ship. There are nine hundred crew members alive. Some are on the fence. We put their numbers close to seven hundred, leaving us with twenty-four hundred dead. We’re still collecting bodies from the lower decks.”

Miller felt sick. War was one thing. The battlefield made sense. The men around you were brothers. You bled for each other. But what happened on this ship was an affront to everything he believed about the U.S. military. He pushed aside his rising anger and asked, “Do you have prisoners?”

“In hindsight, prisoners would have been a smart idea,” Partin said. “But we—we were afraid. We killed the bastards and threw them overboard. Our dead are in the hangar, covered with sheets, but the smell is getting bad and we’ll need to give them sea burials soon.” Partin looked up as he remembered something. “We checked the commander’s quarters. Found lots of Nazi and white supremacist paraphernalia. Same with the senior officers. Small flags. Old uniforms. Guns. I don’t know if they had it all along, or if it came from the mainland, but it helped with the guilt.” He looked at Miller. “Nazis. Can you believe it?”

“You have no idea,” Miller said. He stood in front of Partin. “Listen, Ensign, what you did here; you can’t be thanked enough. If I get my way, each and every member of this crew will get the Medal of Honor. But this thing isn’t over. The world is still in danger.”

Partin listened intently, his eyes locked on Miller’s.

“Can you take us to the mainland? I need to see what’s there.”

“I’ve got plenty of helicopters,” Partin said. “But no pilots. They’re all gone, or dead.”

“I took lessons,” Vesely said.

“How many?” Miller asked.

“Two. But only piloted once. No takeoff. No landing.”

Miller silently cursed, then saw a hand rise in his periphery. He looked over and saw Hammaker, hand raised. He stood, looking unsure of himself, and said, “I can fly.”

“No way are we letting the kid fly us to Antarctica,” Brodeur said.

“My father is a helicopter pilot for Fox News in Chicago. He taught me how to fly. I have a commercial license.”