Armen Gharabegian - Protocol 7

Nastasia turned back and said, “It’s the same opening.”

“But-”

“It is the same opening!”

Hayden cursed. “Listen! We need to make a decision, there can’t be two Station 35s…we need to make a choice now! We are less than three thousand meters from site one, and five thousand from site two! It’s do or die, people!”

Or both, Max told himself as they surged forward, closer and closer to the final decision point.

Years of covert operations had taught him not to expect the expected. He was convinced that one of the two sites that appeared on the navigational instruments was a decoy, a fake…and he was determined to plant the Spector in the right tunnel, the one that would save their lives.

Max pushed on. Simon watched the octagons of the two Station 35s grow and grow.

“None of this is making sense,” Ryan said. “None of what I’m seeing is what’s displayed in the satellite maps, and the depth that we are looking at is completely different than what I’ve studied.”

“Okay,” Max said. “If we can’t trust the sensors…we trust my gut.”

Simon said, “Max…”

Max said, “Do or die.”

“MAX!”

Max stood up suddenly, threw his arms out, and pushed to the left and up as hard as he could.

The Spector rushed toward the opening that the map didn’t show, the one the instrument cluster insisted wasn’t there at all.

Do or die, he told himself one last time.

Little did he know that the Spector had already passed the threshold of an invisible security parameter deep underwater. Soon, whatever was down there would know that they’d arrived.

One mile below the frozen surface, in the depths of the Antarctic ice, an officer turned to his Black Ops commander and said, “Sir, we’ve got an incision in Fissure 9.”

The commander’s neck almost cracked as his head spun around to face the officer. He never wanted to hear the words “Fissure 9.” Hearing “incision” was bad enough.

The Black Ops commander, designated “Roland” (everyone in Black Ops had strict orders to use aliases), was an impressive-even intimidating-man in his late forties with graying hair shaved barely above the skull and a tall, athletic build. His military presence and strong frame overpowered the small control room.

He and the men who surrounded him had the most important secret in the world to protect-and they would fight to the death to keep it.

Roland’s approach was instantaneous upon hearing the officer’s report on Fissure 9. He walked to the console where the officer was sitting and told him, “That’s not possible.”

He shifted uncomfortably in the extreme weather rig he was forced to wear made from a heat-equalizing polymer that could function in temperatures from thirty below to 120 above; it wore like a body suit that was half a size too small, complete with ribbed sections running the entire length of the limbs. A highly sophisticated heating system transferred the body heat through the suit’s internal channels, keeping the temperature at a comfortable level in the freezing cold.

The mission patch on his right shoulder read “Special Ops-Fissure 9.” The insignia above the patch read “Vector 5.”

Roland knew that an unauthorized “incision”-their official term for entry into the ice shelf-was not only impossible, it was unheard of. He had never known of such an incident in the seventeen years that he had been commander of the unit. It was particularly impossible now. Antarctica was in an absolute quarantine, which prevented anyone landing on the continent. And even before the total lockdown, no one had made an entry through Fissure 9 in twenty years-since its creation.

Fissure 9 did not exist, according to any maps. To make things even more obscure, the depth readings near the ice shelf were manipulated by a set of dedicated computers so all incoming vessels were remotely guided away from the entry through false readings.

As he stood above the officer, Roland realized that if this young man’s report was true, it could be one of the greatest security breaches in history, and it was NOT going to happen on his watch.

He had to do something immediately. Not only could his job and possibly his life be in danger, but the political stability of the entire world-precarious as it was at the moment-was at stake as well.

No one could know what Vector5, the nebulous, nefarious organization for which he worked, was doing deep inside the Antarctic ice. Not now-not ever.

Roland composed himself and calmly asked the officer, “Did you check the log? Is it one of our subs scheduled for a pickup that managed to enter with an AI malfunction?”

“No, sir,” the officer replied. “We aren’t due for a transfer until the thirtieth at twenty-two hundred hours. And the uranium capsules won’t even be ready to transfer until the twenty-fifth.”

“What the fuck is this, then?” the commander said, raising his voice for the first time.

The officer gulped. “I…don’t know, sir.”

“A whale? Some sort of…giant fucking squid?”

“Negative, sir, we’ve scanned for that,” the officer replied instantly.

The commander turned without another word and walked into the adjacent room. Like all the chambers of the station, it had no real corners, just a flat ceiling above and a flat, pitted floor below a circular wall that curved at the junctures, as if they were standing inside a large square that was trapped between two plates of ice. The shape had something to do with the technology that built the labyrinth; he had heard the explanation about “unusual inflatables” and “induced crystallization” and never understood a word of it. He didn’t care; as long as they held up and prevented millions of tons of ice from burying him, he could live with them-cold as they were. Most of the time his surroundings reminded him of the interior of a submarine-curved, windowless spaces connected by hatches and narrow corridors. Except, of course, this “submarine” was thousands of feet below the ice.

The monitor room he had entered was the largest in the station. It was filled with officers carefully studying hundreds of security cameras placed throughout the continent, both above and below the ice. From the outside, the station looked like a cocoon tethered under a huge dome of ice that curved five hundred feet into the frosty air, like a subterranean football stadium. The structure was designed as one of Vector5’s key control and command centers-this one chiefly responsible for Fissure 9-and connected to it through several tunnels of various diameters meant for various purposes. These days, since the total quarantine, the primary function of the station had been logistic coordination for incoming submarines picking up minerals, including uranium. The minerals were packaged in special containers and transferred up to Fissure 9 from various locations around the continent.

The entire operation was incredibly efficient, absolutely controlled, and highly secretive, and it had run without accident, incident, or security breach since its creation.

At least, the commander thought bitterly, until today.

Over the years, Roland had come to hate and respect Fissure 9. The massive tunnel led to three dozen entry points in to the Southern Sea, and stretched for fourteen miles under the ice, to another gigantic dome, far larger than the one that was home to Roland’s own recon center, approximately five thousand feet below the surface of the ice. The far end of Fissure 9, so distant from shore, opened into a large underground basin at sea level, where submarines docked to drop off and pick up valuable resources and minerals. But that was all miles away.

The center’s unique placement and design allowed it to be heated during construction, so it could penetrate the dense ice and then be frozen solid in place. Its sophisticated anchoring system allowed Vector5 to create a network of structures that attached themselves throughout the icy continent thousands of feet below by a series of intricate tunnels. Here in Roland’s three-level recon station, sixty officers carefully monitored the entire length of the construct and carefully accounted for all the submersibles that came to pick up and deliver tons of illegal uranium, and other valuable resources that’d since become scarce.