Robert Williams - Ice Fortress

He’d never make it. Even on ideal terrain, he’d never cover that distance in time. On the slick ice? No way.

Cover fire spewed from the top of the conning tower. Sam had broken out the LWRC carbine that had been strapped to his pack and was giving the unseen enemy a taste of its own medicine. Jack could have kissed the big ginger headed brute. The line of fire across the ice stopped abruptly as the shooters broke for cover.

It was now or never.

With the grenade smoke shielding his movements and an interruption to the incoming fire, Jack made a dash to the tower as fast as the glassy ice would allow. Half way up the ladder, he heard Sam’s weapon fall silent.

Reload. Jack began counting off the seconds it should take Sam to slam home a fresh clip.

The shooters wasted no time and within seconds the side of the steel tower lit up with sparks from a volley of rounds only inches from where Jack clung to the icy ladder.

Scrambling up the slippery rungs, Jack was only a foot from the lip of the tower when his feet betrayed him and he started to fall toward the ice pack. And the waiting enemy.

Inexplicably, he remained suspended in mid-air. Looking up he saw that the grinning giant had leaned over the top of the ladder and managed to loop his big ham fist through one of the haul loops on Jacks pack, unmoved by the shower of bullets that sprayed around them.

With apparent ease, the big man hoisted Jack over the vertex of the conning tower structure and out of harm’s way. At least for the moment.

“Lucky that strap held or I could easily have dropped you in the ice hole .” Sam gave Jack a reassuring slap on the back.

Jack nodded. Now they were even. In one hell of a shitstorm, but even.

Risking a brief look over the edge of the conning tower, Jack could see, through the clearing smoke that they were surrounded on all sides by a heavily armed squad wearing NATO style snow camouflage. What he found most interesting was the fact that the crack team had adopted the exact same tactical approach to the submarine as he would have done if he were in their place.

He had no idea who the white suited enemy was, but he did know they were bloody good at their job. It was also becoming apparent, given all they had been through since arriving at Pine Gap, that the stakes were a lot higher than some old paintings or a few bars of gold. Someone was launching a serious and very deadly mission and sparing no expense in the process.

“Okay, covert ops boy, if you have a plan to get our asses out of this mess, I’m all ears.” Sam didn’t need to risk having his head blown off to see what was happening down on the ice. The look on Coulson’s face told him all he needed to know.

“I’ve got no idea what kind of goat rodeo we’ve been dropped into, but I’m betting some big chief at the Pentagon knows a lot more than we—” Jack’s words were cut off when a burst from a high-caliber machine gun hammered against the tower.

“Whatever it is that we’ve been sent to safeguard,” he continued when the thundering .50 caliber rounds paused for a beat, “it must be a lot more important than Colonel Daniels was told — he only sent the two of us. Whoever these other guys are, they’ve brought a whole fucking army!”

Captain Jameson knew it wouldn’t be long before alarms were raised at Pacific Command. There was no way a nuclear sub went off the grid without raising a stink. Operational protocol called for the Barracuda to go shallow at regular intervals and report via an VLF comms link to PACOM. All they had to do was wait it out and remain silent and deep and hope that someone at Pearl had the good sense to send help.

“Conn, Sonar,” the Barracuda’s sonar tech called, quick with urgency, “I’m, picking up gunfire and lots of it. Some of it heavy.”

Captain Jameson turned to the sonar operator, “Heavy?”

“Heavy caliber, sir,” Porter, the sonar operator explained.

“You can tell the caliber from this depth?” Jameson looked skeptical.

“Sir, I’ve got this gear so finely tuned if they drop a beer can in the water I can tell you if it’s Miller or Bud.” Porter was equal parts proud and defensive of his high tech baby.

“How are we even picking up surface small arms fire?” asked Durand.

Porter looked a little sheepish. “I’m not real sure, sir. It might sound weird, but I think someone is actually shooting at the UFO or sub or whatever it is up there and that’s what CAVES is picking up.” The young sonar tech was referring to the Barracuda’s state-of-the-art Conformal Aperture Velocity Sonar array.

“Why the hell would anyone be shooting at… whatever that is up there?” Leah chimed in.

“Probably the same reason that someone’s been hunting us. I think there’s a player in this game who knows something we don’t. There’s something serious going on here but we’re operating in the dark without comms.”

“So we just bob around under the ice and hope like hell the other sub doesn’t find us and finish us off for good?” Leah said aloud what the other Barracuda men had been thinking. “It sounds like whatever it is we’ve found ourselves in the middle of, it’s closing in fast. But what do I know? I’m only an oceanographer.”

That was it. Suddenly Jameson saw an idea that had been clawing at his subconscious snap into sharp focus. Of course…

He pointed to Sutton and Alvarez, “You two, work with Porter over there and plot us a course through that opening or tunnel or whatever you called it. Get us inside that structure and at least we have somewhere to hide while we figure this out.”

Dave and Juan looked to Leah for confirmation. She was their boss, after all.

“Do it,” she instructed the men. She looked the captain in the eye, “Maybe my science geeks will turn out to be useful after all.”

Jameson scanned the maps on his monitor, annoyed that she had to have the last word, like a typical woman.

“Let’s not forget,” he said to no one in particular, “It was this floating science fair that got us into this situation in the first place.”

“We think we’ve plotted a way through the ice mountain, Captain,” Porter announced an hour later.

“I should think so, too,” Captain Jameson snapped back, looking not at his own man but the two civilian sonar and computer experts. “If this… structure… is what I’m quite sure it is, then Nazi submarine captains were navigating through that tunnel, at a depth of 300 feet with no more than a map, compass and sonar equipment so old it had vacuum tubes in it.”

Silence filled the Command Center.

Previously, the talk of German U-Boats had been no more than an abstract historical concept, like finding any other submerged shipwreck, something Leah and her team had done their share of over the years.

But now, the captain was adding another hideous layer of reality to their reality. It looked like they’d stumbled upon a Second World War German submarine base. One that, in all likelihood, given its proximity to South America, had been used to aid the escape of high ranking Nazis and Waffen-SS officers when their monstrous crimes marked them as hunted war criminals.

It had been said aloud and there was no possibility of the genie being put back in the bottle. Neither the hardened military men nor the contingent of civilian scientists were prepared for such a revelation. To a man, and woman, they wished Juan had been right and that they had found a UFO in the ice.