Robert Williams - Ice Fortress

The pressure dropped further.

Sam took a moment to check on Jack’s status. He was gone.

Looking around, he saw Jack standing in front of a series of regulating valves and stop-cocks. Jack was behaving like a frenzied mad man turning every valve and shutting off every stop-cock he could reach in a crazed attempt to stem the flow of water.

It seemed to be working.

Jack turned in Sam’s direction. There was no point trying to shout above the roar of the incoming water. Sam pointed to the patch kit he’d partially put in place, hoping that Jack would understand. He did.

Wading through the frigid bilge water, Jack positioned himself to help bolt the patch in place. After tightening the nut by hand, Sam took over with the wrench and a few minutes later, one patch was secured.

Sam pointed to the next breach and the two men, like a well-oiled machine repeated the process until the spray of water was reduced to a mere trickle.

“Good work, Jack. How did you know which valves to shut off?”

“I didn’t,” replied Jack. “I figured I couldn’t make things any worse, so I just went at all of them —”

“Like a dog with two dicks, from what I could see,” Sam finished.

“Guess I got lucky,” added Jack.

“I thought you were out cold.” Sam had an apologetic look in his eyes. He’d made a call to fix the leak instead of getting Jack out of harm’s way. He hoped Jack understood.

“The water brought me around. Don’t worry I would have done the same if I were you.”

Sam nodded his thanks for the understanding.

“What do we do now, kapitänleutnant ?” Jack smiled, but his voice was tempered with tension.

“It’s funny you should ask. While I was busy trying to save the boat and our lives, I had a few ideas, just in case we managed to scrape through. But first, I have a question for you…”

Jack raised a brow, prompting Sam to continue.

“Does this kind of shitstorm happen for you on a daily basis?”

Jack shrugged and sighed. “Pretty much.”

“Nice of you to join us, XO,” Captain Jameson greeted Durand as he entered the Control Room. “Nice nap?”

“Sorry sir, I’m feeling okay now and ready for duty.” Peter Durand avoided eye contact with the captain and the civilian scientists. He did look deathly pale, Jameson noted.

“Glad to hear it. Take us up.”

“Sir?” Durand hadn’t yet seen the photonics display. Now he noticed that Leah, Dave and Juan still had their eyes glued to the monitor and came in for a look.

“Holy…” He looked at the captain and swallowed hard. “Is this for real?”

“We’ll know for sure XO, if you ever get around to blowing the tanks and get us to the surface.”

“Aye sir,” Durand snapped with a sense of renewed urgency and proceeded to order the pilots to blow the tanks take them to the surface.

“XO, we’re going to need some floodlights so see what you can round up from engineering.”

“Aye sir,” Durand responded as he dashed through the hatch at the rear of the Control Room on his way to Engineering.

Jameson stared hard at the civilians. “You three are staying here until I take a good look around.”

All three shook their heads. There was no way they were staying below decks at a time like this. As scientists, they all had a profound sense of the historical moment at hand. Juan already had his camera strapped over his neck, looking more like a tourist than a computer expert.

“This is my boat and you’re my responsibility.” His tone was firm and not negotiable.

But Leah, Dave and Juan weren’t in the navy and they weren’t accustomed to the chain of command. They all stood and made their way toward the deck hatch behind the Control Room and the former Attack Center.

Frank Jameson didn’t feel like the captain of a multi-billion dollar killing machine right now. Like the civilians, he felt like he was part of something else that he couldn’t quite describe as he led the way to the hatch without a word of reprimand for the mutinous geeks.

Durand had unfurled a collection of electrical cables which snaked over the curved hull of the sub to provide power to the floodlights he’d had engineering throw together in double quick time. After plugging in the last of the connectors, he used his two-way radio to give the engineer below decks the order to power up.

Instantly the cavern in which they’d surfaced was lit up in all directions.

Nobody spoke. Jameson, Durand and the scientists were wide eyed and dumfounded. The only things to escape their mouths were the clouds of mist as they breathed through their open mouths.

The cavernous space defied description and would have been a feat of engineering had it been built in an industrialized country within the past decade. But the gigantic bronze eagle with the Nazi emblem clutched in its claws clearly dated the structure to a time long since passed. And they were in one of the most inhospitable regions on the entire planet. It was no wonder they were agog at the sight before them. It almost seemed beyond impossible.

They had surfaced in what, at one time, had plainly been a U-Boat pen with individual concrete wet docks to hold multiple boats at one time. The domed concrete structure that enclosed it was easily as long as two football fields and almost as wide as it was long. There was no way to judge the height of the curved roof as the lights, powerful as they were, didn’t penetrate all the way to the top.

“These walls must be three feet thick or more of solid, reinforced concrete. How did they build this? I doubt we’d be able to do this today, even with an unlimited budget.” Dave was the first to break the silence. “There’d have to be more than half a million cubic yards of concrete here.”

“How is one question that comes to mind. For me, a better question is why they built it,” Jameson pondered. “Seems like it would have taken years and this is hardly the most strategic place they could have built a submarine base,” he added.

“Maybe strategy wasn’t the objective,” Juan offered. “Given how long this place has remained undiscovered maybe secrecy was what it was all about.”

“But why all the way down here?” asked Jameson, not expecting a reply.

“Can we get off the boat and take a look around?” Leah asked with uncharacteristic enthusiasm.

Juan and Dave looked surprised. After all, a Second World War Nazi U-Boat base was surely more of a ‘guy thing’.

“Well we’ve got nothing much else to do while we wait for PACOM to mobilize some help, so maybe it wouldn’t hurt for you to explore a just a little?”

Juan was already strobing the bleak concrete interior with his camera flash like a snap happy tourist. Dave also looked like he was ready to jump ashore.

“Captain,” Durand broke their festive spirit with his authoritative tone, “is that such a good idea?”

“I’m going exploring, Durand,” Leah interjected forcefully, although she had wished they were better dressed for a polar excursion.

“After you secure us to the dock Mr. Durand, you have the boat. I’ll be ashore with these three.” He gestured to the smiling trio as they hopped from one foot to the other and rubbed their hands to keep warm.

“Aye sir,” Durand responded but he looked far from happy about it. At least he’d be warm in the boat while the other guys went off with Dora the Explorer.

The XO keyed his mic to order engineering to send up a couple of men to help him secure the boat when he felt the deck move below his feet as if they were in open water. The water in the center of the U-Boat pen roiled and churned before forming into a powerful wave that surged across the water and slammed broadside into the Barracuda, knocking it into a nearby concrete berth. The sound of thousands of tons of steel colliding with the reinforced concrete berth produced a torturous groan that echoed throughout the enormous chamber. The reverberation was so loud and so prolonged that it drowned out the sound of the submarine erupting to the surface, like a leviathan from the depths, following an emergency blow of its tanks.