Robert Williams - Ice Fortress

“Sorry about that. We had no idea…” Jack looked sheepishly at Leah.

“Anyway, if that’s not enough of a talking point, apparently your buddy Sam discovered something on board the U-Boat while you were playing Baywatch.”

“Found something?” Jack sat bolt upright.

“I’ve no idea what, but it’s given my two scientists a hard-on like I never thought possible. They haven’t even been in to see how I’m doing. So whatever it is you two guys have in that U-Boat, it must be absolutely mind blowing.”

A pair of coveralls had been left on the end of the bunk for Jack, as he threaded his limbs through them he noticed an evacuation diagram on the wall opposite. He took a moment to commit the sub layout to memory, an instinctive impulse for a man in Jack’s profession. He wasn’t even fully conscious that he’d done it, the habit was so in-built.

Jack shook his head in disbelief. He couldn’t imagine the ham-fisted, red headed giant finding his own ass without a map, least of all something that got a couple of nerdy looking scientists all worked up.

Karl Muller was built like a Russian war monument. He had a head like a cinder block mounted atop impossibly broad shoulders and crowned with a purposeful blonde buzz cut. He cut a fearful and imposing figure, even in the vastness of the Antarctic ice shelf. In fact, Muller made a hell of an impression wherever he found himself deployed. While the men he served with used their downtime to Skype with family or girlfriends back home, or just watch online porn, Muller spent his time in the gym, pumping iron. Lots of iron, in his case, and beating sparring partners to the canvas in brutal and bloody bouts of hand-to-hand combat. At 6 feet 5 inches tall and a well-muscled 230 pounds, he’d yet to find a sparring partner who could last a single round.

Muller had been born into The Brotherhood. He wasn’t a paid mercenary like many of the other soldiers who served the cause. Money didn’t mean much to Muller. All he wanted was to serve the Reich and see the pathetic, liberal world he despised bow before the new order. Standartenführer Muller, they would call him and that would be just the start of his rise through the ranks of the new Reich.

For ten years, at The Brotherhood’s behest, he’d served in the German army to learn the skills and tactics of a Special Forces soldier in the Kommando Spezialkräfte or KSK. Having spent much of his time in Afghanistan and Iraq with the KSK before being given his own command within The Brotherhood, Muller was struggling to come to terms with the cold, harsh environment of the Antarctic. There was a time when he thought the scorching and barren deserts were hell on earth. Now he was finding out what hell was really like.

Weapons seized and became inoperable. Batteries barely functioned out in the open, so radio communications were unreliable. Aircraft couldn’t fly most of the time and even if they were able to de-ice their wings for take-off, the grease that coated vital mechanicals like landing gear and flaps would freeze solid, leaving the aircraft icebound. Their flight from Belgrano II to the drop zone had been delayed due to the blizzard, compromising the mission. But he’d known better than to try to tell Barnes about the unique dangers of Antarctic flight. That man was focused on one thing only and that was the U-Boat.

His years in the stinking desert fighting a bunch of camel humpers hadn’t prepared him for this glacial mission. And who knew the sub was going to be where it was, in full view of their enemy’s snooping satellites. They’d been waiting for 70 years for it to reappear, he’d been told and they’d expected it to return to the U-Boat bunker where they knew it had docked after the long and silent journey from Argentina. Something had gone wrong, but it wasn’t his job to work out what that might have been. His mission was to find and secure the sub at any cost. And then make sure the contents of the sub remained secret. No survivors. No witnesses.

As he and his team trudged through the crisp, powdered snow that covered the ice, a hellish wind tore at them like an invisible fist trying to drive them back. Progress was slow but they were making ground toward where he hoped to find the entrance to the bunker he’d circled on the map after receiving the coordinates from Barnes. Compasses were useless so close to the magnetic South Pole, so Muller was forced to rely on a GPS to navigate through the near zero visibility of the blizzard. He hoped like hell the damned batteries handled the cold better than he did.

“What do you mean the navy doesn’t know where their subs are?” Preston was horrorstruck at the idea that the navy had nuclear weapons scattered around the globe like forgotten toys and nobody knew where they were. Not even Naval Command.

“Our subs run silent and deep during their patrols. Only the captains of these boats know their patrol area, which is highly classified. The Ohio class subs deployed with ballistic missile launch capability but the attack subs are deployed with Tomahawk cruise missiles and have both conventional and nuclear warheads,” DIA Director George Turner explained. “And one surgical strike with a nuclear tipped Tomahawk is all we need.”

Preston was only an Assistant Director and, worse, An AD in charge of SIGINT or Signals Intelligence. Turner didn’t think he had a right to know about the nation’s nuclear weapons capability in any detail, but the scenario unfolding before them called for extraordinary measures. The fact that The President had authorized a nuclear strike only served to confirm the true horror of the consequences should they fail.

“If PACOM don’t know where they are and if they are undetectable below the surface, then the enemy can’t know where they are, not even if they have a mole inside Pacific Command or any of the other navy command areas,” Turner continued.

“There must be another way,” said Preston. “We haven’t used nuclear weapons since 1945 and there’s a good reason for that.”

“Satellite communications are still patchy since Pine Gap got hit. We have no military to speak of anywhere near the Antarctic. The whole Antarctic continent was declared a military free zone since the 1960’s for God’s sake. McMurdo Station, even if we could even reach them, is full of meteorologists, glaciologists, geologists, oceanologists and about every other ‘ologist’ you could think of, but no military and no weapons. Besides, they’d never be able to fly to the Ronne Ice Shelf with the weather as it is.”

“But a nuclear strike? Seriously?” Preston pressed the point that he wasn’t on board with the nuclear weapon launch.

Finally Preston’s boss chimed in, “Henry, there’s no other way. We had a research sub down there — they went dark. We’ve had confirmation that the covert ops guy and one other we deployed from Pine Gap were dropped over the area, but they’ve gone dark, too. We have to assume we have no assets in the region.”

“But are we even sure this… this thing is even on board the U-Boat?” implored Preston.

“Son, we’re not sure of anything but the fact remains that this device can never fall into enemy hands, it can’t even fall into our hands. It’s just too dangerous and the consequences are beyond horrific. We’ve even had unconfirmed chatter regarding a neo Nazi organization that have been looking for it for decades. Can you imagine what would happen if they found it? My God, if that happened then you’d be begging me to send in the nukes.” Turner jabbed a finger at Preston, his cheeks flushed with anger.