Robert Williams - Ice Fortress

Just one round per man fired with near surgical precision at the positions he locked away in his memory.

With each shot, one man went down and Jack’s spent brass kicked out of the ejection port, ringing as it hit the cold concrete floor.

The pounding against the lead lined bulkhead hatch continued relentlessly. Sohler imagined the two grease covered, stockily built engineers working in tandem with sledgehammers like railway men hammering spikes in a practiced cadence. They would have used the boats one and only cutting torch to cut through the hatch if Sohler hadn’t commandeered it and locked it, along with himself, inside The Bell’s compartment.

Sohler was a sailor. A U-Boot Kapitänleutnant and a damned good one. He knew the sea, he knew submarines and he knew how to sink enemy ships with his torpedoes.

He wasn’t an atomic scientist but he’d heard enough rumors about the work of Werner Heisenberg to be afraid. Nobody should possess a weapon of such devastating destructive power, especially one that even the scientists who built it couldn’t predict its true power or the lasting effects of an atomic detonation. If the stories he’d heard about the atomic weapons tests were only half true, these weapons had the potential to turn Europe into a nightmarish wasteland. He wouldn’t let his family live or die like that.

The Allied and Norwegian resistance operation in Telemark and the subsequent sabotage of the ‘SF Hydro’, the Norwegian ferry transporting the last of Germany’s heavy water supply and manufacturing equipment, was a grim reminder for Sohler. It wasn’t just about building a better bomb. There was more to the atomic weapon project than that, and it made Sohler uneasy. His moral compass faltered between his patriotic duty as a Nazi U-Boot Kapitänleutnant and his moral objection to the use of these terrible atomic weapons that had been designed to destroy entire cities inhabited by innocent people.

If the Norwegian resistance were willing to undertake such a daring raid and sacrifice the lives of their own civilians to sink the heavy water consignment, thwarting one of Germany’s most promising atomic programs, then perhaps preventing this Bell weapon from being used was worth his own personal sacrifice. He only hoped his wife and son would one day understand that he wasn’t a traitor, no matter how history portrayed him.

These thoughts fueled his frantic efforts to weld shut the hatch before he set the timers on the scuttling charges he had strategically placed around the compartment. Even if they weren’t enough to destroy the device, they would surely breach the pressure hull and flood the compartment. Although sealed, the compartment would hold enough water to take the boat all the way to the bottom of the sea under the Antarctic ice shelf where it would never be found.

There was no way they could stop him.

Kammler would either go down with the boat and die quickly in the frigid depths or he would die slowly, trapped in an ice bound concrete bunker. Either way, Sohler didn’t care, so long as Kammler and his hideous ideas died.

Before he could finish welding the hatch, the two halves of the machine began to rotate in opposite directions on their axis and the entire room filled with an unnatural and eerie blue light.

“ Nein! ” Sohler screamed, scrambling to set the timers on the explosives.

He was too late.

“The shooting’s stopped,” Juan whispered weakly. When he’d signed up for adventures in the Antarctic, he had something else in mind. Spectacular scenery, uncharted subpolar oceans, days that lasted months.

Grenades exploding and being shot at with automatic weapons wasn’t featured in the recruitment brochure.

They’d all regrouped in the control room for no other reason that they felt more at home there and it was the compartment that could be most easily sealed off from outside forces if the need arose.

To keep his mind off the sound of bullets ricocheting off the hull, the XO, Durand had resumed reading the former U-Boat captain’s log.

“He thinks it’s an atomic bomb,” he blurted out as soon as he’d translated another page of the U-Boat log.

“I thought the Nazi’s never developed an atomic bomb,” said Dave.

“Of course they did!” shrieked Juan, his eyes sparkling with excitement. “Haven’t you ever wondered why the American Manhattan project wasn’t able to deliver its so called ‘gadget’ on Hiroshima until after the German surrender? The Germans already had the technology. Our guys had been working for years to find the right way to detonate the bomb, but they never figured it out. We captured the top Nazi atomic guys in Europe after the surrender and secretly brought them back to the States to finish off the Manhattan project.”

Leah, Dave, Durand and Captain Jameson all rolled their eyes at Juan’s crackpot theory.

“What about the German U-Boat full of enriched uranium we captured after Germany fell. What do you think happened to that? I’ll tell you — it ended up in the ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’ bombs they dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that’s what happened to it. Enriched uranium was as rare as rocking horse shit back in those days. Mock me if you want, but I’m telling you—”

“You’re telling us what you’ve been reading in those stupid conspiracy theory blogs you’re so addicted to,” Dave broke in.

“Well, let’s see what Herr Sohler has to say about it, shall we?” Juan turned to Durand and signaled for him to continue.

“In his final entries, it looks like they made it here to this base and that’s where he starts not making much sense. Sohler claims The Bell is in a lead lined compartment on board our U-Boat over there. He’s positive it’s an atomic bomb and he doesn’t want German, or anyone else, by the sound of his ramblings, to have atomic weapons. He keeps mentioning his wife and child and how he doesn’t want them involved in an atomic war.

Then he goes off the rails and documents his plan to seal up the compartment containing this ‘atomic weapon’ and scuttle the boat so it never gets found.”

“He clearly didn’t get around to doing that did he?” Juan suggested.

“The only way we’re ever going to know for sure is if we get a look inside that compartment,” Captain Jameson spoke up, having stayed out of the conspiracy theory argument.

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea. What if there’s a dead U-Boat captain in there? Eeew!” Leah screwed up her nose and shivered.

“From a tactical point of view, I think we need to take a look. It’s becoming obvious that there’s a lot going on here we don’t understand and that U-Boat and its cargo, whatever it is, seems to be the center of attention. The more we can find out about what’s going on here, the better our chances of making it through this debacle.”

“The Captain’s right,” Durand agreed.

Juan rubbed his hands together. Finding the answer to one of the greatest mysteries of the Second World War might almost be worth getting shot at. Almost.