Robert Williams - Ice Fortress

“An ice mountain is a—”

“We know what an ice mountain is, thank you captain,” Leah broke in, immediately sorry she spoke so severely.

The three scientists knew full well that in this case what they were looking at was a massive chunk of glacial ice that had broken off at some point in the past 30,000 years and been refrozen inside the icepack as sea ice formed around it. The term ice mountain was somewhat misleading as the bulk of the mountain was actually under the ice, not above it as the term ‘mountain’ might suggest.

“It’s huge,” whispered Dave with a reverence that they all felt. “It’s like, the largest one I’ve ever heard of.”

“Roger that,” Jameson agreed.

“But this makes no sense.” Leah pointed to a dark void in the top third of the upside down mountain. Can’t the sonar or software make out what’s there?”

“That’s the point,” Dave spoke with confidence, “there’s nothing there. It’s an enormous cavern that begins below sea level and continues upward for many stories inside this mountain.” He prodded the image on the screen for emphasis.

Juan shoved a handful of pretzels into his mouth and smiled as he chomped, crumbs raining down the front of his ‘It’s a Browncoat Thing’ T-shirt. He’d told them his code was solid. But there was no need to rub their doubts in their faces.

Leah chewed her bottom lip, an expression of deep thought on her face. Before unexpectedly moving to La Jolla to join one of the most respected Oceanography Institutes in the world to pursue her childhood passion for marine life and the sea, Leah had been on a fast track to becoming one of the brightest Quantum Mechanics stars at Stanford. The Quantum Physics department was a second home to her and her professors were shocked and disappointed when she changed disciplines and cities so suddenly.

While the oceanographer in her marveled at the sight of the magnificent ice mountain and it’s inner void, the engineer in her couldn’t help but wonder if what they were looking at wasn’t a natural phenomenon at all. She was about voice her observation before her thoughts were interrupted.

“What’s that, over there?” Captain Jameson’s eye was drawn to an elongated shape in the ice a short distance from the void they’d been focused on.

All eyes were now on the mystery object.

“How long is it, Dave?” asked the captain.

Dave studied the 3D graphic and looked to Juan for guidance. “Maybe 250 feet long and, say, 20 feet high?”

Juan nodded in agreement, his mouth brimful with pretzels.

Jameson let out a quiet whistle as he exhaled.

Captain Frank Jameson was a career navy man a submariner, like his father and his grandfather. While other kids were playing Nintendo, Frank was watching The Enemy Below, Run Silent, Run Deep and Hunt for Red October. Over and over again. His grandfather, retired Admiral Hunter Jameson, often watch the movies with him and if he was lucky, young Frank might hear a story or two about grandpa’s service during the war.

One such story he’d almost forgotten because it wasn’t so memorable to a young boy as it didn’t involve a decisive victory or something blowing up. It was a chase grandpa had lost. The German U-Boat he’d been stalking off the coast of Argentina had got away. Grandpa joked that it had fled to a secret Nazi submarine base hidden deep in the Antarctic ice shelf rather than face his swift and deadly torpedoes.

He’d thought the whole story was made up because grandpa Hunter had run out of real ones. Then during his Naval Submarine School training, he’d read about the extraordinary post war mission led by the famous Admiral Byrd, who before the war had been an accomplished arctic and Antarctic explorer. During the substantial and highly unusual ‘Operation High Jump’ mission, Byrd had led a colossal expedition of some 4,700 men, an armada of ships, including one aircraft carrier and a fleet of aircraft to the Antarctic where they photographed and searched over half a million square miles of Antarctic ice. The U.S. government had called it a ‘training exercise’. Conspiracy theorists, in the wake of the much publicized Roswell UFO crash in 1947, claimed it was a search for another crashed UFO.

Captain Jameson wondered if they had unwittingly stumbled across what his grandfather had once chased and what Admiral Byrd had been searching for many years later.

“Christ on a bike,” he mouthed. When Leah, Dave and Juan turned to face him, he was aware that he’d spoken aloud.

Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler was arguably the most powerful general in the Third Reich. Some would say the most powerful figure in all of Nazi Germany, yet few knew anything about him and fewer still had ever seen him, as photographs of SS General Kammler were extremely rare. It would not be for some years before the true genius and abhorrently evil nature of Dr. Hans Kammler would be unveiled. By then, it would be too late.

Even U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower, himself the single most significant general of the second world war and future president of the United States of America, credited Kammler with being only months away from developing weapons that might have cost the Allies the war.

Coupled with his undeniable engineering brilliance, Dr. Kammler’s natural sociopathic tendencies accelerated his rise through the ranks of the Waffen-SS from the very early years of the war. Widely acknowledged as the chief architect of the death camps, Kammler’s most satisfying assignment was overseer of ‘Special Projects’, reporting directly to the Fuhrer himself. The task was well suited to his sociopathic personality and his engineering capabilities. Only after Hitler removed the Luftwaffe from the V1 rocket program and handed command of the program to Dr. Kammler did the German rocket program begin to reach its full potential.

Within months, Kammler’s rocket program produced what might have been the most deadly weapon ever devised — the V2 rocket. While the V1 struck terror throughout London as they rained down on the city with little warning, the Spitfire pilots and anti-aircraft gunners could still bring them down. It became a question of how many would reach their target.

Rocket scientist Werner von Braun proposed a bold and radical rocket design in which Kammler’s foresight and vision saw great destructive potential — a rocket that could touch the fringes of space on its pre-programmed trajectory before plummeting vertically at terrifying speed to its target. The V2 rocket was impossible to intercept and unleashed catastrophic destruction and unimaginable carnage due to its specially designed warhead payload. If he could overcome the crude sabotage attempts by the Jews and Polaks who worked in the highly toxic underground factories producing the unstable rocket fuels, Kammler might yet launch enough V2’s to turn the tide in Germany’s favor.

The V2 rocket was the first man made vehicle to reach space, an honor Kammler proudly shared with von Braun, but their collaboration had not yet reached its zenith. The next generation would fly through low earth orbit before re-entering the atmosphere, directly over the United States of America.

None of this was of any interest to the general as he stood at the edge of the muddy airfield dressed in his immaculate uniform and polished boots, awaiting the arrival of a cargo so critical to his research that he felt compelled to supervise the unloading himself. His commanding, black SS uniform was not the reason why most of the airfield personnel avoided him. None of them wanted the attention of the man who commanded the largest contingent of slave labor in all of Europe. There was no point in risking the displeasure of such an imposing and fearsome figure.