Robert Doherty: The Citadel

Lansale leaned forward. "The plan was always to make the Citadel 'disappear.'"

"Yes," the man agreed, "but the plan was for that to happen six months from now."

"I will accelerate the plan," Lansale said. "All links to the Citadel will be severed within seven days. I'll personally take care of it."

Antarctica, Approximately 575 Miles

East of High Jump Station

28 May 1949

"The last load," the young captain in the gray parka remarked.

"Amen to that," Captain Vannet muttered. Through the scratched Plexiglas windshield, he glanced at the frozen runway splayed out in front of his plane. To his left rear, a staircase descended into the cargo bay of the massive Martin JRM-Mars transport, where his loadmaster was securing the few pallets of luggage the passengers had carried on board. Along the walls, soldiers bundled up in cold weather gear were seated on red web seats, ready to get started on the long journey out of here in the world's largest seaplane, which had been converted for use in the Antarctic by replacing the pontoons on each wing with large skis.

Capable of carrying over sixteen tons of cargo or 133 people, and with a wingspan over two hundred feet wide, the JRM-Mars was a workhouse that had allowed them to haul more cargo back and forth to this spot than a squadron of smaller planes.

Vannet couldn't blame the soldiers crowded in the cargo bay. He'd brought them here four months ago via High Jump Station set up near the Ross Ice Shelf, then spent the intervening time flying back from the station every opportunity the weather gave, bringing in equipment and supplies to these men for whatever they were building here in the frozen wasteland of the Antarctic. A week ago that process had hurriedly been reversed with an emergency order, and he started bringing equipment and people out. The outflow in equipment and supplies had been considerably less than the inflow.

The sky was clear and the wind had died down. The weather report from High Jump Station written down by his copilot looked good, but Vannet had long ago learned that the Antarctic was one place where weather reports could be counted on about as far as the report itself could be folded into a paper airplane and thrown. The only constant in the weather here was change-and the change was usually for the worse.

Vannet wasn't sure who the captain-Whitaker was his name-worked for. All he knew was that four months ago he had been ordered to do whatever the man said. Captain Whitaker had been here waiting to receive their cargo every time they'd landed at the Citadel-the code name they knew for this unmarked location. Today even Whitaker was going out with them. If anyone was remaining behind, Vannet knew not and cared even less. It was their last flight from the Citadel, and successfully completing it was his only concern.

Vannet shifted his gaze back to the "airstrip." The plane sat in a large bowl of ice surrounded on three sides by ice ridges and intermittent, towering mountains punching through the thick polar cap; the strip pointed toward the one open side. The bulky MARS with four turboprop engines mounted on its wings was a powerful aircraft, and Vannet felt confident in its abilities. Bracketed over the plane's pontoons were sets of skis that allowed them to negotiate the 2,000 meters of relatively level ice and snow that these people called a runway. He would be damn glad to never see this place again.

"Closing the ramp," the loadmaster announced in Vannet's headset. In the rear of the plane the back ramp lifted from the thin, powdery snow as hydraulic arms pulled it up. Descending from the top of the cargo bay came the top section of the ramp. Like jaws closing, the two shut against the swirling frozen air outside. The heaters fought a losing battle against the cold as they pumped hot air out of pipes in the ceiling of the cargo bay, ten feet overhead.

Vannet turned to Captain Whitaker. "We're all set, sir."

Whitaker simply nodded and clambered down the steps to take his seat in the rear.

"Let's do it," Vannet told the copilot. Carefully, they turned the nose straight on line, due south. As Vannet increased throttle, the plane moved, slowly gathering momentum as the propellers and skis threw up a plume of snow behind.

Vannet waited until he was satisfied they had enough speed, and then pulled in the yoke. The nose of the MARS lifted, and the plane crawled into the air. Once he reached sufficient altitude to clear the mountains, Vannet banked hard right and headed west. In the distance, out the right window, the ice pack that hugged the shore of Antarctica could be seen as a tumbled mass of broken sea ice that extended to the horizon.

Vannet turned the controls over to his copilot. Four hours and they'd be at High Jump Station, the temporary sprawling base established under the auspices of exploring Antarctica; they would refuel, and then he and his crew and passengers could begin the long stop-filled flight back to their home base in Hawaii. After four months down here they were more than ready to see loved ones and bask in the sun.

The whole mission had turned strange after the initial order to support Operation High Jump, a massive exploration of Antarctica by the military. Almost their entire squadron had received the tasking and deployed south. But on arrival at High Jump Station, a cluster of Quonset huts set next to another ice runway on the shore of a large ice-covered bay, their plane had been detached from the others and given this strange mission to support Captain Whitaker and the Citadel. They'd been warned, in no uncertain terms, that they were not to discuss the mission with anyone.

"I've got the beacon clear," the copilot informed Vannet.

As long as they kept the needle on the direction finder centered, they'd come in right on top of High Jump Station. That was another odd thing. They'd flown every mission on instruments in both directions, never once using a map, not that there were any maps available. As any good pilot would, Vannet had a rough idea where the Citadel was located, using both flight time and azimuth, but he certainly couldn't pinpoint it, and if it weren't for the radio beacons, they could easily become lost.

Satisfied all was going well, he kicked back in his chair to take a quick nap. He was going to need the rest since he was the primary pilot for the longer ten-hour leg from High Jump Station to New Zealand.

Three hours later he was awakened by the copilot. He could feel the plane descending, and looking out of the cockpit, saw the cluster of huts and tents and mounds of supplies that was the land-based hub of the Antarctic High Jump Expedition. Out the right window he could see the massive form of Mount Erebus, an active volcano dominating the horizon. Below lay the Ross Ice Shelf, the edge more than five hundred miles from its origin at the foot of the Queen Maud Mountains.

The copilot swung them around on approach. As soon as the skis touched the ice runway, he reduced throttle and used the flaps to break the plane. It was a long slow process as they slid down the strip, and Vannet watched carefully as his copilot struggled to keep them on a straight line. They finally slowed enough so the copilot could taxi the plane over to where several other smaller C-119 aircraft were parked along with a cluster of fuel trucks.

As they came to a halt, the copilot kept the engines running, which was against normal regulations during refueling, but they had all learned that regulations developed outside of Antarctica rarely worked well in this forbidding climate. They needed to keep the engines running to keep heat flowing to the cargo bay, and more important, to prevent them from seizing up if allowed to cool too much.

Vannet looked out the window as anonymous figures in bulky cold-weather clothing hooked hoses up to the fuel points and began pumping the precious liquid in.