“Agree. I have an idea. It’s risky though.”
CHAPTER 99
1.5 Miles outside Drill Site #6
East Antarctica
Robert Hunt had to drive slower — the giant umbrella had almost pulled him off the snowmobile twice. He had finally found a comfortable speed where he could hold on, but even at that speed, the noise of the machine, combined with the umbrella’s flapping, was almost deafening. Through the din he heard an unusual noise. He looked back. Had the men followed him? He stopped the snowmobile. It wasn’t an engine. It was a voice.
He tore his jacket open and searched for the radio. The signal indicator was lit — they were calling him. He killed the machine, but the signal was gone. He waited. Around him, the rolling hills of East Antarctica were as quiet as the Serengeti at sunset. Far in the distance a wind gust blew snow dust off the top of a rounded peak.
He pressed the radio button and said, “This is Snow King.”
He took a deep breath. The abrupt response and the operator’s sharp tone startled him. “Snow King— why were you radio silent?”
Robert thought, then pressed the button on the radio and spoke as evenly as he could manage. “We are in transit. The radios are hard to hear.”
“Transit? What’s your location?”
Robert swallowed. They’d never asked for his location or contacted him between sites before. What could he say… Could they see him from the air?
“Snow King! Do you copy!?”
He fidgeted in the seat, then lifted the radio back to his face. “Bounty, this is Snow King. Estimate we are 3 klicks from location seven.” He released the button and lowered it to the snowmobile again. He inhaled. “We have encountered… We have problems with one of the snowmobiles. We are repairing.”
“Stand by, Snow King.”
The seconds ticked by. It was cold as hell, but all he could feel was his heart beating in his throat.
“Snow King. Do you require assistance?”
He answered instantly, “Negative, Bounty. We can handle it.” He waited for a second and added, “Should we alter our destination?”
“Negative, Snow King. Carry on at best speed and observe standing local blackout protocol.”
“Copy that, Bounty.”
He dropped the radio to the seat. In that moment, it had felt as heavy as an anvil. His adrenaline slowly receded, and as it did, he realized his right arm was aching. Holding the umbrella had taken its toll. He could barely make a fist, and his shoulder throbbed with every micron he moved. He gritted his teeth and shifted the umbrella to the other side of the snowmobile.
Through his cold and pain, his mind screamed: go back now. He considered why they would have called. There were only two possibilities: a) they were on to him or b) they wanted to make sure he was clear of the site. If they were on to him, his goose was cooked anyway. If they were doing something at the site they didn’t want him to see, that put him in a tough spot.
When he had set out, he had told himself that if they caught him, he’d simply say he left something at the drill site. Nothing wrong with that. The umbrella? “Just observing local blackout protocol.”
But the radio conversation had blown that cover story. If they caught him now, he’d be out of a job at best, and maybe, if they were criminals engaged in something illegal… things would get a lot worse for him.
So he made a compromise with himself: he would drive to the top of the closest dune, see what he could see, then head back. He had tried.
Robert had to drive slowly now. He held the umbrella with his left elbow and braced it against his torso. It took him almost an hour to reach the peak of the dune. He took his binoculars out and scanned the distant horizon for the site.
He couldn’t believe his eyes.
The machines towering over the site were of a scale he’d never seen — and he had seen some massive machines. They dwarfed the site, which now looked like a tornado had hit it. The drilling platform lay half-buried in snow like an overturned microscope laying in a children’s sandbox next to construction toys. But this was no sandbox, and the snow tracks on these “toys” must have been at least 50 feet tall. The main vehicle looked like a centipede. It was long, maybe four or five hundred feet, and had a small head, no doubt the “cab” that pulled it. Its body was a series of white, balloon-shaped segments. It curved around the site in a semicircle.
Beside the centipede, a white crane truck, about 10 times the size of your standard industrial construction crane, held its crane arm high in the air. Was it pulling something out? Or, more likely, lowering something.
Robert zoomed in. Before he could focus on the crane’s cable, he caught a glimpse of something, or an outline of something, in front of the centipede. He panned left, but at such high zoom, he lost the site completely. He zoomed out, reacquired the site, and zoomed in again, focusing on the middle of the centipede.
Were they people or robots? Whatever they were, they were wearing what looked like white hazmat suits, except these suits were more bulky. They moved in a labored, slow fashion. They looked almost like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghost Busters or the Michelin Tire Guy. The height was right for people. Robert followed one with the binoculars as the white figure waddled to the drill site. The crane was rotating toward the centipede. It had pulled something from the hole. Another marshmallow man came into view and helped the other man unhook and lower the crane’s bounty to the ground. It looked like a disco ball, but it was black. Behind the men, on the last section of the white centipede, a door opened. It slid from bottom to top, like a space ship in a cheesy 50s TV show, revealing yellow light inside and a bank of computer screens. There was also a large white box, which two suited men inside pushed down a recently-extended ramp. On the ground, the other two men joined them and began taking the white panels off the side. They came away easily — they must have been flex or some sort of cloth.
Robert focused the binoculars. The box was a cage. It held two monkeys, maybe chimps; they were small enough. They hopped around and clung to each other, avoiding the bars. They must be freezing to death. One of the men quickly dropped to his knees and began punching at what must have been a control panel on the bottom of the cage. At the top of the cage, what had been a faint orange glow became a red ember, and the monkeys settled down a bit.
Another man waved an arm at the crane and it swung over. They attached it to the top of the cage, then attached the black ball.
The men stood aside as the crane lifted the cage, swung it over to the hole, and lowered it. Two men walked behind the crane and emerged driving two crab-like machines. They drove to the drill hole and connected the machines. Joined, the two machines covered the entire hole except for a small slot large enough for the cable to pass.