“If we have that long . . .”
“We’ll find something,” Painter promised, but his words didn’t come out as convincingly as he had hoped. “If not our team, then Gray’s.”
“Has Kat heard anything from the others?”
“No, not yet. But she says the solar storm is dying down, and satellite communications will hopefully resume later today. So let’s at least try to hold back that nuclear option until we regain contact with Gray.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Me, too.
He said his good-byes and stepped back to the café door when a bullet clipped his arm and shattered the restaurant window.
He fell to a knee while more rounds strafed the front of the café. Glass exploded over him as he rolled for cover behind a trash bin.
He caught a brief glimpse of his team inside, ducking for cover—he also saw three men in black camouflage burst from the kitchen behind them, assault weapons blazing into the morning diners. Across the street, another trio of assailants came charging, rifles smoking.
Pinned down, Painter had time for only one thought, recognizing the direness of their situation.
Gray, you’d better be having more luck.
19
April 30, 12:09 P.M. GMT
Queen Maud Land, Antarctica
“Everybody get aboard the lift!” Harrington shouted, as he rushed to the gondola that hung from its tracks alongside the observation deck of the beseiged Hell’s Cape station. “Now!”
Gray had a hard time obeying, his gaze fixed to the dark netherworld beyond this glass-enclosed perch. Floodlights along the backside of the steel superstructure illuminated the immediate area below. But even those powerful xenon lamps failed to penetrate very far into that inky, cavernous blackness.
After fifty yards, the rock floor disappeared into a vast lake. The black surface bubbled and belched a yellowish steam, creating a toxic haze over the water. A higher shelf of wet stone hugged the lake’s right bank. Muddy tread tracks ran from the base of the superstructure out to that natural bridge.
Gray pictured those smaller CAATs parked in the hangar. He now understood the necessity for amphibious craft in the frozen arctic.
“Hurry!” Harrington barked.
The professor had opened the double set of doors that allowed access to the gondola and ducked through them. He crossed to a panel inside and hit a large red button. A siren ignited, blaring loudly, echoing from inside the steel superstructure and beyond.
Gray pushed Kowalski toward the waiting cage. “Go!”
Jason followed them with Stella.
Gray cringed at the noise as he climbed inside. As the doors closed, the din of the emergency klaxon died to a muffled ringing, proving how solidly insulated the gondola was.
“What’re you doing, Professor?” Gray asked. “What’s your plan?”
“To get somewhere safe.”
Harrington pulled a lever and the cage began moving. But the gondola didn’t head back through the superstructure toward the battle being waged in the hangar. Instead, it rode forward, out into that vast cavern.
Ducking a bit and craning his neck, Gray saw the black steel tracks continuing along the cavern roof, supported by trestles in places to create a relatively even run.
“Where are we going?” he asked as he straightened.
“To the Back Door.” Harrington waved ahead with one arm; his other hand remained on the long red lever. “It’s a substation about four miles out. It leads back to the surface, just beyond the Fenriskjeften crags.”
Gray pictured that line of jagged peaks near the coast.
“There’s a radio there,” Stella added. “And a garaged CAAT.”
“So we’re just going to run?” Kowalski asked.
“No.” The professor pointed to the red button he had struck. “I just sounded a general evacuation alarm. The British forces will hold off Dylan Wright’s commandos for as long as possible, but after thirty minutes, they know to run. To get clear of this area.”
“Why?” Gray asked.
“The entire backside of this station is packed full of bunker buster bombs, including an American-made thirty-thousand-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator. It will destroy the base and seal up the mouth of the cavern system, bottling up what’s down here.”
“When’s it set to blow?”
Harrington looked worried.
Stella answered, “It can only be deployed from the Back Door. Only my father has the blast code.”
Gray frowned. So the British forces will flee out the front while we sneak out the back door, blowing everything behind us. What the hell required such a level of security?
Before he could ask, Gray felt a mother of all headaches flaring behind his eyes—but it wasn’t only him.
Kowalski clutched the sides of his head, groaning. “Motherfu—”
Jason leaned on his knees, looking ready to vomit.
Harrington spoke through a tight jaw. “We’ll be through the worst of it in another few seconds.”
Gray breathed deeply, close to losing his breakfast, too. Then slowly the pain subsided; his back molars stopped vibrating in his skull. He could now guess the source of the sudden agony.
“LRAD?” he asked.
Long Range Acoustic Device.
Harrington nodded. “We have a series of sonic cannons pointed continually into the cavern at the edge of the station. As a buffer to keep everything as far back as possible. We’ve found a mix of ultrasonic and infrasonic frequencies to be an effective deterrent down here. Better than guns.”
Gray leaned a hand against the wall, steadying himself, glad the gondola was so well insulated. He could only imagine the raw intensity of that sonic deterrent outside.
Jason pointed between his feet to a glass hatch in the floor. Through the window, a chair could be seen below, bolted inside an enclosed undercarriage canopy. A weapon with a large conical dish was racked in front of the seat.
“That’s another LRAD cannon, isn’t it?” Jason asked.
Stella nodded. “You can also swap it out for a machine gun, if need be.”
“Once we’re beyond the buffer zone,” Harrington warned, “we may need both to protect the lift if we run into any serious trouble.”
Trouble from what?
Out the windows ahead of them, the world was pitch-black. Behind the gondola, the station’s lamp-lit bulkheads continued to recede into the darkness, reflected in the boiling lake. Then the tracks followed a bend in the cavernous tunnel and even that last light vanished.