The Tethys Report (The Rise of the Chirons Book 1) Page 6

  The room we entered was a kind of a midway point that was not heated, so we went in even further to where the rest of them must have gone. We moved in, and this room was a kind of utility area that led off into three directions. There were various pieces of science equipment, along with living supplies stacked all around—nothing unusual.

  He brought up the microphone and said in a faint voice to the group, “We’re definitely being watched by armed forces—probably Russian. I saw perhaps a group of ten, well-armed due east. They’re all facing us.”

  He cocked his ear, listening to a response, and said, “Roger,” before going back to his position near the inner door, holding his gun at the ready.

  A few moments later, the advance team came back.

  “Jesus this whole mission is gone. We can’t salvage it,” said Hal.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Everyone we saw was dead inside, and there’s some kind of elevator. That’s what takes up most of the space in the second building. The Russians are trying to cover their tracks,” he said.

  “Yeah, and they’ve surrounded the place outside. We’re in a really bad spot here,” said Lance. “This is crazy. What are the Russians doing aiming their guns at us?”

  “They’re definitely not out here to play some bridge,” said Alex.

  “There’s probably no way we can make a break for it?” Hal asked. “Back to the snowcats?”

  “It wouldn’t be a promising idea. They’ve got us locked so they can shoot at us from a ways off at their leisure,” said Alex. “We might get lucky since the wind conditions and visibility are very poor, but that should only be a last resort.”

  “Anyone speak Russian?” Ross said.

  “I do,” I said. And it was true. It was useful when I did research there before the final block was put into place.

  “They’ve got their guns all trained on us,” said Lance looking through his binoculars. “Jesus, we’re outnumbered here. What if there’s more of them out there?”

  “We’re going to have to talk to them. If I reach them on the wire, can you tell them that we’ll leave peacefully?” Hal asked me.

  “Yeah, I think I can do that,” I said. Though in truth, I had not practiced that phrase much.

  “Hang on,” said Bret. “Hang on, hang on. Look at this. Oh my god,” he said, and we all looked to where he was facing. On the table in the room there was a large black box, and he was staring at it with great intensity.

  Hal was the next one there. “Yep, that’s a bomb,” he said before cursing. I jumped up to see and saw a complexly wired instrument with a timer in the center of it.

  “Is that what I think it is?” I said.

  “I reckon so,” he said. The timer said 29:20 when I had looked at it, counting down by seconds.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” said Bret. “They must have remotely triggered the timer on this thing.”

  Hal said to me, pointing to his receiver, “Here, I think I’ve got them. Say whatever you have to in order to get us out of here, safely. We’ll worry about the details later. Don’t tell them how many are here though, whatever you do. Push this button here to talk.”

  I pushed the button and spoke a Russian greeting into the microphone. I waited for about ten seconds, batting sweat from my forehead. I pushed the button again and spoke the same greeting. Then the answer came almost in immediately after in very terse and strange Russian. I cocked my left ear and listened until the message was over.

  “What’s it say,” Hal said after the message was done.

  I looked at them and said, “Basically that we’re trespassers and will be shot if we try to escape. That’s it.”

  “What do you mean that’s it?” Bret said.

  “I think they mean to have this place go under—no survivors.” There were quite a few curses. “There’s one more thing,” I said.

  “What is it?”

  “Their Russian was strange. It’s nothing like the people I spoke to when I went to Moscow.”

  “Leaving the question aside for why you were in Moscow in the first place, what do you think it means?” Bret asked.

  I looked back at him with a blank stare. “I don’t know.”

  “Great. Now we’re fucked,” he replied.

  I asked the question that had been burning on my mind. “Did you see Jen in there?”

  Hal shook his head, but I wasn’t satisfied at this.

  “Are you sure about not wanting any survivors?” he said.

  Our answer came in the next moment when two loud explosions rippled through the building we were in. I was pushed to the ground the force was so big. When I got to my feet, I was disoriented to say the least.

  “What was that?” someone said.

  “They just took out our vehicles. They’re completely gone,” said Alex looking through his binoculars. He was the most exposed to the outside, and could best see what was going on.

  “Do you think we can salvage any of them.”

  “Not a chance. Based on what I see from my binoculars and the size of the explosions, they’re basically gone. That means we’re not getting out of here without help.”

  “Any chance Kraftburger will send a rescue?” I asked.

  “Probably not soon enough,” said Hal. “Even if I wanted to disobey a direct order and contact him while we’re in the Shadow Zone, they’re still jamming the radio anyway. Of course out here they can tap into whatever we say, so they’ll know that we’re worried enough to call for backup. It’s as if we walked right into the perfect trap.”

  “Do you think Kraftburger set us up?” Ross asked.

  “It’s possible,” I said. “But it’s more likely that someone back home tipped off the Russians—or whoever they are. They won’t be letting us go now from what we’ve seen. “

  “What should we do?” said Alex.

  No one had an answer.

  I noticed something spread across the side of the wall. It looked like a schematic of the entire compound and where the mysterious elevator led to.

  “Hey look at this,” I said. “It looks like there is another way out from the other side.”

  “What do you mean?” said Hal.

  I showed him. Just like I was told before, the elevator apparently went down to Lake Victor, and from a distance away, there was another elevator that rose to possibly another facility. I took a picture of it and held it on my camera.

  “How do we know they haven’t closed that one up too?”

  “We don’t,” I said. “But we do know that if we stay here, we’re toast.”

  “Good point. So you’re saying we should go down the elevator?” Hal asked me.

  “I think it’s the best idea. Those guys outside aren’t going to let us live, and even if we do sneak off in the night, we’ll never make it back to the outpost in time.”

  “Maybe a rescue?”

  I looked at him askance. “I’m going down. As a scientist, this is the perfect opportunity for me anyway.” Besides, I thought, I wanted to see if she was down there.

  “I’m not going down there,” said Lance. His bushy black mustache was peppered with ice and snow. “I’m just going to take my chances. I’ve got family back home, and I’ve got no more time for this shit.” He threw down his gun, and before we could stop him, moved towards the door. He held his hands up high in the air and waved them while slowly walking out.

  “Lance,” I called out to him. “Don’t do it.” They shot him just as he walked beyond the main entrance. Lance had heard the first shot and tried to avoid it, but the second one proved accurate. A few more loud shots went off, and then it was all over for him. They didn’t even bother with a silencer.

  There were six of us left. We all stood and looked at each other. There was nothing left to say about the situation.

  “Are those computers working?” I said.

  “We haven’t checked,” said Hal. I moved quickly over to a console, turned it on.

  “
We’ve got to go,” he said.

  “Wait.” The computer turned on with no problems. Now, let’s see if they’ve got the Internet going.”

  “How would they get that working down here?”

  “Satellite,” I said. “It’s standard down here. With a little work, it may get us to some neutral help in the Shadow Zone, or maybe even Eagle Zone.”

  “We can’t get into our system, right? Which Internet Zone are we authorized to patch into?” Hal asked.

  “Any of them. Fuck orders. I don’t care which one it is. It depends now on the satellite we connect to. Of course since we’re well outside Eagle Zone and this isn’t encrypted, they’ll likely be able to read our transmissions. It doesn’t matter though. We have to send a message because if we go down there, we’re not going to be sending anything, and the Russians will be up here able to do whatever they want. We have to tell Command or we’ll have no chance of rescue.”

  Hal relented after hearing this.

  “Dammit,” Hal said, slamming his fist on a desk. It made a loud banging sound that unnerved all of us. “I can’t believe how badly this is going. All our intel was wrong, and we got set up obviously. Now Lance is dead, that poor son of a bitch.”

  I worked at the computer awhile, and finally found the Internet was connected.

  “Should we fight our way out?” Alex asked.

  “Not a chance,” said Hal. “We can’t fight snipers out there in the dark. They’re probably trained for the sub-zero conditions. The only thing we have going for us is the wind.”

  “Why not go for it then? We’ve got infrared here too. We could make a go for it,” Alex said.

  “And what if they retreat?” Hal asked. “All they have to do is pull back and wait us out. Most of our gear was in those vehicles. I doubt they have enough here, and besides, there’s the small issue of that bomb right there.”

  “Hey Hal, I got this up,” I said. “I’m sending Kraftburger a message about where we’re going and why. I’m also sending it to a few friends back home on a blind copy, so the government doesn’t find out. “

  Hal came over and said, “Well maybe we can contact them and get ourselves a safe passage without having to go down.”

  “You know that’s probably not a good idea. Is there anyone you want to send a message to?”

  “Yes, I’ll send it to the air force commander at the Florida base. If Kraftburger is crooked, he’ll do something.”

  We finished and moved off with the others.

  “How much time?” Bret asked.

  “About twenty-one minutes. We need to be out of this steel igloo and well clear from that elevator when this baby blows,” said Ross. He was checking his medical instruments and loading them into the elevator, which was a steel cube that was connected to a magnet. Apparently, the elevator would hover down. I looked through the slight gap between the elevator and the depths below. Although the shaft was only partially visible from intermittent lighting, I could see the bottom. Based on the latest readings, it was likely a kilometer or so down to get to the lake’s surface.

  “Come on,” I said. They didn’t need to be told twice. The elevator was at the surface when we got there. The rest of us got on easily, as it pretty spacious inside, about twenty by twenty feet.

  “Everyone on? Here we go,” I said. I hit the button, and it moved slowly at first before picking up speed. I saw that it showed the depth on a panel near the door.

  “How much time do we have?”

  “Just under twenty minutes. I’ve set my watch to the exact time,” said Alex. “Can’t we hurry this damn thing up any faster? We’ve not gone that far—maybe fifty meters at best.”

  I looked at the control panel, and saw two arrow buttons—one pointed up, the other pointed down. I pushed the one that pointed down, and the elevator picked up speed. It gave a reading on the panel that was in meters and calculated that we would reach a half a kilometer after about five minutes. Hal got frustrated and hit the button a few more times.

  “Come on goddammit,” he said while adding a few more curses.

  It reached just over two hundred meters.

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  I didn’t know how long we had left, but I guessed it was still a good kilometer. I kept my eyes off the timer and distance. The elevator itself was surrounded by ice on all sides. I knew from experience that the ice may as well have been steel. As a geologist, it would have been extremely interesting just to study the composition of the ice, which would contain rocks and minerals as well as plenty of life forms.

  “It’s picking up speed,” Hal said practically stabbing the down button. “Hang on. I think I jammed this fucker.”

  I thought we were moving at a free fall after a while, but I was certainly glad to have the speed. I remembered I had a flashlight with my gear and took it out. Inspecting the ice wall, I noticed some of the rocks that we were traveling through. Although we were moving down a tunnel of ice, there were quite a few rocks strewn throughout the ice. From what I knew of the surrounding environment, I guessed that they were old—very old, but there was something strange about them, and I moved towards the side of the elevator to get a closer look. Some of the rock fell onto the platform, and I picked some of it up. It looked as though it was igneous rock mixed into the ice that we were traveling through, but of course that was impossible. I was startled from my studies by a voice.

  “Do you think this is normal?” Hal said to me, gesturing at the platform.

  It took me a while to respond. “I don’t know. As long as they have some powerful magnets. This can’t be cables they’ve got us on. I think it’s powered electromagnetically.”

  “Ten minutes! We’re going to have to act fast once we get down there. We’re just barely halfway down according to this thing. “

  I looked at the map. It looked like we would arrive at some sort of landing zone, and then we would be able to see the way forward from there. That was the hope anyway.

  Then we stalled. The platform screeched to a halt, as the machinery moving the engine downwards halted suddenly. The pale lights that illuminated the surface of the elevator were dimmed almost to the point of being extinguished.

  “What the hell is going on?” someone shouted. I couldn’t tell who it was.

  Having not much idea about mechanical problems on electromagnetic elevators, I wasn’t much help. But I did have some training a while back in how to get car engines going, so I moved to look at the mechanical system.

  “Something’s wrong with the rotor,” Hal said. Alex was standing beside him. The others were waiting around for us to fix it.

  “I think I’ve seen this kind of equipment before. Basically the magnets on this platform wedge themselves between two electromagnetic fields.”

  Hal gave me an ironic look—one which was both impatient and sardonic.

  “That means that I think the railing is warped, and we need to push our way along a bit further.”

  “Well, we don’t have time. That bomb is going to go off, and then we’re screwed. This hole we’re traveling down isn’t going to last a moment in all of this.”

  “I know, but I’m a scientist really, not an engineer.”

  “What’s the difference? I’ve always been wondering about that.”

  “Really?” I asked incredulously. “You want to know now?”

  “Yes.”

  I thought about it for a second. The ridiculousness of the moment carried into near amazement. Here I was down the middle of a remote ice tunnel explaining some farfetched tidbit to someone who probably put bullets into shady characters on a weekly basis.

  “Scientists come up with the theories, and engineers put them into practice—usually making them useful for humankind. That’s about the best I can do to explain the two. Now let’s look at this, so we can get moving.”

  “You said that we just have to force it a bit more?”

  “8 minutes,” said Alex. My stomach churned. I wasn’t quite ready to
check out yet.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “So we just have to get it squeezed through, and we can continue on?”

  “That’s pretty much it,” I said.

  “Come on then, give me a hand with this,” Hal said grabbing a pipe that was on the platform. He stuck it onto one of the rotaries that wheeled us through the magnetic track. I strained, pulling the lever through one of the wheels connected to the engine. It wouldn’t move.

  “Hey guys, get over here and help,” Hal said.

  All of the others moved over, but the pipe would only accommodate about four people at most.

  We struggled for a while—futilely it seemed—until we finally got the thing moving. The son of a bitch was tight. The pipe made a noise, and something gave. The noise was deafening, and for an instant, I thought that we had broken the machine, but it started to move again.

  We had five minutes and probably about three or four hundred meters left. It was going to be close.

  “How long is this damn thing anyway? The pressure is starting to pick up,” Alex said.

  “I don’t know how much more time, but it shouldn’t be too long.,” I answered.

  “Relax. Since you gentlemen have been so naughty in your life, if that explosion really does go off, and we all get squashed down here, we’re probably heading in the right direction anyway—for the person who you’ll be seeing anyway.”

  “Fuck you Alex,” said Bret.

  He grinned devilishly.

  “We’re really going to have to move fast once we get to the bottom,” Alex said. We’ll have to hit the landing and start running. What’s the inside like?”

  “From what I’ve seen of the map, we’ll have to head into the main room from about two smaller buffer areas,” I said.

  “Buffer areas? What do you mean?”

  “There apparently are two rooms we have to cross to get to the main research facility below, and one of them is some sort of mechanical area where the elevator is operated.”