The Spawning (50 page)

The Icewolf barely made it down into the Trough without crashing into the walls of the glacier itself, savage headwinds tearing at it and trying to slap it from midair. When it set down, it bounced, shook wildly, then bounced again before coming to rest with a resounding thud that nearly knocked everyone out of their seats.

Then the door was open and Coyle and the others pushed out into a rushing whirlpool of white nothingness. The wind was screaming at nearly fifty miles an hour, flashlight beams revealing a gutted, pitted ice-scape of ridges, yawning hollows, and jagged escarpments of blue ice. It looked like the dark side of the moon, remote and desolate and eerie with lashing sheets of drift and jumping shadows, that wind moaning like a banshee the whole time.

Fucking hell on Earth,
is what Coyle thought.

It made the plateau almost look cozy.

Emperor Cave was some two-hundred feet ahead, but in that weather it might as well have been ten miles. Dayton formed them into a chain with himself out front, his troopers—Long, Reja, McKerr, Norrys, and Barnes—in the back, Coyle and Gwen and Horn in the middle. They were roped together as they pushed over the seamed, craggy ice and that was so that if anyone went into a crevasse, the others could yank him or her out. But truth be told, in that wind and darkness, if one went in, they were
all
going in.

The temperature was sixty below and they all wore goggles against the constant onslaught of snow and ice particles scraped from the glacier itself. Even with their ECWs on, parka hoods zipped tight, balaclavas pulled down, the wind was unbearably frigid.

You could lose yourself in ten paces in this,
Coyle thought,
and freeze up tight in fifteen minutes. Whose goddamn idea was this in the first place?

But he knew the answer to that one, all right. He'd volunteered just as Horn and Gwen had. Frye and Locke had wanted to come, too, but they drew the short straws.

They pushed on through wind and ice fog and then Dayton stopped, called out as loud as he could: “There! There it is!”

Coyle couldn't see it at first.

Even their flashlight beams only made it five or ten feet before being reflected back by the storm. He followed behind Dayton and then, rising out of that turbulent murk . . . a circle of light above them, the mouth of Emperor Cave. From their position out in the storm, they could see that the power was still on because inside the cave it was glowing with a blue-green phosphorescence. That meant the generator was still chugging along and it also meant somebody might still be alive in there.

There had been eight. Three scientists—Dryden, Stone, and Kenneger—two contract workers, Warren and Biggs, and a couple of engineers, Reese and Paxton. The eighth man was a Navy lieutenant-commander named Beeman.

Steel poles had been driven into the ice with bright red nylon rope threaded through them as a guyline. They led from the bottom of the sheer ice slope which canted at a mean sixty degrees all the way up to the mouth of the cave which was about a hundred feet above. Not an endearing prospect in the weather.

Dayton started up and his daisy chain followed.

The wind was vicious all the way and it was a matter of pulling themselves up hand over hand and it was painfully slow. And as they climbed, their Stabilicer cleats digging into the smooth face of the glacier, the entrance of the Emperor got nearer and nearer and larger and larger until it loomed above like some yawning blue mouth. Coyle estimated that mouth to be sixty feet across and at least fifty from floor to roof. Amazing.

About thirty feet up, Gwen lost her footing and slid into Horn who stumbled into the troopers behind him. Coyle's first indication of that was when the rope tying him to her snapped tight. For a moment there, the wind punching into them with what seemed typhoon force, it seemed that they were all going to go tumbling down in a merry heap. And they would have had it not been for the superior conditioning of Dayton and his men who dug in and held the line while Gwen and the others finally found their feet and got their cleats into the ice again.

Gripping the rope above with one hand and putting his flashlight right in their faces, Dayton cried out: “Watch what the fuck you're doing back there!”

Coyle heard Gwen call out, “What?” because the wind was so loud you couldn't hear much unless you were right on top of someone.

Up they went, the wind blasting into them, the guyline snapping wildly, ice-covered and slippery. Finally they made it up to the mouth, one after the other appearing out of the snow-clotted murk.

“Okay,” Dayton called out. “Get ready for the shit.”

And maybe the others hadn't heard him, but Coyle heard him just fine.

EMPEROR ONE

T
HE MAIN SHAFT LEADING into the mouth turned off to the right and opened into a sheltered grotto of shimmering blue ice that was enormous, a worm hole cut right into the belly of the glacier itself. The walls were made of carven flows, runnels, and rivers of ice that looked like melted candle wax, the arched ceiling above a jagged expanse of thousands of icicles like spears waiting to fall. All of it was sparkling with a refracted blue-green light that was at once dazzling and spectral.

“It's almost . . . beautiful,” Gwen said.

Horn grunted. “Yeah, lovely.”

Coyle listened for signs of life but heard only a gravelike silence that was broken by the hum of the generator and the cracking of the glacier itself.

The security lights made everything glow, created crawling shadows and pockets of night. Just ahead were four Hypertats lined up like coffins. Only one was lit up. As Dayton's men went to check out the generator and the numerous storage sheds and shacks, Dayton led Coyle and the others towards the Hypertats over the rippling ice.

“Let's see what this clusterfuck is all about,” he said.

Coyle only knew what he had heard and what Dayton had told him. The Emperor Cave site was occupied that winter by a Navy-sanctioned scientific team studying the guts of the glacier. They had reported finding some sort of specimen in the ice and then nothing . . . just a garbled Mayday from one of the team members that everyone was dead.

That's all Coyle knew, or at least all Dayton was telling him, but he figured it was enough.
A specimen in the ice.
Well, that spoke volumes. It brought to mind the Kharkov Tragedy and the macabre events that had transpired since and long before.
They chopped something from the ice, only it probably wasn't as dead as it should have been.
He followed behind Dayton, their flashlight beams filled with suspended ice crystals, everyone's breath coming out in frosty clouds that dissipated very slowly.

As they moved forward through the unreal, sepulchral silence, Coyle felt it begin to take hold of him: the fear. It flooded through him and settled in his belly in a solid, shifting mass. An atavistical terror that was labyrinth and deep-set, an ancient network of alarm.

Gwen gripped his arm suddenly and he jumped.

“You feel it, too, don't you?”

“Yes,” he said.

The menace was almost electric, agitated and cycling to life as if their coming here had flipped some switch and turned on some ancient machine of phobic dread and malignity. The atmosphere was noxious and shivering.

But at least they were out of the wind and it wasn't quite as cold in here. And they were armed. That was a good thing. Dayton's men had flamethrowers, grenades, submachine guns and sidearms. He had given Coyle and Horn military-issue SPAS-12 assault shotguns and Gwen a Beretta 9mm handgun, the Model 92 automatic. But down here, in this awful place, Coyle had to wonder if it was enough.

Ahead, he saw a row of Skidoos hooked up to block heaters. He wondered what they were for just as he wondered, really, what all this was about. A winter deep-field project like this. Glaciology? Yeah, right.

Long came running up, crunching over the ice. “Generator is running fine,” he said. “Plenty of fuel. But she's auto-feed, could run for weeks on her own until the tanks dry-up.”

Only one of the Hypertats was lit up and this is where they went. As they came around the side, Reja called out: “Captain . . . over here.”

Here we go,
Coyle thought.

He followed Dayton around the side of the Hypertat and Reja and Barnes were standing there in their olive drab polar suits, weapons pointed up. The other men were rushing over.

A body.

The door to the Hypertat hung from one hinge, looked like it had been hit with incredible force.

And just inside, sprawled on the floor, was the corpse.

A man in ECWs, his body contorted and back arched as if from some horrible convulsion. But the worse thing was his face which was just grotesque: mouth seized open in a scream, hollow eye sockets filled with crystallized blood, tissue and blood and slime splashed down from those sockets in a grisly caul. All of it frozen into icicles that grew from his face to the floor like melted tallow.

“Shit,” Horn said.

Gwen looked away, but then looked back again. “What happened to him?” she said. “What could do that to him . . . blow his eyes out like that?”

But nobody ventured a guess.

“It's Warren, I think,” Dayton said. “One of the contract guys. Must've sent out that Mayday and then . . . and then . . .”

“Then what?” Gwen demanded.

Coyle was staring at the corpse. The heater was running inside the Hypertat, but with the door wide open the body had iced-up. He was thankful for that, thankful that the subzero temperatures of Antarctica always reduced dead things to shriveled ice sculptures. He didn't want to think what the body might have smelled like otherwise.

“You check the other Hypertats?” Dayton said.

“Empty. All of ‘em,” Barnes informed him.

“Then we go downstairs.” He looked at his men, one after the other. “Norrys. I'm posting you up here.”

“Alone, sir?”

“Yes, alone, goddammit. If there's trouble, it'll be below not up here. Now we all have headsets and we keep in constant communication. Norrys . . . we don't check in within thirty minutes, none of us, you evacuate and make for the chopper. Understood? You do not come after us.”

“Aye, sir.”

He pulled away, looking nervously around. The guy was scared and Coyle didn't blame him a bit. Dayton and his boys were all SEALs, courtesy of the Navy, but all the training and all the experience in the world couldn't prepare you for this kind of thing.

Coyle was just glad it wasn't him.

He looked around, seeing the Hypertats and sheds, generating station and snowmobiles, pallets of yellow fuel drums stacked two high against the wall. So many places to hide. So many places for the imagination to create things that were not there.

Dayton turned to the rest of them. “Shall we go below, people?”

“Do we have a choice?” Horn said.

Down they went.

EMPEROR TWO

“W
ELL, SOMEBODY RAN THIS line,” Dayton said. “And that somebody might still be down here.”

They were looking at a yellow electrical cord that ran into a crevice and was connected to the Polar Haven beyond. And what its purpose was, nobody even wanted to guess.

The far wall of the glacier was set with many crevices, many of which had been taped off because they probably led to crevasses. There was even a huge circular tunnel that looked unpleasantly artificial, like the burrow of an immense worm. But only one had an electrical cord leading into it.

“Must be where they were working,” Gwen said to the cold-pinched faces around her. “Maybe this is where they melted their
specimen
out.”

And that's the very thing everyone was afraid of, because that specimen of Dr. Dryden's was missing. Nobody liked the idea of that.

Down in the cavern, Dayton stationed McKerr at the Polar Haven and Barnes up at the top of the ice rise that sloped down and down until it flattened out and met the far wall of the glacier itself where all the crevices were. This is where Dayton took Coyle and the others, following the cord. For despite the mammoth size of the lower cavern, with the security lights strung out there was really nowhere else for anyone to hide. Nothing but the Haven, a tool shed, and the collapsed remains of what looked like a tent. Nothing but open ice that lifted and canted, forming mounds and ridges, scalloped hollows. And all of it had been checked.

And while they were checking it out, dread growing in each and every one of them like a fetus coming to term, they found the electrical cord which led from the Polar Haven and down the slope and into one of the crevices.

There was frozen blood at the triangular mouth.

“All right,” Dayton said. “Reja, take point. Long, you're the back door. Rest of you fall in-between.”

And into the crevice they went.

The blue ice walls were clear as glass, flashlight beams glaring off them in blinding arcs. It was like being in some crazy mirror maze of fissured ice that started and stopped, twisting and turning, the walls narrowing and then widening. The lights created crawling shadows, distorted reflections, and that ever-present aquamarine glow that turned faces green and the smears of blood on the walls black as ink.

It was all claustrophobic, cramped, unsettling.

Coyle found it easy to imagine what it would be like to lose your way and never get out again, nothing but those ice walls pressing in closer and closer. But judging from the cleat-marks on the floor, they were not lost.

“There's something over here,” Reja said, his light reflecting off the mouth of a fissure that led off from the main passage. “Like a room.”

They followed him in there, their breath puffing out in white clouds that filled the flashlight beams like smoke. As they panned their lights around, they saw a dome-shaped room whose floor sloped into a central depression. Down there, forms were heaped and tangled. The forms of men long dead.