Ice Hunt

“Out!” Bratt yelled. “We don’t have the firepower to hold off this many!”

Together, they ran up the tunnel in a mad rush.

The sudden movement drew the beasts, like cats after fleeing mice.

“This way!” Amanda screamed.

The double doors to the station appeared ahead.

In a mad rush, they hit the doors. Matt held the way open and waved the civilians through. “Move, move, move!”

The Navy personnel kept up a rear guard, then quickly followed into the station.

As the doors were slammed shut, a shot rang out ahead of them. Matt ducked from a ricochet off the metal wall.

It seemed their gunfire had drawn more than just grendels.

“Halt!” a soldier in a white parka barked at them in heavily accented English. He and four others had a post at the other end of the hall. Assault rifles were trained on them. “Drop weapons! Now!”

No one moved for a breath.

Amanda had been continuing forward, deaf to the command, but Matt grabbed her elbow. She glanced to him.

Matt shook his head. “Stay with me,” he mouthed.

“Do as they say,” Bratt ordered, tossing aside his rifle as example. Other weapons clattered. “Keep moving forward. Get away from the doors.”

“Keep hands in air!” the Russian yelled at them. “Move in single line to here!”

With a nod from Bratt, they followed their captor’s instructions.

Quickly forming a line, they hurried down the long hall. They hadn’t taken more than ten steps when something huge hit the double doors behind them. The metal doors buckled.

Everyone froze.

“Down,” Bratt ordered.

They dropped to hands and knees. Matt pulled Amanda down with him.

A single shot fired, perhaps in startled reflex. But the aim was good. O’Donnell was a moment too slow in dropping with the others. The back of his head exploded, showering bone and blood. Then his body toppled backward, limbs flung out.

A flurry of Russian commands followed, yelling at each other.

“Goddamn it,” Bratt swore on the floor, his face purpling with rage.

Matt glanced between the trigger-happy Russians and the buckled door. Neither choice was good.

The Russian in charge stepped forward. “What trick—?”

Something again charged the door, hitting it like a runaway train. Hinges ripped clean, and both doors flew into the hall.

Accompanying the doors, a grendel barreled into the hall. Others followed.

Chaos ensued as everyone surged forward on the floor.

Shots rang out, wild with fear.

“Stay down!” Bratt yelled. “Crawl forward.”

They would never make it. If they didn’t catch a stray bullet like O’Donnell, they’d be ravaged by the beasts.

“Over here!” Amanda yelled. She had rolled to the wall and reached up to a door handle above her head. A bullet came close to shaving off a finger, but she managed to yank the handle. Using her other hand, she hauled the door open. The thick steel hatch now acted as a shield against the bullets. “Inside!”

They all tumbled after her.

Greer was last, diving through, a grendel at his heels.

Amanda slammed the door shut behind him as the beast struck. The concussion knocked her into Matt. He steadied her, but she shoved to the door.

In the dark, Matt heard a metal bar slide home.

Muffled as they were by the thick hatch, the echo of the gun battle still reached them. Occasional heavy bodies collided with the walls and door.

As the battle waged in the hallway, they all lay panting on the floor, huddled in a mass just inside the doorway. Matt took a moment to pull out his moosehide boots and cram them over his aching, frozen feet.

“We should be safe for the moment.” Amanda spoke from the darkness. “This door is solid plate steel.”

“Where are we?” Matt asked, lacing his boots.

“The heart of the station,” Bratt answered. “Its main research lab.”

A light switch was flipped and bare bulbs flickered to life.

Matt stared around the clean and orderly lab. Steel tables were aligned with military precision. Glass-fronted cabinets housed beakers and polished tools. Refrigeration units lined one wall. Other smaller rooms opened off the main lab, but they were too dark to see into.

As Matt’s gaze circled the room, another chain of lights flickered into existence. Each bulb flared, one after the other, illuminating a curving concourse that arced away into the distance. The corridor seemed to follow the outer wall, probably circled the entire level.

Matt bore witness to what each bulb illuminated. “Oh, dear God…”

Act Three

Feeding Frenzy

11

Timeless

APRIL 9, 1:42 P.M.

OUT ON THE ICE…

Bundled in a white parka, Viktor Petkov rode through the heart of a blizzard. His hands were encased in heated mittens, his face protected from the winds by the furred edge of his hood, a thick wool scarf, and a pair of polarized goggles.

But no amount of clothing could keep the cold from his heart. He was heading to the gravestone of his father, a frozen crypt buried in the ice.

He straddled the backseat of the hovercraft bike, harnessed in place. The skilled driver, a young officer under Mikovsky, handled the vehicle with a reckless confidence that could only come from youth. The craft flew over the ice, no more than a handspan above the surface, a rocket against the wind.

The storm continued its attempt to blow them off course, but the driver compensated, maintaining a direct line toward the lost station using the bike’s gyroscopic guidance system.

Viktor stared out at the snow-blasted landscape. Around him lay nothing but a wasteland, a desert of ice. With the sun blanketed by clouds and snow, the world had dissolved into a wan twilight. It sapped one’s will and strength. Here, hopelessness and despair took on physical dimensions. With winds wailing in his ears, the eternal desolation sank into his bones.

Here is where my father spent his last days, alone, exiled, forgotten.

The craft swung in a slow arc, following the shadow of a pressure ridge, the spines of a sleeping dragon. Then, out of the continual gloom, a misty light grew.

“Destination ahead, Admiral!” the driver called back to him.

The hovercraft adjusted course under him. Flanking the lead bike, the other two craft matched the maneuver like a squadron of MiG fighters in formation. The trio raced toward the light.

Details emerged through the blowing snow. A mountain range of ice, a black pool, square, man-made, and at the base of one peak, a shaft of light shone like a beacon in the storm.