The initial flight to New Zealand required the nine men and two women in Sly’s entourage to board two commercial aircraft and spend more than thirty hours on coaches, planes, in transit lounges and queues. Patience was one of Sly’s superpowers, but even he had a hard time with boredom waiting for a plane.

  Looking out through high airport windows in the AccessOne departure lounge at Dallas, Sly fell into conversation with Captain John Ramirez, an experienced officer he’d personally recruited into the project.

  Originally from Syracuse, upstate New York, the dark-haired man was full of enthusiasm. Ramirez wasn’t Sly’s first choice for the trip’s unit commander, but the other man was out of the country, his hands likely full of someone else’s mess. Regretfully, real missions took precedence to a volunteering gig the soldiers did in their space time. Under those circumstances, Ramirez was a more than adequate replacement – a pragmatic officer with a strong sense of responsibility to his men.

  “We’re missing three on active service,” Ramirez said, frowning. “That gonna be a problem? You wanted a full contingent for the testing.”

  “Put bluntly, I wanted a couple of spares,” Sly said, sipping at a warm twelve ounce cup of coffee through the plastic lid. “We’ve enough bodies for our purposes, as long as no one breaks a leg.” He chuckled at a thought. “We could even make that work, given the sensors are medical monitors, but let’s not have to try.”

  Ramirez looked out over the tarmac to where a titanic plane took fuel like a beached blue whale on a scaled-up intravenous drip.

  “They’re missing a treat,” he said, his face in disagreement with his words. “A sixteen-hour flight in the belly of the beast. I’ve not flown in any civilian plane that big. At least we’ll have better food than they serve on a Hercules.”

  “Denver to Christchurch’s a long way,” Sly agreed. “In my experience, more than four hours on any plane, however comfortable in theory, is in practice best endured asleep.”

  “Your experience is more extensive than mine,” Ramirez said. “I’ve been overseas a couple of times, but Germany’s not Afghanistan. Winters there were like being at home, plenty of snow.”

  “Glacial ice will be a treat, then. How’s your XO settling in?”

  “Lieutenant Sarah Kim’s a capable, ambitious officer,” Ramirez said, and Sly pictured an athletic, attractive woman with sharp features, a sharper analytical mind and multifarious language skills. “She’s overseeing the operations sergeants.”

  “Marcus and Clarke? How’s that going?”

  “They’re bedding in okay, but they didn’t know each other in their units. The ops sergeants are good guys, fortunately. They can handle most things on their own.”

  “I wouldn’t want to argue with Emil Marcus,” said Sly, keeping a straight face.

  “They call him Mount Doom,” Ramirez smiled. “He’s a big man, he comes over as serious as a court martial, but he’s got a sense of humour, even if you have to drill for it. Physical intimidation will get you a long way. He’s teamed with Sergeant Grace Clarke, so when simple compliance isn’t enough, he’s got her to lean on. She’s Kim’s chief fixer and problem solver, for anything Marcus can’t simply bulldoze through.”

  Sly grinned, remembering a compact redhead with freckles that stood out through a ski mask. “I can imagine them together. Isn’t she on the short side?”

  “I won’t tell her you said that,” the captain said drily. “Sure, Clarke’s not tall, but she’s built like a Ford Bronco – muscles on a small frame, like a power lifter. Weaklings didn’t pass SFAS.”

  Or the year-long Special Forces Qualification Course. He recalled how Clarke’s shoulders filled her jacket, but what stuck in his mind from the interview was her incisive intellect: switched on, prepared, and mentally tough.

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  Hearing the call to proceed to the gate, Sly looked around for a bin for the cup.

  The team arrived in Christchurch on the ninth of October and Sly received a stream of messages as they queued for immigration. An email from the multi-node Gus agent in the US said it was working on the link-analysis but that the research was so far incomplete. Another message from Army Logistics belatedly offered the team an alternative military transport via Punta Arenas in Chile. The flight was the usual way for US military to travel far south, but Sly would’ve said no, even if the proposal hadn’t been absurdly late. He wanted the team to keep to its covert profile, using travel options college-funded personnel might use.

  Talking to immigration, Sly leaned into Ronald Thorpe’s ‘accidental’ death. As planned, he and two of his team, Ramirez and Nguyen, acted as insurance investigators. The rest of the group posed as a specialist facilities team tasked with assessing the living conditions at the Area 71 base, to make them safe before the start of the season – close enough to the truth.

  In Christchurch the team was briefed by a representative of the US Antarctic Program before collecting their Extreme Cold Weather gear and boarding a C-130 Hercules capable of landing at McMurdo Station, a civilian base outside the Antarctic Circle serviced by the US military.

  The mild weather on arrival at McMurdo was deceptive. Two hours after they arrived a storm hit, accompanied by shrill high winds, and the team lost a day of travel-time. Sly used the delay in cramped quarters to prepare his dozen volunteers for the harsh conditions of the remote continental interior. They were all well-trained and capable but hadn’t previously visited the Antarctic Plateau.

  He also checked everyone was happy with their eyewear. Worn for both team communications and low-light vision, ‘shades’ were technologically advanced. Each fused a powerful processor, state-of-the-art micro-LED optical projectors, waveguide lenses and solid-state batteries into thin classic frames. Sly kept a pair for himself despite Clarity having many of the same functions. That was mostly for the audio communications, but shades made damn fine sunglasses, too.

  The thousand-mile flight to Leviathan Station was delayed until the winds died and the de Havilland Twin Otter could safely take off. The ski-equipped aircraft were smaller than the Hercules, but most everything was. Area 71 had a short ice strip, but no one knew if the field was clear enough to use. Since the peculiar death and the evacuation of the winter maintenance team, no residents remained at the base to check for obstructions or storm debris.

  Not willing to risk a direct flight, Sly co-ordinated with International Operations at Leviathan to request immediate ground transport. Leviathan readily agreed since the station still had Area 71’s Bandvagn ‘Hagglund’, a big Swedish-built all-terrain vehicle the researchers left when they flew out with the body of Ronald Thorpe.

  The final flight to Leviathan Station was worth the tedious trip so far.

  Below the plane stretched a landscape that Ernest Shackleton, the preeminent explorer of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, had described as a ‘white chaos of frozen waves and bergs’.

  Around him in the plane Sly saw haunted expressions as his team-mates stared down to the harsh, pristine beauty of the ice. The quality of the light from the midnight sun dazzled, and a vivid blue and green glow sprang from the prismatic edges of the ice. Very occasionally a stark black rock breached the surface, like the crooked back of an enormous whale caressed by the spumes of wind-devils, only to sink as the Twin Otter flew on.

  Landing against a crosswind was dramatic but ultimately uneventful. The Green Berets came down from the plane to the ice in single file, where a tracked vehicle from Leviathan awaited. The team stepped up into the rear passenger unit with the ease of familiarity, and Sly climbed up beside the driver.

  Five minutes later their rough terrain taxi parked up by a living module on sleds, half-way between the airfield and the base on the horizon, spewing snow as it braked. The driver pulled in behind another caterpillar-tracked vehicle wearing the patina of much use, as if a fool rubbed it down daily with one-eighty-grit sandpaper. Two equally wind-chapped drivers sat in the surprisingly pleasant living module as Sly stepped in, one idly reading an old birthday card from a shelf. They were waiting for him, and both were experienced with the likely conditions and the route.

  “It’s a twenty hour-drive to Area 71,” explained Joe, the older man. “October’s a transition month. You can get minus-thirty temperatures most days, but the weather can turn nasty in the blink of an eye.”

  Sly raised a mental eyebrow. Was minus-thirty not nasty? He realized then that Antarctica would be held to a different standard to most places he’d been to, even those known for their harsh climate.

  “It’s best to have guides,” the one called Tony said, with an accent Sly recognized as Amsterdam Dutch. “I’ll drive you, Joe’ll come in a second vehicle with more of your gear. And later he’ll drive me and him back.”

  And that was that.