The next three hours began with Sly shrugging off his coats.

  He arranged hot food for the drivers from Leviathan, Tony and Joe, but gave them no reason to stay. Sly regretted he couldn’t show more hospitality, but he was there to do a job and there was a potential, however small, that the caves weren’t safe. He said as much to the pair, and they accepted it. It was the truth, after all, although not in the way they thought. Tony brought Area 71’s Hagglund up the steep slope and into the garage, and two hours later the Europeans departed, fuel tanks full.

  As soon as the drivers were out of sight, Nio Gonzalez tracked the airdrop cache signal out on to the ice. He took the initiative, a snowmobile and a sled he found in the garage, and was back twenty minutes later with the first load. Lieutenant Kim and Sergeant Marcus went with him on the second run and they returned with everything else.

  The cache contained items Sly couldn’t have explained at any border. He busied himself checking the contents and each item was ticked off the digital list as Gus spotted it through Clarity’s digital eye. The haul from Gonzalez’s first run included M4A1 carbines, side-arms, and M500 shotguns: standard weapons readily available from any US armoury. There was also enough ammo for a small war.

  The second load contained boxes of helmets plus a mix of armour rated from NIJ Level II to IIIA. Stopping anything short of rifle rounds, the modular armour design allowed the addition of a padded chainmail undershirt and a ceramic-plate vest, a modern take on protection against slashing and piercing weapons. With protestors in mind Sly’s inventory also included less lethal systems, from pepper spray and CS gas to flashbang grenades, rubber bullets and bean-bag rounds.

  Carbine suppressors were at the bottom of the second load. Calling the precision-engineered sleeves ‘silencers’ was misleading, as a suppressed shot resembled a jackhammer more than the ‘phut’ of a silenced weapon from popular action movies. Anything that made a full-on assault less noisy was desirable in the echoing caves, however. Sly preferred a police action to a battle, but naturally it was better to have the suppressors and not need them, than the reverse.

  During planning Sly judged that underground warfare rewarded mobility much more than heavy weaponry. A single carbine could control a corridor, so long as the operator couldn’t be flanked, and any weapon that would literally bring the roof down on friend and foe alike wasn’t worth the airfreight. His one contingency was the inclusion of a M2010 sniper rifle. From elevation the rifle could kill most things a sniper could see, and you could see a lot across flat ice on a well-lit day. It went without saying that fighting outdoors hereabouts meant the situation had already gone to shit. A well-lit day in Antarctica was as rare as a cold day in hell.

  Clarke was appointed armourer once the weapons were in and unpacked. Sly signed for a belt and a Sig Sauer M17 for his personal use, plus a handful of 9mm clips and a cleaning kit. Then he watched as Captain Ramirez organized a thorough sweep of the upper cavern.

  According to Gus, Area 71’s four levels started with the garage and accommodation nearest the surface. Immediately below, a service level similar in size and extent to the first provided space for water purification, laundry, waste treatment and electricity systems. Sly’s hands were clammy and his mouth dry as he descended the gentle slope to L2 with the captain, Serenity prominent in his mind.

  Serenity’s objective had been the capture of Gustav Meier, the notorious leader of an equally infamous terrorist faction, who the NSA tracked to the historical and archaeological site of Derinkuyu in the Cappadocia region of Turkey. An underground city carved out of soft volcanic rock, Derinkuyu once housed twenty thousand people in an extensive network of tunnels, rooms and chambers. The city was now a tourist attraction and as such wasn’t permanently inhabited, except by Meier and his cadre, who had broken through thin walls into a hitherto unknown district of the site.

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  Acting as recon, Sly tailed one of the gang members back to the Meier’s base, but it had been a terrible mistake. The man drew him on into a maze-like area of the underground city, one with no radio coverage, and straight into a trap.

  Following Ramirez down into the depths of Area 71, Sly recalled his escape. He’d been injured in a firefight, pursued by the gang into an even older and more unsafe section of unlit passageways where he’d lost the terrorists but also his sense of direction in the dark. Three days later, half dead from blood loss and dehydration, he’d stumbled out of a passage following the ghostly flashlights and laughter of a local school tour. He hardly knew who he was, never mind where he’d been.

  Derinkuyu was thousands of miles away, but Area 71 was underground, uninhabited, and barely half-lit, and the similarities were too close for comfort. Area 71’s upper levels both possessed sinuous, smooth, and tubular curving walls, which he assumed was natural, but scaffolding and plastic planks were needed to bridge uneven ground. To Sly’s eyes, every hollow and recess was a hidden entrance into a world of shadows. Poor lines of sight made clearing the chambers unusual, but the team got the job done and without undue fuss, another day at the office for the rest of the team.

  Sly knew that Level Three – L3 for short – would be less easily cleared. For one, it was more than a hundred metres deeper underground, accessible only by cage hoist. L3 was also the most fertile research ground, where the geologists spent most of their time. Published research papers on Antarctic volcanic processes, mineral analysis and water erosion all cited L3 rocks and strata. Naturally the search teams would need to take care not to disturb the site.

  Ramirez found the elevator shaft and the immobilized cage hoist but sent no one down. A cage hoist was to an elevator as a dune buggy was to a suburban 4x4 – stripped down, open to the air and offering minimal extra protection. Although there were external control panels at the top of each shaft, each cage was normally controlled by onboard operators. When Peck’s team had escaped, leaving the cage hoists inaccessible and unpowered, they had trapped the intruders below. If the attackers hadn’t somehow climbed out, by now they’d presumably do almost anything to escape.

  Sly wondered if the mission would end tamely with the macabre discovery of mummified corpses in the dark, but he was curiously dissatisfied by the thought. In either case, they would need to wait to find out. Ramirez wanted to clear the upper complex before tackling L3 or L4, and Sly agreed wholeheartedly. He too disliked to leave dangers at his back.

  Below L3, access to the caverns was restricted, gated and locked-off. The deepest caves were labelled ‘unsafe’ and that wasn’t wrong, since Ronald Thorpe died on L4. Thinking about the darkness in the deepest caverns made his gut clench.

  Sly’s mind was full of dark speculation when Richard Nguyen knocked outside his room. While some of the rooms had fabric or beaded curtains, Sly’s converted cubbyhole he used as an office and a makeshift bedroom had neither. He beckoned both visitors into the narrow space and asked Nguyen to sit. Ramirez chose to watch from what would’ve been the doorway, if there had been a door.

  “I’d like you to take a couple of helpers and thoroughly search the researchers’ rooms,” Sly said without much preamble. “Document and pack their things, be meticulous and box them carefully but leave nothing behind. Note anything out of place or unusual. Before you ask, I don’t know what I’m expecting, only that it’s important. Pay attention to books, papers, recording machines, and USB devices.”

  Nguyen was uncharacteristically business-like. “Yes, Colonel.”

  “Then, search the dormitories, look for places anything the size of a book, or even a roll of paper, might be hidden. Use your imagination. Give it a good sweep.”

  The intelligence officer nodded, and Sly let him go.

  Sly asked Ramirez to stay for a moment but said just one thing.

  “We’ll go deeper tomorrow. Get ready for L3.”