Operation Antarctica

- 2 -

The corridor was only wide enough for two of them to pass abreast at a time. Banks went down first ahead of Parker and Hynd to stand over the body beside McCally. Some thin light filtered down from above, but not enough for a clear view of the body. He pulled down his goggles.

The Swastika armband stood out sharp and clear in the night vision, leaving Banks in no doubt about the man’s allegiance even despite the layer of frost that covered the corpse from head to toe. He wasn’t a soldier; he wore a set of thick canvas overalls, stout boots, had a pair of heavy-rimmed spectacles frozen to his face, and he wasn’t wearing any headgear. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up as far as his elbows.

“He’s not wearing any cold weather gear, Cap,” McCally said, stating the obvious. This man had been working in warmer conditions than they currently faced. Then he’d been struck down, but there was no obvious cause of death, nor any wounds of any kind. There hadn’t been any voiding of body fluids either. It looked like he’d set himself down to sleep on the landing, then froze — and quickly at that — in place.

Banks looked up to the roof. They were in a man-made tunnel that looked to be of the same iron as the door to the outside. Strips of what must be lighting, and possible heating, ran the length of the ceiling, all currently dark, and with the same thin layer of frost covering everything.

“A sudden loss of power, maybe?” McCally said. “Would that do it?”

Banks looked down at the body again.

“Even down here it wouldn’t happen that fast. He’d have had time to try to get somewhere warmer. It looks like he just gave up on the spot. Went to sleep and froze to death.”

He waved his light down the stairs ahead. They kept going into the darkness, with no bottom in sight, and a cold waft of stale air came up from below.

“Gloves on, lads, and hoods up. It’s going to get a tad chilly from here on in.”

He was right behind McCally as they went down, thirty steps before they reached the bottom. There hadn’t been any more corpses on the stairs, but there were more here. They lay in doorways, on floors, slumped against walls, strewn throughout the large open chamber in which the squad found themselves.

The ceiling was a few feet above their heads, with more of the lighting strips stretching over it, all as frosted as the ones they’d seen in the stairwell on the way down. The chamber appeared to be the central hub of the underground system, with a dozen doors in a circle around it. Some of the doors were closed, others open, but with only darkness showing beyond them, too far away for their lights to penetrate the shadows. Banks counted the bodies, twelve in all, and all of which looked as rested, composed, and dead, as the one up on the landing by the door. To a man, they appeared to have stopped whatever business they’d been about and died, with no sign of stress or injury.

And that’s just the ones I can see. What the fuck happened here?

Eleven of the doors off the chamber were single-sized, but there was one double door and after taking his bearings, Banks knew that must lead deeper again into the ice, toward where he’d seen the domed area between the huts and the hills. If they were going to find anything, he had a hunch it would be through there.

But better to be safe than sorry.

“I want a sweep of all these rooms,” he said. “Leave the large door for last — I’ve got a feeling we’ll be going through there soon enough. But make sure the rest of the rooms are clear. And if you find any documentation, any books or papers, shout out and I’ll come running. And Wiggins…”

The hefty private looked up as Banks shone a light on him.

“Aye, Cap?”

“Don’t touch anything you shouldn’t. And keep your trousers on, lad. Wouldn’t want your bollocks to drop off, would we?”

They split into the same teams as they’d used to search the sheds outside. McCally took his team off clockwise, and Banks went the other way. Banks’ first stop was at a long row of lockers against the walls; a quick examination found they contained a mixture of cold weather gear and weaponry — vintage pistols and rifles in the main, everything covered in the same white frosting.

They moved on and quickly discovered that of the eleven rooms, eight were sleeping quarters, six bunks to a room. They found more corpses, half of the bunks occupied by the same, strangely calm, frozen dead. Banks noted that they were all men, and equally split between civilians and military judging by the uniforms on some, overalls on others.

Of the remaining three rooms, one was a mess hall, a cramped set of six tables and long benches, and a large kitchen and storage area at the rear beyond a serving trestle. Banks went over to check the tall cupboards. He found a freezer, almost empty save for lumps of ice that might be meat, and a larger packed with decades-old tins of vegetables and fruit, many of which had burst. There were no bodies here, just more of the thin covering of frost and a terrible sense of emptiness.

“What the fuck happened here, Cap?” Wiggins whispered.

“That’s what we’re trying to find out, lad.”

The second to last room Banks led his team to was obviously a generator and electrical area; he recognized what must be a fuse panel, gauges that registered voltage, and a cubic metal box that he took to be the base’s generator, but looked like nothing he’d ever seen before. Along the far wall, there was a series of tall metal containers and cabling, looking more like a farmer’s milking system than anything remotely electrical. A thicker cable led off, through the wall and away, heading further into the ice.

Banks turned to the team.

“Wiggins, Parker, see if you can make head or tail of this; maybe even get it up and running. We could do with a heat, or barring that, even some light would be nice to save us wandering about here in the gloaming.”

He left the two men in the generator room and headed to the last door. The handle felt icy cold even through his gloves, and he had to put his shoulder to the door. It scraped, ice on metal, as it opened.

This wasn’t a dorm, but an officer’s quarters. There was a proper bed at the far end of the room, but the occupant wasn’t in it; he was sitting upright in a chair at a writing desk. Banks knew this must be the base commander, and the man was definitely military; the black uniform, stiff hat, and bright red swastika armband all clearly visible even under the frost layer. His insignia told Banks his rank had been Oberstleutnant, a Wing Commander. The fact that he was a Luftwaffe officer, in Antarctica, was the first sign they’d had that there might be something to find here after all.

The officer looked to have been in his fifties, clean-shaven bar a pencil moustache as black as his uniform jacket. His eyes were now little more than frozen, milky marbles set back in their sockets but apart from that, he looked as if he might stand at any moment after having had a nap.

The desk itself was strewn with notebooks, maps, papers, and diagrams. Banks brushed the ice off one, a nicely bound leather journal, and opened it. Although the rest of the papers on the desk all seemed to be written in German, much to his surprise, this particular book was written in English. One name toward the bottom of the first page immediately caught his eye.

From the personal journal of Thomas Carnacki, 472 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea.

As I have mentioned elsewhere in these journals, there are several of my cases I cannot relate to Dodgson and the others at all. Some of them involve maintaining a degree of delicacy and decorum. For example, there is a great lady of the land who would be most embarrassed should details of her involuntary nocturnal wanderings ever become public.

But there are other cases, often dark, often furtive, that I must by rights keep close to my chest. This is not because they are too alarming or disturbing for my good friends, but purely because if I did tell anyone, I would in all probability meet my end in a dark cell on bread and water for the rest of my natural life. That is, if I did not see the end of a hangman’s rope first. Matters of national security are tricky things at the best of times, and when they call for my peculiar area of expertise, they tend to become even more peculiar still and even less available for public consumption.

My friend, Dodgson, has written elsewhere of my infrequent encounters with the extraordinary Mr. Winston Churchill, and the matter I will relate here begins, and ends, with one such meeting.

“The plot thickens,” Banks whispered to himself. He needed to know more, but before he had time for that, he needed to know what was beyond the big double door.

A leather satchel sat on the floor at the dead oberst’s feet, and Banks quickly gathered up all the papers and notebooks and stowed them away, before stowing the satchel itself in his backpack, feeling the weight of history on his shoulders.

While Banks was stowing the papers, Hynd had been checking the desk drawers.

“Nothing important in here, Cap,” he said. “Fresh paper and ink, frozen solid. There doesn’t seem to be a log or report book.”

“It’ll be around somewhere,” Banks replied. “And that’s something we’ll definitely want.”

He had a last look at the officer in the chair — he still couldn’t believe the man wasn’t going to get up and walk. There was only one other thing of note, a calendar hanging on the wall by the door with one date circled heavily in red pencil.

4th of January, 1942.

McCally and his team arrived from across the chamber as Banks and Hynd left the officer’s room.

“Anything, Cally?”

The corporal shook his head.

“More dead men in their beds. Looks like whatever did it took them nice and quiet in their sleep. It’s a fucking mystery all right.”

So far, they had not found a single sign that there had been any warning at all given to the residents of the base. It appeared they had all died in the same moment, some going about whatever their business might be and others, possibly a different work shift, being taken in their beds. Banks hoped an answer might be forthcoming on the other side of the big double door.

Before broaching it, he walked over to the generator room doorway and called out to the two men working inside.

“Any joy, Wiggins?” he asked.

The private looked glum.

“Nothing doing, Cap,” he said. He pointed his light at the thicker wiring that ran through the wall. “We thought the generator might be here to feed power through yon cable there. But it’s the other way round. It’s all dead in here, and any juice to run this beastie would be coming from wherever that goes.”

On the other side of the double doors.

“Saddle up then, lads,” Banks said. “Let’s find out what these buggers were all so busy at before they died.”