Eternity Base Read online

  ETERNITY BASE

  The Green Beret Series

  by

  Bob Mayer

  Prologue

  ANTARCTICA

  APPROXIMATELY 575 MILES EAST OF MCMURDO STATION

  21 DECEMBER 1971

  “The last load,” the army major in the gray parka remarked.

  “Amen to that,” Captain Reinhart muttered. Through the scratched Plexiglas windshield, he glanced at the frozen runway splayed out in front of his plane. To his left rear, a staircase descended into the cargo bay of the C-130 transport where his loadmaster was securing the few pallets of luggage the passengers had carried on board. Along the walls, the major’s soldiers, bundled up in cold-weather gear, were seated on red web seats, ready to get started on the long journey out of here.

  Reinhart couldn’t blame them. He’d brought them here four months ago from Vietnam via McMurdo Station and then spent the intervening time flying back from the Station every opportunity the weather gave, bringing the men equipment and supplies for whatever they were building here in the frozen wasteland of the Antarctic. A week ago that process had reversed and he’d started bringing out equipment and people. The outflow in equipment and supplies had been considerably less than the inflow. Reinhart was anxious to go.

  The sky was clear and the wind had died down. The weather report from McMurdo looked good, but Reinhart had long ago learned that the Antarctic was one place where weather reports could be counted on about as far as the report itself could be folded into a paper airplane and thrown. The only constant in the weather here was change—and the change was usually for the worse.

  Reinhart wasn’t sure who the major worked for. The name tag on the major’s parka read Glaston. All Reinhart knew was that four months ago he had been ordered to do whatever the man said. Glaston had been there waiting to receive their cargo every time they’d landed at Eternity Base—the code name of this unmarked location. Today even Glaston was going out with them. If anyone was remaining behind, Reinhart did not know and cared even less. It was their last flight from Eternity Base, and successfully completing it was his only concern.

  On what served as an “airstrip,” the plane sat in a large bowl of ice surrounded on three sides by ice ridges and intermittent towering mountains punching through the thick polar cap; the strip pointed toward the one open side. The hulking C-130, with four powerful turboprop engines mounted on its broad wings, was the most reliable cargo airplane ever to fly, and Reinhart felt confident in its abilities. Bracketed over the plane’s wheels were sets of skis that allowed them to negotiate the 2,000 meters of relatively level ice and snow that these people called a runway.

  “Closing the ramp,” the loadmaster announced in Reinhart’s headset. In the rear of the plane, the back ramp lifted from the thin, powdery snow as hydraulic arms pulled it up. Descending from the high dark hole that led to the uplifted tail came the top section of the ramp. Like jaws closing, the two shut against the swirling frozen air outside. The heaters fought a losing battle against the cold as they pumped hot air out of pipes in the ceiling of the cargo bay, ten feet overhead.

  Reinhart turned to Glaston. “We’re all set, sir.”

  The major simply nodded and clambered down the steps to take his seat in the rear.

  “Let’s do it,” Reinhart told the copilot. Carefully, they turned the nose straight on line, due south. As Reinhart increased throttle, the plane slowly gathered momentum. The propellers and skis threw up a plume of snow behind.

  Reinhart waited until he was satisfied they had enough speed and then pulled in the yoke. The 130’s nose lifted and the plane crawled into the air. Once he reached sufficient altitude to clear the mountains, Reinhart banked hard right and headed west. In the distance, out the right window, the ice pack that hugged the shore of Antarctica could be seen as a tumbled broken mass extending to the horizon.

  Reinhart turned over the controls to his copilot. Two hours and they’d be at McMurdo; the passengers would be off-loaded for transfer to another aircraft, and he and his crew could begin the long, stop-filled flight back to their home base in Hawaii. After four months down here, they were more than ready to see loved ones and celebrate a sunny Christmas.

  This whole mission had been strange from the initial tasking back in early September. Reinhart and the four members of his crew had flown the Hawaii-Pago, Pago-Christchurch, New Zealand-McMurdo Base, Antarctica, run several times in the past. Almost every cargo crew in their squadron stationed at Hickam Air Force Base received the honors every so often. But four months ago they’d been tasked “for the duration of the mission” to support Glaston. They’d met him at a dirt airstrip outside a classified Special Forces camp in Vietnam, only to be told to fly to the U.S. Antarctic research station at McMurdo and take on transloaded cargo from other C-130 cargo planes coming in from New Zealand, then fly the cargo out to this site. What had been especially interesting about the mission was the fact that as far as their parent unit knew, they were still in Vietnam. All their mail had come through that theater before being forwarded down here.

  “I’ve got the beacon clear,” the copilot informed Reinhart.

  As long as they kept the needle on the direction finder centered, they’d come in right on top of McMurdo. That was another odd thing. They’d flown every mission on instruments in both directions, never once using a map—not that maps were very useful over the frozen wasteland of Antarctica. As any worthwhile pilot would, Reinhart had a reasonably good idea of where Eternity Base was, based on both flight time and azimuth. Satisfied that all was going well, he settled back in his seat for a nap. He’d need the rest if he was going to take the eight-hour leg from McMurdo to New Zealand.

  Two hours later a nudge on Reinhart’s shoulder awakened him. “McMurdo,” the copilot announced.

  Out of the left window Reinhart saw the sprawl of buildings that made up the largest human habitation in the continent. With the onslaught of winter just a few months away, the population would drop from its summer high of six hundred to less than a hundred caretakers. Out the right window the massive form of Mount Erebus, an active volcano, filled the horizon twenty-four miles away. Directly below lay the edge of the massive Ross Ice Shelf, more than five hundred miles from its southern origin at the foot of the Queen Maud Mountains.

  The copilot swung them around for a final approach to McMurdo’s ice strip. As soon as the skis touched, he reduced throttle and upped flaps for maximum stop. They slid down the runway, using the tail to keep them on line. Slowly the aircraft’s speed dropped.

  Reinhart could see two other C-130s sitting near the field’s operation tower. One of those would take their cargo and passengers for the trip back to Vietnam, and then they would be free to go. After radioing the tower for instructions, they taxied over to the designated plane and idled the engines. A forklift was waiting to take off the pallets. As soon as the ramp was open, the soldiers stomped across the snow and onto another plane while Reinhart’s two enlisted crewmen rolled out the pallets.

  Glaston was the last to leave, waiting in the cockpit until all had been cross-loaded. “Anxious to get home, I suppose?”

  Reinhart grinned, the adrenaline of pleasant anticipation flowing. “Damn right. We’re talking white beach and tanned women back in Hawaii.”

  Glaston nodded. “Have a good flight. We’ve appreciated your help. My superiors will be forwarding letters of commendation for you and your crew to your headquarters.”

  That was the least they could do, Reinhart thought, to pay them back for spending four months living in a damn Quonset hut buried under the snow at McMurdo and flying a load every time the weather cleared. Of course things could have been worse: they actually could have been flying missions in Vietnam. “I appreciate that,
sir.”

  The major disappeared down the stairwell, and the loadmaster slammed shut the personnel door behind him.

  Reinhart turned to his copilot and navigator. “Do we have clearance to go?”

  The navigator’s face split in a wide grin. “We have clearance, and the weather looks good all the way to New Zealand, sir.”

  “All right. Let’s head for home.”

  They turned their nose into the wind and powered up. Soon the plane was in the air and over the ice-covered Ross Sea. New Zealand was eight hours away, due north.

  Reinhart piloted the first three hours, as they slowly left the white ice behind and finally made it over clear ocean, speckled with small white dots far below, indicating icebergs. At that point, Reinhart turned over the controls to his copilot and got out of his seat. “I’m going to take a walk in back and get stretched out.”

  He climbed down the stairs. The loadmaster and his assistant were sleeping on the web seats strung along the side of the plane. The only cargo remaining was the pallet that held the crew’s personal baggage, strapped down in the center of the large bay.

  Reinhart walked all the way to the rear, where the ramp doors met, rolling his head on his shoulders and shaking off the strain of three straight hours in the pilot’s seat.

  His mind was on his wife and young daughter waiting for him in Honolulu when the number two engine exploded with enough force to shear the right wing at the engine juncture. The C-130 immediately adopted the aerodynamics of a rock and rolled over onto its right side. Reinhart was thrown up in the farthest reaches of the tail as the plane plummeted toward the ocean 25,000 feet below. He blinked blood out of his eyes from a cut in his forehead and tried to orient himself.

  His primary thought was to try to crawl back up to the cockpit, but his legs wouldn’t obey his mind. There was a dull ache in his lower back and no feeling below his waist. He grabbed at the cross beams along the roof of the aircraft, trying to pull himself forward with his hands.

  Reinhart was twenty feet from the front of the plane when the surface of the water met the aircraft with the effect of a sledgehammer slamming into a tin can. There was no need for Reinhart to worry about immersion; he was crushed into the floor of the aircraft. He was dead well before his remains began sinking under the dark waves.

  COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO

  20 DECEMBER 1971

  The man in the black suit picked up the phone on the first ring. “Peter here.”

  The voice on the other end was distorted by both distance and scrambler. “This is Glaston. The final link has been severed. Eternity Base is secure.”

  “Did you receive the last package?”

  “Yes, sir. The courier brought them in on the final flight, but I don’t understand why—”

  The man cut him off. “It’s not your place to understand. Did you secure them?”

  “Yes, sir. They’re in the base.”

  “The courier?”

  ‘Taken care of.”

  “Excellent.”

  Chapter 1

  CHICAGO, ILLINOIS,

  FRIDAY, 18 OCTOBER 1996

  The volley of shots was ragged, five going off at the same time, the other two rifles sounding like a car backfiring shortly thereafter. Riley had expected the sharp crack of the blanks so he wasn’t startled, as were some of the other people surrounding the grave.

  His black army raincoat was unbuttoned and the stiff wind was blowing it about, but he didn’t notice. The battered green beret scrunched down on his head was soaked from the freezing drizzle that had been falling for the past half hour, but Riley seemed unaware of it.

  The second volley was slightly better—only one shot a split second behind.

  To Riley’s left, Col. Mike Pike, U.S. Army Retired, was very aware of both the weather and Riley’s condition, and he didn’t like either. In thirty years in the military, Pike had attended more than his share of funerals, but this one was different. He’d never been to the funeral of a woman killed in the line of duty, and he’d never had to comfort the man she’d left behind. It had always been the other way around.

  Not that Pike thought any words could comfort Dave Riley at the moment. Riley’s slight frame was ramrod straight, and his dark eyes were focused on the plain wood coffin suspended over the yawning hole in the ground. The short black hair under his beret was matted and poked out at strange angles around the dark skin of his face, the complexion an inheritance from his Puerto Rican mother, as his name was his inheritance from a father he never knew.

  The salute was done, and a police bugler began playing taps. Pike had spent so many years isolated in the military that he had never really considered the fact that the police community was very similar to that of the army—close knit and banding together when one of their own went down. The last notes of the bugle were ripped away by the wind, and then it was over. The coffin was slowly lowered. Riley stepped forward, grabbed a handful of mud, and opened his fingers to let it fall on the coffin, not even noticing that most of the mud stuck to his skin.

  The commissioner was the first to walk by, shaking Riley’s hand and saying something that was swirled away by the wind. The line of mourners continued, and Riley greeted each mechanically until there was no one left.

  Pike waited. He didn’t mind the freezing rain splashing against his leathery face and rolling down inside his collar. There’d be plenty of time to get warm later. As he’d been told thirty-three years ago as a young buck going through Ranger school, “The human body is waterproof.” He knew that Riley was just as hard, so it wasn’t physical stress that Pike worried about now. It was emotional stress: that was a minefield few warriors felt comfortable traversing.

  “Do you want to be alone?” Pike asked.

  At first he thought Riley hadn’t heard, but then the other man turned his head slightly, as if considering the question, before speaking. “No. She’s dead. Standing here isn’t going to change that. It’s just making her death seem real—standing here, seeing this. I didn’t believe it when they called me. I didn’t begin to believe it until I saw her body in the funeral home.”

  Pike remembered the phone call from Riley three days ago. It had been succinct and to the point: “Donna’s dead, sir. They just called me from Chicago. She walked into the middle of some punks ripping off a deli and got shot.”

  That had been it. Pike had driven the five hundred miles from Atlanta to Fort Bragg that evening, making it in time to fly up to Chicago with Riley. They’d learned more about the incident, as the police referred to it, from the detective handling the case. Donna Giannini had been going to lunch at her old neighborhood deli as she had done almost every day at work. There were two teenagers in the store holding a pistol and a shotgun on the owner in the back room, trying to get him to open a small safe. When she called out from the counter to her old friend the owner, her answer was a blast of buckshot to the chest.

  It hadn’t killed her outright. She drew her gun, stood back up, and shot the kid with the shotgun three times, killing him. Then she collapsed and died. The second kid ran out the back of the store.

  “We’ll get the other one,” the detective had told Riley and Pike. He looked at them and glanced around; then, in the manner of one professional to another, he continued in a lower voice: “He won’t be brought in alive. Everyone on the street knows it, he knows it, we know it, and I just want you to know it. Donna was good people and a damn good cop. We don’t let cop killers walk here or go cry in the courtroom.”

  Donna Giannini had been good people, Pike reflected. The best. He had gotten to know her well when she and Riley had come to him for help the previous year after running into trouble with rogue elements of the Witness Protection Program. He had known Dave Riley from his time in the Special Forces; years earlier, under Pike’s command, Riley had run direct action missions into Colombia to destroy cocaine factories. The two had kept in touch over the years.

  Pike had been happy about the two of them being
together. He knew they’d had plans: Riley was going to finish out his twenty years next spring, then retire, move up to Chicago, and go back to school. That was something Pike had heartily approved of. It was as if Riley had come out of his shell and become alive, ready to start a new life after the trials and darkness of his life in the Special Forces. But now—now, Pike didn’t know what was going to happen to his friend.

  Pike had been relieved when the detective assured them that the second man wouldn’t be brought in alive. He’d feared that Riley would stay in Chicago and exact his own vengeance. At least now he could get Riley out of town without tripping over bodies.

  Riley turned from the grave and looked out over the cemetery. He seemed reluctant to leave, but the inevitable was sinking in. “All right,” he finally said. “Let’s go.”

  They walked slowly over to the rental car, each lost in his own thoughts. As Pike got behind the wheel, Riley slumped down in the passenger seat and looked out the window, keeping the fresh mound of dirt in sight until they turned a corner. Then he faced front. “I put in my papers,” he said, as flatly as if he were announcing the sun coming up.

  “You what?” Pike said, surprised.

  “I’m on terminal leave. I’ve got enough days of leave saved up to run me through my retirement day next year. I was going to stay on active duty and cash in my leave when I retired—to pay for my first year of school—but that no longer is neces . . .” Riley paused, and Pike kept his eyes straight ahead on the rain-soaked road, not wanting to see the tears.

  “What are you going to do?” Pike finally asked. ‘Take some time to—”

  “I don’t want time and I don’t want to think,” Riley snapped. He turned to his old friend. “Sorry, sir. I know it might be too much to ask, but do you have any jobs I might be able to do?”

  Pike ran a security consulting firm, with clients all over the United States and overseas. He was glad that Dave was turning to him for help. “Hell, yeah. I’d love to have you come work for me.”