Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [142]
A ‘2’ sprang up in the next blank space. Hensleigh smiled, vindicated.
Then she began to whisper to herself. ‘Sixteen digit code, ten digits to choose from. Shit. We’re talking trillions of possible combinations.’
‘Do you think you can crack it?’ Montana said.
‘I don’t know,’ Hensleigh said. ‘It depends on what the first eight digits are supposed to mean, and whether I can figure that out.’
At that moment, Montana leaned forward and pressed the first button fourteen times. On the screen, the blank spaces filled up quickly.
The screen beeped suddenly. And then a new prompt appeared at the bottom:
24157817 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
INCORRECT CODE ENTERED – ENTRY DENIED
ENTER AUTHORIZED ENTRY CODE
The screen then reverted back to the original screen, with the original eight numbers and the sixteen blank spaces.
Hensleigh looked at Montana, perplexed. ‘How did you know that?’
Montana smiled. ‘It gives you a second chance if you enter the wrong code. Like most military entry-code systems.’
At the other end of the cavern, Gant was crouched down on the ground over by the fissure she had found at the base of the ice wall. She pointed her flashlight inside the horizontal fissure.
Gant wanted to know more about this cavern. There was something about the cavern itself and the man-made ‘spaceship’ they had found in it that made her wonder . . .
Gant peered in through the fissure. In the beam of her flashlight, she saw a cave. A round, ice-walled cave that seemed to stretch away to the right. The floor of the cave was about five feet beneath her.
Gant lay down on her back and shimmied through the fissure, and began to lower herself down to the floor of this new cave.
And then suddenly, without warning, the ice beneath her gave way and Gant fell clumsily to the floor of the cave.
Clangggggg-!
The sound of her landing on the floor of the cave reverberated all around her. It had sounded like someone hitting a piece of steel with a sledgehammer.
Gant froze.
Steel?
And then slowly – very slowly – she gazed down at the floor beneath her.
The floor was covered with a thin layer of frost, but Gant saw it clearly. Her eyes widened.
She saw the rivets first – small round domes on a dark grey background.
It was metal.
Thick, reinforced metal.
Gant panned her flashlight around the small cave. It was cylindrical in shape – like a train tunnel – with a high, round ceiling that rose above the horizontal fissure through which she had come. The horizontal fissure was about halfway up the wall. In fact, Gant could almost see through the thick ice wall above the fissure, as if it were translucent glass.
Gant swung her flashlight around and pointed it at the tunnel leading away from her.
And then she saw it.
It looked like a door of some sort, made of heavy grey steel. It was set into the ice, and was completely covered in frost and icicles. It looked like a door on a naval vessel or submarine – solid-looking, hinged on a sturdy metal bulkhead.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Gant breathed.
Pete Cameron called the Post’s office in Washington D.C. for the third time. He was sitting in Andrew Trent’s living room.
At last, Alison picked up.
Cameron said, ‘Where have you been? I’ve been calling all afternoon.’
‘You’re not gonna believe what I found,’ Alison said.
She recounted for him what she had found on the All States Libraries Database: how the references to latitude and longitude that Cameron had picked up at SETI referred to the location of an ice station in Antarctica – Wilkes Ice Station.
Cameron pulled out his original notes from his visit to SETI, looked at them as Alison spoke.
Then Alison told him about the academics who lived down at the ice station and the papers and books they had written. She also told him about the Library of Congress and the ‘Preliminary Survey’ by C.M. Waitzkin.
‘It was signed out to an O. Niemeyer in 1979,’ Alison said.
Cameron frowned. ‘Niemeyer? Otto Niemeyer? Wasn’t he on the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Nixon?’
‘Under Carter, too,’ Alison said.
Andrew Trent