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THE WATER WAS getting choppier. It took me twenty minutes to get close enough to realize what I’d been swimming toward. It wasn’t some hallucination after all.
It was an iceberg.
The part I could see was about fifty feet long, with a couple of jagged peaks jutting up toward the sky. I felt a sudden surge of relief. I figured if I could get there and climb on, at least I wouldn’t have to die from drowning. I could just die from hypothermia. I’d read that it was like going to sleep.
I breast-stroked the final fifty yards or so, then used my elbows to haul myself onto a low ledge just above the waterline. I rolled onto my side and lay there for a few minutes, catching my breath. I flexed my fingers to get the feeling back in the tips. I stared up at the sky and watched the vapor clouds blow out of my mouth.
I realized that my wet clothes were starting to freeze in the open air. Before long, I’d be covered in an icy shell. Part of me just wanted to close my eyes and let go. That would be the easy way out. No pain. No fear. But I couldn’t do it. Something inside made me start moving.
I rolled over and pressed against the ice to push myself up. It felt strange. I pounded on the surface. I scraped at it with my fingernails. I leaned closer. I scraped again. I realized that what I was feeling wasn’t ice at all. There was nothing natural about it. It was some kind of manufactured material, made to look like ice from a distance—like a gigantic Hollywood prop.
What the hell was going on? I looked up and saw a series of indentations in the white surface, leading up the side of one of the peaks. From out in the water, they’d looked like natural formations. From where I stood now, they looked like steps. I started to make my way up.
Even though the ice was artificial, it was covered with a layer of actual frost, slick and dangerous. One wrong move and I’d be back in the water. I felt for handholds as I moved up the steps. Just ahead was a large overhang, dripping with icicles. I reached up and touched one. A convincing fake.
I peeked under the overhang and saw a hard vertical edge—some kind of hatch. It looked rusted shut. I scraped through the thin coating of frost until I found an indented metal handle. It wasn’t much of a grip. I hooked my fingers in and pulled. The hatch groaned slightly and the gap widened a few millimeters. I tried again. My fingers slipped off. They were stinging from the cold and scraped raw from the rough metal.
I was getting nowhere.
I pulled the backpack off my shoulder. I unfastened one of the straps and slid the metal buckle into the small gap between the hatch door and the frame. Then I pulled the strap up until the buckle caught underneath. I gripped the strap with both hands and tugged. The hatch groaned some more. The gap got wider. Now I had enough space to jam my hands underneath. I strained and pulled until the hatch door gave way.
I leaned over and peeked inside. I saw the top edge of a rusted ladder. There was light coming from below. I flipped onto my belly and put my foot on the top rung, then slowly backed through the opening. I pulled the hatch closed behind me.
I was inside a translucent tube. The ladder stretched down about twenty feet. My feet were still so numb I could barely feel the rungs. When I got to the bottom, I was below sea level, in a room about half the size of a football field.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
Of all the stories I’d heard about my ancestor, this was the one I thought hadzerochance of being true. Even the name I’d heard for this place seemed overblown. But it was obviously real.
I was standing in the Fortress of Solitude.
CHAPTER 78
I LOOKED AROUND for a minute, barely moving. It took that long to absorb the scale of the place. The whole interior was supported by a framework of wooden beams, running up, down, and crossways. The ceiling was nearly as high as the peaks outside, maybe thirty feet up. The floor was made of thick planks, like a boardwalk or dock.
When I started walking around, the planks creaked and groaned. There were cracks in the walls where seawater had leaked in, and I saw big puddles and salt stains on the floor. If this place had actually been around since the 1930s, it was amazing that it hadn’t sunk. Even more impressive, some of the lights still worked. They looked like primitive fluorescent tubes, dim but still glowing. They gave the whole place a tunnel-of-doom look. Which reflected exactly how I felt.
In the center of the space, there were long wooden tables covered with all kinds of electronic devices and tools. Most of the stuff looked corroded and useless. I walked over to a row of rusted metal bins against one wall, each one as big as a washing machine. I lifted one of the lids and got hit with a horrible odor. I held my breath and peeked inside. There was a layer of black sludge lining the bottom. I figured it used to be food. Now there was nothing but stench.
At the far end, there was a kitchen with a propane stove and an open cupboard with pots, dishes, and coffee mugs. Against one wall, there were long shelves filled with books—an impressive private library.
A lot of the bindings were falling apart, but I could still read some of the titles, mostly science textbooks and literary classics.The Complete Works of William Shakespeare,theIliad, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.I picked up a couple leather-bound books from the end of the row. The first one wasTwenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,by Jules Verne. The second one was by Robert Louis Stevenson.Kidnapped.
I winced—and thought about Kira.
CHAPTER 79
I SLID THE two books back onto the shelf. My head felt light. I was achy and exhausted. I leaned against the wall and tried to organize my thoughts. They were scattered, and pretty dark.
I was alive, but I wasn’t so sure that was a positive. I’d been trained for a mission, and the mission had failed. It was my job to protect Kira, and I hadn’t done it. And somewhere on the Kamchatka Peninsula, her school was still pumping out smiling killers. It felt strange to think about it, but after all these years, John Sunlight’s vision was actually taking over the world. And there was nothing I could do to stop it.Nothing!
All of a sudden, the anger and helplessness boiled over. I started screaming at the top of my lungs. I grabbed a hammer off a workbench and threw it into a glass cabinet. It shattered with a loud crash. I ran my arm along a crowded benchtop and knocked everything onto the floor—machine parts, chemical bottles, piles of loose papers.
A book tipped off the edge of the bench and landed with a heavy thud. I don’t know why, but something made me reach down and pick it up. It was as thick as a Bible, with brown leather binding. I brushed off the dust and saw a name embossed on the cover. It took me a second to understand what I was looking at.
Dr. Clark Savage, Jr.,the lettering read.
Doc Savage’s full name.
