Read Online The Black Knight by Dean Crawford - Free Book Online

engines.
    Through a small window beside his shoulder Ethan peered out into the frigid atmosphere outside the aircraft. The wing stretched away above him, huge turboprop engines trailing turbulent vapor that glowed in the light of a sun blazing amid a stream of molten metal searing the distant horizon. Far below a featureless canvass of ice fields stretched away into infinity, cast into dark and frosty shadows.
    ‘We’ll make our final approach to McMurdo in the next few minutes,’ the loadmaster said as he walked between them and tugged on their harnesses to check that they were secure.
    Ethan saw his companions jab their thumbs in the air in unison. Hannah Ford, two scientists named Willem Chandler and Amy Reece and their two respective assistants, and twelve Navy SEALs occupied the interior of the aircraft along with their respective equipment, compact vehicles and weapons. The soldiers had been deployed from the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center at Andros Island in the Bahamas, while the two scientists seemed to have been plucked from some mysterious back room at the DIA.
    Chandler, he had learned, was employed by the DIA as what they called a futurist and was apparently an authority on conspiracy theories, while Amy Reece was an exobiologist and linguistics specialist who specialized in the search for life outside the Earth and the effects of extra-terrestrial environments on living organisms. Between them and their respective assistants, Ethan figured they represented the closest things to an expert opinion on Black Knight that the agency had been able to rustle up at short notice.
    Ethan glanced outside as the Hercules dipped its wing and began a gentle turn. The beams of pale sunlight glowing through the windows into the aircraft’s cavernous interior vanished as they were plunged into darkness. The engine roar subsided enough for Ethan to hear the flaps and undercarriage deploy to the sound of whining hydraulics, the huge aircraft dipping and bouncing in the wintry gales blustering across the vast ice plains. Ethan clenched his harness as a tight knot of anxiety in his guts threatened to eject his breakfast over his boots.
    Through the open hatchway to the cockpit far to his left, Ethan spotted the green glow of cockpit instruments and a glimpse of twinkling runway lights stretching out into the dark void ahead. The Hercules bumped and gyrated as it descended, and then a thump reverberated through the fuselage as the aircraft touched down on the ice and the pilots deployed the spoilers and threw the huge engines into reverse. The aircraft thundered and vibrated as though it were coming apart at the seams, and then slowed as it turned off the runway and taxied toward a parking spot.
    Ethan breathed a sigh of relief and closed his eyes. He heard the engines whine down as he watched the loadmaster get out of his seat and hit a large red button inside the fuselage. The rear of the Hercules yawned slowly open as a ramp dropped down onto the ice. Half a dozen soldiers, wrapped up in thick Artic camouflage and armed with rifles, strode up the ramp. The loadmaster pointed at Ethan’s group and waved them over.
    Ethan unstrapped himself from his seat and hefted a large holdall onto his back. He then pulled on thick gloves, tightened his thickly padded jacket and pulled the hood tight over his head as he looked about at their bleak surroundings.
    The station owed its designation to nearby McMurdo Sound, which had been named after Lieutenant Archibald McMurdo of HMS Terror , which first charted the area in 1841 under the command of British explorer James Clark Ross. British explorer Robert Falcon Scott first established a base nearby in 1902 and built Discovery Hut, which still stood adjacent to the harbor at Hut Point. The volcanic rock of the site was the southernmost bare ground accessible by ship in the Antarctic, and the founders initially called the station Naval Air Facility McMurdo from its creation in