Arcadian and the team had fallen into a grey-out several hours ago. For headquarters it was the worst sound you could receive from a field unit—the hissing crackle of dead contact, no reception, not even confirmation of a working communication device. After the first hour Hammerson had ordered men and machinery down to the McMurdo base at the Antarctic. Something had gone wrong and support needed to be there where they surfaced . . . if they surfaced.

Hammerson re-read the intercepted transmission from the Russians down on the ice. The Leningradskaya base was awaiting orders for a covert evacuation—they had men down there, too, and Hammerson bet they weren’t there to lend a hand. Too late and too soon to do anything about it, he narrowed his eyes and continued to stare at the rising steam.

Immediately after the fiery plume from the explosives, hundreds of tons of rock and debris caved in to close the exit for fifty feet from the edge of the drop-off. Large and small boulders fell to the cavern floor making ground-shaking thuds as they either shattered or bounced off into the darkness. Aimee dived for cover, waiting for the sounds of the rockfalls to die down as the echoes continued to travel away into the numerous feeder caverns for minutes afterward. If it was dark before, now it was doubly so as even the torch lights had their range limited by the thick palls of dust filling the air.

Aimee was the first to rush forward to check on Alex as the dust began to settle. She had seen the last minute of his battle with the large Russian and couldn’t believe how fast he had managed to move. In the dark she had had trouble keeping up with his reflexes and bursts of speed and wondered briefly if it could be some form of military steroid the soldiers were taking. In the red light of the flare his face had been terrifying and if she hadn’t known for sure it was Alex in combat, she would never have recognised him.

The luminous glow from the flares coupled with the smoky dust in the air gave the cavern a hellish appearance. She centred in on Alex’s voice and the sounds of rocks being moved out of the way. As she approached, she saw Alex lifting rocks from the prone body of Margaret Anderson. He bent at the knees and grasped a stone the size of a man and lifted it aside as if it were no more than an empty box.

Aimee halted and stared; it couldn’t be real. She had read of instances where people in extreme stress situations had lifted cars but Alex’s face was calm; there were no signs of any stress. When Aimee reached his side he wasn’t even breathing heavily, just looking down with weary resignation. Margaret’s body lay like a broken doll beneath the tons of debris.

“Bruno?” she asked.