Targa House was cleaned and repaired, the power station refitted, and the old drill Tower which had been bulldozed down by a man name Jimmy Hayes was rebuilt, bigger and grander than ever before. A specially designed thermal drill was brought in that could open up a massive shaft to Lake Vordog, a sub-glacial lake nearly a mile below the ice cap. But those that came in to do the work were grateful when they could leave. They had heard things and seen things at the station, dreaming of that ebon, ancient lake far below and what lived there.

Nobody came right out and said the station was haunted, but they looked upon it as a living thing tormented by its own twisted memories and nightmares, something driven mad by what it had known and would still know.

So, although it had never really been empty and was no longer sane, Kharkov still stood.

2
DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS

While the wind screamed in a bleak voice and shook the compound, the team gathered in the old galley at Targa House and listened to Orr speak of why they had come and what it was they hoped to accomplish. Only Navy personnel were in on the briefing. The techies that operated the drill platform were not invited. Their job was to open the shaft, keep it open and ice-free, and to monitor the diver’s habitat some 900 feet below the surface of the lake itself. It had been assembled down there piecemeal by another group that had been flown in for the job and flown out again.

The team that gathered to listen to Orr were all seasoned divers with years of experience in deep-saturation dives and atmospheric suit descents.

Orr was a Navy rear admiral and he liked to talk.

If you wanted to listen, he’d tell you about his hardhat days as a Navy salvage diver or how he blew out his left ear on a submarine mine or his saturation dives with Hydrolab and Sealab III. But today he wasn’t talking about any of that. Today what he was discussing was classified and he’d impressed that upon all of them—Murphy and Hubbs, Javonivic and Bell. They had all signed the Official Secrets Act which promised them that if they talked out of school about what they knew and what they would see, they would not be released from a federal penitentiary until they had long white beards.

No big surprise there.

Bell and the others had signed the OSA before and many times. They were all with the Navy’s DSU—Deep Submergence Unit—and the DSSP—Deep Submergence Systems Project—-both of which were hooked up with the Office of Naval Research and the Special Projects Office. And when you swam in the shadowy realms of the ONR and SPO, signing the Secrets Act was pretty much a given.

Bell had been in on countless black bag jobs with the DSU.