Three days later, Sly Harris entered Le Croissant, a popular café in Old Colorado City, to the welcoming aroma of fresh pastries and black coffee. Wearing a civilian suit, he attracted no stares as he tucked into a quiet nook.

  Sipping from a cup, he checked the time and reviewed his day against the list Gus gave him. Too much to do. Seeing Mike Johnson was important though, and his friend wouldn’t be long. Fort Clayson was only a ten-minute drive away from Old Colorado. He wiped crumbs from the clear glass of the table and didn’t dwell on the lined face in the reflection. Instead, he studied the mid-morning café regulars, a mix of preppy students and deep-tanned retirees, and habitually scanned for anyone out of place.

  Long before he found boredom a handsome man entered wearing a jacket over a white long-sleeved shirt and blue slacks. Sly raised a hand and Mike came to the cubicle, sat, and ordered with an appreciative smile for the waitress.

  “Remember that café where we met?” Sly asked him. Mike chuckled.

  “Working class Moroccan locals inhaling trash French cigarettes and sipping thimbles of sweet black sludge you could stand a spoon in? Of course. You ask every time we meet here. You need a new story.”

  Sly mostly enjoyed the pleasantries, tossing out second-hand anecdotes about his children while tiptoeing past the emotional minefield that was the fractured relationship with Erica, his ex-wife. In turn, Johnson grumbled happily about his first child, still in diapers, then passed on the veneer of gossip a lieutenant colonel from US Army Intelligence and Security Command could share without censure.

  Mike wasn’t Sly’s contemporary, but the pair shared plenty of history. Both were ROTC college graduates, though from different decades, and both had commissioned as second lieutenants. Their paths had crossed during covert operations in the Middle East, the most confused and intense period of Sly’s life. They’d lost touch but met again in the year Sly taught Unconventional Warfare on the Master of Strategic Studies course at the US Army War College. Mike had taken his class.

  Strange how very different people can be good friends, Sly thought, as Mike deftly turned the conversation to the real topic of the day. Sly pushed over a fat envelope for his friend to pocket without comment.

  “Same as usual,” Sly said, offhand. “I updated the will a few days ago, wrote a new letter to the kids, the usual. Nothing eyes-only, but read it, if there’s anything there that makes your buttocks clench let me know. We’re heading out next week.”

  "To Antarctica, Sly. What the hell? Who did you piss off?"

  Sly laughed. Said like that he saw Mike’s point.

  “I’ve been there before, I trained there what, a couple years ago."

  He was tempted to say more but stopped in time. That training trip to McMurdo Station he recollected was a dozen years ago, not two or three. He took a breath, elaborating instead on the logistics of travel to Leviathan Station.

  "We'll fly from Colorado to Christchurch, New Zealand – the usual civilian gateway for Antarctica. From there we’ll thumb a military transport to McMurdo. It’s a long, boring flight. Remind me to pack my War and Peace audiobook, I might get to finish it this time."

  Mike laughed, a warm sound suited for late-night radio.

  "Pacifist crap. Where, after McMurdo?”

  "A ski-equipped LC-130, maybe," Sly said, enthusiasm pulling like a husky. "We’ll land on ice at Leviathan, an EU research facility. Leviathan is one of the few permanently crewed research stations on the plateau... ten support techs in the winter, increasing to seventy scientists in the summer. Yesterday it reached minus four degrees Fahrenheit. Positively balmy.”

  “Yeah, balmy, find a beach, catch some sun.” Johnson gave a wide white grin, then his amusement faded. “You know Antarctica is a demilitarized zone, right? No military bases or maneuvers, no nuclear weapons. Only civilians."

  "We won’t be military, much,” Sly insisted, biting a complementary biscuit that tasted of almonds. Mike was not fond of breaking rules he believed in. Surprising, for an Army spook. “The trip doesn’t end at Leviathan, that’s a pitstop. We head out to a US-funded research site, in a cave system inside a nunatak called Mount Conrad —”

  “Whoa, stop. In a what of the where?”

  Laughing, Sly moved the glass pyramid containing salt across the tabletop.

  “Most of the mountains in eastern Antarctica are way under the ice,” he explained, holding his hand under the glass-topped table, pointing his fingers up. “Subglacial peaks the size of the European Alps are a thousand metres below the surface, mapped only by seismic reflections and ice-penetrating radar.”

  He scraped the salt cellar across the surface of the glass.

  “A nunatak, on the other hand, is a peak that pokes up above the surface. Geologists love ‘em, they can take rock samples, study the moss, knock themselves out. Conrad is an extinct volcano and the only nunatak in the range – the other peaks are below the ice.”

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Mike blinked. “And this nunatak, that’s where you’re going?”

  “The research site is underground, in a vast cave system,” Sly said, tasting the salt on his finger. “People-wise it’s smaller than Leviathan, half a dozen geologists working for Charlton University. Officially we’re on a sabbatical working for an offshoot of CU. The base has an official name, but is better known by its nickname,Area 71."

  Mike’s lips twitched upwards.

  “I’ll bite. Why ‘Area 71’?”

  Sly smiled.

  “The first CU team went to check out a cave system they spotted from satellite pictures,” he said. “They planned to close off the entrance with a weather-proof airlock, using it as a dry supply dump for geologists. When they checked out the caves, one idiot announced that the system was too large, said it was artificial with ‘prior habitation’.”

  Mike laughed out loud in realization.

  “Area 71. You mean, like Area 51, Nevada? Really, aliens?”

  He guffawed, a real belly-laugh this time, and Sly chuckled with him.

  “Aliens, or refugees from Atlantis. The caves were too smooth and extensive to be natural, the guy said – which any good geologist tells you is trash, there’s one really famous tourist attraction in Hawaii… Anyway, when researchers reported what the caves contained CU got funding to set up a permanent base, searching for ‘rare earth minerals’.”

  “Rare earth minerals?” Mike looked thoughtful. “Used in wind turbines and electric cars, cameras, control rods for nuclear reactors…?”

  “Yeah. A strategic resource mostly controlled by China. CU has a silent partner for Area 71, a classified CIA fund, because of the national security implications.”

  “Now Area 71 needs you,” Mike said drily. “Problems with polar bears?”

  “That’s so wrong, I don’t even know where to start,” Sly sighed, and Mike snorted. “Listen, there was an accident that led to a death, one of the volunteer researchers on the winter caretaking team. The base is controversial, it’s in the most pristine wilderness on the planet. Installing sustainable power systems for the base generated half a dozen research papers but not everyone’s happy Area 71 is there. Interested parties want the fatality checked out for foul play.”

  Mike’s sensitive ‘lie-dar’ wasn’t buying the whole package. He frowned.

  “If there are suspicions, why not phone the Agency?”

  “With respect, your average spook wears a raincoat with limited thermal properties,” Sly said smirking. “Green Berets, on the other hand, treat this as training. And one of the interested parties is the Agency.”

  “I hope it goes well,” Mike said with genuine concern. “That’s a long trip.”

  “My swansong,” Sly said absently. Mike raised an eyebrow and Sly considered retracting the ill-timed words. But this was Mike.

  He took a deep breath.

  “You know I’m good at what I do,” he started. “My gift is having a vision, forming a plan, then surrounding myself with the right people to get the job done. But I’m not moving up, I’ve not been offered a promotion or new role for years. My last active service mission was Serenity, and you know that shit didn’t end well. From there I fell into an academic trench, but I climbed out. Now I’m known for how Argos ended, not what it did.”

  He snorted. “Argos would’ve made me stinking rich in civilian life.”

  Mike put up his hands.

  “Or seen you in jail – didn’t Argos hack anything with access to the net?”

  There was some truth in that.

  “Well, yeah... Then there was the skiing accident that put me in the hospital for weeks. I’m in my fifties, Mike, and I don’t have the reputation of having the safest pair of hands. This may be the last time I lead a covert project anywhere as special as Antarctica. I haven’t been operational since joining Oversight as a project director... I was panting on a treadmill yesterday to prove I was fit enough to go. When I’m back, I’m getting out, in case next time they say ‘no’.”

  Mike didn’t look too stupefied. He grunted.

  “You’ve heard this before, Sly... You never made waves but expected the brass to pick you out from all the rest when you didn’t so much as raise a hand. You’re not exactly a rule follower and you’ve the rank but you’re pigeon-holed as a paper-pusher, a desk-jockey. After Serenity, it was your choice to avoid operational roles – you didn’t put yourself forward, and even I don’t understand why. Except for training you’ve not been out in the field in years. No wonder staff thinks of you as a librarian.”

  “Hey, I’m a military historian,” Sly complained, “I know how to recon an old-fashioned library. Yeah, that’s an eldritch skill these days, and it’s in demand – some secret military archives will never be digitized. When I’m not leading Peacock, I’m leading intelligence operations, chaperoning junior researchers who don’t have the clearance to read what they find. That doesn’t mean I won’t get my hands dirty.”

  Mike barked another short laugh.

  “I get it,” he said. “You’re a historian, scared your value lies in the past.”

  Sly pulled a face at the weak joke. “A librarian, left on the shelf.”

  “Still, you handed over Argos without a fuss,” said Mike, seriously. “What you need is one good war to get you out from under Oversight’s thumb.”

  “Oversight’s thumb is up its ass,” Sly said, but his smile felt too tight. “Who am I fooling. Argos let me be around my kids, but when the project ended,” along with my marriage, he managed not to say, “the momentum I had in mainstream military was lost. My mentors were retired, in the ground, or, in one memorable case, committed for indecency to animals.”

  Mike smiled at the quip, but his voice held an edge.

  “You’re not eighty, not dead yet. You need to knuckle down and wait for the bones to roll in your favour.”

  Sly held on to a sense of humour with his nails.

  “Hanging on in there isn’t a fix. Last week I met a general your age, Mike, a real high-flier. Talking to him, I realized I’m not that guy, wasn’t ever that guy. Success is the product of skill and luck, but skill depreciates while luck accumulates. I needed more luck early on. And a better head of hair.”

  “I bet he made you sick,” Mike grinned.

  “Worse, he made me feel as old and leathery as Methuselah’s flipflops. I don’t see that changing until I move on. Once I’m back from Area 71 I’ll be ready for whatever happens next. Keep an ear to the ground for me, okay?”