“Eli, recon,” Ramirez whispered, trusting on Gus to echo his words. “If your name’s not Eli, take cover, stay in the shadows.”

  Sly slumped into a dark, quiet spot behind a wall and watched the picture-in-picture feed from Eli’s shades. The sergeant was quick on his feet, sprinting a shadowed route toward the light, head down. He nimbly dropped to a crawl for the last few feet and peered into the square through a stack of loose bricks.

  The parade space was mostly empty. Crackling bonfires were built on the edges, casting flickering fingers of brightness into the gloom. Shapes and silhouettes flittered in front of the fires: a fever-dream inspired by Dante’s Inferno, perhaps, or the allegory of Socrates’ cave, chains of fearsome shadow reaching out.

  The main body of the cultist forces was formed up across the plaza near the huge triple-arched structure. Eli adjusted the shades’ binocular focus: the enemy didn’t number in the hundreds. Three lines stood parade-ready on the far right. Sixty tangos, Eli mumbled into his mic. Another huddle consisted of a dozen much larger men Sly was thinking of as the elite, as they often stood to one side. Seventy-two.

  Sly became uneasy. Seventy-odd men weren’t many in a traditional military sense but given Antarctica’s long chain of logistics they were a rare resource. Just feeding so many would need dedicated air transport. Close to where he stood on the edge of the square, Eli also counted two men in archaic black cloaks, resting quarterstaffs on the ground. The others appeared to defer to their rank and give them space.

  Officers? Or something else? High-value targets in either case.

  Beyond the two staff bearers was an impatient, compact figure. Ghost.

  “Can you take him out?”

  Captain Ramirez didn’t need to say who ‘he’ was.

  “I can try, but Sergeant Marcus has the better rifle,” Eli subvocalized. “I can’t guarantee a killing shot with a carbine at this range.”

  “Take the shot. If you get him, we can hightail out of here.”

  Eli pushed the carbine up into a firing position and checked his aim. He audibly breathed deeply, allowed for a non-existent crosswind and pulled the trigger, once.

  To Sly’s shock, a doughnut ring of blue light immediately effervesced in the space between the sniper and the Ghost. Like a ripple on water, the glow widened before fading. Ghost, unhurt, turned towards the light, momentarily surprised.

  Eli blasphemed under his breath, as a third figure with a quarterstaff emerged from the group of soldiers and ran in the direction of the other two HVTs.

  “Full clip, Eli, put him down,” said Ramirez, voice clipped and clear. “Everyone else, get closer, be ready to put down covering fire. Colonel, what is that thing?”

  Eli switched to full-automatic, braced and fired, but the invisible wall sprang back to life before the bullets hit Ghost or the staff-bearers. Ripples of flame red, deep ocean blue and bruised purple lit the city centre like fireworks projected on a transparent screen, accompanied by a hiss like the static from ten thousand antique televisions and the ozone-rich smell of the air after a thunderstorm.

  “You see what I see!” Sly said, raising his voice over the sizzle. “That’s a bloody force-shield!”

  Crouching, he hurriedly reviewed the recording of Eli’s first shot, Gus slowing the moment of impact. The bullet hit, creating a pressure-wave, first translucent then sparkling gold. A perfect circle of azure-blue light then flashed, too swift to see, a raindrop striking a pool of water slick with ink.

  He also sprang to check the IR recording and leapt to an instant conclusion.

  “Best guess, the screen converts the bullets’ kinetic energy to light,” he said, as everyone else ran forward, “and heat – the infrared recording is a white-out.”

  Sly checked his position and gear, then ran forward after the others.

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  “Good news, it’s only a curved twelve-foot tall wall, not that wide. Spread out, get behind it.”

  “Spare me the bad news,” said Ramirez drily.

  The bad news came on regardless. A bright flare appeared on the tip of the running man’s staff, like gas being burned off from an oil rig, then –

  “DOWN!”

  Sly tripped and stumbled to his knees, in time to hear a KABOOM reminiscent of airborne ordinance exploding. An impossibly brilliant wave roared overhead, and a thousand bullets of rock flung themselves from the walls accompanied by a sharp, pungent scent like electrical sparks.

  On the positive side, no one appeared seriously hurt, although Eli bled from a cut on the face and Singh clutched an arm. The implication was obvious, though.

  “The HVT’s got a bazooka! Take cover! Covering fire!” Ramirez shouted. “Let’s see if we can get their heads down.”

  “Not now,” Sly murmured, too late. “I’m running out of ammo!”

  That volley did no good at all. Once the bruises dissipated against the screen he saw the last staff-bearer had joined the others. Eli saw him turn toward the oppressive, looming arch.

  The cultist smiled, then the ancient city ignited, exploding with a million hues.

  Sunshine gushed from the high central arch of the triumphal gate, blinding night-vision which automatically switched off. Golden and glaring, the wave of light fell like a tsunami flooding a beach. Stunned by a mental shock with the impact of a physical slap, Sly raised his arm to block the light.

  The invisible shield was astonishing but the intense sunlight pouring through the monument was incredible on a whole other level. The phenomenon was utterly incomprehensible. On the alien side of the archway the land sloped up, revealing another square in a far distant city and its massed ranks of soldiers, perhaps a thousand men alert and waiting. Bright sunlight flashed on what, spears and helms? And windmoved bloody pennants! Cavalry began to move into a trot, then a canter.

  He stared through the portal into the sunlight from another world and his thoughts cascaded, a pinball bonus round.

  This alien tech was why the city could be here, in the darkness under the ice.

  This was the other way into Level Four, how the cultists arrived.

  This was why the CIA didn’t tell the world!

  But no… Even as the last panicked thought crossed Sly’s mind, he negated it.

  Finding the city came first. Area 71 was the CIA’s archaeological dig long before anyone arrived using the portals. Then the cultists arrived. A scouting party.

  The last pieces dropped into place.

  First, one or two arrived, four months ago. And no, not cultists. They were something else.

  “Madre’d dios,” Nio whispered.

  “Colonel, any advice now would be appreciated,” said Ramirez in a monotone.

  “Tell them to bring their own food,” Emil Marcus interrupted fervently. “There’s not enough in the whole of Antarctica for those mothers.”

  Sly’s mind raced. He thought of the shield that they must get past or through, and saw the three officers standing behind the screen, staffs plunged hard into the ground, faces hard in a mask of concentration. They stood only a stone’s throw away from the edge of the shield, but the bullets couldn’t pass.

  A white-water torrent of images filled his head with noise, but then he saw.

  A stone’s throw? Why would they stand a stone’s throw away from an impenetrable shield? He stared at the HVTs, and the idea finally slithered through.

  Shit... is that why the tangos used crossbows?

  Sly grabbed at the intuition and suddenly grasped what they needed to do.

  “Eli,” he cried hoarsely, “get the rifle. Emil, get it to him! Who has a grenade launcher? Tell me now!” Gus autocompleted the answer. “Josh Smith!”

  “I’ve got it, Colonel. Why?”

  Because the single-shot, under-barrel grenade launcher could propel a variety of 40mm explosive rounds at seventy-six metres a second, designed for a slow, arcing trajectory. Of the weapons they had, it was the only one slower but more lethal than a crossbow.

  But he didn’t have time to say any of that. He waved his arm, pointed.

  “Smith! Get ready to fire the launcher into those three officers!”

  “That’s straight at that, that wall,” Smith warned. “I don’t have the trajectory to land a grenade directly behind it.”

  Sly waved that away. “Straight at ‘em is fine.”

  He saw Eli take up the snipers’ rifle and check it over.

  “Eli, as soon as the grenade goes up, take out as many of the tangos as you can, as quickly as you can, starting with the HVTs. Headshots, Eli. Smith?”

  “Yessir!”

  A fine time to test a theory.

  “Fire the frickin’ thing.”

  The 40mm high-explosive grenade arced over the square, visible as a dot against the daylight bright portal. It hit the invisible wall.

  Which sparkled but didn’t glow. The grenade slowed sharply but penetrated further than any of the bullets, dropping to the stone-paved floor on the other side of the invisible wall, bouncing once hard, twice before rolling to a stop between the three HVTs. The fuse tick-ticked, then blew.