Free The Black Knight by Dean Crawford

Captain Forrester listened to Jarvis as he replied from the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington DC.
    ‘The Germans had been sending exploratory missions down to Antarctica since the early nineteenth century,’ he said. ‘The Antarctic Plateau was claimed for Norway by Roald Amundsen as the King Haakon VII Plateau when his expedition was the first to reach South Pole in 1911. The name Queen Maud Land was initially applied in January 1930 to the land between 37°E and 49°30’E discovered by Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen and Finn Lützow-Holm during Lars Christensen’s Norvegia expedition of 1929. Norway’s claim was disputed by Germany, which in 1938 dispatched the German Antarctic Expedition, led by Alfred Ritscher, to fly over as much of it as possible. The ship Schwabenland reached the pack ice off Antarctica in January 1939. During the expedition, an area of about a hundred forty thousand square miles was photographed from the air by Ritscher, who dropped darts inscribed with swastikas every sixteen miles. Germany attempted to claim the territory surveyed by Ritscher under the name New Swabia, but lost any claim to the land following its defeat in the Second World War.’
    Ethan frowned as Hannah replied.
    ‘So if they were prevented from annexing the territory after their defeat then how could they have built any kind of operational base up here, much less kept it secret for seventy years? There are at least twelve research stations all across Queen Maud Land belonging to many different nations.’
    ‘That’s what’s caused the confusion,’ Doctor Chandler replied. ‘The entire story of a German base being built in Antarctica at the end of the Second World War, which has been in circulation for decades, has always been rejected by historians based on the assumption that because the Germans spent so much time surveying Queen Maud Land, that’s where the site of the base must be. These recent signals intelligence tells us that the assumption has been wrong.’
    A digital image of Antarctica replaced Jarvis on the monitor as Chandler went on.
    ‘The legend purports that the Nazi mission was supposed to establish a base on Antarctica in order to set up a staging post for further invasions of countries in the southern hemisphere prior to the invasion of Poland. However, records show that the mission was merely an attempt to scout new territories into which the Nazi machine could spread as the war progressed. Historians have repeatedly pointed out that the supposed discovery by the Nazis of warm water and vegetation within Antarctica’s wastes, which would have been used to sustain a population or a base of some kind, were false and that there were no such sources.’ The image changed again to a portion of the continent’s eastern shores, north west of the Polar Star’s current location.
    ‘That was until 2015,’ Chandler said, ‘when surveys conducted by scientific teams on the continent and orbiting satellites detected a series of subterranean pathways that were channeling warm water beneath the Totten Glacier, a seventy mile long and eighteen mile wide feature and the largest on the continent’s east coast.’
    Ethan watched as graphics taken from research published in the Nature Geoscience journal showed a trough some three miles wide that had formed a gateway deep underneath the glacier, along with another tunnel that could allow warmer sea water to penetrate the glacier base.
    Captain Forrester nodded as he observed the graphics.
    ‘It’s is the most rapidly thinning glacier in East Antarctica,’ he said. ‘Our own surveys have shown that much, but we didn’t know anything about a warm water channel beneath it.’
    ‘During a voyage to the frozen region during the past southern hemisphere summer,’ Jarvis replied via the screen, ‘researchers found the waters around Totten Glacier were around a degree and a half Celsius warmer than other areas.’
    ‘Doesn’t sound like much,’ Ethan pointed