The Reluctant Warrior Read Online Free PDF

someone please tell me what’s happening here?” He gazed down at the discarded jacket. “Out here you should be dead within ten seconds if you take that off.”
    “The way I figure it we’ve stumbled across a belt of intense volcanic activity,” Jed explained. “Somehow that’s created this warmer environment we’re experiencing.”
    “Kinda like an oasis in the middle of the Antarctic wasteland,” Jonathon added.
    Rex wasn’t convinced. “But mammals and marine life, is it possible?”
    “Apparently it is,” Jonathon said. He pointed across the bow. “I think I can just make out the shoreline ahead.”
    Within forty minutes they were close enough to see the outline of the high rocky cliffs that towered above the tranquil waters of the lake. Jonathon’s face dropped. “How’re we going to get up that lot?”
    “If we want to live we’re going to have to find a way,” Jed said philosophically. “And we all want to see what’s on the other side of those cliffs…right?”
    Both men nodded, only Jonathon less enthusiastically than Rex.
    Another thirty minutes on and they were dragging the boat up onto the stony shore. “Right,” Rex said, rubbing his mitted hands together, “let’s tackle that cliff.”
    Surveying it from top to bottom Jed could see it was completely devoid of ice. That was a blessing at least. He pointed to a cleft in the rock. “Looks like a way up through there.”
    Jonathon shuddered at the thought, “if you’re a mountain goat maybe.”
    Rex’s eyebrows moved downwards immediately. “If it’s the only way, then it’s the only way.” He strode towards the cleft and attacked the rock aggressively with his ice pick. “It’s soft enough for me to cut some footholds,” he called confidently over his shoulder, as the other two followed in his wake, a shower of rock fragments raining down on them at regular intervals. It was Rex who made it to the top first. “Good grief.”
    Jed hauled himself up the last few feet to stand beside him, and what he saw struck him with awe. “I wouldn’t have believed it possible.”
    Rex turned to him with a grin. “Ah but it is. We’ve stumbled on a whole new world that no one else in the history of mankind has ever seen.”
    Jed couldn’t help noticing the masses of red flowers that clothed the forest canopy. “There’s the source of that pollen we saw,” he said with satisfaction.
    “Come on,” Rex urged, already moving towards the shelter of the trees, “our adventure awaits.”

Chapter Four
    This was the moment Jed had dreamed of his entire life but never thought possible. Ever since he as a nine year old school boy had read stories of explorers stumbling across new lands he had wanted this. To discover a new land that no man had ever set foot on before. That was why he had come to Antarctica, though not seriously believing he would lay eyes on anything more than endless ice and an occasional mountain range to break the monotony. But here he was, walking in a pristine forest gazing up at gigantic trees that hosted a tantalizing array of exotic birdlife that neither he nor Jonathon could identify. It had his emotions running the gamut from fear to exhilaration and back to fear again.
    What frightened him the most was not the vast variety of plant and bird life they were witnessing, but rather the impossibility of it existing in such an inhospitable environment as Antarctica could dish up. It was as if they had passed through to some parallel dimension. Not that he actually gave that theory much plausibility; he wasn’t much into those sorts of controversial theories. But could it really be they had stumbled into an area of intense volcanic activity that caused the ground and surrounding air to be so warm that bird and plant life could flourish? If so, where were the steam vents and volcanic rock that should pepper the area? He hadn’t seen any so far.
    There was something so wrong about this. It was as if in the midst of