People of the Crater (Version 2)

The war is over, and Captain Garin has been forgotten. Once the hottest fighter pilot in the American forces, he's now just another hungry ex-soldier wandering a world that no longer needs him. Then comes an offer: investigate a strange mist obscuring Antarctica. Garin takes it, desperate for purpose, for pay, for anything. But the mist has been waiting for him. Summoned by ancient creatures half-lost to time, he learns he was never random bait for a government contract. He is the answer to a prophecy older than human civilization. Send the Black Throne to dust. Conquer the Black Ones. Bring the Daughter from the Caves of Darkness. Garin must descend into a hidden world beneath the ice, where something dark has waited in the shadows for millennia. Andre Norton builds a story where a broken man pieces himself together not through healing, but through facing the cosmic. The Antarctic setting becomes a landscape of the soul: cold, alien, unforgiving, and strangely beautiful. This is pulp adventure at its most mythic.