Ice Station (16 page)

In a blur of green, he brought his crossbow up and fired.

Gant was about twenty feet away and she actually saw the arrow dip in
the air as it covered the distance between them. She sidestepped
quickly, her gun hand flailing behind her, as the arrow thudded into
her Maghook and sent it flying from her hand.

And then, before she knew it, Cuvier was right in front of her with
his Bowie knife drawn. He came in fast, his long-bladed hunting knife
arcing down toward Gant's throat—

There came a sudden metallic zing as Cuvier's blade came
to a jarring halt.

Gant had caught his blow with her own knife.

The two soldiers separated and began to circle each other warily.
Cuvier held his knife underhanded. Gant held hers backhanded,
SEAL-style. Both still wore their night-vision goggles.

Suddenly Cuvier lunged and Gant swatted bis blade away. But the
Frenchman had a longer reach, and as they separated again he swiped at
Gant's goggles and dislodged them from her head.

For a single terrifying moment Gant saw nothing.

Just blackness.

Total blackness.

In this darkness, without her goggles, she was blind.

Gant felt the catwalk beneath her vibrate. Cuvier was lunging at her
again.

Still blind, she ducked instinctively, not knowing whether it was the
right move or not.

It was the right move.

She heard the swish of Cuvier's knife as it sliced through the
darkness above her helmet.

And then she took the opportunity.

Gant thrust her hands forward in the darkness and grabbed Cuvier by
the lapels.

“You remember giving this to me,” she said, picturing the
arrow sticking out from the front of her helmet. “Well, now you
can have it back.”

And with that Gant rammed her head forward.

With an explosion of blood, the arrow jutting out from the front of
her helmet shot right through Cuvier's left eye and
penetrated his brain. The Frenchman let out a hideous, inhuman scream,
and Gant felt a wash of warm blood instantly spray all over her face.

She quickly withdrew the arrow from the French soldier's head and
he dropped to the floor, dead.

While Gant fought with Cuvier, Schofield and Latissier rolled around
on the catwalk.

As they fought, Schofield heard noises everywhere. Voices spoke
frantically over his helmet intercom:

“—They're going round the other side!”

“—going for the other ladder!”

Footsteps clanged on the catwalk above him.

A crossbow fired somewhere nearby.

Schofield heard a sudden snap as Latissier managed to lock another
arrow into the bolt of his crossbow. Schofield quickly elbowed the big
Frenchman hard in the face, up under his night-vision goggles, broke
his nose. Blood splattered everywhere, all over Schofield's arm,
all over the lenses of Latissier's goggles.

The Frenchman grunted with pain as he flung Schofield away from him,
toward the edge of the catwalk. The two men separated, and
Latissier—still lying on the catwalk, half-blinded by the
splotches of blood on his night-vision goggles— angrily brought
his crossbow around toward Schofield's head.

Schofield was right at the edge of the catwalk, up against the
railing. He thought fast.

He caught Latissier's weapon hand as it came round toward him and
then, in a very sudden movement, rolled himself off the edge of
the catwalk!

Latissier had never expected it.

Schofield kept his grip on Latissier's weapon hand as he fell,
and, hanging from it, he swung down onto the empty deck below. Like a
cat, Schofield landed on his feet and immediately raised
Latissier's crossbow up at the underside of the D-deck catwalk and
pulled the trigger.

Latissier was lying facedown on the catwalk—with his arm
stretched awkwardly out over the edge—when the crossbow
discharged. At point-blank range, the arrow shot up through a gap in
the steel grating, penetrated Latissier's night-vision goggles,
and lodged itself right in the middle of the Frenchman's forehead.

Down in the drilling room, Rebound faced the crossbow-wielding French
commando.

The Frenchman thought he had the upper hand, thought he had Rebound
dead to rights. He only forgot one thing.

Night vision is hell on peripheral vision.

He was standing too close.

Which was why he never saw the Maghook that Rebound was holding at his
hip.

Rebound fired. The Maghook shot out from its launcher and slammed into
the Frenchman's chest from a range of three feet. There came a
series of instantaneous cracks as the French commando's
rib cage collapsed in on his heart. He was dead before he hit the
ground.

Rebound took a deep breath, sighed with relief, looked at the drilling
room in front of him.

He saw what the Frenchman had been doing and his mouth fell open. And
then he remembered what the Frenchman had said earlier.

“Le piège
est tendu.”

Then Rebound looked at the room again.

And he smiled.

“South tunnel,” Montana's voice said over
Schofield's helmet intercom.

Schofield was down on E-deck now, having swung down there on
Latissier's arm. He looked across the pool and saw a black figure
running into the south tunnel. It was the last French
commando—save for the one who had rappelled down the shaft
earlier.

“I see him,” Schofield said, taking off in pursuit.

“Sir, this is Rebound,” Rebound's voice
suddenly cut across the airwaves. “Did you just say the south
tunnel?”

“That's right.”

“Let him come,” Rebound said firmly. “And
follow him down.”

Schofield frowned. “What are you talking about, Rebound?”

“Just follow him, sir.” Rebound was whispering now.
“He wants you to.”

Schofield paused for a moment.

Then he said, “Do you know something that I don't,
Corporal?”

“That I do, sir,” came the reply.

Montana, Snake, and Gant joined Schofield on E-deck, at title entrance
to the south tunnel. They'd all heard Rebound over their helmet
intercoms.

Schofield looked at them as he spoke into his helmet mike. “All
right, Rebound, it's your call.”

Schofield, Montana, Snake, and Gant edged cautiously down the long
southern tunnel of E-deck. At the end of the tunnel they saw a door,
saw the silhouette of the last French soldier disappear behind it, a
shadow in the green darkness.

Rebound was right. The soldier was moving slowly. It was almost as if
he wanted them to see him go into the drilling room.

Schofield and the others pressed forward down the tunnel. They were
about ten yards away from the door to the drilling room when suddenly
a hand reached out from the shadows and grabbed Schofield by the
shoulder. Schofield spun instantly and saw Rebound emerge from a
cupboard set into the wall. There seemed to be another body in the
cupboard behind Rebound. Rebound pressed bis finger against his lips
and led Schofield and the others down the tunnel toward the drilling
room door.

“It's a trap,” Rebound mouthed as they reached the door.

Rebound pushed open the door. It creaked loudly as it swung open in
front of them.

The door swung wide and the Marines saw the last Frenchman standing
over on the far side of the drilling room.

It was Jean Petard. He looked forlornly at them. He was caught in a
dead end, and he knew it. He was trapped.

“I . . . I surrender,” he said meekly.

Schofield just stared at Petard. Then he turned to Rebound and the
others, as if calling for advice.

Then he stepped forward into the drilling room.

Petard seemed to smile, relieved.

At that moment, Rebound suddenly stuck his arm out in front of
Schofield's chest, stopping him. Rebound had never taken his eyes
off the Frenchman.

Petard frowned.

Rebound stared at him and said, “Le piège est tendu.”

Petard cocked his head, surprised.

“The trap is set,” Rebound said in English.

And then Petard suddenly averted his gaze and looked at something
else, something on the floor in front of him, and his smile went flat.
He looked up at Rebound, horrified.

Rebound knew what Petard had seen.

He had seen five French words, and as soon as he had seen them, Petard
knew that his fight was over.

Those five words were: BRAQUEZ CE CÔTÉ SUR L'ENEMMI.

Rebound stepped forward and Petard yelled, “No!” but
it was too late. Rebound stepped through the trip wire in front of the
door, and the two concave mines in the drilling room exploded with all
their terrifying force.

The highway stretched away into the desert.

A thin, unbroken strip of black overlaying the golden-brown floor of
the New Mexico landscape. Not a single cloud appeared in the sky.

A lone car raced along the desert highway.

Pete Cameron drove, sweating in the heat. The air conditioner in his
rented Toyota had long since given up the fight for life, and now the
car was little more than an oven on wheels. It was probably ten
degrees hotter inside the car than it was outside.

Cameron was a reporter for the Washington Post, had been for
three years now. Before that, he had made a name for himself doing
features for the respected investigative-reporting journal Mother
Jones.

Cameron had fitted in well at Mother Jones. The journal has
one all-encompassing goal: to expose misleading government reports.
Cover-ups. And to a large extent, it had been successful in achieving
this goal. Pete Cameron loved it, thrived on it. In his last year at
Mother Jones, he had won an award for an article he had
written on the loss of five nuclear warheads from a crashed B-2
stealth bomber. The bomber had crashed into the Atlantic Ocean just
off the coast of Brazil and the U.S. Government had issued a press
release saying that all five warheads had been recovered, safely and
intact. Cameron had investigated the story, had queried the methods
used to find the missing nukes.

The truth soon emerged. The rescue mission had not been about the
recovery of the warheads at all. It had been about recovering all
evidence of the bomber. The nuclear warheads had been a secondary
priority, and they had never been found.

It was that article and the award ftiat followed it that had brought
Cameron to the attention of the Washington Post. They offered
him a job, and he took it with both hands.

Cameron was thirty years old and tall, really
tall—six-feet-five. He had messy sandy-brown hair and wireframe
glasses. His car looked like a bomb had hit it—empty Coke cans
were strewn about the floor, intermingled with crumpled cheeseburger
wrappers; pads and pens and scraps of paper stuck out from every
compartment. A pad of Post-its rested in the ashtray. Those that had
been used were stuck to the dashboard.

Cameron drove through the desert.

His cellular rang. It was his wife, Alison.

Pete and Alison Cameron were something of celebrities among the
Washington press community, the famous—or
infamous—husband-and-wife team of the Washington Post.
When Pete Cameron had arrived at the Post from Mother
Jones three years ago, he had been assigned to work with a young
reporter named Alison Greenberg. The chemistry between them had
ignited immediately. It was electric. In one week, they were in bed
together. In twelve months, they were married.

“Are you there yet?” Alison's voice said over the
speaker phone. Alison was twenty-nine and had shoulder-length auburn
hair, enormous sky blue eyes, and a beaming smile that made her face
glow. Pete loved it. Alison wasn't conventionally beautiful, but
she could stop traffic with that smile. At the moment, she was working
out of the paper's D.C. office.

“I'm almost there,” he replied.

He was on his way to an observatory out in the middle of the New
Mexico desert. Some technician at the SETI Institute there had called
the paper earlier that day claiming to have detected some chatter over
an old spy satellite network. Cameron had been sent to investigate.

It was nothing new. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
Institute, or SETI, picked up stuff all the time. Their radio
satellite array was very powerful and extraordinarily sensitive. It
wasn't uncommon for a SETI technician, in his search for
extraterrestrial transmissions, to “cross beams” with a
stray spr satellite and pick up a few garbled words from a restricted
military transmission.

Those pickups were disparagingly labeled “SETI sightings” by
the reporters at the Washington Post. Usually they amounted
to nothing—just incomprehensible one-word
transmissions—but the theory was that maybe, one day, one of
those garbled messages would provide the starting point for a story.
The kind of story that ended in the word Pulitzer.

Alison said, “Well, call me as soon as you're done at the
institute.” She put on a mock-sexy voice. “I have a
thing for SETI sightings.”

Cameron smiled. “Very provocative. Do you do house calls?”

“You never know your luck in the big city.”

“You know,” Cameron said, “in some states, that could
qualify as sexual harassment.”

“Honey, being married to you is sexual harassment,”
Alison said.

Cameron laughed. “I'll call you when I'm done,” he
said before hanging up.

An hour later, Cameron's Toyota pulled into the dusty parking lot
of the SETI Institute. There were three other cars parked in the lot.

A squat two-story office building stood adjacent to the parking lot,
nestled in the shadow of a three-hundred-foot-tall radio telescope.
Cameron counted twenty-seven other identical satellite dishes
stretching away from him into the desert.

Inside, he was met by a geeky little man wearing a white lab coat and
a plastic pocket protector. He said his name was Emmett Somerville and
that it was he who had picked up the signal.

Somerville led Cameron down some stairs to a wide underground room.
Cameron followed him silently as they negotiated their way through a
maze of electronic radio equipment. Two massive Cray XMP
supercomputers took up an entire wall of the enormous subterranean
room.

Somerville spoke as he walked. “I picked it up at around
two-thirty this morning. It was in English, so I knew it couldn't
be alien.”

“Good thinking,” Cameron said, deadpan.

“But the accent was definitely American, and considering the
content, I called the Pentagon right away.” He turned to look at
Cameron as he walked. “We have a direct number.”

He said it with nerdy pride: The government thinks we're so
important that they gave us a direct line. Cameron figured that
the number Somerville had was probably the number for the
Pentagon's PR desk, a number that SETI could have found by looking
up the Department of Defense in the phone book. Cameron had it on his
speed-dial.

“Anyway,” Somerville said, “when they said that it
wasn't one of their transmissions, I figured it was OK to give you
guys at the paper a call.”

“We appreciate it,” Cameron said.

The two men arrived at a corner console. It consisted of two screens
mounted above a keyboard. Next to the screens was a broadcast-quality
reel-to-reel recording machine.

“Wanna hear it?” Somerville asked, his finger poised above
the PLAY button on the reel-to-reel machine.

“Shoot.”

Emmett Somerville hit the switch. The reels began to rotate.

At first Cameron heard nothing, then static. He looked expectantly at
Emmett the Geek.

“It's coming,” Somerville said.

There was a wash of some more static and then, suddenly, voices.

“—copy, one-three-four-six-two-five— ”

“—contact lost due to ionospheric
disturbance—”

“-—forward team—”

“—Scarecrow— ”

“—minus sixty-six point five— ”

“—solar flare disrupting radio—”

“—one-fifteen, twenty minutes, twelve seconds
east—”

“—how,” static, “get there
so—”

“—secondary team en route—”

Pete Cameron slowly shut his eyes. It was another bum steer. Just more
indecipherable military gobbledygook.

The transmission ended and he turned and saw that Somerville was
watching him eagerly. Clearly, the SETI technician wanted something to
come of his discovery. He was a nobody. Worse, a nobody out in the
middle of nowhere. A guy who probably just wanted to see his name in
the Washington Post in anything other than an obituary.
Cameron felt sorry for him. He sighed.

“Could you play it again for me,” he said, reluctantly
pulling out his notepad.

Somerville practically leaped for the REWIND button.

The tape played again and Cameron dutifully took notes.

It was ironic, Schofield thought, that Petard,
the last French commando, should be killed by one of his own weapons.
Especially when it was a weapon that France had obtained from the
United States by virtue of their alliance under NATO.

The M18A1 mine is better known throughout the world as the
“Claymore.” It is made up of a concave porcelain plate that
contains hundreds of ball bearings embedded in a six-hundred-gram wad
of C-4 plastic explosive. In effect, a Claymore is a
directable fragmentation grenade—its lethality is
dependent not on the force of its relatively small initial blast, but
rather on the devastating fan-shaped spray of shrapnel that it emits.
If one sits behind a Claymore, one will not be harmed by its shrapnel
blast. If one is caught in front of it, one will be shredded to
pieces.

The most well-known characteristic of the Claymore, however, is the
simple instruction label that one finds embossed on the forward face
of the mine. It reads: THIS SIDE TOWARD ENEMY.

Or, in French, BRAQUEZ CE CÔTÉ SUR L'ENEMMI.

If you ever found yourself looking at those words, you knew you were
looking at the wrong end of a Claymore.

The two Claymores in the drilling room had been central to the French
commandos' last-ditch plan to beat the Marines. After it was all
over, Schofield pieced together that plan:

They had sent someone down to the drilling room, ahead of the others.
Once there, that person had set up the two Claymores so that they
faced the door. The Claymores would then be connected to a trip wire.

Then, the other French commandos would pretend to retreat to the
drilling room, deliberately allowing the Marines to follow
them.

Of course, the Marines would know that the drilling room was a dead
end, so they would think that the French, in their desperate
attempt to flee, had run themselves into a corner, into a trap.

Surrender would be inevitable.

But as the Marines entered the drilling room to secure the French
troops, they would break the trip wire and set off the two Claymores.
The Marines would be cut to ribbons.

It was an audacious plan. A plan that would have changed the course of
the battle.

And it was cunning, too. It turned a full-scale retreat— hell,
a total surrender—into a decisive counterattack.

But what Petard and the French had not accounted for was that
one of the American soldiers might come upon their trap while they
were setting it.

Schofield was proud of Rebound. Proud of how the young Marine had
handled the situation.

Rather than blow the lid on the French plan and continue with
unpredictable hand-to-hand fighting, Rebound had coolly
allowed the French to believe that their plan was still
afoot.

But he had changed one thing.

He had turned the Claymores around.

That was what Petard had seen when Rebound had spoken to him in the
drilling room. He had seen those chilling words.

THIS SIDE TOWARD ENEMY.

Pointing at him.

Rebound had got the better of him. And when Rebound stepped forward
across the trip wire, it was to be the last thing that Petard ever
saw. The battle, at last, was over.

An hour later, the station's lights were back on and all of the
bodies, French and American, had been found and accounted for. At
least, those bodies that could be found.

The French had lost four men to the killer whales; the Americans, one.
Eight other French commandos and two more U.S. Marines—Hollywood
and Ratman—had been found in various locations around the ice
station. They had all been confirmed dead.

The Americans also had two wounded, both quite seriously. Mother, who
had lost one of her legs to the killer whale, and, rather
surprisingly, Augustine “Samurai” Lau, the very first Marine
to have been gunned down by the French.

Mother was faring better than Samurai. Since her wound was a localized
one—confined to the lower extremity of her left leg—she
was still conscious. In fact, she still had full movement in all of
her other limbs. The flow of blood from the wound had been stopped,
and the methadone took care of what pain there was. The only enemy
that remained was shock. Thus it was decided that Mother would remain
in her storeroom on E-deck, under constant supervision. To move her
might trigger a fit.

Samurai, on the other hand, was in a much worse state. He was in a
self-induced coma, his stomach having been ripped to shreds by
Latissier's barrage of gunfire at the very beginning of the
battle.

The young Marine's body had responded to the sudden trauma in the
only way it knew how—it had switched itself off. At the time
they found him alive, Schofield had marveled at the ability of the
human body to take care of itself in the face of such extreme crisis.
No amount of methadone or morphine could have quelled the pain of that
many gunshot wounds. So Samurai's body had done the next-best
thing: it had simply turned off its sensory apparatus and was now
awaiting external help.

The problem was whether or not Schofield could provide that external
help.

Anything greater than basic medical knowledge is rare in a frontline
unit. The closest thing such units have to a doctor is the team medic,
who is usually a low-level Corporal. Legs Lane had been
Schofield's medic, and he was now deader than dead.

Schofield walked quickly around the A-deck catwalk. He'd just come
up from E-deck, where he had checked on Mother, and
was now wearing a new pair of silver antiflash glasses. Mother had
given them to him. She'd said that in her state, she wouldn't
be needing them anymore.

Schofield poked his head around the dining room door. “What do
you think, Rebound?” he said.

Inside the dining room, Rebound was working feverishly over
Samurai's inanimate body. The body lay flat on its back on a table
in the center of the room. Blood dripped off the edges of the table,
forming a red puddle on the cold porcelain floor.