Ice Station (18 page)

After the battle was over, the Marines had found the two French
scientists, Luc Champion and Henri Rae, cowering in a cupboard in the
dining room on A-deck.

They had not offered any resistance. Indeed, as they had been dragged
unceremoniously out of the cupboard to face their conquerors the
horror on their faces had said it all. They had backed the wrong side
in this fight. The men they had deceived were now their captors. The
price for their treachery would be high.

Both men had been taken down to E-deck, where they were handcuffed to
a pole in plain view. Schofield's team had work to do, and
Schofield didn't want to waste any of his manpower guarding the
two French scientists. By cuffing the two Frenchmen to a pole out in
the open the Marines down on E-deck could work as well as keep an eye
on them.

Schofield stepped out onto the B-deck catwalk. He was about to speak
into his helmet mike when Sarah Hensleigh came out onto the catwalk
behind him.

“I have something I have to ask you,” she said.
“Something I couldn't ask you back in the common room.”

Schofield held up a hand, spoke into his helmet mike: “Rebound.
This is Scarecrow. How's Samurai?”

Rebound's voice came in over his earpiece. “I've
managed to stop the bleeding for the moment, sir, but he's still
pretty bad.”

“Stable?”

“As stable as I'm gonna get him.”

“All right, listen. I want you to go down to E-deck and grab that
French scientist named Champion, Luc Champion,” Schofield said.
He looked at Sarah as he spoke. “I've just been informed that
our good friend Monsieur Champion is a surgeon.”

“Yes, sir,” Rebound said eagerly. He seemed
relieved that someone more qualified might be able to take over
Samurai's care. But then he seemed to check himself. “Uh,
sir...”

“What is it?”

“Can we trust him?”

“No,” Schofield said firmly as he began to climb up the
rung-ladder toward A-deck. He motioned for Sarah to follow him up.
“Not a whit. Rebound, you just tell him that if Samurai dies, so
does he.”

“Gotcha.”

Schofield reached the top of the rung-ladder and stepped up onto the
A-deck catwalk. He helped Sarah up behind him. Almost immediately, he
saw Rebound emerge from the dining room doorway not far away and jog
for the opposite rung-ladder. He was going down to E-deck to get
Champion.

Schofield and Sarah headed for the main entrance to the station. As
they walked along the catwalk, Schofield looked down at the station
beneath him and thought about his people.

They were scattered everywhere.

Montana was outside. Riley and Gant were down on E-deck, getting the
scuba gear ready for the dive to the cave. Snake was smack in the
middle, in the alcove on C-deck, fixing the winch controls. And Santa
Cruz was nowhere to be seen, since he was off conducting a search of
the station for erasers.

Christ, Schofield thought, they were spread all over the place.

Schofield's helmet intercom crackled. It was Santa Cruz.

“What is it, Private?” Schofield said.

“Sir, I've conducted a search of the station and I've
found no sign of any erasing device.”

“No erasers?” Schofield frowned. “Nothing at all?”

“Not a thing, sir. My guess is they didn't expect things
to happen so fast, so they didn't get a chance to lay
any.”

Schofield thought about that.

Cruz was probably right. The French team's plan had undoubtedly
been cut short by Buck Riley's arrival at the station and his
accidental discovery of what had really happened to the crashed French
hovercraft. The French commandos' plan had been to win the
Americans' trust and then shoot them in the back. Since that plan
hadn't come to fruition, it was no surprise that they hadn't
been able to set any erasers.

“But I did find something, sir,” Santa Cruz said.

“What?”

“I found a radio, sir.”

“A radio?” Schofield said dryly. It was hardly a
mind-blowing discovery.

“Sir, this ain 't no ordinary radio. It looks like a
portable VLF transmitter.”

That got Schofield's attention. A VLF, or very low frequency,
transmitter is a rare device. It has a frequency range of between 3
kHz and 30 kHz, which, in real terms; amounts to an unbelievably long
wavelength. It is so long—or, in radio terms, so
“heavy”—that the radio signal travels as a ground
signal that follows the curvature of the Earth's surface.

Until only very recently, signals traveling at such low frequencies
required very high-powered transmitters, which were, of course, very
large and cumbersome. Thus they weren't often used by ground
forces. Recent developments in technology, however, had resulted in
heavy but nonetheless portable, VLF transmitters. They looked and
weighed about the same as the average backpack.

The fact that the French had brought such a transmitter to Wilkes
bothered Schofield. There was really only one use for VLF radio
signals, and that was—

No, that's ridiculous, Schofield thought. They
couldn't have done that.

“Cruz, where did you find it?”

“Down in the drilling room,” Santa Cruz's voice
said.

“Are you there now?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bring it out to the pool deck,” Schofield said.
“I'll come down after I check on Montana outside.”

“Yes, sir.”

Schofield clicked off his intercom. He and Sarah came to the entrance
passageway.

“What are erasers?” Sarah asked.

“What? Oh,” Schofield said. He only just remembered that
Sarah wasn't a soldier. He took a deep breath.
“Eraser is the term used to describe an explosive device
that is planted in a battlefield by a covert incursionary force for
use in the event that their mission fails. Most of the time, an eraser
is set off by a delay switch, which is just an ordinary timer.”

“OK, wait a minute. Slow down,” Sarah said.

Schofield sighed, slowed down. “Small crack units like these
French guys we met tonight usually find themselves fighting in places
where they're not supposed to be, right? Like there would probably
be an international incident if it could be proved that French troops
were in a U.S. research station trying to kill everybody, right?”

“Yeah....”

“Well, there's no guarantee that these crack units are gonna
succeed in getting what they came for, is there,”
Schofield said. “I mean, hey, they might come up against a team
of tough hombres like us and wind up dead.”

Schofield grabbed a parka off a hook on the wall and began to put it
on.

He said, “Anyway, these days, nearly all elite teams—the
French Parachute Regiment, the SAS, the Navy SEALs— nearly all
of them carry contingency plans just in case they fail in their
missions. We call those contingency plans 'erasers' because
that's exactly what they're designed to do: erase
that whole team's existence. Make it look like that team was never
there. Sometimes they're called cyanide pills, because if any of
the enemy are caught, the eraser will ultimately act as their
suicide pill.”

“So, you're talking about explosives,” Sarah said.

“I'm talking about special explosives,”
Schofield said. "Most of the time erasers are either
chlorine-based explosives or high-temperature liquid detonators.
They're designed to wipe off faces, vaporize bodies, destroy
uniforms and dog tags. They're designed to make it look like you
were never there.

“Erasers are actually a relatively recent phenomenon. No one had
ever really heard about them until a couple of years ago when a German
sabotage team was caught in an underground missile silo in Montana.
They were cornered, so they pulled the pin on three liquid-chlorine
grenades. After those things went off, there was nothing
left. No soldiers. No silo. We think the Germans were there to disable
some ballistic nuclear missiles that we said didn't exist.”

“A German sabotage unit. In Montana,” Sarah said in
disbelief. “Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Germany
supposed to be our ally?”

“Isn't France supposed to be our ally?” Schofield
replied, raising his eyebrows. “It happens. More often than you
think. Attacks from so-called 'friendly' countries. They even
have a term for it at the Pentagon; they call them Cassius Ops, after
Cassius, the traitor in Julius Caesar.”

“They have a term for it?”

Schofield shrugged into his coat. “Look at it this way. America
used to be one of two superpowers. When there were two superpowers,
there was a balance, a check. What one did the other countered. But
now the Soviets are history and America is the only real superpower
left in the world. We have more weapons than any other nation in the
world. We have more money to spend on weapons than any other
nation in the world. Other countries would go broke trying to keep up
with our defense spending. The Soviets did. There are a lot of
countries out there—some of whom we call friends— who
think that America is too big, too powerful, countries who would
really like to see America take a fall. And some of those
countries—France, Germany, and to a lesser extent Great
Britain—aren't afraid to give us a little push either.”

“I never knew,” Sarah said.

“Not many people do,” Schofield said. “But it's one
of the main reasons my unit was sent to this station. To defend it
against any of our 'allies' who might decide to make a play
for it.”

Schofield pulled his parka tight around himself and grabbed the handle
to the main door leading outside.

“You said you wanted to ask me about something,” he said.
“Can you talk as you walk?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess so,” Sarah said as she quickly grabbed a
parka off one of the hooks.

“Then let's go,” Schofield said.

Down on E-deck, Libby Gant was checking the
calibration on a depth gauge.

She and Riley were on the outer perimeter of the deck that surrounded
the pool. It had been a good forty-five minutes since they had seen a
killer whale, but they weren't taking any chances. They stayed
well away from the water's edge.

Gant and Riley were checking the unit's scuba gear, in preparation
for the dive that would be made in the station's diving bell.

They were alone on E-deck, and they worked in silence. Every now and
then, Riley would wander over to the storeroom in the south tunnel and
check on Mother.

Gant put down the depth gauge she was holding and grabbed another.
“What happened to his eyes?” she asked quietly, not looking
up from what she was doing.

Riley stopped working for a moment and looked up at her. When he
didn't speak immediately, Gant raised her own eyes.

For a while, Riley seemed to evaluate her. Then, abruptly, he looked
away.

“Not many people know what happened to his eyes,” he said.
“Hell, until today, not that many people had even seen
his eyes.”

There was a short silence.

“Is that why his call sign is Scarecrow?” Gant said softly.
“Because of his eyes?”

Riley nodded. “Norman McLean gave it to him.”

“The general?”

“The General. When McLean saw Schoneld's eves, he said he
looked like a scarecrow McLean had once had guarding his cornfield
back in Kansas. Apparently, it was one of those scarecrows that had
two slits for each eye, you know, like a plus sign.”

“Do you know how it happened?” Gant asked gently.

At first Riley didn't answer. Then, finally, he nodded. But he
didn't say anything.

“What happened?”

Riley took a deep breath. He put down the helium compressor he was
holding in his hand and looked at Gant. “Shane Schofield
wasn't always in command of a ground Recon Unit,” he began.
“He used to be a pilot, based on the Wasp.”

The USS. Wasp is the flagship of the United States Marine
Corps. It is one of seven Landing Helicopter Dockships in the Corps,
and it is the battle center for any major Marine expedition. Most
casual observers mistake it for an aircraft carrier.

What a lot of people don't know about the Marine Corps is that it
maintains a sizable aviation wing. Although this air wing is used
primarily to transport troops, it is also used to support ground
attacks. For this purpose it is equipped with lethal AH-1W Cobra
Attack Helicopters—instantly recognizable because of their
skinny shape—and British-made (but American-modified) AV-8B
Harrier II fighter jets, or, as they are more widely known throughout
the world, Harrier jump jets. Harriers are the only attack planes in
the world with the ability to take off and land vertically.

“Schofield was a Harrier pilot on the Wasp. One of the
best, so they tell me,” Riley said. “He was in Bosnia in
1995, during the worst of the fighting there, flying patrol missions
over the no-fly zone.”

Gant watched Riley closely as he spoke. He was staring off into space
as he recounted the story.

"One day, late in 1995, he got shot down by a mobile Serbian
missile battery that Intelligence said didn't exist. I think they
found out later that it was a two-man strike team in a jeep with six
American-made Stingers in the backseat.

“Anyway,” Book said, “Schofield managed to eject a
second before the Stingers took out his fuel tanks. He came down bang
in the middle of Serb-held territory.”

Riley turned to face Gant.

"Our lieutenant survived for nineteen days in the Serbian
woodlands—alone—while over a hundred Serbian troops swept
the forest looking for him. When they found him, he hadn't eaten
in ten days.

“They took him to a deserted farmhouse and tied him to a chair.
Then they beat him with a wooden plank with nails stuck into it and
asked him questions. Why was he flying over this area? Was he a spy
plane? They wanted to know how much he knew about their positions
because they thought he was up there providing air support for U.S.
ground forces inside Serb territory.”

“U.S. ground forces were inside Serbian territory?”
Gant asked.