Ice Station (2 page)

Then Austin saw something come out of one of the holes.

“Holy Christ,” he breathed.

Hideous screams burst across the intercom.

In the radio room of the ice station, Hensleigh stared in stunned
silence at the blinking console in front of her. Beside her, Abby had
her hand across her mouth. Terrified shouts rang out from the
wall-mounted speakers:

“Raymonds! ”

“He's gone!”

“Oh, shit, no—”

“Jesus, the walls! They're coming out of the fucking
walls!”

And then suddenly Austin's voice. “Get out of the water!
Get out of the water now! ”

Another scream. Then another.

Sarah Hensleigh grabbed her mike. “Ben! Ben! Come in!”
Austin's voice crackled over the intercom. He was speaking
quickly, in between short, shallow breaths. “Sarah, shit,
I... I can't see anybody else. I can't... They're all...
they're all gone....” A pause, and then, “Oh,
sweet Jesus... Sarah! Call for help! Call for anything you
ca—”

And then a crash of breaking glass exploded across the intercom and
the voice of Benjamin Austin was gone.

Abby was on the radio, yelling hysterically into the mike.

“For God's sake, somebody answer me! This is station
four-zero-niner—I repeat, this is station four-zero-niner. We
have just suffered heavy losses in an underwater cavern and request
immediate assistance! Can anybody hear me? Somebody, please
answer me! Our divers—oh, Jesus—our divers said they saw a
spacecraft of some sort in this cavern, and now, now we've lost
contact with them! The last we heard from them, they were under
attack, under attack in the water. . . .”

Wilkes Ice Station received no response to their distress signal.

Despite the fact that it was picked up by at least three different
radio installationss.

The hovercraft raced across the ice plain.

It was painted white, which was unusual. Most Antarctic vehicles are
painted bright orange, for ease of visibility. And it sped across the
vast expanse of snow with a surprising urgency. Nobody is ever in a
hurry in Antarctica.

Inside the speeding white hovercraft, Lieutenant Shane Schofield
peered out through reinforced fiberglass windows. About a hundred
yards off his starboard bow he could see a second
hovercraft—also white—whipping across the flat, icy
landscape.

At thirty-two, Schofield was young to be in command of a Recon Unit.
But he had experience that belied his age. At five-ten, he was lean
and muscular, with a handsome creased face and closely cropped black
hair. At the moment, his black hair was covered by a camouflaged
Kevlar helmet. A gray turtleneck collar protruded from beneath his
shoulder plates, covering his neck. Fitted inside the folds of the
turtleneck collar was a lightweight Kevlar plate. Sniper protection.

It was rumored that Shane Schofield had deep blue eyes, but this was a
rumor that had never been confirmed. In fact, it was folklore at
Parris Island—the legendary training camp for the United States
Marine Corps—that no one below the rank of General had ever
actually seen Schofield's eyes. He always kept them hidden behind
a pair of reflective silver antiflash glasses.

His call sign added to the mystery, since it was common knowledge that
it had been Brigadier General Norman W. McLean himself who had given
Schofield his operational nickname—a nickname that many assumed
had something to do with the young Lieutenant's hidden eyes.

“Whistler One, do you copy?”

Schofield picked up his radio. “Whistler Two, this is Whistler
One. What is it?”

“Sir—” The deep voice of Staff Sergeant Buck
“Book” Riley was suddenly cut off by a wash of static. Over
the past twenty-four hours, ionospheric conditions over continental
Antarctica had rapidly deteriorated. The full force of a solar flare
had kicked in, disrupting the entire electromagnetic spectrum and
limiting radio contact to short-range UHF transmissions. Contact
between hovercrafts one hundred yards apart was difficult. Contact
with Wilkes Ice Station—their destination—was impossible.

The static faded and Riley's voice came over the speaker again.
“Sir, do you remember that moving contact we picked up about
an hour ago?”

“Uh-huh,” Schofield said.

For the past hour, Whistler Two had been picking up emissions from the
electronic equipment on board a moving vehicle heading in the opposite
direction, back down the coast toward the French research station,
Dumont d'Urville.

“What about it?”

“Sir, I can't find it anymore.”

Schofield looked down at the radio. “Are you sure?”

“We have no reading on our scopes. Either they shut down or
they just disappeared.”

Schofield frowned in thought; then he looked back at the cramped
personnel compartment behind him. Seated there, two to each side, were
four Marines, all dressed in snow fatigues. White-gray Kevlar helmets
sat in their laps. White-gray body armor covered their chests.
White-gray automatic rifles sat by their sides.

It had been two days since the distress signal from Wilkes Ice Station
had been picked up by the U.S. Navy landing ship, Shreveport,
while it had been in port in Sydney. As luck would have it, only a
week earlier it had been decided that the Shreveport—a
rapid deployment vessel used to transport Marine Force Reconnaissance
Units—would stay in Sydney for some urgent repairs
while the rest of her group returned to Pearl Harbor. That being the
case, within an hour of the receipt of Abby Sinclair's distress
signal, the Shreveport— now up and ready to
go—was at sea, carrying a squad of Marines due south, heading
toward the Ross Sea.

Now Schofield and his unit were approaching Wilkes Ice Station from
McMurdo Station, another, larger, U.S. research facility about nine
hundred miles from Wilkes. McMurdo was situated on the edge of the
Ross Sea and was manned by a standing staff of 104 all year round.
Despite the lasting stigma associated with the U.S. Navy's
disastrous nuclear power experiment there in 1972, it remained the
U.S. gateway to the South Pole.

Wilkes, on the other hand, was as remote a station as one would find
in Antarctica. Six hundred miles from its nearest neighbor, it was a
small American outpost, situated right on top of the coastal ice shelf
not far from the Dalton Iceberg Tongue. It was bounded on the landward
side by a hundred miles of barren, windswept ice plains and to seaward
by towering three-hundred-foot cliffs that were pounded all year round
by mountainous sixty-foot waves.

Access by air had been out of the question. It was early winter, and a
minus-thirty-degree blizzard had been assailing the camp for three
weeks now. It was expected to last another four. In such weather,
exposed helicopter rotors and jet engines were known to freeze in
midair.

And access by sea meant taking on the cliffs. The U.S. Navy had a word
for such a mission: suicide.

Which left access by land. By hovercraft. The twelve-man Marine Recon
Unit would make the eleven-hour trip from McMurdo to Wilkes in two
enclosed-fan military hovercrafts.

Schofield thought about the moving signal again. On a map, McMurdo,
d'Urville, and Wilkes stations formed something like an isosceles
triangle. D'Urville and Wilkes on the coast, forming the base of
the triangle. McMurdo—farther inland, on the edge of the
enormous bay formed by the Ross Sea—the point.

The signal that Whistler Two had picked up heading back along the
coast toward Dumont d'Urville had been maintaining a steady speed
of about forty miles an hour. At that speed, it was probably a
conventional hovercraft. Maybe the French had had people at
d'Urville who'd picked up the distress signal from Wilkes,
sent help, and were now on their way back....

Schofield keyed his radio again. “Book, when was the last time
you held that signal?”

The radio crackled. “Signal last held eight minutes ago.
Range finder contact. Identical to previously held electronic
signature. Heading consistent with previous vector. It was the same
signal, sir, and as of eight minutes ago it was right where it should
have been.”

In this weather—howling eighty-knot winds that hurled snow so
fast that it fell horizontally—regular radar scanning was
hopeless. Just as the solar flare in the ionosphere put paid to radio
communications, the low-pressure system on the ground caused havoc
with their radar.

Prepared for such an eventuality, each hovercraft was equipped with
roof-mounted units called range finders. Mounted on a revolving
turret, each range finder swung back and forth in a slow 180-degree
arc, emitting a constant high-powered focal beam known as a
“needle.” Unlike radar, whose straight-line reach has always
been limited by the curvature of the Earth, needles can hug the
Earth's surface and bend over the horizon for at least another
fifty miles. As soon as any “live” object—any object
with chemical, animal, or electronic properties—crosses the path
of a needle, it is recorded. Or, as the unit's range finder
operator, Private José “Santa” Cruz, liked
to put it, “if it boils, breathes, or beeps, the range
finder'll nail the fucker.”

Schofield keyed his radio. “Book, the point where the signal
disappeared. How far away is it?”

“About ninety miles from here, sir,” Riley's
voice answered.

Schofield stared out over the seamless expanse of white that stretched
all the way to the horizon.

At last he said, “All right. Check it out.”

“Roger that,” Riley responded immediately.
Schofield had a lot of time for Book Riley. The two men had been
friends for several years. Solid and fit, Riley had a boxer's
face—a flat nose that had been broken too many times, sunken
eyes, and thick black eyebrows. He was popular in the
unit—serious when he had to be, but relaxed and funny when the
pressure was off. He had been the Staff Sergeant responsible for
Schofield when Schofield had been a young and stupid Second
Lieutenant. Then, when Schofield had been given command of a Recon
Unit, Book—then a forty-year-old, highly respected Staff
Sergeant who could have had his choice of assignment within the Marine
Corps establishment— had stayed with him.

“We'll continue on to Wilkes,” Schofield said. “You
find out what happened to that signal, and then you meet us at the
station.”

“Got it.”

“Follow-up time is two hours. Don't be late. And set your
range finder arc from your tail. If there's anybody out there
behind us, I want to know.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh, and, Book, one more thing,” Schofield said.

“What?”

“You play nice with the other kids, you hear.”

“Yes, sir.”

“One, out,” Schofield said.

“Whistler Two, out.”

And with that, the second hovercraft peeled away to the right and sped
off into the snowstorm.

An hour later, the coastline came into view, and
through a set of high-powered field glasses Schofield saw Wilkes Ice
Station for the first time.

From the surface, it hardly looked like a “station” at
all— more like a motley collection of squat, domelike
structures, half-buried in the snow.

In the middle of the complex stood the main building. It was little
more than an enormous round dome mounted on a wide square base. Above
the surface, the whole structure was about a hundred feet across, but
it couldn't have been more than ten feet high.

On top of one of the smaller buildings gathered around the main dome
stood the remains of a radio antenna. The upper half of the antenna
was folded downward, a couple of taut cables the only things holding
it to the upright lower half. Ice crusts hung off everything. The only
light, a soft white glow burning from within the main dome.

Schofield ordered the hovercraft to a halt half a mile from the
station. No sooner had it stopped than the port-side door slid open,
and the six Marines leaped down from the hover-craft's inflated
skirt and landed with muffled whumps on the hard-packed snow.

As they ran across the snow-covered ground, they could hear, above the
roar of the wind, the crashing of the waves against the cliffs on the
far side of the station.

“Gentlemen, you know what to do,” was all Schofield said
into his helmet mike as he ran.

Wrapped in the blanket of the blizzard, the white-clad squad fanned
out, making its way toward the station complex.

Buck Riley saw the hole in the ice before he saw the battered
hovercraft in it.

The crevasse looked like a scar on the icescape—a deep
crescent-shaped gash about forty meters wide.

Riley's hovercraft came to rest a hundred yards from the rim of
the enormous chasm. The six Marines climbed out, lowered themselves
gently to the ground, and cautiously made their way across the snow,
toward the edge of the crevasse.

PFC Robert “Rebound” Simmons was their climber, so they
harnessed him up first. A small man, Rebound was as nimble as a cat
and weighed about the same. He was young, too, just twenty-three, and
like most men his age, he responded to praise. He had beamed with
pride when he'd overheard his lieutenant once say to another
platoon commander that his climber was so good, he could scale the
inside of the Capitol Building without a rope. His nickname was
another story, a good-natured jibe bestowed upon him by his unit in
reference to his less than impressive success rate with women.

Once the rope was secured to his harness, Simmons lay down on his
stomach and began to shimmy his way forward, through the snow, toward
the edge of the scar.

He reached the edge and peered out over the rim, down into the
crevasse.

“Oh, shit....”

Ten meters behind him, Buck Riley spoke into his helmet mike.
“What's the story, Rebound?”

“They're here, sir.” Simmons's voice was
almost resigned. “Conventional craft. Got somethin' in
French written on the side. Thin ice scattered all about underneath
it. Looks like they tried to cross a snow bridge that didn't
hold.”

He turned to face Riley, his face grim, his voice tinny over the
short-range radio frequency. “And, sir, they's pretty
fucked up.”

The hovercraft lay forty feet below the surface, its rounded nose
crumpled inward by the downward impact, every one of its windows
either shattered or cracked into distorted spider-webs. A thin layer
of snow had already embarked upon the task of erasing the battered
vehicle from history.

Two of the hovercraft's occupants had been catapulted by the
impact right through the forward windshield. Both lay against
the forward wall of the crevasse, their necks bent backward at obscene
angles, their bodies resting in pools of their own frozen blood.

Rebound Simmons stared at the grisly scene.

There were other bodies inside the hovercraft. He could see their
shadows inside it and could see star-shaped splatters of blood on the
cracked windows of the hovercraft.

“Rebound?” Riley's voice came in over his
helmet intercom. “Anybody alive down there?”

“Don't look like it, sir,” Rebound said.

“Do an infrared,” Riley instructed. “We
got twenty minutes before we gotta hit the road, and 1 wouldn 't
want to leave and find out later that there were some survivors down
there.”

Rebound snapped his infrared visor into place. It hung down from the
brow of his helmet, covering both of his eyes like a fighter
pilot's visor.

Now he saw the crashed hovercraft through a wash of electronic blue
imagery. The cold had taken effect quickly. The whole crash site was
depicted as a blue-on-black outline. Not even the engine glowed
yellow, the color of objects with minimal heat intensity.