Ice Station (37 page)

“What the ...” Hensleigh said.

The screen read:

“Numbers?” Montana said.

“English?” Sarah Hensleigh said. “What the
hell is this thing?”

For her part, Gant just shook her head. And as she walked away from
the “spaceship” she began to laugh softly.

Schofield and Renshaw lay flat on their backs of
the cold hard surface of the iceberg, listening to the rhythmic sound
of the waves crashing against the ice cliffs two hundred yards away.

They just lay there for a while, catching their breath.

After a few minutes, Schofield reached around with his hand until he
found a small black unit attached to his waist. He pressed a button on
the unit.

Beep!

“What are you doing?” Renshaw said, not looking up.

“Initializing my GPS unit,” Schofield said, still lying on
his back. “It's a satellite location system that uses the
Navistar Global Positioning System. Every Marine has one, for use in
emergencies. You know, so people can find us if we end up on a life
raft out in the middle of the ocean. I figured this wasn't too
much different,” he sighed. “In a dark room on a somewhere,
a flashing red dot just appeared on someone's screen.”

“Does that mean they're gonna come for us?” Renshaw
asked.

“We'll be long dead by the time anybody gets here. But
they'll at least be able to find our bodies.”

Renshaw said, “Oh, great. It's nice to see my tax
dollars at work. You guys build a satellite location system so that
they can find my body. Wow.”

Schofield turned to look at Renshaw. “At least I can leave a note
attached to our bodies telling whoever finds us exactly what happened
at the station. At least then they'll know the truth. About the
French, about Barnaby.”

Renshaw said, “Well, that makes me feel better.”

Schofield propped himself up on his elbow and looked out toward the
cliffs. He saw the mountainous waves of the Southern Ocean smash
against them and explode in spectacular showers of white.

Then, for the first time, he took in the iceberg around him.

It was big. In fact, it was so big it didn't even rock in
the heavy seas. Above the surface, the whole thing must have
been at least a mile long. Schofield couldn't even begin to guess
how large it was under the surface.

It was roughly rectangular in shape, with an enormous white peak at
one end. The rest of the iceberg was uneven and cratered. It looked to
Schofield like a ghostly white moonscape.

He stood up.

“Where are you going?” Renshaw said, not getting up.
“You gonna walk home?”

“We should keep moving,” Schofield said. “Keep warm for
as long as we can and, while we're at it, see if there's some
way we can get back to the coast.”

Renshaw shook his head and reluctantly got to his feet and followed
Schofield out across the uneven surface of the iceberg.

They trudged for almost twenty minutes before they realized they were
going in the wrong direction.

The iceberg stopped abruptly and they saw nothing but sea stretching
away to the west. The nearest iceberg in that direction was three
miles away. Schofield had hoped they might be able to
“iceberg-hop” back to the coast. It wouldn't happen in
this direction.

They headed back the way they had come.

They made very slow going. Icicles began to form around Renshaw's
eyebrows and lips.

“You know anything about icebergs?” Schofield asked as they
walked.

“A little.”

“Educate me.”

Renshaw said, “I read in a magazine once that the latest trend
among assholes with too much money is 'iceberg climbing.'
Apparently it's quite popular among mountaineer types. The only
problem is that eventually your mountain melts.”

“I was thinking about something a little more
scientific,” Schofield said. “Like, do they ever
float back in toward the coast?”

“No,” Renshaw said. “Ice in Antarctica moves from the
middle out. Not the other way round. Icebergs like this one
break off from coastal ice shelves. That's why the cliffs are
sheer. The ice overhanging the ocean gets too heavy and it just breaks
off, becoming”—Renshaw waved his hand at the iceberg around
them—“an iceberg.”

“Uh-huh,” Schofield said as he trudged across the ice.

“You get some big ones, though. Really big ones.
Icebergs bigger than whole countries. I mean, hell, take this baby.
Look how big she is. Most large icebergs live for about ten or twelve
years before they ultimately melt and die. But given the right weather
conditions—and if the iceberg were big enough to begin
with—an iceberg like this could float around the Antarctic for
up to thirty years.”

“Great,” Schofield said dryly.

They came to the spot where Renshaw had hauled Schofield out of the
water after Schofield had destroyed the French submarine.

“Nice,” Renshaw said. “Forty minutes of walking and
we're back where we started.”

They started up a small incline and came to the spot where the French
submarine's torpedo had hit the iceberg.

It looked like a giant had taken a huge bite out of the side of the
iceberg.

The large landslide of ice that had just fallen away under the weight
of the explosion had left a huge semicircular hole in the side of the
berg. Sheer vertical walls stretched down to the water ten meters
below.

Schofield looked down into the hole, saw the calm water lapping up
against the edge of the enormous iceberg.

“We're gonna die out here, aren't we?” Renshaw said
from behind him.

“I'm not.”

“You're not?”

“That's my station and I'm gonna get it
back.”

“Uh-huh.” Renshaw looked out to sea. “And do you have
any idea as to exactly how you're gonna do that?”

Schofield didn't answer him.

Renshaw turned around. “I said, how in God's name do
you plan to get your station back when we're stuck out
here!”

But Schofield wasn't listening.

He was crouched down on his haunches, looking down into the
semicircular hole the torpedo had carved into the iceberg.

Renshaw came over and stood behind him.

“What are you looking at?”

“Salvation,” Schofield said. “Maybe.”

Renshaw followed Schofield's gaze down into the semicircular hole
in the iceberg and saw it immediately.

There, embedded in the ice a couple of meters down the sheer, vertical
cliff face, Renshaw saw the distinctive square outline of a frozen
glass window.

Schofield tied their two parkas together and, using the two jackets as
a rope, got Renshaw to lower him down to the window set into the ice
cliff.

Schofield hung high above the water, in front of the frozen glass
window. He looked at it closely.

It was definitely man-made.

And old, too. The wooden panes of the window were weathered and
scarred, bleached to a pale gray. Schofield wondered how long the
window—and whatever structure it was attached to—had been
buried inside this massive iceberg.

The way he figured it, the blast from the submarine's torpedo must
have dislodged the ten meters or so of ice in from of the window,
exposing it. The window and whatever it was attached to, had been
buried deep within the iceberg.

Schofield took a deep breath. Then he kicked hard, shattering the
window.

He saw darkness beyond the now-open window, a small cave of some sort.

He pulled a flashlight from his hip pocket and, with a final look up
at Renshaw, swung himself in through the window and into the belly of
the iceberg.

The first thing Schofield saw through the beam
of his flashlight was the upside-down words:

The words were written on a banner of some sort. It hung
limply:—upside down—across the cave in which Schofield now
stood.

Only it wasn't a cave.

It was a room of some sort—a small wooden-walled room,
completely buried within the ice.

And everything was upside down. The whole room was inverted.

It was a strange sensation, everything being upside-down. It took
Schofield a second to realize that he was actually standing on the
ceiling of the underground room.

He looked off to his right. There seemed to be several other rooms
branching off from this one—

“Hello down there!” Renshaw's voice sailed in from
outside.

Schofield poked his head out through the window in the ice cliff.

“Hey, what's happening? I'm freezing my nuts off out
here,” Renshaw said.

“Have you ever heard of Little America IV?” Schofield asked.

“Yeah,” Renshaw said. “It was one of our research
stations back in the sixties. Floated out to sea in '69 when the
Ross Ice Shelf calved an iceberg nine thousand square kilometers big.
The Navy looked for it for three months, but they never found
it.”

“Well, guess what,” Schofield said. “We just did.”

Cloaked in three thick woolen blankets, James Renshaw sat down on the
floor of the main room of Little America IV. He rubbed his hands
together vigorously, blew on them with his warm breath, while
Schofield—still dressed in his waterlogged
fatigues—rummaged through the other rooms of the darkened
inverted station. Neither man dared to eat any of the thirty-year-old
canned food that lay strewn about the floor.

“As I remember it, Little America IV was kind of like
Wilkes,” Renshaw said. “It was a resource exploration
station, built into the coastal ice shelf. They were after offshore
oil deposits buried in the continental shelf. They used to lower
collectors all the way to the bottom to see if the soil down there
contained—”

“Why is everything upside-down?” Schofield asked from the
next room.

“That's easy. When this iceberg calved, it must have flipped
over.”

“The iceberg flipped over?”

“It's been known to happen,” Renshaw said. “And if
you think about it, it makes sense. An iceberg is top-heavy when it
breaks off the mainland, because all the ice that's been living
underwater has been slowly eroded over the years by the
warmer seawater. So unless your iceberg is perfectly balanced when it
breaks free from the mainland, the whole thing tips over.”

In the next room, Schofield was negotiating his way through piles of
rusty overturned junk. He stepped around a large, cylindrical cable
spooler that lay awkwardly on its side. Then he saw something.

“How long did you say the Navy looked for this station?”
Schofield asked.

“About three months.”

“Was that a long time to look for a lost station?”

In the main room, Renshaw shrugged. “It was longer than usual.
Why?”

Schofield came back in through the doorway. He was carrying some metal
objects in his hands.

“I think our boys were doing some things down here that they
weren't supposed to,” Schofield said, smiling.

He held up a piece of white cord. It looked to Renshaw like string
that had been covered over with white powder.

“Detonator cord,” Schofield said as he tied the white
powdery cord in a loop around his wrist. "It's used as a fuse
for close-quarter explosives. That powdery stuff you see on it,
that's magnesium-sulfide. Magnesium-based detonator cords burn hot
and fast—in fact, they burn so hot that they can cut clean
through metal. It's good stuff; we sometimes use it today.

“And see this.” Schofield held up a rusted pressurized
canister. “VX poison gas. And this”—he held up another
tube— “sarin.”

“Sarin gas?” Renshaw said. Even he knew what that was. Sarin
gas was a chemical weapon. Renshaw recalled an incident in Japan in
1995 when a terrorist group had detonated a canister of sarin gas
inside the Tokyo subway. Panic ensued. Several people were killed.
“They had that stuff in the sixties?” he asked.

“Oh, yes.”

“So you think this station was a chemical weapons facility?”
Renshaw asked.

“I think so, yes.”

“But why? Why test chemical weapons in Antarctica?”

“Two reasons,” Schofield said. “One: Back home, we keep
nearly all of our poison gas weapons in freezer storage, because most
poison gases lose their toxicity at higher temperatures. So it makes
sense to do your testing in a place that's cold all year
round.”

“And the second reason?”

“The second reason is a lot simpler,” Schofield said,
smiling at Renshaw. “Nobody's looking.”

Schofield headed back into the next room. “In any case,” he
said as he disappeared behind the doorway, “none of that's
really much use to us right now. But they do have something
else back here that might be helpful. In fact, I
think it might just get us back in the game.”

“What is it?”

“This,” Schofield said as he reappeared in the doorway and
pulled a dusty scuba tank out into view.

Schofield set to work calibrating the thirty-year-old scuba gear.
Renshaw was tasked with cleaning out the breathing apparatus—the
mouthpieces, the valves, the air hoses.

The compressed air mix was the main risk. After thirty years of
storage, there was a risk that it had gone toxic.

There was only one way to find out.

Schofield tested it—he took a deep inhalation and looked at
Renshaw. When he didn't drop dead, he declared the air OK.

The two men worked on the scuba gear for about twenty minutes. Then,
as they were nearing readiness, Renshaw said quietly, “Did you
ever get to see Bernie Olson's body?”

Schofield looked over at Renshaw. The little scientist was bent over a
pair of mouthpieces, washing them out with seawater.

“As a matter of fact, I did,” Schofield said softly.

“What did you see?” Renshaw said, interested.

Schofield hesitated. “Mr. Olson had bitten his own tongue
off.”

“Hmmm.”

“His jaw was also locked rigidly in place and his eyes were
heavily inflamed—red-rimmed, bloodshot.”

Renshaw nodded. “And what were you told happened to him?”

“Sarah Hensleigh told me you stabbed him in the neck with a
hypodermic needle and injected liquid drain cleaner into his
bloodstream.”

Renshaw nodded sagely. “I see. Lieutenant, could you have a look
at this please?” Renshaw pulled a waterlogged book from the
breast pocket of his parka. It was the thick book that he had taken
from his room when they had evacuated the station.

Renshaw handed it to Schofield. Biotoxicology and Toxin-Related
Illnesses.

Renshaw said, “Lieutenant, when someone poisons you with drain
cleaner, the poison stops your heart, just like that.
There's no struggle. There's no fight. You just die. Chapter
2.”

Schofield flipped the water-soaked pages to chapter 2. He saw the
heading: “Toxin-Related Instantaneous Physiological Death.”

He saw a list of what the author had called “Known Poisons.”
In the middle of the list, Schofield saw “industrial cleaning
fluids, insecticides.”

“The point is,” Renshaw said, “there are no
outward signs of death by such a poison. Your heart stops;
your body just stops.” Renshaw held up his finger.
“But not so certain other toxins,” he said.
“Like, for instance, sea snake venom.”

“Sea snake venom?” Schofield said.

“Chapter 9,” Renshaw said.

Schofield found it. “Naturally Occurring Toxins—Sea
Fauna.”

“Look up sea snakes,” Renshaw said.

Schofield did. He found the heading: “Sea Snakes—Toxins,
Symptoms and Treatment.”

“Read it,” Renshaw said.

Schofield did.

“Out loud,” Renshaw said.

Schofield read, “The common sea snake (Enhydrina
schis-tosa) has a venom with a toxicity level three times that of
the king cobra, the most lethal land-based snake. One drop (0.03 mL)
is enough to kill three men. Common symptoms of sea snake envenomation
include aching and stiffness of muscles, thickening of the tongue,
paralysis, visual loss, severe inflammation of the eye area and
dilation of the pupils, and, most notably of all, lockjaw. Indeed, so
severe is lockjaw in such cases, that it is not unknown for victims of
sea snake envenomation to—”

Schofield cut himself off.

“Read it,” Renshaw said softly.

“—to sever their own tongues with their teeth.”
Schofield looked up at Renshaw.

Renshaw cocked his head. “Do I look like a killer to you,
Lieutenant?”

“Who's to say you didn't put sea snake venom inside that
hypodermic syringe?” Schofield countered.

“Lieutenant,” Renshaw said, “at Wilkes Ice Station, sea
snake venoms are kept in the Biotoxins Lab, which is
always—always—locked. Only a few people have
access to that room, and I'm not one of them.”

Schofield remembered the Biotoxins Laboratory on B-deck, remembered
the distinctive three-circled biohazard sign pasted across its door.

Strangely, though, he also found himself remembering something else.

He remembered Sarah Hensleigh telling him earlier: “Before all
this happened, I was working with Ben Austin in the Bio Lab
on B-deck. He was doing work on a new antivenom for Entrydrina
schistosa.”

Schofield shook the thought away.

No. Not possible.

He turned to Renshaw. “So who do you think killed Bernie
Olson?”

“Why, someone who had access to the Biotoxins Lab, of
course,” Renshaw said. “That could mean only Ben Austin,
Harry Cox, or Sarah Hensleigh.”

Sarah Hensleigh..:.

Schofield said, “Why would any of them want to kill Olson?”

“I have no idea,” Renshaw said. “No idea.”

“So as far as you know, not one of those people had a motive to
kill Olson?”

“That's right.”

“But you had a motive,” Schofield said. “Olson
was stealing your research.”

“Which kind of makes me the ideal person to set up, doesn't
it?” Renshaw said.

Schofield said, “But if someone really wanted to set you up, they
would have actually used drain cleaner to kill Olson. Why go to the
trouble of using sea snake venom?”

“Good point,” Renshaw said. “Good point. But if you
read that book, you'll find that drain cleaner has a 59% mortality
rate. Sea snake venom has a 98 % mortality rate. Whoever killed Olson
wanted to make sure that he died. That's why they used
the sea snake venom. They did not want him to be resuscitated.”

Schofield pursed his lips in thought.

Then he said, 'Tell me about Sarah Hensleigh."

“What about her?”

“Do you two get along? Do you like her; does she like you?”

“No, no, and no.”

Schofield said, “Why don't you like her?”

“You really want to know?” Renshaw sighed deeply.
He looked away. “It's because she married my best
friend—actually, he was also my boss—and she didn't
love him.”

“Who was that?” Schofield asked.

“A guy named Brian Hensleigh. He was head of geophysics at
Harvard before he died.”

Schofield remembered Kirsty telling him about her father before. How
he had taught her advanced math. And how he had died only recently.

“He died in a car accident, didn't he?”

“That's right,” Renshaw said. “Drunk driver jumped
the curb and killed him.” Renshaw looked up at Schofield.
“How come you know that?”

“Kirsty told me.”

“Kirsty told you.” Renshaw nodded slowly. “She's a
good kid, Lieutenant. Did she tell you that she's my
goddaughter?”

“No.”

“When she was born, Brian asked me to be her godfather, you know,
in case anything ever happened to him. Her mother, Mary Anne, died of
cancer when Kirsty was seven.”

Schofield said, “Wait a second. Kirsty's mother died when she
was seven?”

“Yep.”

“So, Sarah Hensleigh isn't Kirsty's
mother?”

“That's right,” Renshaw said. “Sarah Hensleigh was
Brian's second wife. Sarah Hensleigh is Kirsty's
stepmother.”

Suddenly things began to make sense to Schofield. The way Kirsty
hardly ever spoke to Sarah. The way she withdrew into herself whenever
she was near Sarah. The natural response of a child to a stepmother
she didn't like.

“I don't know why Brian married her,” Renshaw said.
“I know he was lonely, and, well, Sarah is attractive
and she did show him quite a bit of attention. But she was
ambitious. Boy, was she ambitious. You could see it in her eyes. She
just wanted his name, wanted to meet the people he worked with. She
didn't want him. And the last thing she wanted was his
kid.”

Renshaw laughed sadly. “And then that drunk driver skipped the
curb and killed Brian and in one fell swoop Sarah lost Brian
and got the kid she never wanted.”

Schofield asked. "So why doesn't she like you!'

Renshaw laughed again. “Because I told Brian not to marry
her.”

Schofield shook his head. Obviously there had been a lot more going on
at Wilkes Ice Station before he and his Marines had arrived than
initially met the eye.

“You ready with those mouthpieces?” he asked.

“All set.”

“This conversation is to be continued,” Schofield said as he
got to his feet and began to shoulder into one of the scuba tanks.

“Wait a second,” Renshaw said, standing. “You're
going back in there now? What if you get killed going back
in? Then there'll be nobody left who believes my story.”

“Who said I believed your story?” Schofield said.

“You believed it. I know you believed it.”

“Then it looks like you'd better come with me. Make sure I
don't get killed,” Schofield said as he walked over to the
window set into the iceberg and looked out through it.

Renshaw paled. “OK, OK, let's just slow down for a second
here. Have you given any thought to the fact that there is a pod of
killer whales out there? Not to mention some kind of seal
that kills killer whales—”