Ice Station (9 page)

“Move!” Schofield said quickly to Gant as he ducked back
inside the doorway and slammed the door shut.

He and Gant moved to the far side of the room just in time to hear the
grenade bounce up against the outside of the thick wooden door.

Clunk, clunk

And then the grenade exploded. White splinters shot out from the
inside of the door as the pointed tips of a hundred jagged metal
shards instantly appeared in their place.

Schofield looked at the door, stunned.

The whole door, from floor to ceiling, was littered with tiny
protrusions. What had once been a smooth wooden surface now looked
like some kind of sinister medieval torture device. The whole thing
was covered with sharp, spiked pieces of metal that had
almost managed to rip right through the thick wooden door.

Other, similar, explosions rang out from the level above Schofield and
Gant. They both looked up.

B-deck, Schofield thought."

I'd probably try to flush us all into the one place.

“Oh, no,” Schofield said aloud.

“What?” Gant asked.

But Schofield didn't answer. Instead, he quickly yanked open the
destroyed door and looked out into the central shaft of the ice
station.

A bullet immediately rammed into the frost-covered door frame next to
his head. But it didn't stop him seeing them.

Up on A-deck, five of the French commandos were on their feet, laying
down a suppressing fire over the whole of the station.

It was cover fire.

Cover fire for the other five commandos who were at that moment
abseiling down from A-deck to B-deck. It was a short, controlled ride,
and in a second the five commandos were on the B-deck catwalk, guns up
and heading for the tunnels.

As he saw them, Schofield had a sickening realization. Most of his
Marines were on B-deck, having retreated there after the second French
team had charged in through the main entrance of the station.

And there was another thing.

B-deck was the main living area of Wilkes Ice Station. And Schofield
himself had sent the American scientists back to their quarters while
he and his team had gone to meet the newly arrived French hovercraft.

Schofield stared up at B-deck in horror.

The French had flushed them all into one place.

On B-deck, the world suddenly went crazy.

No sooner had Riley and Hollywood rounded the bend in the ice tunnel
than they were confronted by the frightened faces of the residents of
Wilkes Ice Station.

The instant he saw them, Riley suddenly remembered what B-deck was.

The living area.

Suddenly a stream of submachine-gun fire raked the ice wall behind
him.

At the same time, Schofield's voice came over Riley's helmet
intercom: “All units, this is Scarecrow. I have a visual on
five hostile objects landing right now on the B-deck catwalk. I
repeat, five hostile objects. Marines, if you're on B-deck, look
sharp.”

Riley's mind went into overdrive. He quickly tried to remember the
floor plan of B-deck.

The first thing he recalled was that the layout of B-deck differed
slightly from that of the other floors of Wilkes. All of the other
floors were made up of four straight tunnels that branched out from
the central well of the ice station to meet the circular outer tunnel.
But because of an anomalous rock formation buried in the ice around
it, B-deck didn't have a south tunnel.

It only had three straight tunnels, meaning that the outer, circular
tunnel didn't form a complete circle as it did on every other
floor. The result was a dead end at the southernmost point of the
outer circle. Riley remembered seeing the dead end before: it housed
the room in which James Renshaw was being held.

Right now, though, Riley and Hollywood found themselves in the outer
tunnel, caught on the bend between the east tunnel and the north
tunnel. With them were the scientists from Wilkes, who had obviously
heard something going on outside but had dared not venture beyond the
immediate vicinity of their rooms. Among the frightened faces in front
of him, Riley saw a little girl.

Jesus.

“Take the rear,” Riley said to Hollywood, meaning that part
of the outer tunnel that led back to the north tunnel.

Riley himself began to move past the group of scientists, so that he
could take up a position in view of the east tunnel.

“Ladies and gentlemen! Could you please move back into your
rooms!”

“What's going on?” one of the men asked angrily.

“Your friends upstairs weren't really your friends,”
Riley said. “There's now a team of French paratroopers inside
your station and they will kill you if they see you. Now could you
please get back in your room.”

“Book! Grenade!” Hollywood's voice echoed down
the corridor.

Riley spun to see Hollywood come charging around the bend toward him.
He also caught a glimpse of a fragmentation grenade bouncing into the
tunnel twenty feet behind him.

“Oh, fuck.” Riley turned instantly, looking for cover in the
opposite direction—in the east tunnel, ten yards away.

It was then that he saw two more grenades tumble out of the
east tunnel and come to rest against the wall of the outer
tunnel.

“Oh, really fuck.” Riley's eyes went wide.
There were now fragmentation grenades at both ends of the
tunnel.

“Get inside! Now!” Riley screamed at the scientists
as he began to throw open the nearest door. “Get back in
your rooms now.”

It took the scientists a second to grasp what Riley meant, but when
they did get it they immediately dived for their doorways.

Riley hurled himself inside the nearest doorway and peered back out to
see what Hollywood was doing. The young corporal was running for all
he was worth down the curved tunnel toward Riley.

And then suddenly he slipped. And fell.

Hollywood went sprawling—clumsily, head first—onto the
frost-covered floor of the tunnel.

Riley watched helplessly as Hollywood frantically began to pick
himself up off the floor, looking anxiously back at the fragmentation
grenade in the tunnel behind him as he did so.

Maybe two seconds left.

And in an instant Riley felt his stomach knot.

Hollywood wasn't going to make it.

Right in front of Hollywood—in the only doorway he could
possibly get to in time—two of the scientists were desperately
trying to get into the same room. One was pushing the other in the
back, trying to get him to move inside.

Buck Riley watched in horror as Hollywood looked up at the two
scientists and saw that he had no chance of getting into that room.
Hollywood then swung back round to look at the fragmentation grenade
thirty feet down the curved corridor behind him.

A final, desperate turn, and Hollywood's eyes met Riley's.
Eyes white with fear. The eyes of a man who knows he is about to die.

He had nowhere to go. Nowhere at all.

And then, with thunderous intensity, the three grenades— one
from the north tunnel, two from the east—unleashed their anger
and Riley ducked back behind his doorway and saw a thousand glistening
metal shards whip past him in both

Another explosion rocked the outside of the
thick wooden door, and a new Wave of metal shards slammed into it.

Schofield and Gant were at the back of the room on C-deck, taking
cover behind an upturned aluminium table.

“Marines, call in,” Schofield said.

Voices came in over his intercom; gunfire rang out in the background.

“This is Rebound! I'm with Legs and Mother! We are under
heavy fire in the northwest quadrant of B-deck!”

A burst of static suddenly cut across Schofield's earpiece.
“—is Book... wood is down. I'm in...
quadrant—” Book's voice cut off abruptly, the
signal gone.

“This is Montana, Santa Cruz is with me. We're still on
A-deck, but we're pinned down.”

“Lieutenant, this is Snake. I'm outside, approaching the
main entrance right now.”

There was no word from Hollywood. And Mitch Healy and Samurai Lau were
already dead. Schofield did the math. If all three of them were dead,
then the Marines were down to nine now.

Schofield thought about the French. They had started with twelve men,
plus the two civilian scientists. Snake had said earlier that he'd
killed one outside, and Schofield himself had capped another one
upstairs. That meant the French were down to ten
men—plus the two civilians, wherever the hell they
were.

Schofield's thoughts returned to the present. He looked at the big
wooden door in front of him, covered with dozens of protruding silver
spikes.

He turned to Gant. “We can't stay here.”

“I kind of already got that idea,” Gant replied deadpan.

Schofield spun to look at her, confused by her reply. Gant didn't
say anything. She just pointed over his shoulder.

Schofield turned around and for the first time really looked
at the room around him.

It looked like a boiler room of some sort. Anodized black pipes
covered the ceiling. Two enormous white cylinders—lying on their
sides, one on top of the other—took up the entire right-hand
wall of the room. Each cylinder was about twelve feet long and six
feet high.

And in the middle of each cylinder was a large diamond-shaped red
sticker. On the sticker was a picture of a single flame and, in large
bold letters, the words:

Schofield stared at the massive white cylinders. They appeared to be
connected to a computer that sat on a table in the rear corner of the
room. The computer was switched on, but at the moment the screen was
filled with a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit screen saver: a
buxom blonde in an impossibly small bikini lying provocatively on a
tropical beach somewhere.

Schofield crossed the room quickly and stood in front of the computer.
The sexy woman on the screen pouted at him.

“Maybe later,” he said to the screen as he hit a key on the
keyboard. The screen saver vanished instantly.

It was replaced by a colored schematic diagram of the five floors of
Wilkes Ice Station. Five circles filled the screen— three on the
left, two on the right—each one comprised of the central well of
the station surrounded by a larger outer circle. The outer circle was
connected to the central well by four straight tunnels.

Rooms were arrayed both between the outer tunnel and the
central well and outside the outer tunnel. Different rooms
were painted different colors. A color chart on the side of the screen
explained that each color indicated a different temperature. The
temperatures ranged from —5.4° to —1.2° Celsius.

“It's the air-conditioning system,” Gant said, taking up
a position by the door. “L-5 means it uses chlorofluorocarbons as
propellant. Must be pretty old.”

“Why doesn't that surprise me,” Schofield said as he
walked over toward the door and grabbed the handle.

He opened the door a crack—

—just in time to see a black baseball-sized object come
rocketing toward him.

A long finger of white smoke traced a line through the air behind it,
revealing its source: Petard up on A-deck, with a FA-MAS assault rifle
equipped with an underslung 40mm grenade launcher.

Schofield ducked just as the gas-propelled grenade shot through the
narrow gap in the doorway above his head, banked upward slightly, and
slammed into the back wall of the air-conditioning room.

“Out! Now!” he yelled.

Gant didn't need to be told. She was already on her way out the
door, MP-5 up and firing.

Schofield dived through the doorway after her, just as the
air-conditioning room exploded behind him. The heavy, spike-ridden
door almost blew off its hinges as the concussion wave flung it
outward like a twig. The door whipped around in a full 180-degree arc
before banging into the ice wall out on the catwalk, right next to
Schofield. An enormous fireball then blasted out from the doorway and
shot past Schofield out into the open space in the center of Wilkes
Ice Station.

“Scarecrow! Come on!” Gant called as she fired up at A-deck
from farther down the catwalk.

Schofield leaped to his feet and cut loose an extended burst from his
MP-5, aiming up at where he had seen Petard only moments before.

He and Gant raced aronnd the C-deck catwalk—out in the
open—Schofield with his gun trained up to the left, Gant taking
the right. Long tongues of bright yellow flames burst out from the
muzzles of their MP-5s. Return fire from the French raked the ice
walls all around them.

Schofield saw a small alcove set into the wall about ten yards ahead
of them.

“Fox! There!”

“Got it!”

Schofield and Gant threw themselves into the small alcove just as a
second, more powerful, explosion boomed out from the air-conditioning
room.

From the moment it erupted Schofield knew that this detonation was
different from the first one. It wasn't like the short, contained
blast of a grenade. It had more resonance to it, more substance. It
was the sound of something large exploding . . . .

It was the sound of one of the air-conditioning cylinders
exploding.

The walls to the air-conditioning room cracked instantly under the
weight of the massive explosion. Like a cork being popped from a
champagne bottle, a length of black piping shot clear of the
air-conditioning room and careered at phenomenal speed across the
one-hundred-foot space in the middle of the station and lodged itself
into the ice wall on the far side.

Schofield pressed himself flat against the wall of the alcove as a
hail of bullets slammed into the ice next to him. He looked at the
alcove around him.

It was just a small nook sunk into the wall, designed, it seemed, for
the sole purpose of housing the control console that drove the
enormous winch, which raised and lowered the station's diving
bell. The console itself, Schofield saw, was little more than a series
of levers, dials, and buttons arranged on a panel.

In front of the console sat an abnormally large steel-plated chair.
Schofield immediately recognized the chair as a pilot's ejection
seat from an F-14 fighter. The black exhaust marks beneath the
seat's booster and the sizable dent in its large steel headrest
told Schofield that this ejection seat had, in a former life, been
used for its given purpose. Someone at Wilkes had cleverly mounted the
enormous seat on a rotating stand and then bolted the whole thing down
to the floor, turning four hundred pounds of military junk into
heavy-duty furniture.

Suddenly a new barrage of automatic gunfire thundered down from the
northwest corner of A-deck and Gant jumped onto the ejection seat and
ducked behind the headrest, curling her small frame into a ball so
that she was completely covered by the big seat's steel-lined
backplate.

The burst of gunfire lasted a full ten seconds and pummelled the rear
of the ejection seat. Gant pressed her head up against the headrest,
keeping her eyes shielded from the onslaught of ricocheting bullets.

As she did so, however, some movement caught her eye.

It was off to her left. Down to her left.

Down in the pool at the base of the station. Under the
surface. A glistening black-and-white shape, unbelievably huge,
cruising slowly, ominously, beneath the surface. It must have been
deeper than it appeared, because the high dorsal fin wasn't
breaking the surface.

The first dark shape was joined by a second shape, then a third, and
then a fourth. The lead one must have been at least forty feet long.
The others were smaller.

Females, Gant thought. She had read once that for every one
male there were usually eight or nine females.

The water was choppy and it served only to make their blurred
black-and-white outlines look all the more sinister. The leader rolled
on his side and Gant caught a side-on glimpse of the white underbelly
and the wide open mouth and the two terrifying rows of teeth and
suddenly the picture was complete.

It was then that Gant saw the two juveniles, swimming behind the
enormous lead male. They were the two killers she had seen earlier,
before the battle with the French had erupted, the two killers who had
been searching for Wendy.

Now they were back... and they had brought the rest of the pack
with them.

The full pod of killer whales began to circle the pool at the base of
Wilkes Ice Station, and as she huddled behind the headrest of the
ejection seat Gant felt a new sense of dread begin to crawl up the
back of her spine.

Hollywood had never stood a chance.

The shards from the three fragmentation grenades had rained down on
him with terrifying intensity—from in front and behind.

Book could only watch helplessly as his young partner— on the
floor, on his knees—put a feeble hand over his face and then
fell under the weight of the hailstorm of metal fragments.

The scientist who had been trying to push his colleague into the
nearby doorway hadn't been fast enough, either. Like Hollywood, he
was now unrecognizable. The wave of metal shards had cut him down
where he stood. And while Hollywood's body armor had been
effective in protecting his chest and shoulders from the
blast, the scientist hadn't been so lucky. His whole
body—unprotected by any kind of armor— was a hideous
bloodstained mess.

No exposed tissue could have survived such a bombardment. None had.
The storm of shards had ripped every inch of exposed skin from the two
men's bodies.

And for a moment, a brief moment, Buck Riley could do nothing but
stare at the broken body of his fallen friend.

On the other side of B-deck, Rebound was charging around the curved
outer tunnel, gun up.

Legs Lane and Mother Newman ran behind him, firing desperately back at
the three shadows coming down the tunnel after them.

Legs Lane was a thirty-one-year-old Corporal, olive-skinned,
square-jawed, Italian in both looks and manner. For her part, Mother
Newman was the second of the two women in Schofield's
unit—and she couldn't have been more different from Libby
Gant.

Whereas Gant was twenty-six, compact and had a short crop of straight
blond hair, Mother was thirty-four, six-foot-two, and had a fully
shaven head. She weighed in at nearly two hundred pounds. Her call
sign, Mother, wasn't supposed to mean “maternal figure.”
It was short for motherfucker.

Mother spoke into her helmet mike: “Scarecrow. This is your
Mother speaking. We are experiencing heavy fire on B-deck. I repeat.
We are experiencing heavy fire on B-deck. We have enemy troops behind
us and frag grenades bouncing all over the fucking place. We are
approaching the west tunnel and are going to head for the central
shaft. If you or anyone out there has a visual on the shaft, we'd
really love to hear about it.”

Schofield's voice came over their helmet intercoms:
"Mother. This is Scarecrow. I have a visual on the central
shaft. There are no hostile objects out on the catwalk. We spotted
five on your level before, but they're all in the tunnels
now.

“I can also confirm five more hostiles up on A-deck, and at
least one of those has a forty-mil grenade launcher. If you have to
break out onto the catwalks, we'll cover you from below. Montana,
Santa Cruz? You out there?”

“We're here,” came Montana's voice.

“You still on A-deck?”

“Affirmative that.”

“You still pinned down?”

“We're working on it.”

“Just keep doing what you're doing. Draw their fire. We
're gonna have three of our people stepping out into the open on
B-deck in about ten seconds.”

“No problem, Scarecrow.”

Mother said, “Thanks, Scarecrow. We're moving into the
western tunnel now. Coming to the central shaft.”

In the alcove on C-deck, Schofield keyed his helmet mike again.
“Book! Book! Come in!”

There was no reply.

“Jesus, Book. Where are you?”

Inside the women's shower room on B-deck, Sarah Hensleigh snapped
around at the sound of a door being kicked in.

For one terrifying instant, she thought the French soldiers were
storming the women's shower room. But they weren't. The sound
had come from the next room, the men's shower room.

The French were in the next room!

With Sarah inside the women's shower block were Kirsty, Abby
Sinclair, and a geologist named Warren Conlon. When Buck Riley had
ordered them back to their rooms, the four of them had immediately
scrambled in here. They had only just made it, with Conlon just
managing to squeeze in through the door frame and jam the door shut a
split second before the fragmentation grenades had gone off in the
tunnel outside.

The women's shower block was situated in between the outer tunnel
and the central shaft, in the northeastern corner of B-deck. It had
three doors: one leading to the north tunnel, one leading to the outer
tunnel, and one leading to the men's shower room next door.

More sounds echoed out from the men's shower room.

The sounds of French soldiers kicking open cubicle doors, looking for
anyone who had attempted to hide in the cubicles.

Sarah pulled Kirsty toward the door that led to the north tunnel.
“Come on, honey, keep moving.”

Sarah looked back over her shoulder.

Beyond the row of six shower recesses she could see the top quarter of
the door that led to the men's shower room.

It was still closed.

The French soldiers would be coming through that door any second now.

Sarah reached the door leading out to the north tunnel and grabbed the
handle.

She hesitated. There was no way of knowing what lay on the other side.

“Sarah! What are you doing? Come
on,” Warren Conlon said in a desperate, hissing whisper.
Tall and thin, he was a timid man, nervous at the best of times. Now
he was positively terrified.

“OK, OK,” Sarah said. She began to turn the handle.

There was a loud bang as the door to the men's shower room
suddenly burst open behind them.

“Go!” Conlon yelled.

Sarah threw open the door and, pulling Kirsty with her, charged out
into the north tunnel.

She hadn't gone more than a couple of steps when she stopped dead
in her tracks—

—and found herself looking into the eyes of a man with a gun
pointed right at her head.

The man cocked his head to one side and shook his head.
“Jesus.” He lowered his gun.

“It's OK, it's OK,” Buck Riley said as he ran up to
Sarah and Kirsty. “You scared the shit out of me, but it's
OK.”

Abby Sinclair and Warren Conlon joined them out in the tunnel,
slamming the door shut behind them.

“They in there?” Riley asked, nodding at the women's
shower block.

“Yeah,” Sarah said.

“Are the others all right?” Warren Conlon asked stupidly.

“I don't think they'll be leaving their rooms again in a
hurry,” Riley said as he scanned the tunnel behind him. Automatic
gunfire echoed out from the outer tunnel. As Riley looked behind him,
Sarah noticed a thin line of blood trickling out from a large cut on
his right ear. Riley himself didn't seem to notice it. The
earpiece that he had in that ear had a jagged sliver of metal lodged
in it.

“We may have a slight problem,” Riley said as his eyes
searched the tunnel around them. “I've lost contact with the
rest of my team. My radio gear got hit by some ricocheting fragments
before, so I'm off the air. I can't hear the others, and they
can't hear me.”