Ice Station Read online

  Latissier was lying face-down 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 ribcage 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 the 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 his 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 Petard.

  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’ENNEMI.

  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.

  THIRD INCURSION

  16 June 1130 hours

  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 1977 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 his 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 US 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 that 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-foot-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 in the car. 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. They didn’t have any kids yet, but they were working on it.

  ‘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 mom
ent, she was working out of the paper’s D.C. office.

  ‘I’m almost there,’ Pete Cameron 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 extra-terrestrial transmissions, to ‘cross beams’ with a stray spy satellite and pick up a few garbled words from a restricted military transmission.

  Those pick-ups were disparagingly labelled ‘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-storey 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, Cameron 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, dead-pan.

  ‘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 okay 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 Cameron 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 which 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. If one sits behind it, one will not be harmed by its 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 which one finds embossed on the forward face of the mine. It reads: THIS SIDE TOWARD ENEMY.

  Or, in French ‘BRAQUEZ CE CÔTÉ SUR L’ENNEMI.’

  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 counter-attack.

  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 on foot.

  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.

&nb
sp; 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, 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 US 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 localised 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. As such, 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 marvelled 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 front-line 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.