Ice Station Page 4

  Wendy started winding her head around in Schofield’s hand, forcing him to pat her behind her earflap. He did, and then suddenly Wendy dropped to the ground and rolled over onto her back.

  ‘She wants you to rub her tummy,’ Kirsty said, smiling. ‘She likes that.’

  Wendy lay on the catwalk, on her back, her flippers held out wide, waiting to be patted. Schofield bent down and gave her a quick rub on the stomach.

  ‘You just won yourself a friend for life,’ Sarah Hensleigh said, watching Schofield closely.

  ‘Great,’ Schofield said, rising.

  ‘I didn’t know Marines could be so friendly,’ Sarah said suddenly, taking Schofield slightly off guard.

  ‘We’re not all heartless.’

  ‘Not when there’s something here that you want.’

  The comment made Schofield stop and look at Sarah for a long second. Clearly, she was no fool.

  Schofield nodded slowly, accepting the criticism. ‘Ma’am, if you don’t mind, if we could just get back to what we were discussing before: you know two of them, and you know of one of them, right?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What about the fourth one, Cuvier?’

  ‘Never met him.’

  Schofield moved on. ‘And how many did they take back to d’Urville?’

  ‘They could only fit six people in their hovercraft, so one of their guys took five of our people back there.’

  ‘Leaving the other four back here.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Schofield nodded to himself. Then he looked at Hensleigh. ‘There are a couple of other things we need to talk about. Like what you found down in the ice. And the Renshaw . . . incident.’

  Sarah understood what he was saying. Such matters were best discussed in the absence of a twelve-year-old.

  She nodded. ‘No problem.’

  Schofield looked at the ice station around him: at the pool down at the bottom, at the catwalks set into the walls of the cylinder, at the tunnels that disappeared into the ice. There was something about it all that wasn’t quite right, something that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  And then he realised, and he turned to face Sarah. ‘Stop me if this is a stupid question, but if this whole station is carved into the ice shelf and all the walls are made of ice, why don’t they melt? Surely, you must generate a lot of heat in here with your machinery and all. Shouldn’t the walls be dripping constantly.’

  Sarah said, ‘It’s not a stupid question. In fact, it’s a very good question. When we first arrived here, we found that the heat from the exhaust of the core drilling machine was causing some of the ice walls to melt. So we had a cooling system installed on C-deck. It works off a thermostat which keeps the temperature steady at –1° Celsius no matter what heat we produce. The funny thing is, since the surface temperature outside is almost thirty below, the cooling system actually warms the air in here. We love it.’

  ‘Very clever,’ Schofield said, as he looked around the ice station.

  His gaze came to rest on the dining room. Luc Champion and the other three French scientists were in there, sitting at the table with the residents of Wilkes. Schofield watched them, deep in thought.

  ‘Are you going to take us home?’ Kirsty said suddenly from behind him.

  For a long moment, Schofield continued to watch the four French scientists in the dining room. Then he turned to face the little girl.

  ‘Not just yet,’ he said. ‘Some other people will be here soon to take you home. I’m just here to take care of you until they do.’

  Schofield and Hensleigh walked quickly down the wide ice tunnel. Montana and Hollywood kept pace behind them.

  They were on B-deck, the main living area. The ice tunnel curved around a wide bend. Doors were sunk into it on either side: bedrooms, a common room and various labs and studies. Schofield couldn’t help noticing one particular door which had a distinctive three-ringed biohazard sign on it. A rectangular plate beneath the sign read: BIOTOXIN LABORATORY.

  Schofield said, ‘They said something about it when we got to McMurdo. That Renshaw claimed he did it because the other guy was stealing his research. Something like that.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Hensleigh said, walking fast. She looked at Schofield. ‘It’s just crazy.’

  They came to the end of the tunnel, to a door set into the ice. It was closed and it had a heavy wooden beam locked in place across it.

  ‘James Renshaw,’ Schofield mused. ‘Isn’t he the one who found the spaceship?’

  ‘That’s right. But there’s a whole lot more to it than that.’

  Upon arriving at McMurdo Station, Schofield had been given a short briefing on Wilkes Ice Station. On the face of it, the station seemed like nothing special. It contained the usual assortment of academics: marine biologists studying the ocean fauna; palaeontologists studying fossils frozen in the ice; geologists looking for mineral deposits; and geophysicists like James Renshaw who drilled deep down into the ice looking for thousand-year-old traces of carbon monoxide and other gases.

  What made Wilkes Ice Station something special was that two days before Abby Sinclair’s distress signal had gone out, another high-priority signal had been sent out from the station. This earlier signal, sent to McMurdo, had been a formal request seeking the dispatch to Wilkes of a squad of military police.

  Although the details had been sketchy, it appeared that one of the scientists at Wilkes had killed one of his colleagues.

  Schofield stared at the barred door at the end of the ice tunnel, and shook his head. He really didn’t have time for this. His orders had been very specific:

  Secure the station. Investigate the spacecraft. Verify its existence. And then guard it against all parties until reinforcements arrived.

  Schofield remembered sitting in the closed briefing room on board the Shreveport, listening to the voice of the Undersecretary of Defence on the speakerphone. ‘Other parties have almost certainly picked up that distress signal, Lieutenant. If there really is an extra-terrestrial vehicle down there, there’s a good chance one of those parties might make a play for it. The United States Government would like to avoid that situation, Lieutenant. Your objective is the protection of the spacecraft, nothing else. I repeat. Your objective is the protection of the spacecraft. All other considerations are secondary. We want that ship.’

  Not once had the safety of the American scientists at the station been mentioned, a fact that hadn’t gone unnoticed by Schofield. It obviously hadn’t slipped past Sarah Hensleigh either.

  All other considerations are secondary.

  In any case, Schofield thought, he couldn’t afford to send any divers down to investigate the spacecraft while there existed the possibility that one of the residents of Wilkes might be a source of trouble.

  ‘All right,’ Schofield said, looking at the door, but addressing Hensleigh. ‘Twenty-five words or less. What’s his story?’

  Sarah Hensleigh said, ‘Renshaw is a geophysicist from Stanford, studying ice cores for his Ph.D. Bernie Olson is – was – his supervisor. Renshaw’s work with ice cores was groundbreaking. He was digging core holes deeper than anybody had ever dug before, at times going nearly a kilometre below the surface.’

  Schofield vaguely knew about ice core research. It involved drilling a circular hole about thirty centimetres wide down into the ice shelf and pulling out a cylinder of ice known as a core. Held captive within the core were pockets of gases that had existed in the air thousands of years before.

  ‘Anyway,’ Sarah said, ‘a couple of weeks ago, Renshaw hit the big time. His drill must have hit a layer of upsurged ice – prehistoric ice that has been dislodged by an earthquake sometime in the past and pushed up toward the surface. Suddenly Renshaw was studying pockets of air that were as much as three hundred million years old. It was the discovery of a lifetime. Here was a chance to study an atmosphere that no one has ever known. To see what the earth’s atmosphere was like before the dinosa
urs.’ Sarah Hensleigh shrugged. ‘For an academic, something like that is like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It’s worth a fortune on the lecture circuit alone.

  ‘Only then it got better.

  ‘A few days ago, Renshaw adjusted his drilling vector slightly – that’s the angle at which you drill down into the ice – and at 1500 feet, in the middle of a four-hundred-million-year-old section of ice, he hit metal.’

  Sarah paused, allowing what she had just said to sink in. Schofield said nothing.

  Sarah said, ‘We sent the diving bell down, did some sonic-resonance tests of the ice shelf, and discovered that there was a cavern of some sort right where this piece of prehistoric metal was supposed to be. Further tests showed that there was a tunnel leading up to this cavern from a depth of 3000 feet. That was when we sent the divers down, and that was when Austin saw the spacecraft. And that was when all the divers disappeared.’

  Schofield said, ‘So what does all this have to do with Bernard Olson’s death?’

  Sarah said, ‘Olson was Renshaw’s supervisor. He was always looking over Renshaw’s shoulder while Renshaw was making these amazing discoveries. Renshaw started to get paranoid. He started saying that Bernie was stealing his research. That Bernie was using his findings to write a quickfire article himself and beat Renshaw to the punch.

  ‘You see, Bernie had connections with the journals, knew some editors. He could get an article out within a month. Renshaw, as an unknown Ph.D. student, would almost certainly take longer. He thought Bernie was trying to steal his pot of gold. And then when Renshaw discovered metal down in the cavern and he saw that Bernie was going to include that in his article too, Renshaw flipped.’

  ‘And he killed him?’

  ‘He killed him. Last Friday night. Renshaw just went to Bernie’s room and started yelling at him. We all heard it. Renshaw was angry and upset, but we’d heard it all before so we didn’t think much of it. But, this time, he killed him.’

  ‘How?’ Schofield continued to stare at the locked door.

  ‘He –’ Sarah hesitated. ‘He jabbed Bernie in the neck with a hypodermic needle and injected the contents.’

  ‘What was in the syringe?’

  ‘Industrial-strength drain-cleaning fluid.’

  ‘Charming,’ Schofield said. He nodded at the door. ‘He’s in here?’

  Sarah said, ‘He locked himself in after it happened. Took a week’s worth of food in with him and said that if any of us tried to go in there after him he’d kill us, too. It was terrifying. He was crazy. So one night – the night before we sent the divers down to investigate the cave – the rest of us got together and bolted the door shut from the outside. Ben Austin fixed some runners to the wall on either side of the door while the rest of us slid the beam into place. Then Austin used a rivet gun to seal the door shut.’

  Schofield said, ‘Is he still alive?’

  ‘Yes. You can’t hear him now, which means he’s probably asleep. But when he’s awake, believe me, you’ll know it.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Schofield examined the edges of the door, saw the rivets holding it to the frame. ‘Your friend did a good job with the door.’ Schofield turned around. ‘If he’s locked inside. That’s good enough for me, if you’re sure there’s no other way out of that room.’

  ‘This is the only entrance.’

  ‘Yeah, but is there any other way out the room. Could he dig his way out, say, through the walls, or the ceiling?’

  ‘The ceilings and the floors are steel-lined, so he can’t dig through them. And his room’s at the end of the corridor, so there aren’t any rooms on either side of it – the walls are solid ice,’ Sarah Hensleigh gave Schofield a crooked smile. ‘I don’t think there’s any way out of there.’

  ‘Then we leave him in there,’ Schofield said, as he started walking back down the ice tunnel. ‘We’ve got other things to worry about. The first of which is finding out what happened to your divers down in that cave.’

  The sun shone brightly over Washington, D.C. The Capitol practically glowed white against the magnificent blue sky.

  In a lavish, red-carpeted corner of the Capitol Building, a meeting broke for recess. Folders were closed. Chairs were pushed back. Some of the delegates took off their reading glasses and rubbed their eyes. As soon as the recess was called, small clusters of aides immediately rushed forward to their bosses’ sides with cellular phones, folders and faxes.

  ‘What are they up to?’ the US Permanent Representative, George Holmes, said to his aide, as he watched the entire French delegation – all twelve of them – leave the negotiating room. ‘That’s the fourth time they’ve called a recess today.’

  Holmes watched France’s Chef de Mission – a pompous, snobbish man named Pierre Dufresne – leave the room at the head of his group. Holmes shook his head in wonder.

  George Holmes was a diplomat, had been all his life. He was fifty-five, short and, though he hated to admit it, a little overweight.

  Holmes had a round, moon-like face and a horseshoe of greying hair, and he wore thick, horn-rimmed glasses that made his brown eyes appear larger than they really were.

  Holmes stood up and stretched his legs, looked around at the enormous meeting room. A huge, circular table stood in the centre of the room, with sixteen comfortable, leather chairs placed at equal distances around its circumference.

  The occasion, the reaffirmation of an alliance.

  International alliances are not exactly the friendly affairs the TV news makes them out to be. When Presidents and Prime Ministers emerge from the White House and shake hands for the cameras in front of their interlocking flags, they belie the deal-making, the promise-breaking, the nit-picking and the catfighting that goes on in rooms not unlike the one in which George Holmes now stood. The smiles and the handshakes are merely the icing on very complex, negotiated cakes that are made by professional diplomats like Holmes.

  International alliances are not about friendship. They are about advantage. If friendship brings advantage, then friendship is desirable. If friendship does not bring advantage, then perhaps merely civil relations may be all that is necessary. International friendship – in terms of foreign aid, military allegiance and trade alignment – can be a very expensive business. It is not entered into lightly.

  Which was the reason why George Holmes was in Washington on this bright summer’s day. He was a negotiator. More than that, he was a negotiator skilled in the niceties and subtleties of diplomatic exchange.

  And he would need all his skills in this diplomatic exchange, for this was no ordinary reaffirmation of an alliance.

  This was a reaffirmation of what was arguably the most important alliance of the twentieth century.

  The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

  NATO.

  ‘Phil, did you know that for the last forty years, the one and only goal of French foreign policy has been to destroy the United States’ hegemony over the western world?’ Holmes mused as he waited for the French delegation to return to the meeting room.

  His aide, a twenty-five-year-old Harvard Law grad named Phillip Munro, hesitated before he answered. He wasn’t sure if it was a rhetorical question. Holmes swivelled on his chair and stared at Munro through his thick glasses.

  ‘Ah, no, sir, I didn’t,’ Munro said.

  Holmes nodded thoughtfully. ‘They think of us as brutes, unsophisticated fools. Beer-swilling rednecks who through some accident of history somehow got our hands on the most powerful weapons in the world and, from that, became its leader. The French resent that. Hell, they’re not even a full NATO member any-more, because they think it perpetuates US influence over Europe.’

  Holmes snuffed a laugh. He remembered when, in 1966, France withdrew from NATO’s integrated military command because it did not want French nuclear weapons to be placed under NATO – and therefore, US – control. At the time the French President, Charles de Gaulle, had said point blank that NATO was ‘an American organisation’. No
w, France simply maintained a seat on NATO’s North Atlantic Council to keep an eye on things.

  Munro said, ‘I know a few people who would agree with them. Academics, economists. People who would say that that’s exactly what NATO is designed to do. Perpetuate our influence over Europe.’

  Holmes smiled. Munro was good value. College-educated and an ardent liberal, he was one of those let’s-have-a-philosophical-debate-over-coffee types. The kind who argue for a better world when they have absolutely no experience in it. Holmes didn’t mind that. In fact, he found Munro refreshing. ‘But what do you say, Phil?’ he asked.

  Munro was silent for a few seconds. Then he said, ‘NATO makes European countries economically and technologically dependent upon the United States for defence. Even highly developed countries like France and England know that if they want the best weapons systems, they have to come to us. And that leaves them with two options – come knocking on our door with their hats in their hands, or join NATO. And so far as I know, the United States hasn’t sold any Patriot missile systems to non-NATO countries. So, yes, I think that NATO does perpetuate our influence over Europe.’

  ‘Not a bad analysis, Phil. But let me tell you something, it goes a lot further than that, a lot further,’ he said. ‘So much so, in fact, that the White House maintains that the national security of the United States depends upon that influence. We want to keep our influence over Europe, Phil, economically and especially technologically. France, on the other hand, would like us to lose that influence. And for the last ten years successive French governments have been actively pursuing a policy of eroding US influence in Europe.’

  ‘Example?’ Munro said.

  ‘Did you know that it was France who was the driving force behind the establishment of the European Union?’

  ‘Well, no. I thought it was –’

  ‘Did you know that it was France who was the driving force behind the establishment of a European Defence Charter?’

  A pause.

  ‘No,’ Munro said.