Ice Station Page 5

  ‘Did you know that it is France who subsidises the European Space Agency so that the ESA can charge vastly cheaper prices for taking commercial satellites up into orbit than NASA can?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Son, for the last ten years, France has been trying to unite Europe like never before and sell it to the rest of the world. They call it regional pride. We call it an attempt to tell European nations that they don’t need America anymore.’

  ‘Does Europe need America anymore?’ Munro asked quickly. A loaded question.

  Homes gave his young aide a crooked smile. ‘Until Europe can match us weapon-for-weapon, yes, they do need us. What frustrates France most about us is our defence technology. They can’t match it. We’re too far ahead of them. It infuriates them.

  ‘And as long as we stay ahead of them, they know that they’ve got no option but to follow us. But,’ Holmes held up a finger, ‘once they get their hands on something new, once they develop something that tops our technology, then I think things may be different.

  ‘This isn’t 1966 anymore. Things have changed. The world has changed. If France walked out of NATO now, I think half of the other European nations in the Organisation would walk out with her –’

  At that moment, the doors to the meeting room opened and the French delegation, led by Pierre Dufresne, came back into the room.

  As the French delegates returned to their seats, Holmes leaned close to Munro. ‘What worries me most, though, is that the French may be closer to that new discovery than we think. Look at them today. They’ve recessed this meeting four times already. Four times. Do you know what that means?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’re stalling the meeting. Drawing it out. You only stall like that when you’re waiting for information. That’s why they keep recessing – so they can talk with their intelligence people and get an update on whatever it is they’re up to. And by the looks of things, whatever that is, it could be the difference between the continued existence of NATO and its complete destruction.’

  The sleek black head broke the surface without a sound. It was a sinister head, with two dark, lifeless eyes on either side of a glistening, snub-nosed snout.

  A few moments later, a second, identical head appeared next to the first, and the two animals curiously observed the activity taking place on E-deck.

  The two killer whales in the pool of Wilkes Ice Station were rather small specimens, despite the fact that they each weighed close to five tons. From tip to tail, they were each at least fifteen feet long.

  Having evaluated and dismissed the activity taking place on the deck around them – where Lieutenant Schofield was busy getting a couple of divers suited up – the two killer whales began to circle the pool, gliding around the diving bell which sat half-submerged in the very centre of the pool.

  Their movements seemed odd, almost co-ordinated. As one killer would look one way, the other would look in the opposite direction. It was almost as if they were searching for something, searching for something in particular . . .

  ‘They’re looking for Wendy,’ Kirsty said, looking down at the two killers from the C-deck catwalk. Her voice was flat, cold – unusually harsh for a twelve-year-old girl.

  It had been almost two hours since Schofield and his team had arrived at Wilkes, and now Schofield was down on E-deck, preparing to send two of his men down in the Douglas Mawson to find out what had happened to Austin and the others.

  Fascinated, Kirsty had been watching Schofield and the two divers from up on C-deck when she had seen the two killer whales surface. Beside her, stationed on C-deck to work the winch controls, were two of the Marines.

  Kirsty liked these two. Unlike a couple of the older ones who had merely grunted when she had said hello, these two were young and friendly. One of them, Kirsty was happy to note, was a woman.

  Lance-Corporal Elizabeth Gant was compact, fit, and she held her MP-5 as though it were an extension of her right hand. Hidden beneath her helmet and her silver anti-flash glasses was an intelligent and attractive twenty-six-year-old woman. Her call-sign, ‘Fox’, was a compliment bestowed upon her by her admiring male colleagues. Libby Gant looked down at the two killer whales as they glided slowly around the pool.

  ‘They’re looking for Wendy?’ she asked, glancing down at the little black fur seal on the catwalk beside her. Wendy backed nervously away from the edge of the catwalk, trying, it seemed, to avoid being seen by the two whales circling in the pool forty feet below.

  ‘They don’t like her very much,’ Kirsty said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’re juveniles,’ Kirsty said. ‘Male juveniles. They don’t like anybody. It’s like they have something to prove – prove that they’re bigger and stronger than the other animals. Typical boys. The killer whales around these parts mostly eat baby crabeaters, but these two saw Wendy swimming in the pool a few days ago and they’ve been coming by ever since.’

  ‘What’s a crabeater?’ Hollywood Todd asked from over by the winch controls.

  ‘It’s another kind of seal,’ Kirsty said. ‘A big, fat seal. Killers eat them in about three bites.’

  ‘They eat seals?’ Hollywood said, genuinely surprised.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Kirsty said.

  ‘Whoa.’ Having barely graduated high school, Hollywood couldn’t exactly claim to possess a love for books or academia. School had been a hard time. He’d joined the Marines two weeks after graduating and thought it was the best decision he’d ever made.

  He looked down at Kirsty, assessing her size and age. ‘How come you know all this stuff?’

  Kirsty shrugged self-consciously. ‘I read a lot.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Beside Hollywood, Gant began to laugh softly.

  ‘What’re you laughing at?’ Hollywood asked.

  ‘You,’ Libby Gant said, smiling. ‘I was just thinking about how much you read.’

  Hollywood cocked his head. ‘I read.’

  ‘Sure you do.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Comic books don’t count, Hollywood.’

  ‘I don’t just read comic books.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, I forgot about your prized subscription to Hustler magazine.’

  Kirsty began to chuckle.

  Hollywood noticed, and frowned. ‘Ha-ha. Yeah, well, ‘least I know I ain’t gonna be no college professor, so I don’t try to be somethin’ I’m not.’ He raised his eyebrows at Gant. ‘What about you, Dorothy, you ever try to be somethin’ you’re not?’

  Libby Gant lowered her glasses slightly, revealing sky blue eyes. She gave Hollywood a sad look. ‘Sticks and stones, Hollywood. Sticks and stones.’

  Gant replaced her glasses and turned back to look at the whales down in the pool.

  Kirsty was confused. When she’d been introduced to Gant earlier, she’d been told that her real name was Libby and that her nickname was ‘Fox’. After a few moments, Kirsty asked innocently, ‘Why did he call you Dorothy?’

  Gant didn’t answer. She just kept looking down at the pool, and shook her head.

  Kirsty spun to face Hollywood. He gave her a cryptic smile and a shrug. ‘Everybody knows Dorothy liked the scarecrow better than the others.’

  He smiled as if that explained everything, and went back about his work. Kirsty didn’t get it.

  Gant just leaned on the rail, watching the killer whales, determinedly ignoring Hollywood. The two killers were still scanning the station, looking for Wendy. For an instant one of them seemed to see Gant and it stopped. It cocked its head to one side, and just looked at her.

  ‘It can see me from all the way down there?’ Gant said, glancing at Kirsty. ‘I thought whales were supposed to have poor eyesight out of the water.’

  ‘For their size, killer whales have bigger eyes than most other whales,’ Kirsty said, ‘so their eyesight out of the water is better.’ She looked at Gant. ‘You know about them?’

  ‘I read a lot,’ Gant said, casting
a sideways glance at Hollywood, before turning back to face the killers.

  The two killer whales continued to prowl slowly around the pool. Gliding through the still water, they seemed patient, calm. Content to bide their time until their prey appeared. Down on the pool deck, Gant saw Schofield and the two Marine divers watching the killer whales as they ominously circled the pool.

  ‘How do they get in here?’ Gant said to Kirsty. ‘What do they do – swim in under the ice shelf?’

  Kirsty nodded. ‘That’s right. This station is only about a hundred yards away from the ocean, and the ice shelf out that way isn’t very deep, maybe five hundred feet. The killers just swim in under the ice shelf and surface here inside the station.’

  Gant looked down at the two killer whales on the far side of the pool. They seemed so calm, so cold, like a pair of hungry crocodiles searching for their next meal.

  Their survey complete, the two killer whales slowly began to submerge. In a moment they were gone, replaced by two sets of ripples. Their eyes had remained open the whole way down.

  ‘Well, that was sudden,’ Gant said.

  Her eyes moved from the now empty pool to the diving platform beside it. She saw Montana emerge from the south tunnel with some scuba tanks slung over his shoulders. Sarah Hensleigh had told them that there was a small goods elevator in the south tunnel – a ‘dumb waiter’ – that they could use to bring their diving gear down to E-deck. Montana had been using it just now.

  Gant’s gaze moved to the other side of the platform, where she saw Schofield standing with his head bowed, holding a hand to his ear, as though he were listening to something on his helmet intercom. And then suddenly he was heading toward the nearest rung-ladder, speaking into his helmet mike as he walked.

  Gant watched as Schofield stopped at the base of the rung-ladder on the far side of the station, and turned to look directly at her. His voice crackled over her helmet intercom. ‘Fox. Hollywood. A-deck. Now.’

  As she hastened toward the rung-ladder nearest her, Gant spoke into her helmet mike, ‘What is it, sir?’

  Schofield’s voice was serious. ‘Something just set off the trip-wire outside. Snake’s up there. He says it’s a French hovercraft.’

  Snake Kaplan drew a bead on the hovercraft.

  The lettering on the side of the vehicle glowed bright green in his night-vision gunsights. It read: ‘DUMONT D’URVILLE – 02’.

  Kaplan was lying in the snow on the outskirts of the station complex, bracing himself against the driving wind and snow, following the newly arrived hovercraft through the sights of his Barrett M82A1A sniper rifle.

  Gunnery Sergeant Scott ‘Snake’ Kaplan was forty-five years old, a tall man, with dark, serious eyes. Like most of the other Marines in Schofield’s unit, Kaplan had customised his uniform. A weathered tattoo of a fearsome-looking cobra with its jaws bared wide had been painted onto his right shoulderplate. Underneath the picture of the snake were the words: ‘KISS THIS’.

  A career soldier, Kaplan had been with the Marine Corps for twenty-seven years, during which time he had risen to the magic rank of Gunnery Sergeant, the highest rank an enlisted Marine can reach while still getting his hands dirty. Indeed, although further promotion was possible, Snake had decided to stay at Gunnery Sergeant rank, so that he could remain a senior member of a Marine Force Reconnaissance Unit.

  Members of Recon units don’t care much for discussions about rank. Membership of a Marine Force Reconnaissance Unit alone gives one privileges to which even some officers cannot lay claim. It is not unknown, for instance, for a four-star general to consult a senior Recon member on matters of combat technique and weaponry. Indeed, Snake himself had been approached on several such occasions. And besides, since most of those who were selected for the Recons were sergeants and corporals anyway, rank wasn’t really an issue. They were with the Recons, the elite of the United States Marine Corps. That was rank in itself.

  Upon the unit’s arrival at Wilkes Ice Station, Snake had been put in charge of setting up the laser trip-wire on the landward side of the station, about two hundred metres out. The trip-wire was not really that much different from the rangefinder units on the hovercrafts. It was merely a series of box-like units through which a tiny, invisible laser beam was directed. When something crossed the beam, it triggered a flashing red light on Kaplan’s forearm guard.

  Moments ago, something had crossed the beam.

  From his post on A-deck, Kaplan had immediately radioed Schofield who, sensibly, had ordered a visual check. After all, it might have just been Buck Riley and his team, returning from their check of that disappearing signal. Schofield had set follow-up time at two hours, and it had been nearly that long since Schofield’s team had arrived at the station. Buck Riley and his crew were due here any minute now.

  Only this wasn’t Buck Riley.

  ‘Where is it, Snake?’ Schofield’s voice said over Snake’s helmet intercom.

  ‘South-east corner. Coming through the outer circle of buildings now.’ Snake watched as the hovercraft slowly made its way through the station complex, carefully negotiating its way between the small, snow-covered structures.

  ‘Where are you?’ Snake asked as he stood, picked up his rifle, and started jogging back through the snow toward the main dome.

  ‘I’m at the main entrance,’ Schofield’s voice said. ‘Just inside the front door. I need you to take up a covering position from the rear.’

  ‘Already on it.’

  With the driving snow, visibility was limited, so the hovercraft proceeded slowly through the complex. Kaplan hurried along parallel to it, a hundred yards away. The vehicle came to halt outside the main dome of the ice station. It was slowly beginning to lower itself from its cushion of air when Snake dropped into the snow forty metres away and began to set up his sniper rifle.

  He had just put his eye to his telescopic sight when the side door of the hovercraft slid open and four figures stepped out of it into the snowstorm.

  ‘Good evening,’ Schofield said with a crooked smile.

  The four French scientists just stood there in the doorway to the ice station, dumbstruck. They stood in two pairs, with each pair carrying a large, white container between them.

  In front of them stood Schofield, with his MP-5 held casually by his side. Behind Schofield stood Hollywood and Montana, with their MP-5s raised to shoulder height and their eyes looking straight down the barrels of their guns. Guns which were pointed right at their new visitors.

  Schofield said, ‘Why don’t you come inside.’

  ‘The others are safely back at d’Urville,’ the leader of this new group said, as he sat down at the table in the dining room, alongside his French colleagues. Like the others, he had just passed a thorough pat-down search.

  He had a lean face, hollow, with sunken eyes and high cheekbones. He had said his name was Jean Petard, and Schofield recognised the name from his list. He also remembered the short bio that had appeared under the name. It had said that Petard was a geologist, studying natural gas deposits in the continental shelf. The names of the other three Frenchmen were also on the list.

  The four original French scientists were also there in the dining room – Champion, Latissier, Cuvier and Rae. The remaining residents of Wilkes were now back in their quarters. Schofield had ordered that they remain there until he and his squad had checked out the occupants of this newly arrived hovercraft. Montana and Lance-Corporal Augustine ‘Samurai’ Lau, the sixth and last member of Schofield’s team, stood guard by the door.

  ‘We hurried back as fast as we could,’ Jean Petard added. ‘We brought fresh food and some battery-powered blankets for the return trip.’

  Schofield looked over at Libby Gant. She was over by the far wall of the dining room, examining the two white containers the Frenchmen had brought with them.

  ‘Thank you,’ Schofield said, turning back to face Petard. ‘Thank you for all you have done. We arrived here only several hours after you did and t
he people here have told us how good you have been to them. We thank you for your efforts.’

  ‘But of course,’ Petard said, his English fluent. ‘One must look after one’s neighbours.’ He offered a wry smile. ‘You never know when you yourself might be in need of assistance.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  At that moment Snake’s voice crackled over Schofield’s earpiece: ‘Lieutenant, we have another contact crossing the trip-wire.’

  Schofield frowned. Now things were starting to happen a little too fast. Four French scientists, he could handle. Another four, and the French were starting to show a little too much interest in Wilkes Ice Station. But now, if there were more of them –

  ‘Wait, Lieutenant, it’s all right. It’s one of ours. It’s Riley’s hovercraft.’

  Schofield let out a sigh of relief that he hoped nobody saw, and headed out of the room.

  Over by the wall of the dining room, Libby Gant was sifting through the two large containers that the French scientists had brought with them. She pushed aside a couple of blankets, and some fresh bread. There was also some canned meat down at the bottom of the container. Corned beef, ham, that sort of thing. All were packed in sealed cans, the kind which have a key attached to the side which you use to peel back the lid.

  Gant pushed a couple of the cans aside and was looking for more beneath them when suddenly one of the cans caught her eye.

  There was something wrong about it.

  It was a little larger than the other, medium-sized cans, and was roughly triangular in shape. At first Gant couldn’t tell what it was that struck her about this particular can. It was just that something about it didn’t look right . . .

  And then Gant realised.

  The seal on the can had been broken.

  The peel-back lid, it seemed, had been opened and then set back into place. It was barely visible. Just a thin black line around the edge of the lid. If you were only giving the cans a cursory glance, you would almost certainly miss it.

  Gant turned to look back at Schofield, but he had left the room. She looked up quickly at the French scientists, and as she did so, she saw Petard exchange a quick glance with the one named Latissier.