Ice Station Page 8

  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 directions.

  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 north-west 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. Anodised 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:

  DANGER

  FLAMMABLE PROPELLANT

  L-5

  HIGHLY FLAMMABLE

  Schofield stared at the massive white cylinders. They appeared to be connected to a computer which 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,’ Schofield said to the screen as he hit a key on the keyboard. The screen saver vanished instantly.

  It was replaced by a coloured 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 colours. A colour chart on the side of the screen explained that each colour 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!’ Schofield 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 centre of Wilkes Ice Station.

  ‘Scarecrow! Come on!’ Gant called as she fired up at A-deck from further down the catwalk.

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

  Gant and Schofield raced around 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 second it erupted, Schofield knew that this detonation was different to 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 which 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 recognised the chair as a pilot’s ejection seat from an F-14 fighter. The black exhaust marks beneath the seat’s booster and the sizeable 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 north-west 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 its 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 unrecognisable. The wave of metal shards had cut him down where he stood. And while Hollywood’s body armour 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 armour – 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 blonde 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 40 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 doorframe 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 north-eastern 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 movin
g.’

  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.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ 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 okay, it’s okay,’ Buck Riley said as he ran up to Sarah and Kirsty. ‘You scared the shit out of me, but it’s okay.’

  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 okay?’ 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.