Ice Station (19 page)

Riley nodded silently. “There were two SEAL teams in there.
Carrying out covert surgical hits on Serbian leadership positions.
Night hits. Good hits. They'd been causing chaos among the Serbs,
absolute chaos. They'd be in and out before anyone knew they even
existed. They'd go in, slash their victims' throats, and then
vanish into the night. They were so good that some of the locals
started saying they were ghosts come to haunt them for what they were
doing to their own people.”

Gant said, “Did Scarecrow know about them? The SEAL teams inside
Serb territory?”

Book was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Yes. Officially,
Schofield was patrolling the no-fly zone. Unofficially, he was sending
grid coordinates of Serb leadership farmhouses to the SEALs on the
ground. It didn't make any difference anyway. He never said a
word.”

Gant watched intently as Riley took a deep breath. He was building up
to something.

“In any case,” Book said, “the Serbs decided that
Schofield had been carrying out reconnaissance for the SEAL
teams, that he had been spotting strategic targets from the
air and transmitting their coordinates to men on the ground. They
decided that since he'd been seeing things that he wasn't
supposed to be seeing, they would cut his eyes out.”

“What?” Gant said.

Riley said, “They pulled a razor blade out of a drawer and they
held him down. Then one of them stepped forward and slowly cut two
vertical lines down across Schofield's eyes. Apparently, as he did
it, the man with the razor blade quoted something from the Bible.
Something about if your hand sins, cut it off, and if your eyes sin,
cut them out.”

Gant felt sick. They had blinded Schofield. “What did
they do then?” she asked.

“They locked him in a cupboard and they let him bleed.”

Gant was still shocked. “So how did he get out?”

“Jack Walsh sent a Recon team to go in and get him,” Riley
said.

Gant's ears pricked up at the name. Every Marine knew of Captain
John T. Walsh. He was the captain of the Wasp, the most
revered Marine in the Corps.

Some thought he should have been Commandant, the highest-ranking
officer in the United States Marine Corps, but Walsh's history of
disdain for any kind of politician had prevented that. The Commandant
is required to liaise regularly with members of Congress, and everyone
knew—Walsh more than anyone—that Jack Walsh wouldn't
be able to stomach that. Besides, Walsh had said he would rather
command the Wasp and liaise with soldiers. The Marines loved
him for it.

Riley went on. "When Scott O'Grady got lifted out of Bosnia
on 8 June 1995, they put him on the cover of Time magazine.
He met the President. He did the whole PR thing.

“When Shane Schofield got lifted out of Bosnia five months later,
nobody heard a thing. There were no TV cameras waiting on the deck of
the Wasp to photograph him as he stepped off that helicopter.
There were no newspaper reporters there to take down his story. Do you
know why?”

“Why?”

"Because when Shane Schofield landed on the Wasp after
being extracted from that farmhouse in Bosnia by a team of United
States Marines, he was the worst-looking thing you have ever
seen.

"The extraction had been bloody. Fierce as hell. The Serbs
hadn't wanted to give up their prized American pilot and
they'd fought hard. When that chopper returned and hit the tarmac
on the Wasp, it had four seriously wounded Marines on board.
It also had Shane Schofield.

“The medics and the doctors and the support crews charged out and
got everybody off the chopper as fast as they could. There was blood
everywhere, wounded men screaming. Schofield was taken away on a
gurney. He had blood pouring out of both of his eyes. The
extraction had been so fast—so intense—that no
one had even had a chance to put gauze patches over his eyes.”

Riley paused. Gant just stared.

“What happened after that?” she asked.

“Jack Walsh copped shit from the White House and the
Pentagon. They hadn't wanted him to send anyone in for Schofield
because Schofield wasn't supposed to be there in the first place.
The White House didn't want the 'political damage' that
would follow from an American search-and-rescue mission for a downed
spy plane. Walsh told them where to shove it, said they could fire him
if they wanted to.”

“What about Scarecrow? What happened to him?”

“He was blinded. His eyes had been ripped to shreds. They took
him to Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Maryland. It's got the
best eye surgery unit in the country, or so they tell me.”

“And?”

“And they fixed his eyes. Don't ask me how, 'cause I
don't know how. Apparently, the razor blade cuts were fairly
shallow, so there was no damage to his retinas. The real damage, they
said, was to the outer extremities of his eyes—the irises and
the pupils. Purely physical defects, they said. Defects which could be
fixed.” Riley shook his head. "I don't know what they
did—some fancy new laser-fusing procedure, someone told
me—but they did it; they fixed his eyes. Hell, all I know is
that if you can afford it—and in Scarecrow's case, the Corps
could—you don't need glasses these days.

“Of course, there was still the scarring on his skin,
but otherwise, they did it. Schofield could see again.
Twenty-twenty.” Riley paused. “There was only one
hitch.”

“What was that?”

“The Corps wouldn't let him fly again,” Riley said.
“It's standard procedure across all the armed forces: once
you've had eye trauma of any kind, you can't fly a
military airplane. Hell, if you wear reading glasses, you're not
allowed to fly a military kite.”

“So what did Scarecrow do?”

Riley smiled. "He decided to become a line animal, a ground
Marine. He was already an officer from his flying days, so he kept his
commission. But that was all he kept. He had to start all over again.
He went from flight status, Lieutenant Commander, to ground force,
Lieutenant Second Class, in an instant.

“And he went back to school. Back to the Basic School at
Quantico. And he did every course they had. He did tactical weapons
training. He did strategic planning. Small arms, scout/sniper. You
name it, he did it. He did it all. Apparently, he said he
wanted to be like those men who'd come in and got him out of
Bosnia. What they'd done for him he wanted to be able to do.”

Riley shrugged. “As you can probably imagine, it didn't take
long for him to get noticed. He was too clever to stay a Second
Lieutenant for long. After a few months, they upped him to Full
Lieutenant, and before long, they offered him a Recon Unit. He took
it. That was almost two years ago now.”

Gant had never known. She had been selected for Schofield's Recon
Unit only a year ago, and it had never occurred to her to wonder how
Schofield himself had become the team's commander. That sort of
thing was officer stuff, and Gant wasn't an officer. She was
enlisted, and enlisted troops know only what they are told to know.
Things like the choice of team commander are left to the higher-ups.

“I've been in his team ever since,” Riley said proudly.

Gant knew what he meant. Riley respected Schofield, trusted his
judgment, trusted his appraisal of any given situation. Schofield was
Riley's commander and Riley would follow him into hell.

Gant would, too. Ever since she had been in Schofield's Recon
team, she had liked him. She respected him as a leader.

He was firm but fair, and he didn't mince words. And he had never
treated her any differently from any of the men in the unit.

“You like him, don't you?” Riley said softly.

“I trust him,” Gant said.

There was a short silence.

Gant sighed. “I'm twenty-six years old, Book. Did you know
that?”

“No.”

“Twenty-six years old. God,” Gant said, lost in thought. She
turned to Book. “Did you know I was married once?”

“No, I didn't.”

“Got married at the ripe old age of nineteen, I did. Married the
sweetest man you'd ever meet, the catch of the town. He was a new
teacher at the local high school, just arrived from New York, taught
English. Gentle guy, quiet. I was pregnant by the time I was
twenty.”

Book just watched Gant silently as she spoke.

“And then one day,” Gant said, “when I was two and a
half months pregnant I arrived home early to find him doing it
doggy-style on the living room floor with a seventeen-year-old
cheerleader who'd come round for tutoring.”

Book winced inwardly.

“I miscarried three weeks later,” Gant said. “I
don't know what caused it. Stress, anxiety, who knows. I hated men
after my husband did that to me. Hated them. That was when I
enlisted in the Corps. Hate makes you a good soldier, you know. Makes
you plant every single shot right in the middle of the other guy's
head. I couldn't bring myself to trust a man after what my husband
did. And then I met him.”

Gant was staring off into space. Her eyes were beginning to fill with
water.

"You know, when I was accepted into this unit, the selection
committee put on this big celebration lunch at Pearl. It was
beautiful, one of those great Hawaiian BBQ lunches— out on the
beach, in the sun. He was there. He was wearing this horrible blue
Hawaiian shirt and, of course, those silver sunglasses.

"I remember that at one point during the lunch everybody else was
talking, but he wasn't. I watched him. He just seemed to bow his
head and go into this inner world. He seemed so lonely, so
alone. He caught me looking and we talked about something
inane, something about what a great place Pearl Harbor was and what
our favourite holiday spots were.

"But my heart had already gone out to him. I don't know what
he was thinking about that day, but whatever it was, he was thinking
hard about it. My guess is it was a woman, a woman he
couldn't have.

“Book, if a man ever thought about me the way he was
thinking about her...” Gant shook her head. “I would just
... Oh, I don't know. It was just so intense. It was like
... like nothing I have ever seen.”

Book didn't say anything. He just stared at Gant.

Gant seemed to sense his eyes on her and she blinked twice and the
water in her eyes disappeared.

“Sorry,” she said. “Can't go showing my emotions
now, can I. If I start doing that, people'll start calling me
Dorothy again.”

“You should tell him how you feel about him,” Book said
gently.

“Yeah, right” Gant said. “Like I'd do
that. They'd kick me out of the unit before I could say,
'That's why you can't have women in frontline units.'
Book, I'd rather be close to him and not be able to touch
him than be far away and still not be able to touch
him.”

Book looked hard at Gant for a moment, as if he was appraising her.
Then he smiled warmly. “You're all right... Dorothy,
you know that. You're all right.”

Gant snuffed a laugh. “Thanks.”

She bowed her head and shook it sadly. Then suddenly she looked up at
Book.

“I have one more question,” she said.

“What?”

Gant cocked her head. “How is it that you know all that
stuff about him? All the stuff about Bosnia and the farmhouse and his
eyes and all that?”

Riley smiled sadly.

Then he said, “I was on the team that got him out.”

“Any sort of paleontology is a waiting
game,” Sarah Hensleigh said as she trudged through the snow next
to Schofield toward the outer perimeter of the station. “But now
with the new technology, you just set the computer, walk away, and do
something else. Then you come back later and see if the computer has
found anything.”

The new technology, Sarah had been saying, was a longwave sonic pulse
that the paleontologists at Wilkes shot down into the ice to detect
fossilized bones. Unlike digging, it located fossils without damaging
them.

Schofield said, “So what do you do while you wait for the sonic
pulse to find your next fossil?”

“I'm not just a paleontologist, you know,”
Sarah said, smiling, feigning offense. “I was a marine biologist
before I took up paleontology. And before all this happened,
I was working with Ben Austin in the Bio Lab on B-deck. He was doing
work on a new antivenom for Enhydrina schistosa.”

Schofield nodded. “Sea snake.”

Sarah looked at him, surprised. “Very good, Lieutenant.”

“Yeah, well, I'm not just a grunt with a gun, you
know,” Schofield said, smiling.

The two of them came to the outer perimeter of the station, where they
found Montana standing on the skirt of one of the Marine hovercrafts.
The hovercraft was facing out from the station complex.

It was dark—that eerie eternal twilight of winter at the
poles—and through the driving snow Schofield could just make out
the vast flat expanse of land stretching out in front of the
stationary hovercraft. The horizon glowed dark orange

Behind Montana, on the roof of the hovercraft, Schofielc saw the
hovercraft's range finder. It looked like a long-barreled gun
mounted on a revolving turret, and it swept from side to side in a
slow 180-degree arc. It moved slowly, taking about thirty seconds to
make a complete sweep from left to right before beginning the return
journey.

“I set them just like you said,” Montana said, stepping down
from the skirt so that he stood in front of Schofield “The other
LCAC is at the southeast corner.” LCAC was the official name for
a Marine hovercraft. It stood for “Landing Craft—Air
Cushioned.” Montana was a stickler for formalities.

Schofield nodded. “Good.”

Positioned as they were, the range finders on the hovercrafts now
covered the entire landward approach to Wilkes Ice Station. With a
range of over fifty miles, Schofield and his team would know well in
advance if anybody was heading toward the station.

“Have you got a portable screen?” Schofield asked Montana.