Ice Station (3 page)

More important, however, there were no blobs of orange or yellow
within the image of the vehicle. Any bodies that were still
inside the hovercraft were ice cold. Everyone on board was most
certainly dead.

Rebound said, “Sir, infrared reading is nega—”

The ground gave way beneath him.

There was no warning. No preemptive cracking of the ice. No sense of
it weakening.

Rebound Simmons dropped like a stone into the crevasse.

It happened so fast that Buck Riley almost missed it. One second, he
was watching Rebound as he peered out over the edge of the crevasse.
The next second, Rebound simply dropped out of sight.

The black rope slithered out over the edge after the young private,
uncoiling at a rapid rate, shooting out over the rim.

“Hold fast!” Riley yelled to the two Marines anchoring the
rope. They held the rope tightly, taking the strain, waiting for the
jolt.

The rope continued to splay out over the edge until whack!,
it went instantly taut.

Riley stepped cautiously over to the right, away from the edge of the
crevasse, but close enough so that he could peer down into it.

He saw the wrecked hovercraft down at the bottom of the hole and the
two bloodied and broken bodies pressed up against the ice wall in
front of it. And he saw Rebound, hanging from his rope, two feet above
the hovercraft's banged-open starboard door.

“You OK?” Riley said into his helmet mike.

“Never doubted you for a second, sir.”

“Just hold on. We'll have you up in a minute.”

“Sure.”

Down in the crevasse, Rebound swung stupidly above the destroyed
hovercraft, From where he hung he could see in through the open
starboard door of the hovercraft. “Oh, Jesus...,”
he breathed.

Schofield knocked loudly on the big wooden door.

The door was set into the square-shaped base structure that supported
the main dome of Wilkes Ice Station. It lay at the bottom of a narrow
ramp that descended about eight feet into the ice.

Schofield banged his fist on the door again.

He was lying flat on the parapet of the base structure, reaching down
from above the door to knock on it.

Ten yards away, lying on his belly in the snow at the top of the ramp
with his legs splayed wide, was Gunnery Sergeant Scott
“Snake” Kaplan. His M-16E assault rifle was trained on the
unopened door.

There came a sudden creak, and Schofield held his breath as a
sliver of light stretched out onto the snow beneath him and the door
to the station slowly began to open.

A figure stepped out onto the snow ramp beneath him. It was a man.
Wrapped in about seven layers of clothing. Unarmed.

Suddenly the man tensed, presumably as he saw Snake lying in the snow
in front of him, with his M-16 pointed right at the bridge of the
man's nose.

“Hold it right there” Schofield said from above and
behind the man. “United States Marines.”

The man remained frozen.

“Unit Two is in. Secure,” a woman's voice
whispered over Schofield's earpiece.

“Unit Three. In and secure.”

“All right. We're coming in through the front door.”

Schofield slid down from his perch and landed next to the man on the
snow ramp and began to pat him down.

Snake strode down the ramp toward them, his rifle up, pointed at the
man.

Schofield said to the man, “You American? What's your
name?”

The man spoke.

“Non. Je suis Français.”

And then in English, “My name is Luc.”

There is a tendency among academic observers to
view Antarctica as the last neutral territory on earth. In Antarctica,
so it is said, there are no traditional or holy sites to fight over,
no historical borders to dispute. What remains is something of a
terra communis, a land belonging to the community.

Indeed, by virtue of the Antarctic Treaty, since 1961 the continent
has been divided up into what looks like an enormous pie chart, with
each party to the treaty being allocated a sector of the pie. Some
sectors overlap, as with those administered by Chile, Argentina, and
the United Kingdom. Others cover monumentally vast tracts of
land—Australia administers a sector of the pie that covers
nearly a whole quarter of the Antarctic landmass. There is even one
sector—that which covers the Amundsen Sea and Byrd
Land—that belongs to no one.

The general impression is one of a truly international land-mass. Such
an impression, however, is misguided and simplistic.

Advocates of the “politically neutral Antarctica” fail to
acknowledge the continuing animosity between Argentina and Great
Britain as to their respective Antarctic claims, or the staunch
refusal of all of the parties to the Antarctic Treaty to vote
on the 1985 UN Resolution that would have dedicated the Antarctic
landmass to the benefit of the entire international
community, or the mysterious conspiracy of silence among the Treaty
nations that followed a little-known Greenpeace report in 1995 that
accused the French government of conducting secret underground nuclear
detonations off the coast of Victoria Land.

More important, however, such advocates also fail to recognize that a
land without clearly defined borders has no means of dealing with
hostile foreign incursions.

Research stations can often be a thousand miles apart. Sometimes those
research stations discover items of immense value—uranium,
plutonium, gold. It is not impossible that a foreign state, desperate
for resources, would, upon learning of such a discovery, send an
incursionary force to appropriate that discovery before the rest of
the world even knew it existed.

Such an incident—insofar as it could be known—had never
happened in Antarctica before.

There's always a first time, Schofield thought as he was
led into Wilkes Ice Station by the Frenchman named Luc.

Schofield had heard a recording of Abby Sinclair's distress
signal, heard her mention the discovery of a spacecraft buried within
the ice underneath Wilkes Ice Station. If the scientists at Wilkes
had, in fact, discovered an extraterrestrial spacecraft, it would
definitely be something other parties would be interested in. Whether
or not they had the nerve to send a strike team in to get it was
another question.

In any case, it made him more than a little uneasy to be greeted at
the doors of an American research station by a
French national, and as he walked down the dark, ice-walled
entrance tunnel behind Luc, Schofield found himself gripping his
automatic pistol a little more tightly.

The two men emerged from the darkened entry tunnel into brightly lit,
wide open space. Schofield found himself standing on a thin metal
catwalk overlooking a wide, cylindrical chasm of empty space.

Wilkes Ice Station opened in front of him, a giant subterranean
structure. Narrow black catwalks ran around the circumference of the
underground cylinder, surrounding the wide central shaft. At the base
of the enormous cylinder Schofield saw a circular pool of water, in
the middle of which sat the station's diving bell.

“This way,” Luc said, guiding Schofield to the right.
“They're all in the dining room.”

As he entered the dining room preceded by Luc, Schofield felt like an
adult entering a preschool classroom: a stranger who by the simple
fact of his size and bearing just doesn't fit in.

The group of five survivors sat in a tight circle around the table.
The men were unshaven, the women unkempt. They all looked exhausted.
They looked up wearily as Schofield entered the room.

There were two other men in the room, standing behind the table.
Unlike the people seated at the table, these two, like Luc, seemed
alert, clean, and fresh. One of them was holding a tray of steaming
drinks. He froze in midstep as soon as he saw Schofield walk into the
room.

French scientists from d'Urville, Schofield thought.
Here in response to the distress signal.

Probably.

At first, no one said anything.

Everyone in the room just looked at Schofield, taking in his helmet
and his silver antiflash glasses; his body armor and his snow
fatigues; the MP-5 machine pistol slung over his shoulder; the .44
automatic in his hand.

Snake came in behind Schofield, and all eyes switched to him:
similarly garbed, similarly armed. A clone.

“It's OK,” Luc said gently to the others. “They are
Marines. They are here to rescue you.”

One of the women let out a gasp of air. “Oh, Jesus,” she
said. Then she started to cry. “Oh, thank God.”

American accent, Schofield noted. The woman pushed back her
chair and came toward him, tears pouring down her cheeks. “I knew
you'd come,” she said. “I knew you'd come.”

She clutched Schofield's shoulder plate and began sobbing into his
chest. Schofield showed no emotion. He held his pistol clear of her,
as he'd been trained to do.

“It's OK, ma'am,” was all he said as he guided her
gently to a nearby seat. “It's OK. You're all right
now.”

Once she was seated, he turned to face the others. “Ladies and
gentleman. We are Reconnaissance Unit Sixteen of the United States
Marine Corps. My name is Lieutenant Shane Schofield, and this is
Sergeant Scott Kaplan. We are here in response to your distress
signal. We have instructions to secure this station and ensure that
each of you is unharmed.”

One of the men at the table let out a sigh of relief.

Schofield went on. “So that you're under no illusions, I will
tell you now that we are a Reconnaissance Unit. We will
not be extracting you. We are a front-line unit. We travel
fast, and we travel light. Our task is to get here quickly and make
sure that you are all OK. If there's an emergency situation, we
will extract you; if not, our orders are to secure this station and
wait for a fully equipped extraction team to arrive.”

Schofield turned to face Luc and the other two men standing behind the
table. “Now, I presume you gentlemen are from d'Urville. Is
that correct?”

The man with the tray in his hands swallowed loudly, his eyes wide.

“Yes,” Luc said. “That is correct. We heard the message
on the radio, and we came as soon as we could. To help.”

As Luc spoke, a woman's voice crackled over Schofield's
earpiece. “Unit Two, sweep is clear.”

“Unit Three. We have found three—no, actually,
make that four—contacts in the drilling room. We're on our
way up now.”

Schofield nodded at Luc. “Your names?”

“I am Professor Luc Champion,” Luc said. “This is
Professor Jean-Pierre Cuvier, and holding the tray there is Dr. Henri
Rae.”

Schofield nodded slowly, taking the names in, comparing them to a list
he'd seen on the Shreveport two days previously. It had
been a list of the names of every French scientist stationed at
d'Urville. Champion, Cuvier, and Rae were on it.

There was a knock on the door and Schofield turned.

Sergeant Morgan “Montana” Lee stood in the doorway to the
dining room. Montana Lee was a nugget of a man, stocky and, at
forty-six years of age, the oldest member of the unit. He had a pug
nose and a heavyset, weathered face. Ten yards behind him stood his
partner, Corporal Oliver “Hollywood” Todd. Tall, black, and
lean, Hollywood Todd was twenty-one years old.

And in between the two Marines stood the fruits of their sweep.

One woman.

One man.

One young girl.

And one seal.

“They got here about four hours ago,”
Sarah Hensleigh said

Schofield and Hensleigh were standing on A-deck, out on the catwalk
that looked out over the rest of the ice station.

As Hensleigh had already explained, Wilkes Ice Station was essentially
a great big vertical cylinder that had been bored into the ice shelf.
It dived five stories straight down, all the way to sea level.

Indented at regular intervals on the walls of the cylinder were metal
catwalks that ran around the circumference of the cylinder. Each
catwalk was joined to the one above it by steep, narrow rung-ladders,
so that the whole structure looked kind of like a fire escape.

Branching out from each catwalk, burrowing into the icy walls
of the cylinder, was a series of tunnels that formed the different
levels of the station. Each level was made up of four straight tunnels
that branched out from the central shaft to meet a curved outer tunnel
that ran in a wide circle around the central well. The four
straight tunnels roughly equated the four points on a compass, so they
were simply labeled north, south, east, and west.

Each catwalk/level of Wilkes Ice Station was labeled A through
E—A-deck being the highest, E-deck signifying the wide metal
platform that surrounded the large pool of water at the base of the
massive underground structure. On C-deck, the middle level, Sarah
said, a narrow retractable bridge was able to extend across the wide
central shaft of the station.

“How many?” Schofield asked.

“There were five of them at first,” Sarah said. “Four
stayed here with us, while the fifth guy took the others back to
d'Urville on their hovercraft.”

“You know them?”

Sarah said, “I know Luc and I know Henri—who I think wet
himself when he saw you guys walk in—and I know of the
fourth one, Jacques Latissier.”

After Montana had led Hensleigh into the dining room a few minutes
earlier, it hadn't taken long for Schofield to figure out that she
was the person to speak to about the previous week's events at
Wilkes Ice Station.

While all the others looked either dejected or tired, Sarah had
appeared collected and in control. Indeed, Montana and Hollywood had
said that they'd found her while she had been showing one of the
French scientists the core-drilling room down on E-deck. His name had
been Jacques Latissier—a tall man with a thick black
beard—and he was also on Schofield's mental list.