Ice Station (40 page)

Suddenly Trent said, “All right, I got one! Hensleigh, Sarah T.
The e-mail address is at USC in California, but it's been routed
to an external address: [email protected]. That's
it!”

Trent typed some more.

“All right,” he said a minute later.
“Excellent. They've got a universal address down there:
[email protected]. Excellent. Now, we can send an
e-mail to anyone who has a computer at that station.”

“Do it,” Cameron said.

Trent typed a message, then did a quick cut-and-paste. When he was
finished he practically slammed his finger down on the send button.

Libby Gant stood in front of the heavy steel
door set into the small ice tunnel.

It had a rusty pressure wheel attached to it. With some difficulty,
Gant turned it. She rotated it three times.

And then suddenly she heard a loud clunking noise from within the
great steel door, and the door creaked open a fraction.

Gant pulled the door wide and shone her flashlight beyond it.

“Whoa,” she said.

It looked like an airplane hangar. It was so big, Gant's
flashlight wasn't even strong enough to see the far end. But she
could see enough.

She could see walls.

Man-made walls.

Steel walls, with heavy reinforcing girders holding up a high
aluminium ceiling. Huge yellow robotic arms stood silently in the
gloom, covered in frost. Halogen lights lined the ceiling. Some metal
girders lay at awkward angles on the floor in front of her. Gant saw
that several of them had jagged marks at their ends—they had
been broken clean in two. Everything was covered in a layer of ice.

Gant saw a piece of paper at her feet. She picked it up. It was frozen
solid, but she could still read the letterhead. It read:

ENTERTECH LTD.

Gant walked back to the small tunnel that led to the main cavern. She
called to Montana and Hensleigh.

A few minutes later, Montana rolled through the horizontal fissure and
walked with Gant into the giant subterranean hangar.

“What the hell is going on here?” he said.

They entered the hangar, their flashlights creating beams of light.
Montana went left. Gant went right.

Gant came to an office-type structure that seemed to be overgrown with
ice. The door to the office opened with a loud creak, and slowly, very
slowly, Gant stepped inside.

A body was lying on the floor of the office.

A man.

His eyes were closed, and he was naked. His skin had turned blue. He
looked like he was asleep.

Gant saw a desk on the far side of the office, saw something on it.
Moving toward the desk, she saw that it was a book of some kind, a
leather-bound book.

It just sat there on the desk all by itself. The rest of the desk was
bare. It was almost, Gant thought, as if someone had left it there
deliberately, so that it would be the first thing a visitor
found.

Gant picked up the book. It was covered in a layer of frost, and the
pages were hard, like cardboard.

She opened it.

It appeared to be a diary of some sort.

Gant read an entry near the beginning:

2 June 1978

Things are going well. But it's so cold!! I can't believe they
brought us all the way down here to build a fucking attack plane! The
weather outside is terrible. Blizzard conditions. Thankfully, our
hangar is built below the surface, so we stay out of the weather. The
sad irony is, we need the cold. The system's plutonium
core maintains its grade for longer in the colder temperatures....

Gant jumped ahead to a page not far from the end of the diary.

15 February 1980

No one's coming. I'm sure of it now. Bill Holden died
yesterday, and we had to cut Pat Anderson's hands off, they were
so frostbitten.

It's been two months now since the quake hit, and I've given
up all hope of rescue. Someone said Old Man Niemeyer was supposed to
be coming down here in December, but he hasn't showed.

When I go to sleep at night, I wonder if anyone but Niemeyer knows
we're here.

Gant flipped back some pages, looking for something. She found what
she was looking for around the middle of the diary.

20 December 1979

I don't
know where I am. We were hit by an earthquake yesterday, the biggest
motherfucking earthquake you have ever seen. It was as if the earth
opened up and just swallowed us whole.

I was down in the hangar when it happened, working on the bird. First
the ground began to shake and then suddenly this massive wall of ice
just thrust up out of the ground and ripped the hangar in half. And
then we just seemed to fall. Fall and fall. Massive chunks of the ice
shelf (each one the size of a building, I estimated) caved in on
either side of us as we were sucked down into the earth—I saw
them make enormous dents in the roof of the hangar. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The quake must have ripped an enormous hole underneath the station and
we just fell down into it.

We just kept going down. Down and down. Shaking and falling. One of
the big robot arms fell on Doug Myers, crushed him to death....

Gant was stunned.

This “hangar” had been an ice station. An ice station that
had been set up in the utmost secrecy to build a plane of some
sort—a plane, Gant noticed, that used plutonium. But this
station, it seemed, had originally been up on the surface—or,
rather, buried just underneath the surface like Wilkes Ice
Station—until an earthquake had hit it and sucked it
underground.

Gant flicked to the very last page of the diary.

17 March 1980

I am the last one alive. All of my colleagues are dead. It has been
almost three months now since the quake hit, and I know no one is
coming. My left hand is frostbitten and gangrenous. I cannot feel my
feet anymore.

I cannot go on. I am going to strip myself naked and lie down in the
ice. It should only take a few minutes. If anyone should read this in
the future, know that my name was Simon Wayne Daniels. I was an
aviation electronics specialist for Entertech Ltd. My wife, Lily,
lives in Palmdale, although I don't know if she'll be there
when you read this. Please find her and tell her that I loved her and
tell her that I'm so sorry I couldn't tell her where I went.

It is so very cold.

Gant looked at the naked body on the floor at her feet.

Simon Wayne Daniels.

She felt a pang of sadness for him. He had died here, alone. Buried
alive in this cold, icy tomb.

And then all of a sudden Santa Cruz's voice exploded across her
helmet intercom, shattering her thoughts: “Montana! Fox! Get
out here! Get out here now! I have a visual on enemy divers! I repeat!
Enemy divers are about to come up inside the cavern!”

The team of SAS divers made their way up the
underwater ice tunnel with the aid of sea sleds. There were eight of
them, and by virtue of their twin-propeller sea sleds they moved
quickly through the water. All of them wore black.

“Base. This is Dive Team. Come in,” the lead diver said into
his helmet communicator.

“Dive Team, this is Base,” Barnaby's voice came
in over the intercom. “Report.”

“Base, time is now 1956 hours. Dive time since leaving the diving
bell is fifty-four minutes. We have a visual on the surface. We are
coming up to the cavern.”

“Dive Team, be aware. We have Intel that there are four
hostile agents inside that cavern waiting for you. I repeat, there are
four hostile agents inside the cavern waiting for you. Use appropriate
action.”

“Copy, Base. We will. Dive Team out.”

Gant and Montana came sprinting back into the main cavern.

They came up alongside Santa Cruz, who was manning the tripod-mounted
MP-5s. He pointed down into the pool.

Several ominous black shadows could be seen rising up through the
clear aqua-colored water..

The three Marines took up positions behind various boulders, MP-5s in
their hands. Montana told Sarah Hensleigh to stay behind him and stay
down.

“Don't be impatient,” Montana's voice said
over their helmet intercoms. “Wait for them to breach the
surface. It's no use firing into the water.”

“Got it,” Gant said as she saw the first shadow rise
steadily through the water toward the surface.

A diver. On a sea sled.

He came closer and closer, up and up, until strangely, just below the
surface, he stopped.

Gant frowned.

The diver had just stopped there, about a foot below the
surface.

What was he doing—

And then suddenly the diver's hand shot up out of the water and
Gant saw the object in his hand instantly.

“Nitrogen charge!” she yelled. 'Take cover!"

The diver tossed the nitrogen charge and it bounced onto the hard, icy
floor of the cavern. Gant and the other Marines all ducked behind
their boulders.

The nitrogen charge exploded.

Supercooled liquid nitrogen splattered everything in sight. The gooey
blue poxy smacked against the boulders the Marines were hiding behind,
splattered against the walls of the cavern. Some of it even hit the
big black ship standing in the middle of the enormous cave.

It was the perfect diversion..

Because no sooner had the nitrogen charge gone off than the first SAS
commando was charging out of the water with his gun pressed to his
shoulder and his finger jamming down on the trigger.

The diving bell was almost at the surface now.
It continued its slow rise upward.

After Schofield had seen Barnaby feed Book Riley to the killer whales,
his anger had become intense. He wanted to kill Barnaby. He wanted to
rip his heart out and serve it up to him on a—

Schofield untied the length of cable wrapped around his waist and
ripped the two bulky sixties wet suits off his body. Then he grabbed
his MP-5 and chambered a round. If he didn't kill Barnaby, then he
was damn well going to take out as many of them as he could.

As he readied his gun, Schofield saw a small Samsonite carry case on
one of the shelves of the diving bell. He opened it. And saw a row of
blue nitrogen charges sitting in a cushioned interior, like eggs in an
egg box.

The SAS must have left them here when they went down to the
cave, he thought as he grabbed one of the nitrogen charges and
put it in his pocket.

Schofield looked outside. The killer whales, it seemed, had
disappeared for the moment. For a brief instant, he wondered where
they had gone.

“What are you doing?” Renshaw said.

“You'll see,” Schofield said as he stepped around the
circular pool at the base of the diving bell.

“You're going out there?” Renshaw said in
disbelief. “You're leaving me here?”

“You'll be OK.” Schofield tossed Renshaw his Desert
Eagle pistol. “If they come for you, use that.”

Renshaw caught the gun. Schofield didn't even notice. He just
turned around and, without even a second glance back at Renshaw,
stepped off the metal deck of the diving bell and dropped into the
water.

The water was near freezing, but Schofield didn't care.

He kept hold of the diving bell and climbed up one of its exterior
pipes, pulled himself up onto its spherical roof.

They were almost up at the station now.

And as soon as they got there, Schofield thought, as soon as they
broke the surface, he was going to let rip with the most devastating
burst of gunfire the SAS had ever seen— aimed first and foremost
at Trevor J. Barnaby.

The diving bell rose through the water, approaching the surface.

Any second now, Schofield thought as he gripped his MP-5.

Any second...

The diving bell broke the surface with a loud splash.

And there, standing on top of it, holding onto its winch cable,
dripping with water, was Lieutenant Shane Schofield, with his MP-5
raised.

But Schofield didn't fire.

He blanched.

The whole of E-deck was lined with at least twenty SAS troopers. They
stood in a ring around the pool, surrounding the diving bell.

And they all had their guns trained on Shane Schofield.

Barnaby stepped out from the southern tunnel, smiling. Schofield
turned and saw him, and as he did so, he cursed himself, cursed his
anger, cursed his impulsiveness, for he knew then that in the heat of
the moment, in the pure anger that he had felt following Book's
death, he had just made the biggest mistake of his life.

Schofield tossed his MP-5 over to the deck. It
clattered against the metal decking. The SAS commandos caught hold of
the diving bell with a long hook and pulled it through the water
toward the deck.

Schofield's mind was working again, and with crystal clarity. In
the moment that he had broken the surface and seen the SAS troops with
their guns pointed at him, his senses had returned with all their
force.

He hoped to hell that Renshaw was keeping himself hidden inside the
diving bell.

Schofield jumped down off the diving bell and landed with a loud clang
on E-deck. He breathed a hidden sigh of relief when the SAS commandos
released the diving bell and let it float back out into the center of
the pool. They hadn't seen Renshaw.

Then two big SAS men grabbed Schofield roughly, pinned his arms behind
his back, and slapped a pair of handcuffs around his wrists. Another
SAS soldier frisked him thoroughly and pulled the nitrogen charge out
of his pocket. He also took Schofield's Maghook.

Trevor Barnaby came over. “So, Scarecrow. At last we meet.
It's good to see you again.”

Schofield said nothing. He noticed that Barnaby was wearing a black
thermal wet suit.

He's planning on sending another team down to the cave,
Schofield thought, with himself included.

“You've been watching us from the diving bell, haven't
you,” Barnaby said, grinning. “But so, too, have we been
watching you.” Barnaby smiled as he indicated a small
gray unit mounted on the edge of the pool. It looked like a camera of
some sort, pointed down into the water.