Ice Station (42 page)

A couple of SAS divers made it to land. But the seals just followed
them right out of the water. One diver was on his hands and knees,
clawing his way across the ice, trying desperately to get away from
the water's edge, when a giant seven-ton seal launched itself out
of the pool right behind him.

The massive creature landed on the ice a bare two feet behind him, and
the earth shook beneath its weight. The big seal then lumbered forward
and clamped its jaws shut around the SAS man's legs. Bones
crunched. The man screamed.

And then, before he even knew what was happening, the big seal began
to eat him.

Roughly, with great slashing bites. The high-pitched tearing sound of
flesh being ripped from bone filled the cavern.

Gant stared at the scene in silent awe.

The SAS men were screaming. The seals were barking. Several of mem
began eating their victims while they were still alive.

Gant just stared at the seals. They were huge. At least as big as
killer whales. And they had bulbous round snouts that she had seen in
a book once.

Elephant seals.

Gant noticed that there were two smaller seals in the group. These two
smaller animals had peculiar teeth—strange elongated lower
canines that rose up from their lower jaws and over their
upper lips, like a pair of inverted tusks. The larger seals, she saw,
did not have these tusks.

Gant tried to recall everything she knew about elephant seals. Like
killer whales, elephant seals lived in large groups made up of one
dominant male, known as the bull or beach-master, and a harem of eight
or nine females, or cows, which were all smaller than the bull.

Gant felt a chill as she saw the sex of one of the big seals in front
of her.

These were the females of the group.

The two smaller seals that she saw were their pups. Male
pups, Gant noticed.

Gant wondered where the bull was. He would almost certainly be larger
than these females. But if the females were this big, how big would he
be?

More questions flitted through her mind.

Why did they attack? Elephant seals, Gant knew, could be
exceptionally aggressive, especially when their territory was under
threat.

And why now? Why had Gant and her team been allowed to pass
safely through the ice tunnel only several hours before, while the SAS
had been subjected to so violent an attack now?

There came a sudden final scream from the pool followed by a splash
and Gant looked out from behind her boulder.

There was a long, cold silence. The only sound was that of waves
lapping against the edge of the pool.

All of the SAS divers were dead. Most of the seals were up inside the
cavern now, bent over the spoils of their victory—the bodies of
the dead SAS commandos. It was then that Gant heard a nauseating
crunch and she turned round to see that the elephant seals had begun
to feed en masse.

This battle was well and truly over.

Schofield stood on the pool deck of Wilkes Ice
Station with his hands cuffed in front of him. One of the SAS
commandos was busy tying the grappling hook of Book's Maghook
around his ankles. Schofield looked off to his left and saw the high
black fin of a killer whale slice through the murky red water of the
pool.

“Dive Team, report,” an SAS radio operator said into his
portable unit nearby. “I repeat. Dive Team, come in.”

“Any word?” Barnaby said.

“There's no response, sir. The last thing they said was that
they were about to surface inside the cavern.”

Barnaby gave Schofield a look. “Keep trying,” he said to the
radio operator. Then he turned to Schofield. “Your men down in
that cave must have put up quite a fight.”

“They do that,” Schofield said.

“So,” Barnaby said. “Any last requests from the
condemned man? A blindfold? Cigarette? Shot of brandy?”

At first, Schofield said nothing; he just looked down at his
handcuffed wrists in front of him.

And then he saw it.

Suddenly he looked up.

“A cigarette,” he said quickly, swallowing.
“Please.”

“Mr. Nero. A cigarette for the Lieutenant.”

Nero stepped forward, offered a pack of cigarettes to Schofield.
Schofield took one with his cuffed hands, raised it to his mouth. Nero
lit it. Schofield took a deep draw and hoped to hell that nobody saw
his face turn green. He had never smoked in his life.

“All right,” Barnaby said. 'That's enough.
Gentlemen, hoist him up. Scarecrow, it was a pleasure knowing
you."

Schofield swung, upside-down, out over the pool. His dog tags hung
loosely off his chin, glistening silver in the white artificial light
of the station. The water beneath him was stained an ugly shade of
red.

Book's blood.

Schofield looked up at the diving bell in the center of the pool, saw
Renshaw's face in one of the portholes—saw a single
terrified eye peering out at him.

Schofield just hung there, three feet above the hideous red water. He
calmly held the cigarette to his mouth, took another puff.

The SAS soldiers must have thought it a vain act of bravado—but
while the cigarette dangled from Schofield's mouth they never saw
what he was doing with his hands.

Barnaby offered Schofield a salute. “Rule Britannia,
Scarecrow.”

“Fuck Britannia,” Schofield replied.

“Mr. Nero,” Barnaby said. “Lower away.”

Over by the rung-ladder, Nero pressed a button on the Maghook's
launcher. The launcher itself was still wedged in between two rungs of
the ladder while its rope was stretched taut over the retractable
bridge up on C-deck, creating the same pulleylike mechanism that had
been used to lower Book into the water.

The Maghook's rope began to play out.

Schofield began to descend toward the water.

His hands were still cuffed in front of him. He held the cigarette
between the fingers of his right hand.

His head entered the murky red water first. Then his shoulders. Then
his chest, his stomach, his elbows ...

But then, just as Schofield's wrists were about to go under,
Schofield quickly twisted the cigarette in his fingers and pointed it
toward the loop of magnesium detonator cord that he had now looped
around the chain link of his handcuffs.

Schofield had seen the detonator cord when he had been standing on the
deck only moments before. He had forgotten that he'd tied a loop
of it around his wrist back in Little America IV. The SAS, when they
had frisked him and relieved him of all his weapons earlier, must have
missed it, too.

The burning tip of the cigarette touched the detonator cord a split
second before Schofield's wrists disappeared below the surface.

The detonator cord ignited instantly, just as Schofield's wrists
disappeared into the inky red water.

It burned bright white, even under the water, and cut through the
chain link of Schofield's handcuffs like a knife through butter.
Suddenly his hands broke apart, free.

At that moment, a pair of jaws burst through the red haze around his
head and Schofield saw the enormous eye of a killer whale looking
right at him. And then suddenly it disappeared back into the haze and
was gone.

Schofield's heart was racing. He couldn't see a thing. The
water around him was impenetrable. Just a murky cloud of red.

And then suddenly a series of bizarre-sounding clicks began to echo
through the water around him.

Click-click.

Click-click.

Schofield frowned. What was it? The killers?

And then it hit him.

Sonar.

Shit!

The killer whales were using sonar clicks to find him in the murky
water. Many whales were known to use sonar— sperm whales, blue
whales, killers. The principle was simple: the whale made a loud
click with its tongue, the click traveled through the water,
bounced off any object in the water, and returned to the
whale—revealing to it the object's location. Sonar units on
man-made submarines operated on the same principle.

Schofield was desperately searching the cloudy red haze around
him—searching for the whales—when suddenly one of them
exploded out of the haze and rushed toward him.

Schofield screamed underwater, but the whale slid past
him, brushing roughly against the side of his body.

It was then that Schofield remembered what Renshaw had told him
earlier about the killer whales' hunting behavior.

They brush past you to establish ownership.

Then they eat you.

Schofield did a vertical sit-up, broke the surface. He heard the SAS
commandos on E-deck cheer. He ignored them, gulped in air, went under
again.

He didn't have much time. The killer whale that had just staked
its claim on him would be coming back any second now.

Loud clicks echoed through the red water around him.

And then suddenly a thought struck Schofield.

Sonar....

Shit, he thought, patting his pockets. Do I still have
it?

He did.

Schofield pulled Kirsty Hensleigh's plastic asthma puffer from his
pocket. He pressed the releasing button, and a short line of fat
bubbles rushed out from the puffer.

OK, need a weight.

Need something to weigh it down....

Schofield saw them instantly.

Quickly he pulled his stainless steel dog tags from around his neck
and looped their neck chain around the puffer's releasing button
so that it held it down.

A continuous stream of fat bubbles began to rush out from the puffer.

Schofield felt the body of water around him rock and sway. Somewhere
out in the red murk of the pool, that killer whale was coming back for
him.

He quickly released the small asthma puffer, now weighed down by his
steel dogtags.

The puffer sank instantly, leaving a trail of fat bubbles shooting up
through the water behind it. After a second, the puffer sank into the
murky red haze and Schofield lost sight of it.

A moment later, the killer whale roared out of the haze, coming right
at Schofield, its jaws bared wide.

Schofield just stared at the massive black-and-white beast and prayed
to God that he had remembered it right.

But the killer just kept coming. It came at him
fast—fright-eningly fast—and soon Schofield could see
nothing but its teeth and its tongue and the closing yawn of its jaws
and then—

Without warning, the killer whale banked sharply
in the water and veered downward, chasing the asthma puffer and its
trail of bubbles.

Schofield sighed with relief.

In a dark corner of his mind he thought about sonar detection systems.
Although it is widely stated that sonar bounces off an object
in water, this is not entirely true. Rather, sonar reflects off the
microscopic layer of air that lies in between an
object in water and the water itself.

So when Schofield sank the asthma puffer—spewing out a trail of
nice, fat air bubbles behind it—he had, at least insofar as the
sonar-using killer was concerned, created a whole new target. The
whale must have detected the stream of bubbles with its clicking and
assumed that it was Schofield trying to get away.

And so it had chased it.

Schofield didn't think about it anymore.

He had other things to do now.

He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out Jean Petard's
stun grenade. Schofield pulled the pin, counted to three, and then did
a quick sit-up in the water and broke the surface. He then tossed
the stun grenade
vertically into the air and let himself fall back underwater squeezing
his eyes shut.

Five feet above the surface of the pool, the stun grenade reached the
zenith of its arc and hung in the air for a fraction of a second.

Then it went off.

Trevor Barnaby saw the grenade pop up out of the water. It took him an
extra second to realize what it was, but by then it was too late.

Along with every one of his men, Barnaby did the most natural thing in
the world when he saw a foreign object pop up out of a pool of water.

He looked at it.

The stun grenade exploded like an enormous flashbulb, blinding all of
them. The SAS men on E-deck recoiled as one, as a galaxy of stars and
sunspots came to life on the insides of their eyes.

Schofield did another sit-up in the water. Only this time, when he
broke the surface, he had Petard's crossbow gripped in his hands,
reloaded and ready to go.

He took his aim quickly and fired.

The crossbow's arrow shot across the expanse of E-deck and found
its target. It slammed into the Maghook's launcher, wedged as it
was between the rungs of the rung-ladder.

The launcher jolted out of its position and swung free from the
rung-ladder, swung toward the pool. When it had been wedged in between
the rungs of the rung-ladder, the Maghook's rope had been
stretched up toward the retractable bridge on C-deck at a
forty-five-degree angle. Now that it was released from the
rung-ladder—and since Schofield was floating in the water and,
therefore, not putting any weight on it at the other end—the
launcher swung back like a pendulum, out over the pool, and smacked
into the middle of Schofield's waiting hand.

All right!

He looked up at the bridge on C-deck. The Maghook's rope was now
stretched over the bridge like a block and tackle—with the
length of rope going up parallel to the length of rope going
down.

Schofield gripped the launcher tightly as he hit the black button on
the grip of the Maghook. Instantly he felt himself fly up out of the
bloodstained water as the reeling mechanism of the Maghook hoisted him
up toward the bridge on C-deck, its rope speeding over the bridge
itself, using it as a block and tackle.

Schofield came to the bridge and hauled himself up onto it just as the
first SAS men down on E-deck reached for their machine guns.

Schofield didn't even look at them. He was already running off the
bridge when they started firing.