Ice Station (48 page)

It was the liquid nitrogen from the charge, expanding through the
water, freezing the water as it went! Shit. He
hadn't counted on that! The wall of ice shot through the water
toward Schofield, constantly expanding, like a living, breathing ice
formation growing through the water.

Schofield watched it with wide eyes. If it enveloped him, he would be
dead in an instant.

Get out of here!

And then suddenly Schofield felt something nudge against his shoulder
and he turned.

It was Wendy!

Schofield grabbed her harness and Wendy took off immediately.

The wall of ice behind them gave chase, expanding through the water at
phenomenal speed, building upon itself at an exponential rate.

Wendy swam hard, pulling Schofield with her. She was small, but she
hauled Schofield through the water at incredible speed.

The ice wall closed in on them.

Another elephant seal swung in behind them, spying an easy meal, but
the ice wall caught the big seal, enveloped it within its expanding
mass, and swallowed it whole, froze it within its icy belly.

Wendy swam, toward the surface, deftly avoiding any elephant seals
that tried to cut across her path.

She saw the surface, pulled Schofield toward it.

Behind them, the wall of ice had lost its momentum. The nitrogen from
the charge had ceased expanding. The ice wall fell away behind them.

With Schofield clutching onto her harness, Wendy made her run for the
surface. Elephant seals came at them from every side. It was like a
roller-coaster ride as Wendy ducked and weaved and banked and turned
to avoid the biting teeth of the elephant seals charging at her and
Schofield from every side.

And then suddenly Wendy spotted a gap and caught a glimpse of the
surface.

She went for it.

Elephant seals lunged and snapped at them from every side, but Wendy
was too quick. She hit the surface at full speed and exploded out of
the water.

Wendy shot out from the water, with Schofield holding onto her
harness. They both hit the icy floor of the cavern with a clumsy thud,
and Schofield found himself lying on his belly. He quickly rolled over
onto his back—

—only to see an elephant seal leap high out of the water behind
him and come rushing down toward him!

Schofield rolled. The elephant seal slammed down onto the ground right
next to him. Schofield leaped to his feet, spun around, looked for the
others.

“Lieutenant! Over here! Over here!” Sarah
Hensleigh's voice yelled.

Schofield snapped around and saw Hensleigh waving from inside a small
horizontal hole in the wall about fifty yards away.

Renshaw, Kirsty—and Wendy, too—were already moving toward
the horizontal fissure. Schofield took off after them. As he ran
across the cavern, he saw Kirsty roll in through the horizontal hole;
then he saw Wendy go in after her, then Renshaw.

Suddenly a wash of static cut across his consciousness and a voice
yelled loudly in his ear.

“—you out there? Scarecrow, are you out there? Please
respond!” It was Romeo.

“What is it, Romeo?”

“Jesus! Where have you been? I've been trying to get you
for the last ten minutes.”

“I've been busy. What is it?”

“Get out of the station. Get out of the station
now.”

“I can't do that now, Romeo,” Schofield said as he ran.

“Scarecrow, you don't understand. Air Force just called
us. A group of F-22s just shot down a British fighter about
250 nautical miles out, but the bogey got a shot off before it was
hit.” Romeo paused. “Scarecrow, it's heading
right for Wilkes Ice Station. Satellite scans of radiation emissions
from the missile indicate that it is nuclear.”

Schofield felt a chill run down his spine as he ran. He came to the
fissure in the wall and dropped to the ground, baseball-style, and
slid through the horizontal fissure.

“How long?” he asked when he landed inside the small tunnel.
He ignored the others standing around him.

“Two hundred and forty-three miles at 400 miles per hour.
That gives you thirty-seven minutes until detonation. But that was
nine minutes ago, Scarecrow. I've been trying to get through to
you, but you haven't been responding. You have twenty-eight
minutes until a live nuke hits that ice station. Twenty-eight
minutes.”

“Swell,” Schofield said, looking at his watch.

“Scarecrow. I'm sorry, but I can't stay here.
I've got to get my men to a safe distance. I'm sorry, but you
're on your own now, buddy.”

Schofield looked at his watch.

It was 10:32 p.m.

Twenty-eight minutes. The nuclear missile would hit Wilkes Ice Station
at 11:00 P.M.

He looked up at the group around him. Sarah Hensleigh, Renshaw,
Kirsty, and Wendy. And Gant. It was only then that Schofield realized
that Gant was in the tunnel, too, sitting down on the icy floor. He
saw the ugly red stain in her side and rushed over to her.

“Montana?” he said.

She nodded.

“Where is he?” Schofield asked.

“He's dead. The seals got him. But he killed Santa Cruz and
he winged me.”

“Are you OK?”

“No.” Gant winced.

It was then that Schofield saw the wound. It was a gut shot, to the
side of Gant's stomach. The bullet must have sneaked past the
clasp on the side of her body armor. It wasn't a nice wound to
have—a gut shot was a slow and painful way to die.

“Hold on,” he said. “We'll get you outta
here—”

He began to move Gant, but as he did so, Gant brushed roughly against
his leg and dislodged something from his ankle pocket.

It was a silver locket.

Sarah Hensleigh's silver locket. The locket that she had given to
Schofield before she had gone down to the cave.

The locket landed face down on the icy ground, and in a fleeting
instant, Schofield saw the writing engraved on the back of it:

To Our Daughter,

Sarah Therese Parkes

On Your Twenty-first Birthday.

Schofield froze when he saw the engraving. He quickly pulled out his
printed copy of Andrew Trent's e-mail. He scanned the list of ICG
informers. And he found it.

PARKES. SARAH T. USD
PLNTLGST

Schofield snapped up to look at Sarah Hensleigh. “What's your
maiden name, Sarah?” he asked.

Snick-snick.

Schofield heard the sound of the gun cocking before he saw it emerge
from behind Sarah Hensleigh's back.

Sarah Hensleigh held the pistol out at arm's length, pointed it at
Schofield's head. With her spare hand, she pulled Santa Cruz's
helmet headset out from behind her and adjusted the channel dial on
the belt clip. She spoke into the headset.

“SEAL team, this is Hensleigh. Come in.”

There was no reply. Hensleigh frowned.

“SEAL team, this is Hensleigh. Come in.”

“There's no one up there, Sarah,” Schofield said,
cradling Gant in his arms. “They've evacuated the station.
They're gone. There's a cruise missile on its way here right
now and it's nuclear, Sarah. Those SEALs are long gone. We have to
get out of here, too.”

Suddenly Schofield heard a voice come over Sarah's headset.
“Hensleigh, this is SEAL Commander Riggs. Report.”

Schofield cringed, looked at his watch.

10:35 p.m. Twenty-five minutes to go.

He wasn't to know that the SEALs up in the station had switched
over to a closed-circuit channel to launch their attack on Wilkes. He
wasn't to know that they didn't know about the nuclear missile
coming toward the station.

Hensleigh said, “SEAL Commander. I have the Marine leader down
here with me in the cavern. I have him under forced arrest.”

“We'll be down there soon, Hensleigh. You have authority
to kill him if you have to. SEAL team out.”

“Sarah, what are you doing?” Renshaw said.

“Shut up,” Hensleigh said, swinging the gun round so that
its cold barrel touched Renshaw's nose. “Get over
there,” she said, waving Renshaw and Kirsty to Schofield's
side of the tunnel. Schofield noticed that Sarah Hensleigh held the
gun with confidence and authority. She had used guns before.

Schofield said, “Where are you from, Sarah? Army or Navy?”

Sarah looked at him for a moment. Then she said, “Army.”

“What section?”

“I was at the CDC in Atlanta for a while. Then I did some work
for the Chem Weapons Division. And then, wouldn't you know it, I
suddenly felt the urge to teach.”

“Were you ICG before or after you went to teach at the
university?”

“Before,” Hensleigh said. “Long before. Hell,
Lieutenant, the ICG sent me to teach at USC. They
asked me to retire from the Army, gave me a lifetime pension,
and sent me off to the university.”

“Why?”

“They wanted to know what was going on there. In particular, they
wanted to know about ice core research—they wanted to know about
the chemical gases people like Brian Hensleigh were finding buried in
the ice. Gases from highly toxic environments that disappeared
hundreds of millions of years ago. Carbon monoxide variants,
pure chlorine gas molecules. The ICG wanted to know about
it—they can find uses for that sort of thing. So I got into the
field, and I got to know Brian Hensleigh.”

Renshaw said, “You married him to get information out of
him?”

Over in the corner of the tunnel, Kirsty watched this conversation
with almost stunned interest.

“I got what I wanted,” Sarah Hensleigh said. “So did
Brian.”

“Did you kill him?” Renshaw asked. “The car
accident?”

“No,” Hensleigh said. “I didn't. ICG wasn't
involved in that at all. It was exactly that, an accident. Call it
whatever you want, destiny, fate. It just happened.”

“Did you kill Bernie Olson?” Schofield asked quickly.

Sarah paused before she answered that

“Yes,” she said. “I did.”

“Oh, you fucking bitch,” Renshaw said.

“Bernie Olson was a liar and a thief,” Hensleigh said.
“He was going to publish Renshaw's findings before Renshaw
did. I didn't really care about that. But then when
Renshaw struck metal fifteen hundred feet down, Olson told me
he was going to publish that, too. And I just couldn't
allow that to happen. Not without the ICG knowing about it first”

“Not without the ICG knowing about it first,” Schofield
repeated bitterly.

“It's our job to know everything first.”

“So you killed him,” Schofield said. “With sea snake
venom. And you made it look like Renshaw did it.”

Sarah Hensleigh looked at Renshaw. “I'm sorry, James, but you
were far too easy a target. You and Bernie fought all the time. And
when you fought that night, it was just too good an opportunity to
miss.”

Schofield looked at his watch. “Sarah, listen. I know you
don't believe me, but we have to get out of here. There is a
nuclear missile—”

“There is no missile,” Hensleigh snapped. “If there
were, the SEALs wouldn't be here.”

Schofield glanced at his watch again.

10:36 p.m.

Shit, he thought. It was so frustrating. They were stuck
here, at the mercy of Sarah Hensleigh. And she was just going to wait
here until the nuke arrived and killed them all.

It was at that moment that Schofield's watch flicked over to 10:37
p.m.

Schofield hadn't known about the eighteen Tritonal 80/20 charges
that Trevor Barnaby had laid in a semicircle around Wilkes Ice Station
with the intention of creating an iceberg.

Hadn't known that exactly two hours ago—at 8:37 p.m.—
when Barnaby had been inside the diving bell alone, Barnaby had set a
timer to detonate the Tritonal charges in two hours' time.

The eighteen Tritonal charges exploded as one and the blast was
absolutely devastating.

Three-hundred-foot geysers of snow shot up into the air. A deafeningly
loud groan echoed out across the landscape as a deep semicircular
chasm formed in the ice shelf. And then suddenly, with a loud, ominous
crack, that part of the ice shelf containing Wilkes Ice
Station and everything below it— a whole three cubic kilometers
of ice—suddenly dropped away and began to fall into the sea.

Down in the ice tunnel in the cavern, the world tilted crazily. Chunks
of ice rained down on everyone inside the tunnel. The collective boom
of the eighteen Tritonal charges going off sounded like an enormous
thunderclap.

At first, Schofield thought it was the nuclear missile Thought that
Romeo had made a terrible mistake and that the nuke had arrived half
an hour earlier than expected. But then he realized that it had to be
something else—if it had been the nuke, they would all have been
dead by now. The tunnel lurched suddenly and Sarah Hensleigh was
thrown off balance. Renshaw seized the opportunity and dived forward,
tackling her. The two of them hit the ice wall hard, but Hensleigh
threw Renshaw clear of her.

Schofield was still holding Gant. He put her down and made to stand
up, but Sarah Hensleigh whirled around and pointed her gun right at
his face.

“I'm sorry, Lieutenant. I kind of liked you,” she said.

Despite the cacophony of sound all around them, the sound of the gun
going off inside the small ice tunnel was deafening.

Schofield saw Sarah Hensleigh's chest
explode with blood.

Then he saw her eyes bulge and her knees buckle as she dropped to the
floor, dead.

Schofield's Desert Eagle was still smoking when Gant put it back
in Schofield's thigh holster. Schofield had never had a chance to
draw it, but Gant, down by his knees, had.

Kirsty just stared at the scene with her mouth open. Schofield rushed
over to her.

“Jesus, are you OK,” he said. “Your mother...”

“She wasn't my mother,” Kirsty said quietly.

“Would it be all right if we talked about this later?”
Schofield asked. “In about twenty-two minutes this place is gonna
be water vapor.”

Kirsty nodded.