Ice Station (49 page)

“Mr. Renshaw,” Schofield said, looking at the shuddering
walls all around him. “What's happening?”

Renshaw said, “I don't know—”

At that moment, the whole tunnel lurched suddenly and dropped about
ten inches.

“It feels like the ice shelf has been dislodged from the
mainland,” Renshaw said. “It's becoming an
iceberg.”

“An iceberg ...,” Schofield said, his mind turning. All of a
sudden, his head snapped up and he looked at Renshaw. “Are those
elephant seals still out in that cave?”

Renshaw looked out through the fissure.

“No,” Renshaw said. 'They're gone."

Schofield crossed the tunnel and picked up Gant in his arms, carried
her toward the fissure. “I thought that might happen,” he
said. “I killed the bull. They're probably out looking for
him, now.”

“How are we going to get out of here?” Renshaw said.

Schofield hoisted Gant up into the fissure and pushed her through.
Then he turned to face Renshaw, his eyes gleaming.

“We're gonna fly out of here.”

The big black fighter stood magnificently in the middle of the
underground cavern—its sharply pointed nose tilted downward and
its sleek black wings swept low. Large chunks of ice rained down from
the cavern's high ceiling and exploded against its fuselage.

Schofield and the others raced across the shaking floor of the cavern
and took shelter underneath the belly of the big black plane.

As Schofield held her in his arms, Gant showed him the keypad and the
entry-code screen.

The entry-code screen glowed green.

24157817 :_________________________

ENTER AUTHORIZED ENTRY CODE

“Did anybody figure out the code?” Schofield said.

“Hensleigh was working on it, but I don't think she ever
figured it out.”

“So we don't know the code,” Schofield said.

“No, we don't,” Gant said.

“Great.”

At that moment, Kirsty stepped up alongside Schofield and peered at
the screen.

“Hey,” she said, “Fibonacci number.”

“What?” Schofield and Gant said at the same time.

Kirsty shrugged self-consciously.
“Two-four-one-five-seven-eight-one-seven. It's a Fibonacci
number.”

“What's a Fibonacci number?” Schofield said.

“Fibonacci numbers are a kind of number sequence,” Kir-sty
said. “It's a sequence where each number is the sum of the
two numbers before it.” She saw the amazed looks around her.
“My dad showed it to me. Does anybody have a pen and a piece of
paper?”

Gant had the diary she had found earlier in her pocket. Renshaw had a
pen. At first it dribbled with ink-colored water, but then it worked.
Kirsty began to scribble some numbers in the diary.

She said, “The sequence goes like this: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13,
and so on. You just add the first two numbers to get the third. Then
you add the second and the third to get the
fourth. If you just give me a minute ...,” Kirsty said
as she began to scribble frantically.

Schofield looked at his watch.

10:40 p.m.

Twenty minutes to go.

As Kirsty scribbled in the diary, Renshaw said to Schofield,
“Lieutenant, exactly how do you plan to fly out of
here?”

“Through there,” Schofield said absently, pointing at the
pool of water over on the other side of the cavern.

“What?” Renshaw said, but Schofield wasn't
listening. He was busy looking down at the diary as Kirsty wrote in
it.

After two minutes, she had three rows of numbers written out.
Schofield wondered how long this was going to take. He looked at the
numbers as she wrote them:

0,1,1, 2, 3, 5, 8,13, 21, 34, 55, 89,144, 233, 377, 610, 987,
1597, 2584, 4181, 6765, 10,946, 17,711, 28,657, 46,368, 75,025,
121,393, 196,418, 317,811, 514,229, 832,040, 1,346,269, 3,524,578,
5,702,887, 9,227,465, 14,930,352, 24,157,817

“And see that,” Kirsty said. 'There's your number.
24157817."

“Holy shit,” Schofield said. “OK, then. What are the
next two numbers in the sequence.”

Kirsty scribbled some more.

39,088,169, 63,245,986

“That's them,” Kirsty said, showing the diary to
Schofield.

Schofield took it and looked at it. Sixteen digits. Sixteen blank
spaces to fill. Amazing. He punched the keys on the keypad.

The screen beeped.

24157817 3908816963245986

ENTRY CODE ACCEPTED. OPENING SILHOUETTE

There came an ominous droning sound from within the big black ship and
then suddenly Schofield saw a narrow flight of steps fold down slowly
from the ship's black underbelly.

He gave Kirsty a kiss on the forehead. “I never thought math
would save my life. Come on.”

And with that, Schofield and the others entered the big black ship.

They came into a missile bay of some sort.
Schofield saw six missiles locked into place on two triangular racks,
three missiles per rack.

He carried Gant across the missile bay and lay her on the floor just
as Renshaw and Kirsty stepped up into the belly of the plane. Wendy
hopped clumsily up the steps behind them. Once the little seal was
safely inside, Renshaw pulled the stairs up behind her.

Schofield headed forward, into the cockpit. “Talk to me,
Gant!”

Gant called forward, the pain evident in her voice: “They called
it the Silhouette. It's got some kind of stealth feature that we
couldn't figure out. Something to do with the plutonium.”

Schofield stepped into the cockpit.

“Whoa.”

The cockpit looked amazing—futuristic, especially for a plane
that was built in 1979. There were two seats: one forward and to the
right, the other—the radar operator/gunner's
chair—behind it and to the left. The steepness of the
cockpit—it pointed sharply downward—meant that the pilot
in the front seat sat well below the gunner in the backseat.

He jumped into the pilot's seat just
as—bang!—a large chunk of ice exploded against
the outside of the canopy.

Schofield stared at the console in front of him: four computer
screens, standard control stick, buttons and dials and indicators
everywhere. It looked like an amazing high-tech jigsaw puzzle.
Schofield felt a sudden panic sweep over him.

He would never be able to figure out how to fly this plane. Not in
eighteen minutes.

But then, as he looked at the console more closely, he began to see
that it wasn't actually that much different from the
consoles on the Harriers he had flown in Bosnia. This was a
man-made aircraft, after all—why should it be different?

He found the ignition switch, keyed it.

Nothing happened. Fuel feed, he thought. Got to pump the
fuel feed.

He searched for the fuel feed button. Found it, pumped it. Then he hit
the ignition switch again.

Nothing hap—

VRRRROOOOM!

The twin turbines of the Silhouette's jet engines roared to life
and Schofield felt his blood rush. The sound of the engines blasting
to life was like nothing he had ever heard.

He revved the engines. He had to warm her up fast.

Time, he thought.

10:45 p.m.

Fifteen minutes to go.

He kept revving the engines. Usually such a warm-up routine would take
upward of twenty minutes. Schofield gave himself ten.

God, this was going to be close.

As he revved the engines whole sections of the cavern's ice walls
began to collapse around the big black plane. After five minutes of
revving, he looked for the vertical takeoff switch.

“Gant! Where's the vectored thrust?” On modern
vertical-takeoff-and-landing-capable fighters like the Harrier,
vertical lift-off is achieved through directable, or
“vectored,” thrusters.

“There aren't any,” Gant called from the missile bay.
“It has retrofiring jets instead! Look for the button that starts
the retros!”

Schofield searched for it. As he did so, however, he came across
another button. It was marked: cloak mode. Schofield frowned.

What the hell—

And then suddenly he saw the button he was looking for:

RETROS.

He hit it.

The Silhouette responded immediately and began to rise into
the air. But then abruptly it jolted to a sudden halt. There came a
loud grinding noise from behind it.

“Huh?” Schofield said.

He looked out through the back of the cockpit canopy, and he saw that
the two tail fins of the Silhouette were still firmly
embedded within the ice wall behind it.

Schofield found the button marked afterburner. Punched it.

Immediately a white-hot spray of pure heat burst out from the twin
thrusters at the back of the Silhouette and began to
melt the ice holding the rear of the plane captive.

The ice melted quickly; the tail fins soon came free.

Schofield checked his watch.

10:53 p.m.

The entire cavern lurched downward again.

Come on, now; don't go yet. 1 just need a couple more minutes.
Just a couple more minutes....

Schofield kept warming the engine. He looked down at his watch as it
ticked over to 10:54. Then 10:55.

All right, time's up. Time to go.

He hit the button marked retros again and the eight retro jets on the
underside of the big black ship fired as one, shot out long white
puffs of gas.

This time, the Silhouette rose off the icy ground, and began
to hover inside the enormous underground cavern. The cavern around it
rumbled and shuddered. Chunks of ice rained down from the ceiling,
banged down on the back of the big black plane.

Chaos. Absolute chaos.

10:56 P.M.

Schofield looked out through the tinted-glass canopy of the
Silhouette. The whole cavern was tilting crazily. It was
almost as if the whole ice shelf was lurching forward, moving into
the ocean....

It's falling off the mainland, he thought.

“What are you doing!” Renshaw called from the missile bay.

“I'm waiting for it to flip over!” Schofield called
back.

Suddenly Schofield heard Gant groan with pain. “Renshaw!
Help her! Fix that wound! Kirsty! Get up here! I need
you!”

Kirsty came forward into the cockpit and climbed up into the high rear
chair. “What do you want me to do?”

“See that stick there?” Schofield said. 'The one with
the trigger on it?"

Kirsty saw a control stick in front of her. “Yeah.”

“Pull that trigger for me, will you?”

Kirsty pulled the trigger.

As soon as she did so, two dazzling-white pulses of light shot out
from both wings of the big black fighter plane.

The two tracer bullets slammed into the ice wall in front of the
Silhouette and exploded in twin clouds of white. When the two
clouds dissipated, Schofield saw a large hole in the ice wall.

“Nice shootin,” Tex," he said.

He pulled back on his stick, and the Silhouette rose higher
in the middle of the collapsing ice cavern.

“All right, everybody, hold on, this thing is gonna go any second
now,” Schofield said. “Kirsty, when I say so, I want you to
press down on that trigger and hold it down, OK?”

“OK.”

Schofield peered out through the canopy, looked out at the crumbling
ceiling of the ice cavern, looked out at the pool of water through
which they had all entered the cavern—the water in the pool was
sloshing madly against the ice walls.

And then at that moment, it happened. The whole cavern just
dropped—straight down—and then tilted
dramatically. In that instant, Schofield knew that the whole of the
ice shelf containing Wilkes Ice Station had come completely free of
the mainland.

It had become an iceberg.

Wait for it, Schofield told himself. Wait for it....

And then, abruptly, the whole cavern tilted again.

Only this time, the tilting was much more dramatic. This time
the whole cavern rotated a full 180 degrees, right
around the hovering Silhouette!

The iceberg had flipped over!

The whole cavern was now upside-down."

Suddenly a torrent of water came rushing out of a wide hole in the
“ceiling” of the cavern—the hole that only moments
before had been the mouth of the underwater ice tunnel that had led
up into the cavern.

The underwater ice tunnel no longer led to the depths of the ocean.
Now it led upward. Now it led to the surface.

Schofield maneuvered the Silhouette so as to avoid the
cascade of water pouring out of the ice tunnel. After a good twenty
seconds, the rush of water abated and he pulled back on his stick. The
Silhouette responded by rocking backwards in the air and
pointing itself up at the wide hole in the ceiling.

“All right, Kirsty, now!”

Kirsty jammed down on her trigger.

Immediately the Silhouette's wings spewed forth a devastating
burst of tracer fire. The relentless wave of bullets disappeared
inside the hole in the ceiling and assaulted any icy crags or
outcroppings that dared to jut out of the walls of the ice tunnel.

At that moment, Schofield hit the thrusters and the
Silhouette shot up into the tunnel, just as, behind it, the
ceiling of the enormous cavern spectacularly collapsed in on itself.

The wing-mounted guns of the Silhouette blazed away, blasting
at any imperfections in the ice tunnel as the big black plane flew
upward through what had once been the underwater ice tunnel.

Schofield guided the sleek black plane up through the tunnel, shooting
through puffs of white cloud, rolling the big plane onto its side when
the tunnel narrowed, praying to God that the tracer bullets were
clearing the way.

Up and up the Silhouette went, blasting away at the tunnel in
front of it. Explosions boomed out all around the big black plane. The
sound of its wing-mounted guns firing away was deafening.

And then suddenly the tunnel behind the Silhouette
began to collapse at a phenomenal rate.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

Massive chunks of ice began to rain down from the ceiling of the
tunnel behind the speeding plane. The Silhouette raced upward
through the tunnel, blasting away at the walls of the tunnel in front
of it while at the same time outrunning the collapsing tunnel behind
it.