Ice Station (10 page)

Riley snapped round and looked the other way, out over Sarah's
head, toward that end of the tunnel that led to the catwalks and the
massive shaft in the center of the station.

“Come with me,” was all he said as he brushed past Sarah and
led the way toward the central well of Wilkes Ice Station.

“Book!” Schofield whispered into his
helmet mike as he kept his eyes locked on the western tunnel of
B-deck. “Book! Where are you? God damn it.”

“No Book?” Gant asked.

“Not yet,” Schofield said. He and Gant were still crouched
in their alcove on C-deck, on the eastern side of the station. They
were waiting tensely for Rebound, Mother, and Legs to come out from
the western tunnel of B-deck.

Rebound emerged first. Quickly but cautiously, gun up, eyes looking
down his gun sights, sweeping his MP-5 in a brisk 180-degree arc,
searching for any sign of trouble.

As soon as he saw Rebound emerge, Schofield immediately opened fire on
A-deck, forcing whoever was up there to take cover. Gant came up five
seconds later and did the same.

Schofield pulled back behind the alcove's wall to reload. As he
did so, he watched as Gant fired off three short bursts.

It was then that he saw something strange happen.

The yellow tongue of fire that flashed out from the muzzle of
Gant's gun suddenly leaped forward a full two meters. It was only
for a second, but it looked incredible. For a short moment, Gant's
compact MP-5 machine pistol had looked like a flamethrower.

Schofield was momentarily confused. What the hell had caused
that? Then, suddenly, it hit him, and he spun and looked back at
the—

All of a sudden, Gant yelled, “I'm dry!” and Schofield
snapped back to the present. He immediately opened fire on the A-deck
catwalk while she reloaded.

As he lay down a suppressing fire on A-deck, Schofield saw Legs and
Mother hurry out onto the B-deck catwalk behind Rebound. They were
firing for all they were worth back into the tunnel from which they
had come.

Legs went dry. Schofield watched as Legs popped his clip and let it
drop to the catwalk and then grabbed a fresh magazine. No sooner had
he jammed it into the lower receiver of his gun than he was hit in the
neck by some unseen opponent inside the western tunnel.

Legs flailed backward, losing his balance for a second, before turning
his gun back toward the enemy and letting loose with an extended burst
of gunfire that would have woken the dead. In 2.2 seconds thirty
rounds were spent and that clip was dry, too. Mother grabbed him and
yanked him out onto the catwalk, away from the tunnel.

Now wounded and dripping with blood, Legs began to fumble with a new
clip. The clip slipped through his bloody fingers and fell out over
the railing, dropping fifty feet through the air until it splashed
into the pool at the bottom of the station. At that point, Legs cut
his losses, tossed his MP-5, and pulled out his Colt .45. Single fire
from here.

Schofield and Gant continued to sweep the uppermost deck with their
fire. Gant had watched as Legs's clip dropped all the way down
into the pool, had watched as one of the killer whales banked upward
to see what it was that had fallen into its domain.

Mother went dry. She cut the empty clip and reloaded fast.

Schofield watched anxiously as the three of them— Mother,
Rebound, and Legs—moved along the catwalk between the west and
the north tunnels of B-deck, heading toward the north tunnel.

They were almost there when suddenly Buck Riley burst out from the
north tunnel with four civilians in tow behind him.

Right in front of Mother, Rebound, and Legs!

Schofield saw it as it happened and his jaw dropped.

“Oh, Jesus” he breathed.

This was a disaster. Now four of his people were out in the
open, with four innocent civilians! And any second now the French
would appear and cut them to ribbons.

“Book! Book!” Schofield yelled into his helmet mike.
“Get out of there! Get off the
catwa—”

And then it happened and Schofield's horror was complete.

In perfect synchronization, five French commandos burst out onto the
B-deck catwalk.

Three from the west tunnel. Two from the east.

They opened fire without the slightest hesitation.

What happened next happened almost too fast for
Schofield to comprehend.

The five French commandos on B-deck had just pulled off a perfect
pincer maneuver. They'd flushed Mother, Rebound, and Legs out onto
the catwalk and now were about to finish it off by firing upon them
from both flanks.

The appearance of Buck Riley and the four civilians was an added
bonus. It obviously hadn't been expected—when they had
appeared out on the catwalk, all five of the French soldiers had had
their guns firmly trained on Mother, Rebound, and Legs.

As it turned out, however, they never got a chance to turn their fire
on Riley and the civilians anyway.

The three French commandos who had emerged from the western
tunnel fired first. White-hot tongues of fire shot out from the
muzzles of their guns.

At point-blank range, Legs, Mother, and Rebound were all hit. Mother
in the leg, Rebound in the shoulder. Legs took the brunt of
it—two to the head, four to the chest—his whole body
becoming a shuddering explosion of blood. He was dead before he hit
the ground.

But that was all Schofield saw.

Because that was when it happened.

Schofield watched in amazement as, at the exact moment that
the French commandos on the western side of the station fired their
rifles, two enormous fingers of fire shot out in both directions from
where they stood.

They looked like twin comets. Two seven-foot-tall balls of fire that
rocketed around the circumference of the B-deck catwalk, leaving in
their wake a wall of blazing flames.

The whole of the B-deck catwalk disappeared in an instant as the
spectacular curtain of flames shot up from every point on the circular
metal catwalk, concealing from view everybody who had been standing on
the deck.

For a full second Schofield could do nothing but stare. It had
happened so fast. It was as if somebody had laid down a trail of
gasoline on the B-deck catwalk and then lit a match.

Then it clicked and Schofield immediately spun around to face—

—the air-conditioning room.

And in that instant, it all suddenly made sense.

The air-conditioning cylinders had no doubt been substantially damaged
by the detonation of the rocket grenade minutes earlier. Thus
punctured, they had immediately started spewing out their store of
chlorofluorocarbons.

Highly flammable chlorofluorocarbons.

That was what had happened when Schofield had seen the two-meter
length of fire spew forward from the muzzle of Gant's machine
pistol only moments earlier. It had been a warning of things to come.
But at that time the CFCs hadn't yet filled the station. Hence the
small two-meter flame.

But now... now the amount of flammable gas in the station's
atmosphere had multiplied considerably. So much so mat when the French
had opened fire on the Marines on B-deck, the whole deck had gone up
in flames.

Schofield's eyes widened.

The air-conditioning cylinders were still spewing out CFCs. Soon
the whole station would he contaminated with flammable...

The horror of the realization hit Schofield hard.

Wilkes Ice Station had become a gas oven.

All it needed was one spark, one flame—or one gunshot— and
the whole station would spontaneously combust.

Rivets began to pop out of their sockets on B-deck.

Spot fires burned all over the B-deck catwalk. Agonized screams echoed
out across the open space of the ice station as soldiers and civilians
alike lay writhing on the catwalk, their bodies alight.

It looked like a scene from Hell itself.

The three French soldiers on the western side of the station—the
ones who had opened fire on Mother, Rebound, and Legs—had been
the first to go up in flames, the gaseous air around them having been
ignited by the white-hot tongues of fire that had burst forth from the
muzzles of their guns.

The twin fireballs had immediately shot out from the barrels of their
guns. One had surged forward while the other had turned on them and
rushed with all its fury back at their faces.

Now two of those French soldiers lay on the deck, screaming. The third
was frantically banging himself against the ice wall nearby in a
desperate attempt to put out the flames on his fatigues.

Mother and Rebound were also on fire. Beside them, Legs was already
dead. His motionless body lay flat on the catwalk as it was slowly
devoured by crackling orange flames.

Over by the north tunnel, Buck Riley was trying to smother the flames
on Abby Sinclair's pants by rolling her over on the metal catwalk.
Beside them, Sarah Hensleigh slapped frantically at a cluster of
flames that had ignited on the back of Kirsty's bulky pink parka.
Warren Cordon just screamed. His hair was on fire.

And then, suddenly, there came a sickening sound. The lurching,
wrenching sound of bending steel.

Riley looked up from what he was doing.

“Oh, no,” he moaned.

Schofield also looked up at the sound.

He scanned the catwalk above him and saw a series of triangular steel
supports that fastened the underside of the B-deck catwalk to the ice
wall.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, those supports began to slide out from
the wall.

Under the intense heat from the fire on B-deck, the long rivets that
fastened the supports to the wall were starting to heat up. They
were melting the ice around them and were now starting to slide
out from the wall!

The rivets began to expand—thwack! thwack!
thwack!— and in rapid succession began to crack open the
ice-cold notches of their steel supports and fall to the catwalk
below.

The rivets clanked loudly as they dropped down onto the C-deck
catwalk.

One.

Then two. Then three.

Then five. Then ten.

There were rivets everywhere, raining down on the C-deck catwalk. And
then suddenly a new sound filled Wilkes Ice Station.

The unmistakable high-pitched squeal of rending metal.

“Oh, shit,” Schofield said. “It's gonna
go.”

B-deck went. Suddenly. Without warning.

The entire catwalk—the whole, flaming circle—just fell
away, dropping with a sudden jolt, taking everybody who was still on
it down with it.

Some sections of the catwalk managed to stay attached to the ice
walls. Their fall ended abruptly, almost as soon as it had begun. They
ended up pointing downward at a forty-five-degree angle.

The remaining sections just slid out from the ice walls and dropped
down into the central shaft of the station.

Nearly everyone who had been standing on B-deck dropped with the
collapsed sections of catwalk—eleven people in all.

A tangled mix of civilians, soldiers, and three broken sections of
metal catwalk sailed down the central shaft of Wilkes Ice Station.

They fell a full fifty feet, and then they landed. Hard. In water. In
the pool at the bottom of the station.

Sarah Hensleigh plunged underwater.

A stream of bubbles shot up past her face and the world suddenly went
silent.

Cold. Absolute, unforgiving cold assailed all of her senses at once.
It was so cold it hurt.

And then suddenly she heard noises.

Noises that broke the ghostly underwater silence—a series of
muffled whumps in the water all around her. It was the sound
of the others falling into the pool with her.

Slowly, the curtain of bubbles in front of her face began to disperse,
and Sarah began to make out a number of unusually large shapes moving
smoothly through the water around her.

Large black shapes.

They appeared to glide effortlessly through the silent, freezing
water—each one frightening in its size, as large and as wide as
a car. At that moment, a wash of white cut across Sarah's field of
vision and suddenly an enormous mouth, full of razor-sharp teeth,
opened wide in front of her eyes.

Pure fear shot through her body.

Killer whales.

Suddenly Sarah broke the surface. Gulped in air. The cold of the water
meant nothing now. One after the other huge black dorsal fins began to
rise above the choppy surface of the pool.

Before Sarah could even get a bearing on exactly where in the pool she
was, something burst up out of the water next to her and she spun.

It wasn't a killer whale.

It was Abby.

Sarah felt her heart start again. A second later, Warren Conlon also
came up beside her.

Sarah spun around in the water. All five of the French soldiers who
had been on B-deck when it blew were scattered around the pool. Three
Marines were also in the pool. One of them, Sarah noticed, was
floating facedown in the water.

A scream echoed down through the central shaft of the station.

A shrill, high-pitched squeal.

The scream of a little girl.

Sarah's head snapped to look upward. There, high above her,
hanging by one hand from the downturned railing of the B-deck catwalk,
was Kirsty. The Marine who had been with them when the catwalk had
collapsed was lying facedown on the broken metal platform, reaching
down desperately, trying to grab Kirsty's hand.

Just then, as she was looking up at Kirsty, Sarah felt the immense
weight of one of the killers rush through the water between her and
Conlon. The massive animal brushed against the side of her leg.

And then suddenly Sarah heard a shout.

It had come from the other side of the pool, and Sarah spun around
just in time to see one of the French commandos—his face
blistered and scorched from the fireball— swimming frantically
for the edge of the pool, his terrified, panicked whimpers interrupted
only by short, desperate breaths.