Ice Station (23 page)

Schofield keyed his mike again. “Book, you hear all that?”

“Yeah,” Buck Riley's voice said.

“Any luck with McMurdo?”

“Not yet.”

“Keep trying,” Schofield said. “Over and over. Until
you get them on the line. Gentlemen, the stakes in this game have just
been raised. If we don't get through to McMurdo in less than three
hours, we're all gonna be vaporized.”

“Scarecrow, this
is Fox,” Gant's voice said. “I repeat.
Scarecrow, this is Fox. Hey, Scarecrow? Are you out there?”

Schofield was out on the pool deck on E-deck, watching the cable
descend into the pool, thinking about cruise missiles. It had been
about ten minutes since he had heard the transmission from the French
vessel, Shark. Book, Rebound, and Snake were all still
outside trying to raise McMurdo.

Schofield keyed his mike. “I hear you, Fox. How are you doing
down there?”

“We are coming to three thousand feet. Preparing to stop the
cable.”

There was a short pause.

“OK. We are stopping the cable... now.”

As Gant said the word “now,” the cable plunging into the
water suddenly jolted to a stop. She had stopped its descent from
inside the diving bell.

“Scarecrow, I have the time as 1410 hours,” Gant
said. “Please confirm.”

“I confirm the time as 1410 hours, Fox,” Schofield said. It
was standard deep-diving practice to confirm the time at which a dive
was to start. Schofield didn't know that he was following exactly
the same procedure that the scientists from Wilkes had followed only
two-and-a-half days earlier.

“Copy time at 1410 hours. Turning over to self-contained air.
Preparing to leave the diving bell.”

Gant kept Schofield updated on the dive.

The four divers—Gant, Montana, Santa Cruz, and Sarah
Hensleigh—turned over to self-contained air without incident and
left the diving bell. A few minutes later, Gant reported that they had
found the entrance to the underwater ice tunnel and that they were
beginning their ascent.

Schofield continued to pace around the deck, deep in thought.

He thought about the divers from Wilkes who had disappeared down in
the cavern, about the cavern itself and what was in it, about the
French and their snatch-and-grab effort to seize whatever was down
there, about erasing devices being fired from warships off the coast,
about the possibility that one of his own men had killed Samurai, and
about Sarah Hensleigh's smile. It was all too much.

His helmet intercom crackled to life. “Sir, Book
here.”

“Any luck?”

“Not a goddam thing, sir.”

For the last quarter of an hour, Book, Snake, and Rebound had been
trying to raise McMurdo Station on the unit's portable radio. They
were doing it from just outside the main entrance to the station, as
if being outside the structure might somehow help the signal get
through.

“Interference?” Schofield asked.

“Mountains of it,” Book said sadly.

Schofield thought for a moment. Then he said, “Book. Cancel that
option and come back inside. I want you to go and find the scientists
who are still here. I think they're in that common room on B-deck.
See if you can find out if any of them are familiar with the radio
system here.”

“I copy that, sir.”

Book's voice switched off and Schofield's intercom was silent
again. Schofield stared at the pool of water at the base of the
station and resumed his thoughts.

He thought about Samurai's death and who could have done it. At
the moment, he trusted only two people: Montana and Sarah Hensleigh,
since they had been with him when Samurai had been murdered. They were
the only two people who Schofield knew for certain were not involved
in Samurai's murder. As far as everybody else was concerned, they
were all under suspicion.

Which was why Schofield had decided to keep Book, Snake, and Rebound
all together. If one of them was the killer, he wouldn't be able
to kill again with the other two around....

Suddenly a new thought hit Schofield and he keyed his mike again.
“Book, you still out there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Book, while you're down on B-deck, I want you to ask those
scientists something else,” Schofield said. “I want you to
ask if any of them knows anything about weather.”

The radio room at Wilkes Ice Station is situated in the southeast
corner of A-deck, directly across the shaft from the dining room. It
houses the station's satellite telecommunications gear and
short-range radio transmitters. Four radio consoles— each
consisting of a microphone, a computer screen and keyboard, and some
frequency dials—were in the room, two to each side.

Abby Sinclair was sitting at one of the radio consoles when Schofield
entered the radio room.

The first thing Schofield noticed was that Abby Sinclair had not borne
the recent events at Wilkes Ice Station at all well. Abby was a pretty
woman in her late thirties, with long, frizzy brown hair and large
brown eyes. Long vertical streaks of black mascara ran down from
beneath both of her eyes. They reminded Schofield of the two scars
that cut down across his own eyes—now hidden once again, behind
his opaque silver glasses.

Next to Abby stood the three other Marines—Riley, Rebound, and
Snake. Abby Sinclair was the only scientist in the room.

Schofield turned to Book. “Nobody knows anything about
weather?”

“On the contrary,” Book said. “You're in luck.
Lieutenant Shane Schofield, I'd like you to meet Miss Abby
Sinclair. Miss Sinclair is both the radio expert at this station
and its resident meteorologist.”

Abby Sinclair said, “Actually, I'm not the real radio expert.
Carl Price was, but he... disappeared down in the cave
before. I just help him out with the radio gear, so I guess I'm it
now.”

Schofield smiled reassuringly at her. “That's good enough for
me, Miss Sinclair. Is it OK if I call you Abby?”

She nodded.

Schofield said, “All right. Abby, I have two problems, and
I'm hoping that you can help me with both of them. I need to get
in contact with my superiors at McMurdo as soon as possible. I need to
tell them what's happened here so that they can send in the
cavalry, if they haven't done so already. Now, we've been
trying to raise McMurdo on our portable radio, but we can't get
through. Question One: does the radio system here work?”

Abby smiled weakly. “It was working. I mean, before all
this started. But then the solar flare kicked in and disrupted all our
transmissions. In the end, though, that didn't matter because our
antenna went down in the storm and we never got a chance to fix
it.”

“That's OK,” Schofield said. “We can fix
that.”

Something else that she had said, however, troubled him. Schofield had
been told about the “solar flare” phenomenon on his way to
Wilkes, but he didn't know exactly what it was. All he knew was
that it disrupted the electromagnetic spectrum and, in doing so,
prevented any sort of radio communication.

“Tell me about solar flares,” he said to Abby.

“There isn't really much to tell,” Abby replied.
“We don't really know that much about them. Solar
flare is actually the term used to describe a brief
high-temperature explosion on the surface of the sun, what most people
would call a sunspot. When a sunspot occurs, it emits a huge amount of
ultraviolet radiation. A huge amount. Like ordinary heat from
the sun, this radiation travels through space toward the Earth. When
it gets here, it contaminates our ionosphere, turning it into a thick
blanket of electromagnetic mayhem. Satellites become useless because
radio signals from the Earth can't penetrate the contaminated
ionosphere. Similarly, signals coming from satellites down to
the Earth can't get through the ionosphere either. Radio
communication becomes impossible.”

Abby suddenly looked about her. Her eyes fell on one of the computer
screens next to her. “Actually, we have some weather-monitoring
gear in here. If you'll just give me a minute, I might be able to
show you what I mean.”

“Sure,” Schofield said as Abby switched on the computer next
to her.

The computer hummed to life. Once it was up and running, Abby clicked
through various screens until she came to the one she wanted. It was a
satellite map of southeastern Antarctica, overlaid with multicolored
patches. A barometric weather map. Like the ones on the evening news.

“This is a snapshot of the eastern Antarctic weather system
for”—Abby looked at the date in the corner of the
screen— “two days ago.” She looked around at
Schofield. “It was probably one of the last ones we got before
the solar flare moved in and cut us off from the weather
satellite.”

She clicked her mouse. Another screen came up. “Oh, wait;
here's another one. There it is,” she said.

It filled half the screen.

An enormous yellow-white blob of atmospheric disturbance. It filled
the entire left-hand side of the map, smothering nearly half of the
pictured Antarctic coastline. In real terms, Schofield thought, the
solar flare must have been absolutely enormous.

“And that is your solar flare, Lieutenant,” Abby
said. She turned to look at Schofield. “It must have moved
eastward after this shot was taken and covered us, too.”

Schofield stared at the yellow-white blob superimposed on the
Antarctic coastline. There were slight discolorations in it, red and
orange patches, even some black ones.

Abby said, “Since they usually explode in one section of the
sun's surface, solar flares usually only affect defined areas. One
station might have a total radio blackout while another, two hundred
miles away, will have all of its systems working just fine.”

Schofield stared at the screen. “How long do they last?”

Abby shrugged. “A day. Sometimes two. However long it takes for
all the radiation to make the trip from the sun to the Earth. Depends
on how large the original sunspot was.”

“How long will this one last?”

Abby turned back to face her computer. She looked at the depiction of
the solar flare on the screen, pursed her lips in thought.

“I don't know. It's a big one. I'd say about five
days,” she said.

A short silence followed as what she said sank in to everyone in the
room.

“Five days,” Rebound breathed from behind Schofield.

Schofield was frowning in thought. Abby: “You say it disrupts the
ionosphere, right?”

“Right.”

“And the ionosphere is ...”

“The layer of the Earth's atmosphere about 50 to 250 miles
up,” Abby said. “It's called the ionosphere because the
air in it is filled with ionized molecules.”

Schofield said, “OK. So, a solar flare explodes on the surface of
the sun and the energy it emits travels down to Earth, where it
disrupts the ionosphere, which turns into a shield through which radio
signals can't pass, right?”

“Right.”

Schofield looked at the screen again and stared at the black splotches
on the yellow-white graphic representation of the solar flare. There
was one larger black hole in the middle of the yellow-white blob that
held his attention.

“Is it uniform?” he asked.

“Uniform?” Abby blinked, not comprehending.

“Is the shield uniform in its strength? Or does it have weak
points, inconsistencies, breaks in the shield that could be
penetrated by radio signals? Like these black spots here.”

Abby said, “It would be possible to penetrate them, but
it would be difficult. The break in the flare would have to be
directly over this station.”

“Uh-huh,” Schofield said. “Is there any way that you
could figure out when or if one of those breaks would be directly over
us? Like, maybe, this one here.”

Schofield pointed at the large black hole in the center of the
yellow-white blob.

Abby studied the screen, evaluated the possibilities.

Finally, she said, “There might be a way. If I can bring
up some previous images of the flare, I should be able to plot how
fast it's traveling across the continent and in what direction. If
I can do that, then I should be able to make a rough plot of its
course.”

“Just do what you can,” Schofield said, “and call me if
you find anything. I want to know when one of those breaks is going to
pass over this station, so we can be ready to send a radio signal to
McMurdo when it does.”

“You'll have to fix the antenna outside—”

“I'm already on it,” Schofield said. “You just find
me a break in that
flare. We'll get your antenna up again.”

In Washington, Alison Cameron was also sitting
in front of a computer.

She was in a small computer lab in the Post's offices. A
microcrofilm viewing machine sat in the corner. Filing cabinets lined
two of the four walls. Half a dozen computers filled the rest of the
space in the small lab.

Alison found the screen she was looking for. The All-States Library
Database.

There is a popular urban myth that the FBI has a tap on every library
borrowing computer in the country and they use this facility to track
down serial killers. The killer quotes Lowell at a homicide scene, so
the FBI checks up on every library in the country to see who's
been borrowing Lowell. Like all good urban myths, this is only a
half-truth. There is a system (it is an updatable CD-ROM service) that
cross-links every library computer in the country, telling the user
where a certain book can be found. It doesn't list the names of
every person who has borrowed that book. It just tells you where a
particular book is located. You can search for a book in several ways:
by the author, by the book's title, or even by any unusual
keywords that appear in the text of a book. The All-States Library
Database was one such service.

Alison stared at the screen in front of her. She tabbed down to the
SEARCH BY KEYWORD button. She typed: