Ice Station (25 page)

“It's not something I like to talk about,” she said
quietly. “But, yes, I have heard about it.”

“What have you heard?” Schofield stepped back into the
storeroom.

“Only rumors. Rumors that get bigger and bigger each time you
hear 'em. As an officer, you probably don't hear this shit,
but I'll tell you, if there's one thing about enlisted men,
it's that they gossip like a bunch of old women.”

“What do they say?”

"Enlisted grunts like to talk about infiltrators. It's their
favorite myth. A campfire story designed by senior line animals to
scare the booties off the junior troops and make them trust one
another. You know, if we can't trust each other, who can we trust,
or something like that.

"You hear all kinds of theories about where these infiltrators
come from. Some folks reckon they're inserted by the CIA.
Deep-cover agents enlist with the armed forces with the sole purpose
of infiltrating elite units—so that they can keep tabs on us,
make sure we're doin' what we're supposed to be doin.'

"Others say it's the Pentagon that does it. Others still say
it's the CIA and the Pentagon. I heard one guy—a
real fruit-loop named Hugo Boddington—say once that he'd
heard that the National Reconnaissance Office and the Joint Chiefs of
Staff had a joint subcommittee that they called the Intelligence
Convergence Group and that it was the office that was in
charge of infiltrating American military units.

“Boddington said the ICG was some kind of ultrasecret committee
charged with hoarding intelligence. Charged with ensuring
that only the right people in the right places knew about certain
stuff. That's why they have to infiltrate units like ours. If
we're on a mission and we find something we're not supposed
to—I don't know, like a crashed space shuttle or
something—those ICG guys are there to wipe us out and make sure
that we don't tell anybody about what we saw.”

Schofield shook his head. It sounded like a ghost story. Double agents
among the troops.

But in the back of his mind there was a single doubt. A doubt that
took shape in the form of Andrew Trent's voice screaming over
Schofield's helmet radio from inside that Incan temple in Peru:
“They planted men in my unit!... They planted fucking men in
my unit!” Andrew Trent was no ghost story.

“Thanks, Mother,” Schofield said as he headed back for the
door. “I better get going.”

“Ah, yes,” Mother said. “A unit to run. People to
organize. Responsibility to take. I wouldn't be an officer for all
the money in the world.”

“I wish you'd told me that ten years ago.”

“Ah, yes, but then tonight wouldn't have been anywhere near
as much fun. You take care, you hear me, Scarecrow. Oh, and hey,”
she said. “Nice glasses.”

Schofield paused for a moment in the doorway. He realized that he was
wearing Mother's antiflash glasses. He smiled. “Thanks,
Mother.”

“Hey, don't thank me,” she said. “Hell, the
Scarecrow without his silver glasses, it's like Zorro without his
mask, Superman without his cape. It just ain't right”

“Call me if you need anything,” Schofield said.

Mother gave him a wicked grin. “Oh, I know what I need,
baby,” she said.

Schofield shook his head. “You never quit, do you?”

Mother smiled. “You know what?” she said coyly. “I
don't think you realize it when someone has their eye on you,
honey.”

Schofield raised an eyebrow. “Does someone have their
eye on me?”

“Oh, yes, Scarecrow. Oh, yes.”

Schofield shook his head, smiled. “Good-bye,
Mother.”

“Good-bye, Scarecrow.”

Schofield left the storeroom and Mother sank back against the wall.

When Schofield was gone, she closed her eyes and said softly to
herself, “Does someone have their eye on you? Oh, Scarecrow.
Scarecrow. If only you could see the way she looks at you.”

Schofield stepped out onto the pool deck.

The whole station was deserted. The cavernous shaft was silent.
Schofield stared at the pool, at the stationary cable that stretched
down into it.

“Scarecrow, this is Fox,” Gant's voice said
over his earpiece. “Are you still up there?”

“I'm still here; where are you?”

“Dive time is fifty-five minutes. We are proceeding up the
ice tunnel.”

“Any sign of trouble?”

“Nothing yet—whoa, wait a minute: who's
this?”

“What is it, Fox?” Schofield said, alarmed.

“No. It's nothing,” Gant's voice said.
“It's all right. Scarecrow, if that little girl's up
there with you, you might want to tell her that her friend is down
here.”

“What do you mean?”

“That fur seal, Wendy, She just joined us in the tunnel. Must
have followed us down here.”

Schofield pictured Gant and the others swimming up the underwater ice
tunnel, covered in their mechanical breathing apparatus, while beside
them Wendy swam happily, not needing any such equipment.

“How far have you got to go?” Schofield asked.

“Hard to say. We've been going extra slow, just to be
careful. I'd say it'll be another five minutes or so.”

“Keep me posted,” Schofield said. “Oh, and, Fox. Use
caution.”

“You got it. Scarecrow. Fox, out.”

The radio clicked off. Schofield stared at the water in the pool. It
was still stained red. At the moment, it was calm, glassy. He took a
step forward, toward it.

Something crunched beneath his feet.

He froze, looked down at his boots, bent down.

On the metal deck beneath his feet lay some broken shards of glass.
White frosted glass.

Schofield frowned at the glass.

And then, with frightening suddenness, a voice cut across his helmet
intercom: “Scarecrow, this is Snake. I'm on B-deck. I
just checked Renshaw's room. There was no answer when I banged on
his door, so I busted it open. Sir, there was no one in there. Renshaw
is gone. I repeat, Renshaw is gone.”

Schofield felt a chill run down his spine.

Renshaw wasn't in his room.

He was somewhere inside the station.

Schofield was about to move, about to go and find the others, when he
heard a soft puncturelike sound, followed by a faint whistling through
the air. There came a sudden thwacking noise, and Schofield
immediately felt a stinging, burning sensation on the back of his neck
and then, to his horror, he suddenly realized that the thwacking noise
had been the sound of something impacting against his neck at
extremely high speed.

Schofield's knees buckled. He suddenly felt very weak.

He immediately put his hand to his neck and then held it out in front
of his face.

His hand was slicked with blood.

Blackness slowly overcame him and Schofield dropped to his knees. The
world darkened around him, and as his cheek thudded down against the
ice-cold steel of the deck Shane Schofield had a single terrifying
thought.

He had just been shot in the throat.

And then suddenly the thought vanished and the world went completely
and utterly black.

Shane Schofield's heart...

... had stopped.

Libby Gant swam up the steep underwater ice
tunnel.

It was quiet here, she thought, peaceful. The whole world was tinted
pale blue.

As she swam, Gant could hear nothing but the soft, rhythmic hiss of
her low-audibility breathing gear. There were no other sounds—no
whistling noises, no whale song, no nothing.

Gant stared out through her full-face diving mask. In the glare of her
halogen dive lantern the icy walls of the tunnel glowed a ghostly
blue-on-white. The other divers—Montana, Santa Cruz, and the
scientist woman, Sarah Hensleigh— swam alongside her in silence.

All of a sudden the ice tunnel began to widen dramatically and Gant
saw several large round holes set into the walls on either side of
her.

They were larger than she had expected them to be—easily ten
feet in diameter. And they were round, perfectly round. Gant counted
eight such holes and wondered what kind of animal could possibly have
made them.

And then, abruptly, she forgot about the holes set into the ice walls.
Something else had seized her attention.

The surface.

Gant keyed her intercom. “Scarecrow. This is Fox,” she said.
“Scarecrow. This is Fox. Scarecrow, are you out there?”

There was no reply.

“Scarecrow, I repeat, this is Fox. Come in.”

Still no reply.

That was strange, Gant thought. Why would Scarecrow not answer her?
She had spoken to him only a few minutes ago.

Suddenly a voice crackled over her earpiece.

It wasn't Schofield.

“Fox, this is Rebound!” He seemed to be shouting
above some wind. He must have been outside the station. “I
read you. What's up?”

“We're approaching the surface now,” Gant said.
“Where's Scarecrow?” she added a little too quickly.

“He's inside the station somewhere. Down with Mother, I
think. Must have taken his helmet off or something.”

Gant said, “Well, it might be a good idea to go find him and tell
him what's going on down here. We're about to surface inside
the cavern.”

“Got it, Fox.”

Gant clicked off her radio and resumed her swim upward.

The water's surface looked strange from below.

It was glassy. Still. It looked like a warped glass lens of some sort,
completely distorting the image of whatever it was that lay beyond it.

Gant swam toward it. The others rose slowly in the water beside her.

They all broke the surface together.

In an instant, the world around Gant changed and she found herself
treading water in the center of an enormous pool situated at one end
of a massive underground cavern. She saw Montana and Santa Cruz
hovering in the water beside her, with Sarah Hensleigh behind them.

The cavern was absolutely huge. Its ceiling was easily a hundred feet
high, and its walls stretched so far into the distance that the
farthest reaches of the cavern were cloaked in darkness, evading the
fiarsh luminescent glare of the Marines' high-powered halogen
lanterns.

And then Gant saw it.

“I'll be damned ...,” she heard Santa Cruz say.

For a full minute, Gant could do nothing but stare. Slowly, she began
to make her wav toward the edge of the pool. When she finally stepped
up onto solid ground, she was totally entranced. She couldn't take
her eyes off it.

It looked like nothing she had ever seen before. Like something out of
a movie. The mere sight of it took her breath away.

It was a ship of some sort.

A black ship—completely black from nose to tail—about the
same size as a fighter jet. Gant saw that its two enormous tail fins
were embedded in the ice wall behind it. It looked as if they had been
consumed by the ice as it had crept slowly forward through
the ages.

The huge black spacecraft just stood there—in stark contrast to
the cold white cavern around it—standing high on three
powerful-looking hydraulic landing struts.

It looked fantastic, otherworldly.

And it looked mean.

Black and pointed, sleek and sharp, to Gant it looked like a huge
praying mantis. Its two black wings swooped down on either side of its
fuselage so that it looked like a bird in flight with its wings at the
lowest extremity.

The most striking feature of all, however, was the nose.

The ship had a hooked nose, a nose that pointed sharply downward, like
the nose on the Concorde. The cockpit—a rectangular reinforced
tinted-glass canopy—was situated right above the hooked nose.

A huge praying mantis, Gant thought. The sleekest,
fastest—biggest—praying mantis that
anyone has ever seen.

Gant realized that the others were also out of the water now, standing
beside her on the frost-covered floor of the cavem, also staring up at
the magnificent spacecraft.

Gant looked at her companions' faces.

Santa Cruz's mouth hung open.

Montana's eyes were wide.

Sarah Hensleigh's reaction, however, struck Gant as strange.
Hensleigh's eyes had narrowed and she stared at the spacecraft in
an unusual way. Despite herself, Gant felt a sudden chill. Sarah
Hensleigh's eyes glowed with what looked dangerously like
ambition.

Gant shook the thought off. and with the initial spell of the
spacecraft broken, her eyes began to take in the rest of the gigantic
cavern.

It took all of ten seconds for her to see them.

She froze instantly.

“Oh, God ...,” she said, her voice low. “Oh,
God....”

There were nine of them.

Bodies.

Human bodies, although at first it was hard to tell.

They were laid out on the floor on the far side of the pool—some
lay flat on their backs; others lay draped over large rocks by the
edge of the pool. Blood was everywhere. Puddled on the floor,
splashed against the walls, lathered all over the bodies themselves.

It was carnage.

Limbs had been torn from their sockets. Heads had been wrenched from
shoulders. Circular chunks of flesh had been ripped from the chests of
some of the bodies. Exposed bones lay all over the floor, some of them
splintered, others with ragged pieces of flesh still clinging to them.

Gant swallowed hard, tried desperately to keep herself from throwing
up.

The divers from the station, she thought.

Santa Cruz stepped up alongside her and stared at the mutilated bodies
on the far side of the pool.

“What the hell happened down here?” he said.

Schofield dreamed.

At first there was nothing. Nothing but black. It was like floating in
outer space.

And then all of a sudden—whack—a glaring white
light shattered Schofield's very existence, jarred him like an
electric shock, and he felt searing pain like he had never felt
before.

And then, just as suddenly as it had come, the shock vanished and
Schofield found himself lying on a floor somewhere—cold and
alone, asleep but awake.

It was dark. There were no walls.

He felt a wetness against his cheek.

It was a dog. A large dog. Schofield couldn't tell what type. He
could only tell that it was big. Very, very big.

The dog nuzzled against his cheek, sniffed inquisitively. Its cold wet
nose brushed against the side of his face. Its whiskers tickled his
nose.

It seemed curious, not at all threatening—

And then suddenly the dog barked. Loud as hell.

Schofield jumped. The dog was barking madly now at some unseen foe. It
seemed impossibly angry—frenzied, furious—baring its teeth
at this new enemy.

Schofield continued to lie on the cold floor of the wall-less room
unable—or just unwilling—to move. And then, gradually, the
walls around him began to take shape, and soon Schofield realized that
he was lying on the metal decking of E-deck.

The big dog was still standing over him, barking ferociously,
snarling. The dog, it seemed, was defending him.

But from what? What could it see that he could not?

And then suddenly the dog turned and ran away and Schofield lay alone
on the cold steel deck.

Asleep but awake, unable to move, Schofield suddenly felt vulnerable.
Exposed.

Something was approaching him.

It came from the direction of his feet. He couldn't see it, but he
could hear its footsteps as they clanged—slowly, one after the
other—on the cold steel deck.

And then suddenly it was over him and Schofield saw an evil smiling
face appear above his head.

It was Jacques Latissier.

His face was covered in blood, contorted in an obscene sneer. Ragged
pieces of flesh hung loosely from an open wound in his forehead. His
eyes were alive, burning with hate. The French commando raised his
glistening knife so that it was right in front of Schofield's
eyes.

And then he brought the knife down in a violent slashing—

“Hey,” someone said gently.

Schofield's eyes darted open and he awoke from his dream.

He was lying on his back. In a bed of some sort. In a room with
dazzling white fluorescent lights. The walls were white, too, made of
ice.

A man stood over him.

He was a small man, about five-foot-three. Schofield had never seen
him before.

The man was short and wiry, and he had two enormous blue eyes that
seemed way too big for his small head. Large black bags hung beneath
both of his eyes. He had messy brown hair that looked like it
hadn't been brushed in months and two huge front teeth that were
horribly askew. He wore a Kmart wash-and-wear shirt and a pair of blue
polyester trousers; in fact, he looked decidedly underdressed for the
near-freezing conditions inside Wilkes Ice Station.

And he was holding something.

A long-bladed scalpel.

Schofield stared at it.

The scalpel had blood on it.

The man spoke in a flat nasal voice. “Hey. You're
awake.”

Schofield squinted in the light, tried to lift himself up off the bed.
He couldn't do it. Something stopped him. He saw what it was.

Two leather straps bound his arms to the sides of the bed. Two more
straps bound his legs. When he tried to raise his head to further
examine his situation, he found that he couldn't even do that. It,
too, was strapped tightly down against the bed.

Schofield's blood went instantly cold.

He was completely tied down.

“Just hold on a minute,” the short man said in his
irritating nasal voice. “This will only take one ... more ...
second.”

He raised his bloody scalpel and ducked out of Schofield's field
of vision.

“Wait!” Schofield said quickly.

The short man returned instantly to Schofield's view. He raised
his eyebrows questioningly. “Yes?”

“Where ... where am I?” Schofield said. It hurt to speak.
His throat was parched, dry.

The man smiled, revealing his crooked front teeth. “It's OK,
Lieutenant,” he said. “You're still at Wilkes Ice
Station.”

Schofield swallowed. “Who are you?”

“Why, Lieutenant Schofield,” the man said, “I'm
James Renshaw.”

“Welcome back from the grave,
Lieutenant,” Renshaw said as he unbound the leather strap around
Schofield's head. He had just finished removing the last three
bullet fragments from Schofield's neck with his scalpel.

Renshaw said, “You know, you were very lucky you were wearing
this Kevlar plate inside your collar. It didn't stop the bullet
entirely, but it took most of the speed off it.”

Renshaw held up the circular Kevlar insert that had previously been
fitted inside Schofield's gray turtleneck collar. Schofield had
forgotten all about his neck protector. To him, it was just another
part of his uniform. Kevlar neck protectors were issued exclusively to
Marine officers, as an extra defense against snipers. Enlisted men
received no such protection, since enemy snipers rarely cared for
corporals and sergeants.

With the leather strap around his forehead now removed, Schofield
raised his head and looked at the Kevlar insert that Renshaw held in
his hand.

It looked like a priest's white collar—curved and flat,
designed to encircle its wearer's neck while remaining hidden
inside his turtleneck collar. On one side of the circular Kevlar
insert, Schofield could see a jagged, gaping hole.

The bullet hole.

“That bullet would have killed you for sure if it weren't for
your insert,” Renshaw said. “Would've cut right through
your carotid. After that there would have been nothing anyone
could have done for you. As it happened, the bullet shattered as it
passed through your Kevlar insert, so only a few small fragments of it
lodged in your neck. Still, that would have been enough to kill you,
and as a matter of fact, I actually think it did, at least for a short
time.”

Schofield had stopped listening. He was taking in the room around him.
It looked like someone's living quarters. He saw a bed, a desk, a
computer, and, strangely, a pair of black-and-white TV monitors
mounted on top of two video recorders.

He turned to face Renshaw. “Huh?”

“Several fragments of the bullet lodged in your neck, Lieutenant.
I'm pretty sure—in fact, I'm absolutely
certain—that for at least thirty seconds, you lost your pulse.
You were clinically dead.”

“What do you mean?” Schofield said. He instinctively tried
to raise his hand to feel his neck. But he couldn't move his arm.
His arms and legs were still firmly tied down to the bed.

“Oh, don't worry, I fixed it up,” Renshaw said. “I
took the bullet fragments out and I cleaned the wound. You actually
got a couple of Kevlar fragments in there, too, but they weren't a
problem. In fact, I was just trying to get them out when you woke
up.” Renshaw indicated the bloody scalpel on a silver tray next
to Schofield's bed. Beside the scalpel lay seven tiny metal
fragments, all of them covered in blood.

“Oh, and don't worry about my qualifications,” Renshaw
said with a smile. “I did two years of medicine before I dropped
out and took up geophysics.”