Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [104]
‘You remember those guys I told you about who were parked in the van outside my parents’ house?’
‘Yes. . .’
‘Well, I followed one of them home. Stopped him in the doorway to his apartment and asked him a few questions. He was very co-operative, once he was . . . properly motivated.’
‘What happened to him?’ Cameron asked warily.
When he answered, Trent’s voice was hard, cold, entirely devoid of emotion.
‘He died.’
Snake stood handcuffed to the same pole as Henri Rae and Luc Champion on E-deck. His weapons and body armour had been removed. He just stood there, cuffed to the pole, dressed in his camouflaged, full-body combat fatigues.
Schofield, Riley and Rebound stood on the deck in front of him, looking at him. Mother was also out on the pool deck, sitting in a chair, looking like Cleopatra on a chaise. Schofield had had Book and Rebound carry her out onto the deck for this.
Last of all, behind Schofield, stood James Renshaw. He was the only civilian on the pool deck.
The atmosphere was tense. No one spoke.
Schofield looked at his watch.
It was 3:42 p.m.
He remembered what Abby Sinclair had said about the solar flare in the atmosphere above Wilkes Ice Station. A break in the solar flare would be passing over the station at 3:51.
Nine minutes.
He would have to make this quick. Gant and the others were still down in the cavern and he wanted to contact them and find out exactly what was down there before he called McMurdo.
Schofield pressed a button on the side of his watch and the display changed. The stopwatch screen appeared. It displayed numbers ticking upward:
1:52:58
1:52:59
1:53:00
Damn, Schofield thought.
It was going to be close. After he spoke with the people at McMurdo at 3:51, they would have less than an hour to figure out a way to seek out and destroy the French warship hovering off the coast waiting to fire its missiles at Wilkes Ice Station.
‘All right,’ Schofield said, turning to the group assembled around him. ‘Book. Rebound. You first.’
Book and Rebound told their story.
They had both been outside, working on the station’s antenna, out by one of the outer buildings.
‘And then you called and asked for one of us to go and check on Mr Renshaw,’ Book said. ‘Snake took the call, so he went to do it. He came back after about fifteen minutes and said that everything was fine; said that Mr Renshaw was still in his room and that it had just been a false alarm.’
Schofield nodded – that was when he had been shot.
Book said, ‘A little later, I got up to go and check on Mother, but Snake stopped me and said that he’d do it. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, so I said sure, if he wanted to.’
Schofield nodded again – that was when the attack on Mother had happened.
He stepped forward so that he stood right in front of Snake. ‘Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Would you care to explain yourself.’
Snake said nothing.
Schofield said, ‘Sergeant, I said, would you like to tell me what in fucking hell is going on here?’
Snake didn’t flinch. He just sneered coldly at Schofield.
Schofield hated him, hated the very sight of him.
This was the man who had shot him – killed him – and then checked to make sure that he was dead.
Schofield had thought about his own shooting.
In the end, it was the frosted glass on the deck that explained it. The white frosted glass that Schofield had stepped on only moments before he had been shot.
It explained two things: why Snake was able to fire a gun safely in the gaseous atmosphere of Wilkes Ice Station, and where he had fired it from.
The answer, in the end, was simple.
Snake hadn’t fired his sniper rifle from inside the station at all. He had fired it from outside the station. He had broken a tiny round hole in the white frosted glass dome that towered above the central shaft of the station and he had then shot down through that hole at Schofield. The glass which he had dislodged from the dome to make the hole in it had fallen all the way down through the shaft to E-deck. The same glass that Schofield had stepped on only moments before