Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [11]
One of the women let out a gasp of air. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ she said. Then she started to cry. ‘Oh, thank God.’
American accent, Schofield noted. The woman pushed back her chair and came toward him, tears pouring down her cheeks. ‘I knew you’d come,’ she said. ‘I knew you’d come.’
She clutched Schofield’s shoulderplate and began sobbing into his chest. Schofield showed no emotion. He held his pistol clear of her, as he’d been trained to do.
‘It’s okay, ma’am,’ was all he said, as he guided her gently to a nearby seat. ‘It’s okay. You’re all right now.’
Once she was seated, he turned to face the others. ‘Ladies and gentleman. We are Reconnaissance Unit Sixteen of the United States Marine Corps. My name is Lieutenant Shane Schofield, and this is Sergeant Scott Kaplan. We are here in response to your distress signal. We have instructions to secure this station and ensure that each of you is unharmed.’
One of the men at the table let out a sigh of relief.
Schofield went on. ‘So that you’re under no illusions, I will tell you now that we are a reconnaissance unit. We will not be extracting you. We are a front-line unit. We travel fast, and we travel light. Our task is to get here quickly, and make sure that you are all okay. If there’s an emergency situation, we will extract you, if not, our orders are to secure this station and wait for a fully equipped extraction team to arrive.’
Schofield turned to face Luc and the other two men standing behind the table. ‘Now, I presume you gentlemen are from d’Urville. Is that correct?’
The man with the tray in his hands swallowed loudly, his eyes wide.
‘Yes,’ Luc said. ‘That is correct. We heard the message on the radio, and we came as soon as we could. To help.’
As Luc spoke, a woman’s voice crackled over Schofield’s earpiece. ‘Unit Two, sweep is clear.’
‘Unit Three. We have found three – no, actually, make that four – contacts in the drilling room. We’re on our way up now.’
Schofield nodded at Luc. ‘Your names?’
‘I am Professor Luc Champion,’ Luc said. ‘This is Professor Jean-Pierre Cuvier, and holding the tray there is Dr Henri Rae.’
Schofield nodded slowly, taking the names in, comparing them to a list he’d seen on the Shreveport two days previously. It had been a list of the names of every French scientist stationed at d’Urville. Champion, Cuvier and Rae were on it.
There was a knock on the door and Schofield turned.
Sergeant Morgan ‘Montana’ Lee stood in the doorway to the dining room. Montana Lee was a nugget of a man, stocky, and at forty-six years of age, he was the oldest member of the unit. He had a pug nose and a heavy-set, weathered face. Ten yards behind him stood his partner, Corporal Oliver ‘Hollywood’ Todd. Tall, black and lean, Hollywood Todd was twenty-one years old.
And in between the two Marines stood the fruits of their sweep.
One woman.
One man.
One young girl.
And one seal.
‘They got here about four hours ago,’ Sarah Hensleigh said.
Schofield and Hensleigh were standing on A-deck, out on the catwalk that looked out over the rest of the ice station.
As Hensleigh had already explained, Wilkes Ice Station was essentially a great, big, vertical cylinder that had been bored into the ice shelf. It dived five storeys straight down, all the way to sea level.
Indented at regular intervals on the walls of the cylinder were metal catwalks which ran around the circumference of the cylinder. Each catwalk was joined to the one above it by steep, narrow rung-ladders, so that the whole structure looked kind of like a fire-escape.
Branching out from each catwalk, burrowing into the icy walls of the cylinder, was a series of tunnels which formed the different levels of the station. Each level was made up of four straight tunnels that branched out from the central shaft to meet a curved outer tunnel that ran in a wide circle around the central well. The four straight tunnels roughly equated the four points on a compass, so they were simply labelled north, south, east and west.
Each catwalk/level of Wilkes Ice Station was labelled A through E –