Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [135]
It was definitely man-made.
And old, too. The wooden panes of the window were weathered and scarred, bleached to a pale grey. Schofield wondered how long the window – and whatever structure it was attached to – had been buried inside this massive iceberg.
The way Schofield figured it, the blast from the submarine’s torpedo must have dislodged the ten metres or so of ice in front of the window, exposing it. The window and whatever it was attached to, had been buried deep within the iceberg.
Schofield took a deep breath. Then he kicked hard, shattering the window.
He saw darkness beyond the now open window, a small cave of some sort.
Schofield pulled a flashlight from his hip pocket and with a final look up at Renshaw, swung himself in through the window and into the belly of the iceberg.
The first thing Schofield saw through the beam of his flashlight were the upside-down words:
‘HAPPY NEW YEAR 1969!
WELCOME TO LITTLE AMERICA IV!’
The words were written on a banner of some sort. It hung limply – upside-down – across the cave in which Schofield now stood.
Only it wasn’t a cave.
It was a room of some sort – a small wooden-walled room, completely buried within the ice.
And everything was upside-down. The whole room was inverted.
It was a strange sensation, everything being upside-down. It took Schofield a second to realise that he was actually standing on the ceiling of the under-ground room.
He looked off to his right. There seemed to be several other rooms branching off from this one –
‘Hello down there!’ Renshaw’s voice sailed in from outside.
Schofield poked his head out through the window in the ice cliff.
‘Hey, what’s happening? I’m freezing my nuts off out here,’ Renshaw said.
‘Have you ever heard of Little America IV?’ Schofield asked.
‘Yeah,’ Renshaw said. ‘It was one of our research stations back in the sixties. Floated out to sea in ’69 when the Ross Ice Shelf calved an iceberg nine thousand square kilometres big. The Navy looked for it for three months but they never found it.’
‘Well, guess what,’ Schofield said. ‘We just did.’
Cloaked in three thick woollen blankets, James Renshaw sat down on the floor of the main room of Little America IV. He rubbed his hands together vigorously, blew on them with his warm breath, while Schofield – still dressed in his waterlogged fatigues – rummaged through the other rooms of the darkened, inverted station. Neither man dared to eat any of the thirty-year-old canned food that lay strewn about the floor.
‘As I remember it, Little America IV was kind of like Wilkes,’ Renshaw said. ‘It was a resource exploration station, built into the coastal ice shelf. They were after off-shore oil deposits buried in the continental shelf. They used to lower collectors all the way to the bottom to see if the soil down there contained –’
‘Why is everything upside-down?’ Schofield asked from the next room.
‘That’s easy. When this iceberg calved, it must have flipped over.’
‘The iceberg flipped over?’
‘It’s been known to happen,’ Renshaw said. ‘And if you think about it, it makes sense. An iceberg is top heavy when it breaks off the mainland, because all the ice that’s been living underwater has been slowly eroded over the years by the warmer seawater. So unless your iceberg is perfectly balanced when it breaks free from the mainland, the whole thing tips over.’
In the next room, Schofield was negotiating his way through piles of rusty, overturned junk. He stepped around a large, cylindrical cable-spooler that lay awkwardly on its side. Then he saw something.
‘How long did you say the Navy looked for this station?’ Schofield asked.
‘About three months.’
‘Was that a long time to look for a lost station?’
In the main room, Renshaw shrugged. ‘It was longer than usual. Why?’
Schofield came back in through the doorway. He was carrying some metal objects in his hands.
‘I think our boys were doing some things down here that they weren’t supposed to,’ Schofield said, smiling.
He held up a piece of white cord. It looked