Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [138]
‘So, Sarah Hensleigh isn’t Kirsty’s mother?’
‘That’s right,’ Renshaw said. ‘Sarah Hensleigh was Brian’s second wife. Sarah Hensleigh is Kirsty’s stepmother.’
Suddenly, things began to make sense to Schofield. The way Kirsty hardly ever spoke to Sarah. The way she withdrew into herself whenever she was near Sarah. The natural response of a child to a stepmother she didn’t like.
‘I don’t know why Brian married her,’ Renshaw said. ‘I know he was lonely, and, well, Sarah is attractive and she did show him quite a bit of attention. But she was ambitious. Boy, was she ambitious. You could see it in her eyes. She just wanted his name, wanted to meet the people he worked with. She didn’t want him. And the last thing she wanted was his kid.’
Renshaw laughed sadly. ‘And then that drunk driver skipped the kerb and killed Brian and in one fell swoop, Sarah lost Brian and got the kid she never wanted.’
Schofield asked. ‘So why doesn’t she like you?’
Renshaw laughed again. ‘Because I told Brian not to marry her.’
Schofield shook his head. Obviously there had been a lot more going on at Wilkes Ice Station before he and his Marines had arrived than initially met the eye.
‘You ready with those mouthpieces?’ Schofield asked.
‘All set.’
‘This conversation is to be continued,’ Schofield said, as he got to his feet and began to shoulder into one of the scuba tanks.
‘Wait a second,’ Renshaw said, standing. ‘You’re going back in there now? What if you get killed going back in? Then there’ll be nobody left who believes my story.’
‘Who said I believed your story?’ Schofield said.
‘You believed it. I know you believed it.’
‘Then it looks like you’d better come with me. Make sure I don’t get killed,’ Schofield said as he walked over to the window set into the iceberg and looked out through it.
Renshaw paled. ‘Okay, okay, let’s just slow down for a second here. Have you given any thought to the fact that there is a pod of killer whales out there. Not to mention some kind of seal that kills killer whales –’
But Schofield wasn’t listening. He was just staring out through the window set in the ice. In the distance to the south-west – at the top of one of the nearby ice cliffs – he saw a faint, intermittent green flash. Flash-flash. Flash-flash. It was the green beacon light mounted on top of Wilkes Ice Station’s radio antenna.
‘Mr Renshaw. I’m going back in there . . . with or without you, whatever might be in the way.’ Schofield turned to face him.
‘Come on. It’s time to retake Wilkes Ice Station.’
Wrapped in two layers of oversized, 1960s-era wetsuits, Schofield and Renshaw swam through the icy silence, breathing with the aid of their thirty-year-old scuba gear.
They both had the same length of steel cable tied around their waists – cable that stretched all the way back to the large cylindrical spooler inside Little America IV, about a mile to the north-east of Wilkes Ice Station. It was a precaution, in case either of them got lost or separated and had to get back to the station.
Schofield held a harpoon gun that he had found inside the Little America station out in front of him.
The water around them became crystal clear as they swam underneath the coastal ice shelf and into a forest of jagged stalactites of ice.
Schofield’s plan was that they would swim under the ice shelf – depending on how deep it went – and come up inside Wilkes Ice Station. Outside, he had taken his bearings from the position of the green beacon light atop the station’s radio antenna. Schofield figured that if he and Renshaw could keep swimming in the general direction of the beacon, once they went under the ice shelf, they would eventually be able to spot the pool at the base of the station.
Schofield and Renshaw were in a world of white. Ghostly-white ice formations – like mountain peaks turned upside-down – stretched downward for nearly four hundred feet.
Schofield frowned inside his diving mask. They would have to go quite a way down before they could come up again inside the station.
Schofield and Renshaw swam down the side of one of the enormous