Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [151]
Two SAS commandos stormed into the drilling room with their guns up. Trevor Barnaby strode in behind them.
Barnaby winced when he saw Snake’s body lying flat on the floor, face-down, with its head positioned underneath the large black drilling apparatus – complete with a gaping red hole right through the middle of it.
‘Oh, Scarecrow,’ Barnaby said. ‘Did you have to do that to him?’
Schofield was still breathing hard, and he had tiny flecks of blood splattered all over his face. He didn’t say anything.
Barnaby shook his head. He almost seemed disappointed that Schofield hadn’t been killed by Snake.
‘Get him out of here,’ Barnaby said quietly to the two SAS men behind him. ‘Mr Nero.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘String him up.’
Down in the cave, another battle was underway.
No sooner had the first SAS diver stepped out of the water, than a second SAS diver was up and standing in the shallows behind him.
The first SAS commando stormed out of the water, firing hard. The second man followed him up, sloshing through the knee-deep water with his gun up when suddenly – whump! – he was violently yanked beneath the surface of the water.
The first commando – up on dry land and oblivious to the fate that had befallen his partner – snapped to his right and drew a bead on Montana, just as Gant bobbed up from behind her boulder and took him out from the left.
Gant turned, saw more SAS commandos surfacing in the pool with their sea sleds.
Then suddenly something else caught her eye.
Movement.
A large black object just slid out from one of the wide, ten-foot holes in the ice wall above the pool and dropped smoothly into the water.
Gant’s jaw dropped.
It was an animal of some sort.
But it was so huge. It looked like . . . like a seal. A great, big, enormous seal.
At that moment, another massive seal emerged from a second hole in the ice wall. And then another. And another. They just slid out from their holes and splashed down into the pool, raining down on the team of SAS divers from every side.
Gant just watched them with her mouth wide open.
The pool was a broiling froth now, choppy and frothy. Suddenly, another SAS diver went under, replaced by a slick of his own blood. And then abruptly the man next to him fell forward in the water as one of the enormous seals ploughed into him from behind and drove him under. Gant saw the animal’s glistening wet back rise above the water for an instant before it submerged on top of the British soldier.
A couple of SAS divers made it to land. But the seals just followed them right out of the water. One diver was on his hands and knees, clawing his way across the ice, trying desperately to get away from the water’s edge when a giant, sevent-on seal launched itself out of the pool right behind him.
The massive creature landed on the ice a bare two feet behind him and the earth shook beneath its weight. The big seal then lumbered forward and clamped its jaws shut around the SAS man’s legs. Bones crunched. The man screamed.
And then before he even knew what was happening, the big seal began to eat him.
Roughly, with great, slashing bites. The high-pitched tearing sound of flesh being ripped from bone filled the cavern.
Gant stared at the scene in silent awe.
The SAS men were screaming. The seals were barking. Several of them began eating their victims while they were still alive.
Gant just stared at the seals. They were huge. At least as big as killer whales. And they had bulbous round snouts that she had seen in a book once.
Elephant seals.
Gant noticed that there were two smaller seals in the group. These two smaller animals had peculiar teeth – strange, elongated lower canines that rose up from their lower jaws and over their upper lips, like a pair of inverted tusks. The larger seals, Gant saw, did not have these tusks.
Gant tried to recall everything she knew about elephant seals. Like killer whales, elephant seals lived in large groups made up of one dominant male, known as the