Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [154]
But the killer just kept coming. It came at him fast – frighteningly fast – and soon Schofield could see nothing but its teeth and its tongue and the closing yawn of its jaws and then –
Without warning, the killer whale banked sharply in the water and veered downward, chasing after the asthma puffer and its trail of bubbles.
Schofield sighed with relief.
In a dark corner of his mind, Schofield thought about sonar detection systems. Although it is widely stated that sonar bounces off an object in water, this is not entirely true. Rather, sonar reflects off the microscopic layer of air that lies in between an object in water and the water itself.
So when Schofield sank the asthma puffer – spewing out a trail of nice, fat air bubbles behind it – he had, at least insofar as the sonar-using killer was concerned, created a whole new target. The whale must have detected the stream of bubbles with its clicking and assumed that it was Schofield trying to get away. And so it had chased after it.
Schofield didn’t think about it anymore.
He had other things to do now.
He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out Jean Petard’s stun grenade. Schofield pulled the pin, counted to three and then did a quick sit-up in the water and broke the surface. He then tossed the stun grenade vertically into the air and let himself fall back underwater squeezing his eyes shut.
Five feet above the surface of the pool, the stun grenade reached the zenith of its arc and hung in the air for a fraction of a second.
Then it went off.
Trevor Barnaby saw the grenade pop up out of the water. It took him an extra second to realise what it was, but by then it was too late.
Along with every one of his men, Barnaby did the most natural thing in the world when he saw a foreign object pop up out of a pool of water.
He looked at it.
The stun grenade exploded like an enormous flashbulb, blinding all of them. The SAS men on E-deck recoiled as one, as a galaxy of stars and sunspots came to life on the insides of their eyes.
Schofield did another sit-up in the water. Only this time, when he broke the surface, he had Petard’s cross-bow gripped in his hands, reloaded and ready to go.
Schofield took his aim quickly and fired.
The crossbow’s arrow shot across the expanse of E-deck and found its target. It slammed into the Maghook’s launcher, wedged as it was between the rungs of the rung-ladder.
The launcher jolted out of its position, and swung free from the rung-ladder, swung toward the pool. When it had been wedged in between the rungs of the rung-ladder,the Maghook’s rope had been stretched up toward the retractable bridge on C-deck at a 45 degree angle.Now that it was released from the rung-ladder – and since Schofield was floating in the water and, therefore, not putting any weight on it at the other end – the launcher swung back like a pendulum, out over the pool and smacked into the middle of Schofield’s waiting hand.
All right!
Schofield looked up at the bridge on C-deck. The Maghook’s rope was now stretched over the bridge like a block-and-tackle – with the length of rope going up parallel to the length of rope going down.
Schofield gripped the launcher tightly as he hit the black button on the grip of the Maghook. Instantly, he felt himself fly up out of the bloodstained water as the reeling mechanism of the Maghook hoisted him up toward the bridge on C-deck, its rope speeding over the bridge itself, using it as a block-and-tackle.
Schofield came to the bridge and hauled himself up onto it just as the first SAS men down on E-deck reached for their machine guns.
Schofield didn’t even look at them. He was already running off the bridge when they started firing.
Schofield climbed the rung-ladder up to B-deck two rungs at a time.
When he got up onto what was left of the B-deck catwalk, he reloaded his crossbow. Then he dashed toward the east tunnel and headed for the living quarters. He had to find Kirsty and then somehow, he had to figure out