Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [161]
And then suddenly he saw it.
The harpoon gun.
The harpoon gun that he had taken from Little America IV. It was just lying there on the deck, right in front of his eyes.
Off-balance, Schofield reached for the harpoon gun just as Barnaby leapt down onto the deck in front of him and let fly with a brutal side-kick.
The kick connected and Schofield fell – harpoon gun and all – off the deck and into the small pool of water at the base of the diving bell, and suddenly he found himself outside the falling diving bell!
The diving bell plummeted past him and Schofield reached out with his left hand and caught hold of a pipe on the side of it as it rushed past him and suddenly he was yanked downwards.
Schofield kept a hold of the harpoon gun as he wrapped one of his legs around the exterior piping of the falling diving bell. He could only guess how deep they had fallen.
A hundred feet? Two hundred feet?
Schofield peered in through one of the small round portholes of the diving bell. This porthole also had a thin white crack running across it.
Schofield saw the crack and suddenly he realised what it was. The liquid nitrogen that had splattered against the diving bell up in the station was contracting the porthole’s glass, weakening it, causing it to crack.
Schofield saw Barnaby inside the diving bell, saw him standing on the small metal deck, saluting at Schofield, waving his detonation unit at him, as if it were all over.
But it wasn’t over.
Schofield stared at Barnaby through the porthole.
And then, as he looked at Barnaby from outside the diving bell, Schofield did a strange thing, and in an instant, the smile vanished from Barnaby’s face.
Schofield had raised his harpoon gun –
– and pointed it at the cracked porthole.
Barnaby saw it a second too late and Schofield saw the British general step across the diving bell and scream, ‘No!’ just as Schofield pulled the trigger on the harpoon gun and the harpoon shot straight through the cracked glass of the diving bell’s porthole.
The result was instantaneous.
The harpoon shot through the cracked glass of the porthole, puncturing the high pressure atmosphere of the diving bell. With the integrity of the diving bell lost, the immense weight of the ocean pressing in all around it suddenly became overwhelming.
The diving bell imploded.
Its spherical walls came rushing inwards at phenomenal speed as the colossal pressure of the ocean crushed it like a paper cup. Trevor Barnaby – Brigadier-General Trevor J. Barnaby of Her Majesty’s SAS – was crushed to death in a single, pulverising instant.
Shane Schofield just hung there in the water as he watched the remains of the diving bell sink into the darkness.
Barnaby was dead. The SAS were all dead.
He had the station back.
And then Schofield had another thought and a wave of panic swept over him. He was still a hundred feet below the surface. He would never be able to hold his breath long enough to get back up.
Oh Jesus, no.
No . . .
At that moment, Schofield saw a hand appear in front of his face and he almost jumped out of his skin because he thought it must have been Barnaby, that Barnaby had somehow managed to escape from the diving bell a second before it had –
But it wasn’t Trevor Barnaby.
It was James Renshaw.
Hovering in the water above Schofield, breathing through his thirty-year-old scuba gear.
He was offering Schofield his mouthpiece.
It was 9:00 p.m. when Schofield stepped back up onto E-deck.
It was 9:40 by the time he had searched the station from top to bottom, searching for any SAS commandos who might still have been alive. There weren’t any. Schofield picked up various weapons as he went – an MP-5, a couple of nitrogen charges. He also got his Desert Eagle back from Renshaw.
Schofield also looked for Mother, but there was no sign of her.
No sign at all.
Schofield even looked inside the dumb waiter that ran between the different decks, but Mother wasn’t inside it either.
Mother was nowhere to be found.