Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [162]
Schofield sat down on the edge of the pool on E-deck, exhausted. It had now been more than twenty-four hours since he had last slept and he was beginning to feel it.
Beside him, Renshaw’s scuba gear from Little America IV lay dumped on the deck, dripping. It still had the long length of steel cable tied to it – the cable that stretched back down through the water, down under the ice shelf and out to sea, back to the abandoned station in the iceberg about a mile off the coast. Schofield shook his head as he looked at the ancient scuba gear. Behind him on the deck sat one of the British team’s sea sleds – a sleek, ultra-modern unit. The exact opposite of Little America IV’s primitive scuba gear.
Renshaw was upstairs in his room on B-deck, getting some bandages, scissors and disinfectant to use on Schofield’s wounds.
Kirsty was standing on the deck behind Schofield, watching him, concerned. Schofield took a deep breath and shut his eyes. Then he grabbed his nose and – craaaack – his broken nose went back into place.
Kirsty winced. ‘Doesn’t that hurt?’
Schofield grimaced and nodded. ‘A lot.’
Just then, there came a loud splash and Schofield spun around just in time to see Wendy burst up out of the water and land on the metal deck. She loped over to him and Schofield patted her on the head. Wendy immediately rolled over onto her back and got him to pat her on the belly. Schofield did so. Behind him, Kirsty smiled.
Schofield looked down at his watch.
9:44 p.m.
He thought about the breaks in the solar flare that Abby Sinclair had told him about earlier.
Abby had said that breaks in the flare would be passing over Wilkes Ice Station at 7:30 p.m. and 10:00 p.m.
Well, he’d missed the 7:30 break.
But there were still sixteen minutes until the last break passed over the station at 10:00 p.m. He’d try to get on a radio then and call McMurdo.
Schofield sighed, turned around. He had some things to do before then, though.
He saw a Marine helmet on the deck. Snake’s, he guessed. Schofield reached over and grabbed it, put it on his head.
He then positioned the helmet’s microphone in front of his mouth. ‘Marines, this is Scarecrow. Montana. Fox. Santa Cruz. Do you copy?’
At first there was no reply, then suddenly Schofield heard: ‘Scarecrow? Is that you?’
It was Gant. ‘Where are you?’ she said.
‘I’m up in the station.’
‘What about the SAS?’
‘Killed ’em. Got my station back. What about you? I saw that Barnaby sent a team down there.’
‘We had a little help, but we took care of them without any losses. Everyone’s accounted for. Scarecrow, we have got a lot to talk about.’
Down in the ice cavern, Libby Gant looked out from behind the horizontal fissure.
After the short-lived battle with the British dive team, she and the others had retreated to the fissure, not to get away from the SAS commandos – they were all dead – but rather to get away from the giant elephant seals that had begun to prowl around the cavern after gorging themselves on the SAS troops. Right now, Gant saw, the seals were clustered around the big black ship, like campers gathered around a campfire.
‘Like what?’ Schofield’s voice said.
‘Like a spaceship that isn’t a spaceship,’ Gant said.
‘Tell me about it,’ Schofield said wearily.
Gant quickly told Schofield about what she had found. About the ‘spaceship’ itself and the keypad on it, about the hangar and the diary and the earthquake that had buried the whole station deep within the earth. It looked like a top-secret military project of some sort – the secret construction by the US Air Force of some special kind of attack plane. Gant also mentioned the reference in the diary to a plutonium core inside the plane.
Then she told Schofield about the elephant seals and the bodies inside the cave and how the seals had cut down the SAS troops as they had emerged from the water. Their viciousness, Gant said, was shocking.
Schofield took it all in silently.
He then told Gant of the elephant seal that he had seen earlier on the monitor inside Renshaw’s room; told her about the abnormally large lower canines