Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [165]
Santa Cruz smiled. ‘Better you than me, ma’am.’
‘Thanks.’
At that moment, Montana came into the workshop. ‘Doctor Hensleigh?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Fox said to tell you that you might like to have a look at something she’s found over in the office. She
said it was a codebook or something.’
‘All right.’ Hensleigh got up and left the workshop.
Montana and Santa Cruz were alone.
Santa Cruz resumed his examination of the ship’s schematics.
Santa Cruz said, ‘You know, sir, this plane is something else. It’s got a standard turbofan powerplant with supercruise capability. And it’s got eight small, retro jets on its underbelly for vertical take-off and landing. But the strange thing is, both of these power-plants run on regular jet fuel.’
‘So?’ Montana said from the doorway.
‘So . . . what does the plutonium core do?’ Santa Cruz said, turning to face Montana.
Before Montana could reply, Cruz turned back around to face his schematics. He pulled some hand-written notes out from under them.
‘But I think I figured it out,’ Santa Cruz said. ‘I was telling Fox about this before. These notes I found say that the engineers at this hangar were working on some new kind of electronically-generated stealth mechanism for the Silhouette, some kind of electromagnetic field that surrounded the plane. But to generate this electromagnetic field they needed a shitload of power, something in the neighbourhood of 2.71 gigawatts. But the only thing capable of generating that kind of power is a controlled nuclear reaction. Hence, the plutonium.’ Santa Cruz nodded to himself, pleased.
He never noticed Montana stepping up quickly behind him.
‘I tell ya,’ Santa Cruz went on, ‘this has been one seriously fucked-up mission. Spaceships, French troops, British troops, secret bases, plutonium cores, ICG traitors. Fuck. It’s just –’
Montana’s knife entered Santa Cruz’s ear. It went in hard, and penetrated Santa Cruz’s brain in an instant.
The young private’s eyes went wide, then he fell forward and slammed down face-first on the desk in front of him. Dead.
Montana extracted his bloody knife from Santa Cruz’s skull and turned around –
– and saw Libby Gant standing in the doorway to the workshop, with a bundle of papers in her hands, staring at him in apoplectic horror.
Schofield keyed his helmet mike. ‘Gant! Gant! Come in!’
There was no reply.
Schofield glanced at his watch.
9:58 p.m.
Shit. The break in the solar flare would be here in two minutes.
‘Gant, I don’t know if you can hear me, but if you can, listen up. Montana is ICG! I repeat, Montana is ICG! Don’t turn your back on him! Neutralise him if you have to. I repeat, neutralise him if you have to. I’ve gotta go.’
And with that, Schofield raced upstairs and headed for the radio room.
Gant ran across the cavernous hangar with Montana in hot pursuit. She sprinted past an ice wall just as a line of bulletholes erupted across it.
Gant unslung her MP-5 as she raced through the bulkhead doorway that led back to the fissure and the main cavern. She fired wildly behind her. Then she dived into the horizontal fissure and rolled through it just as Montana appeared in the bulkhead doorway behind her and let off another burst of gunfire.
Another line of bulletholes raked across the ice wall around Gant, only this time, the line of bulletholes cut across the middle of her body.
Two bullets lodged in her breastplate. One opened up a jagged red hole in her side.
Gant stifled a scream as she rolled through the fissure, clutching her side. She clenched her teeth, saw the trickle of blood seep between her fingers. The pain was excruciating.
As she rolled out of the fissure and into the main cavern, Gant saw the elephant seals over by the spaceship, and indeed, no sooner was she out of the fissure than she saw one of the seals lift its head and look over in her direction.
It was the male. The big bull male, with its fearsome lower fangs. He must have returned sometime in the last half hour, Gant thought.
The male barked at her.