Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [176]
‘Were you ICG before or after you went to teach at the university?’
‘Before,’ Hensleigh said. ‘Long before. Hell, Lieutenant, the ICG sent me to teach at USC. They asked me to retire from the Army, gave me a lifetime pension, and sent me off to the university.’
‘Why?’
‘They wanted to know what was going on there. In particular, they wanted to know about ice core research – they wanted to know about the chemical gases people like Brian Hensleigh were finding buried in the ice. Gases from highly toxic environments that disappeared hundreds of millions of years ago. Carbon monoxide variants, pure chlorine gas molecules. The ICG wanted to know about it – they can find uses for that sort of thing. So I got into the field, and I got to know Brian Hensleigh.’
Renshaw said, ‘You married him to get information out of him?’
Over in the corner of the tunnel, Kirsty watched this conversation with almost stunned interest.
‘I got what I wanted,’ Sarah Hensleigh said. ‘So did Brian.’
‘Did you kill him?’ Renshaw asked. ‘The car accident?’
‘No,’ Hensleigh said. ‘I didn’t. ICG wasn’t involved in that at all. It was exactly that, an accident. Call it whatever you want, destiny, fate. It just happened.’
‘Did you kill Bernie Olson?’ Schofield asked quickly.
Sarah paused before she answered that.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I did.’
‘Oh, you fucking bitch,’ Renshaw said.
‘Bernie Olson was a liar and a thief,’ Hensleigh said. ‘He was going to publish Renshaw’s findings before Renshaw did. I didn’t really care about that. But then when Renshaw struck metal fifteen hundred feet down, Olson told me he was going to publish that, too. And I just couldn’t allow that to happen. Not without the ICG knowing about it first.’
‘Not without the ICG knowing about it first,’ Schofield repeated bitterly.
‘It’s our job to know everything first.’
‘So you killed him,’ Schofield said. ‘With sea snake venom. And you made it look like Renshaw did it.’
Sarah Hensleigh looked at Renshaw. ‘I’m sorry, James, but you were far too easy a target. You and Bernie fought all the time. And when you fought that night, it was just too good an opportunity to miss.’
Schofield looked at his watch. ‘Sarah, listen. I know you don’t believe me, but we have to get out of here. There is a nuclear missile –’
‘There is no missile,’ Hensleigh snapped. ‘If there were, the SEALs wouldn’t be here.’
Schofield glanced at his watch again.
10:36 p.m.
Shit, he thought. It was so frustrating. They were stuck here, at the mercy of Sarah Hensleigh. And she was just going to wait here until the nuke arrived and killed them all.
It was at that moment that Schofield’s watch flicked over to 10:37 p.m.
Schofield hadn’t known about the eighteen Tritonal 80/20 charges that Trevor Barnaby had laid in a semicircle around Wilkes Ice Station with the intention of creating an iceberg.
Hadn’t known that exactly two hours ago – at 8:37 p.m. – when Barnaby had been inside the diving bell alone, that Barnaby had set a timer to detonate the Tritonal charges in two hours’ time.
The eighteen Tritonal charges exploded as one and the blast was absolutely devastating.
Three hundred-foot geysers of snow shot up into the air. A deafeningly loud groan echoed out across the landscape as a deep, semi-circular chasm formed in the ice shelf. And then suddenly, with a loud, ominous crack, that part of the ice shelf containing Wilkes Ice Station and everything below it – a whole three cubic kilometres of ice – suddenly dropped away and began to fall into the sea.
Down in the ice tunnel in the cavern, the world tilted crazily. Chunks of ice rained down on everyone inside the tunnel. The collective boom of the eighteen Tritonal charges going off sounded like an enormous thunderclap.
At first, Schofield thought it was the nuclear missile. Thought that Romeo had made a terrible mistake and that the nuke had arrived half an hour earlier than expected. But then Schofield realised that it had to be something else – if it had been the nuke, they would all have been dead