Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [180]
And then, abruptly, the whole cavern tilted again.
Only this time, the tilting was much more dramatic. This time the whole cavern rotated a full 180 degrees, right around the hovering Silhouette!
The iceberg had flipped over!
The whole cavern was now upside-down!
Suddenly, a torrent of water came rushing out of a wide hole in the ‘ceiling’ of the cavern – the hole that only moments before had been the mouth of the underwater ice tunnel that had led up into the cavern.
The underwater ice tunnel no longer led to the depths of the ocean. Now it led upwards. Now it led to the surface.
Schofield manoeuvred the Silhouette so as to avoid the cascade of water pouring out of the ice tunnel. After a good twenty seconds, the rush of water abated and Schofield pulled back on his stick. The Silhouette responded by rocking backwards in the air and pointing itself up at the wide hole in the ceiling.
‘All right, Kirsty, now!’
Kirsty jammed down on her trigger.
Immediately, the Silhouette’s wings spewed forth a devastating burst of tracer fire. The relentless wave of bullets disappeared inside the hole in the ceiling and assaulted any icy crags or outcroppings that dared to jut out of the walls of the ice tunnel.
At that moment, Schofield hit the thrusters and the Silhouette shot up into the tunnel, just as, behind it, the ceiling of the enormous cavern spectacularly collapsed in on itself.
The wing-mounted guns of the Silhouette blazed away, blasting at any imperfections in the ice tunnel as the big black plane flew upwards through what had once been the underwater ice tunnel.
Schofield guided the sleek black plane up through the tunnel, shooting through puffs of white cloud, rolling the big plane onto its side when the tunnel narrowed, praying to God that the tracer bullets were clearing the way.
Up and up the Silhouette went, blasting away at the tunnel in front of it. Explosions boomed out all around the big black plane. The sound of its wing-mounted guns firing away was deafening.
And then suddenly the tunnel behind the Silhouette began to collapse at a phenomenal rate.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Massive chunks of ice began to rain down from the ceiling of the tunnel behind the speeding plane. The Silhouette raced upwards through the tunnel, blasting away at the walls of the tunnel in front of it while at the same time outrunning the collapsing tunnel behind it.
Through the cockpit canopy it looked like some kind of video-game thrill ride. The tunnel swept past Schofield at phenomenal speed, and occasionally the world flipped upside-down as he rolled the big plane to avoid falling chunks of ice.
Schofield watched as the barrage of tracer bullets decimated the walls of the tunnel in front of him, widening it, smoothing it, and then suddenly – voom! – the walls of the ice tunnel vanished and in a single, glorious instant, Schofield saw the sky open up in front of him.
The Silhouette burst out of the iceberg and flew up into the clear open sky.
The Silhouette shot up into the air, almost vertical, and Schofield looked back over his shoulder and saw that the ice shelf that had held Wilkes Ice Station within it was indeed no longer an ice shelf. It was now an iceberg.
An absolutely massive iceberg.
It had flipped over and Schofield saw the eroded underbelly of what had once been the ice shelf – the thin, icy stalactites; the glistening-wet mountain peaks – rising like spires above the new berg. He also saw the jagged, black hole through which the Silhouette had blasted out of the berg.
And then suddenly movement caught Schofield’s eye: a thin white object racing over the ocean, heading toward the newly formed iceberg.
The missile.
And as the Silhouette roared into the sky, Schofield watched in silent awe as the nuclear-tipped missile slammed into the iceberg and burrowed into it. There was about a three second delay . . .
And then the nuclear device detonated.
Armageddon.
The white-hot flash of the nuclear explosion – directly beneath the Silhouette as it shot up into the sky – was