Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [189]
‘I don’t get how you can kill your own men and think you’re doing the country a favour.’
‘Jesus, Scarecrow, you weren’t even supposed to be there in the first place.’
That stopped Schofield. ‘What?’
‘Think about it,’ Kozlowski said. ‘How did you come to get to Wilkes Ice Station before anybody else?’
Schofield thought back, right to the very beginning. He had been on the Shreveport, in Sydney. The rest of the fleet had gone back to Pearl, but the Shreveport had stayed down there for repairs. It was then that the distress signal had come through.
‘That’s right,’ Kozlowski said, reading Schofield’s thoughts. ‘You were in for repairs in Sydney when the Shreveport received the distress signal from Wilkes. And then some dumb-fuck civilian sent you down there right away.’
Schofield remembered the voice of the Undersecretary of Defense coming in over the speakers of the briefing room on board the Shreveport, instructing him to go down to Wilkes and protect the spacecraft.
Kozlowski said, ‘Scarecrow, the Intelligence Convergence Group doesn’t set out to kill American units. It exists to protect Americans –’
‘From what? The truth?’ Schofield retorted.
‘We could have had an Army Ranger unit filled with ICG men down at that station six hours after you got there. They could have taken that station – even if the French had already got there – and held it and no American soldiers would have had to have been killed.’
Kozlowski shook his head. ‘But no, you just happened to be in the area. And that’s why we stack units like yours with ICG men – for this very eventuality. In a perfect world, the ICG would get there first every time. But if the ICG can’t get there first, then we make sure that reconnaissance units like yours are properly constituted so as to ensure that whatever information is found at the site stays at the site. For the sake of national security, of course.’
‘You kill your own countrymen,’ Schofield said.
‘Scarecrow. This didn’t have to happen. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. If anything, you got to Wilkes Ice Station too fast. If this had all been done as it should have been done, I wouldn’t have to kill you now.’
The Buick came to the guard station at the outer fence of the dockyard. A boom gate was lowered in front of it. The driver wound down his window and had a short conversation with the boom gate guard.
And then suddenly, the door next to Kozlowski was yanked open from the outside and an armed Naval Policeman appeared in the open doorway with his gun aimed squarely at Kozlowski’s head.
‘Sir, would you please get out of the car.’
Kozlowski’s face darkened. ‘Son, do you have any idea who you are talking to?’ he growled.
‘No, he doesn’t,’ a voice said from outside the car. ‘But I do,’ Jack Walsh said as he appeared outside the open car door.
Schofield, Kirsty and Renshaw all got out of the car, totally confused. The navy-blue Buick was surrounded by a swarm of Naval Police, all with their guns out.
Schofield turned to Walsh. ‘What’s going on? How did you know?’
Walsh nodded over Schofield’s shoulder. ‘Looks to me like you got yourself a guardian angel.’
Schofield spun, looked for a familiar face amid the crowd. At first he didn’t see a single face that he knew.
And then suddenly, he did. But it wasn’t a face he expected to see.
There, standing ten yards behind the ring of Naval Police surrounding the Buick, with his hands in his pockets, was Andrew Trent.
As Kozlowski and his driver were taken away in handcuffs, Schofield walked over to Trent.
Standing with Trent were a man and a woman whom Schofield had never met before. Trent introduced them as Pete and Alison Cameron. They were reporters with The Washington Post.
Schofield asked Trent what had happened. How had the Naval Police – backed up by Jack Walsh – known to stop Kozlowski’s car?
Trent explained. A couple of days ago, he had seen the amateur footage of the Wasp’s damaged flight deck on TV. Trent knew missile damage when he saw it. Then, when he learned that the