Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [19]
‘It can see me from all the way down there?’ Gant said, glancing at Kirsty. ‘I thought whales were supposed to have poor eyesight out of the water.’
‘For their size, killer whales have bigger eyes than most other whales,’ Kirsty said, ‘so their eyesight out of the water is better.’ She looked at Gant. ‘You know about them?’
‘I read a lot,’ Gant said, casting a sideways glance at Hollywood, before turning back to face the killers.
The two killer whales continued to prowl slowly around the pool. Gliding through the still water, they seemed patient, calm. Content to bide their time until their prey appeared. Down on the pool deck, Gant saw Schofield and the two Marine divers watching the killer whales as they ominously circled the pool.
‘How do they get in here?’ Gant said to Kirsty. ‘What do they do – swim in under the ice shelf?’
Kirsty nodded. ‘That’s right. This station is only about a hundred yards away from the ocean, and the ice shelf out that way isn’t very deep, maybe five hundred feet. The killers just swim in under the ice shelf and surface here inside the station.’
Gant looked down at the two killer whales on the far side of the pool. They seemed so calm, so cold, like a pair of hungry crocodiles searching for their next meal.
Their survey complete, the two killer whales slowly began to submerge. In a moment they were gone, replaced by two sets of ripples. Their eyes had remained open the whole way down.
‘Well, that was sudden,’ Gant said.
Her eyes moved from the now empty pool to the diving platform beside it. She saw Montana emerge from the south tunnel with some scuba tanks slung over his shoulders. Sarah Hensleigh had told them that there was a small goods elevator in the south tunnel – a ‘dumb waiter’ – that they could use to bring their diving gear down to E-deck. Montana had been using it just now.
Gant’s gaze moved to the other side of the platform, where she saw Schofield standing with his head bowed, holding a hand to his ear, as though he were listening to something on his helmet intercom. And then suddenly he was heading toward the nearest rung-ladder, speaking into his helmet mike as he walked.
Gant watched as Schofield stopped at the base of the rung-ladder on the far side of the station, and turned to look directly at her. His voice crackled over her helmet intercom. ‘Fox. Hollywood. A-deck. Now.’
As she hastened toward the rung-ladder nearest her, Gant spoke into her helmet mike, ‘What is it, sir?’
Schofield’s voice was serious. ‘Something just set off the trip-wire outside. Snake’s up there. He says it’s a French hovercraft.’
Snake Kaplan drew a bead on the hovercraft.
The lettering on the side of the vehicle glowed bright green in his night-vision gunsights. It read: ‘DUMONT D’URVILLE – 02’.
Kaplan was lying in the snow on the outskirts of the station complex, bracing himself against the driving wind and snow, following the newly arrived hovercraft through the sights of his Barrett M82A1A sniper rifle.
Gunnery Sergeant Scott ‘Snake’ Kaplan was forty-five years old, a tall man, with dark, serious eyes. Like most of the other Marines in Schofield’s unit, Kaplan had customised his uniform. A weathered tattoo of a fearsome-looking cobra with its jaws bared wide had been painted onto his right shoulderplate. Underneath the picture of the snake were the words: ‘KISS THIS’.
A career soldier, Kaplan had been with the Marine Corps for twenty-seven years, during which time he had risen to the magic rank of Gunnery Sergeant, the highest rank an enlisted Marine can reach while still getting his hands dirty. Indeed, although further promotion was possible, Snake had decided to stay at Gunnery Sergeant rank, so that he could remain a senior member of a Marine Force Reconnaissance Unit.
Members of Recon units don’t care much for discussions about rank. Membership of a Marine Force Reconnaissance Unit alone gives one privileges to which even some officers cannot lay claim. It is not unknown, for instance, for a four-star general to consult a senior Recon member on matters of