Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [25]
A chunk of ice exploded next to Schofield’s head and he spun around. Petard was back on his feet in the dining room. Firing hard with his assault rifle. Schofield levelled his Desert Eagle at the dining room and fired six rapid shots back at Petard.
He looked back at the main entrance.
Ten seconds, at the most.
‘Shit,’ he said aloud, looking at Gant, limp in his arms. ‘Shit.’
He looked down over the railing of the catwalk and saw the pool of water way down at the bottom of the station. It couldn’t have been more than sixty or seventy feet. They could survive the fall . . .
No way.
Schofield looked at the catwalk on which he stood and then at the ice wall behind him.
Better.
‘Scarecrow, you better get out of there!’ It was Montana. He was now out on the catwalk, on the southern side of the station. From where he was standing he could see into the main entrance tunnel on the northern side. Whatever he saw there wasn’t good.
‘I’m trying, I’m trying,’ Schofield said.
Schofield fired off two more shots at Petard in the dining room before holstering his pistol.
Then he quickly reached over his shoulder and pulled his Maghook from its holster on his back. The Armalite MH-12 looks a little like an old-fashioned Tommy gun. It has two pistol grips: one normal grip with a trigger, and one forward, support grip below the muzzle. In effect the Maghook is a gun, a compact, two-handed launcher that fires a grappling hook from its muzzle at tremendous speed.
At Schofield’s feet, Gant began to groan.
Schofield pointed his launcher at the ice wall and fired. A loud, metallic whump rang out as the grappling hook shot out from the muzzle and slammed into the ice wall. The hook exploded right through the wall, into the dining room. Once on the other side, its ‘claws’ snapped open.
‘Scarecrow! Get moving!’
Schofield turned, just as Gant groggily got to her feet beside him.
‘Grab my shoulders,’ he said to her.
‘Wha – huh?’
‘Never mind. Just hold on,’ Schofield said as he threw her arms over his shoulders. The two of them stood close, nose to nose. In any other circumstance, it would have looked like an intimate clinch, two lovers about to kiss – but not now. Holding Gant tightly, Schofield spun and leaned his butt up against the railing.
He looked back toward the main entrance tunnel and saw shadows moving quickly over the ice walls of the passageway. Gunfire began to spew out from within the passageway.
‘Hold tight,’ Schofield said to Gant.
And then, with both hands holding the launcher behind Gant’s back – and with her arms wrapped tightly around his neck – Schofield shifted his weight backwards and the two of them tumbled over the railing and fell out into space.
No sooner had Schofield and Gant fallen clear of the railing than it was assaulted by a torrent of bullets. A brilliant cascade of white-orange impact sparks exploded above their heads as they dropped clear of the catwalk.
Schofield and Gant fell.
The Maghook’s cable splayed out above them. They whipped past B-deck, past Riley and Hollywood, who spun around at the unexpected sight of a pair of bodies dropping past them.
Then Schofield hit a black button on the forward grip of the launcher and a clamping mechanism inside the muzzle bit into the unspooling cable.
Schofield and Gant jolted to a sudden stop, just below B-deck, and the Maghook’s cable began to swing them in toward the catwalk. They swung in fast, over the C-deck catwalk, and dropped down onto the metal gangway.
As soon as his feet hit the catwalk, Schofield pressed down twice on the trigger of the launcher. When he did so, up on A-deck, the grappling hook’s claws responded by immediately collapsing inward with a sharp snick, and the hook was sucked back through the hole it had created in the dining room wall. The grappling hook fell down into the central shaft of the ice station, reeled in by the launcher. In a couple of seconds it was back in Schofield’s hands, and he and Gant hurried inside the nearest doorway.
‘Grenade!’
Riley and Hollywood ran