Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [28]
‘As a leader,’ Barnaby had said, ‘you simply cannot afford to get angry or upset.’
Recognising that no commanding officer was immune from feeling angry or frustrated, Barnaby had offered his three-step tactical analysis as a diversion from such feelings. ‘Whenever you feel yourself succumbing to angry feelings, go through the three-step analysis. Get your mind off the anger and get it back on the job at hand. Soon, you’ll forget about what pissed you off and you’ll start doing what you’re paid for.’
And as he stood there in the doorway on C-deck, in the freezing-cold, ice-covered world of Wilkes Ice Station, Shane Schofield could almost hear Trevor Barnaby speaking inside his head.
Okay, then.
What is their objective?
They want the spaceship.
How are they going to get it?
They’re going to kill everybody here, grab the spaceship and somehow get it off the continent before anybody even knows it existed.
All right. But there was a problem with that analysis. What was it – ?
Schofield thought for a moment. And then it hit him.
The French had arrived quickly.
So quickly, in fact, that they had arrived at Wilkes before the United States had been able to get a team of its own there. Which meant they’d been close to Wilkes when the original distress signal had gone out.
Schofield paused.
French soldiers had been at d’Urville when Abby Sinclair’s signal had gone out.
But the distress signal could never have been anticipated. It was an emergency, a sudden occurrence.
And that was the problem with his analysis.
A picture began to form in Schofield’s mind: they had seen an opportunity, and they had decided to take it . . .
The French had had their commandos at Dumont d’Urville, probably doing exercises of some sort. Arctic warfare, or something like that.
And then the distress signal from Wilkes had been picked up. And suddenly the French would have realised that they had one of their elite military units within six hundred miles of the discovery of an extra-terrestrial spacecraft.
The prospective gains were obvious: technological advances to be garnered from the propulsion system, the construction of the exterior shell. Maybe even weapons.
It was an opportunity too good to pass up.
And the beauty of the plan was that if the French did in fact manage to remove the spacecraft from Wilkes Ice Station, could the American Government realistically go crying to the UN or the French Government and say that France had stolen an alien spacecraft from American custody? You can hardly complain when something you’re not supposed to have in the first place is stolen from you.
But the French commandos faced two problems.
Firstly: the American scientists at Wilkes. They would have to be eliminated. There could be no witnesses.
The second problem was worse: it was almost certain that the United States would dispatch a protective reconnaissance unit to Wilkes. So a clock was ticking. In fact, the French had realised that, in all probability, US troops would arrive at Wilkes before they could get the spaceship off the continent.
Which meant there would be a firefight.
But the French were here by chance. They’d had neither the time nor the resources to prepare a full-strength assault on Wilkes. They were a small force facing the probability that the US would arrive on the scene, with a force of greater strength than theirs, before they could make good their escape with the spacecraft.
They needed a plan.
And so they’d posed as scientists, concerned neighbours. Presumably with the intention that they would earn the Marines’ trust and then kill them while their backs were turned. It was as good a strategy as any for an impromptu force of inferior strength.
Which left one further question: how were they going to get the spaceship out of Antarctica?
Schofield decided that that question could wait. Better to tackle the battle at hand. So we ask again:
What is their objective?
To eliminate us and the scientists here at Wilkes.
How are they going to achieve that?
I don’t know.
How would you achieve that?