Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [31]
Schofield thought about the French. They had started with twelve men, plus the two civilian scientists. Snake had said earlier that he’d killed one outside, and Schofield himself had capped another one upstairs. That meant the French were down to ten men – plus the two civilians, wherever the hell they were.
Schofield’s thoughts returned to the present. He looked at the big wooden door in front of him, covered with dozens of protruding silver spikes.
He turned to Gant. ‘We can’t stay here.’
‘I kind of already got that idea,’ Gant replied deadpan.
Schofield spun to look at her, confused by her reply. Gant didn’t say anything. She just pointed over his shoulder.
Schofield turned around and for the first time, really looked at the room around him.
It looked like a boiler room of some sort. Anodised black pipes covered the ceiling. Two enormous white cylinders – lying on their sides, one on top of the other – took up the entire right-hand wall of the room. Each cylinder was about twelve feet long and six feet high.
And in the middle of each cylinder was a large, diamond-shaped red sticker. On the sticker was a picture of a single flame and, in large bold letters, the words:
DANGER
FLAMMABLE PROPELLANT
L-5
HIGHLY FLAMMABLE
Schofield stared at the massive white cylinders. They appeared to be connected to a computer which sat on a table in the rear corner of the room. The computer was switched on, but at the moment the screen was filled with a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit screen saver: a buxom blonde in an impossibly small bikini lying provocatively on a tropical beach somewhere.
Schofield crossed the room quickly and stood in front of the computer. The sexy woman on the screen pouted at him.
‘Maybe later,’ Schofield said to the screen as he hit a key on the keyboard. The screen saver vanished instantly.
It was replaced by a coloured schematic diagram of the five floors of Wilkes Ice Station. Five circles filled the screen – three on the left, two on the right – each one comprised of the central well of the station surrounded by a larger, outer circle. The outer circle was connected to the central well by four straight tunnels.
Rooms were arrayed both between the outer tunnel and the central well, and outside the outer tunnel. Different rooms were painted different colours. A colour chart on the side of the screen explained that each colour indicated a different temperature. The temperatures ranged from –5.4° to –1.2° Celsius.
‘It’s the air-conditioning system,’ Gant said, taking up a position by the door. ‘L-5 means it uses chlorofluorocarbons as propellant. Must be pretty old.’
‘Why doesn’t that surprise me,’ Schofield said as he walked over toward the door and grabbed the handle.
He opened the door a crack –
– just in time to see a black, baseball-sized object come rocketing toward him.
A long finger of white smoke traced a line through the air behind it, revealing its source: Petard up on A-deck, with a FA-MAS assault rifle equipped with an underslung 40mm grenade launcher.
Schofield ducked just as the gas-propelled grenade shot through the narrow gap in the doorway above his head, banked upward slightly, and slammed into the back wall of the air-conditioning room.
‘Out! Now!’ Schofield yelled.
Gant didn’t need to be told. She was already on her way out the door, MP-5 up and firing.
Schofield dived through the doorway after her, just as the air-conditioning room exploded behind him. The heavy, spike-ridden door almost blew off its hinges as the concussion wave flung it outward like a twig. The door whipped around in a full 180-degree arc before banging into the ice wall out on the catwalk, right next to Schofield. An enormous fireball then blasted out from the doorway and shot past Schofield out into the open space in the centre of Wilkes Ice Station.
‘Scarecrow! Come on!’ Gant called as she fired up at A-deck from further down the catwalk.
Schofield leapt to