Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [32]
Gant and Schofield raced around the C-deck catwalk – out in the open – Schofield with his gun trained up to the left, Gant taking the right. Long tongues of bright, yellow flames burst out from the muzzles of their MP-5s. Return fire from the French raked the ice walls all around them.
Schofield saw a small alcove set into the wall about ten yards ahead of them.
‘Fox! There!’
‘Got it!’
Schofield and Gant threw themselves into the small alcove just as a second, more powerful, explosion boomed out from the air-conditioning room.
From the second it erupted, Schofield knew that this detonation was different to the first one. It wasn’t like the short, contained blast of a grenade. It had more resonance to it, more substance. It was the sound of something large exploding . . .
It was the sound of one of the air-conditioning cylinders exploding.
The walls to the air-conditioning room cracked instantly under the weight of the massive explosion. Like a cork being popped from a champagne bottle, a length of black piping shot clear of the air-conditioning room and careered at phenomenal speed across the one-hundred-foot space in the middle of the station, and lodged itself into the ice wall on the far side.
Schofield pressed himself flat against the wall of the alcove as a hail of bullets slammed into the ice next to him. He looked at the alcove around him.
It was just a small nook sunk into the wall, designed, it seemed, for the sole purpose of housing the control console which drove the enormous winch which raised and lowered the station’s diving bell. The console itself, Schofield saw, was little more than a series of levers, dials and buttons arranged on a panel.
In front of the console sat an abnormally large, steel-plated chair. Schofield immediately recognised the chair as a pilot’s ejection seat from an F-14 fighter. The black exhaust marks beneath the seat’s booster and the sizeable dent in its large steel headrest told Schofield that this ejection seat had, in a former life, been used for its given purpose. Someone at Wilkes had cleverly mounted the enormous seat on a rotating stand and then bolted the whole thing down to the floor, turning four hundred pounds of military junk into heavy duty furniture.
Suddenly, a new barrage of automatic gunfire thundered down from the north-west corner of A-deck and Gant jumped onto the ejection seat and ducked behind the headrest, curling her small frame into a ball so that she was completely covered by the big seat’s steel-lined backplate.
The burst of gunfire lasted a full ten seconds and pummelled the rear of the ejection seat. Gant pressed her head up against the headrest, keeping her eyes shielded from the onslaught of ricocheting bullets.
As she did so, however, some movement caught her eye.
It was off to her left. Down to her left.
Down in the pool at the base of the station. Under the surface. A glistening black-and-white shape, unbelievably huge, cruising slowly, ominously, beneath the surface. It must have been deeper than it appeared because the high dorsal fin wasn’t breaking the surface.
The first dark shape was joined by a second shape, then a third, and then a fourth. The lead one must have been at least forty feet long. The others were smaller.
Females, Gant thought. She had read once that for every one male there were usually eight or nine females.
The water was choppy and it served only to make their blurred black-and-white outlines look all the more sinister. The leader rolled on its side and Gant caught a side-on glimpse of the white underbelly and the wide open mouth and the two terrifying rows of teeth and suddenly the picture was complete.
It was then that Gant saw the two juveniles, swimming behind the enormous lead male. They were the two killers she had seen earlier, before the battle with the French had erupted, the two killers who had been searching for Wendy.
Now they were back . . . and they had brought the rest of the pack