Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [37]
The rivets began to expand – thwack! thwack! thwack! – and in rapid succession began to crack open the ice-cold notches of their steel supports and fall to the catwalk below.
The rivets clanked loudly as they dropped down onto the C-deck catwalk.
One.
Then two. Then three.
Then five. Then ten.
There were rivets everywhere, raining down on the C-deck catwalk. And then suddenly a new sound filled Wilkes Ice Station.
The unmistakable, high-pitched squeal of rending metal.
‘Oh, shit,’ Schofield said. ‘It’s gonna go.’
B-deck went. Suddenly. Without warning.
The entire catwalk – the whole, flaming circle – just fell away, dropping with a sudden jolt, taking every-body who was still on it down with it.
Some sections of the catwalk managed to stay attached to the ice walls. Their fall ended abruptly, almost as soon as it had begun. They ended up pointing downward at a 45-degree angle.
The remaining sections just slid out from the ice walls and dropped down into the central shaft of the station.
Nearly everyone who had been standing on B-deck dropped with the collapsed sections of catwalk – eleven people in all.
A tangled mix of civilians, soldiers and three broken sections of metal catwalk sailed down the central shaft of Wilkes Ice Station.
They fell a full fifty feet.
And then they landed.
Hard.
In water.
In the pool at the bottom of the station.
Sarah Hensleigh plunged underwater.
A stream of bubbles shot up past her face and the world suddenly went silent.
Cold. Absolute, unforgiving cold assailed all of her senses at once. It was so cold it hurt.
And then suddenly, she heard noises.
Noises that broke the ghostly, underwater silence – a series of muffled whumps in the water all around her. It was the sound of the others falling into the pool with her.
Slowly, the curtain of bubbles in front of her face began to disperse, and Sarah began to make out a number of unusually large shapes moving smoothly through the water around her.
Large, black shapes.
They appeared to glide effortlessly through the silent, freezing water – each one frightening in its size; as large and as wide as a car. At that moment, a wash of white cut across Sarah’s field of vision and suddenly an enormous mouth, full of razor-sharp teeth, opened wide in front of her eyes.
Pure fear shot through her body.
Killer whales.
Suddenly, Sarah broke the surface. Gulped in air. The cold of the water meant nothing now. One after the other huge black dorsal fins began to rise above the choppy surface of the pool.
Before Sarah could even get a bearing on exactly where in the pool she was, something burst up out of the water next to her and she spun.
It wasn’t a killer whale.
It was Abby.
Sarah felt her heart start again. A second later, Warren Conlon also came up beside her.
Sarah spun around in the water. All five of the French soldiers who had been on B-deck when it blew were scattered around the pool. Three Marines were also in the pool. One of them, Sarah noticed, was floating face-down in the water.
A scream echoed down through the central shaft of the station.
A shrill, high-pitched squeal.
The scream of a little girl.
Sarah’s head snapped to look upward. There, high above her, hanging by one hand from the down-turned railing of the B-deck catwalk, was Kirsty. The Marine who had been with them when the catwalk had collapsed was lying face-down on the broken metal platform, reaching down desperately, trying to grab Kirsty’s hand.
Just then, as she was looking up at Kirsty, Sarah felt the immense weight of one of the killers rush through the water between her and Conlon. The massive animal brushed against the side of her leg.
And then suddenly, Sarah heard a shout.
It had come from the other side of the pool, and Sarah spun around just in time to see one of the French commandos – his face blistered and scorched from the fireball – swimming frantically for the edge of the pool, his terrified, panicked whimpers interrupted only by short, desperate breaths.
It was the only movement in the whole