Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [48]
Schofield clawed at the deck, crawled as fast as he could. Not fast enough. He wasn’t going to make it. He wasn’t going to be able to get over the ejection seat in time.
Schofield saw water spread out on the deck all around him. The wash from the advancing killer whale.
It was right behind him!
Schofield’s adrenalin surged and he dived forward. He knew he wasn’t going to make it over the chair so he slammed himself, back first, into the ejection seat.
He was now facing the pool, ‘sitting’ in the battered ejection seat as it lay crumpled on its side. He looked up and the killer whale filled his entire field of vision.
It was right on top of him! Less than a metre away. It came roaring toward him.
There was no chance of it slowing down.
No chance of it missing him.
And Shane Schofield shut his eyes as the killer whale’s jaws came slamming down around his head.
There came a sudden, otherworldly clang!, a noise louder than anything Schofield had ever heard in his life.
Schofield had expected to feel pain – sharp, sudden, burning pain – as the killer whale’s teeth chomped down hard on his head. But strangely, he didn’t feel any pain.
Bewildered, he opened his eyes . . .
. . . and saw two long rows of razor-sharp teeth stretching away from him into darkness. In between the two long rows of teeth sat an obscenely fat, pink tongue.
It took a second for Schofield’s brain to put it all together.
His head was inside the killer whale’s mouth!
But for some reason – some unfathomable, incredible reason – he was still alive.
It was then that Schofield looked up and saw that his head was surrounded on three sides by the battered steel headrest of the ejection seat.
The killer whale’s ferocious bite had come down hard on the headrest, on either side of Schofield’s head. But the steel headrest had been strong enough to withstand the incredible force of the bite – it had halted the big whale’s teeth only millimetres short of Schofield’s ears. Now, two severe dents in the headrest jutted inwards on either side of his head. One of them – sharp and jagged – had drawn a tiny bead of blood from Schofield’s left ear.
Schofield couldn’t see anything else. His entire upper body, from chest to head, was completely covered by the killer whale’s mouth.
Suddenly, the ejection seat jolted beneath him.
It scraped loudly against the metal deck, and Schofield fell back into the seat as the whole thing lurched forward.
The movement stopped suddenly, almost as soon as it had begun, and Schofield rocked forward and shuddered to a halt. He suddenly realised what was happening.
The whale was dragging him back toward the pool.
The ejection seat jolted once again and Schofield felt the seat slide another three feet across the deck.
In his mind’s eye, Schofield could picture the whale’s movements. It was probably shuffling backwards – as the other one had done before with the Frenchman – undulating its massive body back across the deck as it dragged the four-hundred-pound ejection seat toward the edge of the deck.
The ejection seat moved again and Schofield felt a sudden rush of warm air wash over his face.
It had come from within the whale.
Schofield couldn’t believe it. The killer whale was huffing and puffing, breathing hard as it held this unusually heavy prize within its jaws and dragged it back toward the water! Schofield wriggled in his seat as another rush of warm air hit his face and the seat jolted once again.
His feet were still sticking out from the base of the ejection seat, out from the side of the whale’s propped-open mouth. If he could just wriggle down that way, Schofield thought, he might be able to slip out of the chair – and out of the whale’s mouth – before it reached the water.
Schofield moved slowly, gingerly, easing himself down in the ejection seat, not wanting to alert the whale to his plan.
Suddenly, the seat lurched sideways. It screeched hideously as it slid across the metal deck. Schofield quickly grabbed hold of the armrests to stop himself falling forward onto the big animal’s teeth.