Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [51]
Blackness. Total blackness.
Schofield felt Gant’s weight on the ladder behind him. They were heading up the shaft.
As soon as the lights had gone out, Schofield had immediately ordered his team to ‘go to green’. Then he had outlined his plan.
It was no use playing defence in a darkened environment. They had to stay on the attack. Had to. The team that would win this battle would be the one that used the darkness to its advantage, and the best way to do that was to stay on the offensive. As such, Schofield’s plan was simple.
Keep the French on the run.
They were down on numbers. Only four of the original twelve French commandos were still alive. And Montana had just said that two of those four had just evacuated A-deck. So they were also split into two groups of two.
But most importantly of all, they were running.
Schofield’s team, on the other hand, was also split, but in a much more advantageous way.
Schofield had three Marines up on A-deck – Montana, Snake and Santa Cruz – and another three down on E-deck – Gant, Rebound and himself.
If the Marines up on A-deck could flush the remaining French commandos down through the station, soon those French soldiers would run right into the Marines from the lower decks. And then the Marines – a force of superior numbers, attacking from two flanks – would finish them.
But Schofield didn’t want to get carried away, didn’t want to get ahead of himself, because this would be no ordinary battle.
The fighting would be different.
For in the highly flammable, gaseous atmosphere of the station, neither side could use guns.
This would be old-fashioned, close-quarter fighting.
Hand-to-hand combat.
In near total darkness.
In other words, it would be knives in the dark.
But as he’d thought about it more closely, Schofield had suddenly seen a problem with his plan.
The French had crossbows.
Schofield had looked at the crossbow he had taken from the dead French commando on E-deck. Since it didn’t create a spark of any kind, a crossbow could be fired safely inside the gaseous atmosphere of the station. Schofield tried to think back to his early weapons training at the Basic School at Quantico, tried to remember the vital stats for a hand-held crossbow. He remembered that the standard range of accuracy for a small-size crossbow was not great, about the same as that for a conventional six-shooter, roughly twenty feet.
Twenty feet.
Damn it, Schofield thought. Knives would be useless if the French had a twenty-foot safety zone around themselves. With no corresponding projectile-firing weapon, the Marines wouldn’t stand a chance. The thing was, they didn’t have such a weapon. At least, nothing that they could use safely in the station’s flammable, gaseous environment.
And then it occurred to Schofield.
Maybe they did . . .
Schofield stepped up onto D-deck with his Maghook held out in front of him at shoulder height, ready to fire. In his other hand, he held the dead Frenchman’s crossbow.
Although not exactly designed for accuracy, the Armalite MH-12 Maghook launcher has the ability to shoot its magnetic grappling hook quite substantial distances – over a hundred feet.
Initially, the MH-12 Maghook was intended for use in urban warfare and anti-terrorist operations – its chief purpose was to provide a self-contained rope and grappling hook that could be used for scaling the sides of buildings, or providing zip lines along which anti-terrorist units could slide and make rapid forced entries.
That being the case, the Maghook’s small, hand-held launcher had to have the power to shoot its hook to great heights. The answer was a state-of-the-art hydraulic launching system that provided four thousand pounds per square inch of enhanced vertical thrust. The way Schofield figured it, if he fired his Maghook at an enemy soldier from a distance of twenty feet, four thousand pounds per square inch of thrust had to have some chance of scoring a hit.
And indeed, as Schofield himself had discovered in the pool