Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [57]
Rebound pushed open the door. It creaked loudly as it swung open in front of them.
The door swung wide and the Marines saw the last Frenchman standing over on the far side of the drilling room.
It was Jean Petard. He looked forlornly at them. He was caught in a dead end and he knew it. He was trapped.
‘I . . . I surrender,’ he said meekly.
Schofield just stared at Petard. Then he turned to Rebound and the others, as if calling for advice.
Then he stepped forward into the drilling room.
Petard seemed to smile, relieved.
At that moment, Rebound suddenly stuck his arm out in front of Schofield’s chest, stopping him. Rebound had never taken his eyes off Petard.
Petard frowned.
Rebound stared at him and said, ‘Le piège est tendu.’
Petard cocked his head, surprised.
‘The trap is set,’ Rebound said in English.
And then Petard suddenly averted his gaze and looked at something else, something on the floor in front of him and his smile went flat. He looked up at Rebound, horrified.
Rebound knew what Petard had seen.
He had seen five French words, and as soon as he had seen them, Petard knew that his fight was over.
Those five words were: BRAQUEZ CE CÔTÉ SUR L’ENNEMI.
Rebound stepped forward and Petard yelled ‘No!’ but it was too late. Rebound stepped through the trip-wire in front of the door and the two concave mines in the drilling room exploded with all their terrifying force.
THIRD INCURSION
16 June 1130 hours
The highway stretched away into the desert.
A thin, unbroken strip of black overlaying the golden-brown floor of the New Mexico landscape. Not a single cloud appeared in the sky.
A lone car raced along the desert highway.
Pete Cameron drove, sweating in the heat. The air-conditioner in his rented 1977 Toyota had long since given up the fight for life, and now the car was little more than an oven on wheels. It was probably ten degrees hotter inside his car than it was outside.
Cameron was a reporter for The Washington Post, had been for three years now. Before that, he had made a name for himself doing features for the respected investigative-reporting journal, Mother Jones.
Cameron had fitted in well at Mother Jones. The journal has one all-encompassing goal: to expose misleading government reports. Cover-ups. And to a large extent, it had been successful in achieving this goal. Pete Cameron loved it, thrived on it. In his last year at Mother Jones, he had won an award for an article he had written on the loss of five nuclear warheads from a crashed B-2 stealth bomber. The bomber had crashed into the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast of Brazil and the US Government had issued a press release saying that all five warheads had been recovered, safely and intact. Cameron had investigated the story, had queried the methods used to find the missing nukes.
The truth soon emerged. The rescue mission had not been about the recovery of the warheads at all. It had been about recovering all evidence of the bomber. The nuclear warheads had been a secondary priority and they had never been found.
It was that article and the award that followed it that had brought Cameron to the attention of The Washington Post. They offered him a job and he took it with both hands.
Cameron was thirty years old, and tall, really tall – six-foot-five. He had messy, sandy-brown hair and wireframe glasses. His car looked like a bomb had hit it – empty Coke cans were strewn about the floor, intermingled with crumpled cheeseburger wrappers; pads and pens and scraps of paper stuck out from every compartment in the car. A pad of Post-Its rested in the ashtray. Those that had been used were stuck to the dashboard.
Cameron drove through the desert.
His cellular rang. It was his wife, Alison.
Pete and Alison Cameron were something of celebrities among the Washington press community, the famous – or infamous – husband-and-wife team of The Washington Post. When Pete Cameron had arrived at the Post from Mother Jones three years ago, he had been assigned to work with a young reporter named Alison Greenberg. The chemistry