Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [59]
At first Cameron heard nothing, then static. He looked expectantly at Emmett the Geek.
‘It’s coming,’ Somerville said.
There was a wash of some more static and then, suddenly, voices.
‘– copy, one-three-four-six-two-five –’
‘– contact lost due to ionospheric disturbance –’
‘– forward team –’
‘– Scarecrow –’
‘– minus sixty-six point five –’
‘– solar flare disrupting radio –’
‘– one-fifteen, twenty minutes, twelve seconds east –’
‘– how –’ static, ‘ – get there so –’
‘– secondary team en route –’
Pete Cameron slowly shut his eyes. It was another bum steer. Just more indecipherable military gobbledygook.
The transmission ended and Cameron turned and saw that Somerville was watching him eagerly. Clearly, the SETI technician wanted something to come of his discovery. He was a nobody. Worse, a nobody out in the middle of nowhere. A guy who probably just wanted to see his name in The Washington Post in anything other than an obituary. Cameron felt sorry for him. He sighed.
‘Could you play it again for me,’ he said, reluctantly pulling out his notepad.
Somerville practically leaped for the rewind button.
The tape played again and Cameron dutifully took notes.
It was ironic, Schofield thought, that Petard, the last French commando, should be killed by one of his own weapons. Especially when it was a weapon that France had obtained from the United States by virtue of their alliance under NATO.
The M18A1 mine is better known throughout the world as the ‘Claymore’. It is made up of a concave porcelain plate which contains hundreds of ball bearings embedded in a six-hundred-gram wad of C-4 plastic explosive. In effect, a Claymore is a directable fragmentation grenade. If one sits behind it, one will not be harmed by its blast. If one is caught in front of it, one will be shredded to pieces.
The most well-known characteristic of the Claymore, however, is the simple instruction label which one finds embossed on the forward face of the mine. It reads: THIS SIDE TOWARD ENEMY.
Or, in French ‘BRAQUEZ CE CÔTÉ SUR L’ENNEMI.’
If you ever found yourself looking at those words, you knew you were looking at the wrong end of a Claymore.
The two Claymores in the drilling room had been central to the French commandos’ last-ditch plan to beat the Marines. After it was all over, Schofield pieced together that plan:
They had sent someone down to the drilling room, ahead of the others. Once there, that person had set up the two Claymores so that they faced the door. The Claymores would then be connected to a trip-wire.
Then, the other French commandos would pretend to retreat to the drilling room, deliberately allowing the Marines to follow them.
Of course, the Marines would know that the drilling room was a dead end, so they would think that the French, in their desperate attempt to flee, had run themselves into a corner, into a trap.
Surrender would be inevitable.
But as the Marines entered the drilling room to secure the French troops, they would break the trip-wire and set off the two Claymores. The Marines would be cut to ribbons.
It was an audacious plan. A plan that would have changed the course of the battle.
And it was cunning, too. It turned a full-scale retreat – hell, a total surrender – into a decisive counter-attack.
But what Petard and the French had not accounted for was that one of the American soldiers might come upon their trap while they were setting it.
Schofield was proud of Rebound. Proud of how the young Marine had handled the situation.
Rather than blow the lid on the French plan and continue with unpredictable hand-to-hand fighting, Rebound had coolly allowed the French to believe that their plan was still on foot.
But he had changed one thing.
He had turned the Claymores around.
That was what Petard had seen when Rebound had spoken to him in the drilling room. He had seen those chilling words.
THIS SIDE TOWARD ENEMY.
Pointing at him.
Rebound had got the better of him.
And when Rebound stepped forward across the trip-wire, it was