Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [6]
His call-sign added to the mystery, since it was common knowledge that it had been Brigadier-General Norman W. McLean himself who had given Schofield his operational nickname – a nickname which many assumed had something to do with the young lieutenant’s hidden eyes.
‘Whistler One, do you copy?’
Schofield picked up his radio. ‘Whistler Two, this is Whistler One. What is it?’
‘Sir –’ the deep voice of Staff Sergeant Buck ‘Book’ Riley was suddenly cut off by a wash of static. Over the past twenty-four hours, ionospheric conditions over continental Antarctica had rapidly deteriorated. The full force of a solar flare had kicked in, disrupting the entire electromagnetic spectrum, and limiting radio contact to short-range UHF transmissions. Contact between hovercrafts one hundred yards apart was difficult. Contact with Wilkes Ice Station – their destination – was impossible.
The static faded and Riley’s voice came over the speaker again. ‘Sir, do you remember that moving contact we picked up about an hour ago?’
‘Uh-huh,’ Schofield said.
For the past hour, Whistler Two had been picking up emissions from the electronic equipment on board a moving vehicle heading in the opposite direction, back down the coast toward the French research station, Dumont d’Urville.
‘What about it?’
‘Sir, I can’t find it anymore.’
Schofield looked down at the radio. ‘Are you sure?’
‘We have no reading on our scopes. Either they shut down, or they just disappeared.’
Schofield frowned in thought, then he looked back at the cramped personnel compartment behind him. Seated there, two to each side, were four Marines, all dressed in snow fatigues. White-grey kevlar helmets sat in their laps. White-grey body armour covered their chests. White-grey automatic rifles sat by their sides.
It had been two days since the distress signal from Wilkes Ice Station had been picked up by the US Navy landing ship, Shreveport, while it had been in port in Sydney. As luck would have it, only a week earlier it had been decided that the Shreveport – a rapid deployment vessel used to transport Marine Force Reconnaissance Units – would stay in Sydney for some urgent repairs while the rest of her group returned to Pearl Harbor. That being the case, within an hour of the receipt of Abby Sinclair’s distress signal, the Shreveport – now up and ready to go – was at sea, carrying a squad of Marines due south, heading toward the Ross Sea.
Now, Schofield and his unit were approaching Wilkes Ice Station from McMurdo Station, another, larger, US research facility about nine hundred miles from Wilkes. McMurdo was situated on the edge of the Ross Sea and was manned by a standing staff of 104 all year round. Despite the lasting stigma associated with the US Navy’s disastrous nuclear power experiment there in 1972, it remained the US gateway to the South Pole.
Wilkes, on the other hand, was as remote a station as one would find in Antarctica. Six hundred miles from its nearest neighbour, it was a small American outpost, situated right on top of the coastal ice shelf not far from the Dalton Iceberg Tongue. It was bounded on the landward side by a hundred miles of barren, windswept ice plains, and to seaward, by towering three hundred foot cliffs which were pounded all year round by mountainous sixty-foot waves.
Access by air had been out of the question. It was early winter and a minus-thirty-degree blizzard had been assailing the camp for three weeks now. It was expected to last another four. In such weather, exposed helicopter rotors and jet engines were known to freeze in mid-air.
And access by sea meant taking on the cliffs. The US Navy had a word for such a mission: suicide.
Which left access by land. By hovercraft. The twelve-man Marine Recon Unit would make the eleven-hour trip from McMurdo to Wilkes in two enclosed-fan, military hovercrafts.
Schofield thought about the moving signal again. On a map, McMurdo, d’Urville and Wilkes stations formed something like an isosceles triangle. D’Urville and Wilkes on the coast, forming the base of the