Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [7]
The signal that Whistler Two had picked up heading back along the coast toward Dumont d’Urville had been maintaining a steady speed of about forty miles an hour. At that speed, it was probably a conventional hovercraft. Maybe the French had had people at d’Urville who’d picked up the distress signal from Wilkes, sent help, and were now on their way back . . .
Schofield keyed his radio again. ‘Book, when was the last time you held that signal?’
The radio crackled. ‘Signal last held eight minutes ago. Rangefinder contact. Identical to previously held electronic signature. Heading consistent with previous vector. It was the same signal, sir, and as of eight minutes ago it was right where it should have been.’
In this weather – howling eighty-knot winds that hurled snow so fast that it fell horizontally – regular radar scanning was hopeless. Just as the solar flare in the ionosphere put paid to radio communications, the low pressure system on the ground caused havoc with their radars.
Prepared for such an eventuality, each hovercraft was equipped with roof-mounted units called rangefinders. Mounted on a revolving turret, each rangefinder swung back and forth in a slow 180-degree arc, emitting a constant, high-powered focal beam known as a ‘needle’. Unlike radar, whose straight-line reach has always been limited by the curvature of the earth, needles can hug the earth’s surface and bend over the horizon for at least another fifty miles. As soon as any ‘live’ object – any object with chemical, animal or electronic properties – crosses the path of a needle, it is recorded. Or, as the unit’s rangefinder operator, Private José ‘Santa’ Cruz, liked to put it, ‘if it boils, breathes or beeps, the rangefinder’ll nail the fucker’.
Schofield keyed his radio. ‘Book, the point where the signal disappeared. How far away is it?’
‘About ninety miles from here, sir,’ Riley’s voice answered.
Schofield stared out over the seamless expanse of white that stretched all the way to the horizon.
At last he said, ‘All right. Check it out.’
‘Roger that.’ Riley responded immediately. Schofield had a lot of time for Book Riley. The two men had been friends for several years. Solid and fit, Riley had a boxer’s face – a flat nose that had been broken too many times, sunken eyes and thick black eyebrows. He was popular in the unit – serious when he had to be, but relaxed and funny when the pressure was off. He had been the Staff Sergeant responsible for Schofield when Schofield had been a young and stupid second lieutenant. Then, when Schofield had been given command of a Recon unit, Book – then a forty-year-old, highly respected Staff Sergeant who could have had his choice of assignment within the Marine Corps establishment – had stayed with him.
‘We’ll continue on to Wilkes,’ Schofield said. ‘You find out what happened to that signal, and then you meet us at the station.’
‘Got it.’
‘Follow-up time is two hours. Don’t be late. And set your rangefinder arc from your tail. If there’s anybody out there behind us, I want to know.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Oh, and Book, one more thing,’ Schofield said.
‘What?’
‘You play nice with the other kids, you hear.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘One, out,’ Schofield said.
‘Whistler Two, out.’
And with that, the second hovercraft peeled away to the right and sped off into the snowstorm.
An hour later, the coastline came into view, and through a set of high-powered field glasses, Schofield saw Wilkes Ice Station for the first time.
From the surface, it hardly looked like a ‘station’ at all – more like a motley collection of squat, dome-like structures, half-buried in the snow.
In the middle of the complex stood the main building. It was little more than an enormous, round dome mounted on a wide square base. Above the surface, the whole structure was about a hundred feet across, but it couldn’t have been more than ten feet high.
On top of one of the smaller buildings gathered around the main dome stood the remains of a radio