Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [72]
But this Wilcox character had not asked for money. Hadn’t even mentioned it. And since Cameron was in the neighbourhood . . .
‘He may well be,’ Cameron said. ‘But since I’m down here anyway, I might as well check him out.’
‘All right,’ Alison said. ‘But don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
Cameron hung up and slammed the door of his car.
In the Post’s offices in D.C., Alison Cameron hung up her phone and stared into space for a few seconds.
It was mid-morning and the office was a buzz of activity. The wide, low-ceilinged room was divided by hundreds of chest-high partitions, and in every one, people were busily working away. Phones rang, key-boards clattered, people scurried back and forth.
Alison was dressed in a pair of cream pants, a white shirt and a loosely-tied black tie. Her shoulder-length auburn hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail.
After a few moments, she looked at the slip of paper on which she’d jotted down everything her husband had told her over the phone.
She read over each line carefully. Most of it was indecipherable jargon. Talk about Scarecrows, ionospheric disturbances, forward teams and secondary teams.
Three lines, however, struck her.
-66.5
SOLAR FLARE DISRUPTING RADIO
115, 20 MINS, 12 SECS EAST
Alison frowned as she read the three lines again. Then she got an idea.
She quickly reached over to a nearby desk and grabbed a brown folio-sized book from the shelf above it. She looked at the cover: Bartholemew’s Advanced Atlas of World Geography. She flipped some pages and quickly found the one she was looking for.
She ran her finger across a line on the page.
‘Huh?’ she said aloud. Another reporter at a desk nearby looked up from his work.
Alison didn’t notice him. She just continued to look at the page in front of her.
Her finger marked the point on the map designated latitude 66.5 degrees south, and longitude 115 degrees, 20 minutes and 12 seconds east.
Alison frowned.
Her finger was pointing at the coastline of Antarctica.
The Marines gathered around the pool on E-deck in silence.
Montana, Gant and Santa Cruz wordlessly shouldered into scuba tanks. All three wore black thermal-electric wetsuits.
Schofield and Snake watched them as they suited up. Rebound stood behind them. Book Riley walked off in silence toward the E-deck storeroom, to check on Mother.
A large black backpack – the French team’s VLF transmitter that Santa Cruz had found during his search of the station – sat on the deck next to Schofield’s feet.
The news of Samurai’s death had rocked the whole team.
Luc Champion, the French doctor, had told Schofield that he had found traces of lactic acid in Samurai’s trachea, or windpipe. That, Champion had said, was almost certain proof that Samurai had not died of his wounds.
Lactic acid in the trachea, Champion explained, evidenced a sudden lack of oxygen to the lungs, which the lungs then tried to compensate for by burning sugar, a process known as lactic acidosis. In other words, lactic acid in the trachea pointed to death due to a sudden lack of oxygen to the lungs, otherwise known as asphyxiation, or suffocation.
Samurai had not died from his wounds. He had died because his lungs had been deprived of oxygen. He had died because someone had cut off his air.
Someone had murdered Samurai.
In the time it had taken Schofield and Sarah to go out and meet with Montana at the perimeter of the station – the same time it took for Rebound to climb down to E-deck and collect Luc Champion – someone had gone into the dining room on A-deck and strangled Samurai.
The implications of Samurai’s death hit Schofield hardest of all.
Someone among them was a killer.
But it was a fact that Schofield had not told the rest of the unit. He had only told them that Samurai had died. He hadn’t told them how. He figured that if someone among them was a killer, it was better that that person not be aware that Schofield knew about him. Rebound and Champion had been sworn to silence.