Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [8]
Schofield ordered the hovercraft to a halt half a mile from the station. No sooner had it stopped than the port-side door slid open, and the six Marines leapt down from the hovercraft’s inflated skirt and landed with muffled whumps on the hardpacked snow.
As they ran across the snow-covered ground, they could hear, above the roar of the wind, the crashing of the waves against the cliffs on the far side of the station.
‘Gentlemen, you know what to do,’ was all Schofield said into his helmet mike as he ran.
Wrapped in the blanket of the blizzard, the white-clad squad fanned out, making its way toward the station complex.
Buck Riley saw the hole in the ice before he saw the battered hovercraft in it.
The crevasse looked like a scar on the icescape – a deep, crescent-shaped gash about forty metres wide.
Riley’s hovercraft came to rest a hundred yards from the rim of the enormous chasm. The six Marines climbed out, lowered themselves gently to the ground, and cautiously made their way across the snow, toward the edge of the crevasse.
PFC Robert ‘Rebound’ Simmons was their climber, so they harnessed him up first. A small man, Rebound was as nimble as a cat, and weighed about the same. He was young, too, just twenty-three, and like most men his age, he responded to praise. He had beamed with pride when he’d overheard his lieutenant once say to another platoon commander that his climber was so good, he could scale the inside of the Capitol building without a rope. His nickname was another story, a good-natured jibe bestowed upon him by his unit in reference to his less than impressive success rate with women.
Once the rope was secured to his harness, Simmons lay down on his stomach and began to shimmy his way forward, through the snow, towards the edge of the scar.
He reached the edge and peered out over the rim, down into the crevasse.
‘Oh shit . . .’
Ten metres behind him, Buck Riley spoke into his helmet mike, ‘What’s the story, Rebound?’
‘They’re here, sir,’ Simmons’ voice was almost resigned. ‘Conventional craft. Got somethin’ in French written on the side. Thin ice scattered all about underneath it. Looks like they tried to cross a snow bridge that didn’t hold.’
He turned to face Riley, his face grim, his voice tinny over the short range radio frequency. ‘And sir, they’s pretty fucked up.’
The hovercraft lay forty feet below the surface, its rounded nose crumpled inward by the downward impact, every one of its windows either shattered or cracked into distorted spiderwebs. A thin layer of snow had already embarked upon the task of erasing the battered vehicle from history.
Two of the hovercraft’s occupants had been cata-pulted by the impact right through the forward windshield. Both lay against the forward wall of the crevasse, their necks bent backwards at obscene angles, their bodies resting in pools of their own frozen blood.
Rebound Simmons stared at the grisly scene.
There were other bodies inside the hovercraft. He could see their shadows inside it, and could see star-shaped splatters of blood on the insides of the cracked windows of the hovercraft.
‘Rebound?’ Riley’s voice came over his helmet intercom. ‘Anybody alive down there?’
‘Don’t look like it, sir,’ Rebound said.
‘Do an infra-red,’ Riley instructed. ‘We got twenty minutes before we gotta hit the road and I wouldn’t want to leave and find out later that there were some survivors down there.’
Rebound snapped his infra-red visor into place. It hung down from the brow of his helmet, covering both of his eyes like a fighter pilot’s visor.
Now he saw the crashed hovercraft through a wash of electronic blue imagery. The cold had taken effect quickly. The whole crash site was depicted as a blue-on-black outline. Not even the engine glowed yellow, the colour of objects with minimal heat intensity.
More importantly,