Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [9]
Rebound said, ‘Sir, infra-red reading is nega –’
The ground gave way beneath him.
There was no warning. No pre-emptive cracking of the ice. No sense of it weakening.
Rebound Simmons dropped like a stone into the crevasse.
It happened so fast that Buck Riley almost missed it. One second, he was watching Rebound as he peered out over the edge of the crevasse. The next second, Rebound simply dropped out of sight.
The black rope slithered out over the edge after Rebound, uncoiling at a rapid rate, shooting out over the rim.
‘Hold fast!’ Riley yelled to the two Marines anchoring the rope. They held the rope tightly, taking the strain, waiting for the jolt.
The rope continued to splay out over the edge until whack!, it went instantly taut.
Riley stepped cautiously over to the right, away from the edge of the crevasse, but close enough so that he could peer down into it.
He saw the wrecked hovercraft down at the bottom of the hole, and the two bloodied and broken bodies pressed up against the ice wall in front of it. And he saw Rebound, hanging from his rope, two feet above the hovercraft’s banged-open starboard door.
‘You okay?’ Riley said into his helmet mike.
‘Never doubted you for a second, sir.’
‘Just hold on. We’ll have you up in a minute.’
‘Sure.’
Down in the crevasse, Rebound swung stupidly above the destroyed hovercraft. From where he hung he could see in through the open starboard door of the hovercraft.
‘Oh, Jesus . . .’ he breathed.
Schofield knocked loudly on the big wooden door.
The door was set into the square-shaped base structure that supported the main dome of Wilkes Ice Station. It lay at the bottom of a narrow ramp that descended about eight feet into the ice.
Schofield banged his fist on the door again.
He was lying flat on the parapet of the base structure, reaching down from above the door to knock on it.
Ten yards away, lying on his belly in the snow at the top of the ramp with his legs splayed wide, was Gunnery Sergeant Scott ‘Snake’ Kaplan. His M-16E assault rifle was trained on the unopened door.
There came a sudden creak, and Schofield held his breath as a sliver of light stretched out onto the snow beneath him and the door to the station slowly began to open.
A figure stepped out onto the snow ramp beneath Schofield. It was a man. Wrapped in about seven layers of clothing. Unarmed.
Suddenly, the man tensed, presumably as he saw Snake lying in the snow in front of him, with his M-16 pointed right at the bridge of the man’s nose.
‘Hold it right there,’ Schofield said from above and behind the man. ‘United States Marines.’
The man remained frozen.
‘Unit Two is in. Secure,’ a woman’s voice whispered over Schofield’s earpiece.
‘Unit Three. In and secure.’
‘All right. We’re coming in through the front door.’
Schofield slid down from his perch and landed next to the man on the snow ramp, and began to pat him down.
Snake strode down the ramp toward them, his rifle up, pointed at the door.
Schofield said to the man, ‘You American? What’s your name?’
The man spoke.
‘Non. Je suis Français.’
And then, in English. ‘My name is Luc.’
There is a tendency among academic observers to view Antarctica as the last neutral territory on earth. In Antarctica, so it is said, there are no traditional or holy sites to fight over, no historical borders to dispute. What remains is something of a terra communis, a land belonging to the community.
Indeed, by virtue of the Antarctic Treaty, since 1961 the continent has been divided up into what looks like an enormous pie-chart, with each party to the Treaty being allocated a sector of the pie. Some sectors over-lap, as with those administered by Chile, Argentina and the United Kingdom. Others cover monumentally vast tracts of land – Australia administers a sector of the pie which covers nearly a whole quarter of the Antarctic land mass. There is even one