Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [93]
Renshaw offered Schofield a rectangular length of adhesive gauze. ‘Here. Put this on over the stitches. It’ll act like a Band-Aid, keep the wound tightly closed.’
Schofield took the adhesive gauze and fastened it firmly over the wound on his neck. He looked down at the rest of his body. Renshaw had removed most of his body armour – he was dressed only in his full-body camouflage fatigues, with his grey turtle-neck shirt underneath. He was still wearing his boots and his battered ankle/knee guards. His weapons – his pistol, his knife, his MP-5 and his Maghook – and his silver anti-flash glasses all sat on a table on the far side of the room.
Schofield saw the room’s closed door again and something twigged in his memory. He remembered being told that the door to Renshaw’s room had been sealed shut, riveted to its frame by Renshaw’s fellow scientists. But he also remembered something else, something that someone had said only moments before he had been shot. Something about Renshaw’s door being broken down . . .
Suddenly Schofield asked, ‘How did I get here?’
‘Oh, easy. I just stuffed your body inside the dumb waiter and sent it up to this level,’ Renshaw said.
‘No, I mean, I thought you were locked in this room? How did you get out?’
Renshaw offered Schofield a sly smile. ‘Just call me Harry Houdini.’
Renshaw crossed to the other side of the room, and stood in front of the two television monitors. ‘Don’t worry, Lieutenant. I’ll show you how I got out of here in a minute. But first, I’ve got something here that I think you’ll want to see.’
‘What?’
Renshaw smiled again. The same sly smile as before.
‘How would you like to see the man who shot you?’ he said.
Schofield stared at Renshaw for a long moment.
Then, slowly, he swung his legs off the bed. His neck stung and he had a monster of a headache from the concussion. Schofield walked gingerly across the room and stood next to Renshaw in front of the two television monitors.
‘Aren’t you cold?’ Schofield asked, looking at Renshaw’s rather casual attire.
Renshaw pulled open his shirt, Superman-style, revealing a blue, wetsuit-like undergarment. ‘Neoprene bodysuit,’ he said proudly. ‘They use ’em on the shuttle, for spacewalks and the like. It could be a hundred below in here and I wouldn’t notice it.’
Renshaw flicked on one of the monitors and a black-and-white image appeared on the screen.
The image was grainy, but after a few seconds, Schofield realised what he was looking at.
It was a view of the pool at the base of the ice station.
It was a strange view, however – taken from an overhead camera somewhere – one that looked directly down on a section of the pool and its surrounding deck.
‘This is a live feed,’ Renshaw said. ‘It comes from a camera mounted on the underside of the bridge that spans C-deck. It looks straight down on the pool.’
Schofield squinted as he looked at the black-and-white image on the screen.
Renshaw said, ‘The scientists who work at this station come down on six-monthly rotations, so we just inherit each other’s rooms. The guy who had this room before me was a crazy old marine biologist from New Zealand. Strange guy. He just loved killer whales, couldn’t get enough of them. God, he’d watch them for hours, liked to watch them when they came up for air inside the station. Gave them names and everything. God, what was his name . . . Carmine something.
‘Well anyway, old Carmine attached a camera to the underside of the bridge – so he could keep an eye on the pool from his room. When he’d see them on his monitor, he’d hustle on down to E-deck and watch them up close. Hell, sometimes the old bastard would watch ’em from inside the diving bell, so he could get right up close.’
Renshaw looked at Schofield and laughed. ‘I guess you’re the last person in the world I should be talking to about having a close look at killer whales.’
Schofield turned, remembering the terrifying