"Why doesn't that surprise me," Schofield said as he walked over toward the door and grabbed the handle.
He opened the door a crack?
?just in time to see a black baseball-sized object come rocketing toward him.
A long finger of white smoke traced a line through the air behind it, revealing its source: Petard up on A-deck, with a FA-MAS assault rifle equipped with an underslung 40mm grenade launcher.
Schofield ducked just as the gas-propelled grenade shot through the narrow gap in the doorway above his head, banked upward slightly, and slammed into the back wall of the air-conditioning room.
"Out! Now!" he yelled.
Gant didn't need to be told. She was already on her way out the door, MP-5 up and firing.
Schofield dived through the doorway after her, just as the air-conditioning room exploded behind him. The heavy, spike-ridden door almost blew off its hinges as the concussion wave flung it outward like a twig. The door whipped around in a full 180-degree arc before banging into the ice wall out on the catwalk, right next to Schofield. An enormous fireball then blasted out from the doorway and shot past Schofield out into the open space in the center of Wilkes Ice Station.
"Scarecrow! Come on!" Gant called as she fired up at A-deck from farther down the catwalk.
Schofield leaped to his feet and cut loose an extended burst from his MP-5, aiming up at where he had seen Petard only moments before.
He and Gant raced aronnd the C-deck catwalk?out in the open?Schofield with his gun trained up to the left, Gant taking the right. Long tongues of bright yellow flames burst out from the muzzles of their MP-5s. Return fire from the French raked the ice walls all around them.
Schofield saw a small alcove set into the wall about ten yards ahead of them.
"Fox! There!"
"Got it!"
Schofield and Gant threw themselves into the small alcove just as a second, more powerful, explosion boomed out from the air-conditioning room.
From the moment it erupted Schofield knew that this detonation was different from the first one. It wasn't like the short, contained blast of a grenade. It had more resonance to it, more substance. It was the sound of something large exploding . . . .
It was the sound of one of the air-conditioning cylinders exploding.
The walls to the air-conditioning room cracked instantly under the weight of the massive explosion. Like a cork being popped from a champagne bottle, a length of black piping shot clear of the air-conditioning room and careered at phenomenal speed across the one-hundred-foot space in the middle of the station and lodged itself into the ice wall on the far side.
Schofield pressed himself flat against the wall of the alcove as a hail of bullets slammed into the ice next to him. He looked at the alcove around him.
It was just a small nook sunk into the wall, designed, it seemed, for the sole purpose of housing the control console that drove the enormous winch, which raised and lowered the station's diving bell. The console itself, Schofield saw, was little more than a series of levers, dials, and buttons arranged on a panel.
In front of the console sat an abnormally large steel-plated chair. Schofield immediately recognized the chair as a pilot's ejection seat from an F-14 fighter. The black exhaust marks beneath the seat's booster and the sizable dent in its large steel headrest told Schofield that this ejection seat had, in a former life, been used for its given purpose. Someone at Wilkes had cleverly mounted the enormous seat on a rotating stand and then bolted the whole thing down to the floor, turning four hundred pounds of military junk into heavy-duty furniture.
Suddenly a new barrage of automatic gunfire thundered down from the northwest corner of A-deck and Gant jumped onto the ejection seat and ducked behind the headrest, curling her small frame into a ball so that she was completely covered by the big seat's steel-lined backplate.
The burst of gunfire lasted a full ten seconds and pummelled the rear of the ejection seat. Gant pressed her head up against the headrest, keeping her eyes shielded from the onslaught of ricocheting bullets.
As she did so, however, some movement caught her eye.
It was off to her left. Down to her left.
Down in the pool at the base of the station. Under the surface. A glistening black-and-white shape, unbelievably huge, cruising slowly, ominously, beneath the surface. It must have been deeper than it appeared, because the high dorsal fin wasn't breaking the surface.
The first dark shape was joined by a second shape, then a third, and then a fourth. The lead one must have been at least forty feet long. The others were smaller.
Females, Gant thought. She had read once that for every one male there were usually eight or nine females.
The water was choppy and it served only to make their blurred black-and-white outlines look all the more sinister. The leader rolled on his side and Gant caught a side-on glimpse of the white underbelly and the wide open mouth and the two terrifying rows of teeth and suddenly the picture was complete.
It was then that Gant saw the two juveniles, swimming behind the enormous lead male. They were the two killers she had seen earlier, before the battle with the French had erupted, the two killers who had been searching for Wendy.
Now they were back... and they had brought the rest of the pack with them.
The full pod of killer whales began to circle the pool at the base of Wilkes Ice Station, and as she huddled behind the headrest of the ejection seat Gant felt a new sense of dread begin to crawl up the back of her spine.
Hollywood had never stood a chance.
The shards from the three fragmentation grenades had rained down on him with terrifying intensity?from in front and behind.
Book could only watch helplessly as his young partner? on the floor, on his knees?put a feeble hand over his face and then fell under the weight of the hailstorm of metal fragments.
The scientist who had been trying to push his colleague into the nearby doorway hadn't been fast enough, either. Like Hollywood, he was now unrecognizable. The wave of metal shards had cut him down where he stood. And while Hollywood's body armor had been effective in protecting his chest and shoulders from the blast, the scientist hadn't been so lucky. His whole body?unprotected by any kind of armor? was a hideous bloodstained mess.
No exposed tissue could have survived such a bombardment. None had. The storm of shards had ripped every inch of exposed skin from the two men's bodies.
And for a moment, a brief moment, Buck Riley could do nothing but stare at the broken body of his fallen friend.
On the other side of B-deck, Rebound was charging around the curved outer tunnel, gun up.
Legs Lane and Mother Newman ran behind him, firing desperately back at the three shadows coming down the tunnel after them.
Legs Lane was a thirty-one-year-old Corporal, olive-skinned, square-jawed, Italian in both looks and manner. For her part, Mother Newman was the second of the two women in Schofield's unit?and she couldn't have been more different from Libby Gant.
Whereas Gant was twenty-six, compact and had a short crop of straight blond hair, Mother was thirty-four, six-foot-two, and had a fully shaven head. She weighed in at nearly two hundred pounds. Her call sign, Mother, wasn't supposed to mean "maternal figure." It was short for motherfucker.
Mother spoke into her helmet mike: "Scarecrow. This is your Mother speaking. We are experiencing heavy fire on B-deck. I repeat. We are experiencing heavy fire on B-deck. We have enemy troops behind us and frag grenades bouncing all over the fucking place. We are approaching the west tunnel and are going to head for the central shaft. If you or anyone out there has a visual on the shaft, we'd really love to hear about it."
Schofield's voice came over their helmet intercoms: "Mother. This is Scarecrow. I have a visual on the central shaft. There are no hostile objects out on the catwalk. We spotted five on your level before, but they're all in the tunnels now.
"I can also confirm five more hostiles up on A-deck, and at least one of those ha
s a forty-mil grenade launcher. If you have to break out onto the catwalks, we'll cover you from below. Montana, Santa Cruz? You out there?"
"We're here," came Montana's voice.
"You still on A-deck?"
"Affirmative that."
"You still pinned down?"
"We're working on it."
"Just keep doing what you're doing. Draw their fire. We 're gonna have three of our people stepping out into the open on B-deck in about ten seconds."
"No problem, Scarecrow."
Mother said, "Thanks, Scarecrow. We're moving into the western tunnel now. Coming to the central shaft."
In the alcove on C-deck, Schofield keyed his helmet mike again. "Book! Book! Come in!"
There was no reply.
"Jesus, Book. Where are you?"
Inside the women's shower room on B-deck, Sarah Hensleigh snapped around at the sound of a door being kicked in.
For one terrifying instant, she thought the French soldiers were storming the women's shower room. But they weren't. The sound had come from the next room, the men's shower room.
The French were in the next room!
With Sarah inside the women's shower block were Kirsty, Abby Sinclair, and a geologist named Warren Conlon. When Buck Riley had ordered them back to their rooms, the four of them had immediately scrambled in here. They had only just made it, with Conlon just managing to squeeze in through the door frame and jam the door shut a split second before the fragmentation grenades had gone off in the tunnel outside.
The women's shower block was situated in between the outer tunnel and the central shaft, in the northeastern corner of B-deck. It had three doors: one leading to the north tunnel, one leading to the outer tunnel, and one leading to the men's shower room next door.
More sounds echoed out from the men's shower room.
The sounds of French soldiers kicking open cubicle doors, looking for anyone who had attempted to hide in the cubicles.
Sarah pulled Kirsty toward the door that led to the north tunnel. "Come on, honey, keep moving."
Sarah looked back over her shoulder.
Beyond the row of six shower recesses she could see the top quarter of the door that led to the men's shower room.
It was still closed.
The French soldiers would be coming through that door any second now.
Sarah reached the door leading out to the north tunnel and grabbed the handle.
She hesitated. There was no way of knowing what lay on the other side.
"Sarah! What are you doing? Come on," Warren Conlon said in a desperate, hissing whisper. Tall and thin, he was a timid man, nervous at the best of times. Now he was positively terrified.
"OK, OK," Sarah said. She began to turn the handle.
There was a loud bang as the door to the men's shower room suddenly burst open behind them.
"Go!" Conlon yelled.
Sarah threw open the door and, pulling Kirsty with her, charged out into the north tunnel.
She hadn't gone more than a couple of steps when she stopped dead in her tracks?
?and found herself looking into the eyes of a man with a gun pointed right at her head.
The man cocked his head to one side and shook his head. "Jesus." He lowered his gun.
"It's OK, it's OK," Buck Riley said as he ran up to Sarah and Kirsty. "You scared the shit out of me, but it's OK."
Abby Sinclair and Warren Conlon joined them out in the tunnel, slamming the door shut behind them.
"They in there?" Riley asked, nodding at the women's shower block.
"Yeah," Sarah said.
"Are the others all right?" Warren Conlon asked stupidly.
"I don't think they'll be leaving their rooms again in a hurry," Riley said as he scanned the tunnel behind him. Automatic gunfire echoed out from the outer tunnel. As Riley looked behind him, Sarah noticed a thin line of blood trickling out from a large cut on his right ear. Riley himself didn't seem to notice it. The earpiece that he had in that ear had a jagged sliver of metal lodged in it.
"We may have a slight problem," Riley said as his eyes searched the tunnel around them. "I've lost contact with the rest of my team. My radio gear got hit by some ricocheting fragments before, so I'm off the air. I can't hear the others, and they can't hear me."
Riley snapped round and looked the other way, out over Sarah's head, toward that end of the tunnel that led to the catwalks and the massive shaft in the center of the station.
"Come with me," was all he said as he brushed past Sarah and led the way toward the central well of Wilkes Ice Station.
"Book!" Schofield whispered into his helmet mike as he kept his eyes locked on the western tunnel of B-deck. "Book! Where are you? God damn it."
"No Book?" Gant asked.
"Not yet," Schofield said. He and Gant were still crouched in their alcove on C-deck, on the eastern side of the station. They were waiting tensely for Rebound, Mother, and Legs to come out from the western tunnel of B-deck.
Rebound emerged first. Quickly but cautiously, gun up, eyes looking down his gun sights, sweeping his MP-5 in a brisk 180-degree arc, searching for any sign of trouble.
As soon as he saw Rebound emerge, Schofield immediately opened fire on A-deck, forcing whoever was up there to take cover. Gant came up five seconds later and did the same.
Schofield pulled back behind the alcove's wall to reload. As he did so, he watched as Gant fired off three short bursts.
It was then that he saw something strange happen.
The yellow tongue of fire that flashed out from the muzzle of Gant's gun suddenly leaped forward a full two meters. It was only for a second, but it looked incredible. For a short moment, Gant's compact MP-5 machine pistol had looked like a flamethrower.
Schofield was momentarily confused. What the hell had caused that? Then, suddenly, it hit him, and he spun and looked back at the?
All of a sudden, Gant yelled, "I'm dry!" and Schofield snapped back to the present. He immediately opened fire on the A-deck catwalk while she reloaded.
As he lay down a suppressing fire on A-deck, Schofield saw Legs and Mother hurry out onto the B-deck catwalk behind Rebound. They were firing for all they were worth back into the tunnel from which they had come.
Legs went dry. Schofield watched as Legs popped his clip and let it drop to the catwalk and then grabbed a fresh magazine. No sooner had he jammed it into the lower receiver of his gun than he was hit in the neck by some unseen opponent inside the western tunnel.
Legs flailed backward, losing his balance for a second, before turning his gun back toward the enemy and letting loose with an extended burst of gunfire that would have woken the dead. In 2.2 seconds thirty rounds were spent and that clip was dry, too. Mother grabbed him and yanked him out onto the catwalk, away from the tunnel.
Now wounded and dripping with blood, Legs began to fumble with a new clip. The clip slipped through his bloody fingers and fell out over the railing, dropping fifty feet through the air until it splashed into the pool at the bottom of the station. At that point, Legs cut his losses, tossed his MP-5, and pulled out his Colt .45. Single fire from here.
Schofield and Gant continued to sweep the uppermost deck with their fire. Gant had watched as Legs's clip dropped all the way down into the pool, had watched as one of the killer whales banked upward to see what it was that had fallen into its domain.
Mother went dry. She cut the empty clip and reloaded fast.
Schofield watched anxiously as the three of them? Mother, Rebound, and Legs?moved along the catwalk between the west and the north tunnels of B-deck, heading toward the north tunnel.
They were almost there when suddenly Buck Riley burst out from the north tunnel with four civilians in tow behind him.
Right in front of Mother, Rebound, and Legs!
Schofield saw it as it happened and his jaw dropped.
"Oh, Jesus" he breathed.
This was a disaster. Now four of his people were out in the open, with four in
nocent civilians! And any second now the French would appear and cut them to ribbons.
"Book! Book!" Schofield yelled into his helmet mike. "Get out of there! Get off the catwa?"
And then it happened and Schofield's horror was complete.
In perfect synchronization, five French commandos burst out onto the B-deck catwalk.
Three from the west tunnel. Two from the east.
They opened fire without the slightest hesitation.
What happened next happened almost too fast for Schofield to comprehend.
The five French commandos on B-deck had just pulled off a perfect pincer maneuver. They'd flushed Mother, Rebound, and Legs out onto the catwalk and now were about to finish it off by firing upon them from both flanks.
The appearance of Buck Riley and the four civilians was an added bonus. It obviously hadn't been expected?when they had appeared out on the catwalk, all five of the French soldiers had had their guns firmly trained on Mother, Rebound, and Legs.
As it turned out, however, they never got a chance to turn their fire on Riley and the civilians anyway.
The three French commandos who had emerged from the western tunnel fired first. White-hot tongues of fire shot out from the muzzles of their guns.
At point-blank range, Legs, Mother, and Rebound were all hit. Mother in the leg, Rebound in the shoulder. Legs took the brunt of it?two to the head, four to the chest?his whole body becoming a shuddering explosion of blood. He was dead before he hit the ground.
But that was all Schofield saw.
Because that was when it happened.
Schofield watched in amazement as, at the exact moment that the French commandos on the western side of the station fired their rifles, two enormous fingers of fire shot out in both directions from where they stood.
They looked like twin comets. Two seven-foot-tall balls of fire that rocketed around the circumference of the B-deck catwalk, leaving in their wake a wall of blazing flames.
The whole of the B-deck catwalk disappeared in an instant as the spectacular curtain of flames shot up from every point on the circular metal catwalk, concealing from view everybody who had been standing on the deck.
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