Ice Station ss-1

by Matthew Reilly

  Beep!

  "What are you doing?" Renshaw said, not looking up.

  "Initializing my GPS unit," Schofield said, still lying on his back. "It's a satellite location system that uses the Navistar Global Positioning System. Every Marine has one, for use in emergencies. You know, so people can find us if we end up on a life raft out in the middle of the ocean. I figured this wasn't too much different," he sighed. "In a dark room on a somewhere, a flashing red dot just appeared on someone's screen."

  "Does that mean they're gonna come for us?" Renshaw asked.

  "We'll be long dead by the time anybody gets here. But they'll at least be able to find our bodies."

  Renshaw said, "Oh, great. It's nice to see my tax dollars at work. You guys build a satellite location system so that they can find my body. Wow."

  Schofield turned to look at Renshaw. "At least I can leave a note attached to our bodies telling whoever finds us exactly what happened at the station. At least then they'll know the truth. About the French, about Barnaby."

  Renshaw said, "Well, that makes me feel better."

  Schofield propped himself up on his elbow and looked out toward the cliffs. He saw the mountainous waves of the Southern Ocean smash against them and explode in spectacular showers of white.

  Then, for the first time, he took in the iceberg around him.

  It was big. In fact, it was so big it didn't even rock in the heavy seas. Above the surface, the whole thing must have been at least a mile long. Schofield couldn't even begin to guess how large it was under the surface.

  It was roughly rectangular in shape, with an enormous white peak at one end. The rest of the iceberg was uneven and cratered. It looked to Schofield like a ghostly white moonscape.

  He stood up.

  "Where are you going?" Renshaw said, not getting up. "You gonna walk home?"

  "We should keep moving," Schofield said. "Keep warm for as long as we can and, while we're at it, see if there's some way we can get back to the coast."

  Renshaw shook his head and reluctantly got to his feet and followed Schofield out across the uneven surface of the iceberg.

  They trudged for almost twenty minutes before they realized they were going in the wrong direction.

  The iceberg stopped abruptly and they saw nothing but sea stretching away to the west. The nearest iceberg in that direction was three miles away. Schofield had hoped they might be able to "iceberg-hop" back to the coast. It wouldn't happen in this direction.

  They headed back the way they had come.

  They made very slow going. Icicles began to form around Renshaw's eyebrows and lips.

  "You know anything about icebergs?" Schofield asked as they walked.

  "A little."

  "Educate me."

  Renshaw said, "I read in a magazine once that the latest trend among assholes with too much money is 'iceberg climbing.' Apparently it's quite popular among mountaineer types. The only problem is that eventually your mountain melts."

  "I was thinking about something a little more scientific," Schofield said. "Like, do they ever float back in toward the coast?"

  "No," Renshaw said. "Ice in Antarctica moves from the middle out. Not the other way round. Icebergs like this one break off from coastal ice shelves. That's why the cliffs are sheer. The ice overhanging the ocean gets too heavy and it just breaks off, becoming"?Renshaw waved his hand at the iceberg around them?"an iceberg."

  "Uh-huh," Schofield said as he trudged across the ice.

  "You get some big ones, though. Really big ones. Icebergs bigger than whole countries. I mean, hell, take this baby. Look how big she is. Most large icebergs live for about ten or twelve years before they ultimately melt and die. But given the right weather conditions?and if the iceberg were big enough to begin with?an iceberg like this could float around the Antarctic for up to thirty years."

  "Great," Schofield said dryly.

  They came to the spot where Renshaw had hauled Schofield out of the water after Schofield had destroyed the French submarine.

  "Nice," Renshaw said. "Forty minutes of walking and we're back where we started."

  They started up a small incline and came to the spot where the French submarine's torpedo had hit the iceberg.

  It looked like a giant had taken a huge bite out of the side of the iceberg.

  The large landslide of ice that had just fallen away under the weight of the explosion had left a huge semicircular hole in the side of the berg. Sheer vertical walls stretched down to the water ten meters below.

  Schofield looked down into the hole, saw the calm water lapping up against the edge of the enormous iceberg.

  "We're gonna die out here, aren't we?" Renshaw said from behind him.

  "I'm not."

  "You're not?"

  "That's my station and I'm gonna get it back."

  "Uh-huh." Renshaw looked out to sea. "And do you have any idea as to exactly how you're gonna do that?"

  Schofield didn't answer him.

  Renshaw turned around. "I said, how in God's name do you plan to get your station back when we're stuck out here!"

  But Schofield wasn't listening.

  He was crouched down on his haunches, looking down into the semicircular hole the torpedo had carved into the iceberg.

  Renshaw came over and stood behind him.

  "What are you looking at?"

  "Salvation," Schofield said. "Maybe."

  Renshaw followed Schofield's gaze down into the semicircular hole in the iceberg and saw it immediately.

  There, embedded in the ice a couple of meters down the sheer, vertical cliff face, Renshaw saw the distinctive square outline of a frozen glass window.

  Schofield tied their two parkas together and, using the two jackets as a rope, got Renshaw to lower him down to the window set into the ice cliff.

  Schofield hung high above the water, in front of the frozen glass window. He looked at it closely.

  It was definitely man-made.

  And old, too. The wooden panes of the window were weathered and scarred, bleached to a pale gray. Schofield wondered how long the window?and whatever structure it was attached to?had been buried inside this massive iceberg.

  The way he figured it, the blast from the submarine's torpedo must have dislodged the ten meters or so of ice in from of the window, exposing it. The window and whatever it was attached to, had been buried deep within the iceberg.

  Schofield took a deep breath. Then he kicked hard, shattering the window.

  He saw darkness beyond the now-open window, a small cave of some sort.

  He pulled a flashlight from his hip pocket and, with a final look up at Renshaw, swung himself in through the window and into the belly of the iceberg.

  The first thing Schofield saw through the beam of his flashlight was the upside-down words:

  HAPPY NEW YEAR 1969!

  WELCOME TO LITTLE AMERICA IV!

  The words were written on a banner of some sort. It hung limply:?upside down?across the cave in which Schofield now stood.

  Only it wasn't a cave.

  It was a room of some sort?a small wooden-walled room, completely buried within the ice.

  And everything was upside down. The whole room was inverted.

  It was a strange sensation, everything being upside-down. It took Schofield a second to realize that he was actually standing on the ceiling of the underground room.

  He looked off to his right. There seemed to be several other rooms branching off from this one?

  "Hello down there!" Renshaw's voice sailed in from outside.

  Schofield poked his head out through the window in the ice cliff.

  "Hey, what's happening? I'm freezing my nuts off out here," Renshaw said.

  "Have you ever heard of Little America IV?" Schofield asked.

  "Yeah," Renshaw said. "It was one of our research stations back in the sixties. Floated out to sea in '69 when the Ross Ice Shelf calved an iceberg nine thousand square kilometers big. The Navy looked f
or it for three months, but they never found it."

  "Well, guess what," Schofield said. "We just did."

  Cloaked in three thick woolen blankets, James Renshaw sat down on the floor of the main room of Little America IV. He rubbed his hands together vigorously, blew on them with his warm breath, while Schofield?still dressed in his waterlogged fatigues?rummaged through the other rooms of the darkened inverted station. Neither man dared to eat any of the thirty-year-old canned food that lay strewn about the floor.

  "As I remember it, Little America IV was kind of like Wilkes," Renshaw said. "It was a resource exploration station, built into the coastal ice shelf. They were after offshore oil deposits buried in the continental shelf. They used to lower collectors all the way to the bottom to see if the soil down there contained?"

  "Why is everything upside-down?" Schofield asked from the next room.

  "That's easy. When this iceberg calved, it must have flipped over."

  "The iceberg flipped over?"

  "It's been known to happen," Renshaw said. "And if you think about it, it makes sense. An iceberg is top-heavy when it breaks off the mainland, because all the ice that's been living underwater has been slowly eroded over the years by the warmer seawater. So unless your iceberg is perfectly balanced when it breaks free from the mainland, the whole thing tips over."

  In the next room, Schofield was negotiating his way through piles of rusty overturned junk. He stepped around a large, cylindrical cable spooler that lay awkwardly on its side. Then he saw something.

  "How long did you say the Navy looked for this station?" Schofield asked.

  "About three months."

  "Was that a long time to look for a lost station?"

  In the main room, Renshaw shrugged. "It was longer than usual. Why?"

  Schofield came back in through the doorway. He was carrying some metal objects in his hands.

  "I think our boys were doing some things down here that they weren't supposed to," Schofield said, smiling.

  He held up a piece of white cord. It looked to Renshaw like string that had been covered over with white powder.

  "Detonator cord," Schofield said as he tied the white powdery cord in a loop around his wrist. "It's used as a fuse for close-quarter explosives. That powdery stuff you see on it, that's magnesium-sulfide. Magnesium-based detonator cords burn hot and fast?in fact, they burn so hot that they can cut clean through metal. It's good stuff; we sometimes use it today.

  "And see this." Schofield held up a rusted pressurized canister. "VX poison gas. And this"?he held up another tube? "sarin."

  "Sarin gas?" Renshaw said. Even he knew what that was. Sarin gas was a chemical weapon. Renshaw recalled an incident in Japan in 1995 when a terrorist group had detonated a canister of sarin gas inside the Tokyo subway. Panic ensued. Several people were killed. "They had that stuff in the sixties?" he asked.

  "Oh, yes."

  "So you think this station was a chemical weapons facility?" Renshaw asked.

  "I think so, yes."

  "But why? Why test chemical weapons in Antarctica?"

  "Two reasons," Schofield said. "One: Back home, we keep nearly all of our poison gas weapons in freezer storage, because most poison gases lose their toxicity at higher temperatures. So it makes sense to do your testing in a place that's cold all year round."

  "And the second reason?"

  "The second reason is a lot simpler," Schofield said, smiling at Renshaw. "Nobody's looking."

  Schofield headed back into the next room. "In any case," he said as he disappeared behind the doorway, "none of that's really much use to us right now. But they do have something else back here that might be helpful. In fact, I think it might just get us back in the game."

  "What is it?"

  "This," Schofield said as he reappeared in the doorway and pulled a dusty scuba tank out into view.

  Schofield set to work calibrating the thirty-year-old scuba gear. Renshaw was tasked with cleaning out the breathing apparatus?the mouthpieces, the valves, the air hoses.

  The compressed air mix was the main risk. After thirty years of storage, there was a risk that it had gone toxic.

  There was only one way to find out.

  Schofield tested it?he took a deep inhalation and looked at Renshaw. When he didn't drop dead, he declared the air OK.

  The two men worked on the scuba gear for about twenty minutes. Then, as they were nearing readiness, Renshaw said quietly, "Did you ever get to see Bernie Olson's body?"

  Schofield looked over at Renshaw. The little scientist was bent over a pair of mouthpieces, washing them out with seawater.

  "As a matter of fact, I did," Schofield said softly.

  "What did you see?" Renshaw said, interested.

  Schofield hesitated. "Mr. Olson had bitten his own tongue off."

  "Hmmm."

  "His jaw was also locked rigidly in place and his eyes were heavily inflamed?red-rimmed, bloodshot."

  Renshaw nodded. "And what were you told happened to him?"

  "Sarah Hensleigh told me you stabbed him in the neck with a hypodermic needle and injected liquid drain cleaner into his bloodstream."

  Renshaw nodded sagely. "I see. Lieutenant, could you have a look at this please?" Renshaw pulled a waterlogged book from the breast pocket of his parka. It was the thick book that he had taken from his room when they had evacuated the station.

  Renshaw handed it to Schofield. Biotoxicology and Toxin-Related Illnesses.

  Renshaw said, "Lieutenant, when someone poisons you with drain cleaner, the poison stops your heart, just like that. There's no struggle. There's no fight. You just die. Chapter 2."

  Schofield flipped the water-soaked pages to chapter 2. He saw the heading: "Toxin-Related Instantaneous Physiological Death."

  He saw a list of what the author had called "Known Poisons." In the middle of the list, Schofield saw "industrial cleaning fluids, insecticides."

  "The point is," Renshaw said, "there are no outward signs of death by such a poison. Your heart stops; your body just stops." Renshaw held up his finger. "But not so certain other toxins," he said. "Like, for instance, sea snake venom."

  "Sea snake venom?" Schofield said.

  "Chapter 9," Renshaw said.

  Schofield found it. "Naturally Occurring Toxins?Sea Fauna."

  "Look up sea snakes," Renshaw said.

  Schofield did. He found the heading: "Sea Snakes?Toxins, Symptoms and Treatment."

  "Read it," Renshaw said.

  Schofield did.

  "Out loud," Renshaw said.

  Schofield read, "The common sea snake (Enhydrina schis-tosa) has a venom with a toxicity level three times that of the king cobra, the most lethal land-based snake. One drop (0.03 mL) is enough to kill three men. Common symptoms of sea snake envenomation include aching and stiffness of muscles, thickening of the tongue, paralysis, visual loss, severe inflammation of the eye area and dilation of the pupils, and, most notably of all, lockjaw. Indeed, so severe is lockjaw in such cases, that it is not unknown for victims of sea snake envenomation to?"

  Schofield cut himself off.

  "Read it," Renshaw said softly.

  "?to sever their own tongues with their teeth." Schofield looked up at Renshaw.

  Renshaw cocked his head. "Do I look like a killer to you, Lieutenant?"

  "Who's to say you didn't put sea snake venom inside that hypodermic syringe?" Schofield countered.

  "Lieutenant," Renshaw said, "at Wilkes Ice Station, sea snake venoms are kept in the Biotoxins Lab, which is always?always?locked. Only a few people have access to that room, and I'm not one of them."

  Schofield remembered the Biotoxins Laboratory on B-deck, remembered the distinctive three-circled biohazard sign pasted across its door.

  Strangely, though, he also found himself remembering something else.

  He remembered Sarah Hensleigh telling him earlier: "Before all this happened, I was working with Ben Austin in the Bio Lab on B-deck. He was doing work on a
new antivenom for Entrydrina schistosa."

  Schofield shook the thought away.

  No. Not possible.

  He turned to Renshaw. "So who do you think killed Bernie Olson?"

  "Why, someone who had access to the Biotoxins Lab, of course," Renshaw said. "That could mean only Ben Austin, Harry Cox, or Sarah Hensleigh."

  Sarah Hensleigh..:.

  Schofield said, "Why would any of them want to kill Olson?"

  "I have no idea," Renshaw said. "No idea."

  "So as far as you know, not one of those people had a motive to kill Olson?"

  "That's right."

  "But you had a motive," Schofield said. "Olson was stealing your research."

  "Which kind of makes me the ideal person to set up, doesn't it?" Renshaw said.

  Schofield said, "But if someone really wanted to set you up, they would have actually used drain cleaner to kill Olson. Why go to the trouble of using sea snake venom?"

  "Good point," Renshaw said. "Good point. But if you read that book, you'll find that drain cleaner has a 59% mortality rate. Sea snake venom has a 98 % mortality rate. Whoever killed Olson wanted to make sure that he died. That's why they used the sea snake venom. They did not want him to be resuscitated."

  Schofield pursed his lips in thought.

  Then he said, 'Tell me about Sarah Hensleigh."

  "What about her?"

  "Do you two get along? Do you like her; does she like you?"

  "No, no, and no."

  Schofield said, "Why don't you like her?"

  "You really want to know?" Renshaw sighed deeply. He looked away. "It's because she married my best friend?actually, he was also my boss?and she didn't love him."

  "Who was that?" Schofield asked.

  "A guy named Brian Hensleigh. He was head of geophysics at Harvard before he died."

  Schofield remembered Kirsty telling him about her father before. How he had taught her advanced math. And how he had died only recently.

  "He died in a car accident, didn't he?"

  "That's right," Renshaw said. "Drunk driver jumped the curb and killed him." Renshaw looked up at Schofield. "How come you know that?"

  "Kirsty told me."