Ice Station (7 page)

Wilkes Ice Station had become a battlefield.

And everything went to hell.

“This is Scarecrow! This is
Scarecrow!” Schofield yelled into his helmet mike as he ducked
into a doorway amid the cacophony of gunfire. “I count eight
hostiles! I repeat, eight hostile objects! I call it as six military,
two civilians. Civilians are probably concealing weapons for use by
the commandos. Marines, do not show prejudice!”

Chunks of ice rained down all around him as Latissier's stream of
bullets impacted against the ice wall above him.

It was the sight of the crossbow that did it.

Each of the elite military units of the world has its own
characteristic weapon. For the United States Navy SEALs, experts in
close-quarter combat, it is the Ruger pump-action twelve-gauge
shotgun. For the British Special Air Service— the famous
SAS—nitrogen charges are the signature weapon. For U.S. Marine
Force Reconnaissance Units it is the Armalite MH-12 Maghook, a
grappling hook that also contains a high-powered magnet for adhesion
to sheer metallic surfaces.

Only one elite force, however, is known for carrying crossbows.

The Premier Régiment
Parachutiste d'Infanterie de Marine, the crack French commando
unit—known in English as the First Marine Parachute Regiment. It
is the French equivalent of the SAS or the SEALs.

Which is to say that it is not a regular force like, for example, the
Marines. It is one step higher. It is an offensive unit, an
attack team, an elite covert force that exists for one reason and one
reason only: to go in first, and to go in fast, and to kill everything
in sight.

Which was why, when Schofield saw Gant lift the small hand-held
crossbow—it was about the size of a .44 Magnum—from inside
the food can, he knew that these men were not scientists from
d'Urville. They were soldiers. Elite soldiers.

Cleverly, they had anticipated that he would know the names of all the
scientists at d'Urville, so they had appropriated their names. To
add to the illusion, they had also brought with them two
actual scientists from the French research station—Luc
Champion and Henri Rae—people whom the residents of Wilkes would
know personally.

The final touch was probably the best touch of all: they had allowed
Luc Champion, one of the civilians, to take the lead when the Marines
had arrived at Wilkes Ice Station, bolstering the illusion that they
were all merely scientists, following the lead of their superior.

That the French had taken five of the residents of Wilkes Ice
Station—innocent civilians—out on a hovercraft under the
pretense that they were being taken back to safety and then
executed them in the middle of the snow plains made Schofield
furious. In a detached corner of his mind, he conjured up a picture of
what the scene must have looked like— the American scientists,
men and women, crying, pleading, begging for their lives as the French
soldiers moved among them, leveling their pistols at their heads and
blasting their brains all over the inside of the hovercraft.

That at least two French scientists—Champion and Rae— had
gone along with the French commandos made Schofield even angrier. What
could they have been promised that would make them party to the murder
of innocent academics?

The answer, unfortunately, was simple.

They would be given the first opportunity to study the spacecraft when
the French got their hands on it.

Frantic voices shouted over Schofield's helmet intercom.
“—return fire!”

“—clear!”

“—Samurai is down! Fox is down!”

“—can't get a fucking shot—”

Schofield looked out from behind the doorway and saw Gant lying flat
on her back on the catwalk halfway between the dining room and the
main entrance passageway. She wasn't moving.

His gaze shifted to Augustine Lau, lying sprawled out on the catwalk
in the dining room doorway. Lau's eyes were wide open, his face
covered in blood, blood that had sprayed up from his own stomach as
Latissier's barrage of gunfire had assailed him from practically
point-blank range.

Not far from Schofield, in the tunnel leading to the main entrance to
the station, Buck Riley leaned out and returned fire with his MP-5,
drowning out the tinny rat-a-tat sound of the French-made
FA-MAS with the deep, puncturelike firing sound of the German-made
MP-5. Next to him, Hollywood did the same.

Schofield snapped around to look over at Montana, huddled in the
entrance to the western tunnel. “Montana. You OK?”

When Latissier had opened fire a few moments earlier, Montana and Lau
had been the closest men to him, standing in the doorway to the dining
room. When Latissier's gun came up firing, Montana had been quick
enough to duck back behind the doorway. Lau hadn't.

And while Lau had performed what infantry soldiers call the danse
macabre under the brutal weight of Latissier's fire, Montana
had scrambled back along the catwalk to the nearest point of safety,
the west tunnel.

Schofield saw Montana speak into his helmet mike fifty feet away. His
gravelly voice came over Schofield's headset “Check that,
Scarecrow. I'm a little shook up, but I'm OK.”

“Good.”

More bullets slammed into the ice above Schofield's head.
Schofield ducked back behind the doorway. Then, quickly, he peered out
around the door frame. But this time as he did so he heard a strange
whistling sound.

With a sharp thwump, a four-inch-long arrow lodged into the
ice barely five centimeters from Schofield's right eye.

Schofield looked up and saw Petard in the dining room, with his
crossbow raised. No sooner had Petard fired his crossbow than Luc
Champion hurled a short-barreled submachine gun over to him and Petard
rejoined the battle with a sharp volley of gunfire.

Peering around the door frame, Schofield looked quickly over at Gant
again. She was still lying motionless on the catwalk, halfway between
the dining room and the main entrance tunnel.

And then suddenly her arm moved.

It must have been a reflex of some sort as she slowly regained
consciousness.

Schofield saw it instantly and spoke into his helmet mike. “This
is Scarecrow; this is Scarecrow. Fox is still alive. I repeat, Fox is
still alive. But she's out in the open. I need cover so I can go
out there and get her. Confirm.”

Voices came in like a roll call. “Hollywood, check
that!”

“Rebound, check that!”

“Montana, check that.”

“Book, check that,” Buck Riley said.
“You're all clear, Scarecrow. Go!”

“All right, then, now!” Schofield yelled as he
broke cover and scampered out onto the catwalk.

All around him, in perfect unison, the Marines whipped out from their
cover positions and returned fire at the dining room. The noise was
deafening. The ice walls of the dining room exploded into a thousand
pockmarks. The combined strength of the assault forced Latissier and
Petard to cease firing for a moment and dive for cover.

Out on the catwalk, Schofield fell to his knees next to Gant.

He looked down at her head. The arrow from Cuvier's crossbow had
lodged in the forehead guard of her Kevlar helmet, and a narrow stream
of blood ran out from her forehead and down the side of her nose.

Seeing the blood, Schofield leaned closer and saw that the force of
the crossbow had been so strong that the arrow had penetrated
Gant's helmet. Nearly a whole inch of the arrow had passed through
the Kevlar so that now its glistening silver tip was poised right in
front of Gant's forehead.

The helmet had held the arrow clear of her skull by millimeters.

Not even that. The razor-sharp point of the arrow had actually nicked
her skin, drawing blood.

“Come on; let's go,” Schofield said, even though he was
sure Gant couldn't hear him. The Marines' cover fire continued
all around them as Schofield dragged Gant back along the catwalk,
toward the main entrance passageway.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, one of the French commandos popped up from
behind a hole in the wall of the dining room, with his rifle raised.

Still dragging Gant, Schofield quickly brought his pistol up, aimed
through the sights, and loosed two quick rounds. If the FA-MAS sounded
tinny, and the MP-5 sounded like puncture noises, then Schofield's
I.M.I. “Desert Eagle” automatic pistol sounded like a
cannon. The French commando's head exploded in a splash of red as
both rounds found their mark on the bridge of his nose. His head
jolted back sharply—twice—and he dropped instantly out of
sight

“Get out of there, Scarecrow! Move!” Riley's
voice yelled through Schofield's earpiece.

“I'm almost there!” Schofield yelled above the gunfire.

Suddenly another voice came over the intercom.

It was calm, clinical. There was no gunfire in the background behind
it.

“Marine Force, this is Snake, I am still at my post outside.
I report that I now have visual on six more hostiles exiting the
second French hovercraft. I repeat I am looking at six more armed men
disembarking the French hovercraft and approaching the main entrance
of the station.”

A sudden jarring shot rang out over the intercom. Snake Kaplan's
sniper rifle.

“Marine Force, this is Snake. Make that five more hostiles
approaching the main entrance of the station.”

Schofield looked back at the tunnel leading to the main entrance
behind him. That was where he and Gant were heading. Riley and
Hollywood were there right now, firing at the dining room. Beside
them, Sergeant Mitch “Ratman” Healy was doing the same.

And then suddenly, without warning, Healy's chest exploded. Shot
from behind by a high-powered weapon.

Healy convulsed violently as a gout of blood spewed out from his rib
cage. The force of the impact and the subsequent nervous convulsion
bent his back forward at an obscene angle, and Schofield heard a
sickening crack as the young soldier's spine broke.

Riley and Hollywood were out of the entrance passageway in a
nanosecond. As they fired into the tunnel behind them, at some unseen
enemy, they backed quickly toward the nearest rung-ladder that led
down to B-deck.

Unfortunately, since they had only just arrived at the station, the
six Marines who had gone with Riley to investigate the crashed
hovercraft had been gathered around the main entrance passageway when
the fighting had broken out. Which meant that now they were caught
in between two hostile forces: one in the dining room in
front of them and another coming in through the main entrance behind
them.

Schofield saw this. “Book! Go down! Go down! Take your guys down
to B-deck!”

“Already on it, Scarecrow.”

Schofield and Gant were in an even worse position. Caught out on the
catwalk between the dining room and the main entrance passageway, they
had nowhere to go, no doorways to hide behind, no passageways to duck
into. Just a metal catwalk three feet wide, bounded on one side by a
sheer ice wall and on the other by a seventy-foot drop.

And any second now the second French team would be bursting in through
the main entrance passageway and Schofield and Gant would be the first
thing they saw.

A chunk of ice exploded next to Schofield's head, and he spun
around. Petard was back on his feet in the dining room. Firing hard
with his assault rifle. Schofield leveled his Desert Eagle at the
dining room and fired six rapid shots back at Petard.

He looked back at the main entrance.

Ten seconds, at the most.

“Shit,” he said aloud, looking at Gant, limp in his arms.
“Shit.”

He looked down over the railing of the catwalk and saw the pool of
water way down at the bottom of the station. It couldn't have been
more than sixty or seventy feet. They could survive the fall . . . .

No way.

Schofield looked at the catwalk on which he stood and then at the ice
wall behind him.

Better.

“Scarecrow, you better get out of there!” It was
Montana. He was now out on the catwalk, on the southern side of the
station. From where he was standing he could see into the main
entrance tunnel on the northern side. Whatever he saw there wasn't
good.

“I'm trying, I'm trying,” Schofield said.

Schofield fired off two more shots at Petard in the dining room before
holstering his pistol.

Then he quickly reached over his shoulder and pulled his Maghook from
its holster on his back. The Armalite MH-12 looks a little like an
old-fashioned Tommy gun. It has two pistol grips: one normal grip with
a trigger and one forward, support grip below the muzzle. In effect
the Maghook is a gun, a compact, two-handed launcher that
fires a grappling hook from its muzzle at tremendous speed.

At Schofield's feet, Gant began to groan.

Schofield pointed his launcher at the ice wall and fired. A loud
metallic whump rang out as the grappling hook shot out from
the muzzle and slammed into the ice wall. The hook exploded right
through the wall, into the dining room. Once on the other
side, its “claws” snapped open.

“Scarecrow! Get moving!”

Schofield turned, just as Gant groggily got to her feet beside him.

“Grab my shoulders,” he said to her.

“Wha—huh?”

“Never mind. Just hold on,” Schofield said as he threw her
arms over his shoulders. The two of them stood close, nose to nose. In
any other circumstance, it would have looked like an intimate clinch,
two lovers about to kiss—but not now. Holding Gant tightly,
Schofield spun and leaned his butt up against the railing.

He looked back toward the main entrance tunnel and saw shadows moving
quickly over the ice walls of the passageway. Gunfire began to spew
out from within the passageway.

“Hold tight,” he said to Gant.

And then, with both hands holding the launcher behind Gant's
back—and with her arms wrapped tightly around his
neck—Schofield shifted his weight backward and the two of them
tumbled over the railing and fell out into space.