Ice Station

ICE STATION

Matt Reilly

St. Martin's Paperbacks

FOR NATALIE

First published in Australia by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited.

ICE STATION

Copyright © 1999 by Matthew Reilly.

All rights reserved.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Natalie Freer?the most genuine and giving person I know. To Stephen Reilly, my brother and my good friend and my loyal supporter, even from thousands of miles away. To Mum for her comments on the text and to Dad for his woeful title suggestions and to both of them for their love and support. And, last, thanks to everyone at Pan and Thomas Dunne Books (in particular, my editors, Cate Paterson, Pete Wolverton, and Madonna Duffy, first, for "discovering" me and, second, for enduring all of my crazy ideas). To all of you, never underestimate the power of your encouragement.

SOUTHEASTERN ANTARCTICA

THE ANTARCTIC ICE SHELF

INTRODUCTION

From: Kendrick, Jonathan

The Cambridge Lectures: Antarctica?

The Living Continent

(Lecture delivered at Trinity College,

17 March, 1995)

Imagine, if you can, a continent that for one-quarter of the year doubles in size. A continent in a constant state of motion, motion that is undetectable to the human eye, but that is devastating nonetheless.

Imagine if you were to look down from the heavens at this vast, snow-covered mass. You would see the signatures of motion: the sweeping waves of the glaciers, bending in curves around mountains, falling down slopes like cascading waterfalls captured on film.

This is the 'awesome inertia' that Eugene Linden spoke of. And if we, like Linden, imagine that we are looking at that picture through time-lapse photography, taken over thousands of years, then we will see that motion.

Thirty centimeters of movement every year doesn't look like much in real time, but in time-lapse glaciers become flowing rivers of ice, ice that moves with free-flowing grace and awesome, unstoppable power.

Awesome? I hear you scoff. Thirty centimeters a year? What possible harm could that do?

A lot of harm to your tax dollars, I would say. Did you know that the British government has had to replace Halley Station on four separate occasions? You see, like many other Antarctic research stations, Halley station is built underground, buried in the ice?but a mere thirty centimeters of shift every year cracks its walls and drastically skews its ceilings.

The point here is that the walls of Halley Station are under a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure. All of that ice, moving outward from the pole, moving inexorably toward the sea, it wants to get to the sea?to see the world, you might say, as an iceberg?and it isn't going to let something as insignificant as a research station get in its way!

But then again, comparatively speaking, Britain has come off rather well when it comes to dramatic ice movement.

Consider when, in 1986, the Filchner Ice Shelf calved an iceberg the size of Luxembourg into the Weddell Sea. Thirteen thousand square kilometers of ice broke free of the mainland ... taking with it the abandoned Argentine base station, Belgrano I, and the Soviet summer station, Druzhnaya. The Soviets, it seems, had planned to use Druzhnaya that summer. As it turned out, they spent the next three months searching for their missing base among the three massive icebergs that had formed out of the original ice movement! And they found it. Eventually.

The United States has been even less fortunate. All five of its 'Little America' research stations floated out to sea on icebergs in the sixties.

Ladies and gentlemen, the message to be taken from all of this is quite simple. What appears to be barren may not really be so. What appears to be a wasteland may not really be so. What appears to be lifeless may not really be so.

No. For when you look at Antarctica, do not be fooled. You are not looking at an ice-covered rock. You are looking at a living, breathing continent.

From: Goldridge, William

Watergate

(New York: Wylie, 1980)

CHAPTER 6: THE PENTAGON

... What the literature is oddly silent about, however, is the strong bond Richard Nixon forged with his military advisers, most notably an Air Force Colonel named Otto Niemeyer... [p- 80]

... After Watergate, however, no one is quite sure what happened to Niemeyer. He was Nixon's liaison to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, his insider. Having risen to the rank of full colonel by the time Nixon resigned, Niemeyer had enjoyed what few people could ever lay claim to: Richard Nixon's ear.

What is surprising, however, is that after Nixon's resignation in 1974, not much can be found in the statute books regarding Otto Niemeyer. He remained on the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Ford and Carter, a silent player, keeping much to himself, until 1979, when abruptly, his position became vacant.

No explanation was ever given by the Carter Administration for Niemeyer's removal. Niemeyer was unmarried; some suggested, homosexual. He lived at the military academy at Arlington, alone. He had few people who openly claimed to be his friends. He traveled frequently, often to 'destinations unknown,' and his work colleagues thought nothing of his absence from the Pentagon for a few days in December of 1979.

The problem was, Otto Niemeyer never returned ... [p. 86]

PROLOGUE

Wilkes Land, Antarctica 13 June

It had been three hours now since they'd lost radio contact with the two divers.

There had been nothing wrong with the descent, despite the fact that it was so deep. Price and Davis were the most experienced divers at the station, and they had talked casually over the intercom the whole way down.

After pausing halfway to repressurize, they had continued down to three thousand feet, where they had left the diving bell and begun their diagonal ascent into the narrow, ice-walled cavern.

Water temperature had been stable at 1.9° Celsius. As recently as two years previously, Antarctic diving had been restricted by the cold to extremely short-lived and, scientifically speaking, extremely unsatisfactory ten-minute excursions. However, with their new Navy-made thermal-electric suits, Antarctic divers could now expect to maintain comfortable body temperatures for at least three hours in the near-freezing waters of the continent.

The two divers had maintained steady conversation over the radio as they made their way up the steep underwater ice tunnel, describing the cracked, rough texture of the ice, commenting on its rich, almost angelic sky blue color.

And then, abruptly, their talking had stopped.

They had spotted the surface.

The two divers stared at the water's surface from below.

It was dark, the water calm. Unnaturally calm. Not a ripple broke its glassy, even plane. In the glare of their military-spec halogen flashlights, the ice walls around them glistened like crystal. They swam upward.

Suddenly they heard a noise.

The two divers stopped.

At first it was just a single haunting whistle, echoing through the clear, icy water. Whale song, they thought.

Possibility: killers. Recently a pod of killer whales had been seen lurking about the station. A couple of them?two juvenile males?had made a habit of coming up for air inside the pool at the base of Wilkes Ice Station.

More likely, however, it was a blue, singing for a mate, maybe five or six miles offshore. That was the problem with whale song. Water was such a great conductor, you could never tell if the whale was one mile away or ten.

Their minds reassured, the two divers continued upward.

It was then that the first whistle was answered.

All at once, about a dozen similar whistles began to coo across the dense aquatic plane, engulfing the two divers. They were louder than the first whistle.

Closer.

The two divers spun about in every direction, hovering in the clear blue water, searching for the source of the noise. One of them unslung his harpoon gun and cocked the hammer, and suddenly the high-pitched whistles turned into pained wails and barks.

And then suddenly there came a loud whump! and both divers snapped upward just in time to see the glassy surface of the water break into a thousand ripples as something large plunged into the water from above.

The enormous diving bell broke the surface with a loud splash.

Benjamin K. Austin strode purposefully around the water's edge barking orders, a black insulated wet suit stretched tight across his broad barrel chest. Austin was a marine biologist from Stanford. He was also the chief of station of Wilkes Ice Station.

"All right! Hold it there!" Austin called to the young technician manning the winch controls on C-deck. "OK, ladies and gentlemen, no time to waste. Get inside."

One after the other, the six wet-suited figures gathered around the edge of the pool dived into the icy water. They rose a few seconds later inside the big dome-shaped diving bell that now sat half-submerged in the center of the pool.

Austin was standing at the edge of the large, round pool that formed the base of Wilkes Ice Station. Five stories deep, Wilkes was a remote coastal research station, a giant underground cylinder that had literally been carved into the ice shelf. A series of narrow catwalks and ladders hugged the circumference of the vertical cylinder, creating a wide circular shaft in the middle of the station. Doorways led off each of the catwalks?into the ice?creating the five different levels of the station. Like many others before them, the residents of Wilkes had long since discovered that the best way to endure the harsh polar weather was to live under it.

Austin shouldered into his scuba gear, running through the equation in his head for the hundredth time.

Three hours since the divers' radio link had cut out. Before that, one hour of hands-free diving up the ice tunnel. And one hour's descent in the diving bell....

In the diving bell, they would have been breathing "free" air?the diving bell's own supply of heliox?so that didn't count. It was only when they left the diving bell and started using tank air that the clock began to run.

Four hours, then.

The two divers had been living off tank air for four hours.

The problem was their tanks contained only three hours' worth of breathing time.

And for Austin that had meant a delicate balancing act.

The last words he and the others had heard from the two divers?before their radio signal had abruptly cut to static? had been some anxious chatter about strange whistling noises.

On the one hand, the whistling could have been anything: blues, minkes, or any other kind of harmless baleen whale. And the radio cutout could easily have been the result of interference caused by nearly half a kilometer of ice and water. For all Austin knew, the two divers had turned around immediately and begun the hour-long trip back to the diving bell. To pull it up prematurely would be to leave them stranded on the bottom, out of time and out of air.

On the other hand, if the divers actually had met with trouble?killers, leopard seals?then naturally Austin would have wanted to yank up the diving bell as quickly as possible and send others down to help.

In the end, he decided that any help he could send?after hauling up the diving bell and sending it back down again? would be too late anyway. If Price and Davis were going to survive, the best bet was to leave the diving bell down there.

That was three hours ago?and that was as much time as Austin had been willing to give them. And so he'd pulled up the diving bell; and now a second team was preparing to go down?

"Hey."

Austin turned. Sarah Hensleigh, one of the paleontologists, came up alongside him.

Austin liked Hensleigh. She was intelligent while at the same time practical and tough, not afraid to get her hands dirty. It came as no surprise to him that she was also a mother. Her twelve-year-old daughter, Kirsty, had been visiting the station for the past week.

"What is it?" Austin said.

"The topside antenna's taking a beating. The signal isn't getting through," Hensleigh said. "It also looks like there's a solar flare coming in."

"Oh, shit...."

"For what it's worth, I've got Abby scanning all the military frequencies, but I wouldn't get your hopes up."

"What about outside?"

"Pretty bad. We've got eighty-footers breaking on the cliffs and a hundred-knot wind on the surface. If we have casualties, we won't be getting them out of here by ourselves."

Austin turned to stare at the diving bell. "And Renshaw?"

"He's still shut up in his room." Hensleigh looked up nervously toward B-deck.

Austin said, "We can't wait any longer. We have to go down."

Hensleigh just watched him.

"Ben?," she began.

"Don't even think about it, Sarah." Austin began walking away from her, toward the water's edge. "I need you up here. So does your kid. You just get that signal out. We'll get the others."

"Coming to three thousand feet," Austin's voice crackled out from the wall-mounted speakers.

Sarah Hensleigh was sitting inside the darkened radio room of Wilkes Ice Station. "Roger that, Mawson," she said into the microphone in front of her.

"There doesn't appear to be any activity outside, Control. The coast is clear. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we 're stopping the winch. Preparing to leave the diving bell."

One kilometer below sea level, the diving bell jolted to a halt.

Inside, Austin keyed the intercom. "Control, confirm time at 2132 hours, please."

The seven divers sitting inside the cramped confines of the Douglas Mawson looked tensely at one another.

Hensleigh's voice came over the speaker. "I copy, Mawson. Time confirmed at 2132 hours."

"Control, mark that we are turning over to self-contained air supply at 2132 hours."

"Marked."

The seven divers reached up for their heavy face masks, brought them down off their hooks, clamped them to the circular buckles on the collarbones of their suits.

"Control, we are now leaving the diving bell."

Austin stepped forward, pausing for a moment to look at the black pool of water lapping against the rim of the diving bell. Then he stepped off the deck and splashed into the darkness.

"Divers. Time is now 2220 hours; dive time is forty-eight minutes. Report," Hensleigh said into her mike.

Inside the radio room behind Sarah sat Abby Sinclair, the station's resident meteorologist. For the past two hours Abby had been manning the satellite radio console, trying without success to raise an outside frequency.

The intercom crackled. Austin's voice answered, "Control, we are still proceeding up the ice tunnel. Nothing so far."

"Roger, divers," Hensleigh said. "Keep us informed."

Behind her, Abby keyed her talk button again. "Calling all frequencies, this is station four-zero-niner?I repeat, this is station four-zero-niner?requesting immediate assistance. We have two casualties, possibly fatalities, on hand and we are in need of immediate support. Please acknowledge." Abby released the button and said to herself, "Somebody, anybody."

The ice tunnel was starting to widen.

As Austin and the other divers slowly made their way upward, they began to notice several strange holes set into the walls on either side of the underwater tunnel.

Each hole was perfectly round, at least ten feet in diameter. And they were all set on an incline so that they descended into the ice tunnel. One of the divers aimed his flashlight up into one of the holes, revealing only impenetrable inky darkness.

Suddenly Austin's voice cut across their intercoms. "OK, people, stay tight. I think I see the surface."

Inside the radio room, Sarah Hensleigh leaned forward in her chair, listening to Austin's voice over the intercom.

"The surface appears calm. No sign of Price or Davis." Hensleigh and Abby exchanged a glance. Hensleigh keyed her intercom. "Divers. This is Control. What about the noises they mentioned? Do you hear anything? Any whale song?"

"Nothing yet, Control. Hold on now: I'm coming to the surface."

Austin's helmet broke the glassy surface.

Icy water drained off his faceplate. Austin lifted his Princeton-Tec dive light above the water's surface. The exposed halogen bulb cast a wide flood pattern over the area around him, illuminating it to its farthest corners.

Slowly, Austin began to see where he was. He was hovering in the middle of a wide pool, which was itself situated at one end of a gigantic subterranean cavern.

He turned in a complete circle, observing, one after another, the sheer vertical walls that lined every side of the cavern.

And then he saw the final wall.

His mouth fell open.

"Control, you're not going to believe this." Austin's stunned voice broke over the intercom.

"What is it, Ben?" Hensleigh said into her mike.

"I'm looking at a cavern of some sort. Walls are sheer-sided ice, probably the result of some kind of seismic activity. Area of the cavern is unknown, but it looks like it extends several hundred feet into the ice."

"Uh-huh."

"There's, ah... there's something else down here, Sarah."

Hensleigh looked at Abby and frowned. She keyed the intercom. "What is it, Ben?"

"Sarah..." There was a long pause. "Sarah, I think I'm looking at a spaceship."

It was half-buried in the ice wall behind it.

Austin stared at it, entranced.

Completely black, it had a wingspan of about ninety feet. Two sleek dorsal tail fins rose high into the air above the rear of the ship. Both fins, however, were completely embedded in the ice wall behind the ship?two shadowy blurs trapped within the clear, frozen wall. It stood on three powerful-looking landing struts, and it looked magnificent?the aerodynamics sleek to the extreme, exuding a sense of raw power that was almost tangible.

There came a loud splash from behind him and Austin spun.

He saw the other divers, treading water behind him, staring up at the spaceship. Beyond them, however, was a set of expanding ripples, the remnants, it seemed, of an object that had fallen into the water....

"What was that?" Austin said. "Hanson?"

"Ben, I don't know what it was, but something just went past my?"

Austin watched as, without warning, Hanson was wrenched underwater.

"Hanson!"

And then there was another scream. Harry Cox.

Austin turned, just in time to see the slicked back of a large animal rise above the surface and plow at tremendous speed into Cox's chest, driving him underwater.

Austin began to swim frantically for the water's edge. As he swam, his head dipped below the surface and suddenly his ears were assaulted by a cacophony of sound?loud, shrill whistles and hoarse, desperate barks.

The next time his head surfaced, he caught a glimpse of the ice walls surrounding the pool of water. He saw large holes set into the ice, just above the surface. They were exactly the same as the ones he'd seen down in the ice tunnel before.

Then Austin saw something come out of one of the holes.

"Holy Christ," he breathed.

Hideous screams burst across the intercom.

In the radio room of the ice station, Hensleigh stared in stunned silence at the blinking console in front of her. Beside her, Abby had her hand across her mouth. Terrified shouts rang out from the wall-mounted speakers:

"Raymonds! "

"He's gone!"

"Oh, shit, no?"

"Jesus, the walls! They're coming out of the fucking walls!"

And then suddenly Austin's voice. "Get out of the water! Get out of the water now! "

Another scream. Then another.

Sarah Hensleigh grabbed her mike. "Ben! Ben! Come in!" Austin's voice crackled over the intercom. He was speaking quickly, in between short, shallow breaths. "Sarah, shit, I... I can't see anybody else. I can't... They're all... they're all gone...." A pause, and then, "Oh, sweet Jesus... Sarah! Call for help! Call for anything you ca?"

And then a crash of breaking glass exploded across the intercom and the voice of Benjamin Austin was gone.

Abby was on the radio, yelling hysterically into the mike.

"For God's sake, somebody answer me! This is station four-zero-niner?I repeat, this is station four-zero-niner. We have just suffered heavy losses in an underwater cavern and request immediate assistance! Can anybody hear me? Somebody, please answer me! Our divers?oh, Jesus?our divers said they saw a spacecraft of some sort in this cavern, and now, now we've lost contact with them! The last we heard from them, they were under attack, under attack in the water. . . ."

Wilkes Ice Station received no response to their distress signal.

Despite the fact that it was picked up by at least three different radio installationss.

FIRST INCURSION

16 June 0630 hours

The hovercraft raced across the ice plain.

It was painted white, which was unusual. Most Antarctic vehicles are painted bright orange, for ease of visibility. And it sped across the vast expanse of snow with a surprising urgency. Nobody is ever in a hurry in Antarctica.

Inside the speeding white hovercraft, Lieutenant Shane Schofield peered out through reinforced fiberglass windows. About a hundred yards off his starboard bow he could see a second hovercraft?also white?whipping across the flat, icy landscape.

At thirty-two, Schofield was young to be in command of a Recon Unit. But he had experience that belied his age. At five-ten, he was lean and muscular, with a handsome creased face and closely cropped black hair. At the moment, his black hair was covered by a camouflaged Kevlar helmet. A gray turtleneck collar protruded from beneath his shoulder plates, covering his neck. Fitted inside the folds of the turtleneck collar was a lightweight Kevlar plate. Sniper protection.

It was rumored that Shane Schofield had deep blue eyes, but this was a rumor that had never been confirmed. In fact, it was folklore at Parris Island?the legendary training camp for the United States Marine Corps?that no one below the rank of General had ever actually seen Schofield's eyes. He always kept them hidden behind a pair of reflective silver antiflash glasses.

His call sign added to the mystery, since it was common knowledge that it had been Brigadier General Norman W. McLean himself who had given Schofield his operational nickname?a nickname that many assumed had something to do with the young Lieutenant's hidden eyes.

"Whistler One, do you copy?"

Schofield picked up his radio. "Whistler Two, this is Whistler One. What is it?"

"Sir?" The deep voice of Staff Sergeant Buck "Book" Riley was suddenly cut off by a wash of static. Over the past twenty-four hours, ionospheric conditions over continental Antarctica had rapidly deteriorated. The full force of a solar flare had kicked in, disrupting the entire electromagnetic spectrum and limiting radio contact to short-range UHF transmissions. Contact between hovercrafts one hundred yards apart was difficult. Contact with Wilkes Ice Station?their destination?was impossible.

The static faded and Riley's voice came over the speaker again. "Sir, do you remember that moving contact we picked up about an hour ago?"

"Uh-huh," Schofield said.

For the past hour, Whistler Two had been picking up emissions from the electronic equipment on board a moving vehicle heading in the opposite direction, back down the coast toward the French research station, Dumont d'Urville.

"What about it?"

"Sir, I can't find it anymore."

Schofield looked down at the radio. "Are you sure?"

"We have no reading on our scopes. Either they shut down or they just disappeared."

Schofield frowned in thought; then he looked back at the cramped personnel compartment behind him. Seated there, two to each side, were four Marines, all dressed in snow fatigues. White-gray Kevlar helmets sat in their laps. White-gray body armor covered their chests. White-gray automatic rifles sat by their sides.

It had been two days since the distress signal from Wilkes Ice Station had been picked up by the U.S. Navy landing ship, Shreveport, while it had been in port in Sydney. As luck would have it, only a week earlier it had been decided that the Shreveport?a rapid deployment vessel used to transport Marine Force Reconnaissance Units?would stay in Sydney for some urgent repairs while the rest of her group returned to Pearl Harbor. That being the case, within an hour of the receipt of Abby Sinclair's distress signal, the Shreveport? now up and ready to go?was at sea, carrying a squad of Marines due south, heading toward the Ross Sea.

Now Schofield and his unit were approaching Wilkes Ice Station from McMurdo Station, another, larger, U.S. research facility about nine hundred miles from Wilkes. McMurdo was situated on the edge of the Ross Sea and was manned by a standing staff of 104 all year round. Despite the lasting stigma associated with the U.S. Navy's disastrous nuclear power experiment there in 1972, it remained the U.S. gateway to the South Pole.

Wilkes, on the other hand, was as remote a station as one would find in Antarctica. Six hundred miles from its nearest neighbor, it was a small American outpost, situated right on top of the coastal ice shelf not far from the Dalton Iceberg Tongue. It was bounded on the landward side by a hundred miles of barren, windswept ice plains and to seaward by towering three-hundred-foot cliffs that were pounded all year round by mountainous sixty-foot waves.

Access by air had been out of the question. It was early winter, and a minus-thirty-degree blizzard had been assailing the camp for three weeks now. It was expected to last another four. In such weather, exposed helicopter rotors and jet engines were known to freeze in midair.

And access by sea meant taking on the cliffs. The U.S. Navy had a word for such a mission: suicide.

Which left access by land. By hovercraft. The twelve-man Marine Recon Unit would make the eleven-hour trip from McMurdo to Wilkes in two enclosed-fan military hovercrafts.

Schofield thought about the moving signal again. On a map, McMurdo, d'Urville, and Wilkes stations formed something like an isosceles triangle. D'Urville and Wilkes on the coast, forming the base of the triangle. McMurdo?farther inland, on the edge of the enormous bay formed by the Ross Sea?the point.

The signal that Whistler Two had picked up heading back along the coast toward Dumont d'Urville had been maintaining a steady speed of about forty miles an hour. At that speed, it was probably a conventional hovercraft. Maybe the French had had people at d'Urville who'd picked up the distress signal from Wilkes, sent help, and were now on their way back....

Schofield keyed his radio again. "Book, when was the last time you held that signal?"

The radio crackled. "Signal last held eight minutes ago. Range finder contact. Identical to previously held electronic signature. Heading consistent with previous vector. It was the same signal, sir, and as of eight minutes ago it was right where it should have been."

In this weather?howling eighty-knot winds that hurled snow so fast that it fell horizontally?regular radar scanning was hopeless. Just as the solar flare in the ionosphere put paid to radio communications, the low-pressure system on the ground caused havoc with their radar.

Prepared for such an eventuality, each hovercraft was equipped with roof-mounted units called range finders. Mounted on a revolving turret, each range finder swung back and forth in a slow 180-degree arc, emitting a constant high-powered focal beam known as a "needle." Unlike radar, whose straight-line reach has always been limited by the curvature of the Earth, needles can hug the Earth's surface and bend over the horizon for at least another fifty miles. As soon as any "live" object?any object with chemical, animal, or electronic properties?crosses the path of a needle, it is recorded. Or, as the unit's range finder operator, Private José "Santa" Cruz, liked to put it, "if it boils, breathes, or beeps, the range finder'll nail the fucker."

Schofield keyed his radio. "Book, the point where the signal disappeared. How far away is it?"

"About ninety miles from here, sir," Riley's voice answered.

Schofield stared out over the seamless expanse of white that stretched all the way to the horizon.

At last he said, "All right. Check it out."

"Roger that," Riley responded immediately. Schofield had a lot of time for Book Riley. The two men had been friends for several years. Solid and fit, Riley had a boxer's face?a flat nose that had been broken too many times, sunken eyes, and thick black eyebrows. He was popular in the unit?serious when he had to be, but relaxed and funny when the pressure was off. He had been the Staff Sergeant responsible for Schofield when Schofield had been a young and stupid Second Lieutenant. Then, when Schofield had been given command of a Recon Unit, Book?then a forty-year-old, highly respected Staff Sergeant who could have had his choice of assignment within the Marine Corps establishment? had stayed with him.

"We'll continue on to Wilkes," Schofield said. "You find out what happened to that signal, and then you meet us at the station."

"Got it."

"Follow-up time is two hours. Don't be late. And set your range finder arc from your tail. If there's anybody out there behind us, I want to know."

"Yes, sir."

"Oh, and, Book, one more thing," Schofield said.

"What?"

"You play nice with the other kids, you hear."

"Yes, sir."

"One, out," Schofield said.

"Whistler Two, out."

And with that, the second hovercraft peeled away to the right and sped off into the snowstorm.

An hour later, the coastline came into view, and through a set of high-powered field glasses Schofield saw Wilkes Ice Station for the first time.

From the surface, it hardly looked like a "station" at all? more like a motley collection of squat, domelike structures, half-buried in the snow.

In the middle of the complex stood the main building. It was little more than an enormous round dome mounted on a wide square base. Above the surface, the whole structure was about a hundred feet across, but it couldn't have been more than ten feet high.

On top of one of the smaller buildings gathered around the main dome stood the remains of a radio antenna. The upper half of the antenna was folded downward, a couple of taut cables the only things holding it to the upright lower half. Ice crusts hung off everything. The only light, a soft white glow burning from within the main dome.

Schofield ordered the hovercraft to a halt half a mile from the station. No sooner had it stopped than the port-side door slid open, and the six Marines leaped down from the hover-craft's inflated skirt and landed with muffled whumps on the hard-packed snow.

As they ran across the snow-covered ground, they could hear, above the roar of the wind, the crashing of the waves against the cliffs on the far side of the station.

"Gentlemen, you know what to do," was all Schofield said into his helmet mike as he ran.

Wrapped in the blanket of the blizzard, the white-clad squad fanned out, making its way toward the station complex.

Buck Riley saw the hole in the ice before he saw the battered hovercraft in it.

The crevasse looked like a scar on the icescape?a deep crescent-shaped gash about forty meters wide.

Riley's hovercraft came to rest a hundred yards from the rim of the enormous chasm. The six Marines climbed out, lowered themselves gently to the ground, and cautiously made their way across the snow, toward the edge of the crevasse.

PFC Robert "Rebound" Simmons was their climber, so they harnessed him up first. A small man, Rebound was as nimble as a cat and weighed about the same. He was young, too, just twenty-three, and like most men his age, he responded to praise. He had beamed with pride when he'd overheard his lieutenant once say to another platoon commander that his climber was so good, he could scale the inside of the Capitol Building without a rope. His nickname was another story, a good-natured jibe bestowed upon him by his unit in reference to his less than impressive success rate with women.

Once the rope was secured to his harness, Simmons lay down on his stomach and began to shimmy his way forward, through the snow, toward the edge of the scar.

He reached the edge and peered out over the rim, down into the crevasse.

"Oh, shit...."

Ten meters behind him, Buck Riley spoke into his helmet mike. "What's the story, Rebound?"

"They're here, sir." Simmons's voice was almost resigned. "Conventional craft. Got somethin' in French written on the side. Thin ice scattered all about underneath it. Looks like they tried to cross a snow bridge that didn't hold."

He turned to face Riley, his face grim, his voice tinny over the short-range radio frequency. "And, sir, they's pretty fucked up."

The hovercraft lay forty feet below the surface, its rounded nose crumpled inward by the downward impact, every one of its windows either shattered or cracked into distorted spider-webs. A thin layer of snow had already embarked upon the task of erasing the battered vehicle from history.

Two of the hovercraft's occupants had been catapulted by the impact right through the forward windshield. Both lay against the forward wall of the crevasse, their necks bent backward at obscene angles, their bodies resting in pools of their own frozen blood.

Rebound Simmons stared at the grisly scene.

There were other bodies inside the hovercraft. He could see their shadows inside it and could see star-shaped splatters of blood on the cracked windows of the hovercraft.

"Rebound?" Riley's voice came in over his helmet intercom. "Anybody alive down there?"

"Don't look like it, sir," Rebound said.

"Do an infrared," Riley instructed. "We got twenty minutes before we gotta hit the road, and 1 wouldn 't want to leave and find out later that there were some survivors down there."

Rebound snapped his infrared visor into place. It hung down from the brow of his helmet, covering both of his eyes like a fighter pilot's visor.

Now he saw the crashed hovercraft through a wash of electronic blue imagery. The cold had taken effect quickly. The whole crash site was depicted as a blue-on-black outline. Not even the engine glowed yellow, the color of objects with minimal heat intensity.

More important, however, there were no blobs of orange or yellow within the image of the vehicle. Any bodies that were still inside the hovercraft were ice cold. Everyone on board was most certainly dead.

Rebound said, "Sir, infrared reading is nega?"

The ground gave way beneath him.

There was no warning. No preemptive 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 the young private, 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 OK?" 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 him. 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 man.

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 overlap, 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 that covers nearly a whole quarter of the Antarctic landmass. There is even one sector?that which covers the Amundsen Sea and Byrd Land?that belongs to no one.

The general impression is one of a truly international land-mass. Such an impression, however, is misguided and simplistic.

Advocates of the "politically neutral Antarctica" fail to acknowledge the continuing animosity between Argentina and Great Britain as to their respective Antarctic claims, or the staunch refusal of all of the parties to the Antarctic Treaty to vote on the 1985 UN Resolution that would have dedicated the Antarctic landmass to the benefit of the entire international community, or the mysterious conspiracy of silence among the Treaty nations that followed a little-known Greenpeace report in 1995 that accused the French government of conducting secret underground nuclear detonations off the coast of Victoria Land.

More important, however, such advocates also fail to recognize that a land without clearly defined borders has no means of dealing with hostile foreign incursions.

Research stations can often be a thousand miles apart. Sometimes those research stations discover items of immense value?uranium, plutonium, gold. It is not impossible that a foreign state, desperate for resources, would, upon learning of such a discovery, send an incursionary force to appropriate that discovery before the rest of the world even knew it existed.

Such an incident?insofar as it could be known?had never happened in Antarctica before.

There's always a first time, Schofield thought as he was led into Wilkes Ice Station by the Frenchman named Luc.

Schofield had heard a recording of Abby Sinclair's distress signal, heard her mention the discovery of a spacecraft buried within the ice underneath Wilkes Ice Station. If the scientists at Wilkes had, in fact, discovered an extraterrestrial spacecraft, it would definitely be something other parties would be interested in. Whether or not they had the nerve to send a strike team in to get it was another question.

In any case, it made him more than a little uneasy to be greeted at the doors of an American research station by a French national, and as he walked down the dark, ice-walled entrance tunnel behind Luc, Schofield found himself gripping his automatic pistol a little more tightly.

The two men emerged from the darkened entry tunnel into brightly lit, wide open space. Schofield found himself standing on a thin metal catwalk overlooking a wide, cylindrical chasm of empty space.

Wilkes Ice Station opened in front of him, a giant subterranean structure. Narrow black catwalks ran around the circumference of the underground cylinder, surrounding the wide central shaft. At the base of the enormous cylinder Schofield saw a circular pool of water, in the middle of which sat the station's diving bell.

"This way," Luc said, guiding Schofield to the right. "They're all in the dining room."

As he entered the dining room preceded by Luc, Schofield felt like an adult entering a preschool classroom: a stranger who by the simple fact of his size and bearing just doesn't fit in.

The group of five survivors sat in a tight circle around the table. The men were unshaven, the women unkempt. They all looked exhausted. They looked up wearily as Schofield entered the room.

There were two other men in the room, standing behind the table. Unlike the people seated at the table, these two, like Luc, seemed alert, clean, and fresh. One of them was holding a tray of steaming drinks. He froze in midstep as soon as he saw Schofield walk into the room.

French scientists from d'Urville, Schofield thought. Here in response to the distress signal.

Probably.

At first, no one said anything.

Everyone in the room just looked at Schofield, taking in his helmet and his silver antiflash glasses; his body armor and his snow fatigues; the MP-5 machine pistol slung over his shoulder; the .44 automatic in his hand.

Snake came in behind Schofield, and all eyes switched to him: similarly garbed, similarly armed. A clone.

"It's OK," Luc said gently to the others. "They are Marines. They are here to rescue you."

One of the women let out a gasp of air. "Oh, Jesus," she said. Then she started to cry. "Oh, thank God."

American accent, Schofield noted. The woman pushed back her chair and came toward him, tears pouring down her cheeks. "I knew you'd come," she said. "I knew you'd come."

She clutched Schofield's shoulder plate and began sobbing into his chest. Schofield showed no emotion. He held his pistol clear of her, as he'd been trained to do.

"It's OK, ma'am," was all he said as he guided her gently to a nearby seat. "It's OK. You're all right now."

Once she was seated, he turned to face the others. "Ladies and gentleman. We are Reconnaissance Unit Sixteen of the United States Marine Corps. My name is Lieutenant Shane Schofield, and this is Sergeant Scott Kaplan. We are here in response to your distress signal. We have instructions to secure this station and ensure that each of you is unharmed."

One of the men at the table let out a sigh of relief.

Schofield went on. "So that you're under no illusions, I will tell you now that we are a Reconnaissance Unit. We will not be extracting you. We are a front-line unit. We travel fast, and we travel light. Our task is to get here quickly and make sure that you are all OK. If there's an emergency situation, we will extract you; if not, our orders are to secure this station and wait for a fully equipped extraction team to arrive."

Schofield turned to face Luc and the other two men standing behind the table. "Now, I presume you gentlemen are from d'Urville. Is that correct?"

The man with the tray in his hands swallowed loudly, his eyes wide.

"Yes," Luc said. "That is correct. We heard the message on the radio, and we came as soon as we could. To help."

As Luc spoke, a woman's voice crackled over Schofield's earpiece. "Unit Two, sweep is clear."

"Unit Three. We have found three?no, actually, make that four?contacts in the drilling room. We're on our way up now."

Schofield nodded at Luc. "Your names?"

"I am Professor Luc Champion," Luc said. "This is Professor Jean-Pierre Cuvier, and holding the tray there is Dr. Henri Rae."

Schofield nodded slowly, taking the names in, comparing them to a list he'd seen on the Shreveport two days previously. It had been a list of the names of every French scientist stationed at d'Urville. Champion, Cuvier, and Rae were on it.

There was a knock on the door and Schofield turned.

Sergeant Morgan "Montana" Lee stood in the doorway to the dining room. Montana Lee was a nugget of a man, stocky and, at forty-six years of age, the oldest member of the unit. He had a pug nose and a heavyset, weathered face. Ten yards behind him stood his partner, Corporal Oliver "Hollywood" Todd. Tall, black, and lean, Hollywood Todd was twenty-one years old.

And in between the two Marines stood the fruits of their sweep.

One woman.

One man.

One young girl.

And one seal.

"They got here about four hours ago," Sarah Hensleigh said

Schofield and Hensleigh were standing on A-deck, out on the catwalk that looked out over the rest of the ice station.

As Hensleigh had already explained, Wilkes Ice Station was essentially a great big vertical cylinder that had been bored into the ice shelf. It dived five stories straight down, all the way to sea level.

Indented at regular intervals on the walls of the cylinder were metal catwalks that ran around the circumference of the cylinder. Each catwalk was joined to the one above it by steep, narrow rung-ladders, so that the whole structure looked kind of like a fire escape.

Branching out from each catwalk, burrowing into the icy walls of the cylinder, was a series of tunnels that formed the different levels of the station. Each level was made up of four straight tunnels that branched out from the central shaft to meet a curved outer tunnel that ran in a wide circle around the central well. The four straight tunnels roughly equated the four points on a compass, so they were simply labeled north, south, east, and west.

Each catwalk/level of Wilkes Ice Station was labeled A through E?A-deck being the highest, E-deck signifying the wide metal platform that surrounded the large pool of water at the base of the massive underground structure. On C-deck, the middle level, Sarah said, a narrow retractable bridge was able to extend across the wide central shaft of the station.

"How many?" Schofield asked.

"There were five of them at first," Sarah said. "Four stayed here with us, while the fifth guy took the others back to d'Urville on their hovercraft."

"You know them?"

Sarah said, "I know Luc and I know Henri?who I think wet himself when he saw you guys walk in?and I know of the fourth one, Jacques Latissier."

After Montana had led Hensleigh into the dining room a few minutes earlier, it hadn't taken long for Schofield to figure out that she was the person to speak to about the previous week's events at Wilkes Ice Station.

While all the others looked either dejected or tired, Sarah had appeared collected and in control. Indeed, Montana and Hollywood had said that they'd found her while she had been showing one of the French scientists the core-drilling room down on E-deck. His name had been Jacques Latissier?a tall man with a thick black beard?and he was also on Schofield's mental list.

Sarah Hensleigh stared out over the central shaft of the station, deep in thought. Schofield looked at her. She was an attractive woman, about thirty-five, with dark brown eyes, black shoulder-length hair, and high arching cheekbones. Schofield noticed that around her neck she wore a glistening silver locket on a chain.

At that moment, the little girl came out onto the catwalk. Schofield guessed that she must have been about ten. She had short blond hair, a small button nose, and she wore thick glasses that hung down awkwardly over her cheeks. She looked almost comical in the bulky pink parka that she wore?it had a terribly oversize wool-lined hood that flopped down over her face.

And behind the little girl, loping out onto the metal catwalk, came the seal.

"And who is this?" Schofield asked.

"This is my daughter, Kirsty," Sarah said, putting her hand on the little girl's shoulder. "Kirsty, this is Lieutenant Schofield."

"Hi there," Schofield said.

Kirsty Hensleigh just stood there for a moment and stared up at Schofield, taking in his armor, his helmet, and his weapons.

"Cool glasses," she said at last.

"Huh? Oh, yeah," Schofield said, touching his silver anti-flash glasses. Combined with his snow fatigues and his white-gray body armor, he knew the reflective single-lens glasses made him look particularly icy. A kid would like that. Schofield didn't take the glasses off.

"Yeah, I guess they are pretty cool," he said. "How old are you?"

"Twelve, almost thirteen."

"Yeah?"

"I'm kind of short for my age," Kirsty added matter-of-factly.

"Me, too," Schofield said, nodding.

He looked down as the seal flopped forward and started sniffing at his knee. "And your friend here. What's his name?"

"She's a girl, and her name is Wendy."

Schofield reached down and let the seal sniff his hand. She wasn't very big, about the size of a medium-sized dog, and she happily wore a cute red collar.

"Wendy. What kind of seal is she?" Schofield asked as he began to pat Wendy on the head.

"Arctocephalus gazella," Kirsty said. "Antarctic fur seal."

Wendy started winding her head around in Schofield's hand, forcing him to pat her behind her earflap. He did, and then suddenly Wendy dropped to the ground and rolled over onto her back.

"She wants you to rub her tummy," Kirsty said, smiling. "She likes that."

Wendy lay on the catwalk, on her back, her flippers held out wide, waiting to be patted. Schofield bent down and gave her a quick rub on the stomach.

"You just won yourself a friend for life," Sarah Hensleigh said, watching Schofield closely.

"Great," Schofield said, rising.

"I didn't know Marines could be so friendly," Sarah said suddenly, taking Schofield slightly off guard.

"We're not all heartless."

"Not when there's something here that you want."

The comment made Schofield stop and look at Sarah for a long second. Clearly, she was no fool.

Schofield nodded slowly, accepting the criticism. "Ma'am, if you don't mind, if we could just get back to what we were discussing before, you know two of them, and you know of one of them, right?"

"That's right."

"What about the fourth one, Cuvier?"

"Never met him."

Schofield moved on. "And how many did they take back to d'Urville?"

"They could only fit six people in their hovercraft, so one of their guys took five of our people back there."

"Leaving the other four back here."

"That's right."

Schofield nodded to himself. Then he looked at Hensleigh. "There are a couple of other things we need to talk about. Like what you found down in the ice. And the Renshaw ... incident."

Sarah understood what he was saying. Such matters were best discussed in the absence of a twelve-year-old.

She nodded. "No problem."

Schofield looked at the ice station around him: at the pool down at the bottom, at the catwalks set into the walls of the cylinder, at the tunnels that disappeared into the ice. There was something about it all that wasn't quite right, something that he couldn't quite put his finger on.

And then he realized, and he turned to face Sarah. "Stop me if this is a stupid question, but if this whole station is carved into the ice shelf and all the walls are made of ice, why don't they melt? Surely you must generate a lot of heat in here with your machinery and all. Shouldn't the walls be dripping constantly?"

Sarah said, "It's not a stupid question. In fact, it's a very good question. When we first arrived here, we found that the heat from the exhaust of the core-drilling machine was causing some of the ice walls to melt. So we had a cooling system installed on C-deck. It works off a thermostat that keeps the temperature steady at ?1° Celsius no matter what heat we produce. The funny thing is, since the surface temperature outside is almost thirty below, the cooling system actually warms the air in here. We love it."

"Very clever," Schofield said as he looked around the ice station.

His gaze came to rest on the dining room. Luc Champion and the other three French scientists were in there, sitting at the table with the residents of Wilkes. Schofield watched them, deep in thought.

"Are you going to take us home?" Kirsty said suddenly from behind him.

For a long moment Schofield continued to watch the four French scientists in the dining room. Then he turned to face the little girl.

"Not just yet," he said. "Some other people will be here soon to take you home. I'm just here to take care of you until they do."

Schofield and Hensleigh walked quickly down the wide ice tunnel. Montana and Hollywood kept pace behind them.

They were on B-deck, the main living area. The ice tunnel curved around a wide bend. Doors were sunk into it on either side: bedrooms, a common room, and various labs and studies. Schofield couldn't help noticing one particular door that had a distinctive three-ringed biohazard sign on it. A rectangular plate beneath the sign read: biotoxin laboratory.

Schofield said, "They said something about it when we got to McMurdo. That Renshaw claimed he did it because the other guy was stealing his research. Something like that."

"That's right," Hensleigh said, walking fast. She looked at Schofield. "It's just crazy."

They came to the end of the tunnel, to a door set into the ice. It was closed and it had a heavy wooden beam locked in place across it.

"James Renshaw," Schofield mused. "Isn't he the one who found the spaceship?"

"That's right. But there's a whole lot more to it than that."

Upon arriving at McMurdo Station, Schofield had been given a short briefing on Wilkes Ice Station. On the face of it, the station seemed like nothing special. It contained the usual assortment of academics: marine biologists studying the ocean fauna; paleontologists studying fossils frozen in the ice; geologists looking for mineral deposits; and geophysicists like James Renshaw who drilled deep down into the ice looking for thousand-year-old traces of carbon monoxide and other gases.

What made Wilkes Ice Station something special was that two days before Abby Sinclair's distress signal had gone out another high-priority signal had been sent out from the station: This earlier signal, sent to McMurdo, had been a formal request seeking the dispatch to Wilkes of a squad of military police.

Although the details had been sketchy, it appeared that one of the scientists at Wilkes had killed one of his colleagues.

Schofleld stared at the barred door at the end of the ice tunnel and shook his head. He really didn't have time for this. His orders had been very specific:

Secure the station. Investigate the spacecraft. Verify its existence. And then guard it against all parties until reinforcements arrived.

Schofield remembered sitting in the closed briefing room on board the Shreveport, listening to the voice of the Undersecretary of Defense on the speakerphone. "Other parties have almost certainly picked up that distress signal, Lieutenant. If there really is an extraterrestrial vehicle down there, there's a good chance one of those parties might make a play for it. The United States Government would like to avoid that situation, Lieutenant. Your objective is the protection of the spacecraft, nothing else. I repeat. Your objective is the protection of the spacecraft. All other considerations are secondary. We want that ship."

Not once had the safety of the American scientists at the station been mentioned, a fact that hadn't gone unnoticed by Schofield. It obviously hadn't slipped past Sarah Hensleigh either.

All other considerations are secondary.

In any case, Schofield thought, he couldn't afford to send any divers down to investigate the spacecraft while there existed the possibility that one of the residents of Wilkes might be a source of trouble.

"All right," he said, looking at the door but addressing Hensleigh. "Twenty-five words or less. What's his story?"

Sarah Hensleigh said, "Renshaw is a geophysicist from Stanford, studying ice cores for his Ph.D. Bernie Olson is? was?his supervisor. Renshaw's work with ice cores was groundbreaking. He was digging core holes deeper than anybody had ever dug before, at times going nearly a kilometer below the surface."

Schofield vaguely knew about ice core research. It involved drilling a circular hole about thirty centimeters wide down into the ice shelf and pulling out a cylinder of ice known as a core. Held captive within the core were pockets of gases that had existed in the air thousands of years before.

"Anyway," Sarah said, "a couple of weeks ago, Renshaw hit the big time. His drill must have hit a layer of upsurged ice?prehistoric ice that has been dislodged by an earthquake sometime in the past and pushed up toward the surface. Suddenly Renshaw was studying pockets of air that were as much as three hundred million years old. It was the discovery of a lifetime. Here was a chance to study an atmosphere that no one has ever known. To see what the earth's atmosphere was like before the dinosaurs." Sarah Hensleigh shrugged. "For an academic, something tike that is like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It's worth a fortune on the lecture circuit alone.

"Only then it got better.

"A few days ago, Renshaw adjusted his drilling vector slightly?that's the angle at which you drill down into the ice?and at 1500 feet, in the middle of a four-hundred-million-year-old section of ice, he hit metal."

Sarah paused, allowing what she had just said to sink in. Schofield said nothing.

Sarah said, "We sent the diving bell down, did some sonic-resonance tests of the ice shelf, and discovered that there was a cavern of some sort right where this piece of prehistoric metal was supposed to be. Further tests showed that there was a tunnel leading up to this cavern from a depth of 3,000 feet. That was when we sent the divers down, and that was when Austin saw the spacecraft. And that was when all the divers disappeared."

Schofield said, "So what does all this have to do with Bernard Olson's death?"

Sarah said, "Olson was Renshaw's supervisor. He was always looking over Renshaw's shoulder while Renshaw was making these amazing discoveries. Renshaw started to get paranoid. He started saying that Bernie was stealing his research. That Bernie was using his findings to write a quick-fire article himself and beat Renshaw to the punch.

"You see, Bernie had connections with the journals, knew some editors. He could get an article out within a month Renshaw, as an unknown Ph.D. student, would almost certainly take longer. He thought Bernie was trying to steal his pot of gold. And then when Renshaw discovered metal down in the cavern and he saw that Bernie was going to include that in his article, too, he flipped."

"And he killed him?"

"He killed him. Last Friday night. Renshaw just went to Bernie's room and started yelling at him. We all heard it. Renshaw was angry and upset, but we'd heard it all before so we didn't think much of it. But this time, he killed him."

"How?" Schofield continued to stare at the locked door.

"He?" Sarah hesitated. "He jabbed Bernie in the neck with a hypodermic needle and injected the contents."

"What was in the syringe?"

"Industrial-strength drain-cleaning fluid."

"Charming," Schofield said. He nodded at the door. "He's in here?"

Sarah said, "He locked himself in after it happened. Took a week's worth of food in with him and said that if any of us tried to go in there after him he'd kill us, too. It was terrifying. He was crazy. So one night?the night before we sent the divers down to investigate the cave?the rest of us got together and bolted the door shut from the outside. Ben Austin fixed some runners to the wall on either side of the door while the rest of us slid the beam into place. Then Austin used a rivet gun to seal the door shut."

Schofield said, "Is he still alive?"

"Yes. You can't hear him now, which means he's probably asleep. But when he's awake, believe me, you'll know it."

"Uh-huh." Schofield examined the edges of the door, saw the rivets holding it to the frame. "Your friend did a good job with the door." He turned around. "If he's locked inside. That's good enough for me, if you're sure there's no other way out of that room."

"This is the only entrance."

"Yeah, but is there any other way out of the room? Could he dig his way out, say, through the walls, or the ceiling?"

"The ceilings and the floors are steel-lined, so he can't dig through them. And his room's at the end of the corridor, so there aren't any rooms on either side of it?the walls are solid ice," Sarah Hensleigh gave Schofield a crooked smile. "I don't think there's any way out of there."

"Then we leave him in there," Schofield said as he started walking back down the ice tunnel. "We've got other things to worry about. The first of which is finding out what happened to your divers down in that cave."

The sun shone brightly over Washington, D.C. The Capitol practically glowed white against the magnificent blue sky.

In a lavish red-carpeted corner of the Capitol Building, the meeting broke for recess. Folders were closed. Chairs were pushed back. Some of the delegates took off their reading glasses and rubbed their eyes. As soon as the recess was called, small clusters of aides immediately rushed forward to their bosses' sides with cellular phones, folders, and faxes.

"What are they up to?" the U.S. Permanent Representative, George Holmes, said to his aide as he watched the entire French delegation?all twelve of them?leave the negotiating room. "That's the fourth time they've called a recess today."

Holmes watched France's Chef de Mission?a pompous, snobbish man named Pierre Dufresne?leave the room at the head of his group. He shook his head in wonder.

George Holmes was a diplomat, had been all his life. He was fifty-five, short, and, though he hated to admit it, a little overweight.

Holmes had a round, moonlike face and a horseshoe of graying hair, and he wore thick horn-rimmed glasses that made his brown eyes appear larger than they really were.

He stood up and stretched his legs, looked around at the enormous meeting room. A huge circular table stood in the center of the room, with sixteen comfortable leather chairs placed at equal distances around its circumference.

The occasion, the reaffirmation of an alliance.

International alliances are not exactly the friendly affairs the TV news makes them out to be. When Presidents and Prime Ministers emerge from the White House and shake hands for the cameras in front of their interlocking flags, they belie the deal making, the promise breaking, the nit-picking, and the catfighting that go on in rooms not unlike the one in which George Holmes now stood. The smiles and the handshakes are merely the icing on very complex, negotiated cakes that are made by professional diplomats like Holmes.

International alliances are not about friendship. They are about advantage. If friendship brings advantage, then friendship is desirable. If friendship does not bring advantage, then perhaps merely civil relations may be all that is necessary. International friendship?in terms of foreign aid, military allegiance, and trade alignment?can be a very expensive business. It is not entered into lightly.

Which was the reason why George Holmes was in Washington on this bright summer's day. He was a negotiator. More than that, he was a negotiator skilled in the niceties and subtleties of diplomatic exchange.

And he would need all his skills in this diplomatic exchange, for this was no ordinary reaffirmation of an alliance.

This was a reaffirmation of what was arguably the most important alliance of the twentieth century.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

NATO.

"Phil, did you know that for the last forty years, the one and only goal of French foreign policy has been to destroy the United States' hegemony over the Western world?" Holmes mused as he waited for the French delegation to return to the meeting room.

His aide, a twenty-five-year-old Harvard Law grad named Phillip Munro, hesitated before he answered. He wasn't sure if it was a rhetorical question. Holmes swiveled on his chair and stared at Munro through his thick glasses.

"Ah, no, sir, I didn't," Munro said.

Holmes nodded thoughtfully. "They think of us as brutes, unsophisticated fools. Beer-swilling rednecks who through some accident of history somehow got our hands on the most powerful weapons in the world and, from that, became its leader. The French resent that. Hell, they're not even a full NATO member anymore, because they think it perpetuates U.S. influence over Europe."

Holmes snuffed a laugh. He remembered when, in 1966, France withdrew from NATO's integrated military command because it did not want French nuclear weapons to be placed under NATO?and therefore U.S.?control. At the time the French President, Charles de Gaulle, had said point-blank that NATO was "an American organization." Now France simply maintained a seat on NATO's North Atlantic Council to keep an eye on things.

Munro said, "I know a few people who would agree with them. Academics, economists. People who would say that that's exactly what NATO is designed to do. Perpetuate our influence over Europe."

Holmes smiled. Munro was good value. College-educated and an ardent liberal, he was one of those let's-have-a-philosophical-debate-over-coffee types. The kind who argue for a better world when they have absolutely no experience in it. Holmes didn't mind that. In fact, he found Munro refreshing. "But what do you say, Phil?" he asked.

Munro was silent for a few seconds. Then he said, "NATO makes European countries economically and technologically dependent upon the United States for defense. Even highly developed countries like France and England know that if they want the best weapons systems, they have to come to us. And that leaves them with two options?come knocking on our door with their hats in their hands or join NATO. And so far as I know, the United States hasn't sold any Patriot missile systems to non-NATO countries. So, yes, I think that NATO does perpetuate our influence over Europe."

"Not a bad analysis, Phil. But let me tell you something; it goes a lot further than that, a lot further," he said. "So much so, in fact, that the White House maintains that the national security of the United States depends upon that influence. We want to keep our influence over Europe, Phil, economically and especially technologically. France, on the other hand, would like us to lose that influence. And for the last ten years successive French governments have been actively pursuing a policy of eroding U.S. influence in Europe."

"Example?" Munro said.

"Did you know that it was France who was the driving force behind the establishment of the European Union?"

"Well, no. I thought it was?"

"Did you know that it was France who was the driving force behind the establishment of a European Defense Charter?"

A pause.

"No," Munro said.

"Did you know that it is France who subsidizes the European Space Agency so that the ESA can charge vastly cheaper prices for taking commercial satellites up into orbit than NASA can?"

"No, I didn't know that."

"Son, for the last ten years, France has been trying to unite Europe like never before and sell it to the rest of the world. They call it regional pride. We call it an attempt to tell European nations that they don't need America anymore."

"Does Europe need America anymore?" Munro asked quickly. A loaded question.

Homes gave his young aide a crooked smile. "Until Europe can match us weapon-for-weapon, yes, they do need us. What frustrates France most about us is our defense technology. They can't match it. We're too far ahead of them. It infuriates them.

"And as long as we stay ahead of them, they know that they've got no option but to follow us. But"?Holmes held up a finger?"once they get their hands on something new, once they develop something that tops our technology, then I think things may be different.

"This isn't 1966 anymore. Things have changed. The world has changed. If France walked out of NATO now, I think half of the other European nations in the organization would walk out with her?"

At that moment, the doors to the meeting room opened and the French delegation, led by Pierre Dufresne, came back into the room.

As the French delegates returned to their seats, Holmes leaned close to Munro. "What worries me most, though, is that the French may be closer to that new discovery than we think. Look at them today. They've recessed this meeting four times already. Four times. Do you know what that means?"

"What?"

"They're stalling the meeting. Drawing it out. You only stall like that when you're waiting for information. That's why they keep recessing?so they can talk with their intelligence people and get an update on whatever it is they're up to. And by the looks of things, whatever that is, it could be the difference between the continued existence of NATO and its complete destruction."

The sleek black head broke the surface without a sound. It was a sinister head, with two dark, lifeless eyes on either side of a glistening snub-nosed snout.

A few moments later, a second, identical head appeared next to the first, and the two animals curiously observed the activity taking place on E-deck.

The two killer whales in the pool of Wilkes Ice Station were rather small specimens, despite the fact that they each weighed close to five tons. From tip to tail they were each at least fifteen feet long.

Having evaluated and dismissed the activity taking place on the deck around them?where Lieutenant Schofield was busy getting a couple of divers suited up?the two killer whales began to circle the pool, gliding around the diving bell that sat half-submerged in the very center of the pool.

Their movements seemed odd, almost coordinated. As one killer would look one way, the other would look in the opposite direction. It was almost as if they were searching for something, searching for something in particular....

"They're looking for Wendy," Kirsty said, looking down at the two killers from the C-deck catwalk. Her voice was flat, cold?unusually harsh for a twelve-year-old girl.

It had been almost two hours since Schofield and his team had arrived at Wilkes, and now Schofield was down on E-deck, preparing to send two of his men down in the Douglas Mawson to find out what had happened to Austin and the others.

Fascinated, Kirsty had been watching him and the two divers from up on C-deck when she had seen the two killer whales surface. Beside her, stationed on C-deck to work the winch controls, were two of the Marines.

Kirsty liked these two. Unlike a couple of the older ones who had merely grunted when she had said hello, these two were young and friendly. One of them, Kirsty was happy to note, was a woman.

Lance Corporal Elizabeth Gant was compact, fit, and she held her MP-5 as though it were an extension of her right hand. Hidden beneath her helmet and her silver antiflash glasses was an intelligent and attractive twenty-six-year-old woman. Her call sign, "Fox," was a compliment bestowed upon her by her admiring male colleagues. Libby Gant looked down at the two killer whales as they glided slowly around the pool.

"They're looking for Wendy?" she asked, glancing at the little black fur seal on the catwalk beside her. Wendy backed nervously away from the edge of the catwalk, trying, it seemed, to avoid being seen by the two whales circling in the pool forty feet below.

"They don't like her very much," Kirsty said.

"Why not?"

"They're juveniles," Kirsty said. "Male juveniles. They don't like anybody. It's like they have something to prove? prove that they're bigger and stronger than the other animals. Typical boys. The killer whales around these parts mostly eat baby crabeaters, but these two saw Wendy swimming in the pool a few days ago and they've been coming by ever since."

"What's a crabeater?" Hollywood Todd asked from over by the winch controls.

"It's another kind of seal," Kirsty said. "A big, fat seal. Killers eat them in about three bites."

"They eat seals?' Hollywood said, genuinely surprised.

"Uh-huh," Kirsty said.

"Whoa." Having barely graduated high school, Hollywood couldn't exactly claim to possess a love for books or academia. School had been a hard time. He'd joined the Marines two weeks after graduating and thought it was the best decision he'd ever made.

He looked down at Kirsty, assessing her size and age. "How come you know all this stuff?"

Kirsty shrugged self-consciously. "I read a lot."

"Oh."

Beside Hollywood, Gant began to laugh softly.

"What're you laughing at?" Hollywood asked.

"You," Libby Gant said, smiling. "I was just thinking about how much you read."

Hollywood cocked his head. "I read."

"Sure you do."

"I do."

"Comic books don't count, Hollywood."

"I don't just read comic books."

"Oh, yeah, I forgot about your prized subscription to Playboy magazine."

Kirsty began to chuckle.

Hollywood noticed and frowned. "Ha-ha. Yeah, well, least I know I ain't gonna be no college professor, so I don't try to be somethin' I'm not." He raised his eyebrows at Gant. "What about you, Dorothy, you ever try to be somethin' you're not?"

Libby Gant lowered her glasses slightly, revealing sky blue eyes. She gave Hollywood a sad look. "Sticks and stones, Hollywood. Sticks and stones."

Gant replaced her glasses and turned back to look at the whales down in the pool.

Kirsty was confused. When she'd been introduced to Gant earlier, she'd been told that her real name was Libby and that her nickname was Fox. After a few moments, Kirsty asked innocently, "Why did he call you Dorothy?"

Gant didn't answer. She just kept looking down at the pool and shook her head.

Kirsty spun to face Hollywood. He gave her a cryptic smile and a shrug. "Everybody knows Dorothy liked the scarecrow better than the others."

He smiled as if that explained everything and went back about his work. Kirsty didn't get it.

Gant just leaned on the rail, watching the killer whales, determinedly ignoring Hollywood. The two killers were still scanning the station, looking for Wendy. For an instant one of them seemed to see Gant and stopped. It cocked its head to one side and just looked at her.

"It can see me from all the way down there?" Gant said, glancing at Kirsty. "I thought whales were supposed to have poor eyesight out of the water."

"For their size, killer whales have bigger eyes than most other whales," Kirsty said, "so their eyesight out of the water is better." She looked at Gant. "You know about them?"

"I read a lot," Gant said, casting a sideways glance at Hollywood, before turning back to face the killers.

The two killer whales continued to prowl slowly around the pool. Gliding through the still water, they seemed patient, calm. Content to bide their time until their prey appeared. Down on the pool deck Gant saw Schofield and the two Marine divers watching the killer whales as they ominously circled the pool.

"How do they get in here?" Gant said to Kirsty. "What do they do?swim in under the ice shelf?"

Kirsty nodded. "That's right. This station is only about a hundred yards away from the ocean, and the ice shelf out that way isn't very deep, maybe five hundred feet. The killers just swim in under the ice shelf and surface here inside the station."

Gant looked down at the two killer whales on the far side of the pool. They seemed so calm, so cold, like a pair of hungry crocodiles searching for their next meal.

Then, their survey complete, the two killer whales slowly began to submerge. In a moment they were gone, replaced by two sets of ripples. Their eyes had remained open the whole way down.

"Well, that was sudden," Gant said.

Her eyes moved from the now-empty pool to the diving platform beside it. She saw Montana emerge from the south tunnel with some scuba tanks slung over his shoulders. Sarah Hensleigh had told them that there was a small goods elevator in the south tunnel?a "dumbwaiter"?that they could use to bring their diving gear down to E-deck. Montana had been using it just now.

Gant's gaze moved to the other side of the platform, where she saw Schofield standing with his head bowed, holding a hand to his ear, as though he were listening to something on his helmet intercom. And then suddenly he was heading toward the nearest rung-ladder, speaking into his helmet mike as he walked.

Gant watched as Schofield stopped at the base of the rung-ladder on the far side of the station and turned to look directly at her. His voice crackled over her helmet intercom. "Fox. Hollywood. A-deck. Now."

As she hastened toward the rung-ladder nearest her, Gant spoke into her helmet mike. "What is it, sir?"

Schofield's voice was serious. "Something just set off the trip wire outside. Snake's up there. He says it's a French hovercraft."

Snake Kaplan drew a bead on the hovercraft.

The lettering on the side of the vehicle glowed bright gfeen in his night-vision gunsights. It read: DUMONT D'URVILLE? 02.

Kaplan was lying in the snow on the outskirts of the station complex, bracing himself against the driving wind and snow, following the newly arrived hovercraft through the sights of his Barrett M82A1A sniper rifle.

Gunnery Sergeant Scott "Snake" Kaplan was forty-five years old, a tall man with dark, serious eyes. Like most of the other Marines in Schofield's unit, Kaplan had customized his uniform. A weathered tattoo of a fearsome-looking cobra with its jaws bared wide had been painted onto his right shoulder plate. Underneath the picture of the snake were the words: KISS THIS.

A career soldier, Kaplan had been with the Marine Corps for twenty-seven years, during which time he had risen to the magic rank of Gunnery Sergeant, the highest rank an enlisted Marine can reach while still getting his hands dirty. Indeed, although further promotion was possible, Snake had decided to stay at Gunnery Sergeant rank, so that he could remain a senior member of a Marine Force Reconnaissance Unit.

Members of Recon Units don't care much for discussions about rank. Membership in a Marine Force Reconnaissance Unit alone gives one privileges to which even some officers cannot lay claim. It is not unknown, for instance, for a four-star General to consult a senior Recon member on matters of combat technique and weaponry. Indeed, Snake himself had been approached on several such occasions. And besides, since most of those who were selected for the Recons were Sergeants and Corporals anyway, rank wasn't really an issue. They were with the Recons, the elite of the United States Marine Corps. That was rank in itself.

Upon the unit's arrival at Wilkes Ice Station, Snake had been put in charge of setting up the laser trip wire on the landward side of the station, about two hundred meters out. The trip wire was not really that much different from the range finder units on the hovercrafts. It was merely a series of boxlike units through which a tiny invisible laser beam was directed. When something crossed the beam, it triggered a flashing red light on Kaplan's forearm guard.

Moments ago, something had crossed the beam.

From his post on A-deck, Kaplan had immediately radioed Schofield, who, sensibly, had ordered a visual check. After all, it might have just been Buck Riley and his team, returning from their check of that disappearing signal. Schofield had set follow-up time at two hours, and it had been nearly that long since Schofield's team had arrived at the station. Buck Riley and his crew were due here any minute now.

Only this wasn't Buck Riley.

"Where is it, Snake?" Schofield's voice said over Snake's helmet intercom.

"Southeast corner. Coming through the outer circle of buildings now." Snake watched as the hovercraft slowly made its way through the station complex, carefully negotiating its way between the small snow-covered structures.

"Where are you?" Snake asked as he stood, picked up his rifle, and started jogging back through the snow toward the main dome.

"I'm at the main entrance," Schofield's voice said. "Just inside the front door. I need you to take up a covering position from the rear."

"Already on it."

With the driving snow, visibility was limited, so the hovercraft proceeded slowly through the complex. Kaplan hurried along parallel to it, a hundred yards away. The vehicle came to a halt outside the main dome of the ice station. It was slowly beginning to lower itself from its cushion of air when Shake dropped into the snow forty meters away and began to set up his sniper rifle.

He had just put his eye to his telescopic sight when the side door of the hovercraft slid open and four figures stepped out of it into the snowstorm.

"Good evening," Schofield said with a crooked smile.

The four French scientists just stood there in the doorway to the ice station, dumbstruck. They stood in two pairs, with each pair carrying a large white container between them.

In front of them stood Schofield, with his MP-5 held casually by his side. Behind Schofield stood Hollywood and Montana, with their MP-5s raised to shoulder height and their eyes looking straight down the barrels of their guns. Guns that were pointed right at their new visitors.

Schofield said, "Why don't you come inside."

"The others are safely back at d'Urville," the leader of this new group said as he sat down at the table in the dining room alongside his French colleagues. Like the others, he had just passed a thorough pat-down search.

He had a lean face, hollow, with sunken eyes and high cheekbones. He had said his name was Jean Petard, and Schofield recognized the name from his list. He also remembered the short bio that had appeared under the name. It had said that Petard was a geologist, studying natural gas deposits in the continental shelf. The names of the other three Frenchmen were also on the list.

The four original French scientists were also there in the dining room?Champion, Latissier, Cuvier, and Rae. The remaining residents of Wilkes were now back in their quarters. Schofield had ordered that they remain there until he and his squad had checked out the occupants of this newly arrived hovercraft. Montana and Lance Corporal Augustine "Samurai" Lau, the sixth and last member of Schofield's team, stood guard by the door.

"We hurried back as fast as we could," Jean Petard added. "We brought fresh food and some battery-powered blankets for the return trip."

Schofield looked over at Libby Gant. She was over by the far wall of the dining room, examining the two white containers the Frenchmen had brought with them.

"Thank you," Schofield said, turning back to face Petard. 'Thank you for all you have done. We arrived here only several hours after you did and the people here have told us how good you have been to them. We thank you for your efforts."

"But of course," Petard said, his English fluent. "One must look after one's neighbors." He offered a wry smile. "You never know when you yourself might be in need of assistance."

"No, you don't."

At that moment Snake's voice crackled over Schofield's earpiece: "Lieutenant, we have another contact crossing the trip wire."

Schofield frowned. Now things were starting to happen a little too fast. Four French scientists he could handle. Another four and the French were starting to show a little too much interest in Wilkes Ice Station. But now, if there were more of them?

"Wait, Lieutenant; it's all right. It's one of ours. It's Riley's hovercraft."

Schofield let out a sigh of relief that he hoped nobody saw and headed out of the room.

Over by the wall of the dining room, Libby Gant was sifting through the two large containers that the French scientists had brought with them. She pushed aside a couple of blankets and some fresh bread. There was also some canned meat down at the bottom of the container. Corned beef, ham, that sort of thing. All were packed in sealed cans, the kind that has a key attached to the side that you use to peel back the lid.

Gant pushed a couple of the cans aside and was looking for more beneath them when suddenly one of the cans caught her eye.

There was something wrong about it.

It was a little larger than the other, medium-sized cans? about fourteen inches in length?and it was roughly triangular in shape. At first Gant couldn't tell what it was that struck her about this particular can. It was just that something about it didn't look right...

And then she realized.

The seal on this can had been broken.

The peel-back lid, it seemed, had been opened and then set back into place. It was barely visible. Just a thin black line around the edge of the lid. If you were only giving the cans a cursory glance, you would almost certainly miss it.

Gant turned to look back at Schofield, but he had left the room. She looked up quickly at the French scientists, and as she did so, she saw Petard exchange a quick glance with the one named Latissier.

Schofield met Buck Riley at the main entrance. The two men stood out on the A-deck catwalk, about thirty feet away from the dining room.

"How was it?" Schofield asked.

"Not good," Riley said.

"What do you mean?"

"That signal we lost, it was a hovercraft. French markings. From d'Urville. It had crashed into a crevasse."

Schofield looked up sharply at Riley. "Crashed into a crevasse?" He looked back quickly at the Frenchmen in the dining room. Only moments earlier, Jean Petard had said that the other hovercraft had arrived safely back at d'Urville.

"What happened?" Schofield said. "Thin ice?"

"No. That's what we thought at first. But then Rebound got a closer look."

Schofield turned back around. "And?"

Riley gave him a serious look. "There were five dead bodies in that hovercraft, sir. And all of them had been shot through the back of the head."

Gant's voice exploded across Schofield's helmet intercom.

"Sir, this is Fox. There's something wrong here. Their food containers have been compromised."

Schofield spun around and saw Libby Gant coming out of the dining room. She was walking quickly toward him, carrying a food can of some sort, peeling the lid back.

Behind her Schofield saw Petard, in the dining room, rising to his feet, watching Gant, and then watching Schofield himself.

It was then that their eyes met.

It was only for an instant, but that was all either man needed. In that moment, there was a flash of understanding.

Gant cut across Schofield's line of sight with Petard. She had opened the can now and was pulling something out of it. The object she extracted from the can was small and black, and it looked a little like a small crucifix, the only difference being that the shorter, horizontal beam of the object was bent in a semicircle.

Schofield's eyes widened when he saw it and he opened his mouth to shout, but it was too late.

In the dining room, Petard dived for the two white containers, just as Latissier?who hadn't been patted down since he had been at the station when the Marines had arrived? threw open his parka, revealing a short-barreled French-made FA-MAS assault rifle. At the same time, the one named Cuvier pulled both of his hands free of his pockets, revealing two models of the same weapon that Gant now had in her hand. Cuvier immediately fired one of them at Gant just as she turned to face him and Schofield saw her head snap backwards with the impact as she fell to the floor.

Deafening gunfire exploded through the silence as Latissier jammed his finger down on the trigger of his assault rifle and sprayed the dining room with a blanket of suppressing fire. His arc of gunfire cut through the air like a scythe, and it practically ripped Augustine Lau in two.

Latissier didn't let go for a full ten seconds and the sustained burst of machine-gun fire caused everybody else to hit the deck.

Wilkes Ice Station had become a battlefield.

And everything went to hell.

SECOND INCURSION

16 June 0930 hours

"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.

No sooner had Schofield and Gant fallen clear of the railing than it was assaulted by a torrent of bullets. A brilliant cascade of white-orange impact sparks exploded above their heads as they dropped clear of the catwalk.

Schofield and Gant fell.

The Maghook's cable splayed out above them. They whipped past B-deck, past Riley and Hollywood, who spun around at the unexpected sight of a pair of bodies dropping past them.

Then Schofield hit a black button on the forward grip of the launcher and a clamping mechanism inside the muzzle bit into the unspooling cable.

Schofield and Gant jolted to a sudden stop, just below B-deck, and the Maghook's cable began to swing them in toward the catwalk. They swung in fast, over the C-deck catwalk, and dropped down onto the metal gangway.

As soon as his feet hit the catwalk, Schofield pressed down twice on the trigger of the launcher. When he did so, up on A-deck, the grappling hook's claws responded by immediately collapsing inward with a sharp snick, and the hook was sucked back through the hole it had created in the dining room wall. The grappling hook fell down into the central shaft of the ice station, reeled in by the launcher. In a couple of seconds it was back in Schofield's hands, and he and Gant hurried inside the nearest doorway.

"Grenade!"

Riley and Hollywood ran flat out down the northern tunnel of B-deck and dived around the corner.

Just as they cleared the corner a booming explosion rocked the ice tunnel behind them. Hard on the heels of the explosion came the concussion wave and then?

Riley and Hollywood ducked behind the corner as a swarm of dartlike objects shot past them at phenomenal speed and thudded into the opposite wall of the tunnel.

The two Marines looked at each other in astonishment.

A fragmentation charge.

A fragmentation charge is basically a conventional grenade that has been filled with hundreds of tiny pieces of metal? tiny sharp-edged, skewed pieces of metal designed to be as difficult as possible to extract from the human body. When the charge detonates, it sends a wave of these lethal fragments rocketing out in every direction.

"I've always said it," Riley said wryly as he popped his clip and jammed a fresh magazine into the receiver of his MP-5. "Always said it: never trust the fucking French. There's just something about 'em. Maybe it's those beady little eyes they all got. Those assholes are supposed to be our goddamn allies."

"Fuckin' French," Hollywood agreed thoughtfully as he peered around the corner with one eye.

His jaw dropped. "Oh, shit?"

"What?" Riley spun around just in time to see a second grenade bounce around the corner and come to rest five feet away from them.

Five feet.

Out in the open.

There was nowhere to go. They couldn't get clear. Couldn't run down the corridor and get away in ti?

Riley launched himself forward. Toward the grenade. He slid along the frost-covered floor, feet first, soccer-style. When he was within range he let loose with a powerful kick and sent the grenade skittling back down the north tunnel, back toward the central shaft.

As Riley kicked the grenade, Hollywood lunged forward and grabbed him by the shoulder plates and yanked him back behind the corner.

The grenade detonated.

Another deafening explosion boomed out.

A new wave of metal shards blasted out from the corridor, whipped past Riley and Hollywood, and slammed into the wall opposite them.

Hollywood turned and looked at Riley. "Fuck my Roman sandals, man, this is some serious fucking catastrophe."

Riley was already up on his feet. "Come on; we're not staying here."

He looked over toward the other side of the north tunnel and saw Rebound appear at the opposite corner. With him were Corporal Georgio "Legs" Lane and Sergeant Gena "Mother" Newman. They must have come round from the western side of B-deck.

Riley said, "All right, everyone, listen up. As far as I'm concerned, this is now a split op. If we cluster and get cornered, we're all gonna be turned into strawberry fuckin' do-nuts. We have to split up. Rebound, Legs, Mother, you head back west, round the outer tunnel. Hollywood and I'll go east. Once we figure out where we are and what we can do with our position, then we can figure out how the hell we're going to regroup with the others and nail these fuckers. You all OK with that?"

There were no objections. Rebound and the others quickly got to their feet and hustled off down the opposite ice tunnel.

Riley and Hollywood began to run east, following the curve of the outer tunnel.

As he ran, Riley said, "All right, what's this? B-deck, right. OK. What's on B-deck?"

"I don't?" Hollywood cut himself off as they cleared the bend in the tunnel and saw what lay ahead of them.

Both men stopped instantly and immediately felt their blood run cold.

Schofield fired up into the central shaft of Wilkes Ice Station with his Desert Eagle.

He and Gant were down on C-deck, inside a room that opened out onto the central catwalk. Schofield stood in the doorway, gun in hand, looking out across the central shaft and up at A-deck.

Behind him, inside whatever room this was, Gant was down on her haunches, shaking off her dizziness. She had taken off her helmet, revealing a short crop of snow-white blond hair.

Gant looked curiously at her helmet, at the arrow lodged in it. She shook her head and put the helmet back on, arrow and all. She also donned her anti-flash glasses, concealing much of the thin line of dried blood that ran down from her forehead to her chin. Then she grabbed her MP-5 determinedly and joined Schofield at the doorway.

"You OK?" Schofield asked over his shoulder as he aimed his pistol up at A-deck.

"Yeah; did I miss anything?"

"Did you see the part where that bunch of French pricks posing as scientists decided to pull guns on us?" Schofield fired off another round.

"Yeah, I caught that part."

"What about the part where we found out that our new friends had six more guys stashed away in their hovercraft?"

"No, missed that."

"Well, that's the"?he fired off another angry round? "story so far."

Gant looked at Schofield. Behind those opaque silver glasses was a seriously pissed-off individual.

In fact, Schofield wasn't really angry at the French soldiers per se. Sure, at first he'd been annoyed at himself for not picking that the French "scientists" were actually soldiers. But then they had got to Wilkes first, and they had brought with them two genuine scientists, a particularly clever ploy that had been enough to throw Schofield and his team off the scent.

What really made him angry, however, was that he'd lost the initiative in this battle.

The French had caught Schofield and his team off guard, taken them by surprise, and now they were dictating the terms of this fight. That was what really made Schofield pissed.

He tried desperately to fight his anger. He couldn't allow himself to be angry. He couldn't afford to feel that way.

Whenever he found himself beginning to feel angry or upset, Schofield always remembered a seminar he'd attended in London in late 1996 given by the legendary British commander Brigadier General Trevor J. Barnaby.

A burly man, with piercing dark eyes, a fully shaven head, and a severe black goatee, Trevor Barnaby was the head of the SAS?had been since 1979?and was widely regarded as the most brilliant front-line military tactician in the world. His strategic ability with regard to small incursionary forces was extraordinary. When it was executed by the finest elite military unit in the world, the SAS, it was invincible. He was the pride and joy of the British military establishment, and he had never failed on a mission yet.

In November 1996, as part of a USA-UK "knowledge share agreement" it was decided that Barnaby would give a two-day seminar on covert incursionary warfare to the most promising American officers. In return, the United States would instruct British artillery units on the use of mobile Patriot II missile batteries. One of the officers chosen to attend Trevor Barnaby's seminar was Lieutenant Shane M. Schofield, USMC.

Barnaby had had a cocky, hard-edged lecture style that Schofield had liked?a rapid-fire series of questions and answers that had proceeded in a simple, logical progression.

"In any combat exchange," Barnaby had said, "be it a world war or an isolated two unit standoff, the first question you always ask yourself is this: what is your opponent's objective? What does he want? Unless you know the answer to that question, you'll never be able to ask yourself the second question: how is he going to get it?

"And I'll tell you right now, ladies and gentlemen, the second question is of far greater importance to you than the first. Why? Because what he wants is unimportant insofar as strategy is concerned. What he wants is an object, that's all. The worldwide spread of communism. A strategic foothold on foreign territory. The ark of the covenant. Who cares? Knowing of it means nothing, in and of itself. How he plans to get it, on the other hand, means everything. Because that is action. And action can be stopped.

"So, once you have answered this second question, then you can proceed to question number three: what are you going to do to stop him?"

When he had been speaking about command and leadership, Barnaby had repeatedly stressed the need for cool-headed reason. An angry commander, he'd said, acting under the influence of rage or frustration, will almost certainly get his unit killed.

"As a leader," Barnaby had said, "you simply cannot afford to get angry or upset."

Recognizing that no commanding officer was immune from feeling angry or frustrated, Barnaby had offered his three-step tactical analysis as a diversion from such feelings. "Whenever you feel yourself succumbing to angry feelings, go through the three-step analysis. Get your mind off the anger and get it back on the job at hand. Soon, you'll forget about what pissed you off and you'll start doing what you're paid for."

And as he stood there in the doorway on C-deck, in the freezing-cold, ice-covered world of Wilkes Ice Station, Shane Schofield could almost hear Trevor Barnaby speaking inside his head.

OK, then.

What is their objective?

They want the spaceship.

How are they going to get it?

They're going to kill everybody here, grab the spaceship, and somehow get it off the continent before anybody even knows it existed.

All right. But there was a problem with that analysis. What was it??

Schofield thought for a moment. And then it hit him.

The French had arrived quickly.

So quickly, in fact, that they had arrived at Wilkes before the United States had been able to get a team of its own there. Which meant they'd been close to Wilkes when the original distress signal had gone out.

Schofield paused.

French soldiers had been at d'Urville when Abby Sinclair's signal had gone out.

But the distress signal could never have been anticipated. It was an emergency, a sudden occurrence.

And that was the problem with his analysis.

A picture began to form in Schofield's mind: they had seen an opportunity, and they had decided to take it....

The French had had their commandos at Dumont d'Urville, probably doing exercises of some sort. Arctic warfare or something like that.

And then the distress signal from Wilkes had been picked up. And suddenly the French would have realized that they had one of their elite military units within six hundred miles of the discovery of an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

The prospective gains were obvious: technological advances to be garnered from the propulsion system, the construction of the exterior shell. Maybe even weapons.

It was an opportunity too good to pass up.

But the French commandos faced two problems.

First: the American scientists at Wilkes. They would have to be eliminated. There could be no witnesses.

The second problem was worse: it was almost certain that the United States would dispatch a protective Reconnaissance Unit to Wilkes. So a clock was ticking. In fact, the French had realized that, in all probability, U.S. troops would arrive at Wilkes before they could get the spaceship off the continent.

Which meant there would be a firelight.

But the French were here by chance. They'd had neither the time nor the resources to prepare a full-strength assault on Wilkes. They were a small force facing the probability that the U.S. would arrive on the scene, with a force of greater strength than theirs, before they could make good their escape with the spacecraft.

They needed a plan.

And so they'd posed as scientists, concerned neighbors. Presumably with the intention that they would earn the Marines' trust and then kill them while their backs were turned. It was as good a strategy as any for an impromptu force of inferior strength.

Which left one further question: how were they going to get the spaceship out of Antarctica?

Schofield decided that that question could wait. Better to tackle the battle at hand. So we ask again:

What is their objective?

To eliminate us and the scientists here at Wilkes.

How are they going to achieve that?

I don't know.

How would you achieve that?

Schofield thought about that. I'd probably try to flush us all into the one place. That'd be much more efficient than attempting to search the whole station for us and pick us off one by?

"Grenade!" Gant yelled.

Schofield was jolted back to the present as he saw a small black grenade sail out over the A-deck railing and arc down toward him. Six similar grenades went flying down from A-deck and into the three ice tunnels that branched off into B-deck.

"Move!" Schofield said quickly to Gant as he ducked back inside the doorway and slammed the door shut.

He and Gant moved to the far side of the room just in time to hear the grenade bounce up against the outside of the thick wooden door.

Clunk, clunk

And then the grenade exploded. White splinters shot out from the inside of the door as the pointed tips of a hundred jagged metal shards instantly appeared in their place.

Schofield looked at the door, stunned.

The whole door, from floor to ceiling, was littered with tiny protrusions. What had once been a smooth wooden surface now looked like some kind of sinister medieval torture device. The whole thing was covered with sharp, spiked pieces of metal that had almost managed to rip right through the thick wooden door.

Other, similar, explosions rang out from the level above Schofield and Gant. They both looked up.

B-deck, Schofield thought."

I'd probably try to flush us all into the one place.

"Oh, no," Schofield said aloud.

"What?" Gant asked.

But Schofield didn't answer. Instead, he quickly yanked open the destroyed door and looked out into the central shaft of the ice station.

A bullet immediately rammed into the frost-covered door frame next to his head. But it didn't stop him seeing them.

Up on A-deck, five of the French commandos were on their feet, laying down a suppressing fire over the whole of the station.

It was cover fire.

Cover fire for the other five commandos who were at that moment abseiling down from A-deck to B-deck. It was a short, controlled ride, and in a second the five commandos were on the B-deck catwalk, guns up and heading for the tunnels.

As he saw them, Schofield had a sickening realization. Most of his Marines were on B-deck, having retreated there after the second French team had charged in through the main entrance of the station.

And there was another thing.

B-deck was the main living area of Wilkes Ice Station. And Schofield himself had sent the American scientists back to their quarters while he and his team had gone to meet the newly arrived French hovercraft.

Schofield stared up at B-deck in horror.

The French had flushed them all into one place.

On B-deck, the world suddenly went crazy.

No sooner had Riley and Hollywood rounded the bend in the ice tunnel than they were confronted by the frightened faces of the residents of Wilkes Ice Station.

The instant he saw them, Riley suddenly remembered what B-deck was.

The living area.

Suddenly a stream of submachine-gun fire raked the ice wall behind him.

At the same time, Schofield's voice came over Riley's helmet intercom: "All units, this is Scarecrow. I have a visual on five hostile objects landing right now on the B-deck catwalk. I repeat, five hostile objects. Marines, if you're on B-deck, look sharp."

Riley's mind went into overdrive. He quickly tried to remember the floor plan of B-deck.

The first thing he recalled was that the layout of B-deck differed slightly from that of the other floors of Wilkes. All of the other floors were made up of four straight tunnels that branched out from the central well of the ice station to meet the circular outer tunnel. But because of an anomalous rock formation buried in the ice around it, B-deck didn't have a south tunnel.

It only had three straight tunnels, meaning that the outer, circular tunnel didn't form a complete circle as it did on every other floor. The result was a dead end at the southernmost point of the outer circle. Riley remembered seeing the dead end before: it housed the room in which James Renshaw was being held.

Right now, though, Riley and Hollywood found themselves in the outer tunnel, caught on the bend between the east tunnel and the north tunnel. With them were the scientists from Wilkes, who had obviously heard something going on outside but had dared not venture beyond the immediate vicinity of their rooms. Among the frightened faces in front of him, Riley saw a little girl.

Jesus.

"Take the rear," Riley said to Hollywood, meaning that part of the outer tunnel that led back to the north tunnel.

Riley himself began to move past the group of scientists, so that he could take up a position in view of the east tunnel.

"Ladies and gentlemen! Could you please move back into your rooms!"

"What's going on?" one of the men asked angrily.

"Your friends upstairs weren't really your friends," Riley said. "There's now a team of French paratroopers inside your station and they will kill you if they see you. Now could you please get back in your room."

"Book! Grenade!" Hollywood's voice echoed down the corridor.

Riley spun to see Hollywood come charging around the bend toward him. He also caught a glimpse of a fragmentation grenade bouncing into the tunnel twenty feet behind him.

"Oh, fuck." Riley turned instantly, looking for cover in the opposite direction?in the east tunnel, ten yards away.

It was then that he saw two more grenades tumble out of the east tunnel and come to rest against the wall of the outer tunnel.

"Oh, really fuck." Riley's eyes went wide. There were now fragmentation grenades at both ends of the tunnel.

"Get inside! Now!" Riley screamed at the scientists as he began to throw open the nearest door. "Get back in your rooms now."

It took the scientists a second to grasp what Riley meant, but when they did get it they immediately dived for their doorways.

Riley hurled himself inside the nearest doorway and peered back out to see what Hollywood was doing. The young corporal was running for all he was worth down the curved tunnel toward Riley.

And then suddenly he slipped. And fell.

Hollywood went sprawling?clumsily, head first?onto the frost-covered floor of the tunnel.

Riley watched helplessly as Hollywood frantically began to pick himself up off the floor, looking anxiously back at the fragmentation grenade in the tunnel behind him as he did so.

Maybe two seconds left.

And in an instant Riley felt his stomach knot.

Hollywood wasn't going to make it.

Right in front of Hollywood?in the only doorway he could possibly get to in time?two of the scientists were desperately trying to get into the same room. One was pushing the other in the back, trying to get him to move inside.

Buck Riley watched in horror as Hollywood looked up at the two scientists and saw that he had no chance of getting into that room. Hollywood then swung back round to look at the fragmentation grenade thirty feet down the curved corridor behind him.

A final, desperate turn, and Hollywood's eyes met Riley's. Eyes white with fear. The eyes of a man who knows he is about to die.

He had nowhere to go. Nowhere at all.

And then, with thunderous intensity, the three grenades? one from the north tunnel, two from the east?unleashed their anger and Riley ducked back behind his doorway and saw a thousand glistening metal shards whip past him in both

Another explosion rocked the outside of the thick wooden door, and a new Wave of metal shards slammed into it.

Schofield and Gant were at the back of the room on C-deck, taking cover behind an upturned aluminium table.

"Marines, call in," Schofield said.

Voices came in over his intercom; gunfire rang out in the background.

"This is Rebound! I'm with Legs and Mother! We are under heavy fire in the northwest quadrant of B-deck!"

A burst of static suddenly cut across Schofield's earpiece. "?is Book... wood is down. I'm in... quadrant?" Book's voice cut off abruptly, the signal gone.

"This is Montana, Santa Cruz is with me. We're still on A-deck, but we're pinned down."

"Lieutenant, this is Snake. I'm outside, approaching the main entrance right now."

There was no word from Hollywood. And Mitch Healy and Samurai Lau were already dead. Schofield did the math. If all three of them were dead, then the Marines were down to nine now.

Schofield thought about the French. They had started with twelve men, plus the two civilian scientists. Snake had said earlier that he'd killed one outside, and Schofield himself had capped another one upstairs. That meant the French were down to ten men?plus the two civilians, wherever the hell they were.

Schofield's thoughts returned to the present. He looked at the big wooden door in front of him, covered with dozens of protruding silver spikes.

He turned to Gant. "We can't stay here."

"I kind of already got that idea," Gant replied deadpan.

Schofield spun to look at her, confused by her reply. Gant didn't say anything. She just pointed over his shoulder.

Schofield turned around and for the first time really looked at the room around him.

It looked like a boiler room of some sort. Anodized black pipes covered the ceiling. Two enormous white cylinders?lying on their sides, one on top of the other?took up the entire right-hand wall of the room. Each cylinder was about twelve feet long and six feet high.

And in the middle of each cylinder was a large diamond-shaped red sticker. On the sticker was a picture of a single flame and, in large bold letters, the words:

DANGER

FLAMMABLE PROPELLANT

L-5

HIGHLY FLAMMABLE

Schofield stared at the massive white cylinders. They appeared to be connected to a computer that sat on a table in the rear corner of the room. The computer was switched on, but at the moment the screen was filled with a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit screen saver: a buxom blonde in an impossibly small bikini lying provocatively on a tropical beach somewhere.

Schofield crossed the room quickly and stood in front of the computer. The sexy woman on the screen pouted at him.

"Maybe later," he said to the screen as he hit a key on the keyboard. The screen saver vanished instantly.

It was replaced by a colored schematic diagram of the five floors of Wilkes Ice Station. Five circles filled the screen? three on the left, two on the right?each one comprised of the central well of the station surrounded by a larger outer circle. The outer circle was connected to the central well by four straight tunnels.

Rooms were arrayed both between the outer tunnel and the central well and outside the outer tunnel. Different rooms were painted different colors. A color chart on the side of the screen explained that each color indicated a different temperature. The temperatures ranged from ?5.4° to ?1.2° Celsius.

"It's the air-conditioning system," Gant said, taking up a position by the door. "L-5 means it uses chlorofluorocarbons as propellant. Must be pretty old."

"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 has 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 innocent 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.

For a full second Schofield could do nothing but stare. It had happened so fast. It was as if somebody had laid down a trail of gasoline on the B-deck catwalk and then lit a match.

Then it clicked and Schofield immediately spun around to face?

?the air-conditioning room.

And in that instant, it all suddenly made sense.

The air-conditioning cylinders had no doubt been substantially damaged by the detonation of the rocket grenade minutes earlier. Thus punctured, they had immediately started spewing out their store of chlorofluorocarbons.

Highly flammable chlorofluorocarbons.

That was what had happened when Schofield had seen the two-meter length of fire spew forward from the muzzle of Gant's machine pistol only moments earlier. It had been a warning of things to come. But at that time the CFCs hadn't yet filled the station. Hence the small two-meter flame.

But now... now the amount of flammable gas in the station's atmosphere had multiplied considerably. So much so mat when the French had opened fire on the Marines on B-deck, the whole deck had gone up in flames.

Schofield's eyes widened.

The air-conditioning cylinders were still spewing out CFCs. Soon the whole station would he contaminated with flammable...

The horror of the realization hit Schofield hard.

Wilkes Ice Station had become a gas oven.

All it needed was one spark, one flame?or one gunshot? and the whole station would spontaneously combust.

Rivets began to pop out of their sockets on B-deck.

Spot fires burned all over the B-deck catwalk. Agonized screams echoed out across the open space of the ice station as soldiers and civilians alike lay writhing on the catwalk, their bodies alight.

It looked like a scene from Hell itself.

The three French soldiers on the western side of the station?the ones who had opened fire on Mother, Rebound, and Legs?had been the first to go up in flames, the gaseous air around them having been ignited by the white-hot tongues of fire that had burst forth from the muzzles of their guns.

The twin fireballs had immediately shot out from the barrels of their guns. One had surged forward while the other had turned on them and rushed with all its fury back at their faces.

Now two of those French soldiers lay on the deck, screaming. The third was frantically banging himself against the ice wall nearby in a desperate attempt to put out the flames on his fatigues.

Mother and Rebound were also on fire. Beside them, Legs was already dead. His motionless body lay flat on the catwalk as it was slowly devoured by crackling orange flames.

Over by the north tunnel, Buck Riley was trying to smother the flames on Abby Sinclair's pants by rolling her over on the metal catwalk. Beside them, Sarah Hensleigh slapped frantically at a cluster of flames that had ignited on the back of Kirsty's bulky pink parka. Warren Cordon just screamed. His hair was on fire.

And then, suddenly, there came a sickening sound. The lurching, wrenching sound of bending steel.

Riley looked up from what he was doing.

"Oh, no," he moaned.

Schofield also looked up at the sound.

He scanned the catwalk above him and saw a series of triangular steel supports that fastened the underside of the B-deck catwalk to the ice wall.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, those supports began to slide out from the wall.

Under the intense heat from the fire on B-deck, the long rivets that fastened the supports to the wall were starting to heat up. They were melting the ice around them and were now starting to slide out from the wall!

The rivets began to expand?thwack! thwack! thwack!? and in rapid succession began to crack open the ice-cold notches of their steel supports and fall to the catwalk below.

The rivets clanked loudly as they dropped down onto the C-deck catwalk.

One.

Then two. Then three.

Then five. Then ten.

There were rivets everywhere, raining down on the C-deck catwalk. And then suddenly a new sound filled Wilkes Ice Station.

The unmistakable high-pitched squeal of rending metal.

"Oh, shit," Schofield said. "It's gonna go."

B-deck went. Suddenly. Without warning.

The entire catwalk?the whole, flaming circle?just fell away, dropping with a sudden jolt, taking everybody who was still on it down with it.

Some sections of the catwalk managed to stay attached to the ice walls. Their fall ended abruptly, almost as soon as it had begun. They ended up pointing downward at a forty-five-degree angle.

The remaining sections just slid out from the ice walls and dropped down into the central shaft of the station.

Nearly everyone who had been standing on B-deck dropped with the collapsed sections of catwalk?eleven people in all.

A tangled mix of civilians, soldiers, and three broken sections of metal catwalk sailed down the central shaft of Wilkes Ice Station.

They fell a full fifty feet, and then they landed. Hard. In water. In the pool at the bottom of the station.

Sarah Hensleigh plunged underwater.

A stream of bubbles shot up past her face and the world suddenly went silent.

Cold. Absolute, unforgiving cold assailed all of her senses at once. It was so cold it hurt.

And then suddenly she heard noises.

Noises that broke the ghostly underwater silence?a series of muffled whumps in the water all around her. It was the sound of the others falling into the pool with her.

Slowly, the curtain of bubbles in front of her face began to disperse, and Sarah began to make out a number of unusually large shapes moving smoothly through the water around her.

Large black shapes.

They appeared to glide effortlessly through the silent, freezing water?each one frightening in its size, as large and as wide as a car. At that moment, a wash of white cut across Sarah's field of vision and suddenly an enormous mouth, full of razor-sharp teeth, opened wide in front of her eyes.

Pure fear shot through her body.

Killer whales.

Suddenly Sarah broke the surface. Gulped in air. The cold of the water meant nothing now. One after the other huge black dorsal fins began to rise above the choppy surface of the pool.

Before Sarah could even get a bearing on exactly where in the pool she was, something burst up out of the water next to her and she spun.

It wasn't a killer whale.

It was Abby.

Sarah felt her heart start again. A second later, Warren Conlon also came up beside her.

Sarah spun around in the water. All five of the French soldiers who had been on B-deck when it blew were scattered around the pool. Three Marines were also in the pool. One of them, Sarah noticed, was floating facedown in the water.

A scream echoed down through the central shaft of the station.

A shrill, high-pitched squeal.

The scream of a little girl.

Sarah's head snapped to look upward. There, high above her, hanging by one hand from the downturned railing of the B-deck catwalk, was Kirsty. The Marine who had been with them when the catwalk had collapsed was lying facedown on the broken metal platform, reaching down desperately, trying to grab Kirsty's hand.

Just then, as she was looking up at Kirsty, Sarah felt the immense weight of one of the killers rush through the water between her and Conlon. The massive animal brushed against the side of her leg.

And then suddenly Sarah heard a shout.

It had come from the other side of the pool, and Sarah spun around just in time to see one of the French commandos?his face blistered and scorched from the fireball? swimming frantically for the edge of the pool, his terrified, panicked whimpers interrupted only by short, desperate breaths.

It was the only movement in the whole pool. Nobody else had even dared to move.

Almost immediately, a towering black dorsal fin appeared alongside the desperate swimmer. After a second, it slowed, and then it ominously sank below the surface behind him.

The result was as violent as it was sudden.

With a hideous crack, the French commando's body suddenly snapped backwards in the water. He turned in the water and opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out. His eyes just went wide. He must have seen that the whale had crushed the whole of his lower body with its bite and was now holding him firmly within its mighty jaws.

The whale's second yank was even more powerful than the first. It pulled the Frenchman under with such force that the man's head jolted backward and slapped down hard against the water as he went under and disappeared forever.

Sarah Hensleigh gasped. "Oh, Jesus...."

Buck Riley's section of catwalk was still attached to the ice wall. Just. It hung downward at a steep angle, out over the central shaft.

The three scientists?Riley didn't know their names?had all been too slow. The sudden collapse of the catwalk had caught all three of them by surprise. Too slow to get a handhold, they had all fallen down into the shaft.

Riley's reflexes had been quicker. When the catwalk had fallen away beneath him, he had hit the deck and immediately garnered a fingerhold in the grating of the catwalk itself.

The little girl had also been fast.

As soon as the floor had dropped away beneath her, she had fallen to the catwalk and immediately started to slide toward the edge.

Her feet had gone over the edge first, followed quickly by her waist and then her chest. Just as her head fell clear of the railing, she threw out a desperate hand and miraculously caught hold of the hand railing.

The railing held for a second, but, weakened by the force of the gas explosion, it suddenly buckled and snapped and swung out over the edge of the catwalk, so that it now hung upside down out over the shaft.

And so the little girl hung there, one-handed and screaming, from the upside-down railing of the catwalk, fifty feet above the killer-whale-infested pool.

"Don't look down!" Riley yelled, as he reached for her hand. He had already seen the killer whales down in the pool, had just seen one of them take the French commando. He didn't want the little girl seeing them.

The little girl was crying, sobbing, "Don't let me fall!"

"I won't let you fall," Riley said as he lay on his stomach stretched out as far as he could, trying to grab her wrist. Small, isolated spot fires burned on the remnants of the catwalk all around him.

His hand was about a foot away from the girl's when he saw her frightened eyes begin to dart around.

"What's your name?" Riley said suddenly, trying to distract her.

""My hand is hot," she whimpered.

Riley looked back along the railing. About five yards to his left, a small spot fire licked at the point where the downed railing met the catwalk.

"1 know it's hot, honey. I know it is. Just keep holding on. What did you say your name was?"

'Kirsty."

"Hi, Kirsty. My name's Buck, but you can just call me Book like everybody else does."

"Why do they call you that?"

Riley cast a sideways glance at the spot fire licking against the railing.

Not good.

Under the intense heat of the explosion, the black paint on the railing had broken out into dry, paperlike flakes. If the fire came into contact with those flakes, the whole railing would go up in flames.

Riley kept reaching out for Kirsty's hand, stretched harder. Half a foot away. He almost had her.

"Do you always"?Riley breathed a weak half-laugh? "ask this many questions?" He grimaced as he stretched. "If you"?breath?"really wanna know"?breath?"it's because, once"?breath?"one of my friends found out I was writing a book."

"Uh-huh...." Kirsty's eyes began to wander again.

"Kirsty. Now listen to me, honey. I want you keep your eyes looking right at me now, OK. Right at me."

"OK," she said.

Then she looked down.

Riley swore.

Rebound had been less than three yards away from the French commando when he had been taken under. The sheer violence of the Frenchman's death had scared the living shit out of him.

Now, the whole pool was silent.

Rebound hovered in the pool, looking desperately about himself. The water was cold and the bullet wound in his shoulder stung, but he barely even noticed them now.

Mother was treading water next to him, her face watchful. Waiting, with tense anticipation. Legs's body floated facedown in the water next to her, a halo of blood slowly fanning out from its head, seeping into the clear, blue water around it.

The four remaining French commandos were also still in the pool. They completely ignored Rebound and Mother, their battle forgotten, at least for the moment.

Last of all, Rebound saw the scientists?two women and one man.

Ten people in all were in the pool, and not one of them moved.

Not one of them dared to move.

They had all had seen the French commando go under moments before.

The lesson: if you don't move, they might not take you.

Rebound held his breath as three massive shadows glided slowly through the water beneath him.

He heard a sudden click and turned to see Mother holding her MP-5 poised above the surface.

Jesus, Rebound thought. If there was anyone in the world who had the balls to take down a killer whale with a gun, it had to be Mother.

More silence.

Don't move....

And then suddenly there came an incredible roar as one of the whales exploded out from beneath the surface, right next to Mother.

It lifted half of its enormous body out of the water, turned onto its side in mid-air, and then plowed into Legs's motionless body. There was a series of sickening crunches as it caught the dead body in its mouth and clamped down hard with its teeth, breaking nearly every bone in it. And then the whale's head went under and its tail appeared, and then the tail disappeared and only frothing water remained.

And Legs's body was gone.

Rebound just stayed where he was, hovering in the water, his mouth agape. And then, slowly, it dawned on him.

Legs hadn't been moving.

An unspoken understanding instantly spread throughout the nine remaining people in the pool.

The killers didn't care whether they were moving or not. ...

The nine people in the pool moved as one, breaking out into frantic swimming strokes as the killer whales rose to the surface beneath them and commenced their feeding frenzy.

Up on what was left of B-deck, Book Riley swore again.

When Kirsty had seen the pool, seen the enormous black-and-white shapes in it, her lower jaw had started to quiver. Then, when she saw the first killer leap up out of the water and crunch through Legs's dead body, she started to hyperventilate.

"OhmyGod, ohmyGod," she sobbed.

Riley began to hurry. He quickly lowered his upper body out over the edge of the down-turned catwalk, so that he was now practically hanging upside-down, reaching for Kirsty with his free right hand.

Their hands were now only two inches apart.

He almost had her.

And then all of a sudden he heard a soft whooshing sound from somewhere to his left.

Riley's head snapped round.

"No___"

The spot fire had ignited the flakes on the railing. The response was instantaneous. A small orange flame began to race along the length of the railing, devouring the dried paint flakes in its path, leaving a tiny trail of fire in its wake.

Riley's eyes went wide.

The trail of fire was rocketing along the length of the railing.

And heading right for Kirsty's hand!

Kirsty was still looking down at the killer whales in the pool. She swung her head up to look at Riley, and in an instant their eyes met and Riley saw the absolute terror in her eyes.

Riley stretched down as far as he could, his whole upper body dangling upside down off the downturned catwalk, in a desperate effort to grab her hand.

The orange flame raced along the black hand railing, its fire trail lighting up the railing behind it.

Riley's hand was an inch away from Kirsty's.

He stretched again and felt the tips of his fingers brush against the top of her hand.

Another inch. Just another inch...

"Mr. Book! Don't let me fall!"

And then suddenly the bright orange line of fire cut across Riley's field of vision and he yelled in frustration.

"No!"

The fire trail sped across the railing in front of him, right underneath Kirsty's hand.

Riley watched in helpless horror as the little girl squealed with pain and then did the only thing her body knew to do when it came into contact with fire.

She let go.

Kirsty dropped fast.

But as she did so, Buck Riley released his grip on the catwalk above him and lunged forward after her. He dropped three feet straight down?one arm pointed down, the other pointed up. His lower hand snatched the wool-lined hood of Kirsty's pink parka while his upper hand caught the flaming railing behind him.

Both of their bodies jerked to a sudden halt, and Riley did a jarring 180-degree spin that nearly pulled his arm out of its socket. He was now right side up, hanging from the same burning railing that had, only seconds earlier, caused Kirsty to fall.

And oddly, despite the searing heat seeping through his leather-gloved hand, he managed a relieved smile.

"I gotcha, baby," he breathed, almost laughing. "I gotcha."

Kirsty just hung there below him with her arms held out awkwardly on either side of her body, held up only by Riley's grip on the wool-lined hood of her parka.

All right, Riley said to himself, how the hell are we gonna get out of this?

There came a sudden popping sound and abruptly Kirsty lurched downward. She only dropped an inch, and for an instant Riley couldn't understand what had happened.

Then he saw it.

His eyes zeroed in on the join between Kirsty's pink parka and its pink wool-lined hood.

Riley's eyes went wide.

The hood wasn't actually part of the parka.

It was one of those removable hoods that could be connected to the collar of the parka whenever the wearer so desired. It was only attached to Kirsty's parka by six clasplike buttons.

The popping sound that he had heard had been the sound of one of those buttons unclasping.

Riley began to feel sick.

"Oh, that's not fair. That's not fucking fair," he said.

Pop!

Another button unclasped.

Kirsty dropped another inch.

Riley was at a loss. He didn't know what to do. There was nothing he could do. He was already hanging from the lowest point on the railing, so he couldn't lower himself any further. And Kirsty was hanging from his other hand, so he couldn't reach any farther either.

Pop! Pop!

Two more buttons unclasped and Kirsty screamed in horror as she dropped sharply and then jolted to a sudden stop.

The pink hood began to stretch. Only two buttons held it to the parka's collar now.

Riley thought about swinging Kirsty in toward the C-deck catwalk below them, about four yards away. But he quickly dispelled the thought. The wool-lined hood was now only tenuously connected to the parka. Any movement would almost certainly unclasp the remaining two buttons.

"God damn it!" he yelled. "Can't anybody help me!"

"Hold on!" another voice yelled from somewhere nearby. "I'm coming!"

Riley turned his head and saw Schofield on the far side of the C-deck catwalk, inside a small alcove of some sort. Next to him was Fox. Schofield seemed to be directing her to go down the nearest rung-ladder and head for the pool deck while he took care of Riley and Kirsty.

Pop!

One of the last two buttons snapped open, and Riley turned his attention back to Kirsty. Grimacing, he held tight and looked down at her. The little girl was scared out of her mind. Her eves were red. filled with tears. She stared into his eves and spoke through teary sniffles: "I don't want to die. Oh, my God, I don't want to die."

One button left.

The hood was stretched taut, straining under Kirsty's weight.

It wasn't going to hold....

A second before it happened, Buck Riley felt the weight of the little girl pull on the hood and he said softly, "I'm sorry."

With a sudden pop, the final button snapped open and Riley watched helplessly as Kirsty fell away from him in a kind of nightmarish slow motion. Her wide eyes looked right into his as she fell, her face the picture of pure, unspeakable terror. Those wide eyes became smaller and smaller, and Buck Riley felt sick to his stomach as he saw the little girl splash into the icy pool fifty feet below.

The pool at the base of Wilkes Ice Station had become a slaughterhouse. From his alcove on C-deck, Shane Schofield looked down at it in horror.

Blood had so clouded the icy water that nearly half of the enormous pool was now no more than a maroon haze. Even the massive killer whales disappeared when they swam through the murky patches.

Schofield surveyed the scene.

On one side of the pool were the French. They had suffered the worst. They had already lost two men to the killers.

On the other side of the pool were the two remaining Marines?Rebound and Mother?and the three scientists from Wilkes who had been with Book when B-deck had given way. All five of them were swimming desperately for the metal deck that surrounded the pool.

It was into this that Schofield saw the tiny pink-clad figure of Kirsty drop with an ugly splash. She landed back-first and immediately went under. Her high-pitched scream had followed her all the way down.

Schofield snapped around to look over at Book Riley, hanging from the downturned B-deck railing.

Their eyes met for an instant. Book looked beaten, dejected, exhausted. His eyes said it all. He couldn't do any more. He had done all he could.

Schofield hadn't.

He pursed his lips, took in the situation.

Kirsty was on the far side of the pool, on the other side of the diving bell, out in the open. Everybody else was near edges of the pool, trying to get out. In their own efforts to escape, none of them had seen her land in the pool. As he looked down at the pool, Schofield could hear Montana's voice on the intercom yelling at Snake and Santa Cruz in their gunless battle with the French soldiers still up on A-deck.

"?Keep 'em moving round south?"

"?Can't use their guns either?"

Schofield spun around where he stood, looking for something he could use.

He was still in the alcove, alone. Moments earlier, he'd sent Gant down to the pool deck, while he'd intended to go over and help Book. But before he'd even had a chance to get over there, the little girl had fallen. And now she was down in the pool.

Schofield saw the array of buttons on the console behind Mm, saw some words underneath a lever: DIVING BELL?WINCH.

No, that was no help.

But then he saw another, large rectangular button, on which was written a single word: BRIDGE.

Schofield stared at the button for a moment, perplexed. And then he remembered. The retractable bridge. This must have been the control switch for the retractable bridge that Hensleigh had told him about earlier, the bridge that extended out from C-deck, out across the open space in the center of the station.

Without even thinking, Schofield hit the long rectangular button and immediately heard a loud, clanking noise from somewhere beneath his feet.

An engine somewhere within the wall next to him suddenly hummed to life and Schofield watched as a narrow, elongated platform began to extend out over the enormous empty space in the middle of the station.

On the far side of the shaft Schofield saw another, identical, platform begin to extend out from underneath the catwalk. Presumably, the two platforms would meet in the middle and form one bridge spanning the width of the station.

Schofield didn't miss a beat. He charged onto the bridge as it extended out over the center of the station. It extended quite quickly, in a telescopelike motion, smaller extensions being born out of larger ones, and fast enough so that it stayed ahead of him as he ran. It wasn't very wide, only about two feet, and it had no hand railing.

Schofield ran across the extending bridge as it grew forward in front of him. And then just as his platform was about to join with its twin from the other side, he took a deep breath, increased his speed, and leaped diagonally off the bridge.

Riley watched in amazement as Schofield sailed through the air, over the massive diving bell, and arced down toward the icy pool.

He fell fast. But as he did so, Schofield did a strange thing. He raised his right hand and unholstered something from behind his shoulder.

When he hit the water, his feet entered first?with both legs splayed wide so that he wouldn't go far underwater? while both of his hands held the object he had pulled from behind his back.

Kirsty instinctively turned away as the water next to her exploded.

At first she thought it was one of the killer whales bursting out from beneath the surface to take her under, but as the water fell back down on top of her and she was able to see again, all she saw was a man hovering in the water next to her.

It was one of the Marines. In fact, it was the one she had met before, the nice one, the leader. The one who wore the cool reflective silver sunglasses. She tried to remember his name. Seinfeld, she thought, or something like that.

"You OK?" he said.

She nodded dumbly.

His silver glasses hung askew from his nose, dislodged by his landing in the water. He swiped them off quickly and for a brief second Kirsty saw his eyes and she gasped.

Suddenly one of the killers whooshed past them and Kirsty didn't care about Schofield's eyes anymore.

The towering black dorsal fin sailed right past both of their eyes and then slowly, very slowly, lowered itself into the water until finally the tip of the massive fin dipped below the surface and disappeared.

Kirsty began to breathe very fast.

Beside her, Schofield immediately started to look down into the water beneath them. They were treading water in one of the sections of the pool that hadn't yet been contaminated with blood. The water beneath them was crystal clear.

Kirsty followed his gaze and looked down into the water beneath her?

?just in time to see the wide open mouth of the killer whale rushing up at her feet!

Kirsty screamed like a banshee, but beside her, Schofield saved calm. He quickly lowered his Maghook beneath the surface and for a terrifying half-second, waited until the killer was right up close ...

And then he fired.

The grappling hook, with its bulbous magnetic head, thundered out of its launcher into the water and slammed into the killer whale's snout, stopping the massive creature dead in its racks.

Four thousand pounds pet square inch of thrust had launched the grappling hook. Whether or not it had truly been enough to stun a full-grown seven-ton killer whale wasn't entirely clear to Schofield. Hell, the whale was probably just shocked that something had dared to fight back.

Schofield quickly pressed down twice on the trigger of the launcher and the grappling hook immediately began to reel itself in.

He turned to face Kirsty again. "You still in one piece? Got all your fingers and toes?"

Kirsty just stared at him, saw those eyes again, nodded dumbly.

"Come on then," Schofield said as he pulled her through the water.

Sarah Hensleigh reached the edge of the pool and clambered up onto the deck as fast as she could. She turned back and saw Conlon and Abby splashing through the water toward her.

"Hurry up!" Sarah yelled. "Hurry up!"

Abby got there first. Sarah grabbed her hand and yanked her up onto the deck.

Conlon was still two yards away, swimming hard.

"Come on, Warren!"

Conlon swam for all he was worth.

One yard away.

He looked up desperately at Sarah, and she dropped to her knees at the edge of the deck.

He got there. Slammed into the metal rim of the deck like a Olympic swimmer hitting the wall at the end of a race. He reached up, grabbed Sarah's outstretched hand. Sarah was just beginning to haul him up onto the deck when suddenly the water behind him parted and one of the killer whales burst up out of it. The big whale opened its mouth wide and enveloped Conlon's body from foot to chest.

Conlon went bug-eyed as the killer clamped down hard on his chest and Sarah tried desperately to hold onto his hand, but the killer was too strong. When it dropped back down into the water it yanked so hard on Cordon's body that Sarah felt the terrified scientist's fingernails scratch her skin and draw blood, and then suddenly his hand was out of her grasp and she fell to the deck and watched in horror as Warren Conlon disappeared under the water right in front of her eyes.

A few yards away, Mother and Rebound were also approaching the deck.

Rebound swam hard as Mother turned in the water and fired her MP-5 under the surface. One of the first things they teach you at Parris Island, the legendary training camp of the United States Marine Corps, is the resistance that water offers against gunfire. Indeed, the average bullet will lose nearly all of its velocity in less man two meters of water. After that it will just slow to a halt and sink to the bottom.

Such physical laws, however, didn't seem to be bothering Mother right now. She just waited until the killers got close and then she fired hard. The bullets appeared to penetrate the outer skin, but they didn't seem to do much damage. Mother fired and hit, and the killers momentarily darted away, but they always seemed to come back, unhurt, undeterred.

Rebound hit the deck and was about to climb up onto it when he turned and saw Mother behind him.

She was looking down to her left, her gun arm jolting repeatedly as she fired at something under the water. And then suddenly her gun arm stopped its jolting movement and Mother looked confused. Her gun wasn't firing anymore.

Frozen ammo.

Rebound watched as Mother shook her MP-5 in disgust, as if shaking it would somehow make it work again.

It was then that Rebound saw an ominous dark shadow slithering upward underneath the surface, silently approaching Mother from her right.

"Mother! Check right!"

Mother heard him and spun instantly and saw the killer whale rising beneath her. Her gun now useless, Mother just pivoted in the water and lifted her legs up sharply and the killer barreled past her, missing her feet by inches.

But then, just when Rebound thought it had passed her by, the killer whale abruptly changed course and broke the surface of the water and wrapped its jaws around Mother's gun hand.

Mother yelled in pain and released her MP-5, yanking her hand free just as the whale bit down on the gun.

A gash of red appeared instantly above her wrist. Blood slicked her entire forearm.

But her hand was still there.

Mother didn't care. Now gunless, she just swam like hell for the water's edge.

Rebound hoisted himself onto the deck and turned and urged Mother on.

"Move it, Mother! Pick it up, baby!"

Mother swam.

Rebound knelt at the edge of the deck.

Black shadows cut back and forth behind Mother's frantically swimming frame.

Black shapes everywhere. Too many of them. And then, suddenly, it dawned on Rebound.

Mother wasn't going to get to the deck in time.

Then, as if right on cue, a massive black silhouette appeared in the water right behind Mother's frantically kicking legs.

It closed in slowly, through the rippling translucent water, and Rebound saw a pink slit appear across its enormous black-and-white jawline.

Its mouth was opening.

Teeth appeared and Rebound felt his blood run cold.

Through the crystalline water he saw the black shadow slowly rise and rise behind Mother until it overtook her legs and allowed them to kick inside its wide open mouth.

And then, with an ominous sense of finality, the big whale's jaws closed slowly around Mother's knees.

The jolt that Mother experienced was incredible in its ferocity.

Rebound watched in horror as the killer whale yanked her under. The water around Mother started to froth and bubble and blood began to fan out, but Mother was struggling fiercely, putting up a hell of a fight.

Suddenly she broke the surface and so did the killer. Somehow, during their underwater scuffle, Mother must have managed to get one of her legs free from the killer's jaws, because now she was using it to kick down hard on the big whale's snout.

"You motherfucker!" she screamed. "I'm gonna fucking kill you!" But it had her by the other leg and it wasn't letting go.

Abruptly Mother shot forward in the water, raising a wash of white waves in front of her. The whale was pushing her forward, toward Rebound and the deck.

And then?clang!?Mother slammed down hard against the edge of the deck and, amazingly, managed to get a handhold on the metal grating.

"Fucking kill you! You son of a bitchl" Mother yelled through clenched teeth.

Rebound dived forward and grabbed her hand as she grimly held the deck and struggled with the killer whale in a tug-of-war over her own body.

Then Rebound saw Mother draw her powerful Colt automatic pistol from its holster and level it at the killer whale's head. "Oh, fuck me ...," Rebound said.

"You want to eat something, baby?" Mother said to the whale. "Eat this."

She fired.

A small blast of yellow light flared out from the muzzle of Mother's gun as the flash of her pistol ignited the gaseous air around her. Both she and Rebound were hurled a full five yards backward onto the deck by the concussion wave.

The whale wasn't so lucky. As soon as the bullet entered its brain, the killer convulsed violently backward, snapping upward. Then it just fell limply back into the water amid a cloud of its own blood, its final prize?garnered in the split second before it died?a portion of Mother's left leg. Everything from the left knee down.

Schofield and Kirsty were still out in the middle of the pool, caught halfway between the diving bell in the center and the deck twenty-five feet away.

With their backs pressed against each other, they both looked fearfully about themselves. The water around them was ominously still. Quiet. Calm.

"Mister," Kirsty said, her voice barely a whisper. Her jaw was quivering, a combination of fear and cold.

"What?" Schofield kept his eyes trained on the water around him.

"I'm scared."

"Scared?" Schofield said, not exactly hiding his own fear very well. "I didn't think kids these days were afraid of anything. Don't they have this kind of stuff at Sea World?"

At that moment, one of the killer whales shot up out of the water right in front of Schofield. It rose out of the water and arced down fast, heading right for him and Kirsty!

"Go under!" Schofield yelled as he saw the two rows of jagged white teeth open wide in front of him.

He held his breath and ducked underwater, pulling Kirsty down with him.

The world suddenly went silent as the killer whale's immense white underbelly thundered over the top of them at incredible speed. It brushed roughly against the top of Schofield's helmet as it pounded back into the water right above their heads.

Schofield and Kirsty burst back up above the surface, gasped for air.

Schofield quickly looked left: saw Rebound and Mother on the deck. Looked right: saw Sarah and Abby, also safely up on the deck, quickly moving away from the edge.

He spun around: saw another Frenchman get yanked under. The two remaining French commandos were just reaching the edge of the pool. They'd had to swim farther than everyone else, having landed closest to the middle of the pool.

Serves them right, Schofield thought.

He looked up: and immediately saw the retractable bridge that spanned the width of the station from either side of C-deck.

Just then, a deafening explosion boomed out from the alcove on the C-deck catwalk and an unbelievably huge tongue of fire shot out over the whole of the central shaft of the station.

Schofield knew what had happened immediately?the French soldiers up on A-deck, deprived of the use of their guns, were now tossing grenades down into the shaft. Sharp thinking. A grenade detonating in this flammable atmosphere would do twice as much damage as it would normally. Their first target, Schofield noticed, had been the alcove he and Gant had been hiding in before.

Suddenly something emerged from the fireball that had consumed the alcove.

It was large and gray, square-shaped, and it tumbled end-over-end out into the central shaft of the station. It fell fast, cutting through the air, its immense weight driving it downward. With a thunderous crash, the four-hundred-pound ejection seat that had been sitting in front of the console in the C-deck alcove came smashing down onto the deck that surrounded the pool at the bottom of the station. It weighed so much and landed so hard that it dented the thick metal deck when it hit.

Despite the chaos all around him, Shane Schofield kept his eyes locked on the retractable bridge three stories above him. He took in the distance.

Thirty feet. Maybe thirty-five.

He wasted no time, raised his Maghook, flicked a switch marked M with his thumb?and saw a red light on the head of the grappling hook activate?aimed, and fired.

The grappling hook shot up into the air. However, this time the claws of the hook didn't spring outward. This time it was set on magnet.

The bulbous magnetic head of the Maghook thunked into the underside of the retractable steel bridge and stuck there.

Schofield did some quick calculations in his head. "Shit," was all he said when he finished.

Then he handed the launcher to Kirsty and said, "Three words, honey: don't let go."

She took the launcher in both hands and looked at Schofield, puzzled.

He smiled at her reassuringly. "Just hold on."

Then he pressed down firmly on a small black button on the grip of the Maghook.

Suddenly Kirsty flew up out of the water as the Maghook reeled her upward like some bizarre kind of fishing rod.

She was light, so the Maghook had little difficulty whisking her up to the bridge. Schofield knew it would have been considerably slower if his weight were also being?

A killer whale shot up out of the water after Kirsty.

Schofield's jaw dropped as he saw the massive whale lift its entire body out of the water in a magnificent vertical leap.

Kirsty was still moving rapidly upward, pulled up by the Maghook. She looked down and saw the whale emerge from the water beneath her like the Devil coming out of Hell itself. Saw it come roaring up toward her, its body rotating as it rose into the air.

And then all of a sudden Kirsty came to a jarring halt.

The whale kept coming upward.

Kirsty squealed in surprise, looked up, and saw that she had hit the underside of the bridge.

She couldn 't go any farther up!

The whale opened its jaws wide as it reached the zenith uf its leap . . .

Kirsty gripped the Maghook as hard as she could and quiickly brought her legs up tightly against her chest just as the killer's teeth jammed shut with a loud crunch, coming together barely a foot below her butt, the lowest part of her body.

Kirsty watched as the huge black-and-white whale fell away beneath her, diminishing in size until it disappeared back into the pool below. The animal must have been at least thirty feet long, and it had lifted its entire body vertically out of the wat?

Suddenly a hand appeared in front of Kirsty's face and she almost had a heart attack, almost let go of the Maghook.

"It's OK," a voice said. "It's me."

Kirsty looked up and found herself looking into the friendly eyes of the Marine she knew as Mr. Book. She took his hand, and he hauled her up onto the retractable bridge.

She was breathing heavily, almost crying. Buck Riley hearing her, looked at her in amazement. After a second, Kirsty reached into her pocket and pulled out a plastic puffer for her asthma.

She drew in two long puffs and caught her breath. When, finally, she was able to speak she looked at Riley, shook her head, and said, "They definitely don't have that at Sea World."

Schofield was still down in the pool. Two of the killer whales circled him ominously. He noticed that these two appeared to be smaller than the other killers. Juveniles, maybe.

He tilted his head upward and yelled, "Book! I need my Maghook!"

Up on the bridge, Riley immediately dropped to his belly and leaned out over the edge of the narrow metal platform. He reached out underneath the platform and tried to deactivate the magnet on Schofield's grappling hook.

"I need it now, Book!" Schofield's voice sailed up through the shaft of the ice station.