Ice Station

Schofield cut himself off.

"Read it," Renshaw said softly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Schofield shook the thought away.

No. Not possible.

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

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

Sarah Hensleigh..:.

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

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

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

"That's right."

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

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

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

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

Schofield pursed his lips in thought.

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

"What about her?"

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

"No, no, and no."

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

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

"Who was that?" Schofield asked.

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

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

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

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

"Kirsty told me."

"Kirsty told you." Renshaw nodded slowly. "She's a good kid, Lieutenant. Did she tell you that she's my goddaughter?"

"No."

"When she was born, Brian asked me to be her godfather, you know, in case anything ever happened to him. Her mother, Mary Anne, died of cancer when Kirsty was seven."

Schofield said, "Wait a second. Kirsty's mother died when she was seven?"

"Yep."

"So, Sarah Hensleigh isn't Kirsty's mother?"

"That's right," Renshaw said. "Sarah Hensleigh was Brian's second wife. Sarah Hensleigh is Kirsty's stepmother."

Suddenly things began to make sense to Schofield. The way Kirsty hardly ever spoke to Sarah. The way she withdrew into herself whenever she was near Sarah. The natural response of a child to a stepmother she didn't like.

"I don't know why Brian married her," Renshaw said. "I know he was lonely, and, well, Sarah is attractive and she did show him quite a bit of attention. But she was ambitious. Boy, was she ambitious. You could see it in her eyes. She just wanted his name, wanted to meet the people he worked with. She didn't want him. And the last thing she wanted was his kid."

Renshaw laughed sadly. "And then that drunk driver skipped the curb and killed Brian and in one fell swoop Sarah lost Brian and got the kid she never wanted."

Schofield asked. "So why doesn't she like you!'

Renshaw laughed again. "Because I told Brian not to marry her."

Schofield shook his head. Obviously there had been a lot more going on at Wilkes Ice Station before he and his Marines had arrived than initially met the eye.

"You ready with those mouthpieces?" he asked.

"All set."

"This conversation is to be continued," Schofield said as he got to his feet and began to shoulder into one of the scuba tanks.

"Wait a second," Renshaw said, standing. "You're going back in there now? What if you get killed going back in? Then there'll be nobody left who believes my story."

"Who said I believed your story?" Schofield said.

"You believed it. I know you believed it."

"Then it looks like you'd better come with me. Make sure I don't get killed," Schofield said as he walked over to the window set into the iceberg and looked out through it.

Renshaw paled. "OK, OK, let's just slow down for a second here. Have you given any thought to the fact that there is a pod of killer whales out there? Not to mention some kind of seal that kills killer whales?"

But Schofield wasn't listening. He was just staring out through the window set in the ice. In the distance to the southwest?at the top of one of the nearby ice cliffs?he saw a faint intermittent green flash. Flash-flash. Flash-flash. It was the green beacon light mounted on top of Wilkes Ice Station's radio antenna.

"Mr. Renshaw. I'm going back in there... with or without you, whatever might be in the way." Schofield turned to face him.

"Come on. It's time to retake Wilkes Ice Station."

Wrapped in two layers of oversized 1960s-era wet suits, Schofield and Renshaw swam through the icy silence, breathing with the aid of their thirty-year-old scuba gear.

They both had the same length of steel cable tied around their waists?cable that stretched all the way back to the large cylindrical spooler inside Little America IV, about a mile to the northeast of Wilkes Ice Station. It was a precaution, in case either of them got lost or separated and had to get back to the station.

Schofield held a harpoon gun that he had found inside the Little America station out in front of him.

The water around them became crystal clear as they swam underneath the coastal ice shelf and into a forest of jagged stalactites of ice.

Schofield's plan was that they would swim under the ice shelf?depending on how deep it went?and come up inside Wilkes Ice Station. Outside, he had taken his bearings from the position of the green beacon light atop the station's radio antenna. He figured that if he and Renshaw could keep swimming in the general direction of the beacon, once they went under the ice shelf they would eventually be able to spot the pool at the base of the station.

Schofield and Renshaw were in a world of white. Ghostly-white ice formations?like mountain peaks turned upside-down?stretched downward for nearly four hundred feet.

Schofield frowned inside his diving mask. They would have to go quite a way down before they could come up again inside the station.

The two of them swam down the side of one of the enormous ice formations. Through his mask, the only thing Schofield could see was a wall of solid white ice.

After a while, they came to the bottom of the ice formation?the pointed "peak" of the inverted mountain. Schofield slowly swam underneath the peak, and the wall of white glided out of his view?

?and he saw it

His heart nearly skipped a beat.

It was just hanging there in the water in front of him, suspended from its winch cable, making its slow journey back up toward the station.

The diving bell.

Heading back up toward the station.

And then Schofield realized what that meant.

The British had already sent a team down to investigate the cavern.

Schofield hoped to hell that his Marines down in the cavern were ready.

As for him and Renshaw, they had to get to that diving bell. It was a free ride up to Wilkes Ice Station that Schofield did not want to miss.

Schofield spun in the water to signal Renshaw. He saw the short scientist behind him, swimming underneath the inverted mountain peak. He signaled for Renshaw to pick up the pace and the two men hurried through the water toward the diving bell.

"How many are down there?" Barnaby asked softly.

Book Riley didn't say a word.

Book was on his knees, with his hands cuffed behind his back. He was down on E-deck, by the pool. Blood poured out from his mouth. His left eye was half-closed, puffed and swollen. After falling from the speeding hovercraft with Kirsty, Book had been brought back to Wilkes. As soon as he had arrived at the station, he had been taken down to E-deck to face Barnaby.

"Mr. Nero," Barnaby said.

The big SAS man named Nero punched Book hard in the face. Book fell to the deck.

"How many?" Barnaby said. He was holding Book's Maghook in his hand.

"None!" Book yelled through bloody teeth. "There's no one down there. We never got a chance to send anyone down there."

"Oh, really," Barnaby said. He looked at the Maghook in his hands thoughtfully. "Mr. Riley, I find it very difficult to believe that a commander of the caliber of the Scarecrow would neglect to make the task of sending a squad down to that cave the very first thing that he did once he got here."

"Then why don't you ask him?"

"Tell me the truth, Mr. Riley, or very soon I am going to lose my temper and feed you to the lions."

"There's no one down there," Book said.

"OK," Barnaby said, turning abruptly to face Snake. "Mr. Kaplan," he said. "Is Mr. Riley telling me the truth?"

Book looked up sharply at Snake.

Barnaby said to Snake, "Mr. Kaplan, if Mr. Riley is lying to me, I will kill him. If you lie to me, I will kill you."

Book looked up at Snake with wide, pleading eyes.

Snake spoke. "He's lying. There are four people down there. Three Marines, one civilian."

"You son of a bitch!" Book said to Snake.

"Mr. Nero," Barnaby said, tossing Book's Maghook to Nero. "String him up."

Schofield and Renshaw surfaced together inside the slow-moving diving bell.

They climbed up out of the water and stood on the metal deck that surrounded the small pool of water at the base of the spherical diving bell.

Renshaw removed his mouthpiece, gasped for breath. Schofield scanned the interior of the empty diving bell, looking for weapons, looking for anything.

He saw a digital depth counter on the far wall. It was ticking downward as the diving bell ascended: 360 feet. 359 feet. 358 feet.

"A-ha," Renshaw said from the other side of the bell.

Schofield turned. Renshaw was standing in front of a small TV monitor that was attached to the wall high up near the ceiling. Renshaw clicked it on. "I forgot about this," he said.

"What is it?" Schofield asked.

"It's another of old Carmine Yaeger's toys. You remember the old guy I told you about before, the guy who used to watch the whales all the time. Do you remember I told you he used to watch them sometimes from inside the diving bell? Well, this monitor is another one of his video feeds of the station's pool. Yaeger had it installed so he could watch the surface of the pool while he was underwater in the bell."

Schofield looked up at the small black-and-white monitor.

On the screen he saw the same view of E-deck that he had seen when he was in Renshaw's room earlier. The view from the camera on the underside of the retractable bridge on C-deck, looking straight down on E-deck.

Schofield froze.

He saw people on the screen.

SAS troops with guns. Snake still cuffed to the pole. And Trevor Barnaby, pacing slowly around E-deck.

And there was one other person.

There on the deck, down at Barnaby's feet, having his feet tied up, was Book Riley.

"All right, hoist him up," Barnaby said, once Nero had finished tying the Maghook's cable around Book's ankles.

Somebody else had already splayed out the Maghook's rope and tossed its launcher over the retractable bridge on C-deck, creating a pulley-like mechanism.

Nero took the launcher from one of the other British commandos and wedged its grip between two rungs of the rung-ladder between E-deck and D-deck. Then he pressed the black button on the launcher that reeled in the rope.

As a result of the pulley mechanism?the rope being stretched taut over the bridge on C-deck?Book was suddenly lifted off the deck by his ankles. His hands were still cuffed behind his back. He swung out over the pool and dangled helplessly?head-down?in the air above the water.

"What the hell are they doing?" Renshaw asked as he and Schofield stared at the black-and-white monitor.

On the monitor they could see Book dangling directly beneath them, hanging from his own Maghook out over the water.

At that moment, the diving bell rocked slightly, and Schofield grabbed the wall to steady himself.

"What was that?" Renshaw said quickly.

Schofield didn't have to answer him.

The answer lay right outside the windows of the slow-moving bell.

Several large dark shapes rose through the water all around the diving bell, their distinctive black-and-white outlines all too familiar.

The pod of killer whales.

They were heading up toward the station.

The first dorsal fin pierced the surface of the water, and a murmur went up among the twenty or so SAS troops gathered around the pool on E-deck.

Book was still dangling upside-down above the pool. He saw it, too: the enormous black outline of a killer whale gliding slowly through the water beneath him. He began to wriggle, but it was no use?his hands were firmly cuffed, his feet firmly bound.

His dog tags began to slip over his head. A couple of seconds later they dropped off his chin and plonked down into the water and sank fast.

Barnaby watched the killer whales from the poolside deck. "This should make things very interesting."

At that moment, one of his corporals came up to him. It was the same corporal who had reported to him before. "Sir, the Tritonal charges are all set."

The corporal offered Barnaby a small black unit the size of a thick calculator. It had a numbered keypad on it. "The detonation unit, sir."

Barnaby took it. "How are the outer markers looking?"

"We have five men stationed along the outer perimeter monitoring the horizon with laser range finders, sir. Last check, there was no one within fifty miles of this place, sir."

"Good," Barnaby said. "Good."

He turned his attention back to the pool and the American Marine hanging helplessly above it.

"Gives us a little time for some R and R," Barnaby said.

"Jesus, can't this thing go any faster?" Schofield said as he stared at the depth counter. It ticked slowly downward as they rose through the water. They were still 190 feet from the surface. Still at least seven minutes away.

Schofield watched the image of Book on the screen.

"Shit!" he said. "Shit!"

"Mr. Nero," Barnaby said.

Nero pressed a button on the Maghook's launcher, and suddenly the Maghook began to play out its rope and Book began to descend toward the pool, headfirst.

The water beneath him was choppy. Killer whales sliced through it in every direction. Suddenly one of them rose above the surface beneath Book and blew a spray of water out of its blowhole.

Book's head descended toward the water. He was one foot above it when he jolted to a sudden halt.

"Mr. Riley!" Barnaby called from the safety of the deck.

"What?"

"Rule Britannia, Mr. Riley!"

Nero hit the button again and Book's head and upper body plunged underwater.

No sooner was Book underwater than a line of sharp white teeth whooshed past his face.

Book's eyes went wide.

There were so many of them! Killer whales all around him. A slow-moving forest of black and white. The whales seemed to prowl around the water.

And then suddenly Book saw one of them spot him, saw it turn suddenly in the water and come at him?at speed.

Book hung there, upside down in the water, totally exposed, unable to move.

The killer charged at him.

The SAS commandos cheered when they saw the enormous dorsal fin of the killer make a beeline for the submerged Marine.

In the diving bell, Schofield was glued to the monitor.

"Come on, Book," he said. 'Tell me you've got something up your sleeve."

Book shook his hands behind his back. The cuffs wouldn't budge.

The killer came at him.

Fast.

It opened its jaws and rolled onto its side and?

?slid past him, brushing roughly against the side of Book's body.

The SAS commandos booed.

In the diving bell, Schofield breathed a sigh of relief.

Behind him, Renshaw said softly, "It's over."

"What do you mean, it's over?"

"Remember what I told you before. They stake their claim with the first pass. Then they eat you."

Book screamed with frustration under the water.

He couldn't get his hands free.

Couldn't... get.. .his... hands... free....

And then he saw the killer whale again.

It was coming at him a second time. The same whale.

The killer whale powered through the water, faster this time, moving with purpose, its high dorsal fin cutting hard through the chop.

Book saw its jaws open again, and this time he saw the white teeth and the pink tongue and as it came closer and closer his terror became extreme.

The killer whale didn't roll sideways this time.

It didn't brush past him this time.

No, this time, the seven-ton killer whale plowed into Book with pulverizing force, and before Book even knew what had hit him the big whale's jaws came crashing down around his head.

Inside the diving bell, Schofield stared at the monitor in silence.

"Holy Christ," Renshaw breathed from behind him.

The image on the screen was absolutely horrifying.

A fountain of blood spewed out from the water. The whale had crunched into Book's suspended body and consumed his entire upper half. Now it was shaking the corpse violently, trying to wrench it free from the rope?like a great white shark grappling with a piece of meat hung out over the side of a boat.

Schofield didn't say anything.

He swallowed back the vomit welling in his throat.

Down in the cavern, Montana and Sarah Hensleigh stared at the screen above the keypad. Gant had left them. She had gone back over to the fissure she had found at the other end of the cavern.

Hensleigh stared at the screen.

24157817 _________________________

ENTER AUTHORIZED ENTRY CODE

"It's a way in," she said.

Eight digits were already displayed on the screen. 24157817. Then there were sixteen blank spaces to be filled in with the entry code.

"Sixteen gaps to fill," Montana said. "But what's the entry code?"

"More numbers," Hensleigh said thoughtfully. "It's got to be some kind of numerical code, a code that follows on from the eight numbers already on the screen."

"But even if we could figure out the code, how do we insert it into the spaces?" Montana said.

Hensleigh leaned forward and pressed the first black button on the keypad.

A number "1" appeared instantly on the screen?in the first blank space.

Montana frowned. "How did you know that?"

Hensleigh shrugged. "If this thing has instructions written in English, then it's man-made. Which means this keypad is also man-made. Which means it's probably just a regular keypad, with numbers set out on it like on a calculator or a telephone. Who knows, maybe the guys who built it just didn't get round to putting numbers on it."

She hit the second button.

A "2" sprang up in the next blank space. Hensleigh smiled, vindicated.

Then she began to whisper to herself. "Sixteen-digit code, ten digits to choose from. Shit. We're talking trillions of possible combinations."

"Do you think you can crack it?" Montana said.

"I don't know," Hensleigh said. "It depends on what the first eight digits are supposed to mean, and whether I can figure that out."

At that moment, Montana leaned forward and pressed the first button fourteen times. On the screen, the blank spaces filled up quickly.

The screen beeped suddenly. And then a new prompt appeared at the bottom:

24157817 12 11111111111111

INCORRECT CODE ENTERED -

ENTRY DENIED ENTER AUTHORIZED ENTRY CODE

The screen then reverted back to the original screen, with the original eight numbers and the sixteen blank spaces.

Hensleigh looked at Montana, perplexed. "How did you know that?"

Montana smiled. "It gives you a second chance if you enter the wrong code. Like most military entry-code systems."

At the other end of the cavern, Gant was crouched down on the ground over by the fissure she had found at the base of the ice wall. She pointed her flashlight inside the horizontal fissure.

She wanted to know more about this cavern. There was something about the cavern itself and the man-made "spaceship" they had found in it that made her wonder....

Gant peered in through the fissure. In the beam of her flashlight she saw a cave. A round, ice-walled cave that seemed to stretch away to the right. The floor of the cave was about five feet beneath her.

Gant lay down on her back and shimmied through the fissure, and began to lower herself down to the floor of this new cave.

And then suddenly, without warning, the ice beneath her gave way and she fell clumsily to the floor of the cave.

Clangggggg?!

The sound of her landing on the floor of the cave reverberated all around her. It had sounded like someone hitting a piece of steel with a sledgehammer.

Gant froze.

Steel?

And then slowly?very slowly?she gazed down at the floor beneath her.

The floor was covered with a thin layer of frost, but Gant saw it clearly. Her eyes widened.

She saw the rivets first?small, round domes on a dark gray background.

It was metal.

Thick, reinforced metal.

Gant panned her flashlight around the small cave. It was cylindrical in shape?like a train tunnel?with a high, round ceiling that rose above the horizontal fissure through which she had come. The horizontal fissure was about halfway up the wall. In fact, Gant could almost see back through the thick ice wall above the fissure, as if it were translucent glass.

She swung her flashlight around and pointed it at the tunnel leading away from her.

And then she saw it

It looked like a door of some sort, made of heavy gray steel. It was set into the ice and was completely covered in frost and icicles. It looked like a door on a naval vessel or submarine?solid-looking, hinged on a sturdy metal bulk.

"Jesus Christ," she breathed.

Pete Cameron called the Post's office in Washington D.C. for the third time. He was sitting in Andrew Trent's living room.

At last, Alison picked up.

Cameron said, "Where have you been? I've been calling all afternoon."

"You're not gonna believe what I found," Alison said.

She recounted for him what she had found on the All States Libraries Database: how the references to latitude and longitude that Cameron had picked up at SETI referred to the location of an ice station in Antarctica?Wilkes Ice Station.

Cameron pulled out his original notes from his visit to SETI, looked at them as she spoke.

Then Alison told him about the academics who lived down at the ice station and the papers and books they had written. She also told him about the Library of Congress and the "Preliminary Survey" by C. M. Waitzkin.

"It was signed out to an O. Niemeyer in 1979," she said.

Cameron frowned. "Niemeyer? Otto Niemeyer? Wasn't he on the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Nixon?"

"Under Carter, too," Alison said.

Andrew Trent came into the living room. "Did someone say Niemeyer?"

"Yeah," Cameron said. "Otto Niemeyer. Know him?"

"Know of him," Trent said. "He was Air Force. Full colonel. Got on a plane in '79 and never came back."

"That's the one," Alison said over the phone. "Hey, who is that?"

"Andrew Wilcox," Cameron said, looking at Trent.

"Oh, hey, Andrew, nice to meet you," Alison said. "And yes, you're right. Niemeyer got on a silver Air Force Boeing 727 at Andrews Air Force Base on the night of 30 December 1979, heading for destination unknown. He never returned."

"Aren't there any records about where he went?" Pete asked.

"That's classified, baby," Alison said. "Classified. I was able to get a history on him, though. Niemeyer flew Phantoms in Vietnam. Got shot down over the Mekong Delta in '65. POW for a year. Both legs broken. Rescued in '66. Drove a desk at the Pentagon after that. Headed the USAF's Procurement Division for six years from '68 to '74. Appointed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1972 by Nixon, continued there under Carter.

"Apparently, Niemeyer was a player on the stealth project in '77. He was on the Air Force selection committee that chose the B-2 stealth bomber, made by Northrop-Boeing. The official record, however, shows that Niemeyer voted for the loser in the tender, a consortium made up of General Aeronautics and a small electronics company from California called Entertech Ltd."

Pete Cameron said, "So why would he steal a preliminary land survey about some university research station in Antarctica?"

"See, that's the thing," Alison said. "I don't think it's the same station."

"What?"

Alison said, "Listen, I was looking in this book I bought by one of those Antarctic guys, a guy named Brian Hensleigh. According to him, Wilkes Ice Station was built in 1991."

"Uh-huh."

"But Niemeyer disappeared in 1979."

"So what are you saying?" Pete said.

"What I'm saying is that Niemeyer was looking up a station at that location twelve years before Wilkes Ice Station was ever even thought of."

Alison paused. "Pete, I think there were two stations. Two stations built on the same piece of land. One in 1978?the one for which a land survey by C. M. Waitzkin was drawn up?and another in 1991."

Pete Cameron leaned forward, spoke into the phone. "What do you mean, you think they built the second station on top of the first one?"

"I don't think the people who built the second station? Wilkes Ice Station?even knew about the first one," Alison said. "Brian Hensleigh doesn't mention it at all in his book."

"So what was it?" Pete said. "Niemeyer's station, I mean."

"Who knows," Alison said.

At that moment, Andrew Trent saw the sheet of notepaper in Pete's hand, took it, and began examining it.

Alison said, "So, what about you? Get anything newsworthy on your travels?"

"You could say that," Cameron said as he recalled in his mind everything Trent had told him about his unit's slaughter, his official "death," and the Intelligence Convergence Group.

"Hey," Trent said suddenly from across the room. He held up Cameron's SETI notes. "Where did you get these?"

Pete broke off from Alison and looked at the notes he had made at SETI.

COPY 134625

CONTACT LOST?> IONOSPHERIC DISTURB.

FORWARD TEAM

SCARECROW

-66.5

SOLAR FLARE DISRUPT. RADIO

115, 20 MINS, 12 SECS EAST

HOW GET THERE SO?SECONDARY TEAM ENROUTE

Pete told Trent about his visit to SETI, told him that the notes were his record of what had been caught on the airwaves by SETI's radio telescopes.

"And these coordinates," Trent said, pointing to the words "-66.5" and "115, 20 mins, 12 secs east," "they refer to a research station in Antarctica?"

"That's right," Pete said

Trent looked hard at Pete Cameron. "Do you know anything about Marine Force Reconnaissance Units, Mr. Cameron?"

"Only what you've told me."

"They're a forward team," Trent said.

"OK," Pete said, seeing the words "forward team" on his notes.

"Scarecrow...," Trent said, staring down at the notes.

Pete looked from the notes to Trent. "What's a Scarecrow? An operation?"

"No," Trent said a little too suddenly. "Scarecrow's a man. A Marine lieutenant. A friend of mine."

Pete Cameron waited for Trent to say something more, but he didn't. And then suddenly Trent looked up into Cameron's eyes.

"Son of a bitch," Trent said. "Scarecrow's down there."

"What do you mean?" Alison said a few minutes later. "You think there are Marines down at that station?"

"We think so, yes," Cameron said, excited.

"Jesus, there's a secondary team en route, too," Trent said, looking down at the notes again. "Shit."

Trent turned to Cameron. "Hang up for a second. I have to make a phone call."

Cameron told Alison he'd call her back.

Trent quickly dialed a number. Cameron just watched him.

"Yes, hi, Personnel, please," Trent said into the phone. He waited a second, then said, "Yes, hi. I was wondering if you could tell me where I could find Lieutenant Shane Schofield, please. It's a family emergency.... Yes, I'll hold."

Trent waited a full minute before someone returned to the line.

"Yes, hi," Trent said. "What?oh, I'm his brother-in-law, Michael." There was a pause. "Oh, no," Trent said softly. "Oh, my God....Yes, thank you. Good-bye."

Trent practically slammed the phone down. He turned to Cameron. "Holy shit."

"What?"

"According to the United States Marine Corps Personnel Department, First Lieutenant Shane M. Schofield died in a training accident in the South Pacific at 0930 hours yesterday morning. Arrangements are being made to contact his family right now."

Cameron frowned. "He's dead?"

"According to them he is," Trent said softly. "But that doesn't necessarily mean it's true, now, does it." Trent paused. "The secondary team..."

"What about it?"

"There's a secondary team on its way to Wilkes Ice Station right now, right?"

"Yeah...."

"And according to the United States Marine Corps, Shane Schofield is already dead, right?"

"Yeah..."

Trent thought about that for a long moment. Then he looked up suddenly. "Schofield's found something. They're gonna kill him."

Cameron got Alison back on the phone.

"Quick, send it through now," he said.

"All right. All right. Just hold on a second, honey buns," Alison said. Cameron heard the clicking of computer keys at the other end of the line.

"OK, I'm sending it through now," Alison said.

On the far side of the living room, Trent flicked on his computer. He clicked through several screens, came to his e-mail screen.

A small information bar at the bottom of the screen blinked:

YOU HAVE NEW MAIL.

Trent clicked on the "Open" icon.

A list appeared immediately on the screen:

ALL-STATES LIBRARY DATABASE

SEARCH BY KEYWORD

SEARCH STRING USED:LATITUDE -66.5°

LONGITUDE 115° 20' 12"

NO. OF ENTRIES FOUND: 6

TITLE

AUTHOR

LOCATION

YEAR

DOCTORAL THESIS

LLEWELLYN, D. K.

STAMFORD, CT

1998

DOCTORAL THESIS

AUSTIN, B.K.

STAMFORD, CT

1997

POSTDOCTORAL THESIS

HENSLEIGH, S. T.

USC, CA

1997

FELLOWSHIP GRANT RESEARCH PAPER

HENSLEIGH, B. M.

HARVARD, MA

1996

THE ICE CRUSADE: REFLECTIONS ON A YEAR SPENT IN ANTARCTICA

HENSLEIGH, B. M.

HARVARD, MA

1995 AVAIL: AML

PRELIMINARY SURVEY

WAITZKIN, C. M.

LIBCONG

1978

It was the list Alison had got from the All States Database. The list of every work that referred to latitude-66.5° and longitude 115° 20'12".

"All right," Pete said.

"What are you going to do with it?" Alison's voice said over the speakerphone.

"We're gonna use this list to find their addresses," Trent said, typing quickly at the keyboard. "The e-mail addresses of the academics down in Antarctica, so we can send a message to Schofield."

"We figure that most university professors have e-mail," Pete said, "and we're hoping that Wilkes Ice Station is patched in to a satellite phone so that the message can get through."

Suddenly Trent said, "All right, I got one! Hensleigh, Sarah T. The e-mail address is at USC in California, but it's been routed to an external address: sarahhensleigh@wilkes.edu.us. That's it!"

Trent typed some more.

"All right," he said a minute later. "Excellent. They've got a universal address down there: allwilkes@wilkes.edu.us. Excellent. Now, we can send an e-mail to anyone who has a computer at that station."

"Do it," Cameron said.

Trent typed a message, then did a quick cut-and-paste. When he was finished he practically slammed his finger down on the send button.

Libby Gant stood in front of the heavy steel door set into the small ice tunnel.

It had a rusty pressure wheel attached to it. With some difficulty, Gant turned it. She rotated it three times.

And then suddenly she heard a loud clunking noise from within the great steel door, and the door creaked open a fraction.

Gant pulled the door wide and shone her flashlight beyond it.

"Whoa," she said.

It looked like an airplane hangar. It was so big, Gant's flashlight wasn't even strong enough to see the far end. But she could see enough.

She could see walls.

Man-made walls.

Steel walls, with heavy reinforcing girders holding up a high aluminium ceiling. Huge yellow robotic arms stood silently in the gloom, covered in frost. Halogen lights lined the ceiling. Some metal girders lay at awkward angles on the floor in front of her. Gant saw that several of them had jagged marks at their ends?they had been broken clean in two. Everything was covered in a layer of ice.

Gant saw a piece of paper at her feet. She picked it up. It was frozen solid, but she could still read the letterhead. It read:

ENTERTECH LTD.

Gant walked back to the small tunnel that led to the main cavern. She called to Montana and Hensleigh.

A few minutes later, Montana rolled through the horizontal fissure and walked with Gant into the giant subterranean hangar.

"What the hell is going on here?" he said.

They entered the hangar, their flashlights creating beams of light. Montana went left. Gant went right.

Gant came to an office-type structure that seemed to be overgrown with ice. The door to the office opened with a loud creak, and slowly, very slowly, Gant stepped inside.

A body was lying on the floor of the office.

A man.

His eyes were closed, and he was naked. His skin had turned blue. He looked like he was asleep.

Gant saw a desk on the far side of the office, saw something on it. Moving toward the desk, she saw that it was a book of some kind, a leather-bound book.

It just sat there on the desk all by itself. The rest of the desk was bare. It was almost, Gant thought, as if someone had left it there deliberately, so that it would be the first thing a visitor found.

Gant picked up the book. It was covered in a layer of frost, and the pages were hard, like cardboard.

She opened it.

It appeared to be a diary of some sort.

Gant read an entry near the beginning:

2 June 1978

Things are going well. But it's so cold!! I can't believe they brought us all the way down here to build a fucking attack plane! The weather outside is terrible. Blizzard conditions. Thankfully, our hangar is built below the surface, so we stay out of the weather. The sad irony is, we need the cold. The system's plutonium core maintains its grade for longer in the colder temperatures....

Gant jumped ahead to a page not far from the end of the diary.

15 February 1980

No one's coming. I'm sure of it now. Bill Holden died yesterday, and we had to cut Pat Anderson's hands off, they were so frostbitten.

It's been two months now since the quake hit, and I've given up all hope of rescue. Someone said Old Man Niemeyer was supposed to be coming down here in December, but he hasn't showed.

When I go to sleep at night, I wonder if anyone but Niemeyer knows we're here.

Gant flipped back some pages, looking for something. She found what she was looking for around the middle of the diary.

20 December 1979

I don't know where I am. We were hit by an earthquake yesterday, the biggest motherfucking earthquake you have ever seen. It was as if the earth opened up and just swallowed us whole.

I was down in the hangar when it happened, working on the bird. First the ground began to shake and then suddenly this massive wall of ice just thrust up out of the ground and ripped the hangar in half. And then we just seemed to fall. Fall and fall. Massive chunks of the ice shelf (each one the size of a building, I estimated) caved in on either side of us as we were sucked down into the earth?I saw them make enormous dents in the roof of the hangar. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! The quake must have ripped an enormous hole underneath the station and we just fell down into it.

We just kept going down. Down and down. Shaking and falling. One of the big robot arms fell on Doug Myers, crushed him to death....

Gant was stunned.

This "hangar" had been an ice station. An ice station that had been set up in the utmost secrecy to build a plane of some sort?a plane, Gant noticed, that used plutonium. But this station, it seemed, had originally been up on the surface?or, rather, buried just underneath the surface like Wilkes Ice Station?until an earthquake had hit it and sucked it underground.

Gant flicked to the very last page of the diary.

17 March 1980

I am the last one alive. All of my colleagues are dead. It has been almost three months now since the quake hit, and I know no one is coming. My left hand is frostbitten and gangrenous. I cannot feel my feet anymore.

I cannot go on. I am going to strip myself naked and lie down in the ice. It should only take a few minutes. If anyone should read this in the future, know that my name was Simon Wayne Daniels. I was an aviation electronics specialist for Entertech Ltd. My wife, Lily, lives in Palmdale, although I don't know if she'll be there when you read this. Please find her and tell her that I loved her and tell her that I'm so sorry I couldn't tell her where I went.

It is so very cold.

Gant looked at the naked body on the floor at her feet.

Simon Wayne Daniels.

She felt a pang of sadness for him. He had died here, alone. Buried alive in this cold, icy tomb.

And then all of a sudden Santa Cruz's voice exploded across her helmet intercom, shattering her thoughts: "Montana! Fox! Get out here! Get out here now! I have a visual on enemy divers! I repeat! Enemy divers are about to come up inside the cavern!"

The team of SAS divers made their way up the underwater ice tunnel with the aid of sea sleds. There were eight of them, and by virtue of their twin-propeller sea sleds they moved quickly through the water. All of them wore black.

"Base. This is Dive Team. Come in," the lead diver said into his helmet communicator.

"Dive Team, this is Base," Barnaby's voice came in over the intercom. "Report."

"Base, time is now 1956 hours. Dive time since leaving the diving bell is fifty-four minutes. We have a visual on the surface. We are coming up to the cavern."

"Dive Team, be aware. We have Intel that there are four hostile agents inside that cavern waiting for you. I repeat, there are four hostile agents inside the cavern waiting for you. Use appropriate action."

"Copy, Base. We will. Dive Team out."

Gant and Montana came sprinting back into the main cavern.

They came up alongside Santa Cruz, who was manning the tripod-mounted MP-5s. He pointed down into the pool.

Several ominous black shadows could be seen rising up through the clear aqua-colored water..

The three Marines took up positions behind various boulders, MP-5s in their hands. Montana told Sarah Hensleigh to stay behind him and stay down.

"Don't be impatient," Montana's voice said over their helmet intercoms. "Wait for them to breach the surface. It's no use firing into the water."

"Got it," Gant said as she saw the first shadow rise steadily through the water toward the surface.

A diver. On a sea sled.

He came closer and closer, up and up, until strangely, just below the surface, he stopped.

Gant frowned.

The diver had just stopped there, about a foot below the surface.

What was he doing?

And then suddenly the diver's hand shot up out of the water and Gant saw the object in his hand instantly.

"Nitrogen charge!" she yelled. 'Take cover!"

The diver tossed the nitrogen charge and it bounced onto the hard, icy floor of the cavern. Gant and the other Marines all ducked behind their boulders.

The nitrogen charge exploded.

Supercooled liquid nitrogen splattered everything in sight. The gooey blue poxy smacked against the boulders the Marines were hiding behind, splattered against the walls of the cavern. Some of it even hit the big black ship standing in the middle of the enormous cave.

It was the perfect diversion..

Because no sooner had the nitrogen charge gone off than the first SAS commando was charging out of the water with his gun pressed to his shoulder and his finger jamming down on the trigger.

The diving bell was almost at the surface now. It continued its slow rise upward.

After Schofield had seen Barnaby feed Book Riley to the killer whales, his anger had become intense. He wanted to kill Barnaby. He wanted to rip his heart out and serve it up to him on a?

Schofield untied the length of cable wrapped around his waist and ripped the two bulky sixties wet suits off his body. Then he grabbed his MP-5 and chambered a round. If he didn't kill Barnaby, then he was damn well going to take out as many of them as he could.

As he readied his gun, Schofield saw a small Samsonite carry case on one of the shelves of the diving bell. He opened it. And saw a row of blue nitrogen charges sitting in a cushioned interior, like eggs in an egg box.

The SAS must have left them here when they went down to the cave, he thought as he grabbed one of the nitrogen charges and put it in his pocket.

Schofield looked outside. The killer whales, it seemed, had disappeared for the moment. For a brief instant, he wondered where they had gone.

"What are you doing?" Renshaw said.

"You'll see," Schofield said as he stepped around the circular pool at the base of the diving bell.

"You're going out there?" Renshaw said in disbelief. "You're leaving me here?"

"You'll be OK." Schofield tossed Renshaw his Desert Eagle pistol. "If they come for you, use that."

Renshaw caught the gun. Schofield didn't even notice. He just turned around and, without even a second glance back at Renshaw, stepped off the metal deck of the diving bell and dropped into the water.

The water was near freezing, but Schofield didn't care.

He kept hold of the diving bell and climbed up one of its exterior pipes, pulled himself up onto its spherical roof.

They were almost up at the station now.

And as soon as they got there, Schofield thought, as soon as they broke the surface, he was going to let rip with the most devastating burst of gunfire the SAS had ever seen? aimed first and foremost at Trevor J. Barnaby.

The diving bell rose through the water, approaching the surface.

Any second now, Schofield thought as he gripped his MP-5.

Any second...

The diving bell broke the surface with a loud splash.

And there, standing on top of it, holding onto its winch cable, dripping with water, was Lieutenant Shane Schofield, with his MP-5 raised.

But Schofield didn't fire.

He blanched.

The whole of E-deck was lined with at least twenty SAS troopers. They stood in a ring around the pool, surrounding the diving bell.

And they all had their guns trained on Shane Schofield.

Barnaby stepped out from the southern tunnel, smiling. Schofield turned and saw him, and as he did so, he cursed himself, cursed his anger, cursed his impulsiveness, for he knew then that in the heat of the moment, in the pure anger that he had felt following Book's death, he had just made the biggest mistake of his life.

Schofield tossed his MP-5 over to the deck. It clattered against the metal decking. The SAS commandos caught hold of the diving bell with a long hook and pulled it through the water toward the deck.

Schofield's mind was working again, and with crystal clarity. In the moment that he had broken the surface and seen the SAS troops with their guns pointed at him, his senses had returned with all their force.

He hoped to hell that Renshaw was keeping himself hidden inside the diving bell.

Schofield jumped down off the diving bell and landed with a loud clang on E-deck. He breathed a hidden sigh of relief when the SAS commandos released the diving bell and let it float back out into the center of the pool. They hadn't seen Renshaw.

Then two big SAS men grabbed Schofield roughly, pinned his arms behind his back, and slapped a pair of handcuffs around his wrists. Another SAS soldier frisked him thoroughly and pulled the nitrogen charge out of his pocket. He also took Schofield's Maghook.

Trevor Barnaby came over. "So, Scarecrow. At last we meet. It's good to see you again."

Schofield said nothing. He noticed that Barnaby was wearing a black thermal wet suit.

He's planning on sending another team down to the cave, Schofield thought, with himself included.

"You've been watching us from the diving bell, haven't you," Barnaby said, grinning. "But so, too, have we been watching you." Barnaby smiled as he indicated a small gray unit mounted on the edge of the pool. It looked like a camera of some sort, pointed down into the water.

"One never leaves any flank unguarded," Barnaby said. "You of all people should know that."

Schofield said nothing.

Barnaby began to pace. "You know, when I was told that you were leading the American protective force on this mission, I'd hoped that we might get a chance to meet. But then, when I arrived, you flew the coop." Barnaby stopped his pacing. "And then I heard that you were last seen flying off a cliff in a hovercraft and suddenly I was sure we wouldn't be meeting."

Schofield said nothing.

"But now, well"?Barnaby shook his head?"I'm so glad I was wrong. What a pleasure it is to see you again. It's really quite a shame that we have to meet in these circumstances."

"Why is that?" Schofield said, speaking for the first time.

"Because it means that one of us has to die."

"My sympathies to your family," Schofield said.

"Aha!" Barnaby said. "Some fight. I like that. That's what I always liked about you, Scarecrow. You've got fight in you. You may not be the greatest strategic commander in the world, but you're a damned determined son of a bitch. If you don't pick up something right away, you knuckle down and learn it. And if you find yourself on the back foot, you never give up. You can't buy that sort of courage these days."

Schofield said nothing.

"Take heart, Scarecrow. Truth be told, you never could have won this crusade. You were hobbled from the start. Your own men weren't even loyal to you."

Barnaby turned to look at Snake Kaplan on the far side of the pool. Schofield turned to look, too.

"You'd like to kill him, wouldn't you," Barnaby said, staring at Snake.

Schofield said nothing.

Barnaby turned, his eyes narrowing. "You would, wouldn't you?"

Schofield remained silent.

Barnaby seemed to think about something for a moment. When he turned back to face Schofield, he had a glint in his eye.

"You know what?" he said. "I'm going to give you the chance to do exactly that. A sporting chance, of course, but a chance nonetheless."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, since I'm going to kill you both anyway, I figure I might as well leave it up to the two of you to decide who gets fed to the lions and who dies on his feet."

Schofield frowned for a second, not understanding, and then he looked back at the pool. He saw the high black dorsal fin of one of the killer whales cut through the water toward him.

The killers were back.

"Unlock him," Barnaby called to the SAS soldiers guarding Snake. "Gentlemen, to the drilling room."

With his hands cuffed firmly behind his back, Schofield was led down the southern tunnel of E-deck. As he walked past the storeroom, he stole a quick glance inside it.

The storeroom was empty.

Mother was gone.

But Barnaby hadn't said anything about Mother before....

They hadn't found her.

The SAS men marched Schofield down the long, narrow corridor and shoved him into the drilling room. Schofield stumbled inside and spun around.

Snake was shoved into the drilling room a couple of seconds later. His handcuffs had been removed.

Schofield looked at the drilling room around him. In the center of the room stood the large black core-drilling apparatus. It looked like a miniature oil well, with a long, cylindrical plunger suspended in the middle of a black skeletal rig. The plunger, Schofield guessed, was the part of the machine that drilled down into the ice and obtained the ice cores.

On the far side of the core-drilling machine, however, Schofield saw something else.

A body.

Lying on the floor.

It was the crumpled, blood-smeared body of Jean Petard, untouched since Petard had been shredded by the hailstorm of shrapnel from his own Claymore mines several hours earli?

"Gentlemen," Barnaby said suddenly from the doorway. It was the only way in or out of the room. "You are about to fight for the privilege of living. I will return in five minutes. When I return, I expect one of you to be dead. If, after that time, both of you are still alive, I will shoot you both myself. If, on the other hand, one of you is dead, the winner will get to live for a short while and die in a more noble fashion. Any questions?"

Schofield said, "What about these cuffs?" His hands were still handcuffed behind his back. Snake's were free.

"What about them?" Barnaby said. "Any more questions?"

There were none.

"Then, do as you will," Barnaby said before he left the room and closed the door behind him, locking it.

Schofield immediately turned to Snake. "All right, listen, we have to figure out a way to?"

Snake slammed into Schofield hard.

Schofield was lifted clean off the floor and rammed with stunning force into the wall behind him. He doubled over, gasped for breath, and looked up just in time to see Snake's open palm rushing at his face. He ducked quickly and Snake's hand hit the wall.

Schofield's mind went into overdrive. Snake had just come at him with a standard hand-to-hand combat move?an open-palmed punch that was designed to send the other guy's nose back into his brain, killing him with one hit.

Snake was out to kill him.

In five minutes.

The two men were still close, so Schofield thrust up hard with his knee and caught Snake in the groin. Schofield leaped clear of the wall. Once he was clear of Snake and the wall, he jumped up quickly and brought his cuffed hands forward? under his feet?so that they were now in front of his body.

Snake came at him with a flurry of kicks and punches. Schofield parried each blow with his cuffed hands and the two men parted and began to circle each other like a pair of big cats.

Schofield's mind raced. Snake would want to get him onto the floor. While he remained on his feet, he would be OK? because even with his hands cuffed, he could still parry any blow Snake threw at him. But if they both went to the ground, it would be all over. Snake would have him in no time.

Got to stay off the ground....

Got to stay off the ground....

The two Marines circled each other?on either side of the black drilling apparatus in the center of the room.

Suddenly Snake grabbed a length of steel from the floor and swung it hard at Schofield. Schofield ducked, too late, and took a glancing blow to the left side of his head. He saw stars for a second and lost his balance.

Snake was on him in an instant, launching himself across the room, tackling Schofield hard, driving him back against the wall.

Schofield's back slammed into a power switch on the wall and instantly, across the room, the vertical plunger on the drilling machine suddenly whirred to life and began to spin rapidly. It emitted a shrill, roaring sound like that of a buzz-saw.

Snake threw Schofield to the ground.

No!

Schofield hit the ground hard and rolled immediately?

?only to find himself lying face-to-face with Jean Petard.

Or, at least, what was left of Petard's face after it had been ripped to shreds by the blast of the Claymore mines.

And then at that moment?in that fleeting moment?Schofield caught a glimpse of something inside Petard's jacket.

A crossbow.

Schofield reached desperately for the crossbow with his cuffed hands. He got his hands around the grip, got ahold of it, and?

?then Snake crash-tackled him, and both men slid across the floor and slammed into the drilling machine in the center of the room. The sound of the spinning plunger roared in their ears.

Schofield lay on his back, on the floor. Snake knelt astride him.

And in a sudden instant, Schofield saw that he still had the crossbow in his hands. He blinked. He must have kept hold of it when Snake had crash-tackled him.

It was then that Snake hit Schofield with a pulverizing blow.

Schofield heard his nose crack and saw the blood explode outward from his face. His head slammed back against the floor. Hard.

The world spun and for a fleeting instant Schofield blacked out. Suddenly he felt a wave of panic?if he blacked out completely, that would be the end of it. Snake would kill him where he lay.

Schofield opened his eyes again, and the first thing he saw was the spinning plunger of the drilling machine hovering three feet above his head!

It was right over the top of him!

He saw the leading edge of the spinning cylinder?the sharply serrated leading edge, the edge that was designed to cut down through solid ice.

And then suddenly he saw Snake move in front of the plunger, his face contorted with anger, and then he saw Snake's fist come rushing down at his face.

Schofield tried to raise his hands in his defense but they were still cuffed together, pinned underneath Snake's body. He couldn't get them up?

The blow hit home.

The world became a blur. Schofield struggled desperately to see through the haze.

He saw Snake draw his hand back again, preparing for what would no doubt be the final blow.

And then Schofield saw something off to the right.

The switch on the wall that had started the drilling machine. He saw three big round buttons on the switch panel.

Black, red and green.

And then, with startling clarity, the words on the black button suddenly came into focus.

LOWER DRILL.

Schofield looked up at Snake, saw the rapidly spinning plunger right above his head.

There was no way Schofield could shoot Snake with the crossbow, but if he could just angle his hands slightly, he might be able to...

"Snake, you know what?"

"What?"

"I never liked you."

And with that Schofield raised his cuffed hands slightly, aimed his crossbow at the big black button on the wall, and fired.

The arrow covered the distance in a millisecond and... ... hit the big black button right in its center?pinning it to the wall behind it?just as Schofield thrust his head clear of the drilling machine and the plunger, spinning at phenomenal speed, came rushing down into the back of Snake's head.

Schofield heard the sickening crunch of breaking bone as Snake's whole body was yanked violently downward?headfirst?by the weight of the plunger and then suddenly, grotesquely, the plunger, its shrill buzzing filling the room, carved right through Snake's head and a flood of thick red-and-gray ooze poured out from his skull and then with a final sprack! the plunger popped out through the other side of Snake's head and continued on its way down into the ice hole beneath it.

Still somewhat dazed from the fight, Schofield rose to his knees. He turned away from the hideous sight of Snake's body pinned underneath the blood-spattered drilling machine and quickly put the crossbow in his thigh pocket. Then he spun and began looking about himself for any kind of weapon he could use?

His eyes fell instantly on the body of Jean Petard, lying on the floor nearby.

Still breathing hard, Schofield crawled over to it, knelt beside it. He began rifling through the dead Frenchman's pockets.

After a few seconds, he pulled a grenade out from one of Petard's pockets. It had writing on it: M8A3-STN.

Schofield knew what it was instantly.

A stun grenade. A flasher.

Like the one the French commandos had used earlier that morning. Schofield put the stun grenade into his breast pocket

The door to the drilling room burst open. Schofield instantly fell back to the floor, tried to look tired, wounded.

Two SAS commandos stormed into the drilling room with their guns up. Trevor Barnaby strode in behind them.

Barnaby winced when he saw Snake's body lying flat on the floor, face-down, with its head positioned underneath the large black drilling apparatus?complete with a gaping red hole right through the middle of it

"Oh, Scarecrow," Barnaby said. "Did you have to do that to him?"

Schofield was still breathing hard, and he had tiny flecks of blood splattered all over his face. He didn't say anything.

Barnaby shook his head. He almost seemed disappointed that Schofield hadn't been killed by Snake.

"Get him out of here," Barnaby said quietly to the two SAS men behind him. "Mr. Nero."

"Yes, sir."

"String him up."

Down in the cave, another battle was under way.

No sooner had the first SAS diver stepped out of the water than a second SAS man was up and standing in the shallows behind him.

The first SAS commando stormed out of the water, firing hard. The second man followed him up, sloshing through the knee-deep water with his gun up when suddenly?whump!? he was violently yanked beneath the surface of the water.

The first commando?up on dry land and oblivious to the fate that had befallen his partner?snapped to his right and drew a bead on Montana, just as Gant bobbed up from behind her boulder and took him out from the left.

Gant turned, saw more SAS commandos surfacing in the pool with their sea sleds.

Then suddenly something else caught her eye.

Movement.

A large black object just slid out from one of the wide ten-foot holes in the ice wall above the pool and dropped smoothly into the water.

Gant's jaw dropped.

It was an animal of some sort.

But it was so huge. It looked like ... like a seal. A great, big, enormous seal.

At that moment, another massive seal emerged from a second hole in the ice wall. And then another. And another. They just slid out from their holes and splashed down into the pool, raining down on the team of SAS divers from every side.

Gant just watched them with her mouth wide open.

The pool was a broiling froth now, choppy and frothy. Suddenly another SAS diver went under, replaced by a slick of his own blood. And then abruptly the man next to him fell forward in the water as one of the enormous seals plowed into him from behind and drove him under. Gant saw the animal's glistening wet back rise above the water for an instant before it submerged on top of the British soldier.

A couple of SAS divers made it to land. But the seals just followed them right out of the water. One diver was on his hands and knees, clawing his way across the ice, trying desperately to get away from the water's edge, when a giant seven-ton seal launched itself out of the pool right behind him.

The massive creature landed on the ice a bare two feet behind him, and the earth shook beneath its weight. The big seal then lumbered forward and clamped its jaws shut around the SAS man's legs. Bones crunched. The man screamed.

And then, before he even knew what was happening, the big seal began to eat him.

Roughly, with great slashing bites. The high-pitched tearing sound of flesh being ripped from bone filled the cavern.

Gant stared at the scene in silent awe.

The SAS men were screaming. The seals were barking. Several of mem began eating their victims while they were still alive.

Gant just stared at the seals. They were huge. At least as big as killer whales. And they had bulbous round snouts that she had seen in a book once.

Elephant seals.

Gant noticed that there were two smaller seals in the group. These two smaller animals had peculiar teeth?strange elongated lower canines that rose up from their lower jaws and over their upper lips, like a pair of inverted tusks. The larger seals, she saw, did not have these tusks.

Gant tried to recall everything she knew about elephant seals. Like killer whales, elephant seals lived in large groups made up of one dominant male, known as the bull or beach-master, and a harem of eight or nine females, or cows, which were all smaller than the bull.

Gant felt a chill as she saw the sex of one of the big seals in front of her.

These were the females of the group.

The two smaller seals that she saw were their pups. Male pups, Gant noticed.

Gant wondered where the bull was. He would almost certainly be larger than these females. But if the females were this big, how big would he be?

More questions flitted through her mind.

Why did they attack? Elephant seals, Gant knew, could be exceptionally aggressive, especially when their territory was under threat.

And why now? Why had Gant and her team been allowed to pass safely through the ice tunnel only several hours before, while the SAS had been subjected to so violent an attack now?

There came a sudden final scream from the pool followed by a splash and Gant looked out from behind her boulder.

There was a long, cold silence. The only sound was that of waves lapping against the edge of the pool.

All of the SAS divers were dead. Most of the seals were up inside the cavern now, bent over the spoils of their victory?the bodies of the dead SAS commandos. It was then that Gant heard a nauseating crunch and she turned round to see that the elephant seals had begun to feed en masse.

This battle was well and truly over.

Schofield stood on the pool deck of Wilkes Ice Station with his hands cuffed in front of him. One of the SAS commandos was busy tying the grappling hook of Book's Maghook around his ankles. Schofield looked off to his left and saw the high black fin of a killer whale slice through the murky red water of the pool.

"Dive Team, report," an SAS radio operator said into his portable unit nearby. "I repeat. Dive Team, come in."

"Any word?" Barnaby said.

"There's no response, sir. The last thing they said was that they were about to surface inside the cavern."

Barnaby gave Schofield a look. "Keep trying," he said to the radio operator. Then he turned to Schofield. "Your men down in that cave must have put up quite a fight."

"They do that," Schofield said.

"So," Barnaby said. "Any last requests from the condemned man? A blindfold? Cigarette? Shot of brandy?"

At first, Schofield said nothing; he just looked down at his handcuffed wrists in front of him.

And then he saw it.

Suddenly he looked up.

"A cigarette," he said quickly, swallowing. "Please."

"Mr. Nero. A cigarette for the Lieutenant."

Nero stepped forward, offered a pack of cigarettes to Schofield. Schofield took one with his cuffed hands, raised it to his mouth. Nero lit it. Schofield took a deep draw and hoped to hell that nobody saw his face turn green. He had never smoked in his life.

"All right," Barnaby said. 'That's enough. Gentlemen, hoist him up. Scarecrow, it was a pleasure knowing you."

Schofield swung, upside-down, out over the pool. His dog tags hung loosely off his chin, glistening silver in the white artificial light of the station. The water beneath him was stained an ugly shade of red.

Book's blood.

Schofield looked up at the diving bell in the center of the pool, saw Renshaw's face in one of the portholes?saw a single terrified eye peering out at him.

Schofield just hung there, three feet above the hideous red water. He calmly held the cigarette to his mouth, took another puff.

The SAS soldiers must have thought it a vain act of bravado?but while the cigarette dangled from Schofield's mouth they never saw what he was doing with his hands.

Barnaby offered Schofield a salute. "Rule Britannia, Scarecrow."

"Fuck Britannia," Schofield replied.

"Mr. Nero," Barnaby said. "Lower away."

Over by the rung-ladder, Nero pressed a button on the Maghook's launcher. The launcher itself was still wedged in between two rungs of the ladder while its rope was stretched taut over the retractable bridge up on C-deck, creating the same pulleylike mechanism that had been used to lower Book into the water.

The Maghook's rope began to play out.

Schofield began to descend toward the water.

His hands were still cuffed in front of him. He held the cigarette between the fingers of his right hand.

His head entered the murky red water first. Then his shoulders. Then his chest, his stomach, his elbows ...

But then, just as Schofield's wrists were about to go under, Schofield quickly twisted the cigarette in his fingers and pointed it toward the loop of magnesium detonator cord that he had now looped around the chain link of his handcuffs.

Schofield had seen the detonator cord when he had been standing on the deck only moments before. He had forgotten that he'd tied a loop of it around his wrist back in Little America IV. The SAS, when they had frisked him and relieved him of all his weapons earlier, must have missed it, too.

The burning tip of the cigarette touched the detonator cord a split second before Schofield's wrists disappeared below the surface.

The detonator cord ignited instantly, just as Schofield's wrists disappeared into the inky red water.

It burned bright white, even under the water, and cut through the chain link of Schofield's handcuffs like a knife through butter. Suddenly his hands broke apart, free.

At that moment, a pair of jaws burst through the red haze around his head and Schofield saw the enormous eye of a killer whale looking right at him. And then suddenly it disappeared back into the haze and was gone.

Schofield's heart was racing. He couldn't see a thing. The water around him was impenetrable. Just a murky cloud of red.

And then suddenly a series of bizarre-sounding clicks began to echo through the water around him.

Click-click.

Click-click.

Schofield frowned. What was it? The killers?

And then it hit him.

Sonar.

Shit!

The killer whales were using sonar clicks to find him in the murky water. Many whales were known to use sonar? sperm whales, blue whales, killers. The principle was simple: the whale made a loud click with its tongue, the click traveled through the water, bounced off any object in the water, and returned to the whale?revealing to it the object's location. Sonar units on man-made submarines operated on the same principle.

Schofield was desperately searching the cloudy red haze around him?searching for the whales?when suddenly one of them exploded out of the haze and rushed toward him.

Schofield screamed underwater, but the whale slid past him, brushing roughly against the side of his body.

It was then that Schofield remembered what Renshaw had told him earlier about the killer whales' hunting behavior.

They brush past you to establish ownership.

Then they eat you.

Schofield did a vertical sit-up, broke the surface. He heard the SAS commandos on E-deck cheer. He ignored them, gulped in air, went under again.

He didn't have much time. The killer whale that had just staked its claim on him would be coming back any second now.

Loud clicks echoed through the red water around him.

And then suddenly a thought struck Schofield.

Sonar....

Shit, he thought, patting his pockets. Do I still have it?

He did.

Schofield pulled Kirsty Hensleigh's plastic asthma puffer from his pocket. He pressed the releasing button, and a short line of fat bubbles rushed out from the puffer.

OK, need a weight.

Need something to weigh it down....

Schofield saw them instantly.

Quickly he pulled his stainless steel dog tags from around his neck and looped their neck chain around the puffer's releasing button so that it held it down.

A continuous stream of fat bubbles began to rush out from the puffer.

Schofield felt the body of water around him rock and sway. Somewhere out in the red murk of the pool, that killer whale was coming back for him.

He quickly released the small asthma puffer, now weighed down by his steel dogtags.

The puffer sank instantly, leaving a trail of fat bubbles shooting up through the water behind it. After a second, the puffer sank into the murky red haze and Schofield lost sight of it.

A moment later, the killer whale roared out of the haze, coming right at Schofield, its jaws bared wide.

Schofield just stared at the massive black-and-white beast and prayed to God that he had remembered it right.

But the killer just kept coming. It came at him fast?fright-eningly fast?and soon Schofield could see nothing but its teeth and its tongue and the closing yawn of its jaws and then?

Without warning, the killer whale banked sharply in the water and veered downward, chasing the asthma puffer and its trail of bubbles.

Schofield sighed with relief.

In a dark corner of his mind he thought about sonar detection systems. Although it is widely stated that sonar bounces off an object in water, this is not entirely true. Rather, sonar reflects off the microscopic layer of air that lies in between an object in water and the water itself.

So when Schofield sank the asthma puffer?spewing out a trail of nice, fat air bubbles behind it?he had, at least insofar as the sonar-using killer was concerned, created a whole new target. The whale must have detected the stream of bubbles with its clicking and assumed that it was Schofield trying to get away.

And so it had chased it.

Schofield didn't think about it anymore.

He had other things to do now.

He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out Jean Petard's stun grenade. Schofield pulled the pin, counted to three, and then did a quick sit-up in the water and broke the surface. He then tossed the stun grenade vertically into the air and let himself fall back underwater squeezing his eyes shut.

Five feet above the surface of the pool, the stun grenade reached the zenith of its arc and hung in the air for a fraction of a second.

Then it went off.

Trevor Barnaby saw the grenade pop up out of the water. It took him an extra second to realize what it was, but by then it was too late.

Along with every one of his men, Barnaby did the most natural thing in the world when he saw a foreign object pop up out of a pool of water.

He looked at it.

The stun grenade exploded like an enormous flashbulb, blinding all of them. The SAS men on E-deck recoiled as one, as a galaxy of stars and sunspots came to life on the insides of their eyes.

Schofield did another sit-up in the water. Only this time, when he broke the surface, he had Petard's crossbow gripped in his hands, reloaded and ready to go.

He took his aim quickly and fired.

The crossbow's arrow shot across the expanse of E-deck and found its target. It slammed into the Maghook's launcher, wedged as it was between the rungs of the rung-ladder.

The launcher jolted out of its position and swung free from the rung-ladder, swung toward the pool. When it had been wedged in between the rungs of the rung-ladder, the Maghook's rope had been stretched up toward the retractable bridge on C-deck at a forty-five-degree angle. Now that it was released from the rung-ladder?and since Schofield was floating in the water and, therefore, not putting any weight on it at the other end?the launcher swung back like a pendulum, out over the pool, and smacked into the middle of Schofield's waiting hand.

All right!

He looked up at the bridge on C-deck. The Maghook's rope was now stretched over the bridge like a block and tackle?with the length of rope going up parallel to the length of rope going down.

Schofield gripped the launcher tightly as he hit the black button on the grip of the Maghook. Instantly he felt himself fly up out of the bloodstained water as the reeling mechanism of the Maghook hoisted him up toward the bridge on C-deck, its rope speeding over the bridge itself, using it as a block and tackle.

Schofield came to the bridge and hauled himself up onto it just as the first SAS men down on E-deck reached for their machine guns.

Schofield didn't even look at them. He was already running off the bridge when they started firing.

Schofield climbed the rung-ladder up to B-deck two rungs at a time.

When he got up onto what was left of the B-deck catwalk, he reloaded his crossbow. Then he dashed toward the east tunnel and headed for the living quarters. He had to find Kirsty, and then somehow he had to figure out a way to get out of here.

Suddenly an SAS commando rounded the corner in front of him. Schofield whipped his crossbow up and fired. The SAS commando's head snapped backward as the arrow lodged in his forehead and his feet went out from under him.

Schofield quickly went over to the body, crouched down over it.

The SAS commando had an MP-5, a Glock-7 pistol, and two blue grenades that Schofield recognized as nitrogen charges. Schofield took them all. The SAS man also had a lightweight radio headset. Schofield took that, too, wrapped it around his head, and ran off down the tunnel.

Kirsty. Kirsty.

Where were they keeping her? Schofield didn't know. He presumed somewhere on B-deck, but only because that was where the living quarters were.

He entered the circular outer tunnel of B-deck just in time to see two SAS commandos racing toward him. They raised their machine guns just as Schofield brought both of his guns up and fired them simultaneously. The two SAS men went down in an instant. Schofield didn't miss a step as he strode over their bodies.

He moved swiftly round the circular corridor, looking left, looking right.

Suddenly a door to his left opened and another SAS commando emerged, gun up. He managed to get a shot off before Schofield's guns blasted to life and sent the commando flying back into the room from whence he had come.

Schofield entered the room after him. It was the common room.

He saw Kirsty instantly. He also saw two more SAS commandos who were in the process of shoving the little girl toward the door.

Schofield entered the common room warily, with both of his guns up.

When Kirsty saw Schofield step inside the common room with his two guns raised, she thought she had seen a ghost.

He looked awful.

He was soaked to the skin; his nose was broken; his face was bruised, and his body armor was battered all over.

One of the SAS soldiers behind Kirsty stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Schofield step into the room. He held Kirsty out in front of him, put a gun to her head, used her as a shield.

"I'll kill her, mate," the commando said calmly. "I swear to fucking Christ, I'll paint the walls of this room with her brains."

"Kirsty," Schofield said as he calmly leveled his pistol at the SAS man's forehead while at the same time aiming his MP-5 at the other SAS commando's brain.

"Yeah," Kirsty said meekly.

Schofield said evenly, "Shut your eyes, honey."

Kirsty shut her eyes and the world went black.

And then suddenly she heard the double boom! boom! of guns being fired and she didn't know whose guns had fired and then she was falling backward, still in the grip of the SAS man who had grabbed hold of her to use as a shield. They hit the floor hard and Kirsty felt the SAS commando's grip loosen.

She opened her eyes.

The two British soldiers were lying on the floor beside her. She saw their feet, their waists, their chests?

"Don't look at them, honey," Schofield said, moving to her. "You don't want to see that."

Kirsty turned around and looked up at Schofield. He picked her up and held her in his arms. Then Kirsty buried her head in his shoulder plate and cried.

"Come on. It's time to get out of here," Schofleld said gently.

He quickly reloaded his weapons and grabbed Kirsty's hand, and the two of them left the common room.

They raced around the curved outer tunnel, heading for the east passageway. They turned the corner.

And suddenly Schofield stopped.

Mounted on the wall to his left he saw a large rectangular black compartment. Written across it were the words: fuse box.

The fuse box, he thought. This must have been where the French cut the lights earlier....

Schofield got an idea.

He spun where he stood and saw the door leading to the Biotoxin Lab behind him. Next to it he saw a door marked:

STORAGE CLOSET.

Yes.

Schofield wrenched open the door to the storage closet. Inside it, he saw mops and buckets and old wooden shelves loaded with cleaning agents. He quickly reached up and grabbed a plastic bottle of ammonia from one of the shelves.

Schofield emerged from the closet and hurried over to the fuse box. He yanked open the door and saw a series of wires, wheels, and power units inside.

Kirsty was standing farther down the east tunnel, looking out into the central shaft of the station.

"Hurry up," she whispered. "They're coming!"

Schofield heard voices over his newly acquired headset:

"?Hopkins, report?"

"?going after the girl?"

"?perimeter team, return to the station at once. We have a problem here?"

At the fuse box, Schofield quickly found the wire he was looking for. He pulled back the sheath, exposed the copper wire. Then he punched a hole in the plastic ammonia bottle with the butt of his gun and positioned it above the exposed strand of wire. A small trickle of ammonia fluid began to drip slowly out of the bottle, down onto the exposed wire.

The drops of ammonia smacked rhythmically against the wire.

Smack-smack. Smack-smack.

At that moment, in time with the rhythm of the ammonia drops hitting the exposed wire, every light in the tunnel? indeed, every light in the whole station?began to flicker on and off, like a strobe. On. Off. On. Off.

In the flickering light of the tunnel, Schofield grabbed Kir-sty's hand and took off toward the central shaft. Once they got to the catwalk, they hurried up the nearest rung-ladder to A-deck.

Schofield strode around the A-deck catwalk, heading toward the main entrance to the station. The station around him nickered black and white. Darkness, light, darkness, light.

If he could just get to the British hovercrafts, he thought, he might be able to get away and get back to McMurdo.

There was movement everywhere. Shouts echoed through the station as the shadows of SAS commandos raced around the catwalks in the flickering light, searching for Schofield.

Schofield saw that some of the British commandos had tried to put on night-vision goggles.

But night vision would be useless now. With the station's lights flickering on and off, anyone wearing night-vision goggles would be blinded every time the lights came on?which was every couple of seconds.

They reached the main entrance passageway, just as an SAS soldier came bursting out of it onto the catwalk. The SAS man collided with Schofield, and Schofield was almost bowled over the catwalk's railing.

The SAS man hit the deck, rose to his knees, raised his gun to fire, but Schofield let fly with a powerful kick that connected with the soldier's jaw and sent him crashing down to the catwalk.

Schofield was about to step over the downed soldier's body when suddenly he saw a large black satchel stretched over the man's shoulder. He grabbed it, opened it.

He saw two silver canisters inside the satchel. Two silver canisters with green bands painted around them.

Tritonal 80/20 charges.

Schofield frowned.

He had wondered earlier why the British would bring Tritonal charges to Wilkes Ice Station. Tritonal was an extremely powerful explosive, usually used for demolition purposes. Why would Barnaby have it here?

Schofield grabbed the satchel off the unconscious man's shoulder.

As he did so, however, he heard shouts coming from inside the entrance passageway. Then he heard footsteps, and the click of safeties being removed from MP-5s.

The SAS commandos outside, the perimeter team...

They were coming back inside!

"Kirsty! Get down!" he yelled. He spun quickly and brought both of his guns up just as the first SAS commando charged in through the main entrance of Wilkes Ice Station.

The first man went down in a hail of blood and bullets.

The second and the third learned from his error, and they entered the station firing.

"Back inside!" Schofield yelled to Kirsty. "We can't go this way!"

Schofield slid down the nearest rung-ladder with Kirsty on his back.

They hit B-deck. A bullet pinged off the steel ladder next to Schofield's eyes.

Schofield heard more voices over his British headset:

"?the fuck did he go?"

"?took the girl! Killed Maurice, Hoddle, and Hopkins?"

"?saw him on A-deck?"

And then Schofield heard Barnaby's voice. "Nero! The lights! Either get them on or get them off! Find that fucking fuse box!"

The station was in chaos, absolute chaos. There was no steady light, just the terrible incessant flickering.

Schofield saw shadows on the other side of B-deck.

Can't go there.

He looked out over the central shaft, and in a flickering instant, his eyes fell on the retractable bridge on C-deck.

The bridge on C-deck....

Schofield quickly checked his inventory.

One Glock pistol. One MP-5. Neither of which would be enough to take out twenty SAS commandos.

Schofield still had the satchel he had stolen from the SAS man who had come in from outside. Two Tritonal charges were in the satchel. He also had the two nitrogen charges he had liberated from the very first SAS commando he had killed after flying up out of the water on the Maghook.

"All right," he said, looking down at the narrow retractable bridge on the deck beneath him. "It's time to end this."

In the ghostly flickering light of the station, Schofield and Kirsty stepped out onto the retractable bridge on C-deck.

If anybody had seen them, they would have seen them walk right out onto the middle of the bridge, would then have seen him crouch down on one knee and do something to the bridge for several minutes.

And then, when he was done, they would have seen Schofield just crouch down next to Kirsty and wait.

A few minutes later, the British found the fuse box and the flickering stopped and the lights to the station came on again. The station glowed white under its bright fluorescent lights.

It didn't take the SAS long to spot Schofield and Kirsty.

Schofield stood up on the bridge as the remainder of the SAS unit?about twenty men?adopted positions on the C-deck catwalk, surrounding him. It was a strange sight?Schofield and Kirsty out in the middle of the shaft, standing in the center of the retractable bridge, while the SAS took up positions on the circular catwalk all around them.

The SAS raised their guns ...

... just as Schofield held one of the Tritonal charges high above his head.

Good strategy is like magic. Make your enemy look at one hand while you're doing something with the other....

"Hold your fire," Barnaby's voice came over Schofield's headset. "Hold your fire."

Schofield saw Barnaby step out onto the pool deck fifty feet below him, alone. All of the SAS platoon except for Barnaby were up on C-deck, surrounding Schofield.

Schofield glanced at the pool next to Barnaby. The killer whales were nowhere to be seen. Good.

"I've armed the Tritonal charge!" Schofield shouted. "And my finger is holding the arm button down! The timer is set for two seconds! If you shoot me, I'll drop the charge and we all die!"

Schofield stood with his feet spread apart out in the middle of the retractable bridge. Kirsty was kneeling at his feet, huddled beneath him. Schofield hoped that the SAS didn't see his hands shaking. He hoped they didn't see that his shoelaces were missing.

"And if you shoot the girl," Schofield said, seeing one of the SAS men lower his sights at Kirsty, "I'll definitely drop the charge."

As he spoke, Schofield cast a worried glance over at the alcove on the catwalk.

If they retracted the bridge...

Barnaby shouted up to him, "Lieutenant, this is very unpleasant. You have killed no less than six of my men. Have no doubt, we will kill you."

"I want safe passage out of here."

"You're not going to get it," Barnaby said.

"Then we all go up in flames."

Barnaby shook his head. "Lieutenant Schofield, this is not you. You would sacrifice your own life, I know that. Because I know you. But I also know that you could never sacrifice the girl."

Schofield felt his blood chill.

Barnaby was right. Schofield could never kill Kirsty. Bar- naby was calling his bluff. Schofield glanced again at the alcove over on the catwalk. The alcove that housed the bridge controls.

Nero caught him looking.

Schofield watched intently as Nero looked from Schofield to the alcove and then back at Schofield again.

"This is Nero," Schofield heard Nero's voice whisper over the headset. "Subject is looking at the bridge controls over here. He looks pretty nervous about it."

Make your enemy look at one hand...

Bamaby's voice: "The bridge. He doesn't want us to open the bridge. Mr. Nero. Retract the bridge."

"Yes, sir."

Schofield then saw Nero walk slowly toward the alcove and reach for the button that retracted the bridge. He made a point of watching Nero all the way?for this to work he needed the British to think that he was worried about their retracting the bridge....

"Watson," Barnaby's voice said.

"Yes, sir."

"When the bridge opens, kill him. Take him out with a head shot."

"Yes, sir."

"Houghton. Take the girl."

"Yes, sir."

Schofield felt his knees begin to shake. This was going to be close. Very, very close.

.. .while you're doing something with the other....

"Are you ready?" Schofield said to Kirsty.

"Uh-huh."

In the alcove, Nero hit the large rectangular button marked

BRIDGE.

There came a loud mechanical clanking sound from somewhere within the walls of the alcove and then suddenly the bridge underneath Schofield's feet jolted as it came apart at the center and began to retract.

As soon as the bridge began to retract, two of the SAS soldiers fired at Schofield and Kirsty, but they had already dropped out of sight and the bullets whizzed over their heads.

Schofield and Kirsty let themselves fall down into the shaft.

They fell fast.

Down and down, until they splashed into the pool at the bottom of the station.

It had happened so fast that the SAS men up on C-deck didn't know what was going on.

It didn't matter.

For it was then that the two nitrogen charges that Schofield had tied to the ends of the retractable portions of the bridge suddenly and explosively went off.

It was the way that Schofield had tied the nitrogen charges to the bridge with his shoelaces that did it.

He had tied them down in such a way that each nitrogen charge lay on either side of the join between the two platforms that extended out to form the bridge.

What he had also done, however, was tie the pins of each nitrogen charge to the opposite platform, so that when the bridge parted, the retraction of the two platforms would pull both pins from their grenades. What he had needed, however, was for the SAS to retract the bridge.

And right up until they exploded, the SAS soldiers never saw the nitrogen charges. They had been too busy looking at Schofield, first, as he held the (unarmed) Tritonal charge above his head and, second, as he and Kirsty fell down into the pool.

Make your enemy look at one hand while you're doing something with the other.

As he hit the freezing water, Schofield almost smiled. Trevor Barnaby had taught him that.

The two nitrogen charges on the bridge went off.

Supercooled liquid nitrogen blasted out in every direction on C-deck, splattering every SAS commando on the surrounding catwalk.

The results were horrifying.

Nitrogen charges are like no other grenade?for the simple fact that they do not have to penetrate the skin of their victims in order to kill them.

The theory behind their effectiveness is based on the special qualities of water?water is the only naturally occurring substance on earth that expands when it is cooled. When a human body is hit by a burst of supercooled liquid nitrogen, that body becomes very cold, very fast. Blood cells freeze instantly, and being made up of approximately 70% water, they begin to expand rapidly. The result: total body hemorrhage.

And when every single blood cell in a human body explodes it makes for a horrifying sight.

The SAS men on C-deck had their faces exposed?and that was where the liquid nitrogen hit them. So it was in their faces that the supercooled liquid nitrogen took its most devastating effect. The blood vessels under their facial skin? veins, arteries, capillaries?instantly began to rupture and then suddenly, spontaneously, they began to explode.

Black lesions instantly appeared all over their faces as the blood vessels under their skin exploded. Their eyes filled with blood, and the soldiers could no longer see. Blood exploded out from the pores of their skin.

The SAS commandos fell to their knees, screaming.

But they wouldn't scream for long. Brain death would occur within the next thirty seconds as the blood vessels in their brains froze over and themselves began to hemorrhage.

They would all be dead soon, and it would be agony every second of the way.

From down on E-deck, Trevor Barnaby just stared up at the scene above him.

His whole unit had just been cut down by the blast of the two nitrogen charges. In fact, nearly the whole of the interior of the station was covered in blue liquid goo. Hand railings began to crack as the nitrogen froze them. Even the cable that held up the diving bell was covered with a layer of ice?it, too, began to crack as the supercooled liquid nitrogen made it contract in on itself at an alarming rate. Even the portholes of the diving bell down in the pool were covered over with the blue poxy.

Barnaby couldn't believe it.

Schofield had just killed twenty of his men with one stone...

And now he was the only one left.

Barnaby's mind raced.

All right. Think. What is the objective? The spacecraft is the objective. Must control the spacecraft. How do I control the spacecraft? Wait?

I have men down there with it.

Get to the cavern.

Bamaby's eyes fell on the diving bell.

Yes....

At that moment, on the far side of the diving bell, Barnaby saw Schofield and the little girl break through the thin layer of ice that had formed on the surface of the pool when it had been hit by the spray of liquid nitrogen, saw them start swimming for the far deck.

Barnaby ignored them. He just grabbed a scuba tank from the ground next to him and dived into the pool, heading for the diving bell.

Schofield lifted Kirsty out of the water and up onto the deck.

"Are you OK?" he said.

"I got wet again," Kirsty replied sourly.

"So did I," Schofield said as he spun around and saw Trevor Barnaby swimming frantically for the diving bell.

Schofield looked up at the ice station above him. It was silent. There were no more SAS commandos left. It was only Barnaby now. And whoever Barnaby had already sent down to the cavern.

"Get a blanket and stay warm," Schofield said to Kirsty. "And don't go upstairs until I come back."

"Where are you going?"

"After him" Schofield said, pointing at Barnaby.

Trevor Barnaby surfaced inside the diving bell, where he was greeted by the barrel of Schofield's .45-caliber Desert Eagle automatic pistol.

James Renshaw gripped the pistol with both hands, pointed it at Barnaby's head. He was holding the gun so tightly, his knuckles were turning white.

"Don't fucking move, mister," Renshaw said.

Barnaby just looked up at the little man standing inside the diving bell. The little man was wearing some really old kind of scuba gear, and he was clearly nervous. Barnaby looked at the gun in Renshaw's hand and he laughed.

Then he brought his own gun up from under the water.

Renshaw pulled the trigger on his Desert Eagle.

Click!

"Huh?" Renshaw said.

"You have to chamber a round first," Barnaby said as he raised his own pistol at Renshaw.

Renshaw saw what was coming, and with a short squeal he jumped down into the water next to Barnaby?scuba gear and all?and disappeared underwater.

Barnaby climbed up into the diving bell and made straight for the dive controls. He didn't waste any time. He blew the ballast tanks immediately. The diving bell began to descend.

Up on E-deck, Schofield saw the ballast tanks blow.

Shit, he's going down already, he thought as he came to a halt next to one of the rung-ladders. He had planned to go up to the winch controls on C-deck and stop the diving bell from there?

And then at that moment, there came a monstrous noise from somewhere up above him.

Snap-twangggg!

Schofield looked up just in time to see the cable that held up the diving bell?frozen solid by the liquid nitrogen?contract and crack for the final time.

The frozen cable snapped.

The diving bell submerged.

Schofield's mouth fell open. Then he ran.

Ran as fast as he could. Toward the pool. Because now this would be the last trip the diving bell would be making to the underwater tunnel and it was the only way to get to the cavern and if Barnaby were to get there and the Marines down there were already dead, then the British would have the spaceship and the battle would be lost, and Schofield bad come too fucking far to lose everything now?

Schofield hit the edge of the deck running and dived high into the air, just as the diving bell disappeared under the surface.

After penetrating the water, Schofield shot downward.

And then he swam. Hard. With strong, powerful strokes, chasing the descending diving bell.

Now free of its winch cable, the diving bell began to sink fast and Schofield had to use all of his strength to catch it He came close, reached out, and... grabbed the piping that ran around the exterior of the diving bell.

Inside the diving bell, Barnaby holstered his gun and pulled out his detonation unit.

He checked the time. 8:37 p.m.

Then he set the timer on the detonation unit. He gave himself two hours, enough time to get to the underground cavern. It was crucial that he be down there when the ring of Tritonal charges surrounding Wilkes Ice Station went off.

Barnaby then pulled his Navistar Global Positioning System transponder from his pocket and hit the transmit button.

Barnaby smiled as he put the GPS transponder back into his pocket. Despite the loss of his men up in the station, his plan?his original plan?was still on track.

When the eighteen Tritonal charges went off, Wilkes Ice Station would float out to sea on a newly formed iceberg. Then, thanks to Barnaby's GPS receiver, British rescue forces?and British rescue forces alone?would know exactly where to find the iceberg, the station, Barnaby himself, and, most important of all, the spaceship.

The diving bell fell downward through the water?fast?with Shane Schofield clutching onto the piping on top of it.

Slowly, hand over hand, Schofield made his way down the side of the falling diving bell. The big bell rocked and swayed as it careered downward through the water, but Schofield held on.

And then, at last, he came to the base of the bell and swung himself under it.

Schofield burst up inside the diving bell.

He saw Barnaby right away, saw the detonation unit in his hand.

Barnaby whirled around and drew his gun, but Schofield was already launching himself out of the water. Schofield's fist shot up out of the water and slammed into Barnaby's wrist. Barnaby's gun hand popped open in a reflex and the gun flew out of it and clattered to the deck.

Schofield's feet found the deck of the diving bell just as Barnaby crash-tackled him. The two men slammed into the curved interior wall of the bell. Schofield tried to kick Barnaby away from him, but the British commander was too skilled a fighter. Barnaby crunched him against the wall and let fly with a powerful kick. His steel-capped boot connected with Schofield's cheek, and Schofield flailed backward and felt his face slam up against the cold glass of one of the portholes of the diving bell.

At that moment?and for just a split second?Schofield saw the glass of the porthole in front of him, saw a thin crack begin to form in the glass right in front of his eyes.

But he didn't have time to ponder that. Barnaby kicked him again. And again. And again. Schofield fell to the deck.

"You never give up, do you," Barnaby said as he lay the boot into Schofield. "You never give up."

"This is my station," Schofield said through clenched teeth.

Another kick. The steel cap of Barnaby's boot slammed into the rib that Schofield had broken during his fight with the SAS commando in the hovercraft earlier. Schofield roared in agony.

"It's not your station anymore, Scarecrow."

Barnaby kicked at Schofield again, but this time Schofield rolled out of the way and Barnaby's boot hit the steel wall of the diving bell.

Schofield kept rolling until he came up against the metal rim of the pool at the base of the diving bell.

And then suddenly he saw it.

The harpoon gun.

The harpoon gun that he had taken from Little America IV. It was just lying there on the deck, right in front of his eyes.

Off-balance, Schofield reached for the harpoon gun just as Barnaby leaped down onto the deck in front of him and let fly with a brutal side-kick.

The kick connected and Schofield fell?harpoon gun and all?off the deck and into the small pool of water at the base of the diving bell, and suddenly he found himself outside the falling diving bell!

The diving bell plummeted past him and Schofield reached out with his left hand and caught hold of a pipe on the side of it as it rushed past him and suddenly he was yanked downward.

Schofield kept ahold of the harpoon gun as he wrapped one of his legs around the exterior piping of the falling diving bell. He could only guess how deep they had fallen.

A hundred feet? Two hundred feet?

He peered in through one of the small round portholes of the diving bell. This porthole also had a thin white crack running across it.

Schofield saw the crack and suddenly he realized what it was. The liquid nitrogen that had splattered against the diving bell up in the station was contracting the porthole's glass, weakening it, causing it to crack.

He saw Barnaby inside the diving bell, saw him standing on the small metal deck, saluting at Schofield, waving his detonation unit at him, as if it were all over.

But it wasn't over.

Schofield stared at Barnaby through the porthole.

And then, as he looked at Barnaby from outside the diving bell, Schofield did a strange thing, and in an instant the smile vanished from Barnaby's face.

Schofield had raised his harpoon gun?

?and pointed it at the cracked porthole.

Barnaby saw it a second too late and Schofield saw the British general step across the diving bell and scream, "No!" just as Schofield pulled the trigger on the harpoon gun and the harpoon shot straight through the cracked glass of the diving bell's porthole.

The result was instantaneous.

The harpoon shot through the cracked glass of the porthole, puncturing the high-pressure atmosphere of the diving bell. With the integrity of the diving bell lost, the immense weight of the ocean pressing in all around it suddenly became overwhelming.

The diving bell imploded.

Its spherical walls came rushing inward at phenomenal speed as the colossal pressure of the ocean crushed it like a paper cup. Trevor Barnaby?Brigadier General Trevor J. Bar-naby of Her Majesty's SAS?was crushed to death in a single pulverizing instant.

Shane Schofield just hung there in the water as he watched the remains of the diving bell sink into the darkness.

Barnaby was dead. The SAS were all dead.

He had the station back

And then he had another thought and a wave of panic swept over him. He was still a hundred feet below the surface. He would never be able to hold his breath long enough to get back up.

Oh, Jesus, no.

No....

At that moment, Schofield saw a hand appear in front of his face and he almost jumped out of his skin because he thought it must have been Barnaby, that Barnaby had somehow managed to escape from the diving bell a second before it had?

But it wasn't Trevor Barnaby.

It was James Renshaw.

Hovering in the water above Schofield, breathing through his thirty-year-old scuba gear.

He was offering Schofield his mouthpiece.

It was 9:00 p.m. when Schofield stepped back up onto E-deck.

It was 9:40 by the time he had searched the station from top to bottom, searching for any SAS commandos who might still have been alive. There weren't any. Schofield picked up various weapons as he went?an MP-5, a couple of nitrogen charges. He also got his Desert Eagle back from Renshaw.

He also looked for Mother, but there was no sign of her.

No sign at all.

Schofield even looked inside the dumbwaiter that ran between the different decks, but Mother wasn't inside it either.

Mother was nowhere to be found.

Schofield sat down on the edge of the pool on E-deck, exhausted. It had now been more than twenty-four hours since he had last slept and he was beginning to feel it.

Beside him, Renshaw's scuba gear from Little America IV lay dumped on the deck, dripping. It still had the long length of steel cable tied to it?the cable that stretched back down through the water, down under the ice shelf and out to sea, back to the abandoned station in the iceberg about a mile off the coast Schofield shook his head as he looked at the ancient scuba gear. Behind him on the deck sat one of the British team's sea sleds?a sleek, ultramodern unit. The exact opposite of Little America IV's primitive scuba gear.

Renshaw was upstairs in his room on B-deck, getting some bandages, scissors, and disinfectant to use on Schofield's wounds.

Kirsty was standing on the deck behind Schofield, watching him, concerned. Schofield took a deep breath and shut his eyes. Then he grabbed his nose and?craaaack?his broken nose went back into place.

Kirsty winced. "Doesn't that hurt?"

Schofield grimaced and nodded. "A lot."

Just then, there came a loud splash and Schofield spun around just in time to see Wendy burst up out of the water and land on the metal deck. She loped over to him and Schofield patted her on the head. Wendy immediately rolled over onto her back and got him to pat her on the belly. Schofield did so. Behind him, Kirsty smiled.

Schofield looked down at his watch.

9:44 p.m.

He thought about the breaks in the solar flare that Abby Sinclair had told him about earlier.

Abby had said that breaks in the flare would be passing over Wilkes Ice Station at 7:30 p.m. and 10:00 p.m.

Well, he'd missed the 7:30 break.

But there were still sixteen minutes until the last break passed over the station at 10:00 p.m. He'd try to get on a radio then and call McMurdo.

He sighed, turned around. He had some things to do before then, though.

He saw a Marine helmet on the deck. Snake's, he guessed. Schofield reached over and grabbed it, put it on his head.

He then positioned the helmet's microphone in front of his mouth. "Marines, this is Scarecrow. Montana. Fox. Santa Cruz. Do you copy?"

At first there was no reply; then suddenly Schofield heard, "Scarecrow? Is that you?"

It was Gant. "Where are you?" she said.

"I'm up in the station."

"What about the SAS?"

"Killed 'em. Got my station back. What about you? I saw that Barnaby sent a team down there."

"We had a little help, but we took care of them without any losses. Everyone's accounted for. Scarecrow, we have got a lot to talk about."

Down in the ice cavern, Libby Gant looked out from behind the horizontal fissure.

After the short-lived battle with the British dive team, she and the others had retreated to the fissure, not to get away from the SAS commandos?they were all dead?but rather to get away from the giant elephant seals that had begun to prowl around the cavern after gorging themselves on the SAS troops. Right now, Gant saw, the seals were clustered around the big black ship, like campers gathered around a campfire.

"Like what?" Schofield's voice said.

"Like a spaceship that isn't a spaceship," Gant said.

"Tell me about it," Schofield said wearily.

Gant quickly told him about what she had found. About the "spaceship" itself and the keypad on it, about the hangar and the diary and the earthquake that had buried the whole station deep within the earth. It looked like a top-secret military project of some sort?the secret construction by the U.S. Air Force of some special kind of attack plane. Gant also mentioned the reference in the diary to a plutonium core inside the plane.

Then she told Schofield about the elephant seals and the bodies inside the cave and how the seals had cut down the SAS troops as they had emerged from the water. Their viciousness, Gant said, was shocking.

Schofield took it all in silently.

He then told Gant of the elephant seal that he had seen earlier on the monitor inside Renshaw's room, told her about the abnormally large lower canines that protruded up from its lower jaw like a pair of inverted fangs. As he spoke, an image formed in his mind?an image of the dead killer whale they had seen surface earlier; it had had two long tearing gashes going all the way down its belly.

"We saw a couple of seals with teeth like that, too," Gant said. "Smaller ones, though. Juvenile males. The one you saw must have been the bull. From what you're saying, though, it seems like only the males have large lower canines."

Schofield paused at that. "Yes."

And then at that moment, something clicked inside his head. Something about why only the male elephant seals had abnormally large lower teeth.

If the spaceship really had a plutonium core inside it, then it was a good bet that that core was slowly emitting passive radiation. Not a leak. Just passive ambient radiation, which occurred with any nuclear device. If the elephant seals had set up a nest near the ship, then over time the passive radiation from the plutonium might have had an effect on the male seals.

Schofield remembered seeing the infamous Rodriguez Report about passive radiation near an old nuclear weapons facility in the desert in New Mexico. In nearby towns, there were found to be unusually high instances of genetic abnormality. There were also found to be strikingly higher instances of such abnormalities in men than in women. Elongated fingers was a common mutation. Elongated dentures was another. Teeth. The writers of the report had linked the higher incidence of genetic abnormalities in men to testosterone, the male hormone.

Perhaps, he Schofield thought that was what had happened here.

And then suddenly he had another thought. A more disturbing thought.

"Gant, when did the SAS team arrive in the cave?"

"I'm not sure, somewhere around eight o'clock, I think."

"And when did you arrive in the cave?"

"We left the diving bell at 1410 hours. Then it took us another hour or so to swim up the tunnel. So I'd say about three o'clock."

Eight o'clock. Three o'clock.

Schofield wondered when the original team of divers from Wilkes Ice Station had gone down to the cave. There was something there, something that he couldn't quite put his finger on just yet. But it might have been able to explain ...

Schofield looked at his watch.

9:50 p.m.

Shit, time to go.

"Gant, listen; I have to go. There's a window in the solar flare coming over the station in ten minutes and I have to use it. If you and the others are safe down there, do me a favor and look around that hangar. Find out everything you can about that plane, OK?"

"You bet."

Schofield clicked off. But no sooner had he done so than he heard a voice from somewhere high up in the station.

"Lieutenant!"

Schofield looked up. It was Renshaw. He was up on B-deck. "Hey! Lieutenant!" he shouted.

"What?"

"I think you better see this!"

Schofield and Kirsty entered Renshaw's room through the square hole in the door.

Renshaw was standing over by his computer.

"It's been on all day," Renshaw said to Schofield, "but I only looked at it just now. It said I had new mail, so I brought up my e-mail screen and had a look. It came in at 7:32 p.m. and it's from some guy in New Mexico named Andrew Wilcox."

"What's it got to do with me?" Schofield said. He didn't even know anyone named Andrew Wilcox.

"Well, that's the thing, Lieutenant. It's addressed to you."

Schofield frowned.

Renshaw nodded at the screen. On it was a list of some sort, with a message written above it.

Schofield read the message. After a moment, his jaw dropped. The e-mail read:

SCARECROW,

THIS IS HAWK. BE ADVISED:

AWARE OF YOUR LOCATION.

USMC PERSONNEL DEPARTMENT HAS YOU LISTED AS DEAD.

SECONDARY TEAM IS EN ROUTE TO YOUR LOCATION.

SUSPECT THAT YOUR MISSION HAS BEEN TARGETED FOR TERMINATION BY ICG.

FEAR THAT THIS SECONDARY UNIT WILL BE HOSTILE TO YOUR INTERESTS. WOULD HATE FOR THE SAME FATE TO BEFALL YOU AS BEFELL ME IN PERU.

WITH THIS IN MIND, SCAN THE FOLLOWING LIST OF KNOWN ICG INFORMERS. MY UNIT IN PERU HAD BEEN INFILTRATED LONG BEFORE I GOT THERE. YOURS MIGHT BE, TOO.

TRANSMIT NO. 767-9808-09001

REF NO. KOS-4622

SUBJECT:THE FOLLOWING IS AN ALPHABETICAL LIST OF PERSONNEL AUTHORIZED TO RECEIVE SECURE TRANSMISSIONS.

NAME

LOCATION

FIELD/RANK

ADAMS, WALTER K.

LVRMRE LAB

NCLR PHYSCS

ATKINS, SAMANTHA E.

GSTETNR

CMPTR SFTWRE

BAILEY, KEITH H.

BRKLY

AERONTL ENGNR

BARNES, SEAN M. N.

SEALS

LTCMMDR

BROOKES, ARLIN F. A.

RNGRS

CPTN

CARVER, ELIZABETH R

CLMBIA

CMPTR SCI

CHRISTIE, MARGARET V.

HRVRD

IDSTRL CHMST

DAWSON, RICHARD K.

MCROSFT

CMPTR SFTWRE

DELANEY, MARK M.

IBM

CMPTR HRDWRE

DOUGLAS, KENNETH A.

CRAY

CMPTR HRDWRE

DOWD, ROGER F.

USMC

CPRL

EDWARDS, STEPHEN R.

BOEING

AERONTL ENGNR

FAULKNER, DAVID G.

JPL

AERONTL ENGNR

FROST, KAREN S.

USC

GNTC ENGNR

GIANNI, ENRICO R.

LCKHEED

AERONTL ENGNR

GRANGER, RAYMOND K. A.

RANGERS

SNR SGT

HARRIS, TERENCE X.

YALE

NCLR PHYSCS

JOHNSON, NORMA E.

U.ARIZ

BKJTOXNS

KAPLAN, SCOTT M.

USMC

GNNY SGT

KASCYNSKI, THERESA E.

3M CORP

PHSPHTES

KEMPER, PAULENE J.

JHNS HPKNS

DRMTLGY

KOZLOWSKI, CHARLES R.

USMC

SGT MJR

LAMB, MARK I.

ARMALTE

BLLSTCS

LAWSON, JANE R.

U.TEX

INSCTCIDES

LEE, MORGAN T.

USMC

SGT

MCDONALD, SIMON K.

LVRMRE LAB

NCLR PHYSCS

MAKIN, DENISE E.

U.CLRDO

CHMCL AGNTS

NORTON, PAUL G.

PRNCTN

AMNO ACD CHNS

OLIVER, JENNIFER F.

SLCN STRS

CMPTR SFTWRE

PARKES, SARAH T.

USC

PLNTLGST

REICHART, JOHN R.

USMC

SGT

RIGGS, WAYLON J. N.

SEALS

CMMDR

SHORT, GREGORY J.

CCA CLA

LQO SCE

TURNER, JENNIFER C.

UCLA

GNTC ENGNR

WILLIAMS, VICTORIA D.

U.WSHGTN

GEOPHYS

YATES, JOHN F.

USAF

CPTN

P.S. SCARECROW, IF AND WHEN YOU GET BACK TO THE STATES, CALL A MAN NAMED PETER CAMERON AT THE WASHINGTON POST IN D.C. HE WILL KNOW WHERE TO FIND ME.

GOOD HUNTING, HAWK

Schofield stared at the e-mail for a moment, stunned.

"Hawk" was Andrew Trent's call sign.

Andrew Trent, who?Schofield had been told?had died in an "accident" during that operation in Peru in 1997.

Andrew Trent was alive....

Renshaw printed off a copy of the e-mail and handed it to Schofield. Schofield scanned the e-mail again, thunderstruck.

Somehow, Trent had discovered that he was down in Antarctica. He had also discovered that a secondary team was on its way to Wilkes. Most disturbing of all, however, he had discovered that the United States Marine Corps had already listed Schofield as officially dead.

And so Trent had sent Schofield this e-mail, complete with a list of known ICG informers, in case Schofield had any traitors in his unit.

Schofield looked at the time of the e-mail. 7:32 p.m. It must have been transmitted via satellite during the 7:30 p.m. break in the solar flare.

Sctiofield scanned the list. A couple of names leaped out at him.

KAPLAN, SCOTT M. USMC GNNY SGT

Snake. As if Schofield needed to know that Snake was a traitor. And then:

KOZLOWSKI, CHARLES R. USMC SGT MJR

Oh, God, Schofield thought.

Chuck Kozlowski. The Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps, the highest-ranking enlisted soldier in the Corps, was a member of the ICG.

And then Schofield saw another name that made him freeze in horror.

LEE, MORGAN T. USMC SGT

"Oh, no," Schofield said aloud.

"What?" Renshaw said. "What is it?"

Montana, Schofield thought. Montana's real name was Morgan Lee. Morgan T. Lee. Schofield looked up in horror. Montana was ICG.

Down in the hangar, Gant and the others were searching for information about the black plane.

In a small workshop, Santa Cruz was looking at some schematics. Sarah Hensleigh was sitting at a desk behind him, with a pencil and paper out.

"Nice name," Cruz said, breaking the silence.

"What?" Sarah said.

"The name of the plane. Says here that they called it the Silhouette," Santa Cruz said. "Not bad."

Sarah nodded. "Hmmm."

"Any luck with that code?" he asked.

"I think I'm getting closer," Hensleigh said "The number that we were given, 24157817, seems to be a series of prime numbers: 2,41,5,7, until you get to 817. But 817 is divisible by 19 and 43, which are also prime numbers. But then, again, 817 could be two numbers, 81 and 7, or maybe even three numbers. That's the hard part, figuring out just how many numbers 24157817 is supposed to represent"

He smiled. "Better you than me, ma'am."

"Thanks."

At mat moment, Montana came into the workshop. "Dr. Hensleigh?" he said.

"Yes."

"Fox said to tell you that you might like to have a look at something she's found over in the office. She said it was a codebook or something."

"All right." Hensleigh got up and left the workshop.

Montana and Santa Cruz were alone.

Santa Cruz resumed his examination of the ship's schematics.

He said, "You know, sir, this plane is something else. It's got a standard turbofan power plant with supercruise capability. And it's got eight small, retro jets on its underbelly for vertical takeoff and landing. But the strange thing is, both of these power plants run on regular jet fuel."

"So?" Montana said from the doorway.

"So ... what does the plutonium core do?" Santa Cruz said, turning to face him.

Before Montana could reply, Cruz turned back around to face his schematics. He pulled some handwritten notes out from under them.

"But I think I figured it out," he said. "I was telling Fox about this before. These notes I found say that the engineers at this hangar were working on some new kind of electronically generated stealth mechanism for the Silhouette, some kind of electromagnetic field that surrounded the plane. But to generate this electromagnetic field they needed a shitload of power, something in the neighborhood of 2.71 gigawatts. But the only thing capable of generating that kind of power is a controlled nuclear reaction. Hence, the plutonium." Santa Cruz nodded to himself, pleased.

He never noticed Montana stepping up quickly behind him.

"I tell ya," Santa Cruz went on, "this has been one seriously fucked-up mission. Spaceships, French troops, British troops, secret bases, plutonium cores, ICG traitors. Fuck. It's just?"

Montana's knife entered Santa Cruz's ear. It went in hard and penetrated Santa Cruz's brain in an instant.

The young private's eyes went wide; then he fell forward and slammed down face-first on the desk in front of him. Dead.

Montana extracted his bloody knife from Santa Cruz's skull and turned around?

?and saw Libby Gant standing in the doorway to the workshop, with a bundle of papers in her hands, staring at him in apoplectic horror.

Schofield keyed his helmet mike. "Gant! Gant! Come in!"

There was no reply.

Schofield glanced at his watch.

9:58 p.m.

Shit. The break in the solar flare would be here in two minutes.

"Gant, I don't know if you can hear me, but if you can, listen up. Montana is ICG! I repeat, Montana is ICG! Don't turn your back on him! Neutralize him if you have to. I repeat, neutralize him if you have to. I've gotta go."

And with that, Schofield raced upstairs and headed for the radio room.

Gant ran across the cavernous hangar with Montana in hot pursuit. She sprinted past an ice wall just as a line of bullet holes erupted across it.

Gant unslung her MP-5 as she raced through the bulkhead doorway that led back to the fissure and the main cavern. She fired wildly behind her. Then she dived into the horizontal fissure and rolled through it just as Montana appeared in the bulkhead doorway behind her and let off another burst of gunfire.

Another line of bullet holes raked across the ice wall around Gant, only this time the line of bullet holes cut across the middle of her body.

Two bullets lodged in her breastplate. One opened up a jagged red hole in her side.

Gant stifled a scream as she rolled through the fissure, clutching her side. She clenched her teeth, saw the trickle of blood seep between her fingers. The pain was excruciating.

As she rolled out of the fissure and into the main cavern, she saw the elephant seals over by the spaceship, and indeed, no sooner was she out of the fissure than she saw one of the seals lift its head and look over in her direction.

It was the male. The big bull with its fearsome lower fangs. It must have returned sometime in the last half hour, Gant thought

The male barked at her. Then it began to move its massive body toward her, his bulging layers of fat rippling with every lumbering stride.

The bullet wound in Gant's side burned.

She crawled on her backside away from the fissure, keeping one eye on the approaching elephant seal and the other on the fissure itself. A snail trail of her blood stained the frosty floor behind her, betraying her path.

Montana emerged from the horizontal fissure, gun first.

Gant was nowhere to be seen.

He saw the trail of blood on the floor, leading off to the right, around and behind a large boulder of ice.

Montana followed the trail of blood. He quickly came round the ice boulder and let rip with a burst of gunfire. He hit nothing. Gant wasn't there. Her MP-5 just lay there on the floor behind the ice boulder.

Montana spun.

Where the hell was she?

Gant saw Montana come back round the ice boulder and catch sight of her.

She was now sitting on the floor in front of the horizontal fissure, clutching at her side with both hands. It had taken all of her strength?and both of her hands?to get to her feet and run back to the left-hand side of the fissure without spilling any more blood before Montana had emerged from the hole. She had actually intended to go back in through the fissure, but she had only managed to get this far.

Montana smiled, walked slowly over to her. He stood in front of her, with his back to the main part of the cavern.

"You're a complete son of a bitch, you know that," Gant said.

Montana shrugged.

"It's not even an alien fucking spaceship, and you're still killing us," Gant said, looking out into the cavern behind Montana.

"It's not just the ship anymore, Gant. It's what you know about the ICG. That's why you can't be allowed to go back."

Gant looked Montana right in the eye. "Do your fucking worst."

Montana raised his gun to fire, but at that moment a bloodcurdling roar echoed across the cavern.

Montana spun just in time to see the big bull elephant seal come charging across the cavern toward him, roaring loudly. The floor shook with its every booming stride.

Gant took the opportunity and rolled quickly back through the horizontal fissure behind her. She fell in a clumsy heap to the floor of the tunnel behind the fissure.

The big seal loped across the cavern at incredible speed, covering the distance between the ship and the fissure in seconds.

Montana raised his gun, fired.

But the animal was too big, too close.

From inside the tunnel, Gant looked up and saw Montana's outline on the other side of the translucent ice wall above her.

And then suddenly?whump!?she saw Montana's body get slammed up against the other side of the translucent ice wall. A grotesque star-shaped explosion of blood flared out from Montana's body as the big seal slammed him against the ice wall with thunderous force.

Slowly, painfully, Gant got to her feet and peered out through the horizontal fissure into the main cavern.

She saw the elephant seal extract his fangs from Montana's belly. The long, blood-slicked teeth came clear of his wet suit and Montana just dropped to the floor. The elephant seal stood over his prone body in triumph.

And then suddenly Gant heard Montana groan.

He was still alive.

Just barely, but?yes?definitely alive. Gant then watched as the big seal bent down over Montana and ripped a large chunk of flesh from his rib cage.

Schofield strode into the radio room on A-deck on the tick of ten o'clock. Renshaw and Kirsty came in behind him. Schofield sat down in front of the radio console, keyed the microphone.

"Attention, McMurdo. Attention, McMurdo. This is the Scarecrow. Do you copy?"

There was no reply.

Schofield repeated his message.

No reply.

And then suddenly: "Scarecrow, this is Romeo; I read you. Give me a Sit-Rep."

Romeo, Schofield thought. Romeo was the call sign of Captain Harley Roach, the commanding officer of Marine Force Reconnaissance Unit Five. Schofield had met Romeo Roach on a couple of occasions before. He was six years older than Schofield, a good soldier, and a legend with the ladies? hence his call sign, Romeo.

What was more, he was a Marine. Schofield smiled. He had a Marine on the line.

"Romeo," Schofield said, relief sweeping over him. "Situation is as follows: we are in control of the target objective. I repeat, we are in control of the target objective. Heavy losses have been sustained, but the target objective is ours." The target objective, of course, was Wilkes Ice Station. Schofield sighed. "What about you, Romeo? Where are you?"

"Scarecrow, we are currently in hovercrafts, in a holding pattern approximately one mile from the target objective? "

Schofield's head jerked up.

One mile....

But that was right outside the front door....

"?and we are under orders to hold here until further instructed. We have strict instructions not to enter the station."

Schofield couldn't believe it

There were Marines outside Wilkes Ice Station, right outside Wilkes Ice Station. Only one mile out The first thing Schofield wanted to know was?

"Romeo, how long have you been out there?"

"Ah, about thirty-eight minutes now, Scarecrow," Romeo's voice said.

Thirty-eight minutes, Schofield thought with disbelief. A squad of Recon Marines had been sitting on their asses outside Wilkes for the last half hour.

Suddenly a voice came over Schofield's helmet intercom? not over the radio room's speakers. It was Romeo.

"Scarecrow, I gotta talk to you privately."

Schofield clicked off the station's radio and spoke into his helmet mike. Romeo was using the closed-circuit Marine channel.

"Romeo, what the fuck are you doing?" Schofield said. He couldn't believe it. While he had been inside the station doing battle with Trevor Barnaby, a whole unit of Marines had been arriving at Wilkes Ice Station and waiting outside.

"Scarecrow, it's a fucking circus out here. Marines. Green Berets. Hell, there's a whole goddamn platoon of Army Rangers out here patrolling the one-mile perimeter. National Command and the Joint Chiefs sent every unit they could find to cover this station. But the thing is, once we got here, they ordered us to wait until a Navy SEAL team arrived. Scarecrow, my orders are very clear: if any one of my men moves toward that station before that SEAL team arrives, he is to be fired upon."

Schofield was stunned. For a moment he didn't say anything.

Suddenly the situation became clear to him.

He was in exactly the same position that Andrew Trent had been in in Peru. He had got to the station first He had found something inside it And now they were sending a SEAL team?the most ruthless, most deadly special forces unit the United States possesses?into the station.

A line from Andrew Trent's e-mail suddenly popped into Schofield's head:

USMC PERSONNEL DEPARTMENT HAS YOU LISTED AS DEAD.

Schofield swallowed deeply as the horror of the realization hit him.

They were sending in the SEALs.

They were sending in the SEALs to kill him.

SEVENTH INCURSION

16 June 2200 hours

"Romeo, listen to me," Schofield said quickly. "The ICG planted men in my unit. One of my own men began killing my wounded. That SEAL team they're sending in is going to come in here and kill me. You have to do something."

Schofield felt a chill run down his spine when he realized that he was saying to Romeo exactly the same thing that Andrew Trent had said to him from that temple in Peru.

"What do you want me to do?" Romeo said.

"Tell them that there's nothing in here," Schofield said. "Tell them there's no spaceship buried in the ice. Tell them it's just an old Air Force black project that got left down here for some reason."

"Uh, Scarecrow, I have no information on what's inside that station. I don't know anything about spaceships buried in the ice or Air Force black projects."

"Well, that's what this is all about, Romeo. Listen to me. I have fought French paratroopers for this station. I have fought Trevor Barnaby and a platoon of SAS commandos for this station. I do not want to be killed by a bunch of my own psycho countrymen after all I've been through, you hear me!"

"Just hold on a second, Scarecrow."

There was silence on the other end of the line.

After a minute, Romeo said, "Scarecrow, I just consulted with the Army Ranger Captain out here?guy named Brookes, Arlin Brookes?and he said that he will shoot any of my men who attempt to enter the station before the SEAL team arrives. "

Schofield pulled out his printed copy of Andrew Trent's e-mail, the list of ICG informers. His eyes fell on one entry:

BROOKES, ARMN F. A. RNGRS CPTN

Son of a bitch, Schofield thought. It was the same guy he had run into outside the temple in Peru. Arlin F. Brookes. ICG cocksucker.

Romeo said, "OK, Scarecrow. Listen up. I may not be able to come in, but I'll tell you something I heard about thirty minutes ago. The Wasp is sailing about three hundred nautical miles off the coast, out in the open sea. After we got here, I got a call from Jack Walsh on the Wasp. About thirty minutes ago, a patrol of four Marine Harriers shot down a British VC-10 tanker plane about 250 nautical miles off the coast after the tanker tried to make a run for it."

Schofield was silent.

He knew what Romeo was getting at.

Tanker airplanes exist for one reason and one reason only: to top up the fuel on attack planes on long-distance missions.

If a British tanker airplane had been shot down 250 miles off the coast, then it was a good bet that somewhere out there, there was another British plane, an attack plane?a bomber or a fighter?that had been getting its fuel from the tanker. And it probably had orders to?

Oh, no, Schofield thought, realizing. It was Barnaby's eraser.

Like the French team's eraser, that British fighter probably had orders to fire upon Wilkes Ice Station if Trevor Barnaby didn't call in within a certain time.

Romeo said, "The Air Force has been called in. They're sweeping the air over the ocean with AWACS birds and F-22 fighters. They're looking for a rogue British fighter and they have orders to shoot on sight."

Schofield fell back into his chair.

He frowned, rubbed his forehead. The world was closing in around him.

He was trapped. Totally and utterly trapped. The SEALs would be coming in soon?whether or not they realized there was nothing to be gained from this station. And even if Scho-field managed to evade them after they stormed the station, there remained the possibility that Wilkes would be destroyed by an air-to-ground missile from a rogue British fighter off the coast.

There was one option, though, he thought.

Go outside and surrender to Romeo before the SEALs arrived. At least that way, they would stay alive. And if Schofield had learned nothing from this whole day, it was that if you stayed alive, you still had a chance.

Schofield keyed his helmet mike. "Romeo, listen?"

"Oh, shit, Scarecrow. They're here."

"What?"

"The SEALs. They're here. They just let them through the outer perimeter. Four hovercrqfts. They're coming toward the station complex now."

One mile out from Wilkes Ice Station an armada of hovercrafts formed a long, unbroken line. They were arrayed in a semicircle on the landward side of the station and they were all pointed inward?pointing in toward the station.

At that moment, however, four navy blue hovercrafts broke through the line and glided across the ice plain toward the station. They wended their way through the outer buildings of the station complex, in no apparent hurry.

They were the SEAL hovercrafts.

Inside the lead hovercraft, the SEAL commander keyed his radio. "Air Control, this is SEAL team, report," he said. "I confirm previous instructions. We will not enter the station until we are sure you have the bogey."

"SEAL team, this is Air Control. Stand by," a voice on the radio said. "We are standing by for a report from our birds right now."

At that very same moment, at a point 242 nautical miles out from Wilkes Ice Station, six F-22 USAF fighters rocketed over the Southern Ocean.

The F-22 is the most advanced air superiority fighter in the world, the heir to the throne of the old F-15 Eagle. But while the F-22 looks a little like the old F-15 Eagle, the F-22 has one thing the F-15 never had?stealth.

In the lead F-22, the squadron leader was listening to his helmet radio. When the voice at the other end finished speaking, the squadron leader said, "Thanks, Bigbird; I see him."

On his computerized display screen the squadron leader saw a small blip heading west. A readout on the screen read:

TARGET ACQUIRED: 103 NM WNW AIRCRAFT DESIGNATED: E-2000

An E-2000, the squadron leader noted. The Eurofighter 2000. A twin-engine, highly maneuverable pocket fighter, the E-2000 was a joint project of the British, German, Spanish, and Italian Air Forces.

On the squadron leader's screen the blip appeared to be flying casually, completely unaware of the stealthy American fighters a hundred miles behind it.

"All right, people, target has been acquired," the F-22 pilot said. "I repeat, target has been acquired. It's time to rock and roll."

Inside Wilkes Ice Station, Shane Schofield didn't know what the hell to do.

He knew he couldn't surrender to the SEALs. They were almost certainly ICG. If they got him, they would kill him.

He considered going down to the cave and hiding down there?and if necessary holding the spaceship for ransom? but then he realized that it was no longer possible to get down to the cave since the diving bell had been destroyed.

Schofield led Kirsty and Renshaw out of the radio room on A-deck and down the rung-ladder to the lower decks.

"What's going on?" Renshaw said.

"We just got screwed," Schofield said. His mind was racing. Their only option now, he figured, was to hide somewhere inside the station and hold out until the SEALs and everyone else were gone....

And then what are you gonna do? Schofield asked himself. Walk home?

If you stay alive, you still have a chance.

Schofield slid down the rung-ladder, looked down at the pool on E-deck.

And then he saw something.

He saw Wendy, lying on the deck, happily dozing off to sleep.

Wendy, he thought.

Something about Wendy....

The F-22 squadron leader spoke into his helmet mike, "Bigbird, this is Blue Leader. Maintaining stealth mode. Estimate target will be in missile range in... twenty minutes."

Suddenly it hit Schofield.

He spun to face Kirsty. "Kirsty, how long can Wendy hold her breath for?"

Kirsty shrugged. "Most male far seals can hold their breath for about an hour. But Wendy's a girl, and a lot smaller, so she can only hold her breath for about forty minutes."

"Forty minutes...," Schofield said, doing the calculations in his head.

"What are you thinking?" Renshaw asked.

Schofield said, "It takes us roughly two hours to get from the station to the cave, right. One hour to go down three thousand feet in the diving bell and then another hour or so to go up through the ice tunnel."

"Yeah, so ...," Renshaw said.

Schofield turned to face Renshaw. "When Gant and the others were approaching the ice cavern, Gant said the strangest thing. She said that they had a visitor. Wendy. Gant said that Wendy was swimming with them as they made their way up the ice tunnel."

"Uh-huh."

Schofield said, "So, even if Wendy could swim twice as fast as we can, if she swam all the way down and then all the way back up the ice tunnel, she'd run out of breath before she got to the cavern."

Renshaw was silent.

Schofield said, "I mean, it'd be suicide for her not to turn back after she'd swum for twenty minutes because she'd have to know she could get back to an air source?"

Schofield looked from Renshaw to Kirsty.

"There's another way into that ice tunnel," he said. "A shortcut."

"SEAL team, this is Blue Leader. We are closing in on the target. Estimate target will be in missile range in fifteen minutes," the voice of the squadron leader said over the radio of the SEAL team's hovercraft.

The SEALs sat rigidly in their places in the cabin of their hovercraft. Not a trace of emotion crossed any of their faces.

Down on E-deck now, Schofield tossed the low-audibility breathing tanks onto the deck. Kirsty was already putting on a thermal-electric wet suit. It was so hopelessly big for her that she had to roll up the sleeves and ankles to make it fit. Renshaw?already dressed in his neoprene bodysuit?just went straight for the LABA gear.

"Here, swallow these," Schofield said as he handed a blue capsule to each of them. They were N-67D anti-nitrogen capsules. The same pills that Schofield had given to Gant and the others when they had gone down to the cavern earlier. They all quickly swallowed the pills.

Schofield discarded his fatigues and put his body armor and gunbelt back on over his wet suit. As he went through the pockets of his fatigues he found, among other things, a nitrogen charge and Sarah Hensleigh's silver locket. He transferred both items to pockets in his wet suit. Then he quickly began to put on one of the scuba tanks.

There were three tanks in all, all of them filled with four hours' worth of a saturated helium-oxygen mix: 98% helium, 2% oxygen. They got Gant to prepare before she had gone down to the cave earlier.

As he put his own LABA gear on, Renshaw helped Kirsty get into hers.

Schofield got his tanks on first. When he was ready, he immediately began searching the deck around him for something heavy?something very heavy?since they would need a good weight to take them down fast

He found what he was looking for.

A length of the B-deck catwalk that had fallen down to E-deck back when the whole of B-deck had gone up in flames earlier. The length of metal catwalk was about ten feet long and made of solid steel. It even had a section of its handrail still attached to it.

When Renshaw was also ready, Schofield got him to help drag it to the edge of the pool. The big length of metal catwalk screeched loudly as they dragged it across the deck.

As they worked, Wendy hopped up and down beside them, like a dog begging to go for a walk.

"Is Wendy coming with us?" Kirsty asked.

Schofield said, "I hope so. I was hoping she would show us the way."

At that, Kirsty leaped to her feet and hurried over to the wall by the side of the pool. She grabbed a harness from a hook and brought it back to the edge of the pool. Then she began to strap the harness around Wendy's midsection.

"What's that?" Schofield asked.

"Don't worry. It'll help."

"Fine, whatever. Just stay close," Schofield said as he and Renshaw positioned the length of catwalk on the edge of the deck, so that it was all-but-ready to fall off.

"All right," Schofield said. "Everybody in the water."

The three of them jumped into the water and swam back underneath the length of catwalk. Wendy happily leaped into the water after them.

"All right, get a grip on the catwalk," Schofield's voice said over their underwater headsets.

They all grabbed hold of the length of catwalk. They looked like a set of Olympic swimmers preparing to swim a backstroke race.

Schofield placed his hand over Kirsty's to make sure she didn't lose her hold on the catwalk as it sank through the water.

"OK, Mr. Renshaw," Schofield said. "Pull!"

At that moment, Schofield and Renshaw heaved on the catwalk, and suddenly the length of heavy metal tipped off the edge of the deck and fell into the water with a massive splash.

The metal catwalk sank through the water fast.

The three small figures of Schofield, Renshaw, and Kirsty clung grimly to it as it fell. They were all pointing downward, their feet flailing above them. Wendy swam quickly down through the water behind them.

Schofield looked at the depth gauge on his wrist.

Ten feet.

Twenty feet.

Thirty feet.

Down they went, falling fast, through the magnificent white underwater world.

As they fell, Schofield tried to keep one eye on the white ice wall to his left. He searched for a hole in it, searched for the entrance to the shortcut tunnel that led to the underwater ice tunnel.

They hit a hundred feet. Without the pills, the nitrogen in their blood would have killed them by now.

Two hundred feet.

Three hundred.

They flew downward through the water. It became darker, harder to see.

Four hundred, five hundred.

They were falling so quickly.

Six hundred. Seven hundred.

Eight?

And then suddenly Schofield saw it.

"All right, let go!" he yelled.

The others immediately let go of the falling metal catwalk.

They hovered in the water as the catwalk disappeared into the gloom beneath them.

Schofield swam over to the ice wall.

A large, round hole had been burrowed into it. It looked like a tunnel of some sort, a tunnel that descended into aiky darkness.

Wendy swam up alongside Schofield and disappeared inside the dark tunnel. She popped out again several seconds later.

Schofield hesitated.

Renshaw must have seen the doubt in his eyes. "What choice do we have?" he said.

"Right," Schofield said, pulling out his flashlight. He clicked it on. Then he kicked with his feet and swam into the tunnel.

The tunnel was narrow, and it meandered steeply downward. Schofield swam in the lead, with Kirsty behind him and Renshaw bringing up the rear. Since they were swimming downward, they made swift progress. They just allowed the lead weights on their weight belts to pull them down.

Schofield swam cautiously. It was quiet here, like a tomb....

And then suddenly Wendy whipped past him from behind and darted off down the tunnel in front of him.

Schofield looked at his depth gauge.

They had reached a thousand feet.

Dive time was twelve minutes.

"Bigbird, this is Blue Leader. Target is now in missile range. I repeat. Target is now in missile range. Preparing to launch AMRAAM missiles."

"You may fire when ready, Blue Leader."

"Thank you, Bigbird. All right, people. I have missile lock. Missile bay is open. Target appears to be unaware of our presence. OK. This is Blue Leader, Fox One.. .fire!"

The squadron leader jammed down on bis trigger.

At that moment, a long, sleek AIM-120 AMRAAM missile slid out from the missile bay of the F-22 and shot forward after its prey.

The British fighter saw the missile on its scopes straightaway.

The greatest problem for stealth aircraft is that although an aircraft itself may be invisible to radar, any missiles hanging from its wings will not be invisible. Hence, all stealth aircraft like the F-22, the F-117A stealth fighter, and the B-2A stealth bomber carry their missiles internally.

Unfortunately, however, as soon as a missile is fired, it will be seen instantly on radar. Which meant that the moment the F-22 launched its AMRAAM missile at the E-2000 over the horizon, the British plane saw the missile on its scopes.

The British pilot gave himself one minute at the most.

"General Barnaby! General Barnaby! Report!"

There was no reply.

Which was strange, because Brigadier General Barnaby knew that this time?2200 hours to 2225 hours?was a designated contact time, one of only two times a break in the solar flare would permit radio contact. Barnaby had reported in at 1930, another designated contact time, right on schedule.

The British pilot tried the secondary frequency. Still no luck. He tried to hail Nero, Barnaby's second in command.

Still no luck.

"General Barnaby! This is Backstop. I am under attack! I repeat, I am under attack! If you do not answer me in the next thirty seconds, I will have to assume that you are dead and pursuant to your orders I will have no choice but to fire upon the station."

The British pilot looked at his missile light?it was blinking. He had already preset the coordinates of Wilkes Ice Station into the guidance computer of his AGM-88/HLN cruise missile.

The designator letters on the missile said it all.

AGM stood for air-to-ground missile, H for high-speed, and L for long-range. N however, had a special meaning.

It stood for nuclear.

Thirty seconds expired. Still no word from Barnaby.

"General Barnaby! This is Backstop! I am launching the eraser... now/" The British pilot hit his trigger, and a split second later the nuclear-tipped cruise missile attached to the end of his wing streaked away from his plane.

The missile only just got away, for a bare two seconds later?just as the British pilot was reaching for his ejection lever?the American AMRAAM missile slammed into the back of the E-2000 and blew it and its pilot out of the sky.

The American pilots saw the bright orange explosion on the night horizon, saw the blip on their scopes disappear.

A couple of them cheered.

The squadron leader smiled as he looked at the orange fireball on the horizon. "SEAL team, this is Blue Leader. The bogey has been eliminated. I repeat, the bogey has been eliminated. You are free to enter the station. You are free to enter the station."

Inside the SEAL hovercraft, the squadron leader's voice echoed through the speaker: "You are free to enter the station. You are free to enter the station."

The SEAL commander said, "Thank you, Blue Leader. All units, be aware. SEAL team is switching over to closed-circuit channels for the assault on the station."

He clicked off his radio, turned to his men.

"All right, people. Let's go fuck somebody up."

Out over the Southern Ocean, the F-22 squadron leader continued to look out through his canopy at the remains of the British E-2000. Thin orange firetrails descended slowly down to earth like cheap fireworks.

Consumed as he was with this sight, the squadron leader didn't notice a new, smaller blip appear on his radar screen? a blip heading south, toward Antarctica?until almost thirty seconds later.

"What the hell is that?" he said.

"Oh, Jesus," someone else said. "It must have got a missile off before it was hit!"

The squadron leader tried to raise the SEAL team again, but this time he couldn't get through. They'd already switched over to closed-circuit channels for their assault on Wilkes Ice Station.

The main doors to the station exploded inward and the SEAL team stormed inside with their guns blazing.

It was a textbook-perfect entrance. The only problem was, the station was empty.

Schofield looked at his depth gauge: 1470 feet.

He pushed on and a few minutes later, he emerged from the narrow shortcut tunnel and found himself inside a wider, ice-wafted tunnel.

He knew where he was instantly, even though he had never been here before.

On the far side of the underwater ice tunnel he saw a series of round ten-foot holes carved into the tunnel walls. Sarah Hensleigh had told him about them before. And Gant had mentioned them as well, when she had approached the cave. The elephant seals' caves. He was inside the underwater ice tunnel that led up to the spacecraft's cavern.

Schofield breathed a sigh of relief. Yes!

They swam out into the underwater ice tunnel. Beside him, Schofield saw Kirsty let go of Wendy's harness, saw the little seal dart off toward the surface. Schofield, Kirsty, and Renshaw followed, swimming quickly upward, eying the holes in the ice walls around them nervously.

Although the sight of the holes in the walls made him uneasy, Schofield felt fairly certain that the elephant seals would not attack them. He had a theory about that. So far, the only group of divers to have approached the underwater ice cave unharmed had been Gant's group?and they had all been wearing LABA tanks, low-audibility breathing gear. The other groups to have gone down?the scientists from Wilkes and the British?hadn't. And they had been attacked. The way Schofield figured it, the elephant seals hadn't been able to hear Gant and her team when they had approached the cavern. And so they hadn't been attacked.

At that moment, Schofield caught sight of the surface and his thoughts about the elephant seals were forgotten.

He looked at his depth gauge: 1490 feet.

Then he looked at his watch. It had taken them all of eighteen minutes to get here. Very quick time.

And then suddenly a low whistle cut through the water.

Schofield heard it, tensed.

He saw Wendy hovering in the water above him, saw her body whip around suddenly. She had sensed it, too.

Suddenly a second whistle answered the first and Schofield felt his heart sink.

The seals knew they were there....

"Go!" Schofield said to Renshaw and Kirsty. "Go!"

Schofield and Renshaw broke out into swift strokes, heading for the surface. Renshaw was closest to Kirsty, so he just pushed up against her LABA tanks, pushing her up through the water, forcing her to swim faster.

Schofield looked at the surface above him. It looked beautiful, glassy, calm. Like a smooth glass lens.

The whistles around them became more intense, and then suddenly he heard a hoarse bark cut across the underwater spectrum.

Schofield spun in the water, looked about himself, then snapped up to look at the lens-like surface again.

And at that moment, the lens shattered.

Elephant seals plunged into the water from every side. Others roared out of the submerged holes in the walls and charged at Schofield and the others. Their shrieks and barks and whistles filled the water.

Kirsty and Renshaw broke the surface first, right near the edge of the pool. Renshaw?still in the water?pushed hard against the underside of Kirsty's tanks, forcing her out of the water.

Kirsty stumbled frantically up onto dry land, slipped and fell, flat onto her face, and turned just in time to see Renshaw get one arm out of the water and begin to haul himself out when?yank?Renshaw was suddenly wrenched violently under the churning surface.

Kirsty screamed but cut herself off when she saw an enormous shape rise up out of the water in front of her.

She dived away from the water's edge just as one of the elephant seals launched itself out of the water and crashed down onto the ice in front of her. Kirsty staggered and stumbled away from the edge, turned, and saw that the giant seal was loping across the flat floor of the cavern, chasing her!

Kirsty clawed at the icy ground, lost her footing, slipped, and fell.

The elephant seal charged. Kirsty lay sprawled on the floor of the cavern, totally exposed, staring up at the gigantic demon bearing on her and?

And then suddenly boom! the elephant seal's face exploded in a fountain of blood and the big seal went crashing headfirst to the ground.

Kirsty stared in awe as the elephant seal dropped to the floor, revealing behind it: Schofield, hovering in the pool thirty feet away, with his pistol extended.

He had just shot the seal through the back of the head!

Kirsty almost fainted.

Under the surface, James Renshaw was absolutely panic-stricken.

One of the seals had pulled him under and now it had him, had his foot in its mouth!

Renshaw looked down in desperation, and then suddenly he frowned. The seal that had him looked smaller than the others, and it had those distinctive lower fangs that he had seen on the larger male before.

A juvenile male? Renshaw thought.

And then another thought hit him.

If it's young, you might have a chance to get out of this.

So, with his spare foot, Renshaw kicked the small seal hard in the snout.

The seal instantly squealed with pain and released his foot, and Renshaw bolted for the surface.

He burst up out of the water a second later and saw the edge of the pool right in front of him. Then he grabbed the nearest rock and hauled himself out of the water just as another, much larger seal, probably the juvenile's mother, swept through the water behind him and narrowly missed biting his feet clean off.

Schofield was swimming madly for the edge of the pool.

As he swam, he caught fleeting glimpses of the cave around him?he saw Kirsty over on one side of the pool, saw Renshaw over on the other. And then he saw the the ship, the big black ship, standing like an enormous, silent bird of prey in the middle of the massive subterranean cavern.

And then suddenly his view of the big black ship was obliterated by the sight of the big bull seal rising up out of the water right in front of him!

The big seal was already moving fast and it plowed into Schofield at phenomenal speed and Schofield gasped as he felt the wind get knocked out of him and he went under.

The bull seal had rammed into his chest with its long lower fangs. Ordinarily, Schofield guessed, this would have been enough to kill any would-be victim, since the big seal's fangs would pierce the victim's chest

But not with Schofield.

He was still wearing his body armor, and the bull seal's fangs had lodged in his Kevlar breastplate.

The elephant seal drove him downward, pushing against his chest. Schofield struggled, but it was no use. By virtue of his breastplate he was practically impaled on the big animal's fangs.

The seal took Schofield down. Down and down, on the end of its nose. Bubbles shot out from its heaving mouth as it expelled vast quantities of air in its exertion.

Schofield had to do something.

He reached into his pocket, searched for whatever lay in there.

He pulled out a British nitrogen charge, looked at it for a second.

Oh, what the hell, he thought

Schofield quickly pulled the pin on the nitrogen charge and ammed the live grenade into the open jaws of the big elephant seal.

Then he pushed himself off the big animal's fangs and the seal shot past him in the water. It quickly realized that it had lost Schofield, and when it did, the big seal began to turn around.

It was then that the nitrogen charge went off.

The bull seal's head exploded. Then it imploded. And then most shocking thing of all happened. A wave of ice shot out from the dead seal's body. At first Schofield didn't know what it was, and then suddenly he realized.

It was the liquid nitrogen from the charge, expanding through the water, freezing the water as it went! Shit. He hadn't counted on that! The wall of ice shot through the water toward Schofield, constantly expanding, like a living, breathing ice formation growing through the water.

Schofield watched it with wide eyes. If it enveloped him, he would be dead in an instant.

Get out of here!

And then suddenly Schofield felt something nudge against his shoulder and he turned.

It was Wendy!

Schofield grabbed her harness and Wendy took off immediately.

The wall of ice behind them gave chase, expanding through the water at phenomenal speed, building upon itself at an exponential rate.

Wendy swam hard, pulling Schofield with her. She was small, but she hauled Schofield through the water at incredible speed.

The ice wall closed in on them.

Another elephant seal swung in behind them, spying an easy meal, but the ice wall caught the big seal, enveloped it within its expanding mass, and swallowed it whole, froze it within its icy belly.

Wendy swam, toward the surface, deftly avoiding any elephant seals that tried to cut across her path.

She saw the surface, pulled Schofield toward it.

Behind them, the wall of ice had lost its momentum. The nitrogen from the charge had ceased expanding. The ice wall fell away behind them.

With Schofield clutching onto her harness, Wendy made her run for the surface. Elephant seals came at them from every side. It was like a roller-coaster ride as Wendy ducked and weaved and banked and turned to avoid the biting teeth of the elephant seals charging at her and Schofield from every side.

And then suddenly Wendy spotted a gap and caught a glimpse of the surface.

She went for it.

Elephant seals lunged and snapped at them from every side, but Wendy was too quick. She hit the surface at full speed and exploded out of the water.

Wendy shot out from the water, with Schofield holding onto her harness. They both hit the icy floor of the cavern with a clumsy thud, and Schofield found himself lying on his belly. He quickly rolled over onto his back?

?only to see an elephant seal leap high out of the water behind him and come rushing down toward him!

Schofield rolled. The elephant seal slammed down onto the ground right next to him. Schofield leaped to his feet, spun around, looked for the others.

"Lieutenant! Over here! Over here!" Sarah Hensleigh's voice yelled.

Schofield snapped around and saw Hensleigh waving from inside a small horizontal hole in the wall about fifty yards away.

Renshaw, Kirsty?and Wendy, too?were already moving toward the horizontal fissure. Schofield took off after them. As he ran across the cavern, he saw Kirsty roll in through the horizontal hole; then he saw Wendy go in after her, then Renshaw.

Suddenly a wash of static cut across his consciousness and a voice yelled loudly in his ear.

"?you out there? Scarecrow, are you out there? Please respond!" It was Romeo.

"What is it, Romeo?"

"Jesus! Where have you been? I've been trying to get you for the last ten minutes."

"I've been busy. What is it?"

"Get out of the station. Get out of the station now."

"I can't do that now, Romeo," Schofield said as he ran.

"Scarecrow, you don't understand. Air Force just called us. A group of F-22s just shot down a British fighter about 250 nautical miles out, but the bogey got a shot off before it was hit." Romeo paused. "Scarecrow, it's heading right for Wilkes Ice Station. Satellite scans of radiation emissions from the missile indicate that it is nuclear."

Schofield felt a chill run down his spine as he ran. He came to the fissure in the wall and dropped to the ground, baseball-style, and slid through the horizontal fissure.

"How long?" he asked when he landed inside the small tunnel. He ignored the others standing around him.

"Two hundred and forty-three miles at 400 miles per hour. That gives you thirty-seven minutes until detonation. But that was nine minutes ago, Scarecrow. I've been trying to get through to you, but you haven't been responding. You have twenty-eight minutes until a live nuke hits that ice station. Twenty-eight minutes."

"Swell," Schofield said, looking at his watch.

"Scarecrow. I'm sorry, but I can't stay here. I've got to get my men to a safe distance. I'm sorry, but you 're on your own now, buddy."

Schofield looked at his watch.

It was 10:32 p.m.

Twenty-eight minutes. The nuclear missile would hit Wilkes Ice Station at 11:00 P.M.

He looked up at the group around him. Sarah Hensleigh, Renshaw, Kirsty, and Wendy. And Gant. It was only then that Schofield realized that Gant was in the tunnel, too, sitting down on the icy floor. He saw the ugly red stain in her side and rushed over to her.

"Montana?" he said.

She nodded.

"Where is he?" Schofield asked.

"He's dead. The seals got him. But he killed Santa Cruz and he winged me."

"Are you OK?"

"No." Gant winced.

It was then that Schofield saw the wound. It was a gut shot, to the side of Gant's stomach. The bullet must have sneaked past the clasp on the side of her body armor. It wasn't a nice wound to have?a gut shot was a slow and painful way to die.

"Hold on," he said. "We'll get you outta here?"

He began to move Gant, but as he did so, Gant brushed roughly against his leg and dislodged something from his ankle pocket.

It was a silver locket.

Sarah Hensleigh's silver locket. The locket that she had given to Schofield before she had gone down to the cave.

The locket landed face down on the icy ground, and in a fleeting instant, Schofield saw the writing engraved on the back of it:

To Our Daughter,

Sarah Therese Parkes

On Your Twenty-first Birthday.

Schofield froze when he saw the engraving. He quickly pulled out his printed copy of Andrew Trent's e-mail. He scanned the list of ICG informers. And he found it.

PARKES. SARAH T. USD PLNTLGST

Schofield snapped up to look at Sarah Hensleigh. "What's your maiden name, Sarah?" he asked.

Snick-snick.

Schofield heard the sound of the gun cocking before he saw it emerge from behind Sarah Hensleigh's back.

Sarah Hensleigh held the pistol out at arm's length, pointed it at Schofield's head. With her spare hand, she pulled Santa Cruz's helmet headset out from behind her and adjusted the channel dial on the belt clip. She spoke into the headset.

"SEAL team, this is Hensleigh. Come in."

There was no reply. Hensleigh frowned.

"SEAL team, this is Hensleigh. Come in."

"There's no one up there, Sarah," Schofield said, cradling Gant in his arms. "They've evacuated the station. They're gone. There's a cruise missile on its way here right now and it's nuclear, Sarah. Those SEALs are long gone. We have to get out of here, too."

Suddenly Schofield heard a voice come over Sarah's headset. "Hensleigh, this is SEAL Commander Riggs. Report."

Schofield cringed, looked at his watch.

10:35 p.m. Twenty-five minutes to go.

He wasn't to know that the SEALs up in the station had switched over to a closed-circuit channel to launch their attack on Wilkes. He wasn't to know that they didn't know about the nuclear missile coming toward the station.

Hensleigh said, "SEAL Commander. I have the Marine leader down here with me in the cavern. I have him under forced arrest."

"We'll be down there soon, Hensleigh. You have authority to kill him if you have to. SEAL team out."

"Sarah, what are you doing?" Renshaw said.

"Shut up," Hensleigh said, swinging the gun round so that its cold barrel touched Renshaw's nose. "Get over there," she said, waving Renshaw and Kirsty to Schofield's side of the tunnel. Schofield noticed that Sarah Hensleigh held the gun with confidence and authority. She had used guns before.

Schofield said, "Where are you from, Sarah? Army or Navy?"

Sarah looked at him for a moment. Then she said, "Army."

"What section?"

"I was at the CDC in Atlanta for a while. Then I did some work for the Chem Weapons Division. And then, wouldn't you know it, I suddenly felt the urge to teach."

"Were you ICG before or after you went to teach at the university?"

"Before," Hensleigh said. "Long before. Hell, Lieutenant, the ICG sent me to teach at USC. They asked me to retire from the Army, gave me a lifetime pension, and sent me off to the university."

"Why?"

"They wanted to know what was going on there. In particular, they wanted to know about ice core research?they wanted to know about the chemical gases people like Brian Hensleigh were finding buried in the ice. Gases from highly toxic environments that disappeared hundreds of millions of years ago. Carbon monoxide variants, pure chlorine gas molecules. The ICG wanted to know about it?they can find uses for that sort of thing. So I got into the field, and I got to know Brian Hensleigh."

Renshaw said, "You married him to get information out of him?"

Over in the corner of the tunnel, Kirsty watched this conversation with almost stunned interest.

"I got what I wanted," Sarah Hensleigh said. "So did Brian."

"Did you kill him?" Renshaw asked. "The car accident?"

"No," Hensleigh said. "I didn't. ICG wasn't involved in that at all. It was exactly that, an accident. Call it whatever you want, destiny, fate. It just happened."

"Did you kill Bernie Olson?" Schofield asked quickly.

Sarah paused before she answered that

"Yes," she said. "I did."

"Oh, you fucking bitch," Renshaw said.

"Bernie Olson was a liar and a thief," Hensleigh said. "He was going to publish Renshaw's findings before Renshaw did. I didn't really care about that. But then when Renshaw struck metal fifteen hundred feet down, Olson told me he was going to publish that, too. And I just couldn't allow that to happen. Not without the ICG knowing about it first"

"Not without the ICG knowing about it first," Schofield repeated bitterly.

"It's our job to know everything first."

"So you killed him," Schofield said. "With sea snake venom. And you made it look like Renshaw did it."

Sarah Hensleigh looked at Renshaw. "I'm sorry, James, but you were far too easy a target. You and Bernie fought all the time. And when you fought that night, it was just too good an opportunity to miss."

Schofield looked at his watch. "Sarah, listen. I know you don't believe me, but we have to get out of here. There is a nuclear missile?"

"There is no missile," Hensleigh snapped. "If there were, the SEALs wouldn't be here."

Schofield glanced at his watch again.

10:36 p.m.

Shit, he thought. It was so frustrating. They were stuck here, at the mercy of Sarah Hensleigh. And she was just going to wait here until the nuke arrived and killed them all.

It was at that moment that Schofield's watch flicked over to 10:37 p.m.

Schofield hadn't known about the eighteen Tritonal 80/20 charges that Trevor Barnaby had laid in a semicircle around Wilkes Ice Station with the intention of creating an iceberg.

Hadn't known that exactly two hours ago?at 8:37 p.m.? when Barnaby had been inside the diving bell alone, Barnaby had set a timer to detonate the Tritonal charges in two hours' time.

The eighteen Tritonal charges exploded as one and the blast was absolutely devastating.

Three-hundred-foot geysers of snow shot up into the air. A deafeningly loud groan echoed out across the landscape as a deep semicircular chasm formed in the ice shelf. And then suddenly, with a loud, ominous crack, that part of the ice shelf containing Wilkes Ice Station and everything below it? a whole three cubic kilometers of ice?suddenly dropped away and began to fall into the sea.

Down in the ice tunnel in the cavern, the world tilted crazily. Chunks of ice rained down on everyone inside the tunnel. The collective boom of the eighteen Tritonal charges going off sounded like an enormous thunderclap.

At first, Schofield thought it was the nuclear missile Thought that Romeo had made a terrible mistake and that the nuke had arrived half an hour earlier than expected. But then he realized that it had to be something else?if it had been the nuke, they would all have been dead by now. The tunnel lurched suddenly and Sarah Hensleigh was thrown off balance. Renshaw seized the opportunity and dived forward, tackling her. The two of them hit the ice wall hard, but Hensleigh threw Renshaw clear of her.

Schofield was still holding Gant. He put her down and made to stand up, but Sarah Hensleigh whirled around and pointed her gun right at his face.

"I'm sorry, Lieutenant. I kind of liked you," she said.

Despite the cacophony of sound all around them, the sound of the gun going off inside the small ice tunnel was deafening.

Schofield saw Sarah Hensleigh's chest explode with blood.

Then he saw her eyes bulge and her knees buckle as she dropped to the floor, dead.

Schofield's Desert Eagle was still smoking when Gant put it back in Schofield's thigh holster. Schofield had never had a chance to draw it, but Gant, down by his knees, had.

Kirsty just stared at the scene with her mouth open. Schofield rushed over to her.

"Jesus, are you OK," he said. "Your mother..."

"She wasn't my mother," Kirsty said quietly.

"Would it be all right if we talked about this later?" Schofield asked. "In about twenty-two minutes this place is gonna be water vapor."

Kirsty nodded.

"Mr. Renshaw," Schofield said, looking at the shuddering walls all around him. "What's happening?"

Renshaw said, "I don't know?"

At that moment, the whole tunnel lurched suddenly and dropped about ten inches.

"It feels like the ice shelf has been dislodged from the mainland," Renshaw said. "It's becoming an iceberg."

"An iceberg ...," Schofield said, his mind turning. All of a sudden, his head snapped up and he looked at Renshaw. "Are those elephant seals still out in that cave?"

Renshaw looked out through the fissure.

"No," Renshaw said. 'They're gone."

Schofield crossed the tunnel and picked up Gant in his arms, carried her toward the fissure. "I thought that might happen," he said. "I killed the bull. They're probably out looking for him, now."

"How are we going to get out of here?" Renshaw said.

Schofield hoisted Gant up into the fissure and pushed her through. Then he turned to face Renshaw, his eyes gleaming.

"We're gonna fly out of here."

The big black fighter stood magnificently in the middle of the underground cavern?its sharply pointed nose tilted downward and its sleek black wings swept low. Large chunks of ice rained down from the cavern's high ceiling and exploded against its fuselage.

Schofield and the others raced across the shaking floor of the cavern and took shelter underneath the belly of the big black plane.

As Schofield held her in his arms, Gant showed him the keypad and the entry-code screen.

The entry-code screen glowed green.

24157817 :_________________________

ENTER AUTHORIZED ENTRY CODE

"Did anybody figure out the code?" Schofield said.

"Hensleigh was working on it, but I don't think she ever figured it out."

"So we don't know the code," Schofield said.

"No, we don't," Gant said.

"Great."

At that moment, Kirsty stepped up alongside Schofield and peered at the screen.

"Hey," she said, "Fibonacci number."

"What?" Schofield and Gant said at the same time.

Kirsty shrugged self-consciously. "Two-four-one-five-seven-eight-one-seven. It's a Fibonacci number."

"What's a Fibonacci number?" Schofield said.

"Fibonacci numbers are a kind of number sequence," Kir-sty said. "It's a sequence where each number is the sum of the two numbers before it." She saw the amazed looks around her. "My dad showed it to me. Does anybody have a pen and a piece of paper?"

Gant had the diary she had found earlier in her pocket. Renshaw had a pen. At first it dribbled with ink-colored water, but then it worked. Kirsty began to scribble some numbers in the diary.

She said, "The sequence goes like this: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. You just add the first two numbers to get the third. Then you add the second and the third to get the fourth. If you just give me a minute ...," Kirsty said as she began to scribble frantically.

Schofield looked at his watch.

10:40 p.m.

Twenty minutes to go.

As Kirsty scribbled in the diary, Renshaw said to Schofield, "Lieutenant, exactly how do you plan to fly out of here?"

"Through there," Schofield said absently, pointing at the pool of water over on the other side of the cavern.

"What?" Renshaw said, but Schofield wasn't listening. He was busy looking down at the diary as Kirsty wrote in it.

After two minutes, she had three rows of numbers written out. Schofield wondered how long this was going to take. He looked at the numbers as she wrote them:

0,1,1, 2, 3, 5, 8,13, 21, 34, 55, 89,144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, 6765, 10,946, 17,711, 28,657, 46,368, 75,025, 121,393, 196,418, 317,811, 514,229, 832,040, 1,346,269, 3,524,578, 5,702,887, 9,227,465, 14,930,352, 24,157,817

"And see that," Kirsty said. 'There's your number. 24157817."

"Holy shit," Schofield said. "OK, then. What are the next two numbers in the sequence."

Kirsty scribbled some more.

39,088,169, 63,245,986

"That's them," Kirsty said, showing the diary to Schofield.

Schofield took it and looked at it. Sixteen digits. Sixteen blank spaces to fill. Amazing. He punched the keys on the keypad.

The screen beeped.

24157817 3908816963245986

ENTRY CODE ACCEPTED. OPENING SILHOUETTE

There came an ominous droning sound from within the big black ship and then suddenly Schofield saw a narrow flight of steps fold down slowly from the ship's black underbelly.

He gave Kirsty a kiss on the forehead. "I never thought math would save my life. Come on."

And with that, Schofield and the others entered the big black ship.

They came into a missile bay of some sort. Schofield saw six missiles locked into place on two triangular racks, three missiles per rack.

He carried Gant across the missile bay and lay her on the floor just as Renshaw and Kirsty stepped up into the belly of the plane. Wendy hopped clumsily up the steps behind them. Once the little seal was safely inside, Renshaw pulled the stairs up behind her.

Schofield headed forward, into the cockpit. "Talk to me, Gant!"

Gant called forward, the pain evident in her voice: "They called it the Silhouette. It's got some kind of stealth feature that we couldn't figure out. Something to do with the plutonium."

Schofield stepped into the cockpit.

"Whoa."

The cockpit looked amazing?futuristic, especially for a plane that was built in 1979. There were two seats: one forward and to the right, the other?the radar operator/gunner's chair?behind it and to the left. The steepness of the cockpit?it pointed sharply downward?meant that the pilot in the front seat sat well below the gunner in the backseat.

He jumped into the pilot's seat just as?bang!?a large chunk of ice exploded against the outside of the canopy.

Schofield stared at the console in front of him: four computer screens, standard control stick, buttons and dials and indicators everywhere. It looked like an amazing high-tech jigsaw puzzle. Schofield felt a sudden panic sweep over him.

He would never be able to figure out how to fly this plane. Not in eighteen minutes.

But then, as he looked at the console more closely, he began to see that it wasn't actually that much different from the consoles on the Harriers he had flown in Bosnia. This was a man-made aircraft, after all?why should it be different?

He found the ignition switch, keyed it.

Nothing happened. Fuel feed, he thought. Got to pump the fuel feed.

He searched for the fuel feed button. Found it, pumped it. Then he hit the ignition switch again.

Nothing hap?

VRRRROOOOM!

The twin turbines of the Silhouette's jet engines roared to life and Schofield felt his blood rush. The sound of the engines blasting to life was like nothing he had ever heard.

He revved the engines. He had to warm her up fast.

Time, he thought.

10:45 p.m.

Fifteen minutes to go.

He kept revving the engines. Usually such a warm-up routine would take upward of twenty minutes. Schofield gave himself ten.

God, this was going to be close.

As he revved the engines whole sections of the cavern's ice walls began to collapse around the big black plane. After five minutes of revving, he looked for the vertical takeoff switch.

"Gant! Where's the vectored thrust?" On modern vertical-takeoff-and-landing-capable fighters like the Harrier, vertical lift-off is achieved through directable, or "vectored," thrusters.

"There aren't any," Gant called from the missile bay. "It has retrofiring jets instead! Look for the button that starts the retros!"

Schofield searched for it. As he did so, however, he came across another button. It was marked: cloak mode. Schofield frowned.

What the hell?

And then suddenly he saw the button he was looking for:

RETROS.

He hit it.

The Silhouette responded immediately and began to rise into the air. But then abruptly it jolted to a sudden halt. There came a loud grinding noise from behind it.

"Huh?" Schofield said.

He looked out through the back of the cockpit canopy, and he saw that the two tail fins of the Silhouette were still firmly embedded within the ice wall behind it.

Schofield found the button marked afterburner. Punched it.

Immediately a white-hot spray of pure heat burst out from the twin thrusters at the back of the Silhouette and began to melt the ice holding the rear of the plane captive.

The ice melted quickly; the tail fins soon came free.

Schofield checked his watch.

10:53 p.m.

The entire cavern lurched downward again.

Come on, now; don't go yet. 1 just need a couple more minutes. Just a couple more minutes....

Schofield kept warming the engine. He looked down at his watch as it ticked over to 10:54. Then 10:55.

All right, time's up. Time to go.

He hit the button marked retros again and the eight retro jets on the underside of the big black ship fired as one, shot out long white puffs of gas.

This time, the Silhouette rose off the icy ground, and began to hover inside the enormous underground cavern. The cavern around it rumbled and shuddered. Chunks of ice rained down from the ceiling, banged down on the back of the big black plane.

Chaos. Absolute chaos.

10:56 P.M.

Schofield looked out through the tinted-glass canopy of the Silhouette. The whole cavern was tilting crazily. It was almost as if the whole ice shelf was lurching forward, moving into the ocean....

It's falling off the mainland, he thought.

"What are you doing!" Renshaw called from the missile bay.

"I'm waiting for it to flip over!" Schofield called back.

Suddenly Schofield heard Gant groan with pain. "Renshaw! Help her! Fix that wound! Kirsty! Get up here! I need you!"

Kirsty came forward into the cockpit and climbed up into the high rear chair. "What do you want me to do?"

"See that stick there?" Schofield said. 'The one with the trigger on it?"

Kirsty saw a control stick in front of her. "Yeah."

"Pull that trigger for me, will you?"

Kirsty pulled the trigger.

As soon as she did so, two dazzling-white pulses of light shot out from both wings of the big black fighter plane.

The two tracer bullets slammed into the ice wall in front of the Silhouette and exploded in twin clouds of white. When the two clouds dissipated, Schofield saw a large hole in the ice wall.

"Nice shootin," Tex," he said.

He pulled back on his stick, and the Silhouette rose higher in the middle of the collapsing ice cavern.

"All right, everybody, hold on, this thing is gonna go any second now," Schofield said. "Kirsty, when I say so, I want you to press down on that trigger and hold it down, OK?"

"OK."

Schofield peered out through the canopy, looked out at the crumbling ceiling of the ice cavern, looked out at the pool of water through which they had all entered the cavern?the water in the pool was sloshing madly against the ice walls.

And then at that moment, it happened. The whole cavern just dropped?straight down?and then tilted dramatically. In that instant, Schofield knew that the whole of the ice shelf containing Wilkes Ice Station had come completely free of the mainland.

It had become an iceberg.

Wait for it, Schofield told himself. Wait for it....

And then, abruptly, the whole cavern tilted again.

Only this time, the tilting was much more dramatic. This time the whole cavern rotated a full 180 degrees, right around the hovering Silhouette!

The iceberg had flipped over!

The whole cavern was now upside-down."

Suddenly a torrent of water came rushing out of a wide hole in the "ceiling" of the cavern?the hole that only moments before had been the mouth of the underwater ice tunnel that had led up into the cavern.

The underwater ice tunnel no longer led to the depths of the ocean. Now it led upward. Now it led to the surface.

Schofield maneuvered the Silhouette so as to avoid the cascade of water pouring out of the ice tunnel. After a good twenty seconds, the rush of water abated and he pulled back on his stick. The Silhouette responded by rocking backwards in the air and pointing itself up at the wide hole in the ceiling.

"All right, Kirsty, now!"

Kirsty jammed down on her trigger.

Immediately the Silhouette's wings spewed forth a devastating burst of tracer fire. The relentless wave of bullets disappeared inside the hole in the ceiling and assaulted any icy crags or outcroppings that dared to jut out of the walls of the ice tunnel.

At that moment, Schofield hit the thrusters and the Silhouette shot up into the tunnel, just as, behind it, the ceiling of the enormous cavern spectacularly collapsed in on itself.

The wing-mounted guns of the Silhouette blazed away, blasting at any imperfections in the ice tunnel as the big black plane flew upward through what had once been the underwater ice tunnel.

Schofield guided the sleek black plane up through the tunnel, shooting through puffs of white cloud, rolling the big plane onto its side when the tunnel narrowed, praying to God that the tracer bullets were clearing the way.

Up and up the Silhouette went, blasting away at the tunnel in front of it. Explosions boomed out all around the big black plane. The sound of its wing-mounted guns firing away was deafening.

And then suddenly the tunnel behind the Silhouette began to collapse at a phenomenal rate.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

Massive chunks of ice began to rain down from the ceiling of the tunnel behind the speeding plane. The Silhouette raced upward through the tunnel, blasting away at the walls of the tunnel in front of it while at the same time outrunning the collapsing tunnel behind it.

Through the cockpit canopy it looked like some kind of video-game thrill ride. The tunnel swept past Schofield at phenomenal speed, and occasionally the world nipped upside-down as he rolled the big plane to avoid falling chunks of ice.

Schofield watched as the barrage of tracer bullets decimated the walls of the tunnel in front of him, widening it, smoothing it, and then suddenly?voom!?the walls of the ice tunnel vanished and in a single, glorious instant he saw the sky open up in front of him.

The Silhouette burst out of the iceberg and flew up into the clear open sky.

The Silhouette shot up into the air, almost vertical, and Schofield looked back over his shoulder and saw that the ice shelf that had held Wilkes Ice Station within it was indeed no longer an ice shelf. It was now an iceberg.

An absolutely massive iceberg.

It had flipped over and Schofield saw the eroded underbelly of what had once been the ice shelf?the thin, icy stalactites, the glistening-wet mountain peaks?rising like spires above the new berg. He also saw the jagged black hole through which the Silhouette had blasted out of the berg.

And then suddenly movement caught his eye: a thin white object racing over the ocean, heading toward the newly formed iceberg.

The missile.

And as the Silhouette roared into the sky, Schofield watched in silent awe as the nuclear-tipped missile slammed into the iceberg and burrowed into it. There was about a three-second delay ...

And then the nuclear device detonated.

Armageddon.

The white-hot flash of the nuclear explosion?directly beneath the Silhouette as it shot up into the sky?was absolutely blinding.

Solid cliffs of ice were turned instantly to powder as every side of the iceberg containing Wilkes Ice Station and the underground cavern blew out with the blast wave.

The blast wave shot underwater, vaporizing everything in its path, creating huge waves of water that expanded out from the coast, rocking the massive icebergs that lined the cliffs as if they were a child's bath toys. Truth be told, it wasn't a large nuclear blast?three kilotons, with a blast radius of half a kilometer. But then again, there really was no such thing as a small nuclear explosion.