Ice Station ss-1

by Matthew Reilly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  All other considerations are secondary.

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

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

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

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

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

  "Only then it got better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "And he killed him?"

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

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

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

  "What was in the syringe?"

  "Industrial-strength drain-cleaning fluid."

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

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

  Schofield said, "Is he still alive?"

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

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

  "This is the only entrance."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The occasion, the reaffirmation of an alliance.

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

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

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

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

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

  The North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

  NATO.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Example?" Munro said.

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

  "Well, no. I thought it was?"

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

  A pause.

  "No," Munro said.

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

  "No, I didn't know that."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "What?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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