Schofield was on his feet in seconds, moving quickly across the deck toward Rebound, Gant, and Mother over by the south tunnel.
He spoke into his helmet mike as he ran. "Montana, this is Scarecrow, report."
"Still up on A-deck, Scarecrow. Snake and Santa Cruz're up here with me."
"How many up there?" Schofield asked.
"I count it as five military and two civilian," Montana's voice said. "But two of the military guys just made a break for one of the ladders and went down a level. What? Oh, fuck?"
The connection cut off. Schofield heard a scuffle.
"Montana?"
Suddenly a French commando stepped out onto the deck in front of Schofield himself.
He was the last of the five French soldiers who had fallen into the pool, the only one of them to come out of it alive. He looked like death warmed up?dripping wet, scowling, and mad as hell. He glared at Schofield, then raised his crossbow.
Without missing a beat, Schofield drew a throwing knife from a sheath strapped to his knee and threw it underhanded. The knife whistled through the air and thudded into the Frenchman's chest. He dropped instantly. The whole thing took two seconds. Schofield never stopped walking. He stepped over the slumped body, retrieved his knife and the dead French commando's crossbow, and kept moving.
He spoke into his helmet mike again: "Montana, I say again, are you all right?"
"I copy, Scarecrow. I'm OK. Revision on my previous count: make that four military and two civilians. Put me down for one more frog."
"Put me down for one, too," Schofield said.
Schofield arrived at the entrance to the south tunnel, where he found Gant and Rebound. They were dragging Mother into the tunnel.
Schofield saw Mother's leg immediately. A bloody, jagged piece of bone protruded from where her left knee should have been.
"Put her somewhere safe, stop the flow, and give her a hit of methadone," he said quickly.
"Got it?," Gant said, looking up at him. She cut herself off abruptly.
Schofield's antiflash glasses had been lost in the water in the battle with the killer whales, and Gant saw his eyes for the first time.
Two prominent vertical scars cut down across both of his eyes. They were unmissable, hideous. Each scar stretched downward in a perfectly straight line from eyebrow to cheekbone, scarring the eyelid in between.
Gant winced when she saw them and regretted it as soon as she did so. She hoped Schofield didn't notice.
"How are you feeling, Mother?" Schofield asked as they dragged Mother into the tunnel.
"Nothing one good kiss from a fine-lookin' man like you wouldn't fix," Mother growled through clenched teeth. Despite her pain, she, too, saw Schofield's scarred eyes.
"Maybe later," Schofield said as he saw a door set into the tunnel wall ahead of them. "In there," he said to Gant and Rebound.
They opened the door and dragged Mother inside, all four of them dripping wet. They were in a storeroom of some sort. Rebound immediately set to work on Mother's leg.
Schofield spoke into his helmet mike: "Marines, call in."
Names came in over the intercom as each Marine identified him- or herself.Montana, Snake, and Santa Cruz. All up on A-deck.
Rebound and Gant, E-deck. They called in formally over their helmet intercoms even though they were standing right next to Schofield, so that the others would hear their voices and know for a fact that they were still alive. Even Mother said her name, just for the record.
There was no word from Book, Hollywood, Legs, Samurai, or Ratman.
"OK, everyone, listen up," Schofield said. "By my count these bastards are down to four now, plus the two civilians they brought along with them to jerk my chain.
"This has gone far enough. It's time to end it. We have a numerical advantage, seven against four. Let's use it. I want a flush of this entire facility from the top down. I want these assholes pushed into a corner so we can finish them off without losing any more of our people. All right, this is how it's gonna happen. I want?"
There came a sudden thunking noise from above him and Schofield immediately looked upward.
There was a long silence.
Schofield saw a line of fluorescent lights bolted to the ceiling above him. They stretched away at regular intervals down the southern tunnel to his right.
And then, at that moment, as Schofield watched them, every single fluorescent light in the tunnel went out.
The world glowed incandescent green.
Night vision.
With his scarred eyes masked by his night-vision goggles, Shane Schofield climbed up one of the rung-ladders between E-deck and D-deck. He moved slowly and carefully, deliberately. He remembered Book saying once that wearing night-vision goggles is like wearing a pair of low-powered binoculars strapped to your head? you see something and you reach out to grab it, only to find that it's actually a lot closer than you think, and you knock it over.
The whole station was cloaked in darkness.
And silence.
Cold, eerie silence.
With the entire station filled with the flammable propellant from the air conditioners, all gunfire had ceased. The occasional shuffle of movement and the odd low whisper of someone speaking into a helmet microphone were all that could be heard in the pitch-darkness.
Schofield surveyed the green-lit station through his night-vision goggles.
The battle had entered a new phase.
Somehow, one of the French commandos must have managed to find the station's fuse box and turn off all the lights. It was a desperate ploy, but a good one nonetheless.
Darkness has long been the ally of numerically inferior forces. Even the advent of ambient-light technology?night-vision goggles and gun sights?hasn't diminished the average military tactician's opinion of the advantages of a small operation carried out under cover of darkness. It's a simple maxim of warfare?landed, naval, or airborne?nobody likes to fight in the dark.
"Marines, stay alert. Watch for flashers," Schofield whispered into his helmet mike. One of the great dangers of night-vision fighting is the use of stun grenades, or "flashers"? grenades that emit a sudden blinding flare of light that is designed to temporarily disorient an enemy. Since night-vision goggles magnify any given light source, if one sees a flasher go off through a pair of night-vision goggles blindness won't be temporary. It will be permanent.
Schofield peered up into the station's central shaft. No light entered the station from outside the enormous frosted-glass dome that topped the wide central shaft. It was June? early winter in the Antarctic. Outside, it would be twilight for the next three months.
Blackness. Total blackness.
Schofield felt Gant's weight on the ladder behind him. They were heading up the shaft.
As soon as the lights had gone out, Schofield had immediately ordered his team to "go to green." Then he had outlined his plan.
It was no use playing defense in a darkened environment They had to stay on the attack. Had to. The team that would win this battle would be the one that used the darkness to its advantage, and the best way to do that was to stay on the offensive. As such, Schofield's plan was simple.
Keep the French on the run.
They were down on numbers. Only four of the original twelve French commandos were still alive. And Montana had just said that two of those four had just evacuated A-deck. So they were also split into two groups of two.
But most important of all, they were running.
Schofield's team, on the other hand, was also split, but in a much more advantageous way.
Schofield had three Marines up on A-deck?Montana, Snake, and Santa Cruz?and another three down on E-deck: Gant, Rebound, and himself.
If the Marines up on A-deck could flush the remaining French commandos down through the station, soon those French soldiers would run right into the Marines from the lower decks. And then the Marines?a force of superior numbers, attacking from two flanks?would finish them.
But Schofield didn't want to get carried away, didn't want to get ahead of himself, because this would be no ordinary battle.
The fighting would be different.
For in the highly flammable gaseous atmosphere of the station, neither side could use guns.
This would be old-fashioned, close-quarter fighting.
Hand-to-hand combat.
In near total darkness.
In other words, it would be knives in the dark.
But as he'd thought about it more closely, Schofield had suddenly seen a problem with his plan.
The French had crossbows.
Schofield had looked at the crossbow he had taken from the dead French commando on E-deck. Since it didn't create a spark of any kind, a crossbow could be fired safely inside the gaseous atmosphere of the station. Schofield tried to think back to his early weapons training at the Basic School at Quantico, tried to remember the vital stats for a hand-held crossbow. He remembered that the standard range of accuracy for a small-size crossbow was not great, about the same as that for a conventional six-shooter, roughly twenty feet.
Twenty feet.
Damn it, Schofield thought. Knives would be useless if the French had a twenty-foot safety zone around themselves. With no corresponding projectile-firing weapon, the Marines wouldn't stand a chance. The thing was, they didn't have such a weapon. At least, nothing that they could use safely in the station's flammable gaseous environment.
And then it occurred to Schofield.
Maybe they did....
Schofield stepped up onto D-deck with his Maghook held out in front of him at shoulder height, ready to fire. In his other hand, he held the dead Frenchman's crossbow.
Although not exactly designed for accuracy, the Armalite MH-12 Maghook launcher has the ability to shoot its magnetic grappling hook quite substantial distances?over a hundred feet.
Initially, the MH-12 Maghook was intended for use in urban warfare and antiterrorist operations?its chief purpose was to provide a self-contained rope and grappling hook that could be used for scaling the sides of buildings, or providing zip lines along which antiterrorist units could slide and make rapid forced entries.
That being the case, the Maghook's small hand-held launcher had to have the power to shoot its hook to great heights. The answer was a state-of-the-art hydraulic launching system that provided 4,000 pounds per square inch of enhanced vertical thrust. The way Schofield figured it, if he fired his Maghook at an enemy soldier from a distance of twenty feet, 4,000 pounds per square inch of thrust had to have some chance of scoring a hit.
And indeed, as Schofield himself had discovered in the pool before, at close range, underwater, a Maghook had the capacity to stun a seven-ton killer whale. When fired at a one-hundred-and-eighty-pound man at similar range, above water, the Maghook would probably crack his skull.
Thus armed, the Marines were confident that they could handle the French commandos' crossbows.
So the plan would go ahead.
Montana, Snake, and Santa Cruz would work their way down through the station from A-deck, forcing the Frenchmen down, while Schofield, Gant, and Rebound worked their way up from E-deck. They would hopefully meet halfway and the rest would write itself.
Schofield and Gant had departed right away.
Rebound was to join them as soon as he had stemmed the flow of blood from Mother's leg and started her up on an intravenous line of methadone.
The three Marines on A-deck began their attack.
They moved quickly, using a textbook three-man flushing formation known as "leapfrogging." One Marine would move forward, ahead of his partners, and fire his Maghook. Then, while he reeled his hook in to reload, a second Marine would move in front of him?"leapfrogging" him?and fire his Maghook at the enemy. By the time the third man stepped forward and fired, the first man was ready to fire again and the cycle continued.
The two French soldiers on A-deck responded as they were supposed to?they retreated, hastened away from the rolling wave of powerful Maghook fire. They hurried for the ladders, climbed down the shaft.
However, as he fielded reports from Montana about the French soldiers' movement, Schofield noticed something odd about their evasive maneuvers.
They were moving too fast.
In their retreat down the shaft, the four French soldiers had completely avoided the destroyed B-deck catwalk and continued straight down to C.
They moved fluidly, in a swift two-by-two cover formation?the lead two men covering the forward flank, the rear two covering their pursuers behind, with a space of about ten yards between the two pairs.
Earlier, Montana had reported that all four of the French commandos were wearing night-vision goggles. They had come prepared.
They continued to move down the shaft fast.
Schofield had expected them to waste time in the tunnels as they tried to adopt a defensive position. But the French soldiers seemed to have other ideas. They darted into the C-deck tunnels only for so long as it took the Marines pursuing them from the levels above to join them. Then suddenly they appeared on the catwalk again and made for the rung-ladder leading down to D-deck.
At that moment, Schofield recalled something Trevor Barnaby had once said about strategy.
"Good strategy is like magic," Barnaby had said. "Make your enemy look at one hand while you're doing something with the other."
"They're moving for the southwest ladder," Montana's voice said in Schofield's earpiece. "Scarecrow, you down there?"
Schofield moved forward along the D-deck catwalk, the world green before his eyes. "We're on it."
He and Gant approached the southwest corner of D-deck, saw the rung-ladder that led up to C-deck.
Schofield spoke into his mike. "Rebound, where are you?"
"Finishing up now, sir," Rebound's voice replied from the storeroom down on E-deck.
"Flanking west, Sarge," the voice of José "Santa" Cruz said over the intercom.
Montana's voice: "Keep 'em coming, Cruz. Then send 'em down to the Scarecrow."
On D-deck, Schofield and Gant arrived at the rung-ladder. They crouched, leveled their weapons at the empty ladder. They heard boots stomping fast on the metal catwalk above them, heard the distinctive snap-phew! of a crossbow being fired.
"They're coming to the ladder," Santa Cruz's voice said.
More footsteps clanged on the metal grating.
Any second now ...
Any second...
And then suddenly, clunk, clunk.
What the hell?
"Marines! Eyes shut! Flasher on the ground!" Santa Cruz's voice yelled suddenly.
Schofield immediately squeezed his eyes shut just as he heard the stun grenade bounce on the metal deck above him.
The stun grenade went off?like a flashbulb on a camera? and for a brief instant the whole of Wilkes Ice Station flared white.
Schofield was about to open his eyes when suddenly there came a new noise from his right. It sounded like someone doing up a zipper really, really fast.
Schofield spun right and opened his eyes, and his green world streaked laterally. His eyes searched the empty shaft, but he saw nothing.
"Ah, shit!" Cruz said. "Sir! One of them just went over the railing!"
The zipping sound that Schofield had just heard suddenly made sense. It had been the sound of someone rappelling down the central shaft on a rope.
Schofield froze for a split second.
Such a move wasn't a defensive move at all.
It was a coordinated move, a planned move, an attacking move.
The French weren't actually on the run.
They were carrying out a plan of their own.
Make your enemy look at one hand while you're doing something with the other....
Like a chess player caught in check a second before he intends to play his own killing move, Schofield felt his mind start to spin.
What were they up to?
What was their plan?
In the end he didn
't have time to think about it, because no sooner had he heard Santa Cruz's message than a volley of arrows thudded into the ice wall all around him. Schofield ducked and spun and saw Gant dive to the floor behind him, and then he spun back round and before he knew what was happening a figure slid down the rung-ladder in front of him and Schofield found himself standing face-to-face with the Frenchman he knew as Jacques Latissier.
Rebound was crouched over Mother in the storeroom on E-deck.
Mother had tough veins, and, to make it even more difficult, Rebound was wearing his night-vision goggles as he tried to get the needle into her arm. He'd missed the vein on his first four attempts, and he had only now just managed to get the IV line flowing into Mother's arm.
The IV done, Rebound stood up and was about to leave Mother when, strangely, he heard the sound of soft footsteps hurrying down the tunnel outside the darkened storeroom.
Rebound froze.
Listened.
The sound of the footsteps faded as they hurried off down the southern tunnel outside.
Rebound stepped forward and grabbed the doorknob and slowly, quietly, turned it. The door opened and he peered out into the tunnel through his night-vision goggles.
He looked left and saw the pool. Small waves lapped against the sides of the deck.
He looked right and saw a long, straight tunnel stretching away from him into darkness. He recognized it immediately as the elongated southern tunnel of E-deck that led to the station's drilling room.
Since it was the lowest level in the ice station, E-deck housed the station's drilling room?the room from which the scientists dolled down into the ice to obtain their ice cores. So as to maximize the depths to which the scientists could drill, the drilling room had been constructed as far into the ice shelf as possible?to the south of the station, where the ice was deepest. The room was connected to the main station complex by a long, narrow tunnel that stretched for at least forty meters.
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