Ice Station Death
Page 17
As he ran, his mind wandered, and he found himself thinking of having traversed that particular patch of snow an endless number of times. It was as if he was caught in an infinite loop, destined never to be able to break out, never to be able to go on with the rest of his life. The loop continued… and night seemed as far away as it always was.
A dead nothosaur, riddled by bullets from the Russian assault team, lay in his path, and he hardly gave it a second thought, other than to think that Natasha was right: they were just animals, and they could be killed easily—if you were prepared for them. Even the big one would likely not last too long if someone got a few planes in the air armed with missiles. Even just helicopters with anti-tank ordnance could cut it into mincemeat.
The rifle he was carrying, though, wasn’t going to do it. The best he could hope for was not to run into the big bastard.
Javier kept going. He’d halved the distance to Clark, but he wasn’t going to be in time to head him off. Clark would enter the cave before Javier reached him; the Australian was already descending the big incline that the Russians had used for their retreat. His head soon dropped out of sight.
“Damn,” Javier said, and redoubled his pace.
But extra speed didn’t mean that he was catching the other man any quicker. All he achieved was to hit the ground a number of times before deciding that he’d make better progress by slowing down. He’d reached the top of the descent and was in sight of the cave mouth, so he reduced his pace to a walk and unslung the FAL.
Clark was nowhere to be seen. Javier shrugged and began his descent, rifle at the ready. There really weren’t too many options: he was either in the cave or he’d jumped into the sea.
The back of the opening was invisible to Javier from that angle, but he thought that swinging out to see the cavern would only put him in sight of whatever happened to be inside, so he maintained his angle of approach.
The clock in his head ticked and tried to tell him that time was running out for Clark, but Javier forced himself to go slowly. Haste was his enemy.
A scream pierced the wastes. It sounded like it would carry all the way back to Buenos Aires, and it spurred him into action. Throwing caution to the wind, Javier rushed headlong towards whatever might await him in the cave.
At first, he couldn’t find the source of the yelling. He was five meters into the cavern before he realized it was coming from his left, near the wall of bodies.
Javier ran towards the sound and, clearing a pile of fallen ice, he was confronted with a grisly scene.
Clark Smith lay on the ground in a pool of his own blood. He was missing a leg, which had been violently torn from its socket and lay halfway across the cave. Despite the horrendous injuries which must have led to enormous blood loss, the Australian was still alive. He was using his hands to crawl across the ice towards the pile of human bodies around the eggs.
His objective was a shock of blond hair that fell from the pile onto the floor. Its owner was sprawled atop the rest of the bodies, clearly a recent addition. She lay where she’d been dropped: legs on the pile, head dropping over the edge, one arm beside it, the fingers dragging in the snow.
Clark reached her hand and took it in his. To Javier’s astonishment, the girl’s hand first jerked away slightly, and then closed around his.
The nothosaur struck. One moment it was standing to one side watching Clark crawl with its head tilted to one side in a strangely human-like way, and the next it moved, lightning-fast.
Javier flinched as the enormous jaws closed around the Australian’s midriff. He expected them to snap shut and cut the man in half but, instead, the creature lifted him off the ground almost gently and laid him on top of the pile. At some point Smith lost consciousness, but he managed to keep hold of the girl’s hand. The two were now strewn haphazardly across the pile, the ultimate layer of a macabre sculpture.
It was too much for the colonel. Without checking to see if there were any other creatures waiting within, he opened fire on the nothosaur, using the FAL on full automatic. He knew it was less precise, knew that all he was really achieving was to spend his ammo wastefully, but he didn’t care. He wanted to see the creature and its smiling, jagged teeth blown into tiny fragments of flesh and bone and enamel.
The nothosaur screamed. It wasn’t the roar he’d come to associate with these creatures, but something more akin to the sound that he remembered that pigs being slaughtered made when he was a child: high-pitched, plaintive, almost like a woman’s yell of terror in an old horror movie. The sound was both an expression of pain and, somehow, a sound of warning. Nothing that heard the sound could fail to understand the message: “Danger! Danger!”
Was it also a cry for help?
Javier didn’t care. The creature staggered towards him, obviously badly hurt. He’d concentrated his fore on the neck and forward portion of the torso on the assumption that those areas were full of delicate organs… organs hopefully not shielded by a thick skull.
It was evidently working. The nothosaur’s walk became more and more erratic before it finally collapsed in front of Javier.
He finished emptying the clip, and stood above it, shaking and, he realized, shouting and cursing. When the magazine was exhausted, he kicked the nothosaur in the head again and again. There was no need for that, nothing to be gained, but the terror in his body demanded a release.
Gradually, sanity returned and Javier remembered the creature’s screams, and the certainty that they were desperate calls for help. In military terms, he thought, the lizard expected backup. He stopped kicking it and turned his attention to Clark.
The man’s hand was moving. He was alive.
Javier rushed over and put his hand on the Australian’s neck. He would be weak from blood loss, of course, but the Colonel wanted to see just how weak and try to figure out what he could do. The missing leg had been torn off at the hip, there was no way to apply a tourniquet.
And… Clark wasn’t bleeding as much as he should be. That wound should have been gushing blood like a river during snowmelt season, but the fall was barely a trickle, mostly dripping downward along the bodies below him.
As he observed this, Javier searched for a pulse, but no matter how hard he pressed, he was unable to feel anything. The man had to be dead.
Except… The hand had moved again.
It wasn’t his hand.
The girl!
Two steps brought him over to where she lay face down on the pile. He gently disentwined the woman’s living fingers from Clark’s dead ones and turned her over to face him. Long blond hair fell across her face, and though her exposed skin felt cold in his hand, her body wasn’t stiff, didn’t feel dead. In fact, it almost felt like she was moving along with him.
Could Clark have been right? Could he have been wrong about Anna? Had she survived the crash of the snowmobile after all? It seemed impossible: both he and Natasha had been convinced that she was dead.
She coughed and the movement blew her hair away from her face.
Ingrid.
Her eyes were barely open, but when he came close the lids slammed apart and she tried to lift her hands to push him away.
“It’s all right,” he said. “You’re going to be all right.”
He was pretty sure he was lying to her. Ingrid’s jacket, once electric blue like her sister’s, was stained with blood, some dry and flaking, more of it dark and cold. She looked to be on death’s door.
Nevertheless, she was trying to speak.
“Water…” Ingrid whispered.
He cursed himself for a fool, pulled his canteen out of his pocket and poured a few drops onto her lips. She swallowed and he waited.
“More.” Stronger this time.
He poured a little. She drank greedily and tried to sit.
“Wait. You’re hurt.”
“I... know.”
“I’m afraid to move you.”
“I think I can sit up.”
To Javier’s amazement,
she did, with his help. She grimaced and yelped in pain, but she sat.
“Are you all right?” He felt like a fool asking such a moronic question. She obviously wasn’t all right… but her determination was nothing short of amazing.
“Hurts,” she replied.
“I know.”
And then she tried to stand.
“Don’t do that. You…” He stopped. How could he tell her that she wasn’t in any condition to walk? That her only real option was to stay in a cave and either bleed or freeze? He couldn’t, so he put her arm around his neck and helped her stand. She swayed a little, but managed to stay on her feet. He was amazed.
And then their time ran out. A roar, too large to be contained by the cavern, shook the world.
“Oh, shit! It’s the big one.”
But they had more immediate problems. Smaller grey streaks, at least three of them, tore into the cave.
One of them jumped towards them.
Javier reacted instinctively, forgetting that Ingrid was badly hurt. He rolled to one side, out of the way of the hurtling animal, and pulled her with him. They tumbled off the pile of dead bodies and slammed into the cold ground—fortunately, Ingrid landed on top of him, so Javier took the brunt of the impact.
He pulled her back to her feet as he stood, but she wasn’t up to it and began to collapse again. He let her fall and fell on top of her, just as knife-sized teeth snapped shut above him.
Then, for the second time in… two hours? Three? A century? He’d lost all sense of time... he found himself shoving a woman into the crack at the back of the cave and diving in behind her.
But this time, he was just a fraction of a second too slow. Fire coursed down his back as something sliced through his jacket and skin.
“Damn,” Javier said.
“Are you all right?”
“I don’t know. I think so. But it hurts like hell.” Then he laughed.
“What?”
“I’m pretty sure I should be more worried about you than about me. You should see yourself.”
“The blood, you mean? I think most of it belongs to other people. Some of it’s mine, but I think I mostly got bruised. Those things aren’t gentle.” She cocked her head, listening. “What’s that sound?”
“Digging. They’re coming after us.”
***
Breen looked at his phone in disbelief, unable to believe what he was being ordered to do. Kidnapping the girl? Abandoning the other survivors if they couldn’t make it to the rendezvous point in time? The Pentagon must be getting seriously worried about something to risk a PR nightmare of that magnitude.
At least he still had some time to try to keep things from becoming a total disaster… maybe even lower the fallout of the inevitable diplomatic incident.
The last line of the message, however, burned in his mind:
Navy Seahawk will be there to pick you up. ETA: 1500 hours.
That was just ten hours away. The coordinates given coincided almost exactly with the position of the Irizar as far as Breen could tell.
“He’s been gone a long time,” Natasha said.
“Yes. If he doesn’t come back soon, we might have to return to the ship. We can’t hold these buildings without that rifle. We just can’t.”
“They’ll get us if we try to cross.”
“Not necessarily. We’ve already done it once. We should be fine.”
She gave him a look. “And what will you do with me if we make it? You’re not going to let me go back to England, are you?”
Breen sighed. “I would personally let you go back wherever you wanted. All I want is to go to a beach somewhere peaceful where there are no lizards and stay there until they have to lock me up in a nursing home.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“All right. No. You’re not going back to England. The U.S. government is going to debrief you, and then give you a choice. You can go back to Europe and continue to live the life you had before, or you can get asylum in America. If you’re smart, you’ll choose the asylum.”
“What?”
“Exactly what I said. If you go back to England, how long do you think it will take the SVR to have you in a basement somewhere in Vladivostok talking about your experiences here?”
“This isn’t the Cold War, Breen.”
“I know. The communists would have hesitated at snatching someone off a London street and getting them back across the Iron Curtain. You don’t have that particular protection.”
She growled under her breath, but said nothing.
“I wouldn’t worry about that now, though. It’s all moot unless we can find a way to make it out of here alive.”
He stood to get some water. All they had was snow from outside that they were melting in a pan on an electric stove, but it tasted incredible. He was parched and ravenous… but there was no food.
He wondered why anyone would choose to spend half a year marooned here. It was bad enough in the supposedly warm summer with its eternal day, but he couldn’t even imagine what it must be like in winter, with inhuman cold and howling winds and endless night.
He’d been sent to some hellholes over the course of his career. Mountains in Pakistan and deserts in Somalia came to mind immediately, but this… there was no question of living here without infrastructure. The people who came here were eternally one equipment malfunction away from an unpleasant death, and for what?
Most of the other hellholes he’d been to represented some kind of political flashpoint. Africa was the wild border of Islam, where its extremists could hide from the entire world. Pakistan, likewise was at a crossroad.
But Antarctica? It was nothing. Even the science done in the stations was mostly of interest to environmental groups. Politically, the place was irrelevant. The major powers, or at least some of them, had bases there, but it was only to show off a little. No one really cared.
He wondered how this incident would play out on the worldwide news. There was no way it wouldn’t get out. Someone on the Irizar would have had a phone and filmed the whole thing… and there was no way to get a cleanup crew—complete with icebreaker—here in time to erase the evidence. The Argentines would definitely reach the scene first in sufficient numbers to make any difference… and they were terrible at keeping secrets.
Besides, they had no incentive to keep this secret in particular. This was essentially a case in which the U.S. and Russia had clashed and innocents had taken the brunt of the casualties… It had happened before, and it always raised a hue and cry.
This time, the incident would be worse. Argentina was not a world power, but it was an established democracy and a nation that had been at peace with everyone on the planet for more than thirty years. Their voice would be listened to.
“We should probably get back to the ship,” he told Natasha.
She shook her head. “I’m not going anywhere until he gets back.”
Breen just nodded curtly. He still had time.
Chapter 17
The FAL clicked uselessly and Javier cursed. “I’m out of ammo.” He knew, every soldier knew, he shouldn’t have emptied the clip at the other creature… but that was easy to say now. In the moment, with the giant teeth facing him, there was no way he could stop.
Pushing the blond woman ahead of him, he pressed deeper into the crevice.
Ingrid said nothing. She just hyperventilated where he’d dropped her. A cut on her face was bleeding.
“We’ve got to get out of here. This crack leads to a small depression in the ice. We can walk back to the base from there. It’s maybe five hundred meters. Do you think you can make it?”
“I… I’ll try.”
Javier had grave doubts. She looked dizzy and her voice sounded weak, which didn’t surprise him in the least. Even if she was right about not having been hurt too badly, the stress of what had happened to her, combined with having been out in the snow for a couple of hours would be enough to leave her reeling. And Javier wasn
’t too convinced about her assessment of her injuries.
They crawled out of the tunnel, loud scratching behind them a constant reminder that they were not alone, and that slowing would mean an agonizing, inevitable death.
Ingrid grunted in pain, interspersing the sounds with even more eloquent yelps. She was clearly in a huge amount of pain, but Javier knew that she would have to hold up. There was no way they could stop. It just wasn’t an option.
They reached the tunnel exit and he led them out. The first hundred meters or so on the open ice were the least dangerous because they were completely hidden from the view of anything on the beach or in the cave.
But after that, the terrain flattened out and speed would be of the essence.
He took Ingrid’s forearm. The woman felt solid, muscular… maybe she’d be fine after all. They set out on the gentle rise which led towards the base. Ingrid matched him stride for stride, so he let go of her arm and concentrated on choosing the most direct route through the snowy crenellations.
They reached the top of a small ridge. The base was in sight across a flat plain and the going—though tense—should be easier. Javier took two steps.
Ingrid dropped to her knees and then collapsed on the snow. “You go ahead,” she groaned. “I need to rest.”
“Don’t say that. You’ll be fine.” He tugged on her arm, tried to put his hands around her waist and pull her to her feet, but it was no use. Ingrid’s legs appeared to have turned to jelly.
It soon became very apparent that no amount of tugging or whispered cajoling would get her walking again.
Javier took a deep breath and bent down to pass both arms under her. He groaned, grunted and, after nearly slipping multiple times, lifted Ingrid in a fireman’s carry.
He wondered if the Swedes fed their children ball bearings. Though she looked lithe and certainly wasn’t fat, this woman was probably heavier than Javier himself—and he was basically all muscle.
There was no other choice, however. Either he could carry her back to the base, praying that the nothosaurs would insist on digging their way through the tunnel after them and lose all that time… or he could leave her there to die.