Ice Station Death

by Gustavo Bondoni

  Yes.

  She would enjoy killing him.

  Snick.

  And she would enjoy killing his little Russian whore even more.

  ***

  Breen said nothing as they entered, just nodded to his right and said: “The coffee machine is working, take all you want.” He’d settled down beside a window in the tiny nook that served as a kitchen for the infirmary.

  Javier and Natasha descended on it and he stifled a laugh. They weren’t even trying to disguise what they’d been doing.

  He had no issues with it, other than the fact that he would have preferred for them to save their strength for more urgent pursuits. On the other hand, anything that helped them to relax was a positive… even if he knew that a relationship between them would create complications later.

  The clock was ticking, but they still had plenty of time. Of the ten hours he’d been given, only four had passed. It wouldn’t take them more than thirty minutes to return to the Irizar in normal conditions, although he preferred not to risk cutting it that close. But even allowing two hours, they had some time to kill.

  “How’s Ingrid?” Natasha asked.

  “She’s doing well. I’m letting her rest a bit.”

  Natasha nodded and drank. The coffee appeared to be much more important to her than the stricken woman at that particular moment.

  “Can I ask you something?” Breen said.

  Natasha blushed before saying: “Certainly.”

  “How did the sound machine on the fishing boat work?”

  “That?” She seemed bemused by the question. “That was just a simple speaker, boosted by the shape of the hull to carry the sound long distances through water. There wasn’t much science to it at all.”

  “I imagine it must have occurred to someone, though. Did you design it?”

  “Oh, no. It was already there when I arrived. There’s a man called Oleksandr Pripyenko, a paleontologist in St. Petersburg, who has a theory about dinosaur hearing, and the frequencies that they would hear. It’s all based on the shape of fossil skulls and no one ever took him very seriously. The machine was built on his theories, just a speaker that broadcast on a specific tone, in rhythmic pulses.” She chuckled. “Turns out he was right all along—too bad no one survived to tell him about it.”

  “You’ve survived.”

  “I thought you were going to kidnap me and have the CIA hide my voice from the world.”

  Breen felt uncomfortable at the direct way she said it, but not guilty. When he’d said that the Russians were very likely to kill her for what she’d seen, he meant every word of it. Russia was no longer the enemy of the West that it had once been—in many ways it had become an enlightened, modern society—but there were still things that, for strategic reasons, had to be kept secret. This certainly fell into that category.

  And one of the most admirable things about Russians had always been their pragmatic approach to life’s little problems. There was a legend about the space race that held that, while the U.S. was pouring millions into developing a pen that could write effectively in zero-g, the Soviets simply sent pencils.

  Whether that old story was true or not, Breen didn’t know. But it sounded true. It sounded consistent with the Russian approach.

  So, faced with something like an embarrassing violation of international treaties, some countries might simply accept the consequences. Others would protest their innocence and attempt to discredit their accusers.

  All of that would seem hugely unnecessary to a true pragmatist when you could solve it all with a single bullet.

  He changed the subject. “So we can build one?”

  “Sure. All we need is a couple of speakers and something to amplify with.”

  “What about the sound source?”

  “Just download a rock song through that phone of yours…. But why would we want to build one? I thought the point was to stay away from the things, not call them to us.”

  “I was thinking that if we could get them to come here while we run for the Irizar, it would definitely go a long way towards making it much safer to run across the open ice.”

  “That isn’t a bad idea.”

  “What isn’t?”

  They all turned towards the source of the new voice. Ingrid stood just inside the door, a blanket wrapped tightly around her body. She gave them a wan smile. “I’m not a ghost, you know.”

  Then her face fell. Breen had filled her in about what had happened while she wasn’t present. He believed she was still processing the loss of her sister. It clearly hadn’t hit her yet. Or at least not completely.

  Javier rushed over to her. “How do you feel?”

  “Much better now. I…” It was clear she was fighting back tears. “Thank you for what you did. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help out there. I still can’t believe you went back for me. I can’t imagine anyone being so brave. And Clark…” Now she was crying, unable to keep up the strong front.

  Javier didn’t even hesitate. He walked up and hugged the Swedish geologist. She hugged him back, tightly enough to look painful, and bawled into his shoulder. Breen watched Natasha out of the corner of his eye, but if the Russian was jealous, she didn’t let on.

  Ingrid composed herself and looked around the room. Breen expected another round of apologies, but the woman surprised him. “You were about to tell me what isn’t a bad idea.”

  “We’re thinking of setting up a sound lure to bring the creatures here while we try to get back to the Irizar.”

  “But why go back to the Irizar?”

  “Because, it’s better protection than this base, even if it isn’t perfect.”

  Ingrid gave him a strange look. “Then why did you come here in the first place?”

  Breen knew it was time for honesty. “I wanted to get a better look at the guys in black. Part of my job is to report on what they were doing.”

  “Did you know they would be here?”

  “No. Not until they appeared, but once they were here, it was my duty to watch them.”

  “Fair enough, I guess. How does one build this snare?”

  Breen released the breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. The one thing he didn’t want to have to talk about is why he’d brought Natasha with him. An injured woman without recon experience wasn’t exactly the standard choice for that kind of mission.

  “The first thing we need are speakers.”

  They cautiously exited the infirmary and walked over to one of the barracks. The empty bunks and discarded possessions reminded Breen of the pile of frozen bodies in the nest. In that sense, the emptiness was even more chilling than the damage done to the room by the nothosaurs.

  “No one thought to bring a stereo,” Javier remarked.

  “But we have one of these,” Breen said. He pulled two round objects a little bigger than his fist from one of the bedside tables.

  “What’s that?”

  “Cell phone speakers. Here’s the headphone jack.”

  “Well, at least we won’t have to leave our one working phone behind,” Javier said. “This one is full of music, and still halfway charged.” He showed the Russian women the screen of a phone he’d found in an open drawer.

  Breen handed the speakers to Natasha, who plugged in the phone. They listened to the sound for a few moments at full volume before she turned the rig off. “I don’t know if those will be strong enough. They’re loud, but we need a certain amount of bass.”

  “That’s a relief. I would have felt naked without it.”

  Javier gave him a hard look. “Any news about a rescue?”

  “Only that we need to get back to the Irizar.”

  “All right. I think there might be some bigger speakers in the office. Let’s go look.”

  Javier and the two women filed out of the barracks, Natasha stuffing the speakers into her jacket pocket with her good hand. Breen had taken the phone and was crouched under one of the beds in hopes of finding a bigger set of speakers, or m
aybe one of those bass boosters. If he knew one thing about soldiers out on boring duty, it was that they’d have their tunes with them, and be willing to share with anyone who couldn’t shoot them to make them stop. The louder the better.

  He was halfway under a bed when the wooden wall of the barracks exploded inward. That probably saved his life.

  The nothosaur, one of the small ones, shook itself like a wet dog, but what actually flew off were chips of wood and plaster.

  It was only distracted for a second, however. Almost too fast for Breen to react, it pounced onto him, or rather onto the bed he was under. The monster lifted the bed, mattress and all, and shook it like a cat shaking a mouse.

  That was all the opening Breen needed. He pulled the FAL into position and opened fire on it.

  The roar filled the room, dwarfing even the crash the creature made when it came through the wall. The nothosaur reared back, breaking a window in the process. Then it studied him.

  The lay of the land was complicated. The reptile, injured, presumably enraged, stood between Breen and the door. He could hear the others yelling to him.

  “Get back to the Irizar!” he shouted. “I’ll deal with this one.”

  Then, not caring whether they paid any attention to him or not, Breen shot a short burst into the window nearest his position and dove out onto the rocks outside. Blood immediately began seeping into his eye, and he brushed it away as he got to his feet and sprinted towards the building he thought was the offices.

  He was relieved to see that he’d guessed correctly. A pile of recently disturbed components marked what must have been Javier’s attempts to revive the radio.

  The colonel’s recollection had been correct: a set of dusty speakers and an amplifier stood beneath a shelf across the room. Breen looked around and located a metal filing cabinet. He propped it against the door as best he could and headed for the speakers.

  Breen pressed the power button, but nothing happened. He swore in frustration just as the door reverberated with the sound of something slamming into the frame. He was overjoyed that dinosaurs were as stupid as he’d always been told… even after going through a window in the barracks, the nothosaur appeared unable to realize that glass was much easier to penetrate than wooden doors.

  He desperately followed the power cord, wiping blood from his forehead every moment. Finally, he found the plug and jammed it into the nearest outlet.

  The building shook again.

  “Dammit,” he hissed. Time was running out. The last impact had actually caught part of the door and moved it inwards, displacing the cabinet a little. He could see the white of sunlight reflected off snow through the small opening.

  It would take a really, really dumb animal to miss that.

  He stabbed the power button and was relieved to see a small amber light blink on. Then he slammed the phone into place, inserted the cable into the aux plug and pressed play.

  The soft sound of guitars emanated from the speakers.

  “Nah,” Breen said out loud, “that’s not the way to listen to Metallica.”

  He turned the volume knob all the way to the right and smiled.

  “That’s more like it.”

  A single burst from the FAL took out the window, and he exited the office just as the door came down. He got around the building quickly enough that he was sure the monster hadn’t seen him and then stopped to catch his breath.

  He paused to catch his breath and to curse himself for being an idiot. Why had he bothered to do that? They couldn’t really be certain that the sound would shield them from pursuit anyway. He could already be hundreds of meters away.

  But if it did work… having the big sucker out of the way would be truly useful in attempting to prepare for its eventual attack on the Irizar. He tended to agree with Natasha’s assessment that the largest of the creatures wouldn’t just leave the icebreaker alone. It would be back.

  But the longer it took, the better.

  He slalomed between the tightly-packed buildings of the base in an attempt to throw off any pursuit and then headed out onto the ice. Javier, Natasha and Ingrid had gotten clear of the base and could be seen, starkly outlined against the white background, a few hundred meters ahead.

  He began to run after them when, from behind a large drift, the mottled skin of one of the small nothosaurs materialized in front of him. He froze. The thing was close enough that he could have reached out and stroked its chest, close enough to smell the stench of death it emanated.

  Yellow eyes flickered briefly over him and then the head looked away, towards the base, from which the unmistakable chords of Enter Sandman could be heard clearly, even at this distance. It lunged off, running with a strange, uneven gait that made him think of a cross between a skink and a camel.

  Desert creatures both. It certainly wasn’t the kind of movement one expected on the icy plains near the poles.

  But then, if it hadn’t been unnatural and unnerving it would have been out of place somehow.

  Chapter 19

  The crew of the Irizar lowered a rope. The sailor who peered over the railing appeared shocked to see them, but wasted no time in getting men to assist the injured women on board.

  “Did you see some sailors down there?” This was addressed to Javier. The fact that he was the only uniformed Argentine military man in the group apparently held a little weight.

  “No,” Javier replied.

  “The lieutenant took some men to look for you. Everything was fine, he even reported that he found a survivor, but then we lost radio contact.”

  “We didn’t see anyone.” Javier didn’t want to say what that meant: the men from the ship, probably friends of most of the crew, were most likely cold meat now added to the pile surrounding the eggs.

  But everyone who met them knew what losing contact meant. Heads turned to look down at the deck, a quiet moment in memory of shipmates they never expected to see again.

  Javier broke the somber mood. “What news? What is Buenos Aires saying? When are they coming to get us?”

  “There’s a ship on the way from Ushuaia with troops on board. They’re going to get us out of here and then try to secure the airfield to fly in the Hercules. They don’t want to land if there’s any danger of the big monster destroying the plane.”

  “There was a team of Russians out there. They had no trouble. But the Argentine government refuses to risk it to rescue us?” Javier said. “No. Don’t answer that. I already know what you’re going to say. Just tell me when the ship will be here.”

  “A day from now. Well, twenty hours.”

  Javier saw Breen checking his watch. He wondered what the American knew and wasn’t sharing with the rest of the team. Unfortunately, he had a feeling that he’d find out soon enough, and he suspected he wouldn’t like what he learned.

  “All right. Do you know if my cabin survived?”

  “What floor were you on?”

  “The second.”

  “I don’t think so. But we moved her stuff,” he pointed to Natasha, “out of the infirmary and into a belowdecks room.”

  Javier turned to her. “Mind if I join you? I really need to sleep.”

  Natasha smiled.

  ***

  Breen watched the Colonel take the Russian woman aside. He checked his watch again. In five hours, a large helicopter would arrive to fly him—and as many others as he deemed suitable to his country’s interests—to safety.

  His orders were quite clear: he was expected to have Natasha with him when he boarded that chopper. As simple as that.

  But, as always, his orders were emphatically not clear about how he should go about it. Was he expected, or indeed authorized, to shoot Colonel Balzano if the man attempted to stop him?

  He supposed that if he did shoot Balzano, he would probably be fired. And if he failed to get the woman secured, he would be yelled at by the experts at Fort Belvoir.

  All right. So the lesser evil would come from failure. International incid
ents and shooting high-ranking officers from the militaries of friendly nations was worse. Nevertheless, he could probably convince Javier of the advantages of putting the two injured scientists, and the only two female civilians, on the first vehicle out of the theater of operations.

  That vehicle would be an American helicopter.

  Failing that, Breen could try to sucker punch him. But he had to do it some time when no one was watching, and even then, the odds of success were limited. Javier wasn’t some guy just off the turnip truck. He knew how these things went, knew that even though Breen had a healthy respect for the colonel, he knew the American wasn’t above a certain amount of duplicity. Balzano might see him coming a mile away.

  It was definitely something he had to think about.

  Though he was utterly exhausted, Breen decided not to go back into his room—assuming it was even still standing—to rest. There would be plenty of time for that on the flight out.

  He was much more concerned about what might happen to him in the interim. Five hours was still a long time, and judging by what he’d heard, no one had any inkling of where the big creature had gone off to. From what the sailors reported, after the second attack on the Irizar, the monster had sunk back into the depths. Some of the sailors speculated that with the amount of ordnance it had absorbed, it was probably dying, but Breen had his doubts. FAL bullets would be nothing more than pinpricks to a creature that size: annoying, possibly even painful, but unlikely to do much permanent damage.

  A lot could happen in five hours… and though his body ached, he knew it could be suicide to spend the time resting.

  Instead, he headed aft towards the storage room where his equipment had been held. To his relief, subsequent attacks from the big monster hadn’t damaged the area, and his crates were still exactly where he’d left them.

  His snowmobile, the item that had inhabited the largest crate might be dashed to pieces on the ice, but there were still a number of goodies in storage.

  Although his superiors had told him that all the mission entailed would be a bit of driving around the Antarctic plain to points they’d tell him about later and doing a whole lot of watching, perhaps some infiltration work if he saw something suspicious, he was coming to believe that he should have questioned the briefing a little more closely. The Pentagon had plenty of resources, but it didn’t often send recon people into the field with enough equipment to fight a small war.