Ice Station, page 42
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 immediately sped off.
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. But he was heavier than Kirsty and she swam more slowly than she had before.
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, hauled 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.
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 rolled over onto his back –
– only to see another elephant seal leap out of the water and come rushing down toward him!
Schofield rolled. The elephant seal slammed down onto the ground right next to him. Schofield leapt to his feet, spun around, looked for the others.
‘Lieutenant! Over here! Over here!’ Sarah Hensleigh’s voice yelled.
Schofield snapped around and saw Sarah Hensleigh waving from inside a small horizontal hole in the wall about fifty yards away.
Renshaw, Kirsty – and Wendy, too – were already running 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 Schofield’s 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.
‘243 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.
Schofield looked up at the group around him. Sarah Hensleigh, Renshaw, Kirsty and Wendy. And Gant. It was only then that Schofield realised 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.
Gant nodded.
‘Where is he?’ Schofield asked.
‘He’s dead. The seals got him. But he killed Santa Cruz and he winged me.’
‘Are you okay?’
‘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 armour. It wasn’t a nice wound to have – a gut-shot was a slow and painful way to die.
‘Hold on,’ Schofield 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. USC 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, that 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, semi-circular 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 kilometres 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 Schofield realised 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 Gant 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 okay,’ 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 vapour.’
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 downwards 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. ‘24157817. It’s a Fibonacci number.’
‘What’s a Fibonacci number?’ Schofield said.
‘Fibonacci numbers are a kind of number sequence,’ Kirsty 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-coloured water, but then it worked. Kirsty began to scribble some numbers in the diary.
Kirsty 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 five 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. ‘Okay, 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. Schofield punched the keys on the keypad.
The screen beeped.
24157817 3 9 0 8 8 1 6 9 6 3 2 4 5 9 8 6
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.
