Ice Station

'They're looking for Wendy?' she asked, glancing at the little black fur seal on the catwalk beside her. Wendy backed nervously away from the edge of the catwalk, trying, it seemed, to avoid being seen by the two whales circling in the pool forty feet below.

'They don't like her very much,' Kirsty said.

'Why not?'

'They're juveniles,' Kirsty said. 'Male juveniles. They don't like anybody. It's like they have something to prove? prove that they're bigger and stronger than the other animals. Typical boys. The killer whales around these parts mostly eat baby crabeaters, but these two saw Wendy swimming in the pool a few days ago and they've been coming by ever since.'

'What's a crabeater?' Hollywood Todd asked from over by the winch controls.

'It's another kind of seal,' Kirsty said. 'A big, fat seal. Killers eat them in about three bites.'

'They eat seals?' Hollywood said, genuinely surprised.

'Uh-huh,' Kirsty said.

'Whoa.' Having barely graduated high school, Hollywood couldn't exactly claim to possess a love for books or academia. School had been a hard time. He'd joined the Marines two weeks after graduating and thought it was the best decision he'd ever made.

He looked down at Kirsty, assessing her size and age. 'How come you know all this stuff?'

Kirsty shrugged self-consciously. 'I read a lot.'

'Oh.'

Beside Hollywood, Gant began to laugh softly.

'What're you laughing at?' Hollywood asked.

'You,' Libby Gant said, smiling. 'I was just thinking about how much you read.'

Hollywood cocked his head. 'I read.'

'Sure you do.'

'I do.'

'Comic books don't count, Hollywood.'

'I don't just read comic books.'

'Oh, yeah, I forgot about your prized subscription to Playboy magazine.'

Kirsty began to chuckle.

Hollywood noticed and frowned. 'Ha-ha. Yeah, well, least I know I ain't gonna be no college professor, so I don't try to be somethin' I'm not.' He raised his eyebrows at Gant. 'What about you, Dorothy, you ever try to be somethin' you're not?'

Libby Gant lowered her glasses slightly, revealing sky blue eyes. She gave Hollywood a sad look. 'Sticks and stones, Hollywood. Sticks and stones.'

Gant replaced her glasses and turned back to look at the whales down in the pool.

Kirsty was confused. When she'd been introduced to Gant earlier, she'd been told that her real name was Libby and that her nickname was Fox. After a few moments, Kirsty asked innocently, 'Why did he call you Dorothy?'

Gant didn't answer. She just kept looking down at the pool and shook her head.

Kirsty spun to face Hollywood. He gave her a cryptic smile and a shrug. 'Everybody knows Dorothy liked the scarecrow better than the others.'

He smiled as if that explained everything and went back about his work. Kirsty didn't get it.

Gant just leaned on the rail, watching the killer whales, determinedly ignoring Hollywood. The two killers were still scanning the station, looking for Wendy. For an instant one of them seemed to see Gant and stopped. It cocked its head to one side and just looked at her.

'It can see me from all the way down there?' Gant said, glancing at Kirsty. 'I thought whales were supposed to have poor eyesight out of the water.'

'For their size, killer whales have bigger eyes than most other whales,' Kirsty said, 'so their eyesight out of the water is better.' She looked at Gant. 'You know about them?'

'I read a lot,' Gant said, casting a sideways glance at Hollywood, before turning back to face the killers.

The two killer whales continued to prowl slowly around the pool. Gliding through the still water, they seemed patient, calm. Content to bide their time until their prey appeared. Down on the pool deck Gant saw Schofield and the two Marine divers watching the killer whales as they ominously circled the pool.

'How do they get in here?' Gant said to Kirsty. 'What do they do?swim in under the ice shelf?'

Kirsty nodded. 'That's right. This station is only about a hundred yards away from the ocean, and the ice shelf out that way isn't very deep, maybe five hundred feet. The killers just swim in under the ice shelf and surface here inside the station.'

Gant looked down at the two killer whales on the far side of the pool. They seemed so calm, so cold, like a pair of hungry crocodiles searching for their next meal.

Then, their survey complete, the two killer whales slowly began to submerge. In a moment they were gone, replaced by two sets of ripples. Their eyes had remained open the whole way down.

'Well, that was sudden,' Gant said.

Her eyes moved from the now-empty pool to the diving platform beside it. She saw Montana emerge from the south tunnel with some scuba tanks slung over his shoulders. Sarah Hensleigh had told them that there was a small goods elevator in the south tunnel?a 'dumbwaiter'?that they could use to bring their diving gear down to E-deck. Montana had been using it just now.

Gant's gaze moved to the other side of the platform, where she saw Schofield standing with his head bowed, holding a hand to his ear, as though he were listening to something on his helmet intercom. And then suddenly he was heading toward the nearest rung-ladder, speaking into his helmet mike as he walked.

Gant watched as Schofield stopped at the base of the rung-ladder on the far side of the station and turned to look directly at her. His voice crackled over her helmet intercom. 'Fox. Hollywood. A-deck. Now.'

As she hastened toward the rung-ladder nearest her, Gant spoke into her helmet mike. 'What is it, sir?'

Schofield's voice was serious. 'Something just set off the trip wire outside. Snake's up there. He says it's a French hovercraft.'

Snake Kaplan drew a bead on the hovercraft.

The lettering on the side of the vehicle glowed bright gfeen in his night-vision gunsights. It read: DUMONT D'URVILLE? 02.

 Kaplan was lying in the snow on the outskirts of the station complex, bracing himself against the driving wind and snow, following the newly arrived hovercraft through the sights of his Barrett M82A1A sniper rifle.

Gunnery Sergeant Scott 'Snake' Kaplan was forty-five years old, a tall man with dark, serious eyes. Like most of the other Marines in Schofield's unit, Kaplan had customized his uniform. A weathered tattoo of a fearsome- looking cobra with its jaws bared wide had been painted onto his right shoulder plate. Underneath the picture of the snake were the words: KISS THIS.

A career soldier, Kaplan had been with the Marine Corps for twenty-seven years, during which time he had risen to the magic rank of Gunnery Sergeant, the highest rank an enlisted Marine can reach while still getting his hands dirty. Indeed, although further promotion was possible, Snake had decided to stay at Gunnery Sergeant rank, so that he could remain a senior member of a Marine Force Reconnaissance Unit.

Members of Recon Units don't care much for discussions about rank. Membership in a Marine Force Reconnaissance Unit alone gives one privileges to which even some officers cannot lay claim. It is not unknown, for instance, for a four-star General to consult a senior Recon member on matters of combat technique and weaponry. Indeed, Snake himself had been approached on several such occasions. And besides, since most of those who were selected for the Recons were Sergeants and Corporals anyway, rank wasn't really an issue. They were with the Recons, the elite of the United States Marine Corps. That was rank in itself.

Upon the unit's arrival at Wilkes Ice Station, Snake had been put in charge of setting up the laser trip wire on the landward side of the station, about two hundred meters out. The trip wire was not really that much different from the range finder units on the hovercrafts. It was merely a series of boxlike units through which a tiny invisible