Ice Station

table.

'Marines, call in,' Schofield said.

Voices came in over his intercom; gunfire rang out in the background.

'This is Rebound! I'm with Legs and Mother! We are under heavy fire in the northwest quadrant of B-deck!'

 A burst of static suddenly cut across Schofield's earpiece. '?is Book... wood is down. I'm in... quadrant?' Book's voice cut off abruptly, the signal gone.

'This is Montana, Santa Cruz is with me. We're still on A-deck, but we're pinned down.'

 'Lieutenant, this is Snake. I'm outside, approaching the main entrance right now.'

 There was no word from Hollywood. And Mitch Healy and Samurai Lau were already dead. Schofield did the math. If all three of them were dead, then the Marines were down to nine now.

Schofield thought about the French. They had started with twelve men, plus the two civilian scientists. Snake had said earlier that he'd killed one outside, and Schofield himself had capped another one upstairs. That meant the French were down to ten men?plus the two civilians, wherever the hell they were.

Schofield's thoughts returned to the present. He looked at the big wooden door in front of him, covered with dozens of protruding silver spikes.

He turned to Gant. 'We can't stay here.'

'I kind of already got that idea,' Gant replied deadpan.

Schofield spun to look at her, confused by her reply. Gant didn't say anything. She just pointed over his shoulder.

Schofield turned around and for the first time really looked at the room around him.

It looked like a boiler room of some sort. Anodized black pipes covered the ceiling. Two enormous white cylinders?lying on their sides, one on top of the other?took up the entire right-hand wall of the room. Each cylinder was about twelve feet long and six feet high.

And in the middle of each cylinder was a large diamond-shaped red sticker. On the sticker was a picture of a single flame and, in large bold letters, the words:

DANGER

 FLAMMABLE PROPELLANT

 L-5

 HIGHLY FLAMMABLE

 Schofield stared at the massive white cylinders. They appeared to be connected to a computer that sat on a table in the rear corner of the room. The computer was switched on, but at the moment the screen was filled with a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit screen saver: a buxom blonde in an impossibly small bikini lying provocatively on a tropical beach somewhere.

Schofield crossed the room quickly and stood in front of the computer. The sexy woman on the screen pouted at him.

'Maybe later,' he said to the screen as he hit a key on the keyboard. The screen saver vanished instantly.

It was replaced by a colored schematic diagram of the five floors of Wilkes Ice Station. Five circles filled the screen? three on the left, two on the right?each one comprised of the central well of the station surrounded by a larger outer circle. The outer circle was connected to the central well by four straight tunnels.

Rooms were arrayed both between the outer tunnel and the central well and outside the outer tunnel. Different rooms were painted different colors. A color chart on the side of the screen explained that each color indicated a different temperature. The temperatures ranged from ? 5.4° to ?1.2° Celsius.

'It's the air-conditioning system,' Gant said, taking up a position by the door. 'L-5 means it uses chlorofluorocarbons as propellant. Must be pretty old.'

'Why doesn't that surprise me,' Schofield said as he walked over toward the door and grabbed the handle.

He opened the door a crack?

?just in time to see a black baseball-sized object come rocketing toward him.

A long finger of white smoke traced a line through the air behind it, revealing its source: Petard up on A-deck, with a FA-MAS assault rifle equipped with an underslung 40mm grenade launcher.

Schofield ducked just as the gas-propelled grenade shot through the narrow gap in the doorway above his head, banked upward slightly, and slammed into the back wall of the air-conditioning room.

'Out! Now!' he yelled.

Gant didn't need to be told. She was already on her way out the door, MP-5 up and firing.

Schofield dived through the doorway after her, just as the air-conditioning room exploded behind him. The heavy, spike-ridden door almost blew off its hinges as the concussion wave flung it outward like a twig. The door whipped around in a full 180-degree arc before banging into the ice wall out on the catwalk, right next to Schofield. An enormous fireball then blasted out from the doorway and shot past Schofield out into the open space in the center of Wilkes Ice Station.

'Scarecrow! Come on!' Gant called as she fired up at A-deck from farther down the catwalk.

Schofield leaped to his feet and cut loose an extended burst from his MP-5, aiming up at where he had seen Petard only moments before.

He and Gant raced aronnd the C-deck catwalk?out in the open?Schofield with his gun trained up to the left, Gant taking the right. Long tongues of bright yellow flames burst out from the muzzles of their MP-5s. Return fire from the French raked the ice walls all around them.

Schofield saw a small alcove set into the wall about ten yards ahead of them.

'Fox! There!'

'Got it!'

Schofield and Gant threw themselves into the small alcove just as a second, more powerful, explosion boomed out from the air-conditioning room.

From the moment it erupted Schofield knew that this detonation was different from the first one. It wasn't like the short, contained blast of a grenade. It had more resonance to it, more substance. It was the sound of something large exploding . . . .

It was the sound of one of the air-conditioning cylinders exploding.

 The walls to the air-conditioning room cracked instantly under the weight of the massive explosion. Like a cork being popped from a champagne bottle, a length of black piping shot clear of the air-conditioning room and careered at phenomenal speed across the one-hundred-foot space in the middle of the station and lodged itself into the ice wall on the far side.

Schofield pressed himself flat against the wall of the alcove as a hail of bullets slammed into the ice next to him. He looked at the alcove around him.

It was just a small nook sunk into the wall, designed, it seemed, for the sole purpose of housing the control console that drove the enormous winch, which raised and lowered the station's diving bell. The console itself, Schofield saw, was little more than a series of levers, dials, and buttons arranged on a panel.

In front of the console sat an abnormally large steel-plated chair. Schofield immediately recognized the chair as a pilot's ejection seat from an F-14 fighter. The black exhaust marks beneath the seat's booster and the sizable dent in its large steel headrest told Schofield that this ejection seat had, in a former life, been used for its given purpose. Someone at Wilkes had cleverly mounted the enormous seat on a rotating stand and then bolted the whole thing down to the floor, turning four hundred pounds of military junk into heavy-duty furniture.

Suddenly a new barrage of automatic gunfire thundered down from the northwest corner of A-deck and Gant jumped onto the ejection seat and ducked behind the headrest, curling her small frame into a ball so that she was completely covered by the big seat's steel-lined backplate.