Ice Station

'Go!' Conlon yelled.

Sarah threw open the door and, pulling Kirsty with her, charged out into the north tunnel.

She hadn't gone more than a couple of steps when she stopped dead in her tracks?

?and found herself looking into the eyes of a man with a gun pointed right at her head.

The man cocked his head to one side and shook his head. 'Jesus.' He lowered his gun.

'It's OK, it's OK,' Buck Riley said as he ran up to Sarah and Kirsty. 'You scared the shit out of me, but it's OK.'

Abby Sinclair and Warren Conlon joined them out in the tunnel, slamming the door shut behind them.

'They in there?' Riley asked, nodding at the women's shower block.

'Yeah,' Sarah said.

'Are the others all right?' Warren Conlon asked stupidly.

'I don't think they'll be leaving their rooms again in a hurry,' Riley said as he scanned the tunnel behind him. Automatic gunfire echoed out from the outer tunnel. As Riley looked behind him, Sarah noticed a thin line of blood trickling out from a large cut on his right ear. Riley himself didn't seem to notice it. The earpiece that he had in that ear had a jagged sliver of metal lodged in it.

'We may have a slight problem,' Riley said as his eyes searched the tunnel around them. 'I've lost contact with the rest of my team. My radio gear got hit by some ricocheting fragments before, so I'm off the air. I can't hear the others, and they can't hear me.'

Riley snapped round and looked the other way, out over Sarah's head, toward that end of the tunnel that led to the catwalks and the massive shaft in the center of the station.

'Come with me,' was all he said as he brushed past Sarah and led the way toward the central well of Wilkes Ice Station.

'Book!' Schofield whispered into his helmet mike as he kept his eyes locked on the western tunnel of B-deck. 'Book! Where are you? God damn it.'

'No Book?' Gant asked.

'Not yet,' Schofield said. He and Gant were still crouched in their alcove on C-deck, on the eastern side of the station. They were waiting tensely for Rebound, Mother, and Legs to come out from the western tunnel of B- deck.

Rebound emerged first. Quickly but cautiously, gun up, eyes looking down his gun sights, sweeping his MP-5 in a brisk 180-degree arc, searching for any sign of trouble.

As soon as he saw Rebound emerge, Schofield immediately opened fire on A-deck, forcing whoever was up there to take cover. Gant came up five seconds later and did the same.

Schofield pulled back behind the alcove's wall to reload. As he did so, he watched as Gant fired off three short bursts.

It was then that he saw something strange happen.

The yellow tongue of fire that flashed out from the muzzle of Gant's gun suddenly leaped forward a full two meters. It was only for a second, but it looked incredible. For a short moment, Gant's compact MP-5 machine pistol had looked like a flamethrower.

Schofield was momentarily confused. What the hell had caused that? Then, suddenly, it hit him, and he spun and looked back at the?

All of a sudden, Gant yelled, 'I'm dry!' and Schofield snapped back to the present. He immediately opened fire on the A-deck catwalk while she reloaded.

As he lay down a suppressing fire on A-deck, Schofield saw Legs and Mother hurry out onto the B-deck catwalk behind Rebound. They were firing for all they were worth back into the tunnel from which they had come.

Legs went dry. Schofield watched as Legs popped his clip and let it drop to the catwalk and then grabbed a fresh magazine. No sooner had he jammed it into the lower receiver of his gun than he was hit in the neck by some unseen opponent inside the western tunnel.

Legs flailed backward, losing his balance for a second, before turning his gun back toward the enemy and letting loose with an extended burst of gunfire that would have woken the dead. In 2.2 seconds thirty rounds were spent and that clip was dry, too. Mother grabbed him and yanked him out onto the catwalk, away from the tunnel.

Now wounded and dripping with blood, Legs began to fumble with a new clip. The clip slipped through his bloody fingers and fell out over the railing, dropping fifty feet through the air until it splashed into the pool at the bottom of the station. At that point, Legs cut his losses, tossed his MP-5, and pulled out his Colt .45. Single fire from here.

Schofield and Gant continued to sweep the uppermost deck with their fire. Gant had watched as Legs's clip dropped all the way down into the pool, had watched as one of the killer whales banked upward to see what it was that had fallen into its domain.

Mother went dry. She cut the empty clip and reloaded fast.

Schofield watched anxiously as the three of them? Mother, Rebound, and Legs?moved along the catwalk between the west and the north tunnels of B-deck, heading toward the north tunnel.

They were almost there when suddenly Buck Riley burst out from the north tunnel with four civilians in tow behind him.

Right in front of Mother, Rebound, and Legs!

Schofield saw it as it happened and his jaw dropped.

'Oh, Jesus' he breathed.

This was a disaster. Now four of his people were out in the open, with four innocent civilians! And any second now the French would appear and cut them to ribbons.

'Book! Book!' Schofield yelled into his helmet mike. 'Get out of there! Get off the catwa?'

 And then it happened and Schofield's horror was complete.

In perfect synchronization, five French commandos burst out onto the B-deck catwalk.

Three from the west tunnel. Two from the east.

They opened fire without the slightest hesitation.

What happened next happened almost too fast for Schofield to comprehend.

The five French commandos on B-deck had just pulled off a perfect pincer maneuver. They'd flushed Mother, Rebound, and Legs out onto the catwalk and now were about to finish it off by firing upon them from both flanks.

The appearance of Buck Riley and the four civilians was an added bonus. It obviously hadn't been expected? when they had appeared out on the catwalk, all five of the French soldiers had had their guns firmly trained on Mother, Rebound, and Legs.

As it turned out, however, they never got a chance to turn their fire on Riley and the civilians anyway.

The three French commandos who had emerged from the western tunnel fired first. White-hot tongues of fire shot out from the muzzles of their guns.

At point-blank range, Legs, Mother, and Rebound were all hit. Mother in the leg, Rebound in the shoulder. Legs took the brunt of it?two to the head, four to the chest?his whole body becoming a shuddering explosion of blood. He was dead before he hit the ground.

But that was all Schofield saw.

Because that was when it happened.

Schofield watched in amazement as, at the exact moment that the French commandos on the western side of the station fired their rifles, two enormous fingers of fire shot out in both directions from where they stood.

They looked like twin comets. Two seven-foot-tall balls of fire that rocketed around the circumference of the B-deck catwalk, leaving in their wake a wall of blazing flames.

The whole of the B-deck catwalk disappeared in an instant as the spectacular curtain of flames shot up from