Ice Station

every point on the circular metal catwalk, concealing from view everybody who had been standing on the deck.

For a full second Schofield could do nothing but stare. It had happened so fast. It was as if somebody had laid down a trail of gasoline on the B-deck catwalk and then lit a match.

Then it clicked and Schofield immediately spun around to face?

?the air-conditioning room.

And in that instant, it all suddenly made sense.

The air-conditioning cylinders had no doubt been substantially damaged by the detonation of the rocket grenade minutes earlier. Thus punctured, they had immediately started spewing out their store of chlorofluorocarbons.

Highly flammable chlorofluorocarbons.

That was what had happened when Schofield had seen the two-meter length of fire spew forward from the muzzle of Gant's machine pistol only moments earlier. It had been a warning of things to come. But at that time the CFCs hadn't yet filled the station. Hence the small two-meter flame.

But now... now the amount of flammable gas in the station's atmosphere had multiplied considerably. So much so mat when the French had opened fire on the Marines on B-deck, the whole deck had gone up in flames.

Schofield's eyes widened.

The air-conditioning cylinders were still spewing out CFCs. Soon the whole station would he contaminated with flammable...

 The horror of the realization hit Schofield hard.

Wilkes Ice Station had become a gas oven.

All it needed was one spark, one flame?or one gunshot? and the whole station would spontaneously combust.

Rivets began to pop out of their sockets on B-deck.

Spot fires burned all over the B-deck catwalk. Agonized screams echoed out across the open space of the ice station as soldiers and civilians alike lay writhing on the catwalk, their bodies alight.

It looked like a scene from Hell itself.

The three French soldiers on the western side of the station?the ones who had opened fire on Mother, Rebound, and Legs?had been the first to go up in flames, the gaseous air around them having been ignited by the white-hot tongues of fire that had burst forth from the muzzles of their guns.

The twin fireballs had immediately shot out from the barrels of their guns. One had surged forward while the other had turned on them and rushed with all its fury back at their faces.

Now two of those French soldiers lay on the deck, screaming. The third was frantically banging himself against the ice wall nearby in a desperate attempt to put out the flames on his fatigues.

Mother and Rebound were also on fire. Beside them, Legs was already dead. His motionless body lay flat on the catwalk as it was slowly devoured by crackling orange flames.

Over by the north tunnel, Buck Riley was trying to smother the flames on Abby Sinclair's pants by rolling her over on the metal catwalk. Beside them, Sarah Hensleigh slapped frantically at a cluster of flames that had ignited on the back of Kirsty's bulky pink parka. Warren Cordon just screamed. His hair was on fire.

And then, suddenly, there came a sickening sound. The lurching, wrenching sound of bending steel.

Riley looked up from what he was doing.

'Oh, no,' he moaned.

Schofield also looked up at the sound.

He scanned the catwalk above him and saw a series of triangular steel supports that fastened the underside of the B-deck catwalk to the ice wall.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, those supports began to slide out from the wall.

Under the intense heat from the fire on B-deck, the long rivets that fastened the supports to the wall were starting to heat up. They were melting the ice around them and were now starting to slide out from the wall!

The rivets began to expand?thwack! thwack! thwack!? and in rapid succession began to crack open the ice-cold notches of their steel supports and fall to the catwalk below.

The rivets clanked loudly as they dropped down onto the C-deck catwalk.

One.

Then two. Then three.

Then five. Then ten.

There were rivets everywhere, raining down on the C-deck catwalk. And then suddenly a new sound filled Wilkes Ice Station.

The unmistakable high-pitched squeal of rending metal.

'Oh, shit,' Schofield said. 'It's gonna go.'

B-deck went. Suddenly. Without warning.

The entire catwalk?the whole, flaming circle?just fell away, dropping with a sudden jolt, taking everybody who was still on it down with it.

Some sections of the catwalk managed to stay attached to the ice walls. Their fall ended abruptly, almost as soon as it had begun. They ended up pointing downward at a forty-five-degree angle.

The remaining sections just slid out from the ice walls and dropped down into the central shaft of the station.

Nearly everyone who had been standing on B-deck dropped with the collapsed sections of catwalk?eleven people in all.

A tangled mix of civilians, soldiers, and three broken sections of metal catwalk sailed down the central shaft of Wilkes Ice Station.

They fell a full fifty feet, and then they landed. Hard. In water. In the pool at the bottom of the station.

Sarah Hensleigh plunged underwater.

A stream of bubbles shot up past her face and the world suddenly went silent.

Cold. Absolute, unforgiving cold assailed all of her senses at once. It was so cold it hurt.

And then suddenly she heard noises.

Noises that broke the ghostly underwater silence?a series of muffled whumps in the water all around her. It was the sound of the others falling into the pool with her.

Slowly, the curtain of bubbles in front of her face began to disperse, and Sarah began to make out a number of unusually large shapes moving smoothly through the water around her.

Large black shapes.

They appeared to glide effortlessly through the silent, freezing water?each one frightening in its size, as large and as wide as a car. At that moment, a wash of white cut across Sarah's field of vision and suddenly an enormous mouth, full of razor-sharp teeth, opened wide in front of her eyes.

Pure fear shot through her body.

Killer whales.

 Suddenly Sarah broke the surface. Gulped in air. The cold of the water meant nothing now. One after the other huge black dorsal fins began to rise above the choppy surface of the pool.

Before Sarah could even get a bearing on exactly where in the pool she was, something burst up out of the water next to her and she spun.

It wasn't a killer whale.

It was Abby.

Sarah felt her heart start again. A second later, Warren Conlon also came up beside her.

Sarah spun around in the water. All five of the French soldiers who had been on B-deck when it blew were scattered around the pool. Three Marines were also in the pool. One of them, Sarah noticed, was floating facedown in the water.