Ice Station

 And then suddenly Austin's voice. 'Get out of the water! Get out of the water now! '

 Another scream. Then another.

Sarah Hensleigh grabbed her mike. 'Ben! Ben! Come in!' Austin's voice crackled over the intercom. He was speaking quickly, in between short, shallow breaths. 'Sarah, shit, I... I can't see anybody else. I can't... They're all... they're all gone....' A pause, and then, 'Oh, sweet Jesus... Sarah! Call for help! Call for anything you ca?'

And then a crash of breaking glass exploded across the intercom and the voice of Benjamin Austin was gone.

Abby was on the radio, yelling hysterically into the mike.

'For God's sake, somebody answer me! This is station four-zero-niner?I repeat, this is station four-zero-niner. We have just suffered heavy losses in an underwater cavern and request immediate assistance! Can anybody hear me? Somebody, please answer me! Our divers?oh, Jesus?our divers said they saw a spacecraft of some sort in this cavern, and now, now we've lost contact with them! The last we heard from them, they were under attack, under attack in the water. . . .'

Wilkes Ice Station received no response to their distress signal.

Despite the fact that it was picked up by at least three different radio installationss.

FIRST INCURSION

16 June 0630 hours

The hovercraft raced across the ice plain.

It was painted white, which was unusual. Most Antarctic vehicles are painted bright orange, for ease of visibility. And it sped across the vast expanse of snow with a surprising urgency. Nobody is ever in a hurry in Antarctica.

Inside the speeding white hovercraft, Lieutenant Shane Schofield peered out through reinforced fiberglass windows. About a hundred yards off his starboard bow he could see a second hovercraft?also white?whipping across the flat, icy landscape.

At thirty-two, Schofield was young to be in command of a Recon Unit. But he had experience that belied his age. At five-ten, he was lean and muscular, with a handsome creased face and closely cropped black hair. At the moment, his black hair was covered by a camouflaged Kevlar helmet. A gray turtleneck collar protruded from beneath his shoulder plates, covering his neck. Fitted inside the folds of the turtleneck collar was a lightweight Kevlar plate. Sniper protection.

It was rumored that Shane Schofield had deep blue eyes, but this was a rumor that had never been confirmed. In fact, it was folklore at Parris Island?the legendary training camp for the United States Marine Corps? that no one below the rank of General had ever actually seen Schofield's eyes. He always kept them hidden behind a pair of reflective silver antiflash glasses.

His call sign added to the mystery, since it was common knowledge that it had been Brigadier General Norman W. McLean himself who had given Schofield his operational nickname?a nickname that many assumed had something to do with the young Lieutenant's hidden eyes.

'Whistler One, do you copy?'

 Schofield picked up his radio. 'Whistler Two, this is Whistler One. What is it?'

'Sir?' The deep voice of Staff Sergeant Buck 'Book' Riley was suddenly cut off by a wash of static. Over the past twenty-four hours, ionospheric conditions over continental Antarctica had rapidly deteriorated. The full force of a solar flare had kicked in, disrupting the entire electromagnetic spectrum and limiting radio contact to short-range UHF transmissions. Contact between hovercrafts one hundred yards apart was difficult. Contact with Wilkes Ice Station?their destination?was impossible.

The static faded and Riley's voice came over the speaker again. 'Sir, do you remember that moving contact we picked up about an hour ago?'

'Uh-huh,' Schofield said.

For the past hour, Whistler Two had been picking up emissions from the electronic equipment on board a moving vehicle heading in the opposite direction, back down the coast toward the French research station, Dumont d'Urville.

'What about it?'

'Sir, I can't find it anymore.'

 Schofield looked down at the radio. 'Are you sure?'

'We have no reading on our scopes. Either they shut down or they just disappeared.'

 Schofield frowned in thought; then he looked back at the cramped personnel compartment behind him. Seated there, two to each side, were four Marines, all dressed in snow fatigues. White-gray Kevlar helmets sat in their laps. White-gray body armor covered their chests. White-gray automatic rifles sat by their sides.

It had been two days since the distress signal from Wilkes Ice Station had been picked up by the U.S. Navy landing ship, Shreveport, while it had been in port in Sydney. As luck would have it, only a week earlier it had been decided that the Shreveport?a rapid deployment vessel used to transport Marine Force Reconnaissance Units?would stay in Sydney for some urgent repairs while the rest of her group returned to Pearl Harbor. That being the case, within an hour of the receipt of Abby Sinclair's distress signal, the Shreveport? now up and ready to go?was at sea, carrying a squad of Marines due south, heading toward the Ross Sea.

Now Schofield and his unit were approaching Wilkes Ice Station from McMurdo Station, another, larger, U.S. research facility about nine hundred miles from Wilkes. McMurdo was situated on the edge of the Ross Sea and was manned by a standing staff of 104 all year round. Despite the lasting stigma associated with the U.S. Navy's disastrous nuclear power experiment there in 1972, it remained the U.S. gateway to the South Pole.

Wilkes, on the other hand, was as remote a station as one would find in Antarctica. Six hundred miles from its nearest neighbor, it was a small American outpost, situated right on top of the coastal ice shelf not far from the Dalton Iceberg Tongue. It was bounded on the landward side by a hundred miles of barren, windswept ice plains and to seaward by towering three-hundred-foot cliffs that were pounded all year round by mountainous sixty-foot waves.

Access by air had been out of the question. It was early winter, and a minus-thirty-degree blizzard had been assailing the camp for three weeks now. It was expected to last another four. In such weather, exposed helicopter rotors and jet engines were known to freeze in midair.

And access by sea meant taking on the cliffs. The U.S. Navy had a word for such a mission: suicide.

Which left access by land. By hovercraft. The twelve-man Marine Recon Unit would make the eleven-hour trip from McMurdo to Wilkes in two enclosed-fan military hovercrafts.

Schofield thought about the moving signal again. On a map, McMurdo, d'Urville, and Wilkes stations formed something like an isosceles triangle. D'Urville and Wilkes on the coast, forming the base of the triangle. McMurdo? farther inland, on the edge of the enormous bay formed by the Ross Sea?the point.

The signal that Whistler Two had picked up heading back along the coast toward Dumont d'Urville had been maintaining a steady speed of about forty miles an hour. At that speed, it was probably a conventional hovercraft. Maybe the French had had people at d'Urville who'd picked up the distress signal from Wilkes, sent help, and were now on their way back....

Schofield keyed his radio again. 'Book, when was the last time you held that signal?'

The radio crackled. 'Signal last held eight minutes ago. Range finder contact. Identical to previously held electronic signature. Heading consistent with previous vector. It was the same signal, sir, and as of eight minutes ago it was right where it should have been.'

In this weather?howling eighty-knot winds that hurled snow so fast that it fell horizontally?regular radar scanning was hopeless. Just as the solar flare in the ionosphere put paid to radio communications, the low-pressure