Ice Station

system on the ground caused havoc with their radar.

Prepared for such an eventuality, each hovercraft was equipped with roof-mounted units called range finders. Mounted on a revolving turret, each range finder swung back and forth in a slow 180-degree arc, emitting a constant high-powered focal beam known as a 'needle.' Unlike radar, whose straight-line reach has always been limited by the curvature of the Earth, needles can hug the Earth's surface and bend over the horizon for at least another fifty miles. As soon as any 'live' object?any object with chemical, animal, or electronic properties?crosses the path of a needle, it is recorded. Or, as the unit's range finder operator, Private Jose 'Santa' Cruz, liked to put it, 'if it boils, breathes, or beeps, the range finder'll nail the fucker.'

Schofield keyed his radio. 'Book, the point where the signal disappeared. How far away is it?'

'About ninety miles from here, sir,' Riley's voice answered.

Schofield stared out over the seamless expanse of white that stretched all the way to the horizon.

At last he said, 'All right. Check it out.'

'Roger that,' Riley responded immediately. Schofield had a lot of time for Book Riley. The two men had been friends for several years. Solid and fit, Riley had a boxer's face?a flat nose that had been broken too many times, sunken eyes, and thick black eyebrows. He was popular in the unit?serious when he had to be, but relaxed and funny when the pressure was off. He had been the Staff Sergeant responsible for Schofield when Schofield had been a young and stupid Second Lieutenant. Then, when Schofield had been given command of a Recon Unit, Book?then a forty-year-old, highly respected Staff Sergeant who could have had his choice of assignment within the Marine Corps establishment? had stayed with him.

'We'll continue on to Wilkes,' Schofield said. 'You find out what happened to that signal, and then you meet us at the station.'

'Got it.'

 'Follow-up time is two hours. Don't be late. And set your range finder arc from your tail. If there's anybody out there behind us, I want to know.'

'Yes, sir.'

 'Oh, and, Book, one more thing,' Schofield said.

'What?'

 'You play nice with the other kids, you hear.'

'Yes, sir.'

 'One, out,' Schofield said.

'Whistler Two, out.'

 And with that, the second hovercraft peeled away to the right and sped off into the snowstorm.

An hour later, the coastline came into view, and through a set of high-powered field glasses Schofield saw Wilkes Ice Station for the first time.

From the surface, it hardly looked like a 'station' at all? more like a motley collection of squat, domelike structures, half-buried in the snow.

In the middle of the complex stood the main building. It was little more than an enormous round dome mounted on a wide square base. Above the surface, the whole structure was about a hundred feet across, but it couldn't have been more than ten feet high.

On top of one of the smaller buildings gathered around the main dome stood the remains of a radio antenna. The upper half of the antenna was folded downward, a couple of taut cables the only things holding it to the upright lower half. Ice crusts hung off everything. The only light, a soft white glow burning from within the main dome.

Schofield ordered the hovercraft to a halt half a mile from the station. No sooner had it stopped than the port-side door slid open, and the six Marines leaped down from the hover-craft's inflated skirt and landed with muffled whumps on the hard-packed snow.

As they ran across the snow-covered ground, they could hear, above the roar of the wind, the crashing of the waves against the cliffs on the far side of the station.

'Gentlemen, you know what to do,' was all Schofield said into his helmet mike as he ran.

Wrapped in the blanket of the blizzard, the white-clad squad fanned out, making its way toward the station complex.

Buck Riley saw the hole in the ice before he saw the battered hovercraft in it.

The crevasse looked like a scar on the icescape?a deep crescent-shaped gash about forty meters wide.

Riley's hovercraft came to rest a hundred yards from the rim of the enormous chasm. The six Marines climbed out, lowered themselves gently to the ground, and cautiously made their way across the snow, toward the edge of the crevasse.

PFC Robert 'Rebound' Simmons was their climber, so they harnessed him up first. A small man, Rebound was as nimble as a cat and weighed about the same. He was young, too, just twenty-three, and like most men his age, he responded to praise. He had beamed with pride when he'd overheard his lieutenant once say to another platoon commander that his climber was so good, he could scale the inside of the Capitol Building without a rope. His nickname was another story, a good-natured jibe bestowed upon him by his unit in reference to his less than impressive success rate with women.

Once the rope was secured to his harness, Simmons lay down on his stomach and began to shimmy his way forward, through the snow, toward the edge of the scar.

He reached the edge and peered out over the rim, down into the crevasse.

'Oh, shit....'

 Ten meters behind him, Buck Riley spoke into his helmet mike. 'What's the story, Rebound?'

'They're here, sir.' Simmons's voice was almost resigned. 'Conventional craft. Got somethin' in French written on the side. Thin ice scattered all about underneath it. Looks like they tried to cross a snow bridge that didn't hold.'

He turned to face Riley, his face grim, his voice tinny over the short-range radio frequency. 'And, sir, they's pretty fucked up.'

The hovercraft lay forty feet below the surface, its rounded nose crumpled inward by the downward impact, every one of its windows either shattered or cracked into distorted spider-webs. A thin layer of snow had already embarked upon the task of erasing the battered vehicle from history.

Two of the hovercraft's occupants had been catapulted by the impact right through the forward windshield. Both lay against the forward wall of the crevasse, their necks bent backward at obscene angles, their bodies resting in pools of their own frozen blood.

Rebound Simmons stared at the grisly scene.

There were other bodies inside the hovercraft. He could see their shadows inside it and could see star- shaped splatters of blood on the cracked windows of the hovercraft.

'Rebound?' Riley's voice came in over his helmet intercom. 'Anybody alive down there?'

'Don't look like it, sir,' Rebound said.

'Do an infrared,' Riley instructed. 'We got twenty minutes before we gotta hit the road, and 1 wouldn 't want to leave and find out later that there were some survivors down there.'

Rebound snapped his infrared visor into place. It hung down from the brow of his helmet, covering both of his eyes like a fighter pilot's visor.

Now he saw the crashed hovercraft through a wash of electronic blue imagery. The cold had taken effect quickly. The whole crash site was depicted as a blue-on-black outline. Not even the engine glowed yellow, the color of objects with minimal heat intensity.

More important, however, there were no blobs of orange or yellow within the image of the vehicle. Any bodies that were still inside the hovercraft were ice cold. Everyone on board was most certainly dead.

Rebound said, 'Sir, infrared reading is nega?'

The ground gave way beneath him.