Ice Station

it like a paper cup. Trevor Barnaby?Brigadier General Trevor J. Bar-naby of Her Majesty's SAS?was crushed to death in a single pulverizing instant.

Shane Schofield just hung there in the water as he watched the remains of the diving bell sink into the darkness.

Barnaby was dead. The SAS were all dead.

He had the station back

 And then he had another thought and a wave of panic swept over him. He was still a hundred feet below the surface. He would never be able to hold his breath long enough to get back up.

Oh, Jesus, no.

 No....

 At that moment, Schofield saw a hand appear in front of his face and he almost jumped out of his skin because he thought it must have been Barnaby, that Barnaby had somehow managed to escape from the diving bell a second before it had?

But it wasn't Trevor Barnaby.

It was James Renshaw.

Hovering in the water above Schofield, breathing through his thirty-year-old scuba gear.

He was offering Schofield his mouthpiece.

It was 9:00 p.m. when Schofield stepped back up onto E-deck.

It was 9:40 by the time he had searched the station from top to bottom, searching for any SAS commandos who might still have been alive. There weren't any. Schofield picked up various weapons as he went?an MP-5, a couple of nitrogen charges. He also got his Desert Eagle back from Renshaw.

He also looked for Mother, but there was no sign of her.

No sign at all.

Schofield even looked inside the dumbwaiter that ran between the different decks, but Mother wasn't inside it either.

Mother was nowhere to be found.

Schofield sat down on the edge of the pool on E-deck, exhausted. It had now been more than twenty-four hours since he had last slept and he was beginning to feel it.

Beside him, Renshaw's scuba gear from Little America IV lay dumped on the deck, dripping. It still had the long length of steel cable tied to it?the cable that stretched back down through the water, down under the ice shelf and out to sea, back to the abandoned station in the iceberg about a mile off the coast Schofield shook his head as he looked at the ancient scuba gear. Behind him on the deck sat one of the British team's sea sleds?a sleek, ultramodern unit. The exact opposite of Little America IV's primitive scuba gear.

Renshaw was upstairs in his room on B-deck, getting some bandages, scissors, and disinfectant to use on Schofield's wounds.

Kirsty was standing on the deck behind Schofield, watching him, concerned. Schofield took a deep breath and shut his eyes. Then he grabbed his nose and?craaaack?his broken nose went back into place.

Kirsty winced. 'Doesn't that hurt?'

Schofield grimaced and nodded. 'A lot.'

Just then, there came a loud splash and Schofield spun around just in time to see Wendy burst up out of the water and land on the metal deck. She loped over to him and Schofield patted her on the head. Wendy immediately rolled over onto her back and got him to pat her on the belly. Schofield did so. Behind him, Kirsty smiled.

Schofield looked down at his watch.

9:44 p.m.

He thought about the breaks in the solar flare that Abby Sinclair had told him about earlier.

Abby had said that breaks in the flare would be passing over Wilkes Ice Station at 7:30 p.m. and 10:00 p.m.

Well, he'd missed the 7:30 break.

But there were still sixteen minutes until the last break passed over the station at 10:00 p.m. He'd try to get on a radio then and call McMurdo.

He sighed, turned around. He had some things to do before then, though.

He saw a Marine helmet on the deck. Snake's, he guessed. Schofield reached over and grabbed it, put it on his head.

He then positioned the helmet's microphone in front of his mouth. 'Marines, this is Scarecrow. Montana. Fox. Santa Cruz. Do you copy?'

At first there was no reply; then suddenly Schofield heard, 'Scarecrow? Is that you?'

 It was Gant. 'Where are you?' she said.

'I'm up in the station.'

'What about the SAS?'

 'Killed 'em. Got my station back. What about you? I saw that Barnaby sent a team down there.'

'We had a little help, but we took care of them without any losses. Everyone's accounted for. Scarecrow, we have got a lot to talk about.'

 Down in the ice cavern, Libby Gant looked out from behind the horizontal fissure.

After the short-lived battle with the British dive team, she and the others had retreated to the fissure, not to get away from the SAS commandos?they were all dead?but rather to get away from the giant elephant seals that had begun to prowl around the cavern after gorging themselves on the SAS troops. Right now, Gant saw, the seals were clustered around the big black ship, like campers gathered around a campfire.

'Like what?' Schofield's voice said.

'Like a spaceship that isn't a spaceship,' Gant said.

'Tell me about it,' Schofield said wearily.

Gant quickly told him about what she had found. About the 'spaceship' itself and the keypad on it, about the hangar and the diary and the earthquake that had buried the whole station deep within the earth. It looked like a top-secret military project of some sort?the secret construction by the U.S. Air Force of some special kind of attack plane. Gant also mentioned the reference in the diary to a plutonium core inside the plane.

Then she told Schofield about the elephant seals and the bodies inside the cave and how the seals had cut down the SAS troops as they had emerged from the water. Their viciousness, Gant said, was shocking.

Schofield took it all in silently.

He then told Gant of the elephant seal that he had seen earlier on the monitor inside Renshaw's room, told her about the abnormally large lower canines that protruded up from its lower jaw like a pair of inverted fangs. As he spoke, an image formed in his mind?an image of the dead killer whale they had seen surface earlier; it had had two long tearing gashes going all the way down its belly.

'We saw a couple of seals with teeth like that, too,' Gant said. 'Smaller ones, though. Juvenile males. The one you saw must have been the bull. From what you're saying, though, it seems like only the males have large lower canines.'

Schofield paused at that. 'Yes.'

And then at that moment, something clicked inside his head. Something about why only the male elephant seals had abnormally large lower teeth.

If the spaceship really had a plutonium core inside it, then it was a good bet that that core was slowly emitting passive radiation. Not a leak. Just passive ambient radiation, which occurred with any nuclear device. If the elephant seals had set up a nest near the ship, then over time the passive radiation from the plutonium might have had an effect on the male seals.

Schofield remembered seeing the infamous Rodriguez Report about passive radiation near an old nuclear