Ice Station (20 page)

“Right here.” Montana offered Schofield a portable
viewscreen that displayed the results of the range finders'
sweeps.

It looked like a miniature TV with a handle on the left-hand side. On
the screen, two thin green lines clocked slowly back and forth like a
pair of windscreen wipers. As soon as an object crossed the range
finders' beams, a blinking red dot would appear on the screen and
the object's vital statistics would appear in a small box at the
bottom of the screen.

“All right,” Schofield said. “I think we're all
set. I think it's time we found out what's down in that
cave.”

The trudge back to the main building took about five minutes.
Schofield, Sarah, and Montana walked quickly through the falling snow.
As they walked, Schofield told Sarah and Montana about his plans for
the cave.

First of all, he wanted to verify the existence of the spacecraft
itself. At this stage, there was no proof that anything was down there
at all. All they had was the report of a single scientist from Wilkes
who was himself now probably dead. Who knew what he had seen? That he
had also been attacked soon after his sighting of the
spacecraft—by enemies unknown—was another question that
Schofield wanted answered.

There was a third reason, however, for sending a small team down to
the cave. A reason that Schofield didn't mention to Sarah or
Montana.

If anyone else did happen to make a play for the
station—especially in the next few hours when the Marines were
at their most vulnerable—and if they also managed to overcome
what was left of Schofield's unit up in the station proper, then a
second team stationed down in the cave might be able to provide an
effective last line of defense.

For if the only entrance to the cave was by way of an underwater ice
tunnel, then anybody wanting to penetrate it would have to get there
by an underwater approach. Covert incursionary forces hate underwater
approaches and for good reason: you never know what's waiting
for you above the surface. The way Schofield saw it, a small team
already stationed inside the cave would be able to pick off an enemy
force, one by one, as they broke the surface.

Schofield, Sarah, and Montana came to the main entrance of the
station. They trudged down the rampway and headed inside.

Schofield stepped onto the A-deck catwalk and immediately headed for
the dining room. Rebound should have been back there by now—with
Champion—and Schofield wanted to see if the French doctor had
anything to say about Samurai's condition.

Schofield came to the dining room door and stepped inside.

He immediately saw Rebound and Champion standing at the table on which
Samurai lay.

Both men looked up quickly as Schofield entered, their eyes wide as
saucers. They looked like thieves caught with their hands in the till,
caught in the middle of some illegal act.

There was a short silence.

And then Rebound said, “Sir. Samurai's dead.”

Schofield frowned. He had known Samurai's condition was critical
and that death was a possibility, but the way Rebound said it
was—

Rebound stepped forward and spoke seriously. “Sir, he was dead
when we got here. And the doc here says he didn't die from his
injuries. He says ... he says it looks like Samurai was
suffocated.”

Pete Cameron was sitting in his car in the
middle of the SETI parking lot. The searing desert sun beat down on
him. Cameron pulled out his cellular and called Alison in D.C.

“How was it?” she asked.

“Riveting,” he said, flicking through his notes of the SETI
recording.

“Anything to go on?”

“Not really. Looks like they got a few words off a spy satellite,
but it's all Greek to me.”

“Did you write any of it down this time?”

Cameron looked at his notes.

“Yes, dear,” he said. “But I'm not so sure it's
worth anything.”

“Tell me anyway,” Alison said.

“All right,” Cameron said, looking down at his notes.

COPY 134625

CONTACT LOST—> IONOSPHERIC DISTURB.

FORWARD TEAM

SCARECROW

-66.5

SOLAR FLARE DISRUPT. RADIO

115, 20 MINS, 12 SECS EAST

HOW GET THERE SO—SECONDARY TEAM EN

ROUTE

Cameron read his notes aloud for her, word for word, substituting
English for his own shorthand symbols.

“That's it?” Alison said when he was finished.
“That's all?”

“That's it.”

“Not much to go on.”

“That's what I thought,” Cameron said.

“Leave it with me,” Alison said. “Where are you off to
now?”

Cameron plucked a small white card off his dashboard. It was almost
covered over by Post-its. It was a business card.

ANDREW WILCOX

Gunsmith

14 Newbury St, Lake Arthur, NM

Cameron said, “I thought that since I was down here in the
Tumbleweed State, I'd check out the mysterious Mr. Wilcox.”

“The mailbox guy?”

“Yeah, the mailbox guy.”

Two weeks ago, someone had left this business card in Cameron's
mailbox. Just the card. Nothing else. No message came with it, and
nothing was written on it. At first, Cameron almost threw it in the
trash as errant junk mail—really errant junk mail since
it had come from New Mexico.

But then Cameron had received a phone call.

It was a male voice. Husky. He asked if Cameron had got the card.

Cameron said he had.

Then the man said that he had something that Cameron might like to
look into. Sure, Cameron had said, would the man like to come to
Washington to talk about it?

No. That was out of the question. Cameron would have to come to him.
The guy was a real cloak-and-dagger type, super-paranoid. He said he
was ex-Navy, or something like that.

“You sure he's not just another of your fans?” Alison
said.

Pete Cameron's reputation from his investigative days at
Mother Jones still haunted him. Conspiracy theorists liked to
ring him up and say that they had the next Watergate on their hands or
that they had the juice on some corrupt politician.

Usually they asked for money in return for their stories.

But this Wilcox character had not asked for money. Hadn't even
mentioned it. And since Cameron was in the neighborhood ...

“He may well be,” Cameron said. “But since I'm down
here anyway, I might as well check him out.”

“All right,” Alison said. “But don't say I
didn't warn you.”

Cameron hung up and slammed the door of his car.

In the Post's offices in D.C., Alison Cameron hung up her
phone and stared into space for a few seconds. It was midmorning and
the office was a buzz of activity. The wide, low-ceilinged room was
divided by hundreds of chest-high partitions, and in every one people
were busily working away. Phones rang; keyboards clattered; people
scurried back and forth.

Alison was dressed in a pair of cream pants, a white shirt, and a
loosely tied black tie. Her shoulder-length auburn hair was pulled
back in a neat ponytail.

After a few moments, she looked at the slip of paper on which
she'd jotted down everything her husband had told her over the
phone.

She read over each line carefully. Most of it was indecipherable
jargon. Talk about Scarecrows, ionospheric disturbances, forward
teams, and secondary teams.

Three lines, however, struck her.

-66.5

SOLAR FLARE DISRUPTING RADIO

115, 20 MINS, 12 SECS EAST

Alison frowned as she read the three lines again. Then she got an
idea.

She quickly reached over to a nearby desk and grabbed a brown
folio-sized book from the shelf above it. She looked at the cover:
Bartholemew's Advanced Atlas of World Geography. She
flipped some pages and quickly found the one she was looking for.

She ran her finger across a line on the page.

“Huh?” she said aloud. Another reporter at a desk nearby
looked up from his work.

Alison didn't notice him. She just continued to stare at the page
in front of her.

Her finger marked the point on the map designated latitude minus 66.5
degrees and longitude 115 degrees, 20 minutes, and 12 seconds east.

Alison frowned.

Her finger was pointing at the coastline of Antarctica.

The Marines gathered around the pool on E-deck
in silence.

Montana, Gant, and Santa Cruz wordlessly shouldered into scuba tanks.
All three wore black thermal-electric wet suits.

Schofleld and Snake watched them as they suited up. Rebound stood
behind them. Book Riley walked off in silence toward the E-deck
storeroom, to check on Mother.

A large black backpack—the French team's VLF transmitter
that Santa Cruz had found during his search of the station—sat
on the deck next to Schofield's feet.

The news of Samurai's death had rocked the whole team.

Luc Champion, the French doctor, had told Schofield that he had found
traces of lactic acid in Samurai's trachea, or windpipe. That,
Champion had said, was almost certain proof that Samurai had not died
of his wounds.

Lactic acid in the trachea, Champion explained, evidenced a sudden
lack of oxygen to the lungs, which the lungs then tried to compensate
for by burning sugar, a process known as lactic acidosis. In other
words, lactic acid in the trachea pointed to death due to a sudden
lack of oxygen to the lungs, otherwise known as asphyxiation, or
suffocation.

Samurai had not died from his wounds. He had died because his lungs
had been deprived of oxygen. He had died because someone had cut off
his air.

Someone had murdered Samurai.

In the time it had taken Schofield and Sarah to go out and meet with
Montana at the perimeter of the station—the same time it took
for Rebound to climb down to E-deck and collect Luc
Champion—someone had gone into the dining room on A-deck and
strangled Samurai.

The implications of Samurai's death hit Schofield hardest of all.

Someone among them was a killer.

But it was a fact that Schofield had not told the rest of the
unit. He had only told them that Samurai had died. He hadn't told
them how. He figured that if someone among them was a killer, it was
better that that person not be aware that Schofield knew about him.
Rebound and Champion had been sworn to silence.

As he watched the others suit up, Schofield thought about what had
happened.

Whoever the killer was, he had expected that Samurai's death would
probably be attributed to his wounds. It was a good assumption.
Schofield figured that had he been told the Samurai hadn't made
it, he would have immediately assumed that Samurai's body had
simply given up the fight for life and died from its wounds. That was
why the killer had suffocated Samurai. Suffocation left no
blood, no telltale marks or wounds. If there were no other wounds on
the body, the story that Samurai had simply lost the battle with his
bullet wounds gained credence.

What the killer had not known, however, was that asphyiation did, in
fact, leave a telltale sign—lactic acid in the trachea.

Schofield had no doubt that had he not had a doctor present at the
station, the lactic acid would have gone unnoticed and Samurai's
death would have been attributed to his bullet wounds. But
there had been a doctor at the station. Luc Champion. And he
had spotted the acid.

The implications were as chilling as they were endless.

Were there French soldiers still at large somewhere inside the
station? Someone the Marines had missed. A lone soldier, maybe, who
had decided to pick off the Marines one by one, starting with the
weakest of their number, Samurai.

Schofield quickly dismissed the thought. The station, its surrounds, and even the remaining
French hovercraft outside had been swept thoroughly. There were no
more enemy soldiers either inside or outside Wilkes Ice Station.

That created a problem.

Because it meant that whoever had killed Samurai was someone Schofield
thought he could trust.

It couldn't have been the French scientists, Champion and Rae.
Since the end of the battle with the French they had been handcuffed
to the pole on E-deck.

It could have been one of the scientists from Wilkes— while
Schofield was outside with Montana and Hensleigh, they were all in their common room on
B-deck, unguarded by any of the Marines. But why? Why on
earth would one of the scientists want to kill a wounded Marine? They
had nothing to gain from killing Samurai. The Marines were here to
help them.

There still remained one other alternative.

One of the Marines had killed Samurai.

The mere possibility that that might have happened sent a chill down
Schofield's spine. The fact that he had even considered
it chilled him even more. But he considered it nonetheless, because
aside from the residents of Wilkes, a Marine was the only other person
in the station who'd had the opportunity to kill Samurai.

Schofield, Sarah, and Montana had been outside when it had happened,
so Schofield was at least sure about them.

As for the other Marines, however, there were difficulties.

They had all been, more or less, working alone at different places in
the station when the murder had occurred. Any one of them could have
done it without being detected.

Schofield checked them off one by one.

Snake. He had been on C-deck, in the alcove, working on the
destroyed winch controls that raised and lowered the station's
diving bell. He had been alone.

Santa Cruz. He had been searching the station for French
erasing devices. That search had turned up nothing but the VLF
transmitter that now sat silently at Schofield's feet. He had also
been alone.

Rebound. Schofield thought about the young private. Rebound
was the prime suspect. Schofield knew it, Rebound himself knew it. He
was the one who had said to Schofield that Samurai was stable enough
for him to go down to E-deck and fetch Champion. He was also the only
one who had been with Samurai since the battle had ended. For all
Schofield knew Samurai had been dead for over an hour, killed by
Rebound long ago.