Gant sighed. ‘I’m twenty-six years old, Book. Did you know that?’
‘No.’
‘Twenty-six years old. God,’ Gant said, lost in thought. She turned to Book. ‘Did you know I was married once?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Got married at the ripe old age of nineteen, I did. Married the sweetest man you’d ever meet, the catch of the town. He was a new teacher at the local high school, just arrived from New York, taught English. Gentle guy, quiet. I was pregnant by the time I was twenty.’
Book just watched Gant silently as she spoke.
‘And then one day,’ Gant said, ‘when I was two-and-a-half months pregnant I arrived home early to find him doing it doggy-style on the living room floor with a seventeen-year-old cheerleader who’d come round for tutoring.’
Book winced inwardly.
‘I miscarried three weeks later,’ Gant said. ‘I don’t know what caused it. Stress, anxiety, who knows. I hated men after my husband did that to me. Hated them. That was when I enlisted in the Corps. Hate makes you a good soldier, you know. Makes you plant every single shot right in the middle of the other guy’s head. I couldn’t bring myself to trust a man after what my husband did. And then I met him.’
Gant was staring off into space. Her eyes were beginning to fill with water.
‘You know, when I was accepted into this unit, the selection committee put on this big celebration lunch at Pearl. It was beautiful, one of those great Hawaiian BBQ lunches – out on the beach, in the sun. He was there. He was wearing this horrible blue Hawaiian shirt and, of course, those silver sunglasses.
‘I remember that at one point during the lunch, everybody else was talking, but he wasn’t. I watched him. He just seemed to bow his head and go into this inner world. He seemed so lonely, so alone. He caught me looking and we talked about something inane, something about what a great place Pearl Harbor was and what our favourite holiday spots were.
‘But my heart had already gone out to him. I don’t know what he was thinking about that day, but whatever it was, he was thinking hard about it. My guess is it was a woman, a woman he couldn’t have.
‘Book, if a man ever thought about me the way he was thinking about her . . .’ Gant shook her head. ‘I would just . . . Oh, I don’t know. It was just so intense. It was like . . . like nothing I have ever seen.’
Book didn’t say anything. He just stared at Gant.
Gant seemed to sense his eyes on her and she blinked twice and the water in her eyes disappeared.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Can’t go showing my emotions now can I. If I start doing that, people’ll start calling me “Dorothy” again.’
‘You should tell him how you feel about him,’ Book said gently.
‘Yeah, right,’ Gant said. ‘Like I’d do that. They’d kick me out of the unit before I could say “That’s why you can’t have women in front-line units.” Book, I’d rather be close to him and not be able to touch him, than be far away and still not be able to touch him.’
Book looked hard at Gant for a moment, as if he were appraising her. Then he smiled warmly. ‘You’re all right . . . Dorothy, you know that. You’re all right.’
Gant snuffed a laugh. ‘Thanks.’
She bowed her head, and shook it sadly. Then suddenly she looked up at Book.
‘I have one more question,’ she said.
‘What?’
Gant cocked her head. ‘How is it that you know all that stuff about him? All the stuff about Bosnia and the farmhouse and his eyes and all that?’
Riley smiled sadly.
Then he said, ‘I was on the team that got him out.’
‘Any sort of palaeontology is a waiting game,’ Sarah Hensleigh said as she trudged through the snow next to Schofield toward the outer perimeter of the station. ‘But now with the new technology, you just set the computer, walk away and do something else. Then you come back later and see if the computer has found anything.’
The new technology, Sarah had been saying, was a long wave sonic pulse that the palaeontologists at Wilkes shot down into the ice to detect fossilised bones. Unlike digging, it located fossils without damaging them.
Schofield said, ‘So what do you do while you wait for the sonic pulse to find your next fossil?’
‘I’m not just a palaeontologist, you know,’ Sarah said, smiling, feigning offence. ‘I was a marine biologist before I took up palaeontology. And before all this happened, I was working with Ben Austin in the Bio Lab on B-deck. He was doing work on a new antivenom for Enhydrina schistosa.’
Schofield nodded. ‘Sea snake.’
Sarah looked at Schofield, surprised, ‘Very good, Lieutenant.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m not just a grunt with a gun, you know,’ Schofield said, smiling.
The two of them came to the outer perimeter of the station where they found Montana standing on the skirt of one of the Marine hovercrafts. The hovercraft was facing out from the station complex.
It was dark – that eerie eternal twilight of winter at the poles – and through the driving snow, Schofield could just make out the vast, flat expanse of land stretching out in front of the stationary hovercraft. The horizon glowed dark orange.
Behind Montana, on the roof of the hovercraft, Schofield saw the hovercraft’s rangefinder. It looked like a long-barrelled gun mounted on a revolving turret, and it swept from side to side in a slow one-hundred-and-eighty-degree arc. It moved slowly, taking about thirty seconds to make a complete sweep from left to right before beginning the return journey.
‘I set them just like you said,’ Montana said, stepping down from the skirt so that he stood in front of Schofield. ‘The other LCAC is at the south-east corner.’ LCAC was the official name for a Marine hovercraft. It stood for ‘Landing Craft – Air Cushioned’. Montana was a stickler for formalities.
Schofield nodded. ‘Good.’
Positioned as they were, the rangefinders on the hovercrafts now covered the entire landward approach to Wilkes Ice Station. With a range of over fifty miles, Schofield and his team would know well in advance if anybody was heading toward the station.
‘Have you got a portable screen?’ Schofield asked Montana.
‘Right here,’ Montana offered Schofield a portable viewscreen that displayed the results of the rangefinders’ 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 rangefinders’ 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 defence.
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 ramp-way 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 knew 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,’ Cameron 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,’ Cameron 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 PostIts. 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 mail box guy?’
‘Yeah, the mail box guy.’
Two weeks ago, someone had left this business card in Cameron’s mail box. 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 neighbourhood . . .
‘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 mid-morning 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, key-boards 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 look at the page in front of her.
Her finger marked the point on the map designated latitude 66.5 degrees south, 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 wetsuits.
Schofield 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 that 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 tell-tale 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 asphyxiation 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.