Got to stop it.
But how? How does a man destroy a submarine?
And then suddenly he remembered something.
He unshouldered his Maghook as he ran. Then he quickly hit the button marked ‘M’ and saw the red light on the Maghook’s magnetically charged head come to life.
Then he pulled a silver canister from his thigh pocket. It was the foot-long silver canister with the green band painted around it that he had found inside the British hovercraft.
The Tritonal 80/20 high-powered explosive charge.
Schofield looked at the silver-and-green canister as he ran. It had a stainless-steel pneumatic lid on it. He turned the lid and heard a soft hiss! The lid popped open and he saw a familiar digital timing display next to an ‘ARM-DISARM’ switch. Since it was a demolition device, a Tritonal charge could be disarmed at any time.
Twenty seconds, he thought. Just enough time to get clear.
He set the timer on the Tritonal charge for twenty seconds and then held the silver canister out above the bulbous magnetic head of his Maghook. Immediately the steel cylinder thunked down hard against the powerful magnet, and stuck to it, caught in its vice-like magnetic grip.
Schofield was still running hard, sprinting across the rugged landscape of the iceberg.
Then he came to the edge of the iceberg and without so much as a second thought, he hit it at full speed and leapt off it, out into the air.
Schofield flew through the air in a long wide arc – hung there for a full three seconds – before he splashed down hard, feet first, into the freezing-cold water of the Southern Ocean one more time.
Bubbles flew up all around him and for a moment Schofield saw nothing. And then suddenly the bubbles cleared and Schofield found himself hovering in the water right in front of the gargantuan steel nose of the French submarine.
Schofield checked his watch.
2:58:59
2:59:00
2:59:01
One minute to go.
The outer doors of the torpedo tube were fully open now. Schofield swam toward it. The torpedo tube opened wide in front of him, ten yards away.
This had better work, Schofield thought as he raised his Maghook, with the Tritonal charge attached to its head. Schofield pressed the ‘ARM0-DISARM’ switch on the Tritonal charge.
Twenty seconds.
Schofield fired the Maghook.
The Maghook shot out from its launcher, leaving a thin trail of white bubbles in its wake. It sliced through the water toward the open torpedo port . . .
. . . and hit the steel hull of the submarine just below the torpedo port with a loud, metallic clunk! The Maghook – with the live Tritonal charge attached to it – bounced off the thick steel hull of the sub and began to sink limply into the water. Schofield couldn’t believe it.
He’d missed!
Shit! his mind screamed. And then suddenly another thought hit him.
The people inside the sub would have heard it. Must have heard it.
Schofield quickly hit the black button on his grip that reeled the Maghook in, hoped to hell that it got back to him before twenty seconds expired.
Have to get another shot.
Have got to get another shot.
The Maghook began to reel itself in.
And then suddenly Schofield heard another noise.
Vmmmmmm.
Off to Schofield’s left, on the other side of the bow, one of the other torpedo doors was opening!
This door was smaller than the one Schofield had tried to shoot his Maghook into.
Smaller torpedoes, Schofield thought. Ones that are designed to kill other subs, not whole ice stations.
And then with a sudden whoooosh! a compact white torpedo whizzed out from the newly-opened torpedo port and rolled through the water toward Schofield.
Schofield couldn’t believe it.
They had fired a torpedo at him!
The Maghook returned to its launcher and Schofield quickly pressed the ‘ARM-DISARM’ switch on the Tritonal charge – with four seconds to spare – just as the torpedo shot past his waist, its wash knocking him over in the water.
Schofield breathed with relief. He was too close. The torpedo hadn’t had time to get a lock on him.
It was then that the torpedo slammed into the iceberg behind Schofield and detonated hard.
Renshaw was standing on the edge of the iceberg, looking down into the water when the torpedo hit, about twenty yards away.
In an instant, a whole segment of the iceberg exploded in a cloud of white and just fell away into the ocean like a landslide, cut clean from the rest of the massive berg.
‘Yikes,’ Renshaw breathed in awe.
And then suddenly he saw Schofield surface about twenty yards out, saw him gulp in a lungful of air, and then he saw the lieutenant go under again.
With the sound of the torpedo’s explosion still reverberating through the water all around him, and a large slice of the iceberg plunging into the water behind him, Schofield aimed his Maghook at the torpedo port a second time.
2:59:37
2:59:38
2:59:39
Once again, Schofield pressed the arm switch on the Tritonal charge – twenty seconds – and fired.
The Maghook shot through the water . . .
. . . hung there for a long time . . .
. . . and then disappeared inside the torpedo port.
Yes!
Schofield quickly pressed the button marked ‘M’ on his grip and inside the torpedo tube the magnetic head of the Maghook responded immediately by releasing its grip on the silver-and-green Tritonal charge.
Then Schofield reeled in the Maghook, leaving the Tritonal charge inside the torpedo tube.
And then Schofield swam.
Swam for all he was worth.
Inside the torpedo room of the French submarine, the world was deathly silent. A young ensign called the countdown.
‘Vingt secondes de premier lancer,’ he said. Twenty seconds to primary launch. Twenty seconds to the launch of the eraser, a nuclear-tipped, Neptune-class torpedo.
‘Dix-neuf . . . dix-huit . . . dix-sept . . .’
From the iceberg Renshaw saw Schofield break the surface, saw him swimming frantically through the water, Maghook in hand.
The French ensign’s count continued. ‘Dix . . . neuf . . . huit . . . sept . . . ’
Schofield was swimming hard, trying to put as much distance between himself and the sub as he could, because if he was too close when the Tritonal charge went off, the implosion would suck him right in. He’d been ten yards away when he’d fired the Tritonal charge. Now he was twenty yards away. He figured twenty-five and he would be okay.
Renshaw was yelling at him, ‘What the hell is happening!’
‘Get away from the edge!’ Schofield yelled as he swam. ‘Move!’
‘Cinq . . . quatre . . . trois . . .’
The French ensign’s count never got beyond ‘three’.
Because at that moment – at that terrible, stunning moment – the Tritonal charge inside the torpedo tube suddenly went off.
From where Renshaw stood, the underwater explosion was absolutely spectacular, and all the more so because it was unexpected.
It was instantaneous. The dark shadow under the surface that was the French submarine spontaneously erupted into an enormous cloud of white. An immense spray of water fifty feet high and two hundred feet long shot up out of the water and fell slowly back down to earth.
From water level, Schofield saw a horde of monstrous blue bubbles suddenly begin to billow out from a gaping hole in the bow of the submarine, like tentacles reaching out for him. And then just as suddenly they began to retrace their steps and, with terrifying force, the bubbles shot back in toward the submarine and Schofield suddenly felt himself getting sucked back toward the sub.
Implosion.
At that moment, the massive French sub collapsed in on itself like a great big aluminium can and the suct
ion from the implosion ceased. Schofield felt the water’s grip on him relax and he let himself float to the surface. The submarine was gone.
A few minutes later, Renshaw pulled Schofield out of the water and dragged him up onto the iceberg.
Schofield dropped down onto the ice – breathing hard, soaking wet, freezing cold. He was gasping for breath, his body overwhelmed with fatigue, and at that moment – with the French submarine destroyed, and himself and Renshaw hopelessly marooned on an iceberg – the only thing in the world that Shane Schofield wanted to do was sleep.
In the Capitol Building in Washington D.C., the NATO conference reconvened.
George Holmes, the US representative, leaned back in his chair as he watched Pierre Dufresne, the head of the French delegation, stand to speak.
‘My fellow delegates, ladies and gentlemen,’ Dufresne began, ‘the Republic of France would like to express its total and unconditional support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, this fine organisation of nations that has served the West so well for almost fifty years . . .’
The speech dragged on, extolling the virtues of NATO and France’s undying loyalty to it. George Holmes shook his head. All morning, the French delegation had been calling recesses, stalling the conference, and now, all of a sudden, they were pledging their undying loyalty to the Organisation. It didn’t make sense.
Dufresne finished speaking, sat down. Holmes was about to turn and say something to Phil Munro when suddenly the British delegate to the conference – a well-groomed statesman named Richard Royce – pushed his chair back and stood up.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Royce said, in a very articulate, London accent, ‘if I may beg your indulgence, the British delegation requests a recess.’
At that very same moment, directly across the road from the Capitol Building and the NATO conference, Alison Cameron was entering the atrium of the Library of Congress.
Comprised of three buildings, the Library of Congress is the largest library in the world. In fact, its goal upon its founding was to be the single largest repository of knowledge in the world. That is what it is.
Which was why Alison was not surprised to learn that the object of her search – the mysterious 1978 ‘Preliminary Survey’ by C.M. Waitzkin – was to be found at the Library of Congress. If any library was going to have it, the Library of Congress would be it.
Alison waited at the Enquiries Desk as one of the library’s attendants went down to the Stack to get the survey for her. The Library of Congress was a closed-stack library, which meant that the staff got the books for you. It was also a non-circulating library, which meant that you were not allowed to take books out of the building.
The attendant was taking a while, so Alison began to browse through another book she had bought on the way to the Library.
She looked at the cover. It read:
THE ICE CRUSADE:
REFLECTIONS ON A YEAR SPENT IN ANTARCTICA
DR. BRIAN HENSLEIGH
Professor of Geophysics, Harvard University
Alison scanned the introduction.
Brian Hensleigh, it appeared, was the head of Harvard University’s Geophysics faculty. He was into ice core research – a study that involved extracting cylindrical ice cores from the continental ice shelves in Antarctica and then examining the air that had been trapped inside those ice cores thousands of years before.
Apparently, so the book said, ice core research could be used to explain global warming, the greenhouse effect and the depletion of the ozone layer.
In any case, it appeared that for the whole of 1994, this Hensleigh fellow had worked at a remote research station in Antarctica collecting ice core samples.
The name of that research station was Wilkes Ice Station.
And its location: Latitude minus 66.5 degrees, Longitude 115 degrees, 20 minutes and 12 seconds east.
At that moment, the attendant returned and Alison looked up from the book.
‘It’s not there,’ the attendant said, shaking her head.
‘What?’
‘I checked it three times,’ the attendant said. ‘It’s not on the shelf. “Preliminary Survey” by C.M. Waitzkin, 1978. It’s not there.’
Alison frowned. This was unexpected.
The attendant – her name badge said her name was Cindy – shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t understand it. It’s just . . . gone.’
Alison felt a sudden rush of excitement as something occurred to her.
‘If it’s not there, wouldn’t that mean that someone is reading it right now?’ she asked.
Cindy shook her head. ‘No, the computer says that the last time it was loaned out to anybody was in November 1979.’
‘November 1979,’ Alison said.
‘Yeah, spooky huh?’ Cindy looked about twenty years old, a college student no doubt. ‘I took down the name of the borrower if you’re interested. Here,’ she handed Alison a slip of paper.
It was a photocopy of a Request Form, similar to the one Alison herself had filled out to get the survey. The Library of Congress obviously kept every form on file – probably for exactly this situation.
On the Request Form, in the box marked ‘Name of Person Requesting Item’ was a name:
O. NIEMEYER.
‘It happens,’ Cindy the attendant was saying. ‘This Niemeyer guy probably liked it so much that he just walked out with it. We didn’t have magnetic tags on our books back then, so he probably just slipped out past the guards.’
Alison ignored her.
She just stood there, entranced by the Request Form in her hand, by this twenty-year-old piece of evidence that had been sitting in a filing cabinet somewhere in the depths of the Library of Congress, waiting for this day.
Alison’s eyes glowed as they stared at the words:
O. NIEMEYER.
Brigadier-General Trevor Barnaby walked across the pool deck of Wilkes Ice Station. He’d been in control of Wilkes Ice Station for a little over an hour now and he was feeling confident.
Only twenty minutes ago he had sent a team of fully armed divers down in the station’s diving bell. But it would be at least ninety minutes before they reached the underground cave. Indeed, the diving bell’s cable was still plunging into the pool at the base of the station right now.
Barnaby himself was dressed in a black thermal wetsuit. He planned to go down to the underground cave with the second team – to see for himself what was really down there.
‘Well, now,’ Barnaby said as he saw Snake and the two French scientists handcuffed to the pole. ‘What have we here? Why, if it isn’t Sergeant Kaplan.’ By the look on his face, Snake was obviously surprised that Barnaby knew who he was.
‘Gunnery Sergeant Scott Michael Kaplan,’ Barnaby said. ‘Born: Dallas, 1953; enlisted in the United States Marine Corps at age eighteen in 1971; small arms expert; hand-to-hand combat expert; sniper. And as of 1992, under suspicion by British Intelligence as a member of the American spy agency known as the Intelligence Convergence Group.
‘I’m sorry, what is it that they call you? Snake, isn’t it. Tell me, Snake, is this a common occurrence for you? Does your commanding officer often chain you to poles, leaving you at the mercy of the incoming enemy?’
Snake didn’t say anything.
Barnaby said, ‘I would hardly have thought that Shane Schofield would be the kind of master to chain up his loyal squad members. Which means there must be some other reason why he chained you up, n’estce pas?’ Barnaby smiled. ‘Now, whatever could that reason be?’
Snake still said nothing. Every now and then, his eyes would steal a look at the diving bell’s cable as it plunged into the pool behind Barnaby.
Barnaby turned his attention to the two French scientists. ‘And who might you be?’ he asked.
Luc Champion blurted out indignantly, ‘We are French scientists from the research station Dumont d’Urville. We have been detained here against our will by American forces. We demand that we be released in accordanc
e with international –’
‘Mr Nero,’ Barnaby said flatly.
A mountain of a man stepped out from behind Barnaby and stood next to him. He was at least six-foot-five, with broad shoulders and impassive eyes. He had a scar that ran down from the corner of his mouth to his chin.
Barnaby said, ‘Mr Nero, if you please.’
At that moment, the big man named Nero calmly raised his pistol and fired at Champion from point-blank range.
Champion’s head exploded. Blood and brains instantly splattered against the side of Snake’s face.
Henri Rae, the second French scientist, began to whimper.
Barnaby turned to face him. ‘Are you French, too?’
Rae began to sob.
Barnaby said, ‘Mr Nero.’
Rae saw it coming and he screamed, ‘No!’ just as Nero raised his gun again and a moment later the other side of Snake’s face was splattered all over with blood.
In the pitch-darkness of the crawlspace at the base of the elevator shaft, Mother snapped up at the sound of the gunshots.
Damn it, she thought. She must have blacked out again.
Got to stay awake, she thought.
Got to stay awake . . .
Mother stared at the clear plastic fluid bag she had brought with her. It was connected by a tube to an intravenous drip that was stuck into her arm.
The fluid bag was now empty.
Had been for the last twenty minutes.
Mother began to shiver. She felt cold, weak. Her eyelids began to close.
She bit her tongue, trying to force her eyes open with the jolt of pain.
It worked for the first few times. And then it didn’t.
Alone at the base of the elevator shaft, Mother lapsed into unconsciousness.
Out on E-deck, Trevor Barnaby stepped forward, his eyes narrowing. ‘Sergeant Kaplan. Snake. You’ve been a naughty boy, haven’t you?’
Snake said nothing.
‘Are you ICG, Snake? A turncoat? A traitor to your own unit? What did you do, did you blow your cover too soon, did you start killing your own men before you knew for sure that this station was secure? I bet the Scarecrow wasn’t too pleased when he found out. Is that why he chained you to a pole and left you here for me?’