Matthew Reilly - Ice Station

Both men stopped instantly and immediately felt their blood run cold.

Schofield fired up into the central shaft of Wilkes Ice Station with his Desert Eagle.

He and Gant were down on C-deck, inside a room that opened out onto the central catwalk. Schofield stood in the doorway, gun in hand, looking out across the central shaft and up at A-deck.

Behind him, inside whatever room this was, Gant was down on her haunches, shaking off her dizziness. She had taken off her helmet, revealing a short crop of snow-white blond hair.

Gant looked curiously at her helmet, at the arrow lodged in it. She shook her head and put the helmet back on, arrow and all. She also donned her anti-flash glasses, concealing much of the thin line of dried blood that ran down from her forehead to her chin. Then she grabbed her MP-5 determinedly and joined Schofield at the doorway.

"You OK?" Schofield asked over his shoulder as he aimed his pistol up at A-deck.

"Yeah; did I miss anything?"

"Did you see the part where that bunch of French pricks posing as scientists decided to pull guns on us?" Schofield fired off another round.

"Yeah, I caught that part."

"What about the part where we found out that our new friends had six more guys stashed away in their hovercraft?"

"No, missed that."

"Well, that's the"?he fired off another angry round? "story so far."

Gant looked at Schofield. Behind those opaque silver glasses was a seriously pissed-off individual.

In fact, Schofield wasn't really angry at the French soldiers per se . Sure, at first he'd been annoyed at himself for not picking that the French "scientists" were actually soldiers. But then they had got to Wilkes first, and they had brought with them two genuine scientists, a particularly clever ploy that had been enough to throw Schofield and his team off the scent.

What really made him angry, however, was that he'd lost the initiative in this battle.

The French had caught Schofield and his team off guard, taken them by surprise, and now they were dictating the terms of this fight. That was what really made Schofield pissed.

He tried desperately to fight his anger. He couldn't allow himself to be angry. He couldn't afford to feel that way.

Whenever he found himself beginning to feel angry or upset, Schofield always remembered a seminar he'd attended in London in late 1996 given by the legendary British commander Brigadier General Trevor J. Barnaby.

A burly man, with piercing dark eyes, a fully shaven head, and a severe black goatee, Trevor Barnaby was the head of the SAS?had been since 1979?and was widely regarded as the most brilliant front-line military tactician in the world. His strategic ability with regard to small incursionary forces was extraordinary. When it was executed by the finest elite military unit in the world, the SAS, it was invincible. He was the pride and joy of the British military establishment, and he had never failed on a mission yet.

In November 1996, as part of a USA-UK "knowledge share agreement" it was decided that Barnaby would give a two-day seminar on covert incursionary warfare to the most promising American officers. In return, the United States would instruct British artillery units on the use of mobile Patriot II missile batteries. One of the officers chosen to attend Trevor Barnaby's seminar was Lieutenant Shane M. Schofield, USMC.

Barnaby had had a cocky, hard-edged lecture style that Schofield had liked?a rapid-fire series of questions and answers that had proceeded in a simple, logical progression.

"In any combat exchange," Barnaby had said, "be it a world war or an isolated two unit standoff, the first question you always ask yourself is this: what is your opponent's objective ? What does he want? Unless you know the answer to that question, you'll never be able to ask yourself the second question: how is he going to get it ?

"And I'll tell you right now, ladies and gentlemen, the second question is of far greater importance to you than the first. Why? Because what he wants is unimportant insofar as strategy is concerned. What he wants is an object, that's all. The worldwide spread of communism. A strategic foothold on foreign territory. The ark of the covenant. Who cares ? Knowing of it means nothing, in and of itself. How he plans to get it , on the other hand, means everything. Because that is action. And action can be stopped.

"So, once you have answered this second question, then you can proceed to question number three: what are you going to do to stop him ?"

When he had been speaking about command and leadership, Barnaby had repeatedly stressed the need for cool-headed reason. An angry commander, he'd said, acting under the influence of rage or frustration, will almost certainly get his unit killed.

"As a leader," Barnaby had said, "you simply cannot afford to get angry or upset."

Recognizing that no commanding officer was immune from feeling angry or frustrated, Barnaby had offered his three-step tactical analysis as a diversion from such feelings. "Whenever you feel yourself succumbing to angry feelings, go through the three-step analysis. Get your mind off the anger and get it back on the job at hand. Soon, you'll forget about what pissed you off and you'll start doing what you're paid for."

And as he stood there in the doorway on C-deck, in the freezing-cold, ice-covered world of Wilkes Ice Station, Shane Schofield could almost hear Trevor Barnaby speaking inside his head.

OK, then.

What is their objective?

They want the spaceship.

How are they going to get it?

They're going to kill everybody here, grab the spaceship, and somehow get it off the continent before anybody even knows it existed.

All right. But there was a problem with that analysis. What was it??

Schofield thought for a moment. And then it hit him.

The French had arrived quickly.

So quickly, in fact, that they had arrived at Wilkes before the United States had been able to get a team of its own there. Which meant they'd been close to Wilkes when the original distress signal had gone out.

Schofield paused.

French soldiers had been at d'Urville when Abby Sinclair's signal had gone out.

But the distress signal could never have been anticipated. It was an emergency, a sudden occurrence.

And that was the problem with his analysis.

A picture began to form in Schofield's mind: they had seen an opportunity, and they had decided to take it ....

The French had had their commandos at Dumont d'Urville, probably doing exercises of some sort. Arctic warfare or something like that.

And then the distress signal from Wilkes had been picked up. And suddenly the French would have realized that they had one of their elite military units within six hundred miles of the discovery of an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

The prospective gains were obvious: technological advances to be garnered from the propulsion system, the construction of the exterior shell. Maybe even weapons.

It was an opportunity too good to pass up.

But the French commandos faced two problems.

First: the American scientists at Wilkes. They would have to be eliminated. There could be no witnesses.

The second problem was worse: it was almost certain that the United States would dispatch a protective Reconnaissance Unit to Wilkes. So a clock was ticking. In fact, the French had realized that, in all probability, U.S. troops would arrive at Wilkes before they could get the spaceship off the continent.

Which meant there would be a firelight.

But the French were here by chance. They'd had neither the time nor the resources to prepare a full-strength assault on Wilkes. They were a small force facing the probability that the U.S. would arrive on the scene, with a force of greater strength than theirs, before they could make good their escape with the spacecraft.